Women and family

Using primary sources including diaries and letters, this chapter sheds considerable light on the female intellectual and cultural sphere. A wide-ranging discussion of middle-class women living in an Irish urban context is offered here. Although Victorian elite women left a much lighter record than that of men, private correspondence from the large Workman family and Mary Watts’ diary and biography provide a fascinating insight into the female sphere as it existed in the town. Women’s experience of education, culture, singleness, courtship, marriage, motherhood and philanthropy are all discussed in this chapter, raising questions about levels of female independence, self-worth and participation in the public sphere. Fatherhood and childhood are also discussed in this chapter.

A divided city

Belfast’s middle classes lived in a divided city. Politically, Belfast was divided for the period under review into Conservative and Liberal camps. Religious divisions existed between Protestants and Roman Catholics, and within Protestantism itself. Society was also separated into different classes, with the middle classes positioned above the working classes and below the aristocracy. Political, religious and class tensions existed in every industrial city, of course. However, in Belfast, religious division assumed a particularly ugly and bitter hue. This chapter focuses on an elite living in a society divided along lines of both class and religion. The relationship of Belfast’s elite to the city’s working classes and the local aristocracy is explored; while a discussion of Belfast’s middle-class Roman Catholic community assesses the extent to which it was integrated into the city’s elite. The chapter also examines the relationship between the middle classes and the city’s growing sectarianism.

Family businesses, working lives and civic activism

This chapter looks at the role of the business community and charts both the business and civic activity of members of the Belfast business elite. It gives overview of the economic and business culture in which the middle-classes lived and worked. Rather than an economic history of the city, it offers a people-centric view of the city and its economic environment. The focus is on three lesser-known business families of Belfast – the Workmans, Corrys and McCances. Particular attention is paid to the Workman and Corry businesses which together highlight the close-knit nature of the local economy, the interrelatedness of family businesses and the strong connections between industrialists in Belfast and their counterparts in Scotland. Like many of Belfast’s industrial elite, the Presbyterian Workman and Corry families moved to the up-and-coming town at the very beginning of the century to take advantage of the opportunities it had to offer. The first part of the chapter outlines these family businesses and the ways in which they were representative of the city’s business elite. The second part of the chapter discusses the civic activism in which these and other middle-class families engaged.

Portrait of a civic elite

This chapter sketches a group portrait of Belfast’s middle-class elite, taking in geographical, religious and class origins, education, wealth, and standards of living. A key focus of this chapter is the mid-century civic elite: that is, those people who dominated municipal life in Belfast in the middle decades of the century. The chapter does, however, go beyond this group, using various case-studies to branch into a much broader discussion of middle-class wealth, standards of living and social mobility. It provides an overview of the Victorian middle-class community as a whole. A fresh look is cast on suburbanisation and how it affected Belfast’s middle-class community. Suburbanisation is a phenomenon related to social mobility and demographic and economic changes, and as such is highly relevant when studying a dynamic community over a period of time.

Lifestyle and recreation

In this chapter, personal and family papers are used to shed light on middle-class lifestyle, recreation and leisure, and the cultural norms and values underpinning them. In the Victorian period, Belfast’s inhabitants did not have a reputation for engaging in recreational or leisure pursuits. From the late eighteenth century onwards, what visitors tended to notice about Belfast’s middle-class residents was their industrious and business-focused attitude. Yet religion was central to middle-class identity across Britain throughout the nineteenth century: church membership, church attendance and church leadership were all defining features of middle-class life. The Belfast bourgeoisie also had time for cultural pursuits, socialising, summer holidays and travel. This chapter examines several aspects of middle-class leisure, including dancing, sports and summer holidays. It also overviews the religious culture that was such an important part of bourgeois ‘lifestyle’ and indeed identity.

A British or an Irish city? The identity of Victorian Belfast

Nineteenth-century Belfast was an Irish city unlike any other. The only Irish city to experience the industrial revolution, it enjoyed unprecedented levels of growth while other Irish cities declined. During and after the Famine, the divergence between Belfast’s fortunes and those of other Irish towns and cities became increasingly obvious. Keenly aware of its distinctive position in Irish society, Victorian Belfast - ‘Linenopolis’ - developed a civic identity based on its industry and prosperity. It projected an image of economic strength, independence and energy and consciously allied itself with British industrial centres. At the same time, however, Belfast’s unusual situation gave rise to confusion about civic and national identity. Was Belfast British, or Irish? This chapter brings together the themes of civic identity and national identity, exploring how they interacted for this social group. Through an examination of the city’s identity, image and civic pride in the post-Repeal, pre-Home Rule period, it addresses the question of what made Belfast a distinctive culture.

Conclusion

In British history, the period before the 1880s is sometimes known as the ‘high Victorian’ era – a time when the industrial revolution had blossomed into prosperity, when towns and cities built massive town halls and public buildings, when landmark reforms were taking place in parliamentary politics, when the British empire reached its zenith, and when confidence, innovation and dynamism abounded. It was also a period in which nonconformist and evangelical religion dominated the urban scene – across British towns and cities, philanthropic projects, Sunday School teaching, temperance and missions preoccupied thousands of middle-class citizens....

A ‘Northern Athens’? Cultural and intellectual life

In the Victorian period, Belfast was known as the ‘Northern Athens’ – a title which referred to the city’s cultural and intellectual credentials. The term was still being used in the early twentieth century. Yet in the second half of the nineteenth century, as the city’s cultural societies struggled to survive, Belfast’s cultural claims were increasingly under question. By the end of the century it was felt that Belfast was now known more for its hard-headed business character than for its culture. This chapter assesses the cultural and intellectual life of Victorian Belfast and questions the validity of the ‘cultural centre to cultural desert’ narrative. It offers a nuanced discussion of the city’s cultural strengths and weaknesses and those of comparable provincial centres elsewhere. Cultural and scientific associations are examined in some detail; and theatre, music, literature and newspapers are all covered. In addition, the mental intellectual landscape of Belfast’s middle-class elite is discussed.

Introduction

Born in 1843 into a prosperous middle-class family, Thomas Workman was the seventh child of fifteen. His father and uncle ran a muslin manufacturing business. When he was ten years old, Thomas moved with his family from their three-storey mid-terrace in the town centre to a newly built villa in the suburbs. As a young man he entered the family business and soon afterwards he married his wife, Margaret Hill. After a successful few years running his branch of the business, Thomas and Margaret moved with their children to a large country house located ten miles from the city. From here Thomas took the train to work. An upstanding member of the community, Thomas was a magistrate, a governor of the Presbyterian Orphan Society and a Sunday school teacher. Just as both his father and brother had done, he founded a local Presbyterian church. He frequently travelled abroad for work, but still found time to pursue his passions of yachting and natural history. President of the local Natural History Society, Thomas Workman discovered two new species of spiders while on his travels and he published a book, ...