1. For a detailed account of this, see Louise Raw, Striking a Light: the Bryant and May Matchwomen and Their Place in History (London: Continuum, 2011). Raw’s analysis of the strike register shows that the majority of the strikers came from the Irish community in the East End of London; furthermore she points out that the majority of the later dockers’ strike committee were Irish.
2. In her autobiography, Besant is unequivocal on this point: ‘It has always been somewhat of a grievance to me that I was born in London, “within the sound of Bow Bells”, when three-quarters of my blood and all my heart are Irish’. Annie Besant, Annie Besant: An Autobiography (London: n.p., 1885), p. 57. Barry Crosbie attributes Besant’s involvement in the emergence of Indian nationalism to her Irish background. See his Irish Imperial Networks: Migration, Social Communication and Exchange in Nineteenth-Century India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 249.
3. This paraphrases the title of a key New Woman essay, Sarah Grand’s ‘The New Aspect of the Woman Question’, North American Review 158 (1894): 270–6.
4. The Irish have long constituted an invisible migrant minority in Britain, and even in more recent times they were not always recognized as a separate ethnic community, at least until Mary Hickman and Bronwen Walter’s pioneering work challenged the conventional wisdom concerning ‘race’ and immigration. See Mary J. Hickman and Bronwen Walter, Discrimination and the Irish Community in Britain (London: Commission for Racial Equality, 1997).
5. Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 1.