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J. Buckman, Immigrants and the Ciass Struggle. The Jewish Immigrant in Leeds, 1880–1914 . Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983. £17.50.

In the first place, despite the book's title the issue of poverty is only systematically explored in relation to the housing market. The key issues of retail prices and Irish dietary patterns are wholly ignored; the consequence of remittances to Ireland upon the family budget is never considered; and the vital question of the availability of working-class credit is not raised. But the failure to examine poverty from the perspective of consumption is compounded by the reluctance of the author to analyse the dynamics of the local labour market. In any study of a specific town it is not sufficient to quantify the proportion of Irishmen and Irishwomen in certain occupations and to expect the reader to draw conclusions about the incidence of poverty from such data. Instead there is a need to analyse extant wage material, no matter how fragmentary, and to break the local labour market down into its component parts, While, for instance, 'casual' and 'seasonal' patterns of work are mentioned in the text, there is no insight into the dimensions of these sectors of the labour market and no evaluation of the extent to which they were the preserve of the Irish. Seasonality raises the question of the possibility of 'dove-tailing' of employment and thus easing some of the pressures of poverty in family life. Without, however, a deeper analysis of York's labour market in the third quarter of the nineteenth century it is impossible to reach any conclusions about job mobility amongst seasonal workers. But there are other aspects of the labour market which should have been raised in the context of poverty. First, we badly need to know something about the work patterns and earning capacity of the family unit, bearing in mind the important caveat that there was always a substantial under-recording of juvenile and adult female casual hands in nineteenth-century censuses. Second, indigence should not be equated with pauperism, although the only chapter devoted to poverty is entirely concerned with Poor Law relief. Even in its own terms of reference, however, much more should have been said at that point about scales of relief and how local Poor Law policy evolved before and after the irremovable category was created in the late 1840s. Third, immigrant political activity merited fuller treatment than it receives. Although parts of the book examine the salient characteristics of pre-Famine settlement, no mention is made of the contemporaneous agitation for the Repeal of the Act of Union which received vigorous support from immigrant groups in the urban areas of Lancashire and Yorkshire. Again, while passing reference is made to the existence of Ribbonism amongst York's immigrants, no hint is given of the erratic spread of that movement in other parts of the North. Even more strangely the counter-attack against Ribbon activity which was led by both Irish nationalist politicians and the Catholic clergy, including Bishop Briggs residing in nearby Fulford, secures no acknowledgment in the text. While, therefore, Dr Finnegan has at several levels illuminated our understanding of York's Irish community, she has by no means exhausted the topic for future researchers.