L. P. Curtis, Anglo-Saxons & Celts: A Study of Anti-Irish Prejudice in Victorian England, Bridgeport UP 1968)

‘So persistent has been this theme of English cultural and racial superiority over the Irish that one begins to suspect the existence among those who tried to subdue and rule the Irish of a deep-seated need to justify their confiscatory and homicidal habits in that country’ (p.18).

‘[The English were] trying to discharge their own anxieties about feelings of violence, indolence, emotional incontinence, and even femininity onto another people who seemed to bear these stigma. Paddy served as a convenient scapegoat for the frustrations which arose out of a code of civilized and gentlemanly conduct that regulated the public lives of countless Englishmen [...] thus really the Irish Question is an English Question, that is to say, a by-product of the social and emotional pressure under which many middle and upper class Victorians lived and suffered.’ (Ibid., p.65.)

‘Having little or no awareness of the unsettling effects which the forceful and arrned English presence had upon Irish society, English observers jumped to the conclusion that the Irish people were a turbulent semi-nomadic treacherous, idle, dirty, and belligerent lot who reminded them of the “savages” or Indians of North America.’ (p.18.)

Also: ‘The stereotype of the primitive, melancholic, and prognathous Irish Celt was documented by anthropologists and ethnologists who constructed impressive typologies of the physiognomies of the British and Irish peoples.’ (Curtis, Apes, 94; all the foregoing cited in Cheng, Joyce, Race and Empire, 1995, Notes, p.298.)