Koditschek Theodore. Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination: Nineteenth-Century Visions of a Greater Britain

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So life went on for the next few years, as Anthony lurched unsatisfactorily

from one abortive project to the next: he would emigrate to the colonies,

study medicine, seek an Irish professorship, or enter the Republic of

Letters as a novelist or essay writer. “So matters stood,” he recollected,

until “Europe was suddenly shaken as with an electric stroke, by the Paris

Revolution of 26, February, 1848.” Without any effective moral or political

compass, Froude tried to respond to these stirring events. The freethinking

of George Sand and the socialism of Louis Blanc appealed to his youthful

romantic ardor, but horror of social disorder on the continent – and the

specter of Irish rebellion at home – left him quickly diving back into the

folds of orthodoxy. And yet this very renewed appreciation of the virtues of

the Oxford establishment forced him to acknowledge that he could never be

a reliable Anglican clergyman; that his faith would always be inadequate;

and that candor would someday trap him into some inopportune burst of

heresy. By so casually drifting into the Exeter College fellowship, indelibly

“dip[ping] his ﬁngers in the ecclesiastical ink,” he had made the most

catastrophic decision of his life.

Vacillating, once again, he returned to rural Ireland and holed himself

in a picturesque lakefront cottage “en communiste, with an Irish peasant

family, consisting of man, wife, maid, four children, four cows, calves,

etc.” Inspired by this idyllic setting, a second novel spontaneously poured

out, published this time under his own name, as The Nemesis of Faith. Like

a philosophical treatise cast in the style of a cheap romance, Nemesis is

the partly autobiographi cal story of a young Anglican who drifts thought-

lessly into clerical orders, where he undergoes a painful crisis of faith.

Forced by his bishop to resign his beneﬁce, he falls in love with a married

woman, who dies of mortiﬁcation from the ensuing disgrace. The ex-

clergyman, meanwhile, resolves his dilemma by stiﬂing his theological

doubts and converting to Roman Catholicism, where he is conveniently

absolved of his sins. If Froude had any hankerings to adopt his novel’s

solution, its publication in 1849 assured that this option would be fore-

closed. “From all sides,” he explained, “came a cry of execration”:

By the Liberals I was regarded as a reproach to their cause, and they washed their

hands of me. By the orthodox, if I had been the devil in person, I could not have

been thought more horrible. Sewell, the senior Tutor at my own College, publicly

burnt the book in hall before the assembled undergraduates. A preemptory

demand was communicated to me from the Rector and the College authorities

for the resignation of my fellowship.

DF, I: 72–85, 93–121, quotes on 95, 97.

DF, I: 120–48, quotes on 124, 147; James Anthony Froude, The Nemesis of Faith (London,

1849).

Froudian whips 155

Froude put a gallant face on the scandal. Unlike his le ad character, he

had manfully confronted his dilemma, and had thrown over a corrupt

profession that subordinated the pursuit of truth to the practice of dis-

honesty. “I never felt lighter or happier than in the months which now

followed,” he bravely proclaimed. The reali ty was considerably bleaker:

he had burned his bridges with the Church and the universities. All other

establishment professions were closed to such apostates. Friends fell

away, and respectable people shrank in horror, while his father ﬁnally

disinherited him, once and for all. Even the offer of a teaching job in

Tasmania was rescinded, from fear of this dangerous heretical purveyor of

immorality.

The outcry against me meanwhile had been so violent that reasonable people

had begun to ask t hemselves what I had done to deserve retribution so excessive.

The book aft er all had been but a cry of pain. It might have been better to bear

pain silently, but even with a bad toothache an occasional groan m ay be forgiv en.

There was nothing wicked in it that for having written it I should be crushed

like a rat.

In fac t, British liberals had not deserted Froude to the degree that he

claimed. On the contrary, they watched with mounting indignation as

this spirited, articulate scion of the Oxford establishment was destroyed

by his elders for the crime of integrity. In London, he was wined and

dined by the German ambassador, Baron Bunsen, who exposed him

to German criticism, Zoarastrianism, and ancient Indian philosophy.

Introduced to John Cha pman, Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot), and

G. H. Lewes, he was offered entry into the portals of the Westminster

Review coterie. In the summer of 1849, he was invited up to Manchester

as tutor to a wealthy Nonconformist solicitor’s family. Here he met all the

leading Unitarian writers and intellectuals, the Martineaus, the Gaskells,

and Geraldine Jewsbury. For a time, it appeared that Froude would be

absorbed into this milieu – that he would join the liberal free-trading

anti-clerical intelligentsia, marry the daughter of a Manchester magnate,

and live happily and comfortably for the rest of his life. Yet there was

something in Froude that resisted this outcome, something that made

him shrink from these avatars of industrial capitalism, and drove him away

from their liberal individualist ideology.

Try as he might, he could not expunge a longing for the world of his

father – the manly, stalwart Protestant world of old England’s provincial

gentry, which had so profoundly shaped the nation’s development and

DF, I: 130–50, quote on 148.

DF, I: 151–67; MJAF, 45–81. See also Froude’s essay “Progress” for some indications of

what he found objectionable in the ideology of Manchester liberalism.

156 Re-imagining a Greater Britain

history. The Manchester marriage was called off, and Froude proposed to

the daughter of a gentry family instead. As the sister-in-law of his friend,

the budding Anglica n clergyman-novelist Charles Kingsley, this woman

brought with her a new set of associates, more conservative, more nation-

alistic, and more rooted in the countryside. Froude, it now appeared,

had ﬁnally discovered his bearings – his own personal, authentic route to

virile, adult English masculinity. He was not to travel this route alone,

however. Guiding, goading, inspiring, and correcting him along the way

was the towering ﬁgure of a powerful father-substitute: that irascible,

inescapable Victorian prophet Thomas Carlyle.

Froude had ﬁrst encountered Carlyle’s Heroes, Past and Present and

French Revolution in 1842. In all his spiritual perplexities, the young man

turned to what he took as the message of these books. “The question

Carlyle asked of every institution, secular or religi ous, was not is it true?

But is it alive? Life is not truth, but the embodiment in time and morality

of a spiritual or animating principle.” But how could one distinguish

genuine “life” from the multitude of fraudulent crotchets and “pig phi-

losophies” in which modern liberal relativism habitually wallowed?

Carlyle, with his vehement style and strident voice, never seemed to be

in any doubt. Froude eagerly lapped up all the older man’s judgments,

crediting him with dispelling the radical allurements of 1848. Finally, in

June of 1849, the two men met. Perhaps inevitably, Carlyle began their

relationship with a drubbing censure of Froude’s recent book: “ What

on earth is the use of a wretched mortal’s vomiting up all his interior

crudities, dubitations, and spiritual, agonizing bellyaches, into the view

of the public?” the Sage of Chelsea demand ed. Froude’s accommodating

reaction to this corrective strapping, however, put the Sage in a genial

mood. He, after all, had survived a similar youthful spiritual crisis, which

had been resolved by the very insight that Froude had astutely detected

in his works.

The two men quickly became friends , ﬁnding a thread of common

experience in their reaction to Ireland, which Carly le had visited in 1846

(and would visit again in the summer of 1849). The Irish, both men

agreed, were an impossible people who (in Carlyle’s words) “ unfortu-

nately speak a partially intelligible dialect of the English language, and

having a white skin and European features, cannot be prevented from

circulating among us.” Strategically and geographic ally contiguous to

Britain, Ireland had proven to be culturally unassimilable and had there-

fore to be politically ruled with an iron ﬁst. If the Irish could not be

DF, I: 151–67; MJAF, 45–81.

DF, I: 72–5, 111–13, 154–6, 194–201, quotes on 73, 94; MJAF, quote on 59.

Froudian whips 157

civilized, Carlyle ranted, they could at least be compelled to work. All Irish

paupers should be put under military discipline and forced to undertake

bog reclamation. Troublemakers could be isolated and locked up.

A few

months later, Carlyle began a series of Latter-Day Pamphlets that were

even more extravagantly reactionary in tone: Britain herself had fallen into

the hands of irresolute politicians who had lost their way in a fog of

sentimental liberalism. Policy had been taken over by bleeding-heart

drivellers; a myriad of “Sluggard and Scoundrel Protection Societies”

had won the day. His coup de grâce, however, was delivered in his

Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question, which excoriated the ﬁgure of

Quashee, the West-Indian ex-slave, who dared to abandon plantation

work. “A swift, supple ... grinning dancing, affectionate kind of creature”

when under white discipline, Quashee was degenerating into an

ugly ungovernable savage who might have to be brought back under the

whip, if only for his own good.

The fact that Froude encountered Carlyle when he was at the depth of

his furious descent into reaction was to have portentous consequences

for the futures of both men. Having alienated his mainstream audience

with these vicious diatribes, Carlyle became increasingly dependent on

the two younger disciples – Froude and Ruskin – who were prepared to

follow him in his infernal plunge. Froude, for his part, saw that his own

reactionary predispositions were being magniﬁed and reinforced by his

new-found mentor; the anarchy of democracy was just around the corner;

England was in danger; the barbarians were at the gate. Strong, virile,

white men were the one thing needful for order to be restored, and society

to be saved. This was the only “truth” that was authentically “alive” in the

modern era. Whatever rational reservations Froude might harbor at the

harshness of these formulae were dispelled by the authoritarian memories

and lessons of his youth. Carlyle was just ﬁnishing his study of Oliver

Cromwell and was about to embark on an even more ambitious biography

of Frederick the Great. These resolute Protestant heroes of modernity

had arrived at critical moments to restore honor and discipline to elect

Anglo-Saxon peoples who had lost their godly way.

Thomas Carlyle, Reminiscences of my Irish Journey in 1849 (London, 1882), especially

33–5.

Thomas Carlyle, Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches: With Elucidations, 5 vols. (London,

n.d.). For Carlyle’s assessment of Cromwell’s activities in Ireland, see II: 141–6 and 203–7.

On the West Indies, see Thomas Carlyle, “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,”

Fraser’sMagazine, 40 (December, 1849), 670–9, expanded and republished as Occasional

Discourse on the Nigger Question (London, 1853), in Eugene R. August (ed.), Carlyle, the

Nigger Question; Mill, the Negro Question (New York, 1971), 1–37, quote on 12.

Fred Kaplan, Thomas Carlyle: A Biography (Ithaca, 1983), 334–457.

158 Re-imagining a Greater Britain

Yet history and biography were not really genres to Carlyle’s liking. He

lacked the patience and (truth be told) the skill and judgment to spend

years in dank archives, sifting documents, tracing lines of connection,

and synthesizing the results of meticulous research. Here was an arena

in which Froude could dutifully follow the inspiration of the master,

while simultaneously surpassing the Sage in the actual performance of

literary work. As he applied the Carlylean formula to the history of his

own nat ion, powerful patterns began to tak e shape. The middle ages had

been the childhood of the English, when (as with every primitive people)

their quest for truth had been enmired in a poetic atmosphere of fable

and myth. The Reformation had opened up a path to maturity, culmi-

nating in the achievement of British power and the ascendancy of the

modern British imperial state. Yet this triumph of national and imperial

maturation had been won at a price. Childish fables had to be abandoned,

submission had to be made at the altar of empirical realism, discipline

had to be instilled by the heavy hand of benevolent despots, and lesser,

backward peoples had to be forcibly yoked to the van of Anglo-Saxon

mastery.

So Froude gathered his wife and newborn children and prepared him-

self to research and to write. To save money, the family moved to the

Welsh wilderness (following the earlier example of the young Carlyles).

Subsisting on his wife’s small annuity and the money he could earn from

reviewing, Froude began gathering materi als for a full-dress History of

England in the sixteenth century. A widely ci rculated essay on “En gland’s

Forgotten Worthies” surveyed the territory, while correspondence with

Kingsley provided a venue for exploring possible themes. Returning to

London in 1854 to gain access to the major (and largely unexamined)

archive collections, Froude took up the historian’s pen. In 1856, the ﬁrst

two volumes of The History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat

of the Spanish Armada were published. Although the sales were scarcely

on the order of Macaulay, reaction was generally favorable, and Froude

was encouraged to proceed. In 1858, volumes III and IV were issued;

then, in 1860, the next two volumes appeared. In 1864, another two

volumes began with the accession of Elizabeth. In 1866, yet another two

appeared, and, ﬁnally, in 1870, the last two of the twelve-volume set were

completed.

For Froude’s account of Carlyle’s work on these books, see his books Thomas Carlyle: A

History of his Life in London, 1834–81, 2 vols. (New York, 1892) and My Relations with

Carlyle (London, 1903). See also John Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and

the English Past (Cambridge, 1981), 231–85.

DF, I: 168–98, 211–12, II: 263–325; MJAF, 83–127; J. A. Froude, “England’s Forgotten

Worthies,” in Short Studies on Great Subjects, I (New York, 1894), 358–405.

Froudian whips 159

2 Henrician ﬂips

In his opening chapter, “The Social Condition of England in the Sixteenth

Century,” Froude stakes his claim as a counter-Macaulay. Where the

Whig’s analogous “State of England in 1685” saw a nation on the verge of

great progressive changes, Froude depicts a stable and healthy traditional

society which has no inner desire for fundamental change. The population,

he contends (quite incorrectly), was stationary. The economy neither

grew nor contracted. In social relations, a happy balance had been struck

between aristocratic paternalism and peasant independence. Yet, from a

distance, beyond the conﬁnes of this insular commonwealth, “a change

was coming upon the world ... The paths trodden by the footsteps of

ages was broken up: old things were passing away, and the faith and

life of ten centuries were dissolving like a dream.”

Here was a vision of

historical transformation that comported ill with the progress narrative.

It was, Froude suggests, a strange and largely negative revolution, which

suffused all Europe in selﬁshness, amoralism, and mutual slaughter for

nearly two centuries. Amid the chaos and the carnage, however, a uniquely

English form of progress did emerge, since England alone wrested spiritual

reformation from the revolutionary vortex in which the rest of the civilized

world was consumed. In so doing, she transformed herself from a marginal

medieval kingdom into a dynamic redeemer nation, predestined to create

a world empire and to spread her new gospels of Anglo-Saxonism, work,

and power everywhere around the globe.

Froude’s narrative begins in 1528, when England was faced with a crisis

that was at once dynastic, religious, and political: to forestall a return to the

civil wars of the ﬁfteenth century, Henry VIII was duty-bound to produce a

male heir. This imperative in turn obliged him to break with the Pope. The

recent emergence of two super-states to the south and east – France and the

protoplasmic Habsburg Empire – underlined the necessity of internal

English unity. On the other sides, the presence on the north and west of

two unstable frontier lands – Scotland and Ireland – presented endless

opportunities for the meddling of foreign powers. What made this situation

truly alarming in Froude’s eyes was that the moral energies of the English

people were being sapped from within. The fabric of the old Church –

which had organized the spiritual life of the nation for a millennium – was

irremediably rotten. In the royal divorce crisis of 1528, England’sspiritual

and geo-political crises became portentously intertwined.

FHE, I: 1–91, quote on 61.

FHE, I: 93–370, II: 1–122.

160 Re-imagining a Greater Britain

From this point on, Froude’s epic becomes a stage for the interaction

of three main actors, who are destined to save England and forge Britain:

ﬁrst, an old, reactionary clerical order which is impotent and dying; second,

a problematically virile king, who is determined to do his political duty; and

ﬁnally, a spiritually aroused elect, recruited from the ranks of the people,

who are trying to convince the King to lead them in the godly direction they

have divined on their own. In a manner strikingly different from that of

Macaulay, Froude traces the shifting relationship between these actors in

gendered metaphors. The old Church is depicted as impotent and effemi-

nate, personiﬁed in the cold, barren ﬁgure of Catherine of Aragon, or the

Nun of Kent, who is fraudulent, hysterical, and out of control. Yet after

these easy targets have been removed, the Catholic Church reveals its

hidden strengths: it is an institutionally entrenched (but morally degener-

ate) male clerical establishment, which wages a slow guerilla war against the

triumph of the new faith. Cardinals Reginald Pole and David Beton person-

ify these intransigent clerics. Connected by birth to the old Catholic aris-

tocracies, they are powerful and dangerous masters of dissembling and

intrigue. Incapable of any genuine fecundity, they devote their formidable

skills to destroying the Protestant reformers’ creative energies.

To ﬁnd the taproots of this new, irrepressible Protestant spirit, Froude

must descend into the ranks of the people, where he ﬁnds “ a little band

of enthusiasts, armed only with truth and fearlessness.” Empowered wi th

these feeble weapons, they rise up to challenge two estates of gentlemen

and a millennium of orthodoxy.

No common daring was required in those who would stand out at such a time in

defence of such a cause. The bishops might seize them on mere suspicion ...Every

ofﬁcer from the lord chancellor to the parish constable was sworn to seek them out

and destroy them ... hunted like wild beasts from hiding-place to hiding place;

decimated by the stake ... beset by informers, imprisoned, racked, and

scourged ... earning for themselves martyrdom, for us, the free England in

which we live and breathe.

Macaulay, the liberal, dismissed such people as “austere fanatics,” but

the conservative Froude does not see them in this light. Their lowly origins

and extremism are redeemed by their undaunted courage in the face of

very long odds. This is no longer the masculinity of the self-restraining

centrist, but that of the self-certain militant, who is willing to wager body

and soul on the chanc e that he is the harbinger of the future and the

FHE, II: 123–247. For Catherine of Aragon, see I: 106, 146–62, 339–41, 398–413, 454–85,

II: 161–80, 478–81; for the Nun of Kent, see I: 317, 317–36, 403, II: 165–219; for Pole, see

III: 23–57, 189–208, 227–32, IV: 541–57; for Beton, see IV: 21, 50, 202–47, 305–21, 470–9.

FHE, II: 1–115, quote on 37–8.

Henrician ﬂips 161

elect of Go d. Yet in his paeans of praise to the early Protestant radicals,

Froude issues an important caveat: they were not tainted by the sin of

revolutionary presumption. As far as possible, they were not sectarians

and radicals, but moral exemplars and martyrs. In this lay their historical

signiﬁcance and strength.

When the break with the pope was made irreparable ... the fortunes of the

Protestants entered a new phase. The persecution ceased, and those who but

lately were carrying fagots in the streets, or hiding for their lives, passed at once

by a sudden alternation into the sunshine of political favour. The summer was but

a brief one, followed soon by returning winter; but Cromwell and Latimer together

had caught the moment as it went by; and before it was over, a work had been done

in England which, when it was accomplished once, was accomplished forever.

Of course, behind Cromwell and Latimer, in “catching the moment,”

was the true impresario of the Divorce Crisis, the King. Froude’s attempt

to rehabilitate the repu tation of Henry VIII constitutes his most striking

historiographical innovation. Yet it was a dan gerously overdetermined

achievement. One need not be a Freudian to see that he identiﬁed Henry

with his own father – or rather with the man he wished his father had been.

Henry understood that occasional harshness and cruelty were necessary

to navigate amid the treacherous cross-currents of an unstable world.

With Scotland and Ireland in ﬂames, all the monarchs of Europe against

him, the Pope and his minions hell-bent on bringing England down,

Henry did not have the luxury of leniency and kindness. “Executions

for high treason,” Froude reminds his comfortable readers, “bear neces-

sarily a character of cruelty when the peril which conspira cies create has

passed away.” Ironically, it was Henry’s very success in snifﬁng out

traitors that helped to create the conditions of political stability in which

his behavior would be hars hly judge d.

Yet as his father’s son, Froude cannot entirely suppress the many gratu-

itous bloodstains that blot Henry’s record. Perhaps, like Revd. Froude, he

thrashed his children because he lacked the political skill to inspire sponta-

neous obedience and consent. Viewed through the lens of conventional

masculinity, Henry’s record leaves something to be desired: twice cuck-

olded, thrice divorced, at various times estranged from all his literal and

ﬁgurative children, dying without a satisfactory heir, Henry might be seen

as a patriarchal failure. In order to rescue the King from these charges of

impotence and incompetence, Froude invokes (albeit subliminally) an

FHE, II: 34, 94–5.

FHE, I: 343, III: 336–7, 343–5, quote on 336–7. See also FHE, II: 246, 341, IX: 304, 405,

X: 251, 271, and 457, among many other examples of Froude’s contention that hard,

intolerant times required stern, intolerant methods.

162 Re-imagining a Greater Britain

alternative scenario in its place: Henry’s true marriage was not so much

with his wives as with the Protestant reformers, who alone had the power

to consummate his sovereign status by enabling him to make their project

of self-fabrication his own. The truest issue of this union was neither

Edward, nor Mary, nor even Elizabeth, but the Protestant nationalism,

around which a distinctively English (and then British) national identity

could congeal.

Somewhat troubled by evidence showing that the King “was divided

against himself” on the question of religion, Froude grudgingly allows that

a matchmaker, Thomas Cromwell, was required to bring the union of

authority with Protestantism to fruition.

From this point on, however,

Froude renders Henry’s relation to Protestantism as essentially familial.

Seizure of the monastic lands opened the way for ambitious (and lamentably

abortive) schemes for the education and welfare of the national family.

In foreign relations, the Reformation necessitated an equally far-reaching

reconﬁguration in England’s relationshi p with her external kin. The old

imperatives to absorb Scotland and Wales and to conquer Ireland were

greatly intensiﬁed. At the same time, the new family logic enjoined Henry

to give up his retrograde alliances with Charles V and Francis II, his monar-

chical pseudo-brothers. Far better if he had forged a grand Protestant alliance

with his princely Germanic cousins, uniting under the banner of spiritual

freedom all the far-ﬂung branches of the advancing Teutonic tribes.

To be sure, Froude does not fault Henry for his refusal to buy the

Reformation hook, line, and sinker. He is, after all, the father, and he

knows best. It is his job to restrain the excessive idealism of his spouse’s

and his children’s utopian visions. It falls to him to introduce the necessary

note of realism and correction when they become wayward or anarchic.

Cromwell got too big for his britches, and so he had to be executed. By 1540,

“the Reformers had overshot their healthy growth. They required to be

toned down by re newed persecution.”

In 1547, when Henry was struck

down, the rising generation was still too immature to assume direct contro l.

The result was twelve years of much more extreme (perhaps Froude-like)

zigging and zagging under the titular reigns of Edward VI and Mary. By

trying to force his radical utopian agenda, the boy-king’s uncle, the Lord

Protector Somerset, brought Protestantism itself into disrepute.

Needless to say, the collapse of this naive and puerile vision (followed by

the even more criminal Protestant imposter, the Duke of Northumberland)

precipitated a drastic swing to the right. Froude in no way regrets Queen

Mary’s six-year papistical reign of terror, inasmuch as it puriﬁed the ranks

FHE, I: 91–121, 418–22, II: 480–541, III: 260–75, 464–522, IV: 121–38.

FHE, II: 206.

FHE, II: 406–25, III: 367, 450.

FHE, II: 421, III: 473.

Henrician ﬂips 163

of the reformers, and rooted out the careerists and time-servers among

them. By embarking on their bloody rampage, burning heretics, and selling

out the national interest, she and her papistical inquisitor, Cardinal Pole,

created that deathless honor roll of martyrs from whose ashes an enduring

Protestantism would arise.

3 Victorian anxieties and Elizabethan adventures

Froude’s reassessment of the character of Henry VIII, his reﬁgurations of

hard masculinity, his ﬁxation with Iris h backwardness, and his allergic

reaction to Roman Catholicism are all sufﬁciently explained by his per-

sonal biography. Indeed, the publication of the early volumes of his

magnum opus released an enormous emotional weight, inasmuch as

they became th e means of reconciling him with his father. During the

ﬁnal years of the old man’s life, the pair spent long, happy hours discussing

the origins of British Protestantism and the need for stern national dis-

cipline in the sixteenth century.

But how did Froude’ s contemporary

readers respond to his remarkable historiographical reassessment? Because

they had no part in the Froude family drama, their receptivity depended

on changes in the climate of opinion after 1848.

Several factors may have contributed to this change in opinion. The

Crimean War of 1854 – 5 reawakened a stra in of British national chauvin-

ism that had lain dormant, at least since 1815. The shocking revelations

of military inef ﬁciency which war opened up did ev en more to convince

many Britons that national defense had been neglected, and that the

state needed a strong leader at the helm.

The 1857 electoral defeat of

Richard Cobden and John Bright in the liberal, industrial strongholds

of Huddersﬁeld and Manchester, respectively, suggested that liberal

orthodoxy was being questioned, even by the entrepreneurial middle

class. As industrial capitalism spread to the continent, manufacturers

were becoming alarmed at the threat of foreign competition. If this was

not to be expected from Russia, the still slumbering giant, it might well

come from a revitalized France, or from a nasc ent Germany. On another

(but not unrelated) level, the recent emigration of nearly a quarter-million

Irish famine victims to Britain precipitated a wave of xenophobic nativism

from the late 1840s on ward that shocked many liberals, who regarded

such expressions as things of the past. The advent of illustrated

FHE, V: 1–515, VI: 1–534.

DF, I: 200–1.

Asa Briggs, Victorian People: A Reassessment of Persons and Themes, 1851–67 (Chicago,

1955), 52–86; Olive Anderson, A Liberal State at War: English Politics and Economics during

the Crimean War (London, 1967).

164 Re-imagining a Greater Britain