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Like an old cathedral city: Belfast welcomes Queen Victoria, August 1849

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2012

S.J. CONNOLLY
S.J. CONNOLLY*
Affiliation:
School of History and Anthropology, Queen's University Belfast, Belfast BT7 1NN, N. Ireland
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Abstract:

Belfast, with its history of communal violence, is normally seen as lying outside the mainstream of nineteenth-century British urban development. The queen's visit, however, reveals a community characterized by much the same mixture of civic pride and diffidence that characterized other provincial centres. The episode also casts light on the ambivalent attitude of the British and Irish political establishments to the new industrial town, and on Belfast's ambiguous position within the Irish urban hierarchy.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 39 , Issue 4 , November 2012 , pp. 571 - 589
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012 

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41 BNL, 27 Jul. 1849.

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57 BNL, 14 Aug. 1849; NW, 14 Aug. 1849. Another reported slogan, ‘Up goes my caubeen/For Erin's own queen’, employed a dialect word for ‘hat’ recently popularized by Carleton and other Irish writers in English: see, for example, Morgan, Lady [Sydney Owenson], O'Donnell, A National Tale, 3 vols. (London, 1814), II, 251Google Scholar; Carleton, W., ‘The poor scholar’, in Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, 2 vols. (Gerrard's Cross, 1990), II, 265Google Scholar.

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63 NW, 14 Aug. 1849.

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67 RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ/1849: 11 Aug. 1849, 304a, 304b.

68 NW, 16 Aug. 1849; Banner of Ulster, 17 Aug. 1849.

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