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Parnell and the Bradlaugh case

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2016

Walter L. Arnstein
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Extract

It is a historical truism that the ‘Irish question’ dominated British parliamentary life during the last third of the nineteenth century. For good reason does Sir Robert Ensor give one of the chapters in England, 1870-1914 the title ‘The ascendancy of Parnell’. Yet it is the custom to treat the Irish nationalist contingent at Westminster as concerned only with Irish questions. It has been observed, to be sure, that the ‘Irish question’ had a highly significant impact upon English affairs. The Irish land acts of 1870 and 1881, for example, have come to be seen as a type of government intervention in economic affairs foreshadowing the twentieth-century welfare state. One aspect of the existence of an Irish third party at Westminster has, however, been curiously neglected, the impact of Irish M.Ps upon essentially English political controversies. It is with one such controversy that this paper is concerned, the notorious Bradlaugh case.

Type
Research Article
Information
Irish Historical Studies , Volume 13 , Issue 51 , March 1963 , pp. 212 - 235
Copyright
Copyright © Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd 1963

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References

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8 The letter is printed in The Times, 21 May 1880. The most detailed published account of the Bradlaugh case was contributed by Robertson, J.M. to volume ii of Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner’s Charles Bradlaugh: a record of his life and work (London, 1895)Google Scholar. See also Arnstein, Walter L., ‘ Gladstone and the Bradlaugh case ’, in Victorian Studies, v (June 1962), pp. 303-30Google Scholar.

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