ABSTRACT
Belfast at first sight has all the characteristics of a quintessentially British Victorian city.1 Its population growth, from just under 20,000 to just under 350,000 over the course of the nineteenth century, is not spectacularly at variance with the growth rates of many other industrial cities in the north of England.2 Its economic development from its early dependence on textiles to its later expansion into ship-building and heavy engineering is typical of many nineteenth-century British cities. Similar also are Belfast’s relatively high levels of immigration from the surrounding countryside, its evolution as a major centre of trade and transport and its characteristically industrial occupational and social structure.3 Even its architecture and public entertainments were classically Victorian in style and content. Belfast’s ‘red bricked and smoke blackened buildings’, wrote the Frenchman Paul Dubois in 1907, ‘resembles Liverpool or Glasgow rather than an Irish town’.4 This early comparison between the great industrial and trading ports of northern Britain has surfaced again and again in the literature, not least because each city was notorious for its ethnic and religious rivalries.5 Such conflicts, because of their persistence and longevity, have come to be regarded as peculiar to Belfast, but they were by no means untypical of nineteenth-century cities in Britain, Europe and North America as population migrations, challenges to ancien regime established churches and economic and social inequalities produced different configurations of ethnic and religious conflict in many western cities.
