Citizens of Nowhere: longing, belonging and exile among Irish Protestant writers in Britain,c.1830–1970

Abstract

As he entered the final years of his life, Bernard Shaw received a gushing letter from Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India's first Prime Minister. During his undergraduate days in I am by birth a British subject. I have always so described myself when applying for Shaw was, of course, one of the best known public intellectuals of his age, scaling the heights of the London socialist and avant-garde literary worlds over a fifty-year period. This was achieved while he -publicly, at least -cultivated the status of an outsider in England. That he made common cause with the "foreignness" of Jawaharlal Nehru within a British context, despite substantial differences in race and language, spoke volumes for Shaw's conception of a distinctive Irishness that refused to be assimilated by an over-arching Britishness.Shaw's notion of "a citizen of Nowhere" and affirmations of his "foreigner" status inBritain chime with broader articulations of a migrant mentality of otherness, difference, and exclusion from the host country. Such traits historically distinguished the Irish experienceor, at least, perceptions of it -in Britain. The United Kingdom was, and remains, a multinational political unit; population movement within it thus carries elements of both internal and external migration. While nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Irish migrants to Britain moved, technically speaking, from one part of the British state to another, they also travelled from one clearly distinct nation to another. After the creation of Northern Ireland in 1921, this process continued for migrants to Britain from the six counties. Given this dual internal-external migratory framework and -it can hardly be forgotten -the problematic constitutional relationship between Britain and Ireland, the experience of relocation from the smaller to the larger island produced a wealth of ideas concerning identity, homeland, and belonging.