ABSTRACT
Town life in nineteenth-century Britain consisted of a profusion of institutional networks. Everything from local councils, charitable bodies and literary institutions, to harbour commissions and local boards of health required an army of post-holders to attend meetings, manage finances, make decisions and attend functions. Such activities lay at the core of urban middle-class networks in British urban life. There was no shortage of opportunity for people looking to wield influence or shoulder
some level of communal responsibility, to find outlets for their ambitions somewhere within this web of officialdom. Entry into the world of public service and urban activism, moreover, could bring with it rich rewards. As the historian of one urban region has put it, 'service in local elites held out the prospect of acquiring a prominent, respected place in the community ... Local government in particular provided a chance to leap from obscurity to local fame. l
Access into the ranks of these urban networks was by no means automatic however. Office-holding was closely linked to notions of individual status and respectability and there was a degree to which an established reputation as a 'fit and proper person' was a prerequisite for entry.2 For ambitious members of the immigrant Irish middle class in Britain, this was a qualification which was not always easy to fulfil. A number of historians have noted that Irish migrants were rather poorly represented within elite urban networks in British towns. In her study of Victorian London, Lynn Lees observed that few Irish became Poor Law guardians or vestry members before 1860, even though 'many of Irish descent were among the resident middle class of small merchants and professionals,.3 Tom Gallagher, meanwhile, has blamed the tense climate of religious intolerance in nineteenth-century Glasgow for blocking opportunities for Irish Catholics in the upper echelons of civic life. Patrick Dollan, he points out 'was the first member of his community to be elected to a prestigious civil office when he became Glasgow's Lord Provost in 1938.'4 Other studies, however, have revealed that levels of participation in urban networks were subject to significant degrees of regional variation. The experience of the Irish in Welsh towns, in particular, seems to have been rather different.
