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Mass commodity culture and identity: the Morning Chronicle and Irish migrants in a nineteenth-century Welsh industrial town

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2008

PAUL O'LEARY
PAUL O'LEARY*
Affiliation:
Department of History and Welsh History, Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, SY23 3DY
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Abstract

The ‘Labour and the Poor’ investigations of the Morning Chronicle newspaper, which charted social conditions in towns outside London in 1849–51, subjected Irish migrants in Britain to a hostile journalistic gaze. In the case of the iron-manufacturing town of Merthyr Tydfil in south Wales, the minority Irish ethnic identity was defined by observers in terms of exclusion from an emerging mass commodity culture and in opposition to the native working class. This early investigative journalism deployed some conventions of the contemporary novel that were familiar to its mainly middle-class readership to root social identities in material conditions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , August 2008 , pp. 237 - 254
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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References

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