paxvictoriana: ANTI-IRISH POLITICAL CARTOONS, 1848-1899As scholar Lewis Parry Curtis notes in his&nb

paxvictoriana:

ANTI-IRISH POLITICAL CARTOONS, 1848-1899

As scholar Lewis Parry Curtis notes in his Apes and Angels: the Irishman in Victorian Caricature (1971):

It was comforting for some Englishmen to believe — on the basis of the best scientific authority in the Anthropological Society of London — that their own facial angles and orthognathous features were as far removed from those of apes, Irishmen, and Negroes as was humanly possible … The simianizing of Paddy in the 1860s thus emanated from the convergence of deep, powerful emotions about the nature of man, the security of property, and the preservation of privilege … Englishmen who celebrated the genius of the Anglo-Saxon race tended to see themselves as modern Athenians, endowed with Grecian noses and facial angles… these men thought that the common Catholic Irishman was the antithesis of all these desirable qualities: Paddy was a wild, melancholic, indolent, unstable and prognathous Caliban … After the outbreak of Fenian violence in the mid-1860s, Paddy descended further to find himself a niche somewhere between the “white Negro” and the anthropoid apes. [pp. 103, 105, 107, cited in Vincent J. Cheng, Joyce, Race, and Empire]

1. ‘The British Lion and the Irish Monkey’
   — caption: ‘Monkey (Mr. [John] Mitchell): “One of us MUST be ‘Put Down.’”’ (Punch, March 8, 1848)
2. ‘A Great Time For Ireland!’
   — caption : ‘Mr. G-O’rilla, the Young Ireland Party, exulting over the insult to the British flag. Shouldn’t he be extinguished at once?’ (Punch, Dec. 14, 1861)
   [More about The Nation Irish newspaper]
3. ‘The Irish Frankenstein’
   — caption: ‘“The baneful and blood-stained Monster *** yet was it not my Master to the very extent that it was my Creature? *** Had I not breathed into it my own spirit?” *** (Extract from the Works of C[harles] S[tewart] P[A]RN[E]LL, M.P.)’  (Punch, May 20, 1882)
   [see more on advocate of Irish Home Rule, Charles Parnell; and the Phoenix Park Murders of the new Irish Secretary and Undersecretary in Dublin, 1882]
4. ‘Two Forces’
   — image: Britannia, wielding the sword of ‘THE LAW’, protecting the figure of Hiberno (Ireland) from the ape-like man of ‘Anarchy’  (by John Tenniel, Punch, Oct. 29, 1881)
   — text, previous page: ‘Oh Erin, much maddened, take heart, face the light! 
   ‘There is safety, not scathe, in the straight-levelled steel.
   ’If our voice is of Force, ‘tis Force of the Right,
   ‘Not to crush, not to wound, but to guard and to heal.’ [pp193]
5. Scientific racism: the types of the ‘Irish Iberian’, ‘Anglo-Teutonic’, and ‘Negro’
   — text excerpt: ‘They [the supposed African Iberian tribe] came to Ireland and mixed with the natives of the South and West, who themselves are supposed to have been of low type and descendants of savages of the Stone Age, who, in consequence of isolation from the rest of the world, had never been out-competed in the healthy struggle of life, and thus made way, according to the laws of nature, for superior races.’
   (Thomas Nast cartoon, Harper’s Weekly US, after 1857/possibly 1899)
6. 'The King of A-Shantee’
   — (by Frederick B. Opper, Puck, Feb. 15, 1882)
   — ‘The “Ashantee” were a well known African tribe; “shanty” was the Irish word for a shack or poor man’s house. The cartoon mocks Irish poverty, caricatures irish people as ape like and primitive, and suggests they are little different from Africans, who the cartoonists seems to see the same way. This cartoon irishman has, again, the outhrust mouth, sloping forehead, and flat wide nose of the standard Irish caricature.’ -Michael O’Malley, George Mason University
   
7. 'Killing The Goose That Laid The Golden Egg’
   — image of the Catholic Church and the Irish-American thug carving up the Democratic Party goose, followed by the fable from Aesop.
   — (Harper’s Weekly, Nov. 18, 1871)