Historians have devoted greater attention to nineteenth-century Belfast in recent years, focusing in particular on the things Belfast had in common with other provincial cities in Victorian Britain: the creation and evolution of its philanthropic institutions and the range and vitality of its civic, intellectual and political culture. The first great charity of this town both reflects and contributes to this new social history of Belfast. Founded in 1752 to raise funds to build a poorhouse and an infirmary for the poor (opened in 1774), the Belfast Charitable Society provides contributors with a fascinating entry point to explore the development of the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century town.
In a clear and useful introduction, Olwen Purdue lays out the book's two primary goals: to provide a new history of the Belfast Charitable Society (B.C.S.); and to set the institution within a wider context of urban poverty, welfare and public health provision in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Ireland. While the quality of the chapters that follow is a bit uneven, the collection fulfills these goals admirably, enriching our understanding of a relatively neglected era. The collection opens with two short contextual essays, designed to situate the early history of the B.C.S. in its eighteenth-century legislative and international/political settings. The latter sets the stage for Jonathan Jeffrey Wright's insightful exploration of the links between the Atlantic slave trade and early nineteenth-century Belfast. Wright does this through the life of William John Brown, who escaped slavery in New Orleans and came to Belfast as a stowaway in 1830. Stepping off the boat, Brown was a free man, a status confirmed by recent interpretations of the famous Mansfield Case. He told his story before the Belfast Police Court in August 1830, providing Wright with a documentary core to reconstruct aspects of Brown's transatlantic life and experience in Belfast. Brown's time in the northern capital was short. He was buried in the Clifton Street burial ground in 1831, but his life highlights the rich intersections of race, slavery and freedom in pre-Famine Belfast.
The B.C.S. was a philanthropic association dedicated to providing a variety of services for the town's poor. Not surprisingly, some of the collection's best chapters examine the institution's efforts to support people as they struggled with urban poverty. Focusing on the B.C.S.'s late eighteenth-century history, Raymond Gillespie highlights its innovative nature, arguing that the organisation was part of a broader social experiment where mercantile elites attempted to reformulate the Belfast community through the mechanism of the voluntary association, something that allowed the ‘middling sorts’ an opportunity to demonstrate their leadership in a changing town. Ciarán McCabe takes this story into the pre-Famine era, where he examines the complexity and range of the welfare landscape in the fast-growing northern capital. The town's private charities were challenged by the passage of the Irish Poor Law in 1838, but McCabe shows how the B.C.S. successfully adapted its mission to focus its resources on the ‘honest, elderly poor’, a community not considered deserving under the state's new workhouse regime.
The history of public health has been one of the most dynamic subfields in modern Irish history in recent years. Robyn Atcheson ably surveys the development of Belfast's nascent public health infrastructure in the early nineteenth century. The essay's examination of the various places where women were situated in these medical networks (advocates and fundraisers through the B.C.S., as well as caregivers and patients) is of particular interest. Atcheson closes with a brief examination of the Cholera pandemic of 1832, which, she argues, underlines the fact that Belfast had a functional public health system by the 1830s. Christine Kinealy and Gerard MacAtasney's chapter highlights the degree to which this system was challenged by the Great Famine. This was particularly true in 1847, when the onset and spread of fever overwhelmed the town's medical infrastructure, emblemized by the B.C.S.'s reluctant decision to house medical and surgical cases forced out of the general hospital. The authors use a range of archival and press sources to highlight the voices of the suffering poor, something that underlines the tragic impact of the Famine in Belfast.
The book opens with a foreword by the former Irish President Mary McAleese, who reflects on growing up in the shadow of the old poorhouse in Belfast. It closes with an epilogue by the current director of the B.C.S., Paula Reynolds, who discusses the future of the organisation. Both are thoughtful and well written essays that celebrate the humane impact and vision of the organization, but they sit somewhat awkwardly with the rest of the volume, which, after all, focuses on the history of the B.C.S. between 1750 and 1900. This is a minor quibble, for The first great charity of this town is a valuable addition to the new history of Belfast, full of insightful scholarship that highlights the complex and often surprising histories that contributed to the making of the Victorian city.
