Between Isolation and Integration: Religion, Politics, and the Catholic Irish in Preston, C.1829-1868

ABSTRACT Since the 1970s, case-studies have highlighted specific local contexts which informed variegated Irish migrant experience across nineteenth-century Britain. This article scrutinises how the Catholic Irish in Preston navigated their host society. Especially in public and organisational expressions of religion and politics, the Preston Irish were unusually closely connected to their host community. Preston’s unusual confessional demographics and multifaceted political contestation offered the Catholic Irish opportunities for meaningful interventions in local society. Situating this case-study comparatively, this article posits four key interlinking factors shaping migrants’ experiences of a nineteenth-century town: its size, broader immigration patterns, confessional composition, and labour politics.