Ireland's Great Hunger, Volume 2: Relief, Representation, and Remembrance

The papers collected in this volume are a product of the second conference on Ireland’s Great Hunger held at Quinnipiac University in 2005. That conference, focused on the

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University Press of America®, Inc. publishing across academic disciplines since 1975

IRELAND’S

themes of representation and preservation, brought together forty-five scholars from around the world to discuss various aspects of the Famine and its aftermath. Following the

GREAT HUNGER

conference, the complete An Gorta Mór collection of Quinnipiac’s famine commemorative art was placed on display for the first time in the University’s Alumni Hall. The An Gorta Mór collection is on permanent display in the University’s Arnold Bernhard Library and

Relief, Representation, and Remembrance

in other buildings across the University’s Mount Carmel campus. This volume, focused range of disciplines including works of history, literary criticism, anthropology, and art history. DAVID A. VALONE is associate professor of history at Quinnipiac University. He has coedited volumes on Anglo-Irish Identities, 1543–1845 (Bucknell, 2008), Philanthropic Foundations and the Globalization of Scientific Medicine and Public Health (University Press of America, 2006), and Reverence Life, Revisited: Albert Schweitzer’s Relevance Today (Cambridge Scholars, 2006).

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IreGreatHungerV2PBK.indd 1

IRELAND’S GREAT HUNGER

on the theses of relief, representation, and remembrance, contains essays from a broad

Volume 2

edited by

David A. Valone

90000 9 780761 848998

11/23/09 3:48:52 PM

Ireland’s Great Hunger Relief, Representation, and Remembrance Volume 2

Edited by David A. Valone

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF AMERICA,® INC.

Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

Copyright © 2010 by University Press of America,® Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard Suite 200 Lanham, Maryland 20706 UPA Acquisitions Department (301) 459-3366 Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America British Library Cataloging in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Control Number: 2009935041 ISBN: 978-0-7618-4899-8 (paperback : alk. paper) eISBN: 978-0-7618-4900-1

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Contents

Preface

v

Part One Famine Relief 1

A Jersey Ship for Ireland Harvey Strum

3

2

“We cannot but regret the great delay”: Reflections on the Writings of the North Dublin Union Guardians during the Famine Margaret Preston

21

Part Two Writing the Famine 3

4

5

Great Hunger, Unspeakable Home: Landscape, Nature and Original Sin in Lady Morgan’s The Wild Irish Girl and William Carleton’s The Black Prophet Jefferson Holdridge

39

Mapping the Imperial Body: Body Image and Representation in Famine Reporting Robert Smart

57

Representing the Famine, Writing the Self: Irish-Canadian Narratives Michael Kenneally

73

iii

iv

6

7

Contents

Writing the Famine, Healing the Future: Nuala O’Faolain’s My Dream of You Mary Fitzgerald-Hoyt The Cyberculture of Grosse Île Rhona Richman Kenneally

88 111

Part Three Famine Remembrance 8

9

The Famine, Irish-American Transition, and a Century of Intellectual and Cultural History Mary C. Kelly Remembering Homelessness in the Great Irish Famine Niamh Ann Kelly

123 140

10 “She must have come steerage”: The Great Famine in New England Folk Memory E. Moore Quinn

161

11 Towards a Famine Art History: Invention, Reception, and Repetition from the Nineteenth Century to the Twentieth Emily Mark-FitzGerald

181

Selected Bibliography

203

Contributors

217

Index

221

Preface

The papers collected in this volume are a product of the second conference on Ireland’s Great Hunger held at Quinnipiac University in 2005. That conference, focused on the themes of representation and preservation, brought together forty-five scholars from around the world to discuss various aspects of the Famine and its aftermath. The conference was opened with a keynote address by David A. Valone on “Imagined Identity and the Irish Economy: Population, Hunger, and the Irish Peasantry on the Eve of the Famine” and concluded with a plenary session featuring Kevin Whelan’s talk “The Killing Snows: The Cultural Impact of the Irish Famine.” In between, the more than one hundred people who attended the conference were treated to a full day of fascinating and diverse perspectives on the Famine. Following the conference, the complete An Gorta Mór collection of Quinnipiac’s famine commemorative art was placed on display for the first time in the University’s Alumni Hall. Sculptor John Behan, whose work is extensively represented in Quinnipiac’s collection, gave a stirring speech on his work and on artistic famine commemoration. The An Gorta Mór collection is on permanent display in the University’s Arnold Bernhard Library and in other buildings across the University’s Mount Carmel campus. The papers selected for inclusion in this volume represent the diversity and depth of contemporary famine scholarship. They treat aspects of the Famine from a wide range of disciplinary perspective, from history and art history, to literature, anthropology and cultural criticism. It is hoped that these papers both help to capture the spirit of the conference and to set an agenda for ongoing research. As with all scholarly projects, this work represents a collaborative effort. Thanks go to Emily Weed, Chelsea LaManna, and Alan Bisbort for editorial assistance. Dana Pelliccio and Betsy Delaney v

vi

Preface

contributed much needed administrative support. Quinnipiac University, particularly the President John L. Lahey and Dean Hans Bergmann of the College of Arts and Sciences, provided financial assistance for the project. For permission to reproduce images, thanks go to Gabriel Managh of www.irishfaminecottage.com, John McNamara of www.achilltourism.com, Brian Tolle, the Battery Park City Authority, Stan Ries, the National Library of Ireland, the Board of Trinity College Dublin, and the Sunday Independent. Portions of Margaret Preston’s essay were previously printed in her book Charitable Words: Women, Philanthropy, and the Language of Charity in Nineteenth-Century Dublin. Thanks for permission to reprint that material go to Praeger Publishers. One note on editorial style regarding capitalization is also necessary. In general, Famine refers directly to the discrete historical event also known as the Great Hunger in Ireland, which took place roughly 1845 to 1852. All other uses of famine, especially as a descriptive modifier (for example, famine art, famine commemoration, and famine memory), have been set in lower case.

I FAMINE RELIEF

1 A Jersey Ship for Ireland Harvey Strum

“The citizens of the State of New Jersey, deeply sympathizing in the deplorable condition of the poor of Ireland and Scotland,” contributed food, clothing, and money to fill the brig Overmann “with provisions for the starving population of your country.” So reported John Stephens, Oliver Hayes, and Thomas V. Johnson—the Purchasing and Forwarding Committee of the New Jersey Committee for the Relief of Ireland and Scotland— when they sent a load of provisions to the General Committee of Society of Friends in Dublin in March of 1847.1 Unlike today, when most foreign aid goes from the United States government to foreign governments for distribution, funds for famine relief in 1846–47 came from citizens’ committees and churches. Aid went to voluntary groups in Ireland, especially the Society of Friends, which emerged as the major voluntary organization coordinating relief efforts. Word of famine conditions in Ireland appeared in the American press during the winter of 1846–47, and Americans organized relief efforts that culminated in shipments of provisions in the spring and summer of 1847. Men and women from across the United States joined in the effort to aid the starving Irish, ignoring racial, religious, ethnic and political differences. Jewish congregations in New York City, free blacks in Richmond, Germans in Newark and Charleston, and even Choctaws and Cherokees all contributed. Irish organizations, like the Hibernians in Newark, and Roman Catholic religious leaders, like Jersey City’s Rev. John Kelly, rallied the faithful to contribute. In most communities, business, political, civic, and religious leaders established non-partisan and nonsectarian citizens’ committees to solicit and collect contributions. The New 3

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Famine Relief

Jersey Committee for the Relief of Ireland and Scotland, based in Newark, fit this model, and it encouraged the creation of other citizens’ committees throughout the state.2 Ironically, this outpouring of aid for Ireland took place between two periods of nativism in New Jersey.3 Unlike the early 1840s, which were dominated by the nativist American Republican Party, or the period of the Know-Nothings (American Party) of the 1850s, during the famine relief campaign of 1846–47, the people of New Jersey saw Irish-Americans as fellow workers in a charitable effort. Similarly, they viewed the Irish in Ireland as fellow human beings in need of assistance. Newspapers created positive images of the suffering Irish and Scots, and editors, politicians, and religious leaders joined in promoting the responsibility of the American people to help those in need. At the local level, religious leaders, like Episcopalian Bishop of New Jersey, George Washington Doane, or Newark’s mayor, Beach Vanderpool, played key roles in mobilizing public support and confirming the non-sectarian and non-partisan nature of famine relief contributions. As Doane’s son remembered, “at the suggestion of my father…the Jersey ship was loaded with breadstuffs and sent out to Ireland during the fearful famine of 1847.”4 News of the Irish potato blight first reached the U.S. during the winter of 1845–6, and limited efforts to raise funds began in Boston and New York. When word arrived in the summer of 1846 of good potential crops, interest in aiding Ireland faded. Then, in the fall of 1846, the situation turned bleak and relief organizations in Ireland, Scotland, and England solicited contributions. The Society of Friends established a Central Relief Committee in Dublin in November 1846. Most American relief committees like those in Newark, Elizabethtown, Clinton, and Perth Amboy, channeled relief primarily through the Dublin committee.5 New Jersey’s Quakers also sent their contributions, as the Society of Friends in Mount Holly, Rahway, and Plainfield did, to the Dublin committee.6 Irish immigrants often sent funds directly by mail to family members or contributed to Catholic churches that sent the aid to Ireland via New York Bishop John Hughes or their local bishops. In Paterson, local Irish Catholics raised $1,200 in remittances while a rich parishioner donated $300 for distribution by the Catholic Church in Ireland. Most of the remittances from Catholics came from Paterson residents “of the lower or laboring classes.” In Burlington, Irish residents “raised a considerable sum.”7 New York Quaker Jacob Harvey publicized the remittances of Irish laborers and domestics in New York City to spur contributions from others and the New Jersey press reported on Harvey’s accounts.8 Irish in New Jersey actively contributed, some through the Catholic Church, and others through the citizens committees formed in February/March 1847. Contributions from the Irish in Burlington, Paterson, Trenton, Newark, Elizabethtown, and New

A Jersey Ship for Ireland

5

Brunswick came from a population of relatively recent immigrants. Most of these worked as laborers, construction workers, domestics, or industrial workers, yet they sent what they could to family, friends, and compatriots in Ireland. Until late 1846, Americans knew little about events in Ireland because the press concentrated on the Mexican-American War (1846–48). Newspapers did not devote much attention to the crisis until the Arcadia arrived in Boston in November 1846 with news and the New Jersey press began publishing accounts about the crisis. “Ireland appears to be in a deplorable condition,” reported the Burlington Gazette. Readers in Princeton learned that “the famine continues to spread.” Similarly, in Newark, residents who read the Eagle learned that, “great numbers are dying of starvation.” Soon after, press reports began to appear throughout the United States about the desperate situation in Ireland.9 The news led to meetings in East Coast cities like New York and Philadelphia. While a few cities organized relief committees, most fundraising came from the Irish communities or from Quakers reacting to an appeal from the Dublin committee or a second appeal sent by Jacob Harvey to fellow Quakers in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. The Irish communities in Paterson and Jersey City were among the earliest to respond. By midJanuary 1847, the Repeal Association in Paterson made arrangements for a ball to raise funds “for the relief of the destitute” in Ireland.10 This directly linked the repeal movement and Irish nationalist/ethnic associations with famine relief. Residents of Jersey City organized relief operations two months before the rest of the state and two months before national leaders gave their blessing to the famine relief campaign. In late November 1846, the directors of the Working Men’s Protective Benevolent Society called a meeting of the citizens of Jersey City to devise “some plan to minister to the relief of the suffering poor of Ireland.”11 A report published by the committee of the society and confirmed by Sentinel indicated that “the meeting was numerously attended” which led the editor of the Sentinel, Luther Pratt, to conclude that “from the spirit evinced by those present, we are confident that the sympathy felt in behalf of the perishing sons and daughters of the Emerald Isle is very general in our community.”12 Representatives of the committee met with Mayor Phineas C. Dummer who agreed to call a second public meeting in early December to organize a citywide fundraising campaign. This meeting created a citizens’ committee that divided the city into districts; subcommittees went to every house in their districts soliciting contributions. For example, Mayor Dummer and another committee member took responsibility for the district from Essex Street south. A meeting chaired by the mayor adopted resolutions that Americans had a responsibility “as a people enjoying . . . freedom . . . to

6

Famine Relief

show others that Charity and Benevolence are the Handmaids of Freedom” and that the Irish were “so near akin to us in character and sentiment.” Considering the widespread anti-Catholic and anti-Irish nativism of the 1850s that surfaced in Jersey City and lingered for decades, the resolutions of the citizens of Jersey City in 1846 were remarkable for their identification with the Irish “as brothers.”13 In addition, a letter from Father John Kelly, who had taken charge of St. Peter’s Church in 1844, was read to the audience. This was one of the rare moments in the mid-19th century when Catholics and Protestants worked together for a common cause. Particularly in Jersey City, this emerged as a rare example of public endorsement of Catholic/Protestant cooperation on behalf of Irish Catholics.14 Only a few months earlier, Catholics and Protestants had fought over public education when the Jersey City school committee denied a petition from Catholics for a share of the public school fund. The common council also had denied previous requests in 1839 and 1842. In July 1846, there was an especially bitter debate between Catholics and Protestants and between pro- and anti-petition aldermen. Frederick Betts, an alderman on the school committee, denounced another alderman, Horatio Fryatt, for supporting giving public money to St. Peter’s Catholic School, charging that Fryatt sold his vote for Irish Catholic political support.15 Surprisingly, both Betts and Fryatt served on the Irish Famine relief committee, and both gave speeches at the public meeting chaired by the mayor on the need for Jersey City to raise funds to aid the starving in Ireland. Betts told the citizens of Jersey City that “although I claim to not be a descendant on the Emerald Isle—yet, as an American, I have a heart susceptible of the feeling of distress.”16 Betts, Dummer, and other Protestant leaders in Jersey City saw helping Ireland in terms of the values of American Republicanism and Protestant concepts of charity. They could identify with the hungry Irish Catholics in Ireland, but could not identify with the educational and religious needs of Irish Catholics in Jersey City. The newspapers in Jersey City agreed to publish contributions. There were no large benefactors in Jersey City where the contributions generally ranged from 50 cents to $2.00.17 The organizers closed off contributions in mid-December when contributions reached $1,008 and sent the money to General Robert Armstrong, the American Consul in Liverpool, who took responsibility for Jersey City’s funds. He forwarded the money to the Irish Relief Association in Dublin.18 The speed, organization, and generosity of Jersey City’s contributions led the New York Tribune to use it as example to spur surrounding cities to begin famine relief efforts: “Jersey City took the lead of us in the good work . . . what village will not emulate her glorious example?”19 Soon afterward, residents of Newark, Paterson, and Plainfield organized meetings to promote relief efforts, and Elizabeth quickly followed. New Jersey residents organized committees and some state news-

A Jersey Ship for Ireland

7

papers advocated collecting funds even before news of the national call for relief from Washington reached the Garden State. In Paterson, Irish-American Repealers held a fund-raising event in February. Simultaneously, an interdenominational and non-partisan citizens group called a public meeting in January 1847 and established a 15–member committee to solicit contributions in Paterson. The meeting advocated helping the Irish because of a “bond of union,” between the Americans and the Irish. Ireland provided “the largest portion of operatives engaged in constructing our great works of internal improvements.”20 Paterson’s residents were unique in justifying relief because of Irish contributions to canal, railroad and tunnel construction projects. Quakers led the way in Plainfield and reminded local residents at their monthly meeting that the Society of Friends already committed them to soliciting contributions from Quakers in Rahway and Plainfield. A local newspaper endorsed this appeal by Quakers Nathan Vail and Zechariah Webster and called upon non-Quakers to contribute, because the situation in Ireland “loudly calls for the active benevolence of the whole Christian world.”21 Putting aside sectarian differences to aid the Catholic Irish emerged as a major theme in the interdenominational support for famine relief. In both Plainfield and Paterson, appeals for funds emphasized the common bond of Christianity. Simultaneously, in late January, residents of Newark called a public meeting to establish a committee, consisting of local merchants, doctors, lawyers, and politicians to solicit contributions in each of Newark’s four wards. Both Whigs and Democrats served on this committee and on the later state committee. In the West Ward, Alderman Joseph Hollingsworth, a Whig, served on the ward committee, while in the South Ward, Democrat James Courter, another alderman, served on the committee.22 As Courter described the meeting and consequences, “a lively interest is felt here at present in behalf of the starving poor of Ireland,” and he reported that the citizens of Newark gave “liberal donations” for the Irish. Initially, the goals of the Newark committee remained modest—to raise sufficient funds for “a small cargo of flour.”23 By mid-February, a group of citizens met in Newark to establish a statewide famine relief committee and adopt the proposal of Bishop George Washington Doane to charter a Jersey ship for Ireland. The citizens group established a non-partisan voluntary committee, with Whig Mayor Beach Vanderpool as the treasurer who would collect contributions from local and county committees. Three local merchants, John H. Stephens, Thomas V. Johnson, and Oliver Hayes, became the Purchasing and Forwarding Committee, responsible for purchasing, storing, and shipping the provisions to Ireland. Wilson Knott, the postmaster, assumed responsibility for donations of clothing. A corresponding committee that included Frederick T.

8

Famine Relief

Frelinghuysen, later a U.S. Senator and Secretary of War, and John S. Darcy, a physician and hero of the 1832 cholera epidemic in Newark, drafted a circular to solicit contributions from other New Jersey communities. The circular letter identified the Newark-based committee as the state committee, General Relief Committee (or New Jersey Committee) for Ireland and Scotland, and called upon towns, cities, and counties to solicit donations of money, food, and clothing to ship to Newark. The Corresponding Committee also asked the clergy of the state to gather donations. Again, the New Jersey committee emphasized the non-partisan and non-denominational nature of this voluntary citizen’s movement.24 When the citizens of Newark established this committee, they adopted a resolution on the suggestion of a local alderman that stressed that the American people because “of the abundance wherewith God has blessed us” had a special obligation to alleviate the distress of the Irish people.25 This theme appeared spontaneously in meetings in Newark, Elizabeth, and Trenton, and became an essential part of the justification for voluntary citizens efforts for Ireland. Immediately after the committee’s formation, the members solicited advice from the New York City Irish Famine Relief Committee. George Barclay of the New York committee encouraged John Stephens to send donations to the Central Committee of the Society of Friends in Dublin and send a chartered vessel to Cork, two suggestions the committee in Newark adopted. Questions were raised in Newark over who should distribute the food, and where it should be sent, and the suggestions from Barclay resolved those concerns.26 Another concern came from individuals in Newark and Elizabeth who argued that Doane’s suggestion would delay contributions reaching the starving Irish.27 Some questioned if New Jersey could raise sufficient funds and provisions to send a ship to Ireland. Concerned that this might be true, the committee asked David L. Rogers, chairman, to visit cities in the state, like Paterson, Jersey City, and Trenton, to determine if local committees would raise sufficient contributions to fill a chartered vessel. Based on his travels in late February, Rogers got assurances and estimates of money and provisions from local committees, which in the end filled two ships. The committee sent leftover provisions on vessels chartered by the New York committee.28 In an effort to stimulate contributions, the state committee placed advertisements in the press “Jersey Ship for Ireland” and chartered the brig Overmann on March 15, 1847 as the first Jersey ship.29 Editors across New Jersey endorsed the campaign for famine relief, printing stories about conditions in Ireland, editorializing on behalf of famine relief, printing advertisements without charge from the state committee, and encouraging towns, cities, and counties to create relief committees. For example, in Salem the National Standard reminded readers “that a Jersey Ship has been procured” and cautioned that Salem County should not be the “last to extend its helping hand to the starving people of Ireland.”30

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In Plainfield, the local editor reminded readers that the Famine “loudly calls for the active benevolence of the whole Christian world,” and the editor encouraged local residents to contribute so “we hope to be able to state…that a good amount has been raised here.”31 After reporting on a relief meeting in Rancocas, the editor of the New Jersey Mirror in Mount Holly expressed his “hope the citizens of Mount Holly will move in this matter” and reminded readers that people in eastern New Jersey had already raised $5,000.32 In Elizabeth, a newspaper informed readers that “the sympathies of the people in all parts of our Country seem to be waking up to the distressed condition of the people of Ireland” and urged its local committee “to be up and doing” because “we know of more than one ‘Widow’s mite’ ready for this sacred treasury.”33 Similarly, in Flemington, a newspaper asked, “will not the people of Hunterdon respond to the loud calls of suffering humanity?” As the above indicates, New Jersey editors not only reported on the Famine, they actively encouraged, shamed, and pushed readers to contribute to relief as part of a state and national philanthropic effort. Editors made it an issue of local civic pride to make sure that their communities participated. The themes raised paralleled those at public meetings—the magnitude of the crisis in Ireland, common humanity, Christian charity, Americans as a people of plenty, common bonds with the Irish, and participation in a national cause of philanthropy. Some editors also reminded readers that New Jersey in particular profited from the market for grain created by the Famine, and thus had a moral obligation to give of its bounty. As a Salem County editor put it, Salem “in proportion to its population, is believed to have received more pecuniary benefit than any other in the state” from the famine conditions in Ireland and on the continent.34 A Gloucester County paper noted that “the starving conditions in Ireland” and crop shortages in Scotland and the continent had “produced an immense demand for breadstuffs.” In Gloucester County, farmers with grain “are now crowding it to market. Large quantities passed through this place last week in wagons.”35 Editors played an instrumental role in famine relief. Editor James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald accurately claimed that the press “did ‘the public’s business,’” outlining a public service role for journalism.36 Clearly, New Jersey newspaper editors handled the crisis in a way that demonstrated the public service function of journalism. With the help of state editors, the New Jersey Committee for the Relief of Ireland and Scotland succeeded in persuading residents to organize town, city, and county committees. In Newark, the Irish contributed $200 through the Hibernian Provident Society. Father Patrick Moran, an Irish immigrant and the “hard driving and forceful” Catholic spiritual leader of St. John’s Church, raised $610 in his church; the teachers and students in the St. John’s Catholic School contributed another $30.37 Female students

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Famine Relief

and teachers contributed half that amount.38 One Irish girl, Rose Kelly, a domestic, managed to purchase two barrels of cornmeal for “her starving relatives” in Ireland that went aboard Overmann.39 German Catholics at their church added another $90. Protestants also supported the ecumenical drive in Newark and across the state. The “old Blue Church,” the Second Presbyterian, joined the cause as did the leading Episcopalian congregation, Trinity, and the recently formed (1834) Universalist Church. Residents contributed through their churches, the ward committees, at public meetings in January and February, and at a benefit concert of the Alleghanians. The workers at the Passaic Chemical Works gave up a day’s pay to aid the Irish.40 In a community otherwise divided by social, religious, political, and ethnic differences, contributing to famine relief was a rare example of all members of the community uniting in a common cause. Evidence of support across denominational lines was statewide. Episcopalian congregations in Haddonfield, Moorestown, Trenton, Salem, and Princeton contributed. George Washington Doane solicited contributions from other Episcopalian congregations like St. Mary’s Church in Burlington. Even “some little girls” gave Bishop Doane what they could from their wages.41 In Plainfield, Quakers, Baptists in the First and Second Baptist Churches, and Presbyterians donated. At Rahway, Catholic, Episcopalian, Quaker, Baptist and Presbyterian Churches raised funds. The members of the First Presbyterian Church in Cranbury contributed. Even a small Baptist Church in Somerville scraped together what it could to forward to Newark. St. Peters Church, the Catholic Church in Jersey City led by Rev. Kelly, raised a second round of donations. The Society of Friends gave more than any other Protestant denomination. In Salem County, for example, Quakers gave $850. At the Mount Holly Monthly Meeting in early March, Quakers formed a committee to raise funds, and over $800 was contributed. In Gloucester County, the Society of Friends already actively subscribed to Irish relief and gathered over $300. Some of the funds raised by Quakers went to the New Jersey Committee, but most in Salem, Gloucester, and Burlington counties went through the Philadelphia Quakers to Dublin.42 Other state churches sent their contributions through the New Jersey committee although some Baptists sent funds to the Baptist Irish Society and Methodist Congregations sent donations to the Wesleyan Methodist Relief Fund, based in London. Like newspaper editors, the clergy played a leadership role persuading congregations to contribute; some clergyman served on local relief committees, affirming the ecumenical spirit of famine relief. George Washington Doane merits mention as the leading booster of relief among the Protestant clergy. As he told Mayor Beach Vanderpool, “I trust the Jersey Ship is sure to go.”43 To raise money for supplies to fill the ship, the New Jersey Committee depended on the willingness of state residents to organize local and/or

A Jersey Ship for Ireland

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county committees. Just as the state committee could not rely on direct help from Washington, it could not expect direct aid from state political leaders. A proposal in the state legislature for a small state contribution died because of concerns that the use of public money would be unconstitutional. Some legislators attended a public meeting in Trenton, the state capital, on March 1, 1847. The Trenton committee assigned a subcommittee to collect donations from the state legislators.44 However, state political leaders did not play a prominent public role in organizing famine relief outside of Trenton. Whig Governor Charles Stratton did not provide leadership. Among political leaders who did were former-Democratic governor Peter D. Vroom, who delivered a supportive speech at the Trenton meeting. Joseph C. Potts, who later ran unsuccessfully for the 1856 Democratic gubernatorial nomination, served as a secretary for the Trenton meeting, and Stacy G. Potts, a newspaper editor and an unsuccessful challenger to Whig William Pennington in the 1842 gubernatorial contest, also gave a speech favoring relief efforts. State political leaders left it to local officials, like Mayor Vanderpool in Newark, Mayor Dumner in Jersey City, Mayor John T. Robinson in Princeton, and Mayor Charles Burroughs in Trenton, to assume leadership of New Jersey’s fund-raising drive. While many other states were as reluctant as New Jersey to use public funds for Irish relief, leaders in some states, like New York, Virginia, and Louisiana, actively participated in relief efforts and blessed the movement.45 In New Jersey, state political leaders limited their activities and public role to Trenton, leaving it to citizens in Newark and Elizabeth, and George Washington Doane, to assume leadership of the statewide appeal for funds for a Jersey Ship. According to a Jersey City newspaper, widespread support existed for raising funds for a Jersey Ship. “The people throughout the state, both far and near, appear to have taken this matter into their special keeping,” the Sentinel reported on March 10, 1847. Students at the Wines School in Oakland raised $33, and a “Juvenile Fair” in Burlington netted $131. A relief committee in Bloomfield got a $23 donation from Ashland Hall School students. Clinton, Kingston, Springfield, Plainfield, and Belleville set up local citizens committees. The Belleville committee, for example, met on March 3, 1847, to endorse raising funds for the Jersey Ship, and collected $526.46 Residents of Rancocas selected a 25–member committee to raise funds and food, while Mount Holly residents elected a committee of nine. In Burlington, George Washington Doane led a citizens group. As part of its support for the Jersey Ship, the Paterson committee drafted a special circular and requested the help of the clergy and the “LADIES” for money, food, and clothing. Boonton’s citizens met at the First Presbyterian Church on March 12, 1847, passed resolutions in support of a Jersey Ship, established a committee of five to solicit contributions, and a committee of three,

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Famine Relief

including the Presbyterian minister, to forward the $117 to the state committee.47 Clinton followed the same pattern but identified a store, John R. Crawford’s in Camptown, as the depository. Quakers in Plainfield already raised $100 while other residents contributed $300, the donations ranging from 50 cents (from Widow Ross) to $27.50 (from the local Odd Fellows Lodge). Larger communities, like Trenton, set up ward committees, which forwarded money and 300 barrels of cornmeal to Newark.48 In many parts of the state, county committees were established. Residents of Monmouth County met at Freehold on March 1, established a county committee, separate district and township committees, and identified Freehold, Middletown Point, Key Port, and Red Bank as collection points for grain. In its appeal, the Monmouth County Committee asked each teacher to get their schools to raise donations. The County Committee explicitly told “every minister of the Gospel” to collect contributions and asked that the women of Monmouth County actively participate.49 In Gloucester County, citizens met at the Court House in Woodbury on March 7, 1847. They established a county committee, and township committees to solicit contributions, and raised $500, splitting the money between the state committee for the Jersey ship and donations for Philadelphia Friends Committee to Ireland and Scotland.50 In Sussex County, the clergy took on a more direct role on the county committee than in other counties. When the citizens of Sussex met at Newton in the Presbyterian Church on March 1, they elected the minister, Clarkson Dunn, as chair, added three ministers to the county committee, and called on the other denominations in Sussex to contribute.51 All the funds raised in Sussex County went to the state committee for the Jersey Ship. By late February, a movement developed among “many citizens” in Hunterdon County to aid Ireland. The people of Hunterdon met in Flemington, drafted resolutions emphasizing the common humanity and “Common Creator and Preserver” with the Irish, established a county committee and collecting committees in each township. Hunterdon called upon “all the Churches of the County” to solicit contributions.52 People in Somerset County met in Somerville on February 16, created a county committee and urged the clergy to solicit contributions from their congregations. One county committee, Salem, delayed organizing until the Overmann sailed. When it met in April, the committee divided the county into five districts, and the district committees called upon every family in their district for donations for a second Jersey ship. The people of Salem County emphasized the obligation of “one of the richest agricultural counties” in New Jersey that prospered from the distress in Europe to aid the Irish.53 When the first Jersey ship loaded its cargo, state railroads (as did rail lines throughout the U.S.) agreed to the free transport of relief supplies to Newark from local and county committees.54 The state committee chartered the brig Overmann from New York which arrived in Newark in mid-March

A Jersey Ship for Ireland

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for a two-week loading period at wharves donated by Aaron Ward and Company. The ship then sailed to Jersey City to complete loading its cargo for Cork. About $10,500 worth of provisions and clothing were loaded aboard Overmann. The cargo consisted of cornmeal and corn with smaller amounts of wheat flour, beans, hams, dried beef, smoked shoulders, and several boxes of clothing. On her mainmast she bore a white flag with the inscription “New Jersey Relief ship for the suffering Irish” in blue silk.55 After a month’s voyage in rough seas, Overmann arrived in Cork in early May and received an enthusiastic welcome, since the brig carried one of the largest cargos of relief supplies to reach Ireland. The New Jersey Committee ordered Captain Mix to turn over the cargo to the Dublin Quakers who were instructed to distribute the food and clothing “without distinction of religious sect.”56 A small part of the cargo Jerseyans donated for shipment to specific individuals and ministers in Ireland including the two barrels of cornmeal sent by Rose Kelly to her family. The Cork Reporter expressed its gratitude for New Jersey’s help, as did the Irish directly to Captain Mix.57 In addition, Mix reaffirmed the suffering of the Irish and their needs.58 Provisions and money raised by Quakers in Salem, Gloucester, and Burlington counties went to the Society of Friends Central Committee of Philadelphia for the Relief of the Irish Poor and then to Dublin Quakers independently of the New Jersey state committee. Philadelphia Quakers sent four ships in late March and April, St. George for Cork, Lydia Ann for Limerick, John Welsh for Londonderry, and Adele for Donegal, which included the cargo raised by New Jersey Quakers. While some Quakers worked with the New Jersey state committee to fill the Jersey ship most Quaker congregations in Salem, Burlington, and Gloucester counties opted to work through their coreligionists in Philadelphia.59 Meanwhile, George C. DeKay, commander of Macedonian, mailed circulars in late March to the mayors of several New Jersey cities and towns requesting cargo for his warship to take to Ireland from New York City.60 State newspapers reprinted DeKay’s appeal, but residents ignored DeKay’s offer and concentrated their energies on filling Overmann. Although the state committee had 340 barrels of surplus provisions on hand, it decided to charter a second vessel, William T. Dugan, built in Newark, rather than accept DeKay’s offer.61 In fact, when a report appeared in the New York Herald on April 2 that the New Jersey Committee planned to ship surplus provisions aboard Macedonian, John Stephens, Thomas Johnson, and Oliver Hayes went to New York to persuade DeKay to retract the report. The committee feared it would upset donors who expected their contributions to go aboard a second Jersey ship “and prevent some from forwarding their donations” if the report remained unchallenged.62 While state loyalty had little impact on Quakers, most residents relished the idea that their contributions went to Ireland aboard specially-chartered Jersey ships. None of the

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local committees forwarded their contributions to DeKay for Macedonian despite the fact that DeKay lived in New Jersey with his family. State loyalty became a major element in the committee’s call for donations to fill William Dugan. The Purchasing and Forwarding Committee “earnestly appeal to the citizens of New Jersey to come forward.”63 David L. Rogers, Chairman, drafted a second circular that newspapers published asking state residents to give. Since the William Dugan docked in Newark in early April, Rogers pleaded with state residents to contribute as quickly as possible because the ship could only remain at the wharf for two weeks.64 Some newspapers rallied to the challenge. “Has Elizabethtown done her portion? We fear not,” a local newspaper argued as it pushed its readers who gave to give more and reminded those who had not donated to perform “a sacred duty” for the starving Irish.65 A Newark newspaper commended Catholic and Episcopalian congregations for contributions but chastised other “wealthy religious societies” to live up to their Christian responsibility. Since Salem County did not organize a county committee until April 5 its committee emphasized filling the second Jersey ship. Monmouth, Sussex, Bergen, and Somerset counties came through with additional contributions. Bishop Doane donated $50 to show support for the second Jersey ship. Somerville, Readington, and Parsippany gave to Irish relief. These contributions did not quite fill the second Jersey ship, but the New York City committee offered to make up the difference.66 The cargo for the second ship consisted of $7,000 worth of provisions. Most of the cargo was cornmeal or corn with small amounts of flour, rice, beans, ham, barley, potatoes, rye, navy bread, and fish.67 William Dugan left Newark on April 23, 1847, and the brig reached Cork on June 13, 1847, after stops in Jersey City and New York City to take on additional cargo.68 Joseph Bewley wrote to the New Jersey Committee to reassure the residents of the distribution of their supplies.69 According to Bewley, the second New Jersey ship reached Cork at an opportune time, just as a local auxiliary’s stocks of food ran out. Communicating this information from Bewley depended on the willingness of the press to publish these letters, and in 1847 the cooperation of state editors remained essential since the New Jersey Committee used the press to inform donors of the fate of their contributions and of the gratitude of the Irish.70 By early May, the New Jersey Committee stopped soliciting contributions and issued a report indicating the disbanding of the relief campaign. Treasurer Vanderpool sent the remaining $519 for purchase of provisions. Remaining provisions the Purchasing and Forwarding Committee sent to the New York City Committee for shipment. In late May, 39 barrels of cornmeal and two boxes of clothing went to New York for shipment aboard Malabar to Dublin. A large contribution of cornmeal and corn from Burlington County went via Free Trader to Cork in July and a final small

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shipment from Burlington went aboard the Patrick Henry in early September.71 Separately, the local committee in Paterson, Relief Committee of Irish Distress, made another fundraising effort, and the funds it had not sent to the state committee were forwarded to Rev. James Wilson in Lecumper and Edward Donnelly in Desertmartin, both in County Londonderry, who used the money for the poor of their parishes. In particular, Donnelly’s account stressed the gratitude of “starving creatures” of his parish.72 At the local level, Donnelly and Wilson confirmed the gratitude of the people of Ireland for the aid from New Jersey. Both letters from Donnelly and Wilson also reinforced the image of the 1847 famine relief campaign as a people to people initiative independent of the American and British governments. For a brief moment in 1846–1847, the people of New Jersey put aside their sectarian, political, social, and ethnic differences to join in this voluntary movement to aid the starving in Ireland. Catholics and Protestants who fought each other over school issues in Newark and Jersey City temporarily abandoned differences to collaborate in an interdenominational relief campaign. Protestant clergy who detested Catholicism and local political and business leaders unhappy about the social disorder brought by Irish and German immigrants in the 1830s and 1840s found an escape from sectarianism through the concepts of Protestant charity. Baptists, Episcopalians, Quakers, Methodists, Universalists, and Presbyterians helped Catholics in Ireland because for a brief time they could identify with the common humanity and shared Christianity. New Jersey residents saw themselves as a people of plenty who benefited from the distress in Europe, but felt a moral obligation to use part of this plenty to aid the starving. Clergy, newspaper editors, local politicians, and businessmen assumed leadership of the famine campaign and built an ad hoc structure of town, village, city, county, and state committees to coordinate this voluntary effort. At the local, and county meetings, common themes and similar organizational structures emerged to unite the campaign. State and civic pride created a consensus to send two New Jersey ships to Cork with provisions and clothing for Ireland.

NOTES The author gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the New Jersey Historical Commission and the Sage Colleges. 1. John Stephens, Oliver Hayes, and Thomas Johnson to the Central Relief Committee of the Society of Friends, March 30 1847, in Society of Friends, Transactions of the Society of Friends During the Famine in Ireland, Facsimile Reprint of the First Edition, 1852 (Dublin: Edmund Burke, 1996), 236. 2. Historians of 19th century philanthropy have given only passing reference to efforts in New Jersey. For example, Merle Curti, American Philanthropy Abroad: A

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History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1963); Helen Hatton, The Largest Amount of Good: Quaker Relief in Ireland, 1654–1921 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), 108–26; Christine Kinealy, A Death-Dealing Famine: The Great Hunger in Ireland (Chicago: Pluto Press, 1997), 111–16; Rob Goodbody, A Suitable Channel: Quaker Relief in the Great Famine (Bray, Ireland: Pale Publishing, 1995), 21–24, 78–82; and John Holt, “The Quakers in the Great Irish Famine,” (M.L. thesis, Trinity College, University of Dublin, 1973), 110–22. Local historians and historians of New Jersey have also ignored famine relief. See Thomas Fleming, New Jersey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977); William Starr Myers, ed., The Story of New Jersey (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing, 1945); and John Cunningham, Newark (Newark: New Jersey Historical Society, 1966). 3. Barbara Petrick, Church and School in the Immigrant City: A Social History of Public Education in Jersey City, 1804–1930 (Metuchen, N.J.: Upland Press, 2000); Douglas Shaw, The Making of an Immigrant City: Ethnic and Cultural Conflict in Jersey City, New Jersey, 1850–1877 (New York: Arno Press, 1976). Shaw and Petrick recently collaborated in a video about German/Irish immigration to New Jersey. See New Jersey Gazette I (2001): 5; William Gillette, Jersey Blue: Civil War Politics in New Jersey, 1854–1865 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995) covers the Know-Nothings and their relationship to the Republicans. 4. George Washington Doane to the editor of Newark Daily Advertiser, February 12, 1847, Newark Daily Advertiser, February 12, 1847. 5. Joseph Bewley and Jonathan Pim, secretaries, Central Relief Committee, to Beach Vanderpool, November 2, 1847, published in Newark Daily Advertiser, November 26, 1847. 6. Mount Holly New Jersey Mirror, March 11, 1847; Plainfield Union, February 2, 1847. The Union reprinted a notice from local Quakers Nathan Vail and Zachariah Webster, January 28, 1847, soliciting additional donations beyond those raised at the Friends monthly meeting of Rahway and Plainfield for remittance to the Dublin committee. For the Mount Holly contributions, also, Report of the Central Committee of Friends of Philadelphia for the Relief of the Irish Poor (Philadelphia: John Richards, 1847). 7. “A Patersonian” to the editor, May 20, 1847, in New York Freeman’s Journal, June 12, 1847; Burlington in Burlington Gazette, March 19, 1847. 8. For example, Jersey City Sentinel, January 12, 1847; Newark Daily Advertiser, January 22, 1847; Paterson Intelligencer, January 27, 1847. See also Jacob Harvey to Thomas Cope, December 23, 1846, Box B, folder 5, Thomas Cope Family Papers, Quaker Collection, Haverford College, Haverford, Pennsylvania. 9. Burlington Gazette, November 20, 1846; Princeton Whig, November 3, 1846; Newark Eagle, November 20, 1846; Some other New Jersey reports were in Jersey City Sentinel, November 9, 17, 1846; Woodbury Constitution, October 6, 1846; Trenton State Gazette, November 2, 1846; Trenton News, November 18, 1846; Camden West Jersey Mail, November 8, 1846; Elizabeth New Jersey Journal, December 1, 1846; Mount Holly New Jersey Mirror, November 19, 1846. 10. Boston Pilot, January 30, 1847, reported on the Paterson Repealers. In the better organized and more solidly established Irish communities in New York and Philadelphia fundraising for the poor of Ireland started in 1842, New York Freeman’s Journal, July 23, August 13, 1842.

A Jersey Ship for Ireland

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11. Jersey City Sentinel, December 1, 1846. Also see calls for meeting, November 24, 27, 1846; Jersey City Advertiser, December 1, 1846. 12. Jersey City Sentinel “The Poor of Ireland” and “Relief Meeting,” December 1, 1846. 13. Ibid. December 4, 5, 7. 14. On the generally nativist attitudes in Jersey City, see Petrick Church and School, and Shaw “Political Leadership.” 15. Petrick, Church and School, 41–47. 16. Jersey City Sentinel, December 4, 1846. For the longstanding conflict between Protestant political leaders and Catholics, see Petrick or any of Shaw’s works, such as “Political Leadership” or Immigration and Ethnicity in New Jersey History, 23–27. As one example, see the Almshouse fight, Jersey City American Standard 19–27 June 1862. 17. Jersey City Sentinel, 7–15 December 1846. For example, Andrew Levy gave $1.00; Terance O’Neill, $2.00; Mrs. Young, $1.00; Mary Davidson, 25 cents; and Catherine Adams, 50 cents. 18. H. N. Fryatt, et al. to General Robert Armstrong, January 5, 1847 in Sentinel, January 6, 1847; Robert Armstrong to H. N. Fryatt, et al., February 4, 1847, in New York Herald, March 1, 1847; National Archives, U.S. Department of State, Record Group 59, Dispatches from U. S. Consuls in Liverpool, 1790–1906, Microcopy 141, Roll 10, January 1845–December 1850. Also, see Archbishop of Taum to Mayor P. C. Dummer, January 9, 1847, Theobold Matthew to P. C. Dummer, January 11, 1847 in Jersey City Sentinel, February 26, 1847; Theobold Matthew to Rev. John Kelly, January 11, 1847 in Philadelphia United States Gazette, February 27, 1847; C.J. Minchin to Mayor P.C. Dummer, 4 March 1847 in Jersey City Sentinel, April 16, 1847. 19. New York Tribune, December 28, 1846. 20. Newark Daily Advertiser, January 29, 1847. 21. Plainfield Union, February 2, 1847. The Vail-Webster appeal was January 28. 22. Newark Eagle, February 2, 1847. Newark Daily Advertiser, January 29, 1847. 23. James Courter to George Sykes (Democratic Congressman), February 1, 1847, file 20, Box 2, George Sykes Papers, Alexander Library, Rutgers University. Courter’s letter is only letter I found in a manuscript collection in New Jersey recording famine relief. 24. Report of the New Jersey Committee for the Relief of Ireland and Scotland, 3–6; Newark Eagle, February 26, 1847. Newark Sentinel, February 23, 1847. 25. Newark Sentinel, February 23, 1847; Newark Daily Advertiser, February 17, 1847. 26. George Barclay to John H. Stephens, February 23, 1847, in Newark Daily Advertiser, February 25, 1847. 27. See “C.K.”, Elizabeth, February 18, 1847, Newark Daily Advertiser, February 19, 1847. “N.M.”, Elizabeth, February 17, 1847, Newark Daily Advertiser, February 18, 1847. 28. Report of the New Jersey Committee for the Relief of Ireland and Scotland, 6. 29. Newark Daily Advertiser, March 2, 1847; Report of the New Jersey Committee for the Relief of Ireland and Scotland, 4, 6. Examples of the advertisements include Paterson Intelligencer, March 17, 1847; Elizabeth New Jersey Journal, March 16, 1847. Sussex Register (Newton) March 20, 1847; Salem National Standard, March 17, 1847. 30. Salem National Standard, March 17, 1847.

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31. Plainfield Union, February 2, 1847. 32. Mount Holly New Jersey Mirror, March 4, 1847. 33. Elizabeth New Jersey Journal, February 23, 1847. The “Widow’s mite” is a reference to a New Testament story when Jesus commends the generosity of a poor widow. 34. Salem National Standard, March 17, 1847. 35. Woodbury Constitution, February 9, 1847. 36. Historians of American journalism have not emphasized the key role of editors in 19th century voluntary philanthropy and the important civics lesson editors taught their readers, especially during the famine crisis of 1847. See, for example, William Huntzicker’s The Popular Press, 1833–1865 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999). While this is an excellent overview of pre- Civil War American journalism, it fails to explore the public service function of journalism, as well as to mention the Famine and the American response. 37. Citation from Cunningham, Newark, 132; Newark Daily Advertiser, March 12, 1847. 38. Newark Daily Advertiser, March 26, 1847. 39. Report of the New Jersey Committee for the Relief of Ireland and Scotland, 11. 40. Alleghanians, see Newark Daily Advertiser, February 26, 1847; Workmen at Passaic Chemical Works, Newark Sentinel, March 9, 1847. This was their second donation. 41. Newark Daily Advertiser, March 17, 1847. 42. Information on donations, Ibid, 18–19 March 1847; Mount Holly New Jersey Mirror, March 11, 1847; Salem National Standard, April 7, 1847; May 5, 1847; Woodbury Constitution, February 23, 1847; Report of the Central Committee of Friends of Philadelphia, 4–7; Burlington Gazette, March 19, 1847; Newark Sentinel, March 9, 16, 23, 1847. 43. George Washington Doane to Mayor Beach Vanderpool, March 2, 1847, in Newark Sentinel, March 9, 1847. 44. Trenton Plaindealer, March 21, 1847; Trenton News, February 17, March 4, 1847; Trenton State Gazette, February 18, March 3, 1847. 45. Trenton Plaindealer, March 2, 1847; Trenton Sate Gazette, March 4, 1847. No correspondence or editorials could be located to explain the role of the state’s political leaders. The Trenton newspapers did not publish amounts contributed by individual legislators and state political leaders. Stacy G. Potts served in the Assembly, edited Trenton Emporium, and in the 1850s was a justice of the state Supreme Court. 46. For reports of contributions see, for example, Newark Daily Advertiser, March 10–20, 1847; Trenton State Gazette, February 20, 1847. Also, for Belleville, see I. A. Cooley of the Belleville committee to Beach Vanderpool, March 9, 1847 in Newark Daily Advertiser, March 10, 1847. 47. Rev. Daniel E. Magie, Chair, Boonton Relief Committee to Beach Vanderpool, undated, in Newark Daily Advertiser, March 27, 1847; For Burlington, Burlington Gazette, February 26, 1847. 48. Newark Eagle, February 23, 1847; Trenton State Gazette, February 18, March 3, 11, 15, 1847. In Trenton the committee consisted of seventeen members; Paterson Intelligencer, March 10, 1847; For Plainfield, Plainfield Union, March 30, 1847.

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49. The Union (Middletown Point), March 11, 1847. Megan Springate, Assistant Librarian, Monmouth County Historical Association, kindly provided me with copies of The Union. Also, see Trenton State Gazette, March 6, 1847. 50. Woodbury Constitution, March 2, 9, 23, 30, 1847; Report of the Central Committee of the Friends of Philadelphia, 4. 51. Sussex Register (Newton), March 6, 1847. 52. Hunterdon Democrat, February 24, March 3, 10, 17, 1847. 53. Salem National Standard, April 7, 1847. 54. New Jersey Railroad, Camden and Amboy, Morris and Essex, and Somerville Railroad saved the committee $800 in transportation charges. Newark Eagle, March 19, 1847; Trenton State Gazette, March 18, 1847; Report of the New Jersey Committee for the Relief of Ireland and Scotland, 20. 55. Trenton Daily News, April 1, 1847; Jersey City Sentinel, March 31, 1847; Newark Daily Advertiser March 30, 31, 1847. 56. John Stephens, et al to the Central Relief Committee of the Society of Friends, March 30, 1847, Transactions, 236. In a second letter, dated April 1, the New Jersey Committee emphasized sending on the donations for Scotland’s poor, David Rogers, et al, to Joseph Bewley and John Pim, April 1, 1847, Report of the New Jersey Committee, 11. 57. Cork Reporter, May 4, 1847 reprinted in Trenton State Gazette; June 18, 1847. Mix to John Stephens, May 1, 1847, same issue of the Gazette, Newark Daily Advertiser, June 16, 1847; Salem National Standard, June 23, 1847. 58. Edward Mix, Commander of the New Jersey Relief Ship to the New York Journal of Commerce, May 3, 1847, reprinted in Jersey City Sentinel, June 16, 1847. For a brief account of the arrival of Overmann, see Cork Examiner, May 3, 1847; U.S. Department of State, Dispatches of United States Consuls in Cork, 1800–1906, T196, Reel 1, 1800–1850, Consular Return of American Vessels Arriving and Departing from Cork, Ireland, January 1, to July 1, 1847, 13. See page 21 for William Dugan. The New Jersey State Committee also publicized in the press and its summary report a detailed listing of the cargo aboard Overmann. 59. Friends Weekly Intelligencer, April 3, 1847; Report of the Central Committee of Friends of Philadelphia, 3–8. 60. For example, Elizabeth New Jersey Journal, March 30, 1847; DeKay sent out letters to upstate New York as well. As an example DeKay to Mayor of Albany, March 17, 1847, Albany Irish Famine Relief Committee, item 6, box 1, McKinney Library, Albany Institute of History and Art, Albany, New York. 61. Newark Eagle, April 9, 30, 1847. 62. Newark Sentinel, April 13, 1847. See undated card from the Purchasing and Forwarding Committee. 63. Ibid. 64. Paterson Intelligencer, April 14, 1847, Rogers circular, “Second Jersey Ship” April 8, 1847. 65. Elizabeth New Jersey Journal, April 13, 1847. 66. Newark Sentinel, April 13 and May 4 1847. 67. Burlington Gazette, April 30, 1847. 68. Cork Examiner, June 14, 1847.

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69. Joseph Bewley and Jonathan Pim to John H. Stephens, May 18, 1847, in Newark Daily Advertiser, June 4, 1847. Also, see Joseph Bewley and Jonathan Pim to John H. Stephens June 18, 1847, Advertiser, July 8, 1847. A copy of the May letter was published in the committee’s report, 21–22. 70. A last thank you note to the people of New Jersey from the Dublin Quakers appeared in the press in November, Joseph Bewley and Jonathan Pim to Beach Vanderpool, November 2, 1847, in Newark Daily Advertiser, November 26, 1847. 71. Report of the New Jersey Committee, 18–20; “American Contributions,” Transactions, 337–38. 72. Edward Donnelly to the Gentlemen of the Relief committee for Irish Distress, Paterson, July 21, 1847. Also, see Patrick Maginnis, et al to Rev. James Wilson, June 15, 1847, and James Wilson to Rev. J. Elliott Thompson, et al, July 30, 1847, in Paterson Intelligencer, August 25, 1847.

2 “We cannot but regret the great delay”: Reflections on the Writings of the North Dublin Union Guardians during the Famine Margaret Preston

Over the last 20 years, as historians have tackled the Famine in greater depth, Ireland’s workhouse records have proven extremely fruitful; they contain information such as the number, age, and gender of entrants as well as some record of the daily events occurring in the workhouse. They also give a clear sense of sectarian tensions—particularly between the workhouse clergy.1 In addition, the records cast light upon the interactions between upper administrators in the workhouse as well as their relationship with inmates. No one who has read Charles Dickens should be surprised to learn that conditions in any nineteenth-century workhouse were harsh. Certainly, there is much evidence to prove that many of those who ran the workhouses were abusive to inmates. Workhouse employees were charged with many offenses including, at minimum, abuse, incompetence and deliberate cruelty.2 It might be imagined that local guardians were cogs in a massive, merciless bureaucracy that focused only on the bottom line. What evidence from the records increasingly demonstrates, however, is that it is misguided to presume the universal callousness of workhouse administration.3 This paper, using the Famine as its backdrop and Dublin as its setting, will discuss the writings of the workhouse guardians from the recently recovered records of the North Dublin Union (NDU).4 Here, within the bimonthly meetings, can be found evidence of compassion as well as great frustration as the workhouse guardians watched the growing catastrophe.5 By the late eighteenth century Dublin was the second largest metropolitan area in Britain and Ireland. The city enjoyed a well-developed system of hospitals and medical schools, and because of its capital status, was 21

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ensured the year-round presence of a wealthy population who contributed to Dublin’s financial health.6 The capital of Irish banking, Dublin was home to British insurance companies, an active stock exchange, a burgeoning port as well as Trinity College, one of the largest universities in Britain or Ireland.7 Throughout the eighteenth century, Dublin saw impressive change in its cityscape. Architects such as James Gandon, designer of the Customs House and Four Courts, joined colleagues in creating Dublin’s Georgian character that featured wide streets lined with beautiful homes.8 Despite the loss of wealthy politicians who transferred to London when Ireland became part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801, the financial impact upon the city was not immediately apparent because Dublin’s economic status actually improved in the years following the Union.9 However, as the Napoleonic wars ended, technological advances made it less expensive to move supplies by way of ship to other Irish cities. This loss of revenue contributed to the port’s failure to modernize, and it quickly began to lose business. While the city was home to such enterprises as brewing and paper manufacturing, Dublin was not a major industrial center. The lack of diversification in industry hampered the nation as a whole, and Ireland experienced economic decline in the third and fourth decades of the century. With it, Dublin’s circumstances also deteriorated.10 By the dawn of the nineteenth century, Ireland as a whole had made some gains economically as it increased its grain, textile and livestock exports to England, and some, particularly medium to large farmers, benefited.11 Yet, like Dublin, after the Act of Union Ireland’s economy also began to weaken. The post-war slump after the end of the Napoleonic Wars resulted in increased unemployment for Ireland’s textile industry, compelling even more of the population to depend upon agriculture.12 By the eve of the Famine, three-quarters of all employed males worked the land.13 Absentee landlords continued to exact ever-higher rents and small to medium farmers used more of what they grew to pay the rent, leaving them increasingly dependent upon the potato for daily sustenance.14 To add to the difficulties, between 1600 and 1845, Ireland saw its population swell from around 1 to 8.5 million and, between 1801 and 1845, the island’s population increased by approximately fifty percent.15 Where and how were these growing numbers surviving? The land question in Ireland is a topic that has received much attention from scholars who have shown that a small number of landlords, many of whom were absentee, controlled much of Ireland’s land. Generally, these absentee landlords then leased management of the land to a middleman who often rented it themselves to farmers who did the same and so on, such that by the middle of the nineteenth-century Ireland’s land was extraordinarily subdivided, particularly in the western counties.16 The statistics are stunning. On the eve of the Famine, three-quarters of the Irish lived on twenty acres or less with almost 25 percent of the population surviving off of five or fewer.17 In addition to persons

“We cannot but regret the great delay”

23

who leased land, there were cottiers who, in exchange for their labor, were given a small plot of land for potatoes and a cabin. Finally, there were at least 100,000 persons who owned no land at all but instead worked as farm help.18 Ultimately, whether on the farm or in the city, much of Ireland’s populace was impoverished. During the 1830s, the issue of dealing with the administration of poverty was a problem that Parliament sought to tackle for the whole of the United Kingdom. For Ireland, in 1838, Westminster passed the Irish Poor Relief Act. Before 1838, Ireland had no state-funded poor relief, but the New Poor Law now organized all relief under a central authority. In particular, the Imperial Treasury made it clear that it expected Ireland, and specifically Irish landlords, to pay for the majority of Irish relief. The British government had long believed that many of Ireland’s problems were due to careless landlords who failed to pay attention to their land and permitted extensive subdivision that only further impoverished the people. Hoping to force landlords to begin to take some responsibility for their estates, the government made the tax burden a local charge.19 The Irish Poor Relief Act divided Ireland into 130 geographic divisions called unions: each was to have a workhouse that was located near a city or town.20 The government appointed Poor Law Commissioners who then implemented the Irish Poor Law Act. Commissioners issued orders and supplied guidance to on-site Poor Law guardians, but generally, Commissioners did not get involved in individual cases.21 The guardians, who voluntarily administered the workhouse, were, in the system’s early years, wealthy landowners or businessmen living in the same district as the workhouse. Since local taxes paid for the operation of the workhouse, the government believed that this provided guardians with incentive to be as frugal as possible. Finally, unlike in England or Scotland, before Ireland’s local guardians could supply outdoor relief, they had to show that the workhouse was filled to capacity. Dublin was home to two workhouses. The North and South Dublin Unions were opened in March of 1840. As their names denote, the South Dublin Union was located on the city’s south side, which was also the city’s wealthier quarter. The North Dublin Union, located closer to the port and the Army Barracks, was in a district where most property was of lesser value.22 In order to avoid achieving capacity while discouraging the poor from relying upon government assistance, the designers of the New Poor Law sought to ensure that conditions inside the workhouse were worse than those outside.23 Husbands and wives were separated as they entered, and children were not allowed to be with either parent.24 In addition, mobility was restricted; accommodations were unpleasant; and the food was purposely bland and simple. Poor relief in Ireland was therefore limited in scope and impact because, while the government acknowledged it must provide some relief, it hoped that its aid would be ever diminishing.25 Such

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conditions did result in the workhouse becoming a place of fear and dread; when in need of charity, the poor often sought out private organizations. Many chose to remain outside of the workhouse and, “when it is sometimes thoughtlessly suggested to [the poor], that . . . if all fail, they can go to the Union, the answer is quick and to the point—’it were better to go back to the old trade than do that!’”26 As Dublin philanthropist Margaret Aylward suggested, “on talking with these unfortunate creatures in their homes, we found their dread of the poor-house so great, that for the morsel of dry bread doled out to them in the Sunday school, they pledged their immortal soul.”27 Thus, philanthropists were often the first line of defense for the poor who resisted entering the grim confines of Ireland’s workhouses. On the eve of the Famine, dependence upon the potato had become so high, and the population’s living circumstances so reduced, that the ability to purchase an alternative food source had all but disappeared. Evidence suggests that over three million people were living solely off the potato; almost five million were relying upon it as an essential part of their diet, while fewer than one million could be considered free of dependence upon the root crop.28 While in the fall of 1845 the potato failed only in sporadic regions, nevertheless it became clear that suffering could soon be widespread. Sir Robert Peel, Britain’s Prime Minister, privately acknowledged that a potential disaster was in sight in Ireland.29 As a result, in November of 1845, Peel ordered £100,000 worth of corn to be sent to Ireland—both to feed the people but, in particular, to keep down the price of grain.30 Months earlier, the guardians of the NDU had seen the coming crisis and had written to the Poor Law commissioners asking whether they could actually go among the poor of the area “to visit and distribute private relief amongst the struggling and worthy objects whom sickness and misfortune or other causal circumstances have rendered necessarily dependent.”31 By early 1846, the guardians of the NDU appear to have felt the growing pressure of the rising numbers within the workhouse and complained to the commissioners in London in a February letter that “the powers conferred upon the [Poor Law Commissioners] are excessive while the guardians are deprived of all power and the principle officers [meaning the master or matron] of the workhouse are made wholly independent of them.”32 The letter goes on to bluntly state that the guardians felt that the Poor Law Commissioners had “exercised their powers in an arbitrary manner” and that Ireland should be given a separate board of commissions “composed of men acquainted with her bad circumstances and the character and habits of her people.”33 The NDU’s guardians include a petition to the commissioners in which they request the funding for the poor law in Ireland be changed such that the funds are not solely taken “directly out of the pockets of those who live in the country” and which has caused “great grievance and distress to many of the most industrious of the community.”34 Certainly, since it was

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25

the guardian’s pockets that were being emptied they had a great deal of self-interest in altering the system. Yet, they clearly recognized that, given Ireland’s current circumstances, it was a great injustice to all of the citizens to expect the island to solely fund its poor relief. During the middle of 1846, the government had established a relief committee in Dublin that included government representatives and set in motion the creation of public works.35 Westminster sought to implement public works on the principle that those who needed them could work for their relief provisions. The public works programs were to begin in September of 1846 and included such activities as road repair, harbor and pier construction, and drainage implementation. However, there were delays. In November of 1846, the guardians of the North Dublin Union Workhouse wrote to the Poor Law Commissioners and expressed clear frustration: [we] cannot but regret the great delay that has taken place in the employment of the Poor on Public works and still more deplore the Principle of Political Economy adopted and acted upon by them in leaving the supply of food wholly to private enterprise, at a time when the energies of Government should be exercised to the fullest extent in providing a starving population with the means of subsistence at such a rate as would enable them by their earnings to support their families.36

Despite such complaints, the government did attempt to implement a massive public works program on a widespread scale with impressive speed.37 At first, the wages provided would likely have enabled a worker to feed the family. Yet, as NDU’s guardians had clearly recognized, in late 1846, the government’s adherence to laissez-faire principles and unwillingness to regulate the market had caused the cost of food to increase to such a level that this was no longer the case—and the government failed to either raise wages or place a limit on grain prices.38 Regardless, the demand for relief work rose by impressive degrees, since the 1846 crop of potatoes was nearly a complete loss. The public works system was soon overwhelmed and local administrators began complaining that they could not handle the numbers. It also became clear that many of those who applied for employment on public work schemes were too weak from malnourishment to work at physically demanding labor.39 As one observer remembered, “poor men sitting on heaps of stones, breaking them for a certain number of hours after walking five and six miles to their work in rags and tatters, more like specters than able-bodied.”40 In the first months of 1847, the government acknowledged the increasing problems posed by public works.41 It now began to consider doing what it had to date resisted: supplying food directly to the starving population. Hence, in March, the government began to end public works and open up soup kitchens.42 At the same time it became clear that local relief committees and poor law unions were buckling under escalating costs. While the

26

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government recognized that many of the poor law unions were financially strapped, it continued to hold firm in its expectation that Irish property should be made to pay for Irish poverty. However, Parliament acknowledged that, temporarily, it needed to supply more financial aid to Ireland.43 In order to provide the needed monies, the Temporary Relief Act of 1847 subsidized loans to Ireland’s Poor Law Unions with the money being recouped out of taxes placed upon the harvest of 1848.44 In the spring of 1848, when the government began to ask for repayment, the North Dublin Union’s guardians articulated doubt regarding their ability to do so. For example, in a letter to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the North’s guardians communicated great surprise, and even anger: While we do not by any means repudiate the debt we cannot but express it as our opinion, that it is a most impolitic measure at such a time as the present when the citizens have to pay for the support nearly double the number of Poor that they had in the early part of last year, and while business of every kind is standing still, to be called upon to discharge a debt, a great portion of which, as has been stated, was incurred by the indefinite, and in many instances, uncalled for measures of the Government itself.45

The guardians went on to provide a subtle warning, “we have assumed that if at the present moment we are compelled to levy a rate . . . a feeling of discontent & disapprobation will be engendered in the minds of the citizens, which may ultimately lead to very unpleasant results.”46 As volunteers, there was little the government could do to the guardians (removing them at this stage would more likely have been a relief) and in the face of the government’s helplessness, intransigence, and incompetence these men clearly lowered their inhibitions against confronting the British authority. By the fall of 1848, it was clear that the harvest would again be at less than normal levels.47 At this point, while certainly much of the island was reeling from the Famine, its effects were not experienced evenly throughout. The rural areas, particularly in the west, were hardest hit, while urban sectors and the northeast and east felt the crisis to a lesser degree.48 In Dublin, a city with a population of about 230,000 (in 1841), the crisis manifested itself through higher food costs and food shortages. Nevertheless, the experiences of poor urbanites were comparable with their rural cousins. Well before the Famine, Dublin’s poorest were already in dire straits and generally in poorer health than their counterparts in the country. Dublin’s poor were housed in slum conditions that offered little in the way of clean water or sanitation and were incubators of disease.49 What the Famine did to the least of Dublin’s inhabitants was to further reduce their ability to purchase food. In addition, incidence of disease increased dramatically, as the already weakened slum dwellers were joined by famine-stricken migrants in the desperate search for assistance.50

“We cannot but regret the great delay”

27

Now struggling with an unending sea of need, the North Dublin Union’s guardians also believed that the NDU was at a greater disadvantage than Dublin’s other workhouse, the South Dublin Union. The North’s records revealed this to be a very sore point for its guardians.51 “If they seek admission in the South Union they are refused as having no claim, and when they apply to the North the residence of one night in the asylum establishes a right to admission, and they then become chargeable on the North Electoral Division.”52 First, because of the higher property values of the South Dublin Union district, the South’s workhouse received more money from taxes. Second, the NDU’s guardians had long complained that it was to the North Dublin Union that a majority of Irish citizens sent home from England eventually arrived.53 In an April 1847 letter to the Poor Law commissioners, the guardians protested that all the arriving ships carried “these destitute persons broken down in constitution, and whose labor has not enriched this country . . . sent home to Ireland when of no further use (by reason of their being born maybe sired or lived here) [to] become at once chargeable on the North . . . sad disappointment is their lot, they find nothing but distress & destitution.”54 It appears, however, that the Poor Law commissioners made few attempts to respond to guardians’ complaints, while both of Dublin’s workhouses continued to be crowded with the poor of the city. Conditions in the North Dublin Union quickly deteriorated as a result of massive overcrowding. The crisis of the Famine can be easily followed in the Union’s records. The enrollment of the North’s workhouse, which was built to house a maximum of 2,000, leapt from 1,655 in September 1845, to 2,853 in April 1847, with the numbers remaining high well into the next decade.55 As shown in the tables, there were more women than men in the workhouse but fewer girls than boys. Dublin had a significantly higher percentage of women (55 percent in 1841; that dropped to 53.9 percent in 1851) than men in the city and this, as well as women’s greater vulnerability, account for their higher numbers.56 The presumption would then be that girls would outnumber boys but obviously this is not the case. Fitzpatrick offers some insight through his research on the effects of the Famine on females, stating that poor relief favored adult women over men but his evidence conveys that males under the age of fifteen were favored over females. Suggests Fitzpatrick, the Famine “temporarily but undeniably . . . diminished the recognized value of children as future benefactors” and proposes that the reproductive value of young females lost significance as compared with the future work value of young males.57 One way to deal with young females was undertaken in 1847. The government, with the cooperation of Australian authorities, developed a scheme to ship young women from British workhouses to Australia where males greatly outnumbered females.58 In May 1848, the Poor Law Commissioners wrote to the North Dublin Union stating that “only Female

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Famine Relief

Orphans, between the ages of 14 and 18 years, will be sent to Australia from the Workhouse-no males.”59 Though workhouses helped others to emigrate, between 1840 and 1870 Irish workhouses assisted over 50,000 women to depart the island.60 Throughout the Famine the guardians continued to rail against the actions of Westminster. In 1848, the guardians wrote a letter expressing their unhappiness with the Poor Law’s plan to move persons from Galway’s workhouses to Dublin’s. The guardians sought “to prevent a proceeding which would be most injurious to the City of Dublin and oppressive to the rate payers.”61 Again the guardians’ efforts proved fruitless. Ultimately, this may be due to the fact that by this time the Poor Law commissioners themselves had lost all influence and had given up trying to fight with a House of Commons that, upon his resignation in 1849 the Chief Poor Law Commissioner, Edward Twisleton, characterized as promoting a policy of extermination.62 In the end, little relief was forthcoming and conditions improved only when the potato crop recovered after 1851; but by this time at least a million were dead and more than a million had emigrated. As Timothy Guinnane and Cormac Ó Gráda have noted, among the harsh conditions and evidence of corruption in the workhouse, the guardian’s minutes also offer “sentiments of economy and compassion.”63 While it is more likely than not that the guardians were often thinking of their own pocketbooks as they wrote to the Poor Law commissioners, there is also evidence that these men, who themselves were living in the midst of this tragedy, sought to bring some measure of comfort and justice to an overwhelmed system. Indeed, the language goes beyond compassion and clearly, at times, slips into frustration, even anger, at a government that was both unwilling and unable to cope with the Famine. Dublin’s experience of the Famine was not as drawn out as in the west, but the crisis certainly visited the city. Throughout the nineteenth century, Ireland lurched from agricultural crisis to political outrage, and all the while the nation and its capital sunk deeper into economic ruin. With each episode there came a regular influx of impoverished persons who traveled to Dublin in search of solace. In the first half of the nineteenth century, cholera visited the city almost every decade, and is just one example of the epidemics that regularly haunted its slums.64 Dublin had too little housing for too many people with much of it lacking in proper sanitation, further contributing to unremitting disease and high mortality. It is on this stage that Dublin businessmen and philanthropists alike worked trying to bring some relief to the suffering. While government aid continued in the form of the Poor Law into the twentieth century, most sought to avoid entering the confines of the workhouse and instead went in search of private charity. In the early twentieth century, Dublin would once again become the capital of Ireland; it was still a tarnished capital that had made little progress in eliminating the overcrowded, dirty and impoverished slums that characterized her inner city.

Figure 2.1. Total Enrollment NDU 1844–50.

“We cannot but regret the great delay” 29

Figure 2.2. Total Enrollment in NDU for Males and Females over 15 Years, 1844–50.

30 Famine Relief

Figure 2.3. Total Enrollment in NDU for Boys and Girls under 15, 1844–50.

“We cannot but regret the great delay” 31

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Famine Relief

NOTES 1. For example, in 1846 the North Dublin Union’s Roman Catholic Chaplain, Reverend Murphy, complained that the Protestant Minister attempted to “forc[e] a boy named Wm. Murphy, to attend the Protestant place of worship.” The Protestant Chaplain then responded in kind “that the Roman Catholic Chaplain had unwarrantably interfered with a member of his flock, named Keefe.” North Dublin Union (henceforth NDU), March 4, 1846. 2. Dympna McLoughlin, “Superfluous and Unwanted Deadweight: the Emigration of Nineteenth-Century Irish Pauper Women,” in Irish Women and Irish Migration, ed. Patrick O’Sullivan (London: Leicester University Press, 1995), 67. Anna Clark discusses one interesting case in her recent article on a riot in the South Dublin Union in 1860 by young girls abused by workhouse administrators. “Wild Workhouse Girls and the Liberal Imperial State in Mid-Nineteenth Century Ireland” Journal of Social History (2005): 389–409. 3. In truth, historians have found evidence to the contrary. See Timothy W. Guinnane and Cormac Ó Gráda “Mortality in the North Dublin Union During the Great Famine” Economic History Review 55 (2002): 493; James S. Donnelly, Jr., The Great Irish Potato Famine (London: Sutton Press, 2001), 82 and Christine Kinealy, This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845–52 (Dublin: Gill & MacMillan, 1994), 204–5. 4. In 1995, the records of the North Dublin Union, long presumed to have been burned, were found sitting in the attic archives of the Eastern Health Board, formerly Dr. Steevens’ Hospital. Apparently, they had been relocated from St. James’ Hospital, formerly the South Dublin Union. St. James’ storied history includes having been occupied in 1916 during the Easter Rising; fortunately most of the North Dublin Union records were undamaged. 5. The workhouse was one part of an entire network of public and private charity. For a discussion of private aid, see Maria Luddy, Women and philanthropy in nineteenth-century Ireland (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995) and Margaret Preston, Charitable Words: Women, Philanthropy and the Language of Charity in Nineteenth- Century Dublin (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2004). 6. As Dickson notes, by the early eighteenth century, “no European capital apart from London and possibly Copenhagen combined such a range of urban functions as the Irish capital.” David Dickson, “The Demographic Implications of Dublin’s Growth, 1650–1850” in Urban Population Development in Western Europe from the late Eighteenth Century to Early Twentieth Century, eds. Richard Lawton and Robert Lee (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1989), 180. 7. Mary Daly, Dublin the Deposed Capital (Cork: Cork University Press, 1984), 5. 8. Maurice Craig, Dublin, 1660–1860 (London: Penguin 1952), 238–40. Gandon completed the Customs House in 1791, and finished the Four Courts in 1803. 9. Cormac Ó Gráda, Black ‘47 and Beyond (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 158. 10. See Kevin B. Nolan, Travel and Transport in Ireland (Dublin: Gill & MacMillan, 1973), 98; John Lynch, A Tale of Three Cities Comparative Studies in Working-Class Life (London: MacMillan, 1998), 14–15 and Joseph V. O’Brien, “Dear Dirty Dublin” A City in Distress, 1899–1916 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 11.

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11. For a discussion of nineteenth-century Ireland, see David George Boyce, Nineteenth-Century Ireland: The Search for Stability (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1990); W. E. Vaughan, Landlords and Tenants in Ireland, 1848–1904 (Dublin: Economic and Social History Society of Ireland, 1984) and J. J. Lee, The Modernisation of Irish Society 1848–1918 (Dublin: Gill & MacMillan, 1973). 12. Donnelly, The Great Irish Potato Famine, 7 and Kevin Whelan, “Pre and PostFamine Landscape Change,” in The Great Famine ed. Cathal Póitéir (Dublin: Mercier Press, 1995), 25. 13. Kevin Kenny, The American Irish (New York: Longman, 2000), 48. 14. Donnelly, The Great Irish Potato Famine, 4. On the eve of the Famine, some 2 million acres of land, or 1/3 of all the land being sowed, was dedicated to growing potatoes. Kinealy, This Great Calamity, 6. Nevertheless, Ó Gráda suggests that the rental increases were not as oppressive as historians have alleged. Cormac Ó Gráda, Ireland: A New Economic History 1780–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 163–5. 15. Kinealy, This Great Calamity, 9. It is important to note, however, as Ó Gráda shows, the population was not expanding at the high rate historians have alleged. The increase in Ireland’s population was “less rapid after 1821 than before, and closer to the European norm.” Ó Gráda, Ireland: A New Economic History, 69 and 71. 16. Donnelly, The Great Irish Potato Famine, 8. See also Ó Gráda, Ireland: A New Economic History, 123. 17. Donnelly, The Great Irish Potato Famine, 8. 18. By 1841, there were over one million cottiers and their dependents working the land. Whelan, “Pre and Post-Famine Landscape,” 20. Briefly, much of Ireland’s land division, particularly in the West, was based on the rundale and clachan system that, simply put, was community cooperation and familial rights to land. See Robert J. Scally, The End of Hidden Ireland: Rebellion, Famine and Emigration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 13. 19. Ireland’s relief act was actually a more severe version of England’s New Poor Law. In particular, the act prohibited relief to be provided outside the workhouse. Christine Kinealy, “The Administration of the Poor Law in Mayo, 1838–1898” Cathair Na Mart: Journal of the Westport Historical Society, 6 (1986): 98. See also John O’Connor, The Workhouses of Ireland (Dublin: Anvil Books, 1995); and Gerard O’Brien “The Establishment of Poor-law Unions in Ireland, 1838–43,” Irish Historical Studies 23 (November, 1982): 97–120 and Kinealy, This Great Calamity, 18–24. 20. Kinealy, This Great Calamity, 24. 21. Helen Burke, The People and the Poor Law In Nineteenth Century Ireland (London: George Philip Services, 1987), 47 22. The General Valuation of Ireland (1852–54) had valued the North’s ratable property at £265,586 while the South’s was valued at £402,516. NDU., April 14, 1847; Prunty, Dublin Slums, 7. 23. Burke, The People and the Poor Law, 22 and 49. 24. Though as the records of the North Dublin Union show, parents were permitted brief meetings with their children when in 1847 it was ordered that parents “may have the privilege of seeing their female children on Sundays and Holidays as is the case with boys.” North Dublin Union, May 5, 1847.

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25. Kathleen Woodroofe, From Charity to Social Work In England and the Unites States (London: Rutledge & Paul, 1966), 18. See also Kinealy, This Great Calamity, 25. 26. Anonymous, “Begin at the Beginning,” Irish Quarterly Review 8 (1859): 1188. 27. Margaret Aylward, Ladies Association of Charity (n.p., 1852), 23. See also Burke, The People and the Poor Law, 220 and Sarah Atkinson and Ellen Woodlock, “The Irish Poor in Workhouses,” Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science 6 (1861): 645–651. 28. Austin Bourke, Visitation of God? The Potato and the Irish Famine eds. Jacqueline Hill and Cormac Ó Gráda (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1993), 52. 29. Kinealy, This Great Calamity, 34. Well before the Famine, the North’s guardians were complaining of the injustices of the Poor Law system and decried that they had no authority over how they spent the money for which the government taxed them. “We protest against an unlimited power of taxation being vested in any commission the expenditure of such funds being uncontrolled by those from whom they are to be levied.” NDU, October 2, 1844. 30. Eventually, Peel would achieve the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, but his actions brought down his government and Lord John Russell became Prime Minister. Kinealy This Great Calamity, 36–37. See also, Mary E. Daly, “The Operations of Famine Relief: 1845–47” in The Great Irish Famine, ed. Cathal Póirtéir (Dublin: Mercier Press, 1995), 129. 31. NDU, March 19, 1845. 32. Ibid., March 4, 1846. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. After Russell took the helm, he proposed that local areas in Ireland take financial responsibility for the total cost of relief works thereby avoiding “undue dependence upon the central government.” Daly, “The Operations of Famine Relief,” 129. 36. NDU, November 4, 1846. Similar displeasure was expressed by the Board of Guardians for Killarney that, on September 2, 1846, resolved that “this Board repudiates the covert introduction of a system of Out Door Relief attempted by this Act as unsuited to the circumstances of the Country; destructive of all Agricultural property, whether to Tenant, or Landlord, and calculated to make all Ireland, one immense Workhouse, of Paupers and Officials.” See Quinnipiac University on-line records http://www.thegreathunger.org/html/minute/minute2.htm 37. Donnelly, The Great Irish Potato Famine, 72. 38. Daly, “The Operations of Famine Relief,” 130. While not completely stopped, contrary to contemporary suggestions, exports of grain were reduced. Donnelly, The Great Irish Potato Famine, 61. 39. Kinealy, This Great Calamity, 56–60, and Burke, The People and the Poor Law, 108–109. 40. Eneas MacDonnell, Esq., County Mayo Its Awful Conditions and Prospects and Present Insufficiency of Local Relief (London: John Ollivier, 1849), 11. 41. The logistical problems were immense with evidence of corruption as well as outright theft. Daly, “The Operations of Famine Relief,” 131.

“We cannot but regret the great delay”

35

42. Soup kitchens were modeled on the example already provided by the Religious Society of Friends that established its first soup kitchens beginning in 1846. Rob Goodbody, A Suitable Channel: Quaker Relief in the Great Famine (Bray: Pale Publishing, 1995), 29 and Religious Society of Friends, Transactions of the Central Relief Committee of the Society of Friends during the Famine in Ireland 1846–7 (Dublin: Hodges & Smith, 1852), 53. See also Thomas P. O’Neill, “The Society of Friends and the Great Famine,” Studies 39 (1950): 204. 43. See Kinealy, This Great Calamity, 187. For example, in Westport, Co. Mayo, the Marquis of Sligo began to spend his own money to keep the workhouse open. Donald Jordan, Land and Popular Politics in Ireland: County Mayo from Plantation to the Land War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 107. 44. Kinealy, This Great Calamity, 189. 45. NDU, April 12, 1848. The Earl of Clarendon was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland from 1847 to 1852. 46. NDU, April 12, 1848. 47. Kinealy, This Great Calamity, 194. Most of Ireland’s Poor Law Unions remained deeply in debt. 48. Certainly, however, the northeast experienced the Famine. See Christine Kinealy and Gerard Mac Atasney, The Hidden Famine: Hunger, Poverty and Sectarianism in Belfast (London: Pluto Press, 2000). 49. Ó Gráda, Black ‘47 and Beyond, 160, 166; apparently, normally, Dublin had a higher incidence of fever and dysentery. 50. Ó Gráda shows that Dublin’s population, between 1841 and 1851, increased by 11%. “Immigration was probably largely responsible for the rise in deaths from typhoid fever.” Ó Gráda, Black ‘47 and Beyond, 173. 51. The NDU Guardians’ complaints seem to be supported by the statistics— though the increase in demand upon north of the Liffey was only marginally greater than on the south. Ó Gráda, Black ‘47 and Beyond, 173. 52. NDU, April 14, 1847. 53. NDU, October 2, 1844. “We have, year after year, protested unanimously against the provisions of the poor law by which [an] aged and broken down Irish artisan is subject to the miseries of a forcible transmission from the manufacturing districts in England with an English wife and English children merely because he has been born in this country although his productive energies have been consumed amongst those whom the law now relieves from the burden of his support.” 54. NDU, April 14, 1847. 55. For example, in April of 1855, 2,826 people were registered in the Union. NDU, April 1855. The numbers would rise again, as for example during the famine of 1879–81 when the North Dublin Union’s numbers, after January of 1880, would again be over 2,000. See NDU, January 3, 1880. 56. David Fitzpatrick, “Women and the Great Famine” in Gender Perspectives in 19th Century Ireland eds. Margaret Kelleher and James Murphy (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1997), 56. 57. Ibid, 62 and 66. 58. Kinealy, This Great Calamity, 316. The government charged the workhouses for the cost of transferring the females from the workhouse to the port from which the ship departed. Kinealy, This Great Calamity, 317.

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59. NDU, May 17, 1848. 60. Dympna McLoughlin, “Superfluous and Unwanted Deadweight,” 66. See also Janet A. Nolan, Ourselves Alone Women’s Emigration from Ireland 1885–1920 (Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 1989); Pauline Jackson, “Women in Nineteenth Century Irish Emigration,” IMR 23 (1984): 1004–1112 and Hasia Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1983). 61. NDU, April 26, 1848. 62. Peter Gray, Famine, Land and Politics: British Government and Irish Society 1843–50 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999), 314. 63. Guinnane and Cormac Ó Gráda “Mortality in the North Dublin Union,” 493. 64. Cholera was prevalent during 1818–19; 1831–2; 1848–9; 1853–4 and 1866.

II WRITING THE FAMINE

3 Great Hunger, Unspeakable Home: Landscape, Nature and Original Sin in Lady Morgan’s The Wild Irish Girl and William Carleton’s The Black Prophet Jefferson Holdridge

In medieval Ireland, the borders between human and animal, culture and nature were fluid and sympathetic.1 Such sympathy resurfaces many times in Irish literature, most notably in landscape writing of the nineteenth century, in the reclamation of western Ireland that marked the Irish Renaissance, and more recently in the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Paula Meehan, and Michael Longley. Between the medieval saints and contemporary Irish literature, the history of the Irish view of nature, and with it, the acculturated version of nature that we call landscape, has altered many times, and the changes have reflected violent shifts in the history of the country. When the Irish forests were destroyed during the Elizabethan and Cromwellian wars,2 at least in part because they gave shelter to Irish rebels, their felling became symbolic of the fall of the Gaelic order—though in a coded way that only those of a shared culture would understand.3 It became a part of the Jacobite tradition, but its codes are apparent even in Swift, Burke and Goldsmith. From the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, we move from this coded use of landscape as symbol of the Irish condition to a romanticized one, a movement which unsurprisingly accompanied the movement towards reforestation from 1756–1845.4 The divisions in Irish society, which become increasingly apparent in the years after the Act of Union (1801), are reflected in the view towards nature, in the efforts to balance “the blasted heath” with the “sweet village.”5 Such a background helps us to understand Irish attempts to humanize Irish history. Part of the effort towards humanization is most easily represented by positive portrayals of the pastoral. If the rupture reflected in the landscape is a sublime encounter 39

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with history, then pastoral harmony is the beautiful, a compensatory shift in the psychology of aesthetics. On the one hand, the art of landscape insists upon continual sympathy and harmony; it claims to display a model of the beautiful blessed land, while, on the other, in order to reflect the opposite religious, political and aesthetic significance, it insists upon dissonance and claims to display a sublime landscape of the curse. The savage wilderness and the pleasant place are mutually defining opposites; the one is often invoked to exorcise or challenge the other. Nineteenth-century literary figures of the landscape, particularly those of Lady Morgan’s novel The Wild Irish Girl (1806) and William Carleton’s story “Wildgoose Lodge” (1830) and novel The Black Prophet (1847), reflect a growing consciousness of political and social upheaval in the decades leading up to the Great Hunger. Such figures of the landscape also reflect upon long enduring problems of family life in Ireland, especially of marriage and other unions. Further, the allegory of union between Englishness (mirrored in the ordered, harmonious landscape of the beautiful) and Irishness (mirrored in the ruined or wild landscape of the sublime) says as much about individual consciousness as it does about public history, as a host of critical books have made evident.6 In this reading, we may ask how do nature, landscape and original sin figure in The Wild Irish Girl and The Black Prophet. In The Wild Irish Girl, Morgan’s blending of landscape, seascape, and body in the description of castle Inismore has psychological and historical reverberations: “[t]owards the extreme western point of this peninsula, which was wildly romantic beyond all description, arose a vast and grotesque pile of rocks, which at once formed the site and fortifications of the noblest mass of ruins on which my eye ever rested. Grand, even in desolation, and magnificent in decay—it was the castle of Inismore. The setting sun shone brightly on its mouldering turrets, and the waves which bathed its rocky basis, reflected on their swelling bosoms the dark outlines of its awful ruins.”7 This description not only conflates the gendered terms of the beautiful and the sublime as laid out by Edmund Burke (beautiful equaling the feminine, the sublime equaling the masculine)—a subversion Morgan displays throughout the book— but it also relies on a series of assumptions concerning landscape, culture, and nature that serve to define the relationship of Ireland and England. The allegory of union at the heart of her project is full of such conflations, combining with sexual guilt, suggestions of original sin and palimpsests of conquest. In Horatio’s dream of the face of Glorvina as the head of the Gorgon, these themes converge. Like the female Yahoo in Gulliver’s Travels, who tackles Gulliver while he is bathing,8 sexual desire in The Wild Irish Girl both reveals and conceals the ugly truths of conquest and the underlying connection to nature. Both bring into focus the sexual, aesthetic, and political allegory of union as a

Great Hunger, Unspeakable Home

41

means of redemption for the sins of occupation and incest, as we notice in the heady Oedipal theme at the end of The Wild Irish Girl, or in the family intrigue of The Black Prophet. Edmund Burke had foreseen that an Act of Union without legal protection under the constitution was just fornication, revealing the brutal roots of generation.9 As the idea of Union, and the Act of Union, became more unworkable, the themes associated with it became more monstrous as they were repressed. Finally, the original sin that threatens to undo the proposed unities at the end of The Wild Irish Girl bursts into the flames of political violence which consume “Wildgoose Lodge,” and becomes the crime that, once discovered, hangs the eponymous character of The Black Prophet. Early in the narrative of The Wild Irish Girl, it is clear that the landscape is based in familial and national ideas of England and Ireland. The father suggests to Horatio that he should go to Ireland, and, even if coincidentally, this advice mingles national and social concerns in its description of Ireland’s landscape: “I see no cause why Coke upon Lyttleton cannot be as well studied amidst the wild seclusion of Connaught scenery, and on the solitary shores of the ‘steep Atlantic’, as in the busy bustling precincts of the Temple” (I, 6). In other words, it is a knowing coincidence on the part of Lady Morgan. The “wild seclusion,” of course, is the result of the historical catastrophe of the English advance into Ireland from Elizabeth’s reign to Cromwell’s commonwealth. Cromwell’s invocation of “To Hell or Connaught” cements the connotations of the civilized invader versus the barbarian native that had been frequently used from Edmund Spenser’s era. These distinctions have a previous topographical basis in the formation of ‘the pale.’ Whether the expression ‘beyond the pale’ derives from this area of Ireland, or from a similar one in Russia, or was merely a later rationalization (see “Pale” in the Oxford English Dictionary), its distinction between wild and civilized lands pervades the text. In a novel entitled The Wild Irish Girl, a novel which consistently tries to rehabilitate the Irish from the category of barbarian, while using the best connotations of that savagery, the wild seclusion Horatio is sent to study within is perhaps all too emblematic of nature. Just as the savage implies the ability to salvage, making the primitive a redemptive force, nature in such instances is instinct with original sin and innocence. The basis of the primitive scene in Ireland, in which Horatio will live, is also laid early on in the novel’s colonial terms: “I remember when I was a boy, meeting somewhere with the quaintly written travels of Moryson through Ireland, and being particularly struck with his assertion, that so late as the days of Elizabeth, and Irish chieftain and his family were frequently seen seated round their domestic fire in a state of perfect nudity” (I, 13). Something in Horatio desires to unveil this emblem. Like a good Romantic, he is seeking his nature in nature, having been unable to find it

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in culture. In fact, he is seeking to redeem “the original sin of [his] nature,” which is the sin of being overly refined (I, 8). Seeing that Dublin has been Anglicized, that it is too much in the civilized sphere of European culture and history (even Dublin Bay resembles the Bay of Naples), he heads off with alacrity to his destination in the province of Connaught. For as he says, “The native Irish, pursued by religious and political bigotry, made [Connaught] the asylum of their sufferings, and were separated by a provincial barrier from an intercourse with the rest of Ireland, until after the Restoration; so I shall have a fair opportunity of beholding the Irish character in all its primeval ferocity”(I, 14). Horatio then goes on to develop this conceit within the Burkean language of eighteenth-century aesthetics: To him who derives gratification from the embellished labours of art rather than the simple but sublime operations of nature, Irish scenery will afford little interest; but the bold features of its varying landscape, the stupendous attitude of its “cloud-capt” mountains, the impervious gloom of its deep embosomed glens, the savage desolation of its uncultivated heaths and boundless bogs, with those rich veins of a picturesque champagne, thrown at intervals into gay expansion by the hand of nature, awaken, in the mind of the poetic or pictoral traveller all the pleasures of tasteful enjoyment, all the sublime emotions of a rapt imagination. And if the glowing fancy of Claude Loraine would have dwelt enraptured on the paradisial charms of English landscape, the superior genius of Salvator Rosa would have reposed its eagle wing amidst those scenes of mysterious sublimity with which the wildly magnificent landscape of Ireland abounds. But the liberality of nature appears to me to be here but frugally assisted by the donations of art. (I, 18–9).

He even quotes Burke’s idea from the Enquiry of “delightful horror” as the mixed basis for sublime feeling (I, 19). Horatio also nods to the famous painters of the beautiful (the Frenchman Claude Lorrain) and the sublime (the Neapolitan Salvator Rosa), insisting that the latter is the superior genius as the landscape of Ireland is the superior landscape. It is interesting to note that Rosa’s depictions of the banditti of Southern Italy had political references. The banditti were in fact the early version of what is loosely known as the Mafia. Like the dangers of Ireland, such figures in the landscape represent the political turmoil of the period in Southern Italy. The dialectic of barbaric Irish versus civilized English underlie this passage; now we know how the phrases “wild seclusion,” “barren heath” and “healthy pasture” will carry cultural and political significance. Horatio’s encounter with natural, uncultivated beauty (“here agriculture appears in the least felicitous of her aspects”, I, 18–9) will make him confront his own nature, as the novel seeks to reconcile English and Irish cultures and landscapes. It isn’t long before Horatio discovers his family’s ‘original sin’ of conquest. The ruined castle of Glorvina is the product of his own family’s

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usurpation, as well as his own steward’s misrule and criminal actions. He is ashamed: “It would be vain, it would be impossible, to describe the emotion which the simple tale of this old man awakened. The descendant of a murderer! The very scoundrel steward of my father revelling in the property of a man, who shelters his aged head beneath the ruins of those walls where his ancestors bled under the uplifted sword of mine!” He evens understands the theatricality of the moment: “Why this, you will say, is the romance of a novel-read school-boy.” He then contemplates the Biblical roots, the original sin, of the murder for humanity in general: “Are we not all, the little and the great, descended from assassins; was not the first born man a fratricide? and still, on the field of unappeased contention does not ‘man, the murderer, meet the murderer, man?’ ” The tangled roots of Cain and Abel have been exposed: “Yes, yes, ‘tis all true; humanity acknowledges it, and shudders. But still I wish my family had either never possessed an acre of ground in this country, or had possessed it on other terms. I always knew the estate fell into our family in the civil wars of Cromwell, and in the world’s language, was the well-earned meed of my progenitors’ valour; but I seemed to hear it now for the first time” (I, 128–29). Confronted by the gravities of his original sin, and with its true nature (which can only be understood in person, and by implication not by absentees), Horatio deploys the logic of colonial occupation to alleviate his conscience and to fend off any ideas of the humanity of the other: I am glad, however, that this old Irish chieftain is such a ferocious savage; that the pity his fate awakens is qualified by aversion for his implacable irascible disposition. I am glad his daughter is red headed, a pedant, and a romp; that she spouts Latin like the priest of the parish, and cures sore fingers; that she avoids genteel society (I, 130).

Glorvina’s red hair makes her particularly barbaric, like the redheaded Yahoos of Gulliver’s Travels who are especially lascivious. In the end, Horatio fears that Glorvina’s beauty and accomplishments will challenge the colonial assumptions of superiority which support his hereditary political claims. Of course, such deployment of the colonial logic is sure to be undone through Horatio’s aesthetic appreciation of the scene. The aesthetic is always a foundational and/or subversive experience, political, philosophical or artistic, as Horatio’s journey through the countryside on the way to Glorvina’s home, castle Inismore, makes clear. The sublime scenery of his journey unites the sensible world to the supersensible moral sphere and so potentially undoes all the threatening contrarieties of the Gothic encounter on which the colonial suppression of the physical primitive world is based. This concrete description of the sensual world is elevated to the abstract level of the spiritual. Irrational fears vanish under the influence of the rational and moral intelligence:

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Such were the sublime objects which seemed to engage their attention, and added their sensible inspiration to the fervour of those more abstracted devotions in which they were so recently engaged. At last they reached the portals of the castle, and I lost sight of them. Yet still, spell-bound, I stood transfixed to the spot whence I had caught a last view of their receding figures.[…] While I felt like the victim of superstitious terror when the spectre of its distempered fancy vanishes from its strained and eager gaze, all I had lately seen revolved in my mind like some pictured story of romantic fiction. (I, 151).

Horatio then hears Glorvina’s voice (‘Glorvina’ derives from the Irish for “the sweet voiced”), after his encounter with the aesthetics of nature has prepared him to see her and fall (both figuratively and metaphorically) into a new form of consciousness. He asks himself: “Was it the illusion of my now all awakened fancy, or the professional exertions of the bard of Inismore? Oh, no! for the voice it symphonized—the low wild tremulous voice, which sweetly sighed its soul of melody o’er the harp’s responsive chords, was the voice of a woman!” (I, 152). Voice here defines the difference between the absentee and the landlord who is present. Horatio quickly decides to call himself Henry Mortimer, and to pose as a landscape painter so as to gain admittance to the house without anyone knowing his guilt; however, guilt will unsettle both his waking and sleeping dream, as he is confronted by the original sin of desire for conquest: “I fell into a gentle slumber, in which I dreamed that the Princess of Inismore approached my bed, drew aside the curtains, and raising her veil, discovered a face I had hitherto rather guessed at, than seen. Imagine my horror—it was the face, the head, of a Gorgon!” He then wakes to a vision of the real Glorvina, which cures him of the nightmare: “Awakened by the sudden and terrific motion it excited, though still almost motionless, as if from the effects of a night-mare (which in fact, from the position I lay in, had oppressed me in the form of the Princess,) I cast my eyes through a fracture in the old damask drapery of my bed, and beheld—not the horrid spectre of my recent dream, but the form of a cherub hovering near my pillow—it was the Lady Glorvina herself! Oh! how I trembled lest the fair image should only be the vision of my slumber: I scarcely dared to breathe, lest it should dissolve” (I, 186–87). The monstrous Glorvina is an image of Ireland shaped by the colonial logic with which Horatio first attempted to ease his conscience, that the Irish were barbarians who could be monsters unless ruled. The sexual register of the dream is significant. The rest of the novel is in some way an attempt to cure himself of the monstrousness of his gothic dream as the beautiful face of the real Glorvina had done; it is an attempt of the beautiful to unveil the sublime and to cure the murderous original sin of colonization, if not of brutal desire itself. The Princess is continually described in natural terms. She is seen as art and nature balanced. Morgan embodies in her the link between the natural

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and the national. The road ahead for Horatio is to find a way to woo and win her, and that, of course, is attended by various successes and failures. What is most important at the early juncture of the novel is that Horatio is going through a mystical experience, in which, in order to return to the world a new man, he must be estranged from it (II, 120–123). In short, like a good Romantic, he must return to nature, the abode of the Princess: “It seemed to me as if I had lived in an age of primeval simplicity and primeval virtue—my senses at rest, my passions soothed to philosophic repose, my prejudices vanquished, all the powers of my mind gently breathed into motion, yet calm and unagitated—all the faculties of my taste called into exertion, yet unsated even by boundless gratification.” He must also reject his former self: “The past given to oblivion, the future unanticipated, and the present enjoyed, with the full consciousness of its pleasurable existence. Wearied, exhausted, satiated by a boundless indulgence of hackneyed pleasures, hackneyed occupations, hackneyed pursuits.” He must also admit the redeeming influence of his new consciousness: “at a moment when I was sinking beneath the lethargic influence of apathy, or hovering on the brink of despair, a new light broke upon my clouded mind, and discovered to my inquiring heart something yet worth living for. What that mystic something is I can scarcely yet define myself; but a magic spell now irresistibly binds me to that life.” Glorvina has this influence because, through his love of her, Horatio may unite the sublime and the beautiful, the etiological (Glorvina coming from the line of original rulers of Ireland) and the standard of sense (the reason and decorum of English rule), the monstrous and the lovely, nature and culture. The protective mood of love surrounds the sublime origins of the landscape when Glorvina and Horatio then take a walk together: “the luxury of landscape through which we wandered, the sublimity of those stupendous cliffs which seemed to shelter two hearts from the world” (II, 41–42). The cliffs are the transcendent, lofty barriers of the world, marking off beginning and end. Here, beauty and sublimity meet. Later at a funeral, Glorvina is described in these very terms of the unity of sublime and beautiful as she stands amid the Irish mourners: “Glorvina, whom they had not at first perceived, stood like an idol in the midst of them, receiving that adoration which the admiring gaze of some, and the adulatory exclamations of others, offered to her virtues and her charms. While those, personally known to her, she addressed with her usual winning sweetness in their native language, I am sure that there was not an individual among this crowd of ardent and affectionate people who would not have risked his life ‘to avenge a look that threatened her with danger” (II, 188). Of course, at the end of the passage Morgan is quoting Burke’s famous apotheosis of the Queen of France in Reflections on the Revolution in France; Glorvina, like the Queen of France, is the figure of the beautiful that is meant to be protected by the sublime character of the people, the

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strength of the King, by moral rule. The funeral that Glorvina is attending surrounds the death of a father, as we are ominously told. It prefigures the death of Glorvina’s elderly father and, of course, the demise of Irish power in general. Her position here as an aisling figure is very important for Horatio, for he will have to provide protection now that the power of the Irish state has been so diminished. Like Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet (a play to which the novel often alludes), Father John is one of the first to realize the potential of the love between Horatio and Glorvina: “Perhaps,” said the priest, with his usual simplicity, “this sacred sympathy between two refined, elevated, and sensible, souls, in the sublime and beautiful of the moral and natural world, approaches nearer to the rapturous and pure emotions which uncreated spirits may be supposed to feel in their heavenly communion, than any other human sentiment with which we are acquainted” (II, 150). As in Romeo and Juliet, the dream of the Priest eventually becomes the Priest’s tragedy. In The Wild Irish Girl, the war between the rival groups is meant to be resolved. Efforts toward resolution will entail a certain amount of cultural analysis. In particular, certain English prejudices against Ireland must be confronted, and a series of conversations ensue. As so often in the novel, the Irish descent into cultural oblivion has natural analogies (II, 177–78). Landscape and morality becomes the theme of the novel. (II, 189–93). The effort made throughout the narrative from now on aims to exculpate the Irish position. These conversations persist throughout the narrative, with references to Irish history meant to vindicate the nationalist position: “Nor is it now unknown to them, that in the veins of his present Majesty and his ancestors, from James the First, flows the royal blood of the three kingdoms united.” Finally, Horatio seems convinced. The various aspects of this topic are explored, some points foreshadowing Matthew Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867): “My dear Sir,” he (the priest) replied, “a country may be civilized, enlightened, and even learned and ingenious, without attaining to any considerable perfection in those arts, which give to posterity sensible memorials of its passed splendor. The ancient Irish, like the modern, had more soul, more genius, than worldly prudence or cautious calculating forethought” (III, 68). Other conversations, such as on the cultivated lands of the industrious North, (III, 198) or the question of land ownership of ruined monasteries and convents, (III, 199) expose the long history of sectarian views. Lady Morgan’s desire to convince the English of Irish values, whether Catholic or Milesian, is of primary interest to her, but for the present discussion the connections between culture and nature are most relevant. In this light, Glorvina must redeem the historical wrongs against Ireland and the failures of Irish culture through the application of her natural influences within the complex arrangement of colonial powers.

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Horatio makes this very clear when he says of Glorvina’s ability to redeem our original sin: “‘O Glorvina!’ I passionately added, ‘if even thou, fair being, reared in thy native wilds and native solitudes, art deceptive, artful, imposing, deep, deep, in all the wiles of hypocrisy; then is the original sin of our nature unredeemed’” (III, 210). Following this reflection of Glorvina’s character, Horatio must return to the inhuman scene of the crime, the sublime origins of the original sin, rattled by the sense that all is lost, that Glorvina might be unfaithful, that there is no redemption (III, 238). He fears that the family has deserted the Castle. In the language of aesthetics, this is not a moment of the sublime, but of the horrible; that is, one without any compensatory shift in meaning. “A few burning tears relieved him from an agony he was no longer able to endure; and he was now competent to draw some inference from the dreadful scene of desolation by which he was surrounded. The good old Prince was no more!—or his daughter was married! In either case it was probable the family had deserted the ruins of Inismore” (III, 240). The fear is that the original sin may be unredeemed. The sublime encounter may have no moral outcome. It is a fear that will never be entirely banished from the novel. The incestuous nature of the original sin of colonization is revealed, but can it truly be considered and resolved? By usurping the fathers of the conquered land, we implicitly usurp our own, and perhaps we cannot resurrect them. The cure, or antidote, is a portion of the poison: the old father, the Prince, must die in order to give birth to the new. As a consequence of the cure, nature’s voice is silenced along with Glorvina, who, as she is about to marry the Earl, Horatio’s father, finds out the truth of the original sin of occupation, and of the relationship between father and son, and she falls silent (III, 226). She had only wished to marry the elderly father of Horatio in order to save her own father’s life and lands; now it seems that the marriage will mean the death of her own ancestral rights, both literally and figuratively. The Prince of Inismore wants to know what has happened. After discovering the long history of Horatio’s arrival and the Earl’s lineage, he dies (III, 232). Soon the history of the families, the murder, the colonization is revealed to all (III, 242). The earl immediately adopts Glorvina, and makes some attempt to undo the sexual nature of the marriage that was just forestalled (III, 242–47). Culture is meant to refine nature, but seems to attempt merely to wish it out of existence. Is Glorvina’s silence at the end of the novel meant to show that the antidote tasted too much like the poison? Critics have examined the question of Glorvina’s silence from a political and feminist standpoint.10 Like the political and feminist, the aesthetic view of the novel hangs on the shift from nature to culture that the marriage promises—and Glorvina’s silence leaves it hanging.11 Ostensibly, the novel insists that history, and with it the very land itself, will be healed by this marriage of Horatio and Glorvina (III, 250) The Earl

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tells Horatio to be a good landlord, but the law does not preclude bad landlords; and though this novel was an attempt to introduce the English to Irish culture, there are remnants of the colonial law at work, the Irish are still subject to their feelings. Childlike, they need rational rule. The Irish still need to be husbanded as does the land, and so the Earl advises Horatio to “place the standard of support within their sphere; and like the tender vine, which has been suffered by neglect to waste its treasures on the sterile earth, you will behold them naturally turning and gratefully twining round the fostering stem which rescues them from a cheerless and groveling destiny” (III, 263). Ownership of the land is still in English hands and the Union without protection of the constitution, is fornication, as Edmund Burke foresaw. Will this union of Horatio and Glorvina afford the protection of the constitution? On this, Glorvina’s silence is sublime, the silence of the original sin, of the ruined Castle which Horatio was horrified to think was forever empty, the silence of the barren heath. We hearken back to Horatio’s very first image of the Castle and the conflation of the sublime and the beautiful, for it now seems prescient. Glorvina and the Castle intermingled from the start. The feelings of Glorvina are like the swelling of the surrounding seas, full of foreboding and suggestive of the ruined past, but representing all and saying nothing: “The setting sun shone brightly on its mouldering turrets, and the waves which bathed its rocky basis, reflected on their swelling bosoms the dark outlines of its awful ruins” (I, 136). In the end, it is the sea and landscape that are most articulate, for they carry signs of harsh memory so visibly that words are no longer necessary. The historical scars would only be carved more deeply as the nineteenth century progressed. The topography of Ireland finds its cultural as well as cartographic equivalent in the Ordnance Survey of the 1830s,12 when landscape and place-names became the map of national aspiration. The roots in late eighteenth-century ideology are apparent in the landscape: the ‘Wearing of the Green’ and ‘Tree of Liberty.’ Yet there is an increasing split in attitude towards nature and landscape between the Irish peasantry and Anglo-Irish throughout the 19th century. “In either kind of Irish Romantic literature,” notes J. W. Foster, “there was under the circumstances, little celebration of Irish nature for its own sake, none of the self-rewarding sensuousness of Keats or the personal enrichment or pantheistic spirit Wordsworth found in the Lake District. There are no Irish poets of the time to whom we might refer as ‘nature poets’ in the way we might refer to Wordsworth and John Clare as nature poets. (The words ‘nature’, ‘landscape’ and ‘scenery’, in fact, have among the bulk of Irish people to this day a somewhat effete connotation and evoke an Anglo-Irish worldview.) Nor was there that interest in cutting-edge experimental science we find in Shelley or Coleridge.”13 The real or mere Irish could not objectify or appreciate nature as could the

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Anglo-Irish. For Catholics, nature is symbolic; for Dissenters it is objective, scientific, J.W. Foster avers,14 though one may suspect that he overstates it. Yet, Edmund Burke’s notion of aesthetic distance, taken up by William Carleton in “Wildgoose Lodge” (1830), provides the reason for this lack: when you’re in the midst of terror, all the exalted qualities, the compensation of the sublime, are lost. In Carleton’s “Wildgoose Lodge,” nature, culture and the historical pressures on house and family during the Famine and land wars lead to a house of an informer being set on fire and all those within being burnt alive. In the narration, as if to remind us of our position as readers, and of the then primarily English readership, Carleton is concerned with aesthetic distance, in a way similar to Swift’s questioning of conventional ideas of landscape.15 The aesthetics of landscape is corrupted, as is the home which is set therein. When the narrator states, “After this we dispersed every man to his own home,”16 we must wonder what type of return this could be. The wilderness has literally re-entered the house in “Wildgoose Lodge” and abolished all aesthetic distance. For Samuel Ferguson the psychological split toward the land takes the form of that between his cultural nationalism and his political unionism, a split in which the landscape is a neutral ground, which only rarely, as in the “The Fairy Thorn” and “The Welshmen of Tirawley,” allows the darker possibilities that James Clarence Mangan and Carleton reveal. In Mangan and Carleton, the dark necessities of nature and history lead to the anti-pastoral mode of the Famine. One of the most extended expositions of the anti-pastoral mode is William Carleton’s The Black Prophet (1847), a story of an Irish village that revolves around the original sin of a murder, a crime which seems to give utterance to both the social catastrophe of the Famine, to the attending historical incidents of colonization, and to the landscape, as well as images of nature, that serve as the backdrop. The Black Prophet was written in the midst of the ‘Great Famine’, but based on memories of the famines of 1817 and 1822.17 The novel’s plot essentially revolves around three families, the Sullivans, the Daltons and the family of the Black Prophet, known as the McGowans, for most of the novel until, near its end, the gothic genealogy of the family is revealed. Condy Dalton is supposed to have killed one Bartle Sullivan; this murder is the original sin of the novel that provides a raison d’etre of sorts for the Famine itself; for as God calls out for the blood of the murdered man to be accounted for, the suffering of the starving populace calls out for its own blood to be acknowledged. These two scenes of original sin as a cause for suffering parallel one another throughout the novel. It is said that the famine victims “with cadaverous and emaciated aspects had something in them so wild and wolfish, and the fire of famine blazed so savagely in their hollow eyes, that many of them looked like creatures changed from their very humanity by some judicial plague, that had been sent down from

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heaven to punish and desolate the land.”18 The murder was committed some twenty years before, in the year of the 1798 rebellion and the Black Prophet is fittingly a United Irishman. The political aspect of the original sin is therefore not in question, only who is guilty of what crime. It is at the setting of the grey stone of the Glen, where the murder is said to have taken place, which is the rock of the haunted church of Irish consciousness, so to speak, that nature most truly speaks its sublime truths of sin and suffering, revealing a vast web of familial intrigue that mirrors the political intrigue of the country. The first description of the natural scene, by emphasizing its unsocial atmosphere (“Neither bird, nor beast, was seen or heard, except rarely”19) and by placing it within the memory of the childhood of the narrator, highlights, through sheer juxtaposition, its place within the social fabric of the landscape; that is why the narrator remembers seeking the wider social world after viewing the dreary place: At all events the glen was said to be haunted by Sullivan’s spirit, which was in the habit, according to report, of appearing near the place of murder, from when he was seen to enter this chasm—a circumstance which, when taken in connection with its dark and lonely aspect, was calculated to impress upon the place the reputation of being accursed, as the scene of crime and supernatural appearances. We remember having played in it when young, and the feeling we experienced was one of awe and terror, to which might be added, on contemplating the ‘dread repose’ and solitude around us, an impression that we were removed hundreds of miles from the busy on-goings and noisy tumults of life, to which, as if seeking protection, we generally hasted with a strong sense of relief, after having tremblingly gratified our boyish curiosity.20

This sublime encounter is as framed by notions of rebellious curiosity, both personal and political, as it was for Wordsworth. And it also has important familial and social echoes. Family, nation and the blasted heath, are particularly intertwined, or intertwined in a particular way, in Irish literature and history, starting from Burke’s idea of the family as a “little platoon,” or Goldsmith’s of the family as a “little republic.”21 The family that the novel sets forth as one which represents Ireland wronged and righted is the Daltons, who suffer unjustly, both economically and physically, because of their wrongly accused father (and it is seen by all as their original sin and cause of their downfall).22 They are redeemed through romantic love, as well as by a knowing agent of the crown, one Mr. Travers (the bad former landlords, the Hendersons, are suitable dispatched). As noted, he is supposed to have murdered one of the Sullivan family, whose daughter in turn is in love and loved by one of the Dalton sons. This love works to redeem the original sin, at least as far as the plot would have us believe. The family that truly represents the Irish nation, however, is that of the Black Prophet, whose daughter, it seems, no love can

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save, and whose father is the very oracle of the Famine itself. As Flanagan notes: “Carleton’s imagination was most firmly engaged by the figure who gives the novel its title, [who] is the strongest link between the plot and the rich possibilities of the theme.”23 The father is driven to evil, to wrongly framing the Dalton father, among other heinous acts, because he has lost faith in the world, having suspected his wife of being unfaithful. It turns out in the end, that he is the murderer, having murdered his wife’s brother (Bartle Sullivan survived, went to Boston, and returned just in time). That the murder occurs within the family makes it more darkly reflect what Burke called the “pedigrees of guilt”24 that distinguish the political reality of family life in Ireland, where informing, betrayal, conversion to the enemy’s faith or faction, is the order of the day. The wife, it turns out, was unfaithful in spirit only; she loved another, but never acted on her feelings. This latter truth is revealed to Sarah, the wild, beautiful, but good girl (she is a Glorvina of the famine, in other words) on her deathbed, whose suffering is only conventionally redeemed, but remains an unredeemable emblem of the Famine itself. Julian Moynahan notes: “She is full of a self-mistrust and anger that come from growing up in an unloving household.”25 Carleton writes of her after her death: It is impossible to say to what a height of moral grandeur and true greatness, culture and education might have elevated her, or to say with what brilliancy her virtues might have shown, had her heart and affections been properly cultivated. Like some beautiful and luxuriant flower, however, she was permitted to run into wildness and disorder for want of a guiding hand; but not want, no absence of training, could ever destroy its natural delicacy, nor prevent its fragrance from smelling sweet, even in the neglected situation where it was left to pine and die.26

He might well be describing Ireland in his recitation of the relationship of nature, culture and wilderness (that is, nature cultivated versus nature uncultivated). We may disregard Carleton’s sentimental apotheosis at her death. Though Moynahan agrees with Carleton that “she redeems her humanity by sacrificing her life to save others,” to the present critic this gesture seems only partially effective, as Sarah dies wild, without a stable sense of family and home. We may mitigate the force of Carleton’s intentions here because colonial novels are often best read in the interstices between public consumption and private awareness; even Moynahan concludes of all the deaths: “It appears as if the very possibility of an Irish future is being liquidated.”27 We are told she has come to terms with her father and mother, but it is not believable, not even in terms of landscape and nature. If the rupture reflected in the landscape is a sublime encounter with history, then pastoral harmony is the beautiful, a compensatory shift in the psychology of aesthetics.

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The savage wilderness (represented by Sarah) and the pleasant place (represented by the reconstituted position of the Daltons) are mutually defining opposites; the one is invoked to exorcise or challenge the other. Although conventional in its ideas of nature, original sin and divine punishment, this novel has aspects that complicate the model of harmony and fixed design conventionally embraced by natural theology. Instead of moving along Biblical lines of deluge and redemption, or, for that matter, running like clockwork, as in that classically mechanical paradigm of the Enlightenment, the world runs over with boundless energy. Sarah, in the end, is the most beautiful of all because she embodies nature’s energy. Instead of closed harmony, we perceive ample dissonance and dynamism in the open system proposed by post-Newtoninan science. The new paradigm is wilder, more organic and unpredictable. It is also less susceptible to moralized interpretations predicated on the notion of divinely predetermined purposes embedded in nature;28 hence, the moral ambiguity that marks the end of “Wild Goose Lodge” and The Black Prophet. In The Wild Irish Girl, Irish interests are compromised in the wedding of culture and nature. In the marriage, the original sin of nature is like the proverbial anaconda in the chandelier; one knows its there, but fears to acknowledge it. In “Wild Goose Lodge,” home and culture are reduced to charred remains and left to the wilderness. Like many of the Famine victims, Sarah is left deserted in The Black Prophet, her family almost unrecognizable to her; her mother reduced to the word ‘mother’ and her father reduced to grim stoicism in the face of his hanging. Here Margaret Kelleher’s analysis of The Black Prophet, in her study The Feminization of the Famine provides insight: With Carleton’s novel a further aspect to the feminization of the famine is revealed. The characterization of famine mothers, through the associations of domesticity and natural instinct, together with the connotations of sin, even madness, allows the author to move the discourse on famine away from the political and economic spheres and into a moral register. The suggestion of ‘nature’ being the special provenance of motherhood, both less and more than human, is particularly significant. As Warner and many other feminist critics have emphasized, the ‘conflation of nature and woman only continues the false perception that neither is inside culture, that women do no participate in it, let alone create it’. The figure of woman can thus serve to restrain the challenges delivered earlier in the famine novel, through the ‘strange fold that changes culture into nature’, politics into morality.29

Through Sarah, we find our better nature that is behind culture. If Sarah is not a conventional famine victim, because she does not die of starvation, she nevertheless dies of a disease born of famine. And even if her hunger is not physical, Sarah nevertheless dies hungry; hungry for the love of her

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mother (absent most of her life) and for the love of another (Condy Dalton who loves Mave instead). As Maud Ellmann writes in The Hunger Artists there is “something about hunger, or more specifically about the spectacle of hunger, that deranges the distinction between self and other.”30 Even Sarah’s self-sacrifice is the result of such a derangement. The moment of reflection on the self, which serves as a developmental model for such a haunting in Irish literature, is Gulliver looking into the mirror and seeing the Yahoo in himself; it is also his hunger to transcend this image. In Strangers to Ourselves, Julia Kristeva notes how when the national was defined in terms of landscape and nature it had to repress the foreign if it was to affirm a truly national identity. In such a move, civilization humanizes nature by endowing it with beings who look like us, but inevitably nature rebels, reminding us of the uneasy place of the foreigner within any realistic version of the national, and importantly, reminding us that in the depths of our psyche we are foreigners to ourselves. Nature is the inhuman foreigner within, ghosting us and ghosting our interactions with others. This latter demonstration is, of course, the appearance of the uncanny: “Initially it is a shock,” writes Kristeva, “something unusual, astonishment; and even if anguish comes close, uncanniness maintains that share of unease that leads the self beyond anguish, toward depersonalization.”31 “To worry or to smile,” writes Kristeva, “such is the choice when we are assailed by the strange; our decision depends on how familiar we are with our own ghosts.”32 Sarah, in the end, is such a ghost from the Famine; she rises from the grey stone, what Carleton calls the “stone of destiny,”33 of the deserted houses of famine victims, an image of the unspeakable home of the Great Hunger.

NOTES 1. Helen Wadell speaks of the “mutual charities between saints ande beast.” Quoted in John Wilson Foster, “Encountering Traditions” in Nature in Ireland, ed. John Wilson Foster (Dublin: Lilliput, 1997) 36. 2. “The exploitation and reduction of Irish woodlands was a natural consequence of Tudor military action and the policy of settlement—plantation—that accompanied it…Woodlands, in addition to being the wooden el dorado for the English, now become important rallying places and strongholds for the Irish –hence the common use of the word ‘fastness’ to describe them. Elizabeth I, well aware of the two aspects mentioned above, expressly ordered the destruction of all woods in the country to deprive the Irish of this shelter . . . The systematic devastation of Irish woodlands followed rapidly on the unexpected defeat of the combined Irish and Spanish forces at Kinsale in 1601. As a result the substantially forested Ireland of 1600 had by 1711 become a treeless wilderness and a net importer of timber…Thus was introduced a pattern that accelerated dramatically during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,

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when forests were felled indiscriminately for profit and because they were refuges for Irish soldiers (hence the coinage of the term ‘woodkerne’)”; Eoin Neeson, “Woodland in History and Culture” in Nature in Ireland ed. Foster, 140–141. 3. Here I am thinking of the famous anonymous poem in Irish (Caoine Cill Cháis) entitled, in English, “Lament for Kilcash”. There have been many translations of this poem; among them number Thomas Kinsella’s, Paul Muldoon’s and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s. 4. See Neeson, “Woodland in History and Culture,” 145–146. 5. For a discussion of nineteenth-century attitudes towards Nature, see John Wilson Foster, “Nature and Nation in the Nineteenth Century” in Nature in Ireland, ed. Foster, 409–439. 6. Among the most recent are Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork: Cork University Press, 1997); Margot Gayle Backus, The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); Border Crossings: Irish Women Writers and National Identities, ed. Kathryn Kirkpatrick (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000); Mary Jean Corbett, Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing, 1790–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Acts of Union: The Causes, Context and Consequences of the Act of Union, ed. Daire Keogh and Kevin Whelan (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001); Ina Ferris, The Romantic National tale and the Question of Ireland (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Jarlyth Killen, Gothic Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts, 2005); Clíona Ó Gallchoir, Maria Edgeworth: Women, Enlightenment and Nation (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2005); Susan M. Kroeg, “So near to us as a Sister”: Incestuous Unions in Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl and Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee,” Anglo-Irish Identities, 1571–1845, ed. David A. Valone and Jill Marie Bradbury (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 2008), 210–27. 7. Lady Morgan, The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale, 3 vols. (Cambridge Chadwyck-Healey 1999), I:136. Subsequent references to The Wild Irish Girl will appear in the text parenthetically with volume number and page. Emphasis in original has in all cases been retained. 8. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 280. 9. Edmund Burke, “A Letter to Richard Burke,” Letters, Speeches and Tracts on Irish Affairs (London: Macmillan, 1881), 350. 10. For examples of this opinion see Kathryn Kirkpatrick’s introduction to The Wild Irish Girl (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Mary Jean Corbett, Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing, 1790–1870: Politics, History, and the Family from Edgeworth to Arnold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 21–82. 11. Kroeg asserts that “In The Wild Irish Girl and The Absentee, Owenson and Edgeworth quietly remind their English readers that behind the violence of the Union lies the crime of incest” in “So near to us as a Sister,” 279. 12. Foster, Nature in Ireland, 413. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid, 416. 15. “Had we been engaged in any innocent or benevolent enterprise, there was something in our situation just then that had a touch of interest in it to a mind

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imbued with a relish for the savage beauties of nature”. Looking at the burning house, after the gruesome deaths of those within, the narrator significantly observes: “Abstractedly it had sublimity, but now it was associated with nothing in my mind but blood and terror.” William Carleton, “Wildgoose Lodge”in Stories from William Carleton, intro. W.B. Yeats (New York: Lemming, 1978) 198. 16. Carleton, “Wildgoose Lodge,” 199. 17. Even early commentaries made this clear. As Thomas Flanagan perceptively observes, though nature is not his subject, “The vividness and clarity with which [The Black Prophet] reveals a countryside lying under sentence of death give the forcefulness of observed fact to the novel.” John Cronin similarly observes that the novel conveys powerfully “the atmosphere of the period: the incessant rain accompanied by warmth which produced rotting crops; the horror of the famine fever; the make-shift, lean-to sheds for the sick and dying by the roadside; the shallow graves which scarcely concealed the diseased corpses; the starving peasants grubbing for nettles and watercress by road and brook; the riots and attacks on provision carts heading for the port with precious food incredibly intended for export.” Cronin then complains, however, “Yet when Carleton moves from the fact to the fiction, he can only fumble with sentimental heroines and hackneyed abductions and clumsy flashback to forgotten and tedious rural crimes.” Of course, there is a strong element of truth in his complaint, but in the shift from nature to culture, from the wide-view to the particular characters, something important is happening. Carleton is trying to uncover a profound aspect of the relationship of landscape, culture and nature. It is important to remember here that nature and landscape are different, that landscape, as Simon Schama notes, is culture before it is nature, that landscape is an acculturated version of nature, but one, I think, through which the effective writers find a lens to magnify the role of nature in culture. One has only to note how many times Carleton, in this novel, uses the landscape as a way of discussing man’s nature, how many times the haunting of the natural world becomes a prelude for a discussion of human nature. There is no easy way of sorting out the triangle, or pretending that the lines do not blur, but there is some instruction in tracing it throughout the melodramatic trappings of the plot. Thomas Flanagan, The Irish Novelists, 1800–1850 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959) 318–9; John Cronin, The Anglo-Irish Novel, Volume 1: The Nineteenth Century (New Jersey: Barnes and Noble, 1980); 96 Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Vintage, 1996) 61; Schama evocatively writes, “Landscapes are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock”. 18. Carleton, Black Prophet, 221. 19. Ibid., 2. 20. Ibid., 3–4. 21. Burke’s famous phrase is from Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: Dent, 1955), 44: “To love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of publick affections.” Goldsmith’s phrase is from The Vicar of Wakefield: “The little republic to which I gave laws, was regulated in the following manner: by sun-rise we all assembled in our common appartment [sic]; the fire being previously kindled by the servant.” The Vicar of Wakefield (Salisbury: Collins, 1766), I:35. 22. Carleton, Black Prophet, 122.

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23. Flanagan, Irish Novelists, 319. 24. Edmund Burke, “A Letter to Richard Burke,” Irish Affairs, 350. 25. Julian Moynihan, Anglo-Irish: The Literary Imagination in an Hyphenated Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995) 72. 26. Carleton, Black Prophet, 406. 27. Ibid., 72. 28. For a discussion of this historical epistemology, see John Gatta, Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion, and Environment in America from the Puritans to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 213. 29. Margaret Kelleher, The Feminization of the Famine: Expressions of the Inexpressible? (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 39. 30. Maud Ellmann, The Hunger-Artists: Starving, Writing and Imprisonment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993) 54. 31. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991) 188. 32. Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 191. 33. Carleton, Black Prophet, 81.

4 Mapping the Imperial Body: Body Image and Representation in Famine Reporting Robert Smart

No matter how sympathetic British and American famine reporters might have been to the plight of victims of An Gorta Mor, ultimately they could not escape the visual politics1 of Ireland’s long colonial history. In this essay, I argue that what we see in the most terrible depictions of famine suffering and death are images—many of them Gothic—consistent with the long-standing view of the poor Irish as a degenerate, monstrous population.2 The scope of my argument is mapped around the conjunction of three significant lines of discussion in postcolonial politics and representation: first, the representation of the Irish as subhuman (“monstrous”) long before the Famine by English newspapers and travel accounts which served the English colonial enterprise; second, the powerful amalgam of dehumanization and distortion that often framed both these older images and the portrayals of the starving/dying Irish during and after the Famine; and third, the Victorian—“Gothic3”—cultural context of devolution and degeneration in which the peak of civilization achieved by imperial nations was directly threatened by the emigration of colonial populations to their shores. I use the word “monstrous” deliberately in this argument as a reference to the colonial lexicon that portrayed the Irish as monsters, subhumans, to a curious and credulous English public and worked within the discursive system that traded on these images to create the measure of English civility. The English, according to this cultural economy, were civilized to the extent that the Irish were savage. Camille Dereste has termed this process “teratogeny,” the deliberate and systematic production of monsters.4 Such 57

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(re)production served the aims of English colonialism and governed the representation of the Irish for nearly seven hundred years, before and after An Gorta Mor. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen describes this colonial function of the monstrous as a “slippage” of the “boundaries between personal and national bodies,” which as early as Giraldus Cambrensis’ Topography of Ireland (1200) was a “first step toward invading and colonizing the island.”5 This longstanding characterization of the Irish as bogtrotters, indolent, and barbaric representatives of a lesser civilization has been well documented. Thomas Gallagher, L. Perry Curtis and Michael de Nie have all traced the evolution of Irish representation in the English press from early images of savages who drank blood and lived in squalor to the more iconic colonial portraits of the Irish as simian ancestors of the more civilized English. As Fintan Cullen notes in Visual Politics, “The problem with Ireland was that it was not England,” and portraits of the Irish from the late sixteenth century (John Derricke) to the nineteenth century (John Tenniel and Kenny Meadows) tended to dramatize the idea that “all the native Irish are … not good enough to be English.”6 With reference to Ireland as perceived by English readers, as late as 1817, “John Alexander Staples, in A Tour In Ireland, in 1813 and 1814, described Ireland as ‘a country that Englishmen know less about, than they do of Russia, Siberia or the Country of the Hottentots.’”7 This sentiment was echoed in the English press: on February 20, 1847, The Illustrated London News declared that “Ireland is nearly a foreign nation to England and one of those which we know least.”8 This sentiment sounds strange coming only forty-six years after The Act of Union, which was described by its supporters effusively as a “marriage” of equal states.9 As Michael de Nie has suggested, the “famine presented at least a partial opportunity to rewrite and recreate the racial and cultural differences of the Irish and English. Conceivably, the Irish could have been sympathetically portrayed as suffering brothers and sisters, deserving of British aid,” but by the final years of the Famine, “the majority of British newspapers were reinforcing traditional stereotypes of the Irish and promoting British chauvinism.” This last point is critical: initially sympathetic depictions of Irish suffering which showed the victims as brethren in need finally gave way to the visual machinery of colonial representation, and from 1847 on, most portraits of the starving Irish privileged “the idea of Irish inferiority.”10 These less than sympathetic portraits supported the widely held English view of Providentialism,11 which maintained that Irish misfortune was a divine punishment for Catholic and nationalist recalcitrance. On September 1, 1846, The Times framed the question that would come to characterize British reporting of the Famine: “They [the Irish] have come amongst us, but they have not become of us. They have earned our money, but they have carried back neither our habits nor our sympathies, neither our love

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of cleanliness nor our love of comfort, neither our economy nor our prudence. Is this distinctive character [i.e., Irishness] incapable of subjugation or change?”12 The imperial architecture of England’s colonial history with Ireland can be discerned in this formulation, from the natural indolence of the savage Irish to the presumption of Irish inferiority to the English. Punch’s February 1849 cartoon titled “The English Labourer’s Burden” [Fig. 4.1] neatly captures English weariness over repeated calls for relief. From the earliest depictions of Irish “bogtrotters” to the descriptions of famine suffering in the British press, several key features of that representation persist. The Irish are childlike, simian, petulant and perfidious; ultimately, they are incapable of providing for themselves or their families. In February 1848, The Liverpool Journal claimed that the Irish peasant13 “has the strength of a man and the mind of a child—a kind of moral FRANKENSTEIN, scarcely morally responsible for his acts.”14 As Luke Gibbons has noted, even the “benevolent”

Figure 4.1. “The English Labourer’s Burden” Punch February 1849.

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depictions of the Irish as “complementary to Anglo-Saxon rationality served colonial domination … since they justified the continuation of ‘the Union’ between Britain and Ireland.”15 Even a sympathetic reporter of famine suffering like American traveler Asenath Nicholson, a Protestant widow who ventured alone throughout famine-ravaged Ireland in 1847, could not help castigating the Irish for their apparent disregard for the solemn niceties of proper burial for the dead: “The Irish appear to have no regard for their dead when the flesh is consumed, but leave the bones to bleach in the sun and the skulls to be kicked about as footballs in any place.”16 Somehow, the connection between the overwhelming numbers of the dead, a point that Nicholson repeatedly makes elsewhere in her famine account, and the attendant difficulties that faced those responsible for disposing of the dead were lost in her assessment of the barbarous conditions in Murrisk Abbey, near Croagh Patrick. Neither in America nor in England, Nicholson’s remark suggests, would one find such degraded conditions and practices. This distance between what observers saw in Ireland during the Famine and what they perceived at home in England or America is precisely where the distortion and dehumanization of the Irish poor over time occludes the sympathetic depiction of suffering and death. The incredible conditions that prevailed in the worst parts of famine-stricken Ireland seemed ultimately to confirm the longstanding image of the Irish as barely civilized. One hundred and sixty-three years later, the eyewitness descriptions of the victims’ bodies of An Gorta Mor are just as startling to read as they must have been to their contemporary readers: “The body was covered with worms, and had one of its thighs devoured by dogs.”17 James Mahoney, a Cork area artist working for The London Illustrated News, described what he found during his visit to Skibbereen, one of the areas hardest hit by the Famine: “By the side of the western wall is a long newly made grave; by either gable are two of shorter dimensions, which have been recently tenanted; and near the hole that serves as a doorway is the last resting place of two or three children; in fact, this hut is surrounded by a rampart of human bones, which have accumulated to such a height that the threshold, which was originally on a level with the ground, is now two feet beneath it.”18 Little wonder that Sidney Godolphin Osborne, who would later work with Florence Nightingale in the Crimea, described famine victims who were not yet consigned to the mercies of their God as “walking skeletons,” deploying yet another image in the growing lexicon of monstrous/Gothic phrases that described how the diseases and privations of the Famine had distorted the human form into grotesques: “By April, 1847, children were like little old men and women of eighty years of age, wrinkled and bent—every trace of children’s gaiety had disappeared, and even the babies

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were ‘aged.’”19 We notice in this monstrous formulation all the boundarycrossing between human and nonhuman, female and male, old and young, which were included in Kelly Hurley’s description of the Gothic/monstrous body as postcolonial text: as in the Gothic narrative, these remarkable descriptions of famine-related suffering reiterate “the becoming-abhuman of the human subject, with abhumanness theorized in the registers of bodily, subjective, and sexual identity.”20 Thus an older trope in imperial reporting on Ireland—the monstrous Otherness21 of the colonized--is mixed with eyewitness records of famine horrors. Thus the nested text—the real story (in Seamus Deane’s formulation) of “what the Famine meant”22—is scribed on the bodies of the dead and dying themselves: the victims are often approached with a mixture of curiosity and disgust, a typical reaction in colonial responses to the suffering of the colonized. In famine reporting, descriptions of the dead and dying became powerful Gothic texts upon which was written the colonial history between Ireland and England. In his typology of the monster as a cultural construction, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen describes five modes of difference mapped by the monster: “cultural, political, racial, economic, sexual.”23 In reporting about the Famine, we can see traces of all five modes, which provide discursive markers indicating that most famine reporting became essentially a colonial operation. This idea that many of the worst depictions of famine suffering are Gothic is not intended as a critical overstatement: Colm Tóibín notes that many eyewitness reports of famine suffering are “chilling and as ‘convincing’ as anything in Sheridan Le Fanu or Bram Stoker,” the two most significant figures in Ireland’s Gothic literary tradition, both of whom were directly affected by the events of the Famine.24 In many modern discussions about Ireland’s Gothic tradition, the Gothic novel has been expressly linked to Ireland’s colonial history, providing in many cases—especially with the Famine—the means by which the historical distortion and destruction of the Irish peasant could be told.25 As Kelly Hurley explains, the Victorian Gothic novel is “a genre thoroughly imbricated with biology and social medicine: sometimes borrowing conceptual remodelings of human physical identity, as it did from criminal anthropology; sometimes borrowing narrative remodelings of human heredity and culture, as it did from the interrelated discourses of evolutionism, degeneration, and entropy.”26 Because centuries of colonial visual politics had depicted the Irish as pre-civilized, savage and degenerate,27 it became almost inevitable that the images of famine suffering—focusing as they did on the destruction of the human form and the degeneration of human social practices—would tend toward Gothic description. And because of this, as Judith Halberstam correctly notes, we can see these objectified bodies as an epistemological

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space within which “[cultural] meaning runs riot.”28 In the cultural clash between objective reporting and imperial caricature, long held images of the Irish prevailed. As they had to: re-presentation involves the reproduction of archetypal structures and images which are formed by and which in turn reinforce the ontological matrices of England’s fierce colonial Othering of the Irish. Sidney Godolphin Osborne provides a gruesome illustration of this colonial cathexis in her Gleanings in the West of Ireland (1850): speaking of children who were in the final stages of starvation from the Famine, she notes that if “you take hold of the loose skin within the elbow and lift the arm by it, it comes away in a large thin fold, as though you had lifted one side of a long narrow bag, in which some loose bones had been placed; if you place the forefinger of your hand under the chin, in the angle of the jaw bone, you find the whole base of the mouth, so to speak, so thin that you could easily conceive it possible, with a very slight pressure, thus to force the tongue into the roof of the mouth.”29 This chilling example of cultural “slippage” is powerful and significant: the suffering children have become “things,” visual objects that are valuable only because of their probative illustration of the ravages of starvation. They are no longer human. In the words of Julia Kristeva, a provocative advocate of the postcolonial function of the Gothic, these children have become “abject,” moved by their physical suffering and degeneration into the realm of the subhuman. Kristeva notes that the power of abjection in human portrayal “disturbs identity, system, order;” these abjected representations reflect “[t]he In-between, the ambiguous, the composite.”30 These terms are part of the common lexicon of post-colonialism descriptions of the disintegration of the human into stereotype, into imperial caricature. Comments like those by Osborne, as Luke Gibbons has explained in Gaelic Gothic, unwittingly reconstruct the victims of the Famine within a pre-famine colonial discourse.31 What has taken place in these descriptions is the process of “monstering,” or “teratogeny,” a process that had already become a powerful trope in British reporting about Ireland well before the Famine. In Monster Theory: Reading Culture (1997), Jeffrey Cohen located the monster at the center of imperial discourse: The monster’s body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy (both ataractic or incendiary), giving them life and an uncanny independence. The monstrous body is pure culture. A construct and a projection, the monster only exists to be read…. Like a letter on the page, the monster signifies something other than itself: it is always a displacement, always inhabits the gap between the time of upheaval that created it and the moment into which it is received.32

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For England, the monstered Irishman reflected an anti-modernist fantasy and embodied powerful fears of contamination and devolution which were only exacerbated by Irish emigration to English ports during the Famine. Critic Edward Hirsch noted in this regard that “as a result of heavy postfamine emigration into the worst English slums … the stage Irishman was reduced in British characterizations to a subhuman figure, a ‘white negro’33 portrayed in Punch as a primitive Frankenstein or peasant Caliban.”34 Hirsch’s description of English caricatures of the Irish during the second half of the nineteenth century is a veritable catalog of racial and cultural “monstering” which masks imperial fear and desire of the colonial Other. In the postcolonial formulation of Maja-Lisa von Sneidern, “[t]he monster is a disruptive place [within colonial politics] where discourses are at liberty to rehearse emergent and reiterate threatened epistemic principles.…the monster becomes primarily a discursive event, its authors occupying an authorized position; it is the occasion for hybridity.”35 Explicit references to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to describe British fear and repugnance towards the Irish, along with characterizations of the Irish as blood-drinkers, anarchic Calibans and villains, provided an irresistible framing mechanism for the many descriptions of destroyed and distorted bodies, as well as the reports of cannibalism. Even the morality of famine victims (especially female) was questioned when bodies were found in various stages of undress lying in streets and ditches, something that Margaret Kelleher has described in detail in her work on the feminizing of the Famine.36 The prominence of the Frankenstein image in these Victorian racial stereotypes of the Irish is not accidental, for the story of Victor Frankenstein’s creation of a new, horrible being from the body parts of the dead has a peculiar and poignant resonance in famine history and politics, especially when the discussion of that history is recast in terms of the Gothic body [Fig 4.2]. In many of the most vivid and memorable accounts of famine suffering that have survived, the most evocative details have to do with the destruction of the body, the transformation of human forms into grotesques. This is, of course, what the racial caricatures traded in the British press already had suggested, but the metaphoric power of these images increases in the powerful descriptions of those who traveled through the most troubled parts of Ireland. As Marie-Helene Huet reminds us, in “legal terminology, the word ‘representation’ means a delegation of power, and ‘delegation’ in turn implies a distance between the seat of power and the place where it is exercised.”37 The representation of a colonized people in the popular press is itself a sign of the unequal power between those doing the reporting and the subjects of that reporting.

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Figure 4.2.

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John Tenniel, ‘The Irish Frankenstein’, Punch, 20 May 1882.

The Cork Examiner, for example, in March 1847, reported an event that probably would not have found easy reception in any other part of Europe, for fear that the most essential elements of civilization had been irreversibly eroded: “In Belmullet, County Cork, a starving woman lay in her hovel next to her dead three-year-old son, waiting for her husband to return from begging food. When night fell and his failure to return led her to imagine him dead in a ditch, she lay there in the faint light of the fire’s dying embers, caressing with her eyes her dead son’s face and his tiny fists, clenched as if for a fight to get

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into heaven. Then slowly, with death searching her, and now with her own fists clenched, she made one last effort to remain alive. Crawling as far away from her son’s face as she could, as if to preserve his personality or least her memory of it, she came to his bare feet and proceeded to eat them.”38

This is a troubling account, not just because The Cork Examiner was a credible source for famine reporting at the time. The passage exposes the contratextual meaning (Cohen’s notion of “double narrative”)39 of the story once it is placed within the colonial troping of the Irish as monstrous and savage. The emotional affect of the narrator is sympathetic, dwelling on the motherly restraint of this starving woman before her dead son, but the final moment of this report is the most powerful: despite all her attempts to hold on to her humanity, her civility, hunger has reduced this poor woman to the level of the subhuman. The story goes no farther than this final, dramatic point, and so we get no contextualization that might mitigate our sense of horror at the dehumanization of these people. As with Asenath Nicholson’s objection to apparent Irish indifference to death, we cannot imagine such a scene being reported about peasants in England or farmers in America. In such societies, cannibalism is a cultural taboo, never mentioned even if it does happen; here, it is further evidence of Irish dehumanization and alterity. In terms of contemporary representations of the Famine, what we thus see are two parallel depictions: the illustrations of famine suffering which were published in British and American newspapers tended to trade on iconic images that predate An Gorta Mor: the holy family triptych and images of the suffering Madonna, [Fig. 4.3] a feature of famine reporting that Margaret Kelleher has explored as the chief representation of famine portraiture. The second type of illustration featured the walking skeleton and deserted villages, whose most poignant feature (and most provocative feature, considering English descriptions of the Famine as the means by which an overpopulated Ireland would finally be made “ready” for transformation into a proper colony) is the absence of the native Irish, something mentioned in a recent study of the Famine within the Irish canon—Hungry Words—as a “defining characteristic” of famine narratives and pictography.40 Set within a colonial context, these absences reflect two things simultaneously: the reality of famine devastation and the desire of many in England to see in this devastation the possibility of a “new Ireland,” cleared of its teeming masses of peasants and ready to become a modern colony. In most of these cases, we can find traces of longstanding colonial assumptions about the Irish and their unsuitability for modern civilized life. In Michael de Nie’s words, these iconic images argue persuasively that “what the British press wanted to believe about Ireland was more appealing than the grim realities of the famine-stricken country.”41 So long as none of the vexing issues of English political and cultural chauvinism found their way into these illustrations, the benevolence of the government and the

Figure 4.3. “Interior of a cabin, 1846” Pictorial Times, Feb. 7, 1846 and “Woman at Clonakilty” Illustrated London News, Feb. 13, 1847.

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English people could be used to mask the causes of Irish suffering, leaving many in Britain to blame the Irish themselves for their lot. In a particularly tasteless example of the British press trying to suborn Irish complaints about English complacency in providing tangible relief to starving millions, the Spectator in March 1848, one of the worst years of the Famine, offered several “recipes” for cooking Irishmen, replete with loyalist puns and jokes that conflated Ireland’s rebellious history with the suffering that had by then nearly broken the colony’s back: “Crimped Celts, with sauce á la Cromwell Take a few dozen Celts, the wilder the better, put them into as small an enclosure as you have, notch them all over, neatly, with a sharp sword or cutlass. Be careful not to kill any before you have them done. If one should die, throw it aside. When all are crimped, place them before a steady fire of musketry and dish them all as quickly as possible. This mode requires a light and steady hand. The same with Orange sauce Take a hundred of the potato-fed sort, put them into a barn, and smother with straw smoke. The straw should be rather damp, but not too much. Peat-smoke is very good, as it does the eyes better than straw. You can tell when it is quite done by the leaving off of the shrieking. A very elegant dish.” Spectator, 25 March 1848

In a startling admission, the Spectator article concluded dryly that, “The worst, however, of playing with edge-tools of this kind is that the joke is sometimes taken seriously and carried into effect.”42 While such “edge-tools” were viewed as a bracing restorative to constant Irish complaining about lack of food and care, narrative reports of famine suffering often plied a less cautious path of reporting, often detailing some of the most graphic examples of human degradation. After reporting at some length on the humane death of an older peasant woman named Sara, who was comforted by her husband Abraham and kindly neighbors, Asenath Nicholson adds as a grisly postscript the story of “a little orphan girl, who had crept into a hole in the back and died one night, with no one to spread her heath-bed, or to close her eyes, or wash and fit her for the grave. She died unheeded, the dogs lacerated the body, gnawed the bones, and strewed them about the bog.”43 Immediately following this Gothic tale, Nicholson returns to the story of Sara and Abraham, the latter having died in the arms of his daughter who buried him not far from her mountain home: “Thus died Sara and Abraham, and thus they were buried, and let their epitaph be: ‘Lovely and pleasant in their lives, though in death they were divided.’”44 Clearly, the story of Sara and Abraham, with all its Biblical overtones, is positioned in Nicholson’s narrative as a counter to the gruesome story of the unnamed orphan girl, whose death and dismemberment

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by roaming dogs provides us with a discomforting picture of just how bad things throughout famine Ireland had become. In this juxtaposition, the Gothic context for these depictions becomes clear and in the grisly details we see all the hallmarks of the Gothic that Fred Botting suggests are key: the sense of excess, both in the description and in the lack of outrage about this poor girl’s death and dismemberment; the sense of “transgression” that is derived from the juxtaposition of the orphan girl’s story and Abraham and Sara’s narrative; and finally, a sense of threat, subversion, which Botting describes as “Uncertainties about the nature of power, law, society, family and sexuality . . .[which] are linked to wider threats of disintegration.”45 By 1870, the many waves of poor Irish who had emigrated to English shores added fuel to arguments about devolution and cultural and historical entropy which had become a feature of Victorian fin-de-siécle thinking.46 As Kelly Hurley correctly argues, the abhuman body, a feature of much famine reporting as we have seen, provided a canvas for Gothic writers to trace the impending corruption and demise of Victorian cultural superiority: the “hysterical” narratives in many of these novels explored the monstrosity of London’s poor, using many of the same tropes and images that had marked English representation of the Irish before, during, and after the Famine.47 Andrew Mearns, for example, wrote about this threat from the outside in 1883: “seething in the very centre of our great cities, concealed by the thinnest crust of civilization and decency, is a vast mass of moral corruption, of heart-breaking misery and godlessness.”48 This is the historical and cultural context out of which Bram Stoker wrote what is arguably the masterpiece of Victorian Gothic, Dracula, in which all the racial anxiety and cultural unease of Victorian England was framed by powerful echoes of the Famine. Bram Stoker was born in the middle of Black ’47, and suffered from a mysterious malady that left him unable to walk for the first half decade of his life, and he often spoke about these early years of confinement to his Clontarf bedroom as though he too had been a famine victim. As critic Joseph Valente recounts, Charlotte Stoker “nurtured [her son’s] nativist adherences . . . most conspicuously on macabre accounts of the Great Famine just passed . . . [while he came to believe] that his disabling childhood illness had resulted from contagion following in the potato famine’s wake.”49 By the close of the nineteenth century, after decades of emigration left Ireland with half of its 1840 census population, the most powerful story about the Famine and its ravages was told by an expatriate Irishman in the most famous Gothic novel of the century. Historians, cultural critics and reporters had long consigned this chapter in Ireland’s colonial history to silence. In what follows this silence, “History itself becomes a monster: defeaturing, self-deconstructive, always in danger of exposing the sutures that bind its disparate elements into a single, unnatural body.”50 What is also clear from the cultural determination of the monster in pre-famine reporting about

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the Irish is that its function within Ireland’s Gothic tradition should not be surprising, since the Irish Gothic, as W. J. McCormack has noted, “is remarkably explicit in the way it demonstrates its attachment to history and to politics.”51 Early colonial representation of the Irish as monstrous perhaps made it inevitable that the most powerful and subversive stories of Ireland’s An Gorta Mor would be written by its Gothic novelists.

NOTES 1. “[Visual politics in the representation of Ireland] does not just mean the representation of the landscape but encompasses a more varied concern with the issue of Ireland, its people, its history, as well as political and cultural concerns.” From Fintan Cullen, Visual Politics: The Representation of Ireland, 1750–1930 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1997), 1. 2. There is an interesting argument currently being debated about the violence that often accompanied colonization suggesting that the reconstruction of native peoples into such “’ur-peasant’—deformed, rustic and wicked” types prepared the political ground for genocidal strategies of conquest, something which is still being debated about Ireland’s colonial relationship with England. See Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 2. 3. “Monstrous” and “Gothic” are not used interchangeably here, even though the first figures powerfully in the cultural and historical structure of the second. “Gothic” is a cultural and historical literary mode, which involves, “excess, transgression, diffusion and criticism,” while the monster is a product of that cultural operation through which we can “read” as a double narrative.” From Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen ed., Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 13. See also Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996), 171: “[The Gothic] involves a pervasive cultural concern—characterized as postmodernist—that things are not only not what they seem: what they seem is what they are, not a unity of word or image and thing, but words and images without things or as things themselves, effects of narrative form and nothing else.” The presence of the monster threatens a (re)reading of history as Gothic, especially in the case of Ireland. See Cohen, “Monster Culture,” 9. 4. Marie-Helene Huet, “Living Images: Monstrosity and Representation” Representations 4 (1983): 74. 5. Cohen, “Monster Culture,” 10. 6. Cullen, Visual Politics, 104 and 11. 7. Glenn Hooper, The Tourist’s Gaze: Travellers to Ireland 1800–2000 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2001), xx. This comparison of the Irish to Hottentots is a provocative chapter in the story of Irish colonial representation, occurring several times in characterizations of Irish strangeness or wildness. See, for example, the 1810 case of the “Hottentot Venus,” Saarjite Baartman, a young Khosian woman from Southern Africa whose enlarged buttocks were publicly displayed through England and

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France. It’s important to remember how closely the monstrous and the wondrous followed the expansion and consolidation of the British Empire. See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992) and Maja-Lisa von Sneidern, “Joined at the Hip: A Monster, Colonialism, and the Scriblerian Project. Eighteenth-Century Studies 30 (1997): 213–231. See also L. Perry Curtis, Jr, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Washington D. C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 2 and 154. 8. Michael De Nie, The Eternal Paddy: Irish Identity and the British Press, 1798– 1882 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 90. 9. This is the precise language that introduces the Act of Union, July 2, 1800: “WHEREAS in pursuance of H.M.’s most gracious recommendation to the two Houses of Parliament in Great Britain and Ireland respectively, to consider of such measures as might best tend to strengthen and consolidate the connection between the two Kingdoms, the two Houses of the Parliament of Great Britain and the two Houses of the Parliament of Ireland have severally agreed and resolved that, in order to promote and secure the essential interests of Great Britain and Ireland, and to consolidate the strength, power and resources of the British Empire, it will be advisable to concur in such measures as may best tend to unite the two Kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland into one Kingdom, in such a manner, and on such terms and conditions, as may be established by the Acts of the respective Parliaments of Great Britain and Ireland.” 10. De Nie, The Eternal Paddy, 90–1. 11. The most prominent purveyors of this notion in the English popular press were The Times, The London Illustrated News and Punch. 12. The Times, 1 September 1846. 13. This exact formulation is used by Bram Stoker to characterize Mina (Murray) Harker, the Irish heroine of Dracula (1897) who is made English by her marriage to Jonathan Harker. The words come from Abraham van Helsing, Stoker’s alter ego in the story: Mina has “man’s brain—a brain that a man should have were he much gifted—and woman’s heart” in the usual Victorian formulation. Bram Stoker, Dracula (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002), 240. 14. Cited in De Nie, The Eternal Paddy, 121. 15. Cited in Cohen ed., Monster Theory, 585. 16. Asenath Nicholson, Annals of the Famine in Ireland, ed. Maureen Murphy (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1998), 142. 17. John Killen, The Famine Decade: Contemporary Accounts 1841–1851 (Dublin: Blackstaff Press, Ltd., 1995), 148. 18. Ibid., 113. 19. Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–1849 (London: Penguin Books, 1962), 195. 20. Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Regeneration at the Fin de Siécle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 14. 21. “In its function as dialectical Other or third-term supplement, the monster is an incorporation of the Outside, the Beyond—of all those loci that are rhetorically placed as distant and distinct but originate Within.” Cohen, “Monster Culture,” 7.

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22. Seamus Deane, “Dumbness and Eloquence: A Note On English as We Write it in Ireland” in Clare Carroll, Patricia King, eds. Ireland and Postcolonial theory (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 2003), 110. 23. Ibid. 24. Colm Tóibín and Diarmaid Ferriter. The Irish Famine: A Documentary. (London: Profile Books, 2001), 23. During the height of the Famine (1847–8), Sheridan Le Fanu’s brother William, an engineer, had to rescue the bodies of famine victims from marauding dogs at Burnfort near Mallow, and these dreadful reminders of England’s “disastrous imperial policy” surely affected the younger Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Thus it is “feasible . . . to correlate the guilty past of Le Fanu’s fiction with the politics of his time, and particularly of his caste.” W. J. McCormack, “Irish Gothic and After (1820–1945)” in Seamus Deane ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Vol. II (Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991), 102, 230. Stoker, as is mentioned later, was born in 1847, and during his long recuperation from a mysterious disease that left him unable to walk, received detailed descriptions of famine horrors from his mother Charlotte. 25. See, for example, Robert Smart and Michael Hutcheson, “‘Negative History’ and Irish Gothic Literature: Persistence and Politics” Caliban 15 (2004):105–118. 26. Hurley, The Gothic Body, 5. 27. Interestingly, after the Gaelic Revival of the late nineteenth century—another culturally mediated response to the Famine, these same attributes became part of a romanticized vision of a pre-colonial Ireland, concentrated after the English Conquest in the West of Ireland. 28. Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows, Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 2. 29. Sidney Godolphin Osborne, Gleanings in the West of Ireland (London: T. & W. Boone, 1850), 17. 30. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4. 31. Luke Gibbons, Gaelic Gothic: Race, Colonization and Irish Culture (Galway: Arlen House, 2006), 43–49. 32. Cohen, “Monster Culture,” 4. 33. Charles Kingsley, a nineteenth-century English clergyman, amateur naturalist and historian, wrote famously in 1860, after his visit to Ireland, “I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country. I don’t believe they are our fault. I believe there are not only more of them than of old, but that they are happier, better, more comfortably fed and lodged under our rule than they ever were. But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful,” quoted in Edward Hirsch, “The Imaginary Irish Peasant,” PMLA 106 (1991):1119. 34. Hirsch, “The Imaginary Irish Peasant,” 1119. 35. Von Sneidern, “Joined at the Hip,” 217. 36. Margaret Kelleher, “The Female Gaze: Asenath Nicholson’s Famine Narrative,” Chris Morash and Richard Hayes, eds., Fearful Realities: New Perspectives on the Famine (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1996), 121–129. 37. Marie-Helene Huet, “Living Images: Monstrosity and Representation,” Representations 4 (1983): 80.

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38. Cited in Thomas Gallagher, Paddy’s Lament (New York: Harvest Books, 1987), 88. 39. “Every monster is in this way a double narrative, two living stories: one that describes how the monster came to be and another, its testimony, detailing what cultural use the monster serves” Cohen, “Monster Culture,” 13. 40. George Cusack and Sarah Goss, eds., Hungry Words: Images of Famine in the Irish Canon (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006), 2. 41. De Nie, The Eternal Paddy, 117. 42. Ibid., 123. 43. Nicholson, Annals of the Famine, 87. 44. Ibid, 88. 45. Botting, Gothic, 5. 46. It’s worth recalling in this regard the nearly seamless shift, a “semantic slide” in Terry Eagleton’s terminology, between this process of colonial monstering and the nearly hysterical focus in the late Victorian period on devolution and degeneration. Also worth remembering is the fact that The British Museum, that collection of imperial bones, started as a combined exhibition of three collections, one of them by Sir Hans Sloane which contained monsters and natural oddities that surprised even Horace Walpole. See Von Sneidern, “Joined at the Hip,” 216. 47. Hurley, The Gothic Body, 125. 48. Ibid, 161. 49. Joseph Valente, Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, And the Question of Blood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 16. 50. Cohen, “Monster Culture,” 9. Cohen’s clear allusion to the monster built by Victor Frankenstein, an archetypal colonist, should not be missed here. 51. W. J. McCormack, “Irish Gothic and After (1820–1945),” in Seamus Deane ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991), 2:833.

5 Representing the Famine, Writing the Self: Irish-Canadian Narratives Michael Kenneally

In a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies exploring Irish Canadian connections, guest editors Kevin James and Jason King draw attention to the marked ideological inflections characterizing the historiography of Irish emigration and settlement in Canada. Specifically, they identify two distinct narrative threads associated with the Irish immigrant experience to the Canadian colony. The first is derived from the Famine and the tragic events associated with Grosse Île. Until recently, this narrative tended to mask a second, much longer and more diversified record of migration based on a range of economic, cultural and personal agendas.1 While acknowledging the insight of James and King’s typology, this paper argues, in contrast, that Irish immigration to Canada needs to be explored outside such binary parameters. Further, this work asserts that space needs to be made for the literary forms dealing with the Famine and famine immigration that are traditionally overlooked by historians, if fuller, more nuanced and altogether individualized accounts are to be retrieved. From an interdisciplinary perspective, it is evident that written discourse on the Famine and Grosse Île immigration should not be considered merely from a dialectical perspective or subsumed into a polarizing debate among historians. Substantial amounts of material incorporating aspects of Irish immigrants’ experience of, or response to, the Famine are to be found in travel and life writing texts, such as letters, diaries, journals, memoirs and biographies; poems and ballads, as well as in novels, popular historical fiction, populist histories, personal essays, and community newsletters and newspapers. To read such narrative responses to the Famine merely as 73

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evidence to be proffered for either side of a debate within Irish-Canadian historiography is to occlude—if not altogether sideline—consideration of the multiple forms and functions of these representations of knowledge or memory of the Famine. As inscriptions of often nuanced configurations of the Irish immigrant experience in Canada, such texts are amenable to critical readings that valorize them beyond whatever role they might have as material evidence for historians. Canadian narratives that conceptualize the Famine and its attendant immigration, whether written by contemporary observers or by subsequent generations, by the Irish or by others, can profitably be scrutinized from interdisciplinary perspectives so that the vicissitudes and challenges of emigration and the sacrifices and rewards of dislocation and settlement stand revealed in all their diversity and complexity. Rather than viewing these works as merely offering supplementary evidence reinforcing a preordained historiography, they can be profitably read as part of a multifaceted meta-narrative embracing a wide range of subjects and issues embedded in the migration experiences of thousands of individuals from Ireland to Canada. Such texts achieve their rich multivalent status from the nexus of forces set in motion when an individual decides to uproot and re-locate the self, when the immigrant must contend with the challenges of relating to a new spatiotemporal world and respond to evolving perceptions of home and country, landscape and nation, family and community, even time and mortality. King and James make reference to the work of Cecil J. Houston and William J. Smyth who have argued that the images associated with famine emigration to Canada— destitute, disease-ridden Catholics arriving in Quebec and Ontario (Grosse Île, Montreal, Kingston, Toronto), many dying on arrival, the survivors struggling in urban centers where poverty and discrimination posed serious challenges to social and economic integration—have obscured the larger historical narrative of Irish immigrants in the settlement of British North America, especially their role in the development of Upper Canada. Referring to the 1847 famine immigrants, Houston and Smyth have stated that, “Their numbers and their misfortune left an impression on Canadian society that has not been dispelled, for as a result of the Famine the Irish in Canada have acquired a romantic and epic aura. In the popular imagination, the Famine, typhus, cholera, and involuntary exile have grown to be the primary image symbolizing the Irish emigration. The 1847 Famine episode has been generalized to represent a universal tragic beginning for the group.”2 King and James also cite historian Alan O’Day who has argued that the “‘legend of Grosse Île,’ with its received ‘images of wretched refugees encrusted in poverty’, inhibits a wider understanding of the social processes of Irish emigration and North American settlement.”3 To counter the image of the unfortunate and destitute Irish immigrant, Houston and Smyth draw on their meticulous research to argue that “[t]he

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vast majority of Canada’s Irish arrived before the Famine and not as exiles. From the mid-eighteenth century, safe passages, reasoned decisions, and fairly successful outcomes characterized an ongoing mass voluntary emigration.”4 They establish persuasively that Protestants constituted a higher proportion of Irish immigrants than Catholics, and that they arrived with sufficient financial means, material possessions, and farming experience to ensure relatively speedy and successful settlement, predominantly in rural areas. However, in straining to dispel the “romantic and epic aura” of the emotionally compelling famine narrative, they critique populist perceptions of Irish Canadian history and the cultural forms in which it has found expression. In doing so, as King and James point out, Houston and Smyth rarely identify the sources for “the stereotypes they contend to dismantle; nor do they attempt to document or explain the cultural mechanisms by which the common misconceptions of Irish-Canadian popular culture become transmitted and perpetuated.”5 In an earlier study of Irish emigration to Canada, Donald H. Akenson takes a different tack in attempting to reject the Famine as the central symbol of Irish immigrant identity. He claims the image of the Irish immigrant as victim derives partially from the absence of a “tradition of historical writing about the Irish in Canada . . . Between 1878 and 1974 there was no major scholarly book (or even much in the ephemeral line) published about the Irish in central Canada.”6 In that lacuna, Akenson traces the pervasiveness of the myth of the Irish immigrant as impoverished victim to the prejudicial perspective of the historian H. Clare Pentland and the sociologist Kenneth Duncan who, in Akenson’s view, “imported the Irish-American mythology, with scarcely a pause to relabel the package.”7 In contrast to the claims of Houston and Smyth that a “romantic and epic aura” has pervaded the larger narrative of Irish immigration in Canada, Akenson asserts that, Unlike the Irish in the United States, the people of Irish descent in Canada did not need a myth. For most of the nineteenth century, the Irish in Canada were the largest non-French ethnic group, and their prepotence was particularly salient in the rich and (after mid-century) the most populace province, Ontario…instead of requiring a separate ethnic mythology of their own, persons of Irish ethnicity shared the general cosmology of English Canadianism—the Protestant Irish completely, the Catholics with some reservations. In a sense, the economic success of the Irish in Canadian society and their numerical prepotence amongst ‘English-Canadians’ meant that they did not need an historical mythology as part of their survival equipment.”8

Akenson may be overstating the case for Irish Catholics, since the two primary nineteenth-century historical texts dealing with the Irish in Canada do construct images of the appalling circumstances of famine immigrants. The first nine chapters of John Francis Maguire’s The Irish in America (1867)

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address famine immigration to New Brunswick, Quebec and Ontario, with special emphasis on Grosse Île.9 His account focuses on the appalling circumstances in 1847, when the quarantine station could not respond effectively to the arrival of thousands of diseased and impoverished immigrants. Rather than deal with the Famine in Ireland, Maguire prioritizes the modalities of famine immigration in Canada, in particular the ability of survivors to make successful lives for themselves in their new country. Maguire’s purpose, as was Nicholas Flood Davin’s overarching thrust in The Irishman in Canada (1877), was to promote a heroic image of Irish immigrant identity, construct a narrative that moved from destitution to adversity overcome, from despair to hope fulfilled. Both works strove to demonstrate that the Irish character, when freed from oppression and untrammeled by injustices, was capable of noble, even transcendent virtues, evident in the social, economic and political accomplishments of the Irish in their new world.10 Even though Houston and Smyth are convincing in arguing that the account of Irish emigration to Canada must be shorn of its highly emotional associations with the Grosse Île famine story, and more judiciously reflect an Irish immigrant narrative spanning more than two hundred years, this argument ought not imply that all texts dealing with this subject be situated between two diametrically opposed ideological positions. Even though an inordinate proportion of texts, by the Irish and others, do focus on aspects of famine immigration and its associations with Grosse Île, they can also be instructively read from other perspectives and within the contexts of other methodologies. While interrogations of these works would obviously be alert to distinct political inflections defined by an imperial and nationalist dichotomy, a transcendent engagement beyond a dialectically grounded historical perspective can suggest personal, aesthetic and other ideological frames within which the Famine and consequent immigration is conceptualized and depicted. Some of the central questions to be posed have to do with the manner in which the representational images of Irish immigration are rendered and given textual form and contextual implications. For example, within the declared or implicit predetermination of a specific genre of written discourse, and beyond the manifest subject proffered by a given text, what is conveyed through literary strategies or implied by shifting rhetorical manipulation? What balance of personal, aesthetic or ideological impulses animates the representations of Irish famine immigration materials? Such interrogations do not preclude the historian’s search for objectivity and proportion but they can yield more nuanced understandings of the past, reveal its personal subjectivities or individual imagined evocations. For example, contemporary Canadian novels such as Jack Hodgins’s The Invention of the World, Jane Urquhart’s Away, Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace

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and Richard David Adams’s River of the Brokenhearted reveal in varying degrees the enduring potency of famine immigration as a subject amenable to the structural or thematic aesthetics of literary works. In each, representations of the Irish immigrant experience are textually inscribed to accommodate literary exigencies and historical evocations. Patrick Slater’s 1925 novel, The Yellow Briar: A Story of the Irish on the Canadian Countryside, integrates historical aspects of the Famine and famine immigrants into his exploration of Canada as a hospitable environment where the pernicious sectarian divisions of Ireland might be overcome. More recent popular Irish-Canadian historical fiction by writers such as Carol Bennett McCuaig, Mary Tanquay, Michelle Tisseyre and Gabrielle Wills revisit the subject of Irish immigration, raising issues related to the process of community memory and identity, the relationship of the self to history, and the role of place, both real and imagined, in the shaping of community allegiances.11 Even the famine associations of Grosse Île itself cannot be understood solely within the empirical and statistical purview of an historian seeking to de-mythologize its emotional accretions. Recent interdisciplinary scholarship has demonstrated that Grosse Île as a place of public commemoration does not proffer a wholly one-dimensional perspective on the events of 1847.12 Notwithstanding the creation by Parks Canada of a new memorial to mark the 150th anniversary of the Famine and its re-naming the island Grosse Île and the Irish Memorial, it remains a site that is open, complex and multivalent. The visual iconography found on the island, the literary materials provided by Parks Canada on the Irish associations with the island, and the historical and evolving representation of Grosse Île in multiple publications suggest the complex discourse that has been created around the events on the island in the summer of 1847. Indeed, the frequency with which the Famine and the immigration it led to appear in Canadian literary and cultural forms, the degree to which they endure as subjects for literary treatment and imaginative memory, suggest that this subject in itself is worthy of a full-length scholarly investigation. My more specific focus in this essay is on two life writing texts that, while adverting to the Famine and its attendant immigration, subsume them as strands in a literary construct animated primarily by other criteria.13 At the core of both works is a set of letters written by an Irish immigrant who was well settled in Canada prior to 1847. My reading of these letters is particularly attentive to the manner in which a variety of shifting subjects are couched in an unfolding narrative and rendered through a range of linguistic and rhetorical devices, whose ultimate effect points to a greater apprehension of the writing self. Scrutiny of the formulaic elements of specific texts (the conventions of letters are obviously distinct from those of travel writing, for example) and the aesthetics of literary forms produce subtle and kaleidoscopically unfolding revelations about both declared and

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implied subjects, and eventually suggest layered components of an identity moving through time and responding to the challenges of new space. Our Forest Home is ostensibly a collection of letters and journal entries by Frances Stewart who with her husband emigrated from Belfast in 1822, to settle in the bush near what would become Peterborough, Ontario. The genteel and civilized Stewart put a good face on the setbacks, constant hardships and social isolation that were the family’s lot as it attempted to survive in the primitive and challenging conditions facing immigrants in the early nineteenth-century colony. From her arrival until the 1870s, Frances Stewart wrote to her Anglo-Irish friends in Ireland, narrating the story of her unfolding life and acknowledging with gratitude their steady stream of gifts which, though welcome, were bitter reminders of the civilized world she had left and to which she increasingly doubted she would ever return. Rather than being a straightforward edited collection of letters, Our Forest Home is a unique literary compilation, not the least because Stewart’s letters have been selected, interspersed with extracts from her journal and bridged with extended interpretative passages by her daughter, who published what had been intended as private documents in an effort to buttress her own claim to be a successful writer and, of course, to earn money. Thus, the text constitutes a three-way dialogue between the original private voice of the mother as letter writer, the restricted version of that voice permitted by the daughter’s selection of materials, and the daughter’s own editorial interventions and contextualizations. Nevertheless, access to specific features of Stewart’s identity is possible by examining those letters in which her unfiltered voice finds expression. While diaries and letters, especially those of immigrants, partake of recognizable formulaic elements, they are also capable of transcending predictable practices and conventional strategies to reveal identity in the process of profound transformation as it responds to new spatiotemporal conditions. Convergences of certain elements of subjectivity become apparent when the reader focuses on the work’s rhetorical dimensions, attends to the simultaneously denotative and connotative suggestiveness conveyed by form, voice, audience, syntax and idiom, as well as the ostensible manipulations of structure and narrative. To access these often encoded palimpsests of consciousness, to understand how the self achieves linguistic translation onto the page requires examination of the idiosyncratic representation of chosen subjects and responses to unfolding issues. Woven through Our Forest Home are references to emigration by poor Irish Catholics before the famine period, and, in the letters of 1847, specific allusions to the Famine itself. In a letter of 1825, Stewart describes the recently arrived colony of Irish settlers brought to Douro by a Peter Robinson, after whom the settlement would be named. While Stewart expresses sympathy for the new arrivals, the text quickly evinces a self-reflective mode, as the account of the immigrants becomes a catalyst for self-observation.

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She welcomes their arrival in the neighborhood because they give “some variety” to a mostly comfortless life that is “a never-ending scene of bustle, turmoil and hard work.” However, having described the “odd” huts the settlers will occupy temporarily until “log shanties are ready for their families in Douro,” Stewart quickly shifts from an objective perspective to a more subjectively oriented consideration of their condition: The poor creatures suffered a good deal, and many died. They are principally Roman Catholics. A priest also lives here. There seems to be a total want of religion, I feel unhappy about it, the awful consideration, they plan and scheme for this world without thinking that we may be called home at a moment’s warning. How can I forget for a moment the mercies of that God who gives me every blessing? How sweet are the trials which cause me to look up to Him to feel His support, as I do every instant, nothing is too severe if it has that effect. I have many causes for sorrow. I feel the want of a friend beside me to talk to. The children are growing up, showing need of refinement...From six in the morning till nine at night there is not an instant of silence and quiet in any corner of this little dwelling, between four children and two clumsy, uncouth bold servant girls with heavy feet and loud voices.14

Despite her ready acknowledgement of the suffering and primitive conditions of the newly arrived immigrants, Stewart writing insistently moves to a reflection on her own circumstances, complaining about the absence of friends, social refinement and cultural enrichment, but perhaps most revealingly asserting her belief in a privileged relationship with God. As the letters register their incremental impact, they reveal Frances Stewart to be increasingly disappointed that Canada fails to replicate the genteel life she knew in Ireland. With the unfolding years, her initial frustrations with the practicalities of surviving in challenging conditions yield to the dawning awareness that her blessings of a good husband and healthy family do not compensate for the deep-rooted need for social and class confirmations of identity. At such moments, her instinct is to find consolation in the belief in a special relationship with the divine, her certain faith that her sufferings and disillusionments presage an appropriate eternal award. In this context, the religious indifference of the Irish immigrants is readily elided to her own spiritual life and her faith in her divine rewards. Thus, the ostensible subject of these Irish settlers—the appalling conditions which they experienced, the elementary challenges they must confront—does not elicit a sympathetic response from Stewart, not even a proselytizing impulse toward those who are oblivious to the “the awful consideration.” Nor has their predicament served as a catalyst for action or sustained reflection. By contrast, it is revealing that in the introduction that frames this letter, her editor daughter recounts how “My father took a great interest in this movement, although he regretted the choice had been made at that place [Cork,

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Ireland], the people being well-known as very poor and thriftless. Had a better class come it would have been an advantage to the settlement.”15 Despite the shared class-consciousness between father and daughter, their misgivings are at least grounded in the practical desire for the economic improvement of the greater community. Frances Stewart’s representations of the Irish immigrants become revealing indices of subjectivity, and reinforce aspects of identity that continue to emerge throughout the text. The images created thus serve to draw attention to specific underpinnings of the self, since these figures are rendered as distinct others whose moral behavior and religious indifference exist in dramatic contrast to her own. Her reaction to their proximity and overt otherness suggests that she is denying that their presence is a reminder of the intractable conditions of her own life as an immigrant. The manifest commonalities in their immigrant experiences are neutralized by her certainty in her salvation; she and they may now collectively be located in the trying environment of the Canadian bush but these conditions will soon yield to an order in which her presumption of entitlement will prevail. Ultimately, the structural role of the poor Catholic Irish immigrants reinforces the writer’s gradual acknowledgement that the rewards of the afterlife will compensate for the failure of Canada to alleviate the pains of exile and the sacrifices of immigrant settlement. Such self-revealing passages abound in Stewart’s narrative, particularly at moments when she must confront residual reminders of negative associations of Ireland. If Ireland is the lost home, the place where her genteel friends and relatives have lives of civility and social self-assurance, any reminders of the distasteful aspects of that world, such as the Famine, must be contextualized in a manner that negates its impingement on her consciousness in her new home. For example, in an 1847 letter to a friend, she responds to reports on the Famine: The accounts of the famine in Ireland are most heartrending. What a state that poor place is in. I really fear the whole air of the country will be polluted by the masses of putrifying (sic) bodies of animals and decaying vegetables. The pestilence may not be confined to those who have suffered from bad food, and no food. I often wish that all I love were out of it, and here; but then I begin to recollect how very irksome Canadian life would seem to those who have been accustomed to elegance, ease and refinement; how insupportable it would be to those who have lived in a round of amusements, or enjoyed intellectual or scientific society. What a desolate wilderness it would seem to those who have enjoyed the privilege of Christian intercourse with the religious part of society at home, for alas! we have but little of that here. When I think of all of these things, I begin to find I am selfish for wishing anyone to come. And yet does it not seem a contradiction to say, that positively and truly I am as happy here as anybody need wish or expect to be in this world.16

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In this quite extraordinary passage, multiple layers of the self emerge from Stewart’s obtuse indifference and lack of understanding of the human dimensions of famine suffering and her ready reversion to personal concerns. For her, the Famine is a distasteful phenomenon associated more with its effects on abstract space or remembered place rather than its human repercussions. Tellingly, she can readily conjure up rotting animal bodies and putrefying vegetation, and she worries about the effect of the pestilence on those who have not experienced the actual deprivation of food, but she avoids direct consideration of the human victims of hunger and disease. One could argue that the omission of references to human suffering and degradation, her inability to imagine the fundamental conditions of famine victims is the most powerfully revealing dimension of this passage. Her silence here has nothing to do with the issue of expressing the inexpressible, the possibility of textualizing the horrific conditions of the Famine, the debate whether language is capable of capturing the experiences of those who witnessed its awful unfolding.17 Stewart’s concern is not the impossibility of conveying the human dimensions of this tragedy but rather that the members of her social milieu are potentially trapped between two contaminating sources, the physical and human, one described, the other overlooked. Indeed, as the passage goes on, the references to Ireland and its current conditions serve merely as catalysts for a discussion of personal concerns. In the ensuing dialogue with the self in which she expresses her wish that her friends might join her in Canada, the trajectory of the letter moves relentlessly back to the self-absorbing issue of her own happiness. The subject of famine has quickly yielded to a deeply inward and self-centered form of contemplation on the differences between Ireland and Canada. Beneath the dialectical depiction of her remembered home and her current environment are social, economic and class distinctions that Stewart finds difficult to accommodate. As was seen in the earlier extract, this concern surfaces throughout the letters and becomes an ultimate marker of her difficulties in accepting her life as an immigrant and adjusting to the separation from the landscape of home that shaped her affections. But the ‘contradiction’ regarding happiness that she denies experiencing is being played out here in more subtle ways than she concedes. Stewart’s representation of the Famine makes clear how disconnected she feels from its substantiality; for her, it is primarily a phenomenon threatening the social milieu of the friends she yearns for. Her wish that friends be “out of it, and here” is readily cast as a means of diminishing her own alienation and confirming the wisdom of the decision to emigrate. Yet, the very thought of her genteel friends in the Canadian bush is a reminder not only that such solace is unavailable but that the differences between their two worlds are unbridgeable. To acknowledge that they would not likely trade even the ‘pestilence’ of Ireland for the ‘desolate wilderness’ of Canada is a bitter rec-

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ognition of how irretrievably removed she is from the life of “elegance, ease and refinement” which was so integral to her early identity. As inscribed here, the Famine is a phenomenon that destabilizes the reality inhabited by her relatives and friends, and thus is an agent that complicates the relationship that Stewart has with a remembered world, an imaginative thread of identification that might provide sustenance in dealing with immigrant dislocation. By challenging her memories of home, by contaminating the imaginatively nurtured pristine world of past time and place, the Famine triggers her acknowledgement of the irretrievability of the past; but it also brings the inevitable acceptance that recreating the civilized social rituals and mores of her former life is impossible, either in Ireland or Canada. Even if a return to Ireland were possible, she senses that the Famine has significantly transformed the site of her memories, inexorably changing the place she has known. As represented in this passage, therefore, the Famine is the catalyst that forces Frances Stewart to assess her life in a brutally honest manner; she concedes how, in terms of husband, children, society, amusement or religious companionship, “I do think I am much happier than most people I know.”18 Yet, as the years go by, and especially after the death of her husband, she engages in further reassessment of her circumstances, eventually acknowledging her disappointments in life and her increasing acceptance that true happiness will be found only in the next world. In Frances Stewart’s Our Forest Home, then, regardless of whether the Famine possesses an implicit or overt larger ideological charge, its textual representation is profoundly connected to renderings of the self; Stewart’s inscriptions of the Famine override the inherent subject of an important historical event and, instead, trigger deeply embedded revelations about the consciousness of the author. The Famine and its immediate aftermath in Ireland also appear as textual material in another set of Irish immigrant letters written from Upper Canada. Born into an Anglo-Irish Dublin family in 1801, William Hutton arrived in Canada in 1834 and, until his death in 1861, corresponded regularly with his mother in Ireland. As with Stewart, excerpts from letters have been selected and contextualized with biographical information by the editor to provide a composite portrait of Hutton.19 His letters are overtly revealing in predictable ways: as a member of Ireland’s Protestant landed class, Hutton’s decision to emigrate was motivated by the desire for good land and economic security, a strategic movement within the carapace of the British Empire from one colony to another, where he expected that hard work, entrepreneurship and commitment to family, religion and class would be appropriately rewarded. However, beyond the denotative textual markers of his materials, additional facets of subjectivity emerge from the letters. As a settler farmer who was interested in the latest scientific methods and would go on to become the first secretary to the Canadian Bureau

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of Agriculture, Hutton played a prominent role in developing agricultural practices in the nascent colony. Although his letters from 1847 are missing, references in letters of 1846 and 1848 to the failures of the potato crop in Ireland and the ensuing political unrest reveal how this agricultural interest shapes nuanced aspects of identity. In a January 1846 letter, for example, his comments on the potato blight reveal the specialist who has knowledge of farming practices in both countries: “The rot has not affected our potatoes much, though our neighbours have lost heavily. Nor has there been any clue found as to the cause or the remedy. One fact alone appears to be established, that where they were on new land, where potatoes had never been grown before, provided it was dry land, no rot has appeared. Is it not a most remarkable circumstance that the same disease should affect them the same year on opposite sides of the Atlantic, the seasons not being similar in both countries.” Further in the same letter, discussing the challenges for farmers in Canada, Hutton’s reflections serve as a springboard to compare his current situation with life in Ireland: “As to poverty here, it is out of the question. The higher agricultural produce is, the better for all classes, as we are a colony of farmers. At the same time, we are all poor, but want is an entire stranger in our country. This is perhaps the greatest recommendation to Canada, and to a merciful man a blessing not to be recompensed by a more enlightened state of society such as you enjoy; because along with the enlightenment you have to witness the miseries of the human race.”20 Whereas Frances Stewart’s appreciation of her immigrant circumstances remained fundamentally ambiguous because of her yearning for such an ‘enlightened society’, Hutton boasts that the challenges of emigration posed by the absence of such enlightenment are more than recompensed by its rewards. As David Fitzpatrick and others have observed, this upbeat assessment of life in a new place is a central theme in immigrants’ letters, since reported success validates the reasons for emigrating (economic opportunity, acquisition of land, family security) and compensates for the sacrifices (severing of ties with family and friends, leaving country and the landscape of the affections).21 In a March 1846 letter, Hutton writes, “We are sorry to hear of potatoes being so scarce and dear. Here they are not of great importance as an article of diet, no individual in our community being dependent on them for food.”22 Drawing unfavorable comparisons between events in Ireland and life in Canada speaks of a self-centered satisfaction that might even be read as cruel, given that members of Hutton’s own family were still in Ireland. It is pertinent that when he initially settled in Upper Canada, Hutton had to borrow money from his Irish family to buy land, and was therefore keen that they view his Canadian venture as successful. Unlike Stewart’s conflicted attitude to Canada, Hutton’s repeated purpose in the letters was to use their ostensible subject matter to emphasize the benefits of life in the new colony. If Canada was to be the site of

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a successful immigrant experience, it had to be demonstrably rendered in positive terms—in his identity as husband, father, farmer and colonial civil servant—and Ireland must be configured as an inferior place from which emotional attachments can readily be severed. Essential characteristics of the self can be calibrated from such comparative distinctions, as can be seen in an 1848 letter in which Hutton discusses the unrest that was part of the larger context of famine Ireland: I hope your Irish troubles will, after all, not amount to much blood shed; but I cannot help thinking Repeal must be granted…I think if Ireland cannot be put entirely, really and truly on a par with England, there is nothing else for it but Repeal. I would rather become part and parcel of England, if possible; but as at present Ireland can never be anything but England’s dirty suburbs. It may be her want of morality and cleanliness; but bring back her absentees by making it fashion to live in Ireland, and you bring back the wealthy classes, the mainspring of morality and cleanliness. A two or three month’s residence of the Queen would make it the fashion.23

In responding to famine-decimated Ireland, Hutton discloses the complexity of his intertwined relationships to Ireland and Canada. His immigrant identity causes him to view Ireland as a dysfunctional colony for which he is willing to entertain different solutions. His acknowledgement that repeal of the Act of Union might be worthwhile in exchange for some kind of self-government reflects his favorable view of the autonomy of the Canadian colony. Yet his desire to see Ireland integrated as “part and parcel of England” indicates the degree to which his Anglo-Irish identity is fluid and negotiable, a characteristic that makes him an ideal colonist in British North America. He is amenable to the proposition that the social and political ethos required to redeem Ireland are equally desirable for Upper Canada, while the economic prosperity and social harmony of both colonies are dependent on an equitable adoption of the values of Empire. But these passages also reveal other, more imbedded dimensions of identity. While for Hutton the Famine and the social unrest it produced are irritating phenomena symptomatic of a larger political impasse, neither his analysis of Irish problems nor the proposed solutions takes into account the predicament of tenants suffering from the inherent inequities of the landlord system itself; he cannot perceive the implications of his own terminology which describes the economic system in Ireland as producing an ‘enlightened society” yet he traces the success of Canadian agricultural practices to the fact that “we are a colony of farmers.” In describing the conditions in Ireland, Hutton’s textual unwillingness to acknowledge the unnamed presence and demands of the majority Catholic population powerfully situates them as the unidentifiable threat at the core of the Anglo-Irish world, just as elsewhere in the letters his attitudes to the First Nations Peoples, to the

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land itself and indeed to other settlers, are more manifest evidence of an implicit class-consciousness and assertive colonial confidence. The often coded idiom of Hutton’s letters—“dirty suburbs,” “want of morality and cleanliness”—speaks of an ideology shared between the letter writer and the family to whom they are addressed, and cryptically confirms the invisible presence of a subaltern population in Ireland who are bereft of agency to affect change. Writing fourteen years after his arrival in Canada, Hutton reveals that his immigrant experiences have done little to transform his binary conceptualizations of self and the Irish-Catholic other. For him, the Famine is not so much a social phenomenon with distressing human consequences but a legitimizing proof of the need for the kind of political solution he prescribes for Ireland’s woes. It is also a means of confirming his identity as a successful immigrant in Upper Canada, a vindication of personal decision-making and validation of a kind of colonial enterprise that needs to be practiced in Ireland. In writing about the Famine and its consequences, Hutton demonstrates how key elements of his identity—as immigrant, colonist, farmer, husband and father—have found a confluence in a coherent and authoritative self. What should emerge from this brief consideration of these letters by Stewart and Hutton is how the range and richness of representations of the Irish Famine and famine immigration in Irish-Canadian written discourse might serve as multivalent indices of identity. The overt and suggestive dimensions of a variety of texts—whether life writing, travel literature, or a spectrum of fictional forms—can proffer an alternative, non-historiographical frame through which to understand Irish emigration to Canada. While that experience may include representations associated with the Famine and famine immigration, this body of literary discourses ultimately encapsulates a multiplicity of depictions of Irish immigrants dealing with the conditions of dislocation and settlement, and attempting to accept shifting understandings of a self suspended between two worlds, one insistently encountered on a daily basis but always informed by that of another, itself accessible now only through a lens shaped by the workings of memory and colored by imagination.

NOTES 1. Jason King and Kevin James, “Introduction,” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 31 (2005): 14. 2. Cecil J. Houston and William J. Smyth, Irish Emigration and Settlement: Patterns, Links and Letters (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 3–4. 3. King and James, “Introduction,” 14. 4. Houston and Smyth, Irish Emigration, 4.

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5. King and James, “Introduction,” 15. James and King continue: “Furthermore, on closer examination, their versions of Irish-Canadian popular culture often amount to little more than a demotic blend of spurious publications like the Famine Diary, strident occasional essays and commemorative volumes by amateur historians (Quigley) and cultural enthusiasts, and the cultural activism of Irish-Canadian public advocacy groups like ‘Action Grosse Île,’ which achieved a considerable national profile in the mid-1990s as a result of its successful campaign to pressure Parks Canada into revisiting its ill-advised development concept to transform the quarantine station on the island into a historical theme park entitled ‘Canada: Land of Hope and Welcome.’” 6. Donald H. Akenson, Being Had: Historians, Evidence and the Irish in North America (Port Credit, Ontario: P.D. Meany Publishers, 1985), 194. It is instructive that the English-French divide in Canadian society in general extends itself to IrishCanadian historiography. Little sustained research has been conducted on the Irish in Quebec, especially any comparisons with Irish immigration and settlement in Upper Canada. Thomas Guerin’s The Gael in New France (Montreal: Irish Historical Society, 1946), although primarily a descriptive and chronological narrative with little methodological underpinnings, does identify archival sources that historians in English Canada have generally overlooked. More recently, the work of Andre Charbonneau and Andre Sevigny, Nancy Schmitz, and Marianna O’Gallagher explore aspects of the Irish associations with Grosse Île and Québec City. Robert Grace’s The Irish in Quebec: An Introduction to the Historiography (Québec: Institute Québécois de recherce sûr la culture, 1993) lays the foundation for future research on the Irish community in Quebec, as well as the historical interaction between Irish immigrants and the French-speaking population of Quebec. An important first step in this direction is Simon Jolivet, “Les deux questions irlandaises du Québec, 1898–1921 : des considérations canadiennes-françaises et irlando-catholiques” (Ph. D. Dissertation, Concordia University, Montreal, 2008). 7. Ibid, 194. 8. Ibid. 9. John Francis Maguire, The Irish in America (Montreal: D. & J. Sadlier & Co., 1887). 10. Nicholas Flood Davin, The Irishman in Canada (Toronto: Maclear and Company, 1877). 11. Carol Bennett McCuaig, The Kerry Chain-The Limerick Link (Renfrew, Ontario: Juniper Books, 2005); Mary Tanguay, Be at the Windmill (Maitland, Ontario: Voyageur Publishing, 1996); Michelle Tisseyre, Divided Passions (Toronto: Key Porter Books Limited, 1999); and Gabrielle Wills, A Place to Call Home (Lindsay, Ontario: Mindshadows, 2003). 12. For example, see Rhona Richman Kenneally’s “Now You Don’t See it, Now You Do: Situating the Irish in the Material Culture of Grosse Île,” Éire- Ireland 37 (2003): 33–53, and “The Cyberculture of Grosse Île” in the present collection. 13. It should be observed that the two writers discussed in this essay do not consider the Famine as the phenomenon that is now understood as a watershed moment in Irish history, as discussed in their introduction, for example, by Michael Cusack and Sarah Goss in the Hungry Words: Images of Famine in the Irish Canon (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006), 1–2. Stewart and Hutton are aware of an

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unfolding calamity in Ireland, bringing disease, dislocation, starvation and death, but it would be some time before they might be expected to grasp its full historical implications. 14. Frances Stewart, Our Forest Home: Being the Extracts from the Correspondence of the Late Frances Stewart, ed. Ellen Dunlop (Toronto: Presbyterian Printing and Publishing, 1889), 47–48. 15. Ibid, 45–46. 16. Ibid, 141–142. 17. For a full exploration of this issue see Margaret Kelleher’s The Feminization of Famine: Expressions of the Inexpressible? (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). 18. Stewart, Our Forest Home, 142. 19. Gerald Boyce, ed. Hutton of Hastings: The Life and Letters of William Hutton, 1801–1861. (Belleville: Hastings County Council, 1972). 20. Ibid, 141–142. 21. David Fitzpatrick ed., Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia (Cork: Cork University Press, 1994), 561–3. 22. Boyce, ed., Hutton of Hastings, 144. 23. Ibid, 155.

6 Writing the Famine, Healing the Future: Nuala O’Faolain’s My Dream of You Mary Fitzgerald-Hoyt

When Nuala O’Faolain’s first novel, My Dream of You, was published in 2001, it was marketed as an old-fashioned “good read;” Catherine Lockerbie, in her New York Times review of the book, commented that the novel’s style, subject matter, and accessibility might have rendered it an “airport blockbuster.”1 O’Faolain herself declared in an interview at the time, “My very game was to write an airport book that would leave some kind of residue behind. Usually, they finish things off and make an ending happen. I haven’t experienced an ending and I don’t think one will come. I think with airport books—I love Judith Krantz, for instance—you’re inclined to feel you’ve wasted your time. I wanted to leave ideas behind.”2 Indeed, the skeleton of the novel’s plot suggests its potboiler potential: a middle-aged travel writer living in England (Kathleen de Burca), devastated by the death of her best friend, whose homosexuality has rendered him unattainable romantically, returns to her long-estranged Irish homeland; back in England, she finds sexual bliss with a married man who, though he offers her lifelong passion as his mistress, makes it quite clear that he will never leave his wife or his expatriate English home. Kathleen must choose between a clandestine affair conducted at her lover’s convenience and a return to her former, albeit solitary, independence. It should be noted that Lockerbie did not designate the novel “pulp fiction”—because of its “intelligence” and O’Faolain’s “awareness of the possible pitfalls” of writing such a novel. In fact, My Dream of You is a reminder that popular fiction can be absorbing and intelligent, provocative and profound. In fact, in the story of Kathleen de Burca, O’Faolain investigates 88

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some of the most pressing issues in contemporary Ireland: one’s relationship to a personal and national past; the complexity of Irish identity; the changing face of women’s lives in a traditionally patriarchal society. The underlying catalyst for these interrogations is the Famine. Despite a long, bitter estrangement from Ireland, Kathleen is lured back by the Talbot divorce proceedings, an actual nineteenth-century case in which the accusing husband, master of a Big House, alleged that his wife had had an affair with an Irish groom. Intrigued at the possibility of love’s blossoming amidst catastrophe, drawn by the romance of star-crossed lovers bridging national, linguistic, and class boundaries, Kathleen sets out to unearth the case’s many mysteries. What she eventually discovers is a nest of unanswerable questions, a startling lesson in historiography, and finally, a newfound sense of her own place in Irish history. This deceptively old-fashioned narrative, this very readable novel, is the vehicle for an intelligent, complex scrutiny of the Famine’s psychological legacy for contemporary Ireland. O’Faolain once acknowledged that her approach to the Famine is unconventional: “This solemn and tragic event haunts me, but to treat it as part of a single individual’s emotional life is really quite a daring thing to do.”3 Further, O’Faolain took considerable artistic and ethical risks in choosing to focus My Dream of You on the mistress of a Big House, presumably a woman who remained fed, clothed, and sheltered while her husband’s tenants were ravaged by disease, eviction, and starvation; a sexual scandal in the Big House pales in comparison to such horrors. But, in fact, by having her contemporary protagonist attempt to untangle historical events whose narratives are obscure and contradictory, to reincarnate the long-dead players of this domestic drama, O’Faolain embarks upon a subtle, multilayered meditation on contemporary Ireland. Kathleen, much like O’Faolain herself, grew up essentially estranged from Irish culture. In her memoir Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman, O’Faolain describes her own long unawareness of her national identity and how psychologically healing it was for her as an adult to discover a sense of Irishness. Though Kathleen is the daughter of an ardent Nationalist, her knowledge of Irish history and culture is fragmented; as she matures, she views Ireland as a place she must escape in order to survive and to which she is long determined never to return. Kathleen’s first real awareness of the Famine comes from an English historian, who informs the then-child that the very ground on which she plays conceals the remains of famine victims. The Famine grips her young imagination, and she develops a lifelong fascination with the time, which she frequently attempts to conjure up imaginatively—a habit that remains with her as an adult attempting to write a famine-era book. Yet when she wonders how her family survived, her questions remain unanswered by her

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unhappy, uncommunicative parents. As an adult she recalls with wry humor how she participated in a famine tableau for her school’s commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising; she and her companions, barefoot and shawled, “were all holding buckets of potatoes and crying and wailing in case anyone didn’t get the point.”4 Only later is she startled to realize that her Uncle Ned, who as the farmer of a small landholding, is an heir of famine-era Ireland, is moved to tears by the scene. Like many contemporary Irish and diasporic Irish, Kathleen wonders if her own sad family is in part the legacy of the Famine. Looking at her angry father, her sad, withdrawn mother, the neglected children in her household, she “used to wonder whether something that had happened more than a hundred years ago, and that was almost forgotten, could have been so terrible that it knocked all the happiness out of people” (6). As O’Faolain commented in an interview in the London Sunday Times: “The famine is much more important than any of us believe. . . .We never faced it or talked about it. But this was the point when Ireland broke. It lost its whole history. The famine marked us as a people. The Irish are remarkably savage, particularly in family relationships. They are like people who’ve been locked up with a secret. They don’t know what harmed them, but something did.”5 Kathleen’s own adult life suggests a legacy of psychological trauma: she is self-destructive in her personal relationships, spends decades in England living in a dreary, bleak basement flat; her behavior often bespeaks a lifetime of self-loathing. As Brewster and Crossman have commented, “The Famine scarred Ireland’s psychological landscape as deeply as depopulation altered the terrain.”6 Growing up in a family ruptured by neglect, Kathleen moves to England and deliberately avoids returning to Ireland because home has such negative connotations. Yet just as O’Faolain recalls in her memoir Are You Somebody?, Kathleen discovers that however much she believes she fits in English society, her Irishness renders her “other,” even to those she loves. Her negative encounters range from outright bigotry to puzzled incomprehension. After a frustrating search for housing, she is angered and humiliated at having to disguise her Irish accent because it means discrimination; she recalls her father’s stories about the English boarding house with the posted sign “NO BLACKS NO IRISH NO DOGS” (35). As a young woman, Kathleen has a passionate, fruitless love affair with an Englishman, Hugo, who, despite his apparent devotion to her, never introduces Kathleen to his family, and when he shares a transcript of the Talbot case that he acquired in one of his law classes, it is clear that her mention of the Famine bores and irritates him. Though Kathleen blames her own sexual infidelity for the affair’s demise, it is evident that her relationship with Hugo is an unequal one: his social class, nationality, and gender privilege him. Many years later, at an awards ceremony at which her work as a travel writer is being honored, Kathleen is startled by the

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contempt of a tipsy Englishwoman who pushes an uneaten potato from her dinner plate toward Kathleen and declares, “That’s what the Irish know about. Potatoes” (26). Even Alex, her beloved boss at TravelWrite magazine, responds to her excited decision to write a book about the Talbot case, “I don’t know whether there’d be any takers for that kind of thing. You can get a bit sick of the Irish going on about their woes” (26). As a young woman Kathleen internalizes the anti-Irish feeling she encounters. She idolizes her English friend Caroline, imitating her appearance and mimicking her speech while disparaging her own. Rescued by the largesse of Caroline and Sir David, her wealthy father, when Hugo throws her out of their flat, she is later filled with self-loathing for submitting to Sir David’s sexual advances, which he seems to regard as his personal droit du seigneur: Kathleen believes he would never treat his daughter’s non-Irish friends the same way. Horrified that her psychiatrist has allowed a trainee to eavesdrop on her session without her knowledge, she is convinced by his behavior that he feels free to do so because she is Irish. Even as she prepares to leave England, her longtime landlord offers to cancel her remaining debt in exchange for sex, and though she submits out of a complex mix of gratitude that he rented her a flat when no one else would and her own sense of inferiority, not knowing how to refuse, the fact that she repays the money anyway is indicative of her newfound defiance and self-respect. Despite her being an outsider, Kathleen forges a bearable modus vivendi in England, particularly because of her friendship with Jimmy, who as an expatriate American and a homosexual is likewise an outsider. She returns to Ireland, not to visit her family but to research the Talbot case, seeking distraction from her grief over Jimmy’s unexpected death. Kathleen is first drawn to the case not because the alleged affair occurred during the Famine, nor because it occurred in Ireland, but because its suggestion of grand passion in the most improbable circumstances attracts her, the self-destructive veteran of failed love affairs who has lived her life according to her own credo: “I believed in passion the way other people believed in God; everything fell into place around it” (5). Marianne Talbot, the English wife of a Big House landlord, and William Mullan, their Irish groom, seem unlikely lovers, separated by ethnicity, power, and language. If their devotion survived not only such obstacles but also blossomed in the wake of the Famine’s unspeakable suffering, then surely, she reasons, there’s hope for love—and hope for herself. Haunted by her own unhappy past, she comes to believe that imagining the Famine will somehow bring her closer to selfknowledge, pondering “Could I move beyond some momentary imagining of the past towards finding a meaning for it? Not an explanation, but a meaning? And not a meaning in history but in my own life?” (75–6). Ironically, O’Faolain herself did not start out to write about the Famine. In fact, she has said that she really didn’t want to write about it at all. She

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later commented: “If I could have avoided the Famine, I would have. You notice that there are very few accounts from it, very few people have ever shared their memories. So it’s an almost untouchable event in Irish life. And I was stuck with it because the love affair that my heroine is writing a book about did begin in 1849.” 7 She discovered the Talbot case by chance: “About four or five years ago, an old woman said to a man I know, ‘Oh, Nuala would be interested in that type of thing.’ . . . I glanced at it and I didn’t realize that the time would come in my life when I had to write a book.”8 She grew up in an Ireland where people did not talk about the Famine, as the topic was unbearable, a source of shame, but as an adult she purchased a home in County Clare and discovered there a powerful sense of the Famine’s immanence. In response to my e-mail inquiry as to whether the Famine Museum at Strokestown, Co. Roscommon, had inspired the novel, she responded: No the catalyst was not the Famine Museum which is a very austere and cerebral experience. The catalyst was this place I live in—the day hospital was the workhouse, the gate they carried the dead out through is the same gate. The fields behind are lumpy with mass graves, and there is one illegible tombstone. Also, walking with Tim Robinson in Connemara he remarked casually about the bit of bog by the sea we were in –‘they lived here, they lived in these holes here.’ That was the pauper Irish on the eve of the Famine.9

O’Faolain also commented that she was haunted by a document at Strokestown: the inventory of possessions of Gweedore, a Donegal community, population 4,000; she quotes this pathetic list in her novel: “1 cart, no coach or any other vehicle, 1 plough, 20 shovels, 32 rakes, 7 table forks, 93 chairs, 243 stools, 2 feather beds, 8 chaff beds, 3 turkeys, 27 geese, no bonnet, no clock, 3 watches, no looking glass above 3d. in price, and no more than 10 square feet of glass” (103). The account is stark and shocking, and in the novel she juxtaposes it with a description of the contrasting plenty of an estate such as Mount Talbot, considered a “modest” place by Big House standards. Though it is clear that O’Faolain herself sympathized deeply with the Irish who suffered so terribly during the Famine, Kathleen de Burca’s sympathies shift over the course of the novel. She first identifies with the English Marianne Talbot, for whom Ireland must have seemed a frightening, alien place when she arrived there as a bride: it must not have improved upon acquaintance, for it is the scene of her marriage’s deterioration, her child’s nearly fatal illness, and profound psychological suffering. It may also have been the setting of a passionate, thwarted love affair. Perhaps because of Kathleen’s own sense of estrangement from Ireland and her search for lasting love, gender at first overtakes nationality in her sympathies.

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This emotional response puts Kathleen at odds with Nan Leech, the local librarian and amateur historian on whom she must depend for research. To Kathleen’s expressions of sympathy for Marianne Talbot’s probable loneliness Nan retorts with blistering comments about the legacy of the Talbots and their kind: a despoiled countryside, a populace forced into emigration, poverty, and ignorance. Though they eventually reach détente, even affection, Kathleen de Burca and Nan Leech are separated by age, life choices, and even historiography. Whereas Kathleen has been rootless, a travel writer whose London flat is never a home, Nan has spent her life in the town of Ballygall, esteemed by, yet distanced from, her neighbors. Her attitude toward history is traditional: the careful gathering of evidence will bring the historian to “truth;” her version of Irish history is decidedly Nationalist: Ireland to her is a country sucked dry by exploiting outsiders, still bearing the legacy of foreign occupation. Nan Leech venerates history but disparages Kathleen’s attempts to write about the Talbot case because the younger woman is not an historian and has, in her eyes, no right to write about the story at all, lacking as she does the years of training and historical research that could grant her that entitlement. To Nan, the story itself is tainted, detracting attention from what was really important in Ireland during the Famine years: the suffering of the Irish: “—the Talbot story is just the kind of thing an English audience would be interested in. History without the economics, history without the politics, history without the mess” (114). Further, only history has any validity: the possibility that Kathleen might transform the Talbot case into fiction outrages Nan, who reviles historical fiction—indeed, all fiction. What Nan fails to see is that her view of history is selective. In her historical narrative the Talbots have no place except as usurpers and parasites, and she cannot care about the private miseries of the mistress of the Big House. And though neither O’Faolain nor Kathleen shows any inclination to downplay either the Famine’s agonies or the deleterious impact of the British upon Ireland, both make it clear that Irish history has multiple players, multiple narratives. Unlikeable though he may be, Richard Talbot is a credible example of a nineteenth–century Anglo-Irish landlord, and to understand his complicated hostility toward Ireland is to achieve a deeper understanding of the Irish past, a knowledge that both O’Faolain and her protagonist would argue is therapeutic. O’Faolain is careful to infuse her narrative with a contemporary historiographical awareness, much of which is embodied in the conflict between Kathleen and Nan. From the perspective of the Talbot Divorce Proceedings, William Mullan is a dirty, unkempt servant taking sexual liberties far above his social station; from Nan’s perspective, the Mullans were a highly respectable family brought low by English occupation. In Kathleen’s imaginings, Marianne Talbot was a lonely young woman in an alien land; in Nan’s

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view, she was a social parasite with too much leisure time, her comfortable life an indecent contrast to the misery of her husband’s evicted tenants. Though its narratives may be diverse and contradictory, history haunts the Ireland Kathleen encounters after a 30–year absence, the landscape peopled both with the ghosts of Kathleen’s personal memories and the vanished people of the Famine. Nan Leech guides her across a barren landscape that once was, she says, “as crowded as Bangladesh” (81); now its hillocks and ditches summon the memories of evicted people living in ditches and dying uncounted. Yet O’Faolain is careful to render history as an organism rather than an artifact: Nan’s evocation of pre-famine Ballygall reminds Kathleen of her own visits to a remote community in Mali; Nan points out the remains of a turf floor and recalls two sisters of her acquaintance, victims of eviction, who lived in the hollowed-out turf as late as the 1940s, braving poverty and the elements because they would not live under a roof they did not own. To Kathleen’s chagrin, her self-admittedly sentimental attempt to reincarnate the people who once inhabited the barren landscape proves a formidable, even an impossible task. Having seen old photographs of Mount Talbot, she is prepared to see a derelict house whose environs will fire her imagination, but she is shocked to see that the house is gone. Bertie, the hotel-keeper who has befriended her, views the change matter-of-factly, recalling how as a boy he played in the former ballroom but how the crumbling house was bulldozed in the 1960s. Kathleen clings to remnants, including the stables where Marianne Talbot and William Mullan were allegedly found in flagrante delicto. Juxtaposed with Kathleen’s romantic imaginings is a contemporary wedding at the former Talbot Arms, now a hotel owned by Bertie. The English bride, a descendant of a former Ascendancy family who has made her own fortune in a dot.com company, plans to go barefoot and is importing her own wildflowers from England. When Kathleen chuckles over such affectation, and sourly notes that many Irish went barefoot through no choice of their own, Bertie retorts that such a wedding brings him far more profit than would the local Irish, who’d rather “go out to the Hawaii Beach at Tullabeg where they can have a disco after the meal and eat rubber chicken” (109). O’Faolain deftly includes many such prismatic effects: history bubbles up in new variations, some wryly humorous. The contemporary bride is a far cry from the bewildered Marianne Talbot. The Irish legacy of emigration from economic necessity is given different twists: as a young woman Kathleen moves to England to do domestic work not because she cannot find a job in Ireland but rather to get away from an unhappy, stifling home life; Bertie’s son-in-law is working in Saudi Arabia not because he is desperate but because the better wages there will allow him to purchase a house in Ireland. Ironically, Bertie reclaims part of the Mount Talbot garden to grow potatoes.

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It does not take Kathleen long to discover that her attempt to recapture the historical past is fraught with frustration and mystery. Just as the Big House Mount Talbot has all but vanished, historical records that might answer her many questions about the past are no longer extant. Kathleen experiences the historian’s grief both at the disappearance of records and the shortsightedness of her predecessors. Kathleen’s initial excitement at tracking down the earliest records of the Talbots’ crumbling marriage is blasted when she discovers from Nan Leech that all such records, stored in Dublin’s Four Courts, were destroyed during the Irish Civil War in 1922, when Irish Republicans who had once fought for a common cause divided violently over the partition of Ireland. Not the least of the era’s bitter ironies, then, was that the making of history entailed the destruction of the past’s artifacts. Kathleen hopes that the estate records of Mount Talbot could yield valuable information about daily life in the 1840s, but these, too, have vanished. As Nan Leech points out, though the Ballygall Library has existed since the 1890s, the librarians, like their neighbors, had no particular attachment to preserving the history of the landlord system, associated as it is with the trauma of the past. As understandable as those past impulses to destroy or let disintegrate a painful historical era may be, the result is a truncated history, a partial story. Indeed, many of the novel’s characters possess a fragmentary or ideology-driven view of history, and that incomplete understanding shapes and sometimes thwarts their lives. Though they may be surrounded by the artifacts and detritus of the past, they perceive no connection between history and their own lives. Kathleen recalls how her father, a nineteenth-centurystyle Nationalist who esteemed the Irish language and Gaelic football, was ashamed at his brother Ned’s arrest in a protest on behalf of small farmers, a group Mr. de Burca would presumably support. But because he is a civil servant fearful of potential scandal, he distances himself from Ned’s predicament. Yet Mr. de Burca’s Nationalist vision is shortsighted and sometimes lethal; his principles are upheld at the expense of his family. He keeps his wife physically, economically, and emotionally in thrall to him, and because he insists that his religious beliefs will not allow any harm to a fetus, condemns her to an agonizing death from cancer: she is not allowed a possibly life-saving abortion or even radiation therapy. He cruelly humiliates his daughter Nora, and she grows up despising him. He disparages the talents of his son Danny, the only child who wants to remain in Ireland and maintain the farm that has been in the family for generations. Considering the traditional importance of land in Irish culture, de Burca’s decision to leave the farm to his second wife, who quickly puts it on the auction block, is appalling; Danny is able to acquire the land only because his loyal neighbors believe it is indecent to bid against him.

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De Burca purports to be a passionate Nationalist who loves Ireland and its traditions, but he seems incapable of understanding how he shapes and is shaped by history. He refuses to talk about the Famine with an inquisitive Kathleen, who from a very young age perceives the Famine’s psychological legacy in her own chaotic family life. Danny, who as a traditional musician and a small farmer is perpetuating the heritage his father purports to value, is damaged for life by his father’s unrelenting disparagement. A gentle, affectionate man, Danny struggles to keep afloat economically, sometimes collapsing into nearly suicidal drinking bouts. Danny, too, is unaware of being part of Irish history, unable to see that both he and his father have been shaped by the past. When he discovers that Kathleen is researching the Famine, he comments, “I know as much about it [the Famine] as that gatepost there” (219). Nora, whose rancor toward her father has never abated, mocks Kathleen’s interest in the Famine, snapping, “Forget Irish history!. . .When was the last time in Irish history that anyone ever got laid?” (46) In a novel that contemplates trauma and survival, Nora is a ruthless survivor of her own past: she runs away from home as a young girl, and determinedly reinvents herself into a successful woman, unashamed to be a “moneyed Mick” who wields considerable social and political influence in an upscale New York Irish-American community and is matter-of-fact about her regular visits to a psychiatrist. Watching Nora’s self-satisfaction as she eyes her chintz-and-frills apartment, her embodiment of a home from the “old country,” Kathleen realizes that Nora is in her own way continuing the family legacy of being a small farmer: “Wasn’t her apartment her field and her flock? Why wouldn’t she look like a peasant who’d done well at the fair?” (391) While conducting research in Ireland, Kathleen likewise encounters apathy or selective memory about Irish history. Just as she herself has kept Ireland at a safe emotional distance, she discovers that contemporary Ireland has a complicated attitude toward the past, an aversion to remembering it. The owner of the Ballygall supermarket prevents the local Famine Commemoration committee from mounting a plaque in his carpark, former site of a Famine workhouse, because he believes that times are good now and the Famine is best forgotten. When Nan Leech organizes the local library’s commemoration of the Famine, she is well aware that the subject is an emotional minefield, as is demonstrated when a local teacher has his students transfer Famine workhouse records into computer files. Local people must face the reality that their ancestors survived by exploiting others’ misery. As Nan observes to Kathleen: “If you and I are sitting here in a warm room having a nice talk, we have to ask ourselves how our own people survived? What did our people do at the time, that you and I came to be born?” (79) Kathleen stumbles upon a sparsely-attended 1798 commemoration in the town of Mellary, where the guest speaker is a recent parolee from the

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infamous Northern Irish prison known as Long Kesh, and the commemoration is taking place in 1999 rather than 1998 because the town was awaiting his release. Because she sees the North’s Troubles as sectarian, Kathleen questions why this particular speaker would be chosen to commemorate 1798, a rebellion that she views as being about unity, bringing together Catholic and Protestant, Irish and French. The local shopkeeper will have none of this, answering crossly, “The Irish wanted the English out of this country before there even were any Protestants” (259), and the ceremony concludes with the praying of the rosary. Yet it is clear in this scene that Kathleen, too, has had a selective historical memory, for though she wants to view the 1798 rebellion as nonsectarian and inclusive, in her own life she has practiced a studied ignorance about Northern Ireland, seeing its problems as separate from herself, not as a part of her Irish history. As a young journalism student she pled ignorance about Northern Irish politics at a time when the civil rights struggle in the North and the IRA campaign in England made that topic very much a current event. When she hears the former IRA prisoner speak, however, it triggers the painful memory of her exploitation at the hands of Sir David. Now realizing that the prejudice and self-loathing that haunted her in mid-1970s England, when the IRA bombing campaign made Irish people in England particularly conspicuous, has marked her more deeply than she could admit at the time, she wants to be part of the historical commemoration in Mellary, wants to say, “I want you to help me to see how to bring this evil to an end. Suppose I said, I have had my own English wars. I have been defeated, in my time” (260). When past collides with present in her own life, Kathleen believes she has discovered a way to tell the Talbot story. Her meeting with Shay, an Irish expatriate, results in an unexpected night of sexual passion. Middle-aged, ordinary-looking, with a body that shows the signs of years of manual labor, Shay is, Kathleen believes, a kindred spirit. In a reversal of the Marianne Talbot story, he has settled in England with his English wife, and has not lived in Ireland for 30 years, though he makes frequent brief trips home to Sligo to assist his father in the family business. Significantly, he works as a landscape gardener in England, and one recalls the numerous references in Irish history and literature to the English importation of their own gardening methods and native plants to Ireland, including the attempt to transform Irish agriculture during the Famine to allegedly more “progressive” methods. William Trevor, Brian Friel, and other contemporary Irish writers have employed gardening and gardens as metaphors in their studies of Anglo-Irish relations. As Kathleen points out, Shay could do very well as a gardener in Ireland, but he admits that since his marriage England has become his home, even though there are signs that he is not assimilated: his given name, Séamus, has been

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transformed to “Shay”; Kathleen finds his accent unsettling, as it is a mongrel blend of Irish and English; he recalls the difficulties of being an Irish person in England when the Troubles in Northern Ireland were at their worst. Though they have been acquainted only a few hours, Kathleen feels emotionally as well as sexually connected to Shay, and she is therefore devastated when he leaves for the local shop and does not return. Her grief thrusts her back into the Talbot story, and she discovers that rather than trying to reconstruct the story from the outside, with all the attendant historical lacunae, she will write from the inside, and tell the story of Marianne Talbot. Much of the rest of the novel juxtaposes the return of Shay with the story of Marianne’s own alleged love affair. O’Faolain employs metafictional techniques, so that we not only see Kathleen writing, we read the unfolding novel itself, and the result is a vivid reconstruction of Mount Talbot in the late 1840s. Obviously conversant with the history of the time, O’Faolain depicts the concurrent unraveling of the estate and the disintegration of the Talbots’ marriage. Marianne is ill at ease at Mount Talbot, which though a Big House is in considerable disrepair. She is surrounded by servants who speak a language foreign to her, and her husband has become emotionally cold, harried by the financial burdens of the estate. Richard Talbot is himself a study in irony: though he reviles the Irish, he was bullied and called “Paddy Pig” at his English boarding school because of his accent and his Irish address. The Talbots’ child, Mab, who loves and is beloved by the Irish servants, is forbidden to use the Irish words she has learned from them. Too young to understand prejudice, she might have been a fragile bridge between the Talbots and the Irish, but that is not allowed to happen. Her father bans the speaking of Irish in his household to protect his “English rosebud” (176); he later follows the path of many famine-era landlords, investigating cheap passage out of Ireland so that he may rid himself of his tenants; he eventually evicts them. Though Marianne Talbot is credible historically, her identification with this nineteenth-century Englishwoman impels Kathleen to invest her fictionalized Marianne with autobiographical touches. Just as Kathleen, nearly fifty, fears that sexual love and romance may soon be absent from her life, Marianne is well aware that Richard was probably her last chance at marriage, since she possessed neither the conventional beauty nor the wealth to attract a better prospect. Further, both are daughters of demanding, emotionally distant fathers whom they try desperately to please. Marianne’s pride in her daughter is stained by her father’s reminder that she needs to produce a son and heir; Kathleen, though aware of her father’s domestic tyranny, clings to the few times he expressed approval of her. Though Kathleen can sympathize with Marianne’s loneliness and craving for love, there are signs from the beginning of her divided loyalties. Marianne shares in the prejudice and moral blindness of her class and na-

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tionality, referring to the Irish as “Paddy” and never questioning her own privileged position, lonely though it may be. She feels uneasy and distrustful of the Irish-speaking house servants, and her distaste for her new home is symbolized in her loathing for the smell of the turf smoke that seems to permeate the house. Her disgust for the organic fuel that is literally the land itself mirrors her loathing for Ireland. So absorbed is she in her own life that Marianne is detached from the devastation the local community, including Mount Talbot’s servants and tenants, has endured: death, emigration, and erosion of their traditional culture. Of the 8,761 people who have died in the local workhouse, 3,080 reported that they lived on Talbot’s land; Richard Talbot himself has no idea of how many people live on the estate, for many have concealed themselves in the landscape. It takes considerable skill, then, on O’Faolain’s part to sustain readers’ sympathy for Marianne Talbot. Further, to make the attraction between Marianne and William Mullan credible is a difficult task, for Mullan has himself witnessed firsthand the worst horrors of the Famine and is in the unenviable position of having to protect the estate’s livestock from the starving. In fact, Marianne’s attraction for Mullan begins in her otherness: her soft skin, abundant flesh, and elegant dresses are a sharp contrast to his own skeletal thinness and ragged clothes. Mullan, unlike the Talbots, knows the names and faces of the most destitute who look to him for help, though he is powerless to do anything for them. Before being dispossessed by a Talbot ancestor, his family held considerable power in the neighborhood, and his desperate neighbors still treat him with respect, despite his own poverty. He urges them to emigrate, his connection with the Talbots making him cognizant that a whole way of life has ended and that the native Irish can expect no relief. And in fact, the evictions increase, and Scottish farmers are brought in to apply their own methods of agriculture to the land. Yet Marianne, who presumably cares enough about Mullan to risk personal and social ruin for him, apparently knows nothing about his life beyond the confines of the Big House or of the Famine’s personal cost to him. In the only scene in which Kathleen dramatizes a conversation between the two, Marianne behaves very much as a woman of her social position, by turns peremptory and disdainful toward a man whom she clearly views as her inferior. When Mullan urges her to emigrate with him to America, believing they can forge a new life together, it is clear that she thinks him both presumptuous and mad. Kathleen observes that “Every present contains its past” (200), and her desire to portray Marianne and her affair with Mullan sympathetically is autobiographically driven by her attempts to come to terms with her own past and to make sense of her present. The growing attraction between Marianne and William is juxtaposed with the return of Shay and the temptation to

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enter into a long-term relationship with him. Both love affairs carry considerable pitfalls. Mullan knows that he has no future in Ireland, and discovery of their love affair would have dangerous consequences; Shay has no intention of disrupting his long marriage, and the best he can offer Kathleen is a parttime, clandestine arrangement. Kathleen’s malaise extends beyond her relationship with Shay: she slowly discovers that she must make her peace with Ireland itself if she is to find any kind of personal peace. After taking the first difficult step of returning to Ireland, she braces herself to visit her brother Danny on his farm. The Famine past and her own present meld when she realizes that by traveling west to east she is retracing the steps of the Famine survivors who left home in desperation, seeing emigration as their only alternative if they were to survive. Significantly, she forges a further link with the famine Irish by re-entering the Irish language. Whereas at the beginning of the novel she would speak Irish only to herself, tentative about her command of the language as she haltingly translates road signs yet moved by the place names’ lyricism, Bertie’s grandchild demands that she tell him her name in Irish, and she proudly asserts, “Cáitlín.” Yet in tracing Kathleen’s emerging awareness of self and history, O’Faolain carefully avoids the linear pattern of a nineteenth-century Bildungsroman or history text. Kathleen’s research uncovers a pamphlet written by Marianne’s kinsman, John Paget, in 1854, presumably an attempt to defend her before the divorce was made final. Paget’s version is a dark, sinister story of marital cruelty and greed, a far cry from Kathleen’s romantic imaginings. Richard Talbot, in danger of losing the estate because a family will stipulates that he must have a male heir, wishes to rid himself of Marianne, and first starves her, then separates her from her daughter, and finally attempts to force her into a compromising situation with Mullan so that he can divorce her for adultery. Mullan is not her lover, but rather an innocent pawn in this scheme, which ends with her rape by at least one man in her husband’s employ and her subsequent mental collapse. Kathleen is shaken by this challenge to her fictional world, but as persuasive as she finds the Paget version, this historical document betrays its own limitations, biased as it is by Paget’s obvious loyalty to Marianne and hostility toward the Irish. Questions remain about Marianne’s true relationship with Mullan: did he show tenderness to Marianne in a reversal of their social roles, bringing her food when her husband was starving her, feeling pity for her plight? She wonders whether the story cited in the divorce proceedings of Mullan’s seeking Marianne out, trying unsuccessfully to get a note to her, has some validity. Further, yet another historical document stirs the pot: a journalist’s report from the 1850s, probably one of the documents in the original divorce proceedings, contending that a clergyman witnessed Marianne in a

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sexual encounter with a man who was definitely not Mullan. Like the Paget pamphlet, the piece is biased by anti-Irish sentiment; yet like the Paget pamphlet, it raises troubling questions: was Marianne unfaithful with this unnamed man and Mullan? Was she sufficiently mentally competent to consent to sex? The clergyman who allegedly witnessed her transgression is an assistant to the Talbots’ pastor, Rev. McClelland, who according to the divorce proceedings removed Marianne from her home to Dublin, kept her under close watch, and transported her to England, where she was confined to a mental asylum. McClelland allegedly blocked Mullan’s attempts to communicate with Marianne, and Kathleen believes the minister exercised tyrannical control over her. Was Rev. McClelland himself attracted to Marianne, hence his subsequent cruelty to her? Nan and Kathleen conclude that whoever this other man was, he was surely of Marianne’s social standing; they also learn that her husband was not told of this event. Kathleen realizes in horror that Marianne must have been left with nothing: her child taken from her, her husband repudiating her, her own clergyman subjecting her to a life of neglect and solitude. In the face of all this contradictory information, Kathleen must acknowledge that she will never know exactly what happened at Mount Talbot, but even though her original theory has been shaken, her emotional involvement with Marianne’s story brings her closer to personal peace. Marianne’s ordeal makes Kathleen reconsider her own mother, whose apathy toward her children and utter dependence on her domineering husband have played a corrosive part in Kathleen’s emotional life. Richard Talbot’s sadism recalls the acute suffering that Kathleen’s beloved friend Caroline suffered at the hands of an appalling man, a relationship that transformed a beautiful, self-confident English aristocrat into a shattered, self-hating zombie. Noting that “wombs are tear-shaped” (373), she thinks of her own probable inability to have a child, her mother’s frequent pregnancies, indifferent motherhood, and the pregnancy that eventually killed her; Caroline’s vulnerability to Ian because she was pregnant and unmarried; Marianne’s inability to bear a son, a biological reality that was the catalyst for all her subsequent suffering. Even Nan Leech, who has kept herself aloof from love and marriage because she valued her independence in a time when women’s options were severely circumscribed, discovers she is dying from cancer of the womb. Yet despite these bleak realities, it is in part because of Marianne’s story that Kathleen does not accept the half-life that Shay offers her. He is unwilling to leave England and the comfortable domestic life he has constructed there; Kathleen would see him at his convenience. And despite their sexual compatibility and their shared ability both to recall an Ireland that has changed utterly and the experience of feeling alien in England, they are in fact quite different people. Kathleen does not cease to believe in passion,

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but Marianne’s example has taught her the necessity for self-preservation. Kathleen comes to the realization that she hasn’t really been living for passion but rather for punishment: throughout her life, sexual encounters have led to pain and exacerbated her already strong sense of self-loathing. Kathleen now understands that she will never know the truth about the Talbot affair, will never complete the novel she has begun. As Nan Leech tartly observes, this historical event resembles the contemporary fiction that so frustrates the patrons of the library where she works: multiple narratives, conflicting stories, elusive truths. But if Kathleen cannot complete her book, she does achieve a fragile understanding of her personal and national history that ruptures her lifelong pattern of self-loathing and self-destructive behavior. In tracing this process, O’Faolain uses domestic spaces to mirror the changes in Kathleen and in Ireland itself. Mount Talbot, like many other Big Houses in Irish life and literature, becomes dilapidated, abandoned by its last surviving family member, looted and vandalized by the locals, and eventually bulldozed. But O’Faolain departs from the Big House subgenre by focusing on the various houses that Kathleen inhabits as she researches the Talbots. “Home” has long been a fraught term for Kathleen, who can still hear the crunch of spilled sugar on the ragged linoleum in the house where she grew up, a palpable sign of the misery and neglect that lurked within. The dark, anonymous London flat that for decades has been her dwelling never becomes a home but rather an outward sign of her personal misery. However, the “borrowed” homes she inhabits while conducting her research in Ballygall enable her to become reconciled to herself and her nation. Wanting to stay in a place that was standing when Marianne Talbot was alive, she pleads for a room in the former Talbot Arms, later learning that the building was once the vicarage, home of the Rev. McClelland who had such a cruel hand in Marianne’s fate. But the Talbot Arms, reflecting the changing history of Ireland, has passed out of Anglo-Irish hands: it is now familiarly known as “Bertie’s place” for the kindly Irishman who purchased it with money won on a horse. Bertie treats Kathleen not as a guest, but as an adopted family member. Yet because during her time in Ballygall the hotel is frequently booked, Bertie shifts her to two other places that reflect Kathleen’s and Ireland’s changing selves. The cottage at Mellary is surrounded by reminders of the Famine: the local shopkeeper points out the remains of so-called “lazy beds,” the method of trench cultivation used in pre-famine Ireland that made effective use of poor land, a wet climate, and a large work force. As Kevin Whelan has observed, the system allowed for cultivation of even the most inhospitable land, made use of indigenous fertilizers such as peat and seaweed, and produced large yields of potatoes,10 thus sustaining even the poorest, largest families. The lazy beds Kathleen sees in the now thinly-settled landscape

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are a bitter reminder of the cataclysmic depopulation wrought by the Famine, for the potato was the staple food for millions of people; when it failed, they perished or were forced to emigrate. As PJ, the shopkeeper, points out, the open expanse of land around the cottage was once home to thousands of people. The cottage likewise triggers happy memories of her Uncle Ned’s house and connects her to past generations, for aside from indoor plumbing and a few electrical appliances, the place seems timeless. She is startled to realize that it is the first Irish house she’s been in for 30 years. Being there and discovering an emotional connection to her personal and national past is a necessary step in her healing. Kathleen’s later lodging bespeaks a very different Ireland. Richard Talbot had no idea of the number of Irish who inhabited his demesne because so many literally inhabited the landscape, living in ditches and other primitive shelters; the architect Felix’s house, fruit of prosperity and imagination, seems to melt into the landscape: at first glance it resembles “a tumbledown stone farm building” (388). But this is no sad site of Famine eviction but rather an artfully constructed dwelling in harmony with the natural beauty of the landscape and built on the site of an ancient village—Bertie notes that a thousand-year-old artifact has been discovered there. The past is immanent, but it is a past that extends long before the Famine: “In Mellary, I felt as if I had been there forever, you know? Those thick walls of the cottage? You could sit anything out behind them. Storms. Landlords. The Black and Tans. And it was hard work just living there. Every time I went out for a bucket of turf I had to pity the man who saved it and the woman who had to cook on it. But this place is from another planet” (388–9). At Felix’s cottage Kathleen experiences a palpable physical pleasure in the gorgeousness of the landscape, even sleeping outside. In this Irish place she undergoes a Wordsworthian transformation, for the loveliness of the place stirs her compassion, even for the father she has often hated, who never lived in such a beautiful, light-suffused house, “never lived in a bright place in his life” (395). She sees her childhood home, the dingy house on Shore Road, as an emblem of the Ireland her parents inhabited, which “wasted its people as if people were valueless. And as for their grandparents, like the people who lived beside the lake. . .” (395). When Shay later visits her there, the two plunge naked and unselfconscious into the peaty lake, a middle-aged Adam and Eve. The building of the stunning house was done by local craftspeople, and Bertie’s combined admiration for their skill and tart comment on their usual lack of ambition is a striking contrast to the scenes Kathleen renders of the desperate famine-era Irish pleading for work from the unmoved Richard Talbot. Kathleen also revisits the one Irish home she sometimes recalls nostalgically: her Uncle Ned’s farm, now her brother Danny’s home. Despite her affection for her brother and his family, she finds it almost unbearable

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emotionally to visit any family “home” in Ireland; doing so this time forces her to confront her family’s misery and her own legacy as a Famine survivor. Believing she is being helpful, Kathleen leaves her brother a sizeable check; her sister-in-law later reveals that Danny, having suffered lifelong damage at his parents’ hands, used the windfall to fund one of his occasional bouts of near-lethal drinking. Kathleen must now acknowledge her kinship with those who survived the Famine through ruthless self-preservation. As her mother was dying in a Catholic hospital, where her simultaneous pregnancy and uterine cancer meant that to protect the fetus she was denied adequate pain relief, radiation therapy, or a potentially life-saving abortion, Kathleen, enraged at her father and the patriarchal Ireland he represented, fled to England, abandoning her happy student life in Dublin and leaving the teenaged Danny to bear the brunt of the family’s problems. Nora refuses to return home, so bitter is she at her parents, particularly her father. Danny remains with the family at devastating personal cost. Kathleen witnesses the legacy of the Famine in her own family: too many generations of defeat, of thwarted potential, of hopelessness. Yet by the end of the novel she begins to climb out of her peculiar blend of narcissism and self-loathing; she will not spend her life waiting for Shay’s monthly visits, despite the temptation to do so; she promises her sister-in-law that she will rejoin the family by visiting regularly and being a true sister to Danny; she will reach out to the grief-stricken Alex, who has just lost the adored mother who thwarted and controlled his life. And significantly, though Kathleen will never complete the Talbot story, she concludes it with Mullan. Though identifying with Marianne was rooted in her own desire for a grand passion and her own sympathy for another woman, Kathleen, appropriately, gives Mullan in a sense the last word. For if Kathleen is to heal, she must reconcile herself to her personal past and to her Irish identity. She originally left Ireland in hatred and bitterness, willing herself not to think of home; she now realizes that the long years first of menial work, then the travel writing that allowed her to be both rootless and unthinking, were all part of a long continuum of pain and self-hatred that both links her to the past and cries out to be broken. From the isolation of Felix’s lovely house, she confronts the darkest passages of her life, and concludes, “You thought you were the only one who knew about suffering. . . .Well, late and all as it is, you know better now” (501). Indeed, Kathleen’s last bit of historical evidence regarding the Talbot case is a reminder of the Famine’s lingering legacy. She visits 92–year-old Curly Flannery, a former soldier in the War for Independence, who remembers the stories of Talbot servants who testified in the divorce proceedings. Flannery offers little new information about the case, but he utters chilling evidence of the Famine’s lingering trauma by denying that there was ever famine locally. Bertie notes how many of the old people in the neighbor-

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hood refuse to acknowledge the existence of that awful past. Kathleen herself cannot heal until she confronts the past and revises her allegiances. Much as she has sympathized with Marianne Talbot, Kathleen finally establishes her distance from that sad woman, for if she accepts Shay’s offer, she will become like Marianne: “As she begged her husband for tea and sugar, I would have to beg my lover to go on wiping out time for me” (509). She will relive her mother’s pathetic life, a fate she has been fleeing from since she first left Ireland, and admits to herself that all the people she loves and respects would disapprove of Shay’s offer. Ultimately, she understands that she and Shay are real people, and they must live in reality: “We would die to time, yes, when we reached for each other. But time would get in through the lock in the door. We would get old, anyway. We were not Tristan and Isolde. We would not die of passion. Passion, domesticated, would die on us, and what would be left would be life lived wrong” (510–11). Further, despite their passion, Shay and Kathleen are separated by a cultural and psychological divide as formidable in its own way as the gulf separating Mullan and Marianne. Shay is willing to spend more time in Ireland if it means that Kathleen will be there waiting for him, but otherwise he has made England his home. Despite his mention of the discomfort of being an Irishman in England in the 1970s, there is no evidence that he has undergone or is indeed even capable of Kathleen’s introspection regarding her identity as an Irish person. That he sentimentally equates Kathleen with Ireland itself and sings “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” to her without realizing that the song is American, not Irish, bespeaks his identity as a nostalgic expatriate. Tellingly, in contrast to Kathleen’s embracing of her Irish given name, Caítlín, Shay reveals that he sometimes forgets that his real name is Séamus. In contrast, having made her emotionally wrenching homecoming, Kathleen’s current departure from Ireland is worlds away from her bitter first leavetaking, when she hated her country and vowed never to return. Though she has renounced Shay, she has reunited with her family. With Bertie’s confession that he has loved Nan Leech for years but never so much as touched her hand, she must admit that she is not alone in love and loss. And as she leaves Felix’s cottage she drives along the edge of an old Famine road, one of the most heartbreaking relics of the Great Hunger, for these unfinished, useless arteries bespeak futility and loss, starving people forced by British Victorian zeal into having to work for their bread. Just as Kathleen must break free from her self-involvement and become part of a larger community, she must see that the Famine roads are not merely artifacts of a terrible past, but that “This happens now. This happens anywhere that people are demeaned by hunger” (511). Lacking any further documents that will bring the Talbot case to a close, she realizes she is free to conclude it as she will. One lingering mystery is

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the fact that Mullan followed Marianne to her hotel, sending her a note that the Rev. McClelland destroyed without allowing her to read it. Kathleen still believes that there was an emotional attachment between this unlikely couple, and she leaves the two in the same emotional limbo she herself is in: Marianne will never know the contents of the note; Mullan will never know that she didn’t receive it; Kathleen has bidden goodbye to Shay in code, leaving a recording of a few lines from “September Song” on Felix’s answering machine, but she may never know whether he ever called—or whether a few days of thinking have brought him to the same conclusion that she has reached. Kathleen imagines Mullan, heartsick and penniless, driven to emigrate because Talbot has successfully sued him for damages he is incapable of paying. Recalling her own emigration to England, she empathizes with his pain and loneliness. She depicts him working at the Saratoga racetrack in New York, where his love for and skill with horses would have enabled him to build a life, though never surrendering his love for Marianne. She allows him a peaceful death in a lovely forest setting. It has become commonplace to talk of silence as one of the legacies of the Potato Famine, born of trauma so profound that it was unbearable to mention. When My Dream of You was first published, O’Faolain frequently noted in interviews that the Famine was not talked about, was not written about. The torrent of scholarship that accompanied the 150th commemoration of the Famine beginning in 1995 included a challenge to this notion of silence, for works such as Christopher Morash’s Writing the Irish Famine proved that Irish writers had not in fact ignored the Famine; Irish-language scholars revealed that reaction to the catastrophe existed in the language spoken by most of its victims. Melissa Fegan argues, “The impression that very little has been written about the Famine, or that it had very little impact on the country’s literature, is clearly misguided and needs to be revised.” 11 The essays in Hungry Words: Images of Famine in the Irish Canon collectively advance the persuasive argument that the Famine has been very much present in Irish literature, challenging readers to re-examine the Irish literary canon—and perhaps to redefine the canon itself. Still, despite the existence of writing about the Famine, many Irish and diasporic Irish recall the inability or unwillingness to talk about that terrible time. Despite its being praised as a “good read,” an “old-fashioned” novel, My Dream of You takes a forward-looking, original approach to the Famine and its alleged silences. By not only narrating the story of Kathleen de Burca’s confrontation of her personal and national past but also dramatizing her actually writing the Famine, assembling historical documents, imaginatively conjuring the scenes and people of nineteenth-century Ireland, and infusing that narrative with the psychic pain that Kathleen has inherited as a post-Famine Irish woman, O’Faolain offers a complex, sophisticated reading of the Famine’s legacy. Breaking away from a purely Nationalist reading

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of the past, Kathleen evokes a past of multiple narratives, so that the Talbots as well as their perishing tenants are part of the story. Concluding that she can never finish her novel because she has insufficient “context,” cannot add the necessary flesh and substance to her characters because their story contains too many enigmas, too many unanswerable questions, Kathleen nevertheless achieves a significant victory that reflects contemporary Ireland itself. When Shay in a moment of passion declares that Kathleen is Ireland for him, readers’ antennae may tingle, recalling how Eavan Boland and other contemporary Irish women writers have argued the insidiousness of equating woman and nation. Though Kathleen is flattered, Shay’s attempted compliment also alerts the reader to the flaws in the couple’s relationship, its inability to survive in the real world, as Kathleen comes to realize. Yet in a sense, Kathleen is Ireland—and not because of her curly hair and the nostalgia she evokes in her middle-aged expatriate lover. Kathleen by the end of the novel has taken her first shuddering steps away from an emotionally crippling past; her career as a travel writer has given her a wider worldview than the parochialism and paternalism of her father’s generation. Kathleen’s awareness of Ireland as part of a global community is far more psychologically healthy than her father’s provincialism, her father who cherished the Irish language and venerated Irish football yet emotionally eviscerated his children, the future generation of Ireland. Kathleen can view both Ireland and the Famine in a world context, so that the trauma of the 1840s and the sexual exploitation of children in the contemporary Philippines are connected, so that the poverty and social inequity that outrage her about famine Ireland cannot be ignored in their current incarnations throughout the world. One thinks of that final haunting room in the Famine Museum at Strokestown, containing artifacts and photographs from countries more recently plagued by famine. That last room in the museum implicates the visitor, who cannot walk away with the Famine safely tucked back in the 1840s. As Luke Dodd, founder and former director of the Famine Museum has said, “The legacy [of the Famine] should be, it seems to me, to commemorate the dignity of our famine dead and dispossessed, but to remember them in a way which enriches our understanding of the plight of under-privileged peoples everywhere. A formal understanding of the 1840s famine in Ireland alone is an arid thing. Mary Robinson has said that until famine is understood as an experience, nothing will change.”12 That Kathleen’s manuscript, The Talbot Book, is left unfinished is appropriate, not only because she lacks the historical evidence and as she herself says, the context with which to complete it, but because for Ireland itself the story of the Famine is unfinished. As Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill has reflected in a haunting essay, “A Ghostly Alhambra,” inspired by a visit to the Famine

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Museum, the Famine was a cultural catastrophe, “the last and lethal bodyblow to a distinct native way of life and world-view.”13 The native populace, Irish-speaking and inhabiting a traditional culture of communal living, music, storytelling, and talk, inhabited a unique cultural space, a world decimated by the Famine yet lingering, Ní Dhomhnaill argues, in the Irish collective unconscious, where it suffers a pernicious neglect: “It is our present total and almost willful amnesia about the hidden way of life that I see as the most lasting scar caused by the Great Famine. . . .Until we face this deep level of collective amnesia about who we are and where we came from, our existence will be at best highly fragmented, at worst pathogenic.”14 O’Faolain’s two books of memoirs, Are You Somebody? (variously subtitled as The Life and Times of Nuala O’Faolain and The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman) (1996) and Almost There: The Onward Journey of a Dublin Woman (2003), chronicled her own struggles with a troubled family, a shaky sense of self, and a tendency to be self-punishing. She claimed to have discovered no lasting solutions, but her unflinching, heartwrenching path to a muted acceptance of herself and her family, a healing sense of her own Irish identity, and her ability to construct an endurable modus vivendi have some resonance in the fictional creation Kathleen de Burca, though O’Faolain has commented that Kathleen is not a self-portrait. What is striking, though, is that despite having achieved unexpected international acclaim for her writing—indeed with her very first book, published when she was 56 years old—O’Faolain continued to be self-deprecating, unsure of her own writing abilities. As was noted in the beginning of this chapter, her goals in writing My Dream of You were decidedly modest: a popular novel with a “residue” of meaning. O’Faolain might well have been heartened by the arguments of Christopher Morash, who has challenged the traditional reading of the Famine as a catastrophe mired in silence and who has observed that transformations in critical theory since the 1980s have indirectly fueled a new voicing of the Famine through the “permission—borrowed from the wider field of culture studies—to consider literary texts as cultural artefacts rather than as aesthetic objects to be assessed.”15 This transformation has liberated scholars to look for famine literature in places formerly considered unworthy or insufficiently literary, without the burden of having to justify those works’ validity according to the lights of a subjective aesthetic or literary valuation. Whether My Dream of You is a “popular” novel, an “airport book” with a “residue,” is, then, beside the point when considering it as an important contribution to famine literature. Further, Morash, noting the influence of Paul Ricoeur, meditates upon the paradox presented by historical writing, which must attempt to locate that which is absent but has left a “trace”: “The lives, the sufferings, the consciousness of thousands, of millions, of human beings were here; but

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now they are gone. In their place, we have traces: marks on paper, marks on landscape, fragments in memory. And these fragments must bear the burden of the reality of all those past lives; they must, to borrow another phrase from Ricoeur, perform the function of ‘standing for’ that which is no longer present. And this function, as Ricoeur reminds us, is not aesthetic; it is an ethical obligation.16 Morash argues that “the defining feature of the Famine . . . is absence. There is the absence of food, the absence of the culture that was uprooted, and most of all, the absence of the human beings who died or who emigrated.”17 The Famine of 1840s Ireland, which no longer exists, becomes manifested through metaphor, and Morash notes that as the time between the historical Famine and time present in Ireland widens, it could be argued that “keeping the Famine alive through renewing its metaphorical language performs an ethical function in the present, creating a communal conscience” in the face of such contemporary problems as Ireland’s increasing number of refugees, or Ireland’s place in alleviating world hunger and poverty.18 My Dream of You, for which O’Faolain made such modest claims, is a subtle, sophisticated, complex reading of the Famine’s long reach. The past the novel “stands for” (to use Ricoeur’s phrase) embraces multiple generations: not only is the Famine evoked through the lives at Mount Talbot, but the psychological and economic wreckage left in its wake is voiced through the lives of Kathleen de Burca’s parents and their children’s legacy of selfdestructive, self-hating behavior. Silence is palpable in all these damaged lives. Yet to use Morash’s argument, the Famine endures metaphorically: by confronting the past, Kathleen begins to heal and to become aware of the myriad meanings of human hunger. Significantly, although Kathleen abandons her own novel, O’Faolain completes hers, and it is a stunning achievement. My Dream of You insists that history, both personal and national, needs to be unearthed in all its “mess” and in all its voices, not to re-open old scars, not to either assign or eschew blame, but to heal the “amnesia” that paralyzes the present.

NOTES 1. Catherine Lockerbie, “Woman on the Verge,” review of My Dream of You, by Nuala O’Faolain, The New York Times, March 4, 2001. 2. Nuala O’Faolain, “An Unexpected Foray into Fiction,” interview by Robin Dougherty, The Boston Globe, May 27, 2001, D4. 3. Nuala O’Faolain, “Irish writer explores love and longing among the ‘overlooked,’” interview by Ellen Kanner, Bookpage, http://www.bookpage.com/0101bp/ nuala_ofaolain.html 4. Nuala O’Faolain, My Dream of You (New York: Riverhead Books, 2001), 50. Hereafter cited in text with parenthetical page numbers.

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5. Nuala O’Faolain, “Nuala O’Faolain used her first novel to exorcise her deepest private dread,” interview by Liam Fay, The Sunday Times (London), Jan. 28, 2001. 6. Scott Brewster and Virginia Crossman, “Re-writing the Famine: Witnessing in Crisis,” in Ireland in Proximity: History, Gender, Space, ed. Scott Brewster et al. (London: Routledge, 1999), 42. 7. Nuala O’Faolain, “A Woman of Definite Importance: Nuala O’Faolain,” interview by Lynne Shannon, Irish Connections, http://www.irishconnectionsmag.com/archives/v2i2/nuala.htm 8. O’Faolain, “An Unexpected Foray into Fiction,” 2. 9. Nuala O’Faolain, e-mail message to the author, September 1, 2003. 10. Kevin Whelan, “Pre and Post-Famine Landscape Change,” in The Great Irish Hunger, edited by Cathal Póirtéir (Chester Springs, Penn.: Dufour Editions, 1997), 21–2. 11. Melissa Fegan, Literature and the Irish Famine: 1845–1919 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 2. 12. Luke Dodd, “All Our Silences Begin to Make Sense,” interview by Tom Hayden, Irish Hunger: Personal Reflections on the Legacy of the Famine (Nimot, Colorado: Roberts Rinehart, 1997), 55. 13. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, “A Ghostly Alhambra,” in Hayden, Irish Hunger, 68. 14. Ibid., 68–9. 15. Christopher Morash, “An Afterword on Silence,” in Hungry Words: Images on Famine in the Irish Canon, ed. by George Cusack and Sarah Goss (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006), 301. 16. Ibid., 304. 17. Ibid., 306. 18. Ibid., 307.

7 The Cyberculture of Grosse Île Rhona Richman Kenneally

You would think that it would be very depressing to visit a place such as this, but as I stood there I couldn’t help but feel a real sense of the strength and vision that the people who passed through this island must have had. I could only imagine what it must have been like to leave everything and everyone that you knew to go to a strange country only to be put into quarantine on an island and perhaps separated from your loved ones.1

So writes Laura Madigan, a retired radio dispatcher for the Hamilton County [Ohio] Communications Center, who, on August 5, 2001, posted her impressions of a visit to a heritage site in Quebec, Canada. Accompanied by her husband Bob, a retired police officer whose parents emigrated from Ireland and settled in Providence, Rhode Island, Laura had undertaken an extended journey throughout North America; it is “to this adventure” that the resulting fulsomely-detailed website is dedicated. It was the creative artwork of one other visitor to the same heritage site—a greeting card executed by an amateur artist—that inspired a thread of research to explore culture and identity in a Canadian-Irish context. Designed by James Dinan, a member of the Irish community in Quebec City, the greeting card articulates a distinct reading of a landscape and buildings profoundly overwritten with Irish cultural affiliation and significance. It, too, depicts Grosse Île, an island in the St. Lawrence River east of Quebec City. The island served as a quarantine station between 1832 and 1937, and is revered as the largest famine gravesite outside Ireland. Beginning in the 1970s, under the stewardship of Parks Canada (a federal government 111

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agency), Grosse Île was declared a national historic site, and thousands visit the island each year.2 This essay extends a first stage of investigation that explores the ability of artifacts like Jim Dinan’s card to overwrite the cacophony of messages encoded in the landscape and material culture of Grosse Île in such a way as to prioritize predominantly Irish reference points.3 Unlike some other heritage spaces developed at roughly the same time, at Grosse Île it was clearly not the intention of Parks Canada to narrow the visitor’s field of perception by giving exclusive attention to one specific component of the island’s aura as a site of commemoration (the Famine, in this case). Yet Dinan’s card can be seen as evidence of the pliability of Grosse Île’s commemorative markers to anchor complex constructions of Irish identity on the part of visitors to the island, despite the co-presence of other embedded referents—the passagethrough of other immigrant groups; the evolution of medical technology in Canada; or manifestations of the island as a biological microclimate, for example. One can hypothesize, then, that Parks Canada’s strategy of facilitating the creation of diverse historical and cultural narratives on the part of visitors—not all of them necessarily linked directly to Ireland and the Famine—does not seem to have been a deterrent, but, rather, to have enhanced the experience of Irishness at Grosse Île. This was the case despite Parks Canada not having chosen to follow the recommendations made by some individuals who argued, during the initial public consultation phase of the project, that, as one person put it, “The principal theme for the development of the island should be: Grosse Île, the Irish Island.”4 In the final analysis, the island is a place where visitors are encouraged, indeed, challenged, to use their own logic, experience and imagination to tell, or retell, the stories lodged in its buildings and landscape, and the artifacts associated with it. Hence, it has the capacity to play a pivotal role in the creation and/or reinforcement of perceived Irish identity on the part of individuals who engage with the site as tourists.5 The task in this paper is to seek additional indicators of Hiberno-centric appropriations of Grosse Île. Cyberspace proves to be an accommodating venue for this task, theorized, as it is, as a (controversially) democratic space in which individuals have a unique opportunity to express aspects of their identity and sense of community.6 Indeed, perusing the numerous sites that contain material on Grosse Île (over sixty were accessed for this essay) is a revealing act for gaining an understanding of contemporary constructions of Irish identity amongst individuals who were exposed to this heritage environment. Critical researchers in cybertheory have asserted that the Internet can be instrumental in the negotiation of personal identity—during a period, after modernism, when traditional indicators of identity such as bloodlines have been displaced. What is remarkable here is the willingness on the part of these individuals—with a few notable exceptions—to assume

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cyberidentities directly connecting them to the Irish, through their telling of the story of the role of Grosse Île in the context of the Famine. Notwithstanding the habitual recognition of cyberspace as a zone where race and ethnicity can be fairly easily suppressed, abandoned or transformed by the person feeding information through the keyboard, most of these web creators make a conscious decision to represent themselves as immersed in the Irish cause. For the sake of this essay, priority is given to a selection of those websites that have been designed by private individuals, rather than by major institutional or commercial bodies such as Parks Canada. The rationale is to explore how their creators voluntarily and readily assume the mantle of Irishness, and how their vision of Grosse Île’s Irishness reflects a particular reading of its role in famine discourse. It is important to keep in mind that these are websites—a medium which grants the user the potential of vast exposure and, vitally, substantial amounts of artistic and narrative license by virtue of the ability to move beyond the actual physical arrangement of geography and temporal boundaries of chronology. Cyberspace allows the creator of websites to juxtapose, collapse, reconfigure and otherwise modify events and places to make a particular point, and to have that point accessible to anyone with a computer, an Internet provider, and a browser. The audience for these sites constitutes a widened constituency of community, held together despite differences of time zone and miles. Acknowledging the enormous potential influence of the Internet on such a community, Michael Benedikt defines cyberspace in a myriad of ways, including as a “common mental geography, built, in turn, by consensus and revolution, canon and experiment; a territory swarming with data and lies, with mind stuff and memories of nature, with a million voices and two million eyes in a silent, invisible concert to enquiry, deal-making, dream sharing, and simple beholding.”7 Cyberspace also has another essential quality that has been explored by critics: it is a vehicle for the anchoring of individual identity.8 Researchers such as Zygmunt Bauman have argued that, during the relatively recent periods of post- or late-modernity, the perception of the self, and specifically the question “How is one to live?” becomes substantially complicated by the breakdown of metanarratives associated with modernity.9 That is, the underpinning of identity through more traditional defining factors such as inherited religion, politics or nationality becomes challenged and destabilized, leading to what Bauman has called “an orphaned self, thrown open to one’s own devices to make oneself.”10 Resulting attempts to construct self-identity ultimately rely on what Anthony Giddens calls “reflexive biography,” created and sustained by ongoing self-scrutiny and self-definition on the part of the individual, who continually reworks or adjusts that sense of self on the basis of such stimulants as, for example, may be developed through consumer behavior.11 Who we are, then,

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as perceived on a day-to-day basis, becomes conceptualized in terms of whom we would like to be.12 Participation in cyberspace is an opportunity to hone that self-defined identity. It is a chance to move away from identity predefined by gender, race or other conventional criteria, simply by transforming or withholding information about oneself—and this happens all the time in such virtual environments as blogs and online games, and is also the case for websites. Recognition of this has prompted Tara McPherson, in an article on neoConfederate websites, to argue that such sites reflect “a very sincere attempt to make ‘self’ in the world and to articulate a very particular (and [in this case] racially naturalized) presence” in a “very serious battle over demands of place, race and identity.”13 Creators of websites relating to Grosse Île, then, can be understood as actively choosing to define themselves as Irish or as affiliated with the Irish, regardless of where their ancestors were born or where they live or lived. Their websites reveal an imbuing of their own lives with Irishness as they implicate themselves in the narrative of the island. An example of one such website was designed by a man, Gilbert Provost, who does not declare himself to be an Irish descendent.14 It combines information about Grosse Île with lists of ships registers and, quirkily, also links to his favorite websites on wines and favorite program for wine cellar management. Here, too, he posts images from a trip he made to the island, including a photograph of the Old Cemetery where over five thousand Irish and other individuals were known to have been buried. Further implicating himself as an active creator of Irish narrative associated with the island, he includes an image of the anchorage area of Grosse Île and, by using “the aid of modern technology” to superimpose drawings of old ships on the water (thus making the ships appear to be advancing into the harbor), encourages the viewer to “Imagine 75 sailing ships waiting to be inspected or under detention.”15 What is fascinating, here, is the translation between Grosse Île as geophysical space and as cyberspace, whereby the past and the present converge to extend the communicative impact of both the website and the actual landscape. Another website called La Balade Irlandaise, dated March 13, 1998 (it has since been taken down), had as its background pattern, tiled iterations of the map of Ireland, a place never visited by the site creator, presumably the same Mario Grenier who was identified as the owner of the site’s copyright.16 He attributed his “sentiments of loyalty” to Ireland to the fact that when he was six, playing hockey in Gatineau (near Ottawa), the teams in his league were named after countries, and he was arbitrarily chosen for the team called “Ireland.” He proceeded to explain that Grosse Île was a quarantine station, mentioned that 3,389 emigrants—a conservative estimate—never left the island, and reiterates the fact that numerous orphans were adopted by Quebec families. Quoting the oft-cited statistic that upwards of 40% of

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Quebeckers have Irish blood, he asserted what he says most of them do not know, namely that many Irish fought on the side of the rebel Patriots during an anti-British revolt in the province in 1837–38. Finally, he obliquely anchored this fact to Montreal’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade, an event annually attended by thousands. Irish-Canadian history thus merged, in this website, with Quebec nationalism, and was projected toward the present by virtue of a contemporary commemorative event. Another extraordinary website, already referred to above, is RV travels across North America with Bob and Laura Madigan. Bob and Laura retired in 1997, did substantial research (recorded on their site) to buy the right truck and the right camper, and began an odyssey through North America to explore places of all descriptions, historic and contemporary, commercial and cultural, from Progreso, Mexico, to the Saxman Native Village in Alaska to the Newfoundland Insectarium. Laura’s webpage on Grosse Île includes a number of images and about three screens’ equivalent of text, much of it from the official Grosse Île website posted by Parks Canada. She explains that “A group [of immigrants in the nineteenth century] that came in large numbers were the Irish because their country was going through an especially difficult time of famine and disease.” She cites the number of dead, explains that trench graves still show long indentations as a result of mass burials during the Famine period, lists the ports from which ships arrived and provides a link to the Parks Canada website. She adds, “I would definitely recommend this to be placed on your list of ‘must see’ if you ever get to Quebec.” Tellingly, she feels compelled to articulate a strong personal association with Grosse Île. Directly under an image of the Celtic Cross erected by the Ancient Order of Hibernians in 1909, she writes: “To me the island itself tells a story of the strength and fortitude that our [emphasis mine] ancestors had. I just felt a lot of appreciation for what they went through to found the areas in Canada and the U.S. that they founded and passed along to us as our legacy.”17 Grosse Île’s tangible traces of immigrant passage fuse with Laura’s own ancestral heritage, despite no evidence offered by her of specific links between her own family’s migration to North America and this particular island. For Laura, simply touring Grosse Île is enough to conjure a deep sense of affiliation and belonging. Insufficient space precludes analysis of all the sites that appropriate the material culture and history of Grosse Île into individual visions of Irishness. Many are commodified, such as Moytura.com, designed by a woman of Irish parentage named Mary Mullins who was born in the United Kingdom but lived in Ireland at the time of constructing her website. The site is replete with links to such virtual destinations as Moytura’s Irish Shop, Moytura’s Bookshop, Moytura’s Video Store and Moytura’s Music Store. Like Laura Madigan, Mary Mullins plants herself within the historical

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context of the island, and metaphorically assumes the identity of an Irish emigrant even though her domicile is County Galway: Each place I visited in Canada gave me cause for reflection and this visit to Grosse-Île brought home the concept of refugees. Each Irish person who fled their homeland because of the famine and during times of persecution was a refugee and as a nation we are indebted to the generosity of those other nations which opened their doors and took us in. . . . It behoves [sic] us to open our doors and welcome modern day refugees with respect, dignity and a willingness to help as much as we possibly can.18

Other websites represent distinctly different points of view: they, too, accentuate Irish connections, but take an oppositional perspective vis-à-vis the proscribed messages of Grosse Île. “Kill me, I’m Irish” very unambiguously blames the British for the Famine. The site also implicates the “callous attitudes…of their Canadian counterparts” for further suffering by the Irish after emigration, as well as Canada’s “anti-immigrant policies into the 20th century.” Derived from an article by playwright David Fennario published in the Montreal Mirror newspaper, it includes a Photoshopped image of the Old Cemetery, its green color stereotypically heightened for affiliation with The Emerald Isle. Its caption: “Cemetery on Grosse Île / Free coffins for dying ‘Micks.’”19 At the far other end of the spectrum, VDARE.com represents the Irish as undesirable and turns the Grosse Île story into a cautionary tale. The story of the Famine, they say, “is a horror story, and we would all like to prevent such things happening to people anywhere. But stop and think for a moment about what it was like for the people on the receiving end of this migration, what they gave, what it cost the people of North America who had to pick up after this tragedy. Then stop and think what you want to pay to pick up after the human tragedies caused by the despotic governments of North Africa or Asia.”20 Whereas this last site obviously reflects xenophobic tendencies, its presence is testament to the role that the Internet plays as a democratic resource that permits a multitude of voices to be heard. It appears, then, that Grosse Île has indeed inspired the creation, via websites, of numerous narratives of Irishness. Some of these were posted by organizations that played a direct role in the administration and promotion of the island, including Parks Canada and the Ancient Order of Hibernians.21 Others were created by men and women who are not experts in the field—who, acting on personal initiative, felt a pull toward the island as a simultaneously tangible and historical environment, and then directed that energy into cyberspace. These are significant sites in and of themselves, inasmuch as they demonstrate an extension of the recovery from what Kevin Whelan has called the voicelessness of the nineteenth-century Irish, as a result of their having been deprived of their own language and culture by British colonization. This

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is a voicelessness that culminated during the Famine, Whelan argues, leaving the Irish “exiled, refugeed, unhoused, evicted from a community of recognition, silenced.” Whelan believes that the recovery of an Irish voice, and the empowerment of gaining such a voice, can be seen in literary form in the Irish Literary Revival, for example James Joyce’s short story, “The Dead.”22 The websites explored in this paper can be understood as a manifestation of the empowerment of the Irish voice in a further iteration, amongst a constituency of amateur observers of Irish history and tradition who do not normally have the opportunity to offer input in the constructions of Irishness encoded at institutional or monumental venues such as museums, galleries, and of course Grosse Île itself—or who might not be formally educated or extensively versed in Irish historiography. Such an opportunity is not inconsequential, in light, for example, of the controversy that arose over the Gaelic Gotham exhibition held in 1996 at the Museum of the City of New York, and raised pertinent questions regarding just who had the authority to speak for/about/to the New York Irish community.23 The voices given to Irish chroniclers through the websites which address Grosse Île, then, can be seen as taking advantage of current technologies of communication to reinforce conceptions of Irish identity, to continue to move the Irish from a position of subjugation (as they were in Famine times) to one of privilege, as the creators and disseminators of their own cultural ideologies, even if the result is challenged by opposing points of view. Cyberspace, then, is one vehicle that can give back a voice and a language to all who wish to develop a sense of resonance with, and adherence to, an identity doubly silenced through the Famine, both by the actual death and scattering of so many Irish men, women and children, and by the concomitant loss of the Irish language and culture in subsequent decades.

NOTES I would like to thank Maureen Murphy, Marianna O’Gallagher and James Dinan for their assistance during the research phase of this project, and Sara Spike for her editorial input. All websites except that of Mario Grenier (see Footnote 16) accessed 14 February 2009. 1. Laura Madigan, “Grosse Ile, Quebec, QC, Canada,” RV Travels Across North America with Bob and Laura Madigan, 5 August 2001, http://www.rvtravelog.com/ index.htm. 2. For additional studies of Grosse Île see, for example, Lorrie Blair, “(De)Constructing the Irish Famine Memorial in Contemporary Quebec,” in Ireland’s Great Hunger: Silence, Memory and Commemoration, ed. David A. Valone and Christine Kinealy (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2002), 311–329; Sylvie Gauthier, “Le Mémorial: An Irish Memorial at Grosse Île in Quebec,” in Ireland’s Great Hunger: Silence, Memory and

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Commemoration, ed. David A. Valone and Christine Kinealy (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2002), 294–310; Marianna O’Gallagher, Grosse Île: Gateway to Canada 1832–1937 (Ste-Foy, Quebec: Carraig Books, 1984); Marianna O’Gallagher and Rose Masson Dompierre, Eye Witness: Grosse Île, 1847 (Ste-Foy, Quebec: Carraig Books, 1995); Pádraic Ó Laighin, “Grosse-Ile: The HolocaustRevisited,” in The Untold Story: The Irish in Canada, ed. Robert O’Driscoll and Lorna Reynolds, (Toronto: Celtic Arts of Canada, 1988), 1:75–101; Parks Canada, Grosse Île and the Irish Memorial National Historic Site: A Short History (Ottawa: Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada, 1998); Parks Canada, Grosse Île and the Irish Memorial National Historic Site of Canada: Management Plan (Ottawa: Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada, 2001); Parks Canada, Grosse Île and the Irish Memorial National Historic Site: Visitor’s Guide (Ottawa: Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada, 1997); Michael Quigley, “Grosse Ile: Canada’s Famine Memorial,” Éire-Ireland 32 (1997): 20–40. 3. Rhona Richman Kenneally, “Now You Don’t See it, Now You Do: Situating the Irish in the Material Culture of Grosse Île,” Éire-Ireland 37 (2003): 33–53. 4. Anonymous suggestion forwarded to Parks Canada during public consultation on the Future of Grosse Île, in Report of the Advisory Panel, Grosse Île and the Irish Quarantine Tragedy (Quebec: Canadian Heritage, Parks Canada, 1995), appendix 5, A31, page 7. 5. Researchers have debated the degree to which heritage sites should be subjected to editorial intervention by curators in order to enhance certain aspects of the narratives they contain. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, for example, addresses what she calls “agencies of display” in such environments as museums or in landscapes configured as commemorative sites, and gives the transformation of Ellis Island, New York, as an example of a “heritage production” that is ultimately a disingenuous construct, in that it “offers the perfection of the restoration as a remedy for the imperfections of history.” Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 9. See also Kevin Hetherington, “The utopics of social ordering - Stonehenge as a museum without walls,” in Theorizing Museums, ed. Sharon Macdonald and Gordon Fyfe (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 153–176; Kevin Walsh, The Representation of the Past: Museums and Heritage in the Post-Modern World (New York: Routledge, 1992); Wiendu Nuryanti, “Heritage and Postmodern Tourism,” Annals of Tourism Research 23 (1996): 249–260. One exploration of the subject in its broad context is David Lowenthal, Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (New York: Free Press, 1996). For the Irish implications of this debate see R. F. Foster, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making it up in Ireland (London: Penguin Press, 2001), especially the chapters “Theme-parks and Histories” and “Remembering 1798,” and Luke Gibbons, “Back Projections: John Hinde and the New Nostalgia” in Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996), 37–43. New York City’s Irish Hunger Memorial is an example of an intentionally inclusive commemoration site. It links Irish Famine references to other, international episodes of hunger, homelessness and poverty, by interspersing texts referencing both these categories within the horizontal banding of the monument’s stone façade.

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6. This controversy lies in the acknowledgement that access to the web is, finally, restricted on the basis of geography (not available everywhere in the world); political freedom (some governments induce web censorship); availability of required technology; cost; and so on. Still, the opportunity for the broad exposure of the ideas and material of private individuals via the Internet is indisputably greater than through other media forms. 7. Michael Benedikt, “Cyberspace: First Steps,” The Cybercultures Reader, ed. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy (London: Routledge, 2000), 29. 8. For other studies of websites as autobiographical and/or ethnic affiliation see, for example, Linda Leung, Virtual Ethnicity: Race, Resistance and the World Wide Web (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005); Stephen Webre, “Among the Cybercajuns: Constructing Identity in the Virtual Diaspora,” Louisiana History 39 (1998): 443–456; and Elayne Zalis, “At Home in Cyberspace: Staging Autobiographical Scenes,” Biography 26 (2003): 84–119. 9. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), cited in Frank Webster, “Cybernetic Life: Limits to Choice,” Living with Cyberspace: Technology and Society in the Twenty-First Century, ed. John Armitage and Joanne Roberts (New York: Continuum, 2002), 21–33, 36–7. 10. Zygmunt Bauman, Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Reality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), cited in Webster, “Cybernetic Life,” 37. 11. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 52–55. See also Webster, “Cybernetic Life,” 37–38. 12. David Bell, An Introduction to Cybercultures (New York: Routledge, 2001), 96. 13. Tara McPherson, “I’ll Take my Stand in Dixie-Net: White Guys, the South and Cyberspace,” Race in Cyberspace, ed. Beth E. Kolko, Lisa Nakamura and Gilbert B. Rodman (New York: Routledge, 2000), 119. 14. Gilbert Provost, “Grosse Ile,” Genealogy, Ships and Wines, 25 October 2005, http://www.reach.net/~sc001198/. 15. Provost, “Anchorage,” 7 March 2004, http://www.reach.net/~sc001198/anchorage.htm. 16. Mario Grenier, La Balade Irlandaise, March 13, 1998, http://pages.infinit. net/actu/balades/irlande.htm. This page was last consulted on 14 February 2006 but has since been taken down. An archived version of the page is available through the Internet Archive at http://web.archive.org/web/20050210190215/http://pages. infinit.net/actu/balades/irlande.htm. 17. Laura Madigan, “Grosse Ile, Quebec.” Emphasis added. 18. Mary Mullins, “Grosse Île in Quebec: The Last Resting Place for over 6000 Irish Souls,” Moytura’s Journeys, 2000, http://www.moytura.com/grosse-ile.htm. Emphasis added. 19. David Fennario, “Kill Me, I’m Irish,” Montreal Mirror, 14 August 1997, http:// www.montrealmirror.com/ARCHIVES/1997/081497/cover.html. 20. James Fulford, “The Camp of St. Patrick,” Centre for American Unity, 17 March 2001, http://www.vdare.com/fulford/st_patrick.htm. 21. Parks Canada, “Grosse Île and the Irish Memorial National Historic Site of Canada,” 30 May 2005, http://www.pc.gc.ca/lhn-nhs/qc/grosseile/index_e.asp. See

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also “Grosse Île and the Irish Memorial,” Ancient Order of Hibernians, http://www. aoh-montreal.com/grosseile.htm. 22. Kevin Whelan, “The Memories of ‘The Dead,’” Yale Journal of Criticism 15 (2002): 68. 23. See, for example, Steven C. Dubin, “‘The Troubles’ in the New World: The Uncivil War over Gaelic Gotham,” in Displays of Power: Memory and Amnesia in the American Museum (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 64–117; Kevin Kenny, “Taking Care of Irish Culture,” American Quarterly 49, no. 4 (1997): 806– 824; Council for Scholarly Evaluation of Gaelic Gotham, The Gaelic Gotham Report: Assessing a Controversial Exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York (New York: New York Irish History Roundtable, 1997).

III FAMINE REMEMBRANCE

8 The Famine, Irish-American Transition, and a Century of Intellectual and Cultural History Mary C. Kelly

The history of Irish arrival and settlement in the United States is typically framed within familiar constructs of assimilation, integration, and adaptation. Equally well-documented is immigrant Irish involvement in the spheres of labor, politics and religion. Facilitating powerful transitions from “old country” cultural norms to the very different New World context, these spheres form the bedrock of the Irish-American historical narrative. For some time now, though, this narrative has progressed under an air of predictability centering on mass arrival, protracted struggle, and twentieth-century assimilation. Immigrants arriving throughout the Colonial era and nineteenth century gradually distanced themselves from the burdens of home, we have learned, persevered through a challenging acculturation process, and ultimately integrated into the host culture by the early 1900s. Throughout the settlement process, the record affirms, the Irish retained certain elements of their native culture variously adapted and reconfigured within the new host society. While we are well-acquainted with the dominant elements, including the well-plumbed political, educational, and religious affiliations, other dimensions of the process are less clearly delineated. Recent interest in the transatlantic roots of Irish-American history, however, is addressing some of the shortcomings in significant ways. Moving beyond the traditional focuses to re-configure key transition-points within the Irish-American experience and underscore the Irish cultural foundation of the ethnic experience adds depth and fresh perspective to the field in general.1 Of the major cultural imperatives affecting Ireland and the diaspora in the nineteenth century, the impact of the Famine is obvious. Although Irish 123

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movement across the Atlantic sustained throughout the Colonial period and remained steady through the early 1800s, the Famine unleashed a floodtide of unprecedented proportions over the immigrant stream of previous decades. Visibly augmenting and reconstructing the early national and pre1840s immigrant presence, the Famine also anchored a set of connections between the United States and Ireland that exerted long-term influence over the course of settlement and over Irish-American history in general. Although the dramatic nature of famine arrival is clear, several dimensions of the transition within the span of Irish-American history await the attention of historians. The brutal effects of the Famine on the immigrant mentalité include social, political, and cultural ramifications still virtually untapped within the field. Among these, coffin-ship transportation of men and women from Ireland’s four provinces to North America during the worst years of hunger conveyed a factor of significance in the history of almost any settlement process; the intellectual cargo underpinning the immigrant mindset. This storehouse of private consciousness incorporated within its folds the idea of exile, the contemporary experience of hunger and disease, and a wellspring of values and judgments molded by a tenacious past and bearing on a tenuous future. But how did the archive of famine memory shipped across the Atlantic in the hearts and minds of survivors exert impact over the ethnic community through the later nineteenth century, and how can we evaluate its impact?2 While the physical dimensions of the transatlantic crossing are quite welldocumented, the role of the Great Hunger as a major component within the intellectual culture of Irish-America awaits attention. Too, the impact of Ireland’s history on the diaspora has yet to be comprehensively evaluated. Taking its bearings from signal methodological developments in the fields of intellectual and cultural history, this essay explores these themes, centering on the impact of the Famine and its memory and the reverberations of Ireland’s history within the intellectual spheres of the Irish-American public record from the onset of the episode to the mid-twentieth century. This work does not attempt to penetrate the inner sanctum of the immigrant mindset, even if such a thing were possible, or even focus on one dimension of the Irish-American intellectual experience in the century following the Famine. Instead, the fount of cultural expression comprising the contemporary IrishAmerican public record will furnish access to the broad parameters of the intellectual and cultural spheres of the immigrant experience. While no essay could comprehensively address such a broad topic, broaching at least some of the key dimensions generates new groundwork in this area. The following questions remain uppermost throughout: What forces or agents visibly sustained transatlantic connections, including the Famine, over time? How did the Famine and the history of Ireland affect the course of Irish-American settlement? How was famine memory publicly

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institutionalized in the decades after its occurrence? Finally, what role did the Famine play within Irish-America a century after the episode? Exploring the Famine through these lenses helps clarify crucial transatlantic connections and their long-term effects on the course of Irish-American intellectual and cultural history. Considering the role of Ireland’s history and its cultural resonance within the nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigrant context provides a useful foundation for these questions, given that, beyond the familiar themes of political affiliation, educational advancement, labor history, and Catholicism, 3 its impact on immigrant settlement has not received due attention within the historical record, and is not considered relevant to the ethnic experience in many instances.4 As a result, reference to the immigrant homeland and to influential transatlantic linkages is sketchy at best, and tends to be bypassed in the bulk of the scholarship. But connections with the ancestral homeland were first forged within a national context radically different to that of the United States and survived to influence the course of the history to a substantial degree. These powerful cultural linkages play a vital role in mapping the course of Irish-American progress.5 Of the major linkages, the search for self-definition at the core of Ireland’s political and cultural upheavals was transported to American immigrant enclaves with sufficient strength to affect the ethnic experience in fundamental ways.6 Catholic cultural foundations also forged vital transatlantic connections between the native home and the New World. As Conor Cruise O’Brien remarked, the immigrating Irish shipped their faith unconsciously, naturally, and logically.7 On the basis of these and several other cultural connectors, immigrants transported the more important dimensions of their heritage from a national context no longer their own to the intellectual spheres of an immigrant experience as complex as it is captivating.8 The Famine’s primacy within the Irish-American cultural trajectory should, by all accounts, foreground the episode and its public legacy within the historical record. That this has not yet occurred may be due to the particular challenges inherent in intellectual and cultural approaches to history, even when exploring the public dimensions of the historical record.9 Assessing the public dynamic of mentalité, the transmission of ideas across time and space, or the role of nationality and race within the more cerebral layers of the immigrant experience involves vexing issues of judgment and verification, and risks the artificial separation of ideas from factual realities. In short, these approaches can all too easily promote sins of “reductive fallacy” and other such regrettable vices.10 Such pitfalls, however, have not meant overwhelming rejection of the intellectual and cultural focuses.11 To the contrary, recent methodological advances within a remarkably expansive field, and new understanding of a “sense of intergenerational affinity” as an important component of historical remembrance, generate useful tools to work with.12

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Within the Irish-American context, certain criteria require further explanation. The public famine narrative, as it might be rendered, encompasses central elements underpinning this essay and serving as points of departure for future forays. These include escape from a disaster of historic proportions, the effects of that disaster on the immigrant community, and the relegation of the episode to the darker reaches of the Irish-American past by the midtwentieth century.13 As the primary element, the disaster necessarily involves the cultural profile of its victims. Depicted most commonly as a native-born, mainly Catholic, and predominantly rural-based tenantry, the most vulnerable elements within the population transported a heritage rooted in turbulent national history. Arising at regular intervals since the Middle Ages, the issue of cultural survival became even more highly-charged by the pre-famine era. Contemporary political upheavals seriously compromised native traditions and practices as the 1700s and early 1800s wrought further challenge to surviving pockets of Gaelic Ireland under the duress of Penal Codes and Union restrictions. Defenders of “Gaelic Ireland”14 co-opted the heroism of Brian Boru, O’Neill’s coup at the Yellow Ford, and the Flight of the Earls within the broadly-configured nationalist agenda of the later 1700s and early nineteenth century. These and other storied episodes hallmarked a Catholic population constantly under pressure to change, conform, and re-orient toward an alternative cultural context. In effect, a protracted history of political conflict and economic, social and religious compromise propelled the bulk of the population toward Malthusian disaster by the mid-1800s.15 Even as the milestones of Kinsale and the Boyne, and authoritarian Penal legislation further rocked traditional Gaelic foundations, enough of the stuff of “cultural integrity, language, and nationalism”16 endured into the famine era to retain cogent form within provincial Ireland and to arise in subsequent decades within the American context.17 Successive nationalist imperatives mobilized tenantry and smallholders seeking to overturn the Act of Union, while contingents of Irish-speaking Catholics rallied behind the turn-of-the-century United Irishman agenda and the Young Ireland dynamism of the famine era itself. But even widespread and often successful O’Connellite politicization could stem neither the sweeping pestilence of the mid-1840s nor its massive cultural effects. The episode quickly branded The Great Hunger ushered in the most comprehensive national crisis of the modern era, to the point where endurance hung in the balance for millions of the most vulnerable. An ill-equipped population battled its force, and the bleak outlook sustained and even intensified throughout the western seaboard counties as famine persisted into the 1850s. The obliteration of an entire class of smallholders accorded the episode an extraordinary quality. In equally dramatic fashion, the evacuation on the coffin-ships condemned hundreds of thousands of Irish men and women to a painful cultural transition in the United States. Within that

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transition, the Famine not only engendered a mass exodus to transform the contemporary Irish-American ethnic presence, but expanded Ireland’s struggles within a much broader transatlantic cultural context.18 Coffin-ship imagery and teeming slum scenes dominate the history of mid-century American settlement,19 together with the imperatives of departure, emigrant passage and ship-board conditions, the Providential approach to Ireland’s socio-economic crises, and the logistics of stateside immigrant arrival. And these elements constitute vital components of the Irish-American story.20 Much less evident, though, is the intellectual cargo wrought by the Famine and how it was processed and stored within the immigrant mentalité through successive decades and transitions. As the starving men and women docked into a cultural climate within the ports of Boston, New York, Philadelphia and other major centers in North America that became gradually more intimidating as the nineteenth century unfolded, a collision of world-views marked the introductory phase of the Famine’s intellectual record. There can be little doubt that Irish escapees faced pockets of powerful resistance to their suddenly expanded ethnic presence. Incoming Irish of all denominations entered the United States as British subjects since 1802 and were granted citizenship privileges consistent with naturalization, but perceptions of a brutish demeanor and rebellious tendencies overshadowed the ongoing settlement.21 Even in the midst of strident nativist invective, though, and despite these pressures, the Irish had made, and continued to make, considerable progress in the areas of education and commerce, and across the spectrum of Catholic religious leadership. Although a rise in Catholic Irish immigration during the 1830s and pre-Famine years prompted an increase in negative perceptions, the history of Irish settlement during these decades is more complex than either contemporary nativist parameters or the specific lens of “whiteness” would suggest. The intertwined forces of religion, political and class affiliation, and a whole range of diverse cultural identifiers affected perceptions of the Irish; each affected by “the civic and legal realities that surrounded European immigration to the United States,” in the words of Hasia R. Diner.22 Anti-Catholic and anti-Irish feeling certainly found purchase during the Jacksonian era, and there can be no doubt that the Famine solidified negative attitudes evident for decades, but couching the influx within the nativist agenda, to the exclusion of other relevant factors, circumvents the complexity of the immigrant experience. Mass immigration and considerable socio-political change over the Early National and Jacksonian eras, for example; and clashes over the precise nature of perceived threats posed by immigrant color, race, religion, politics, and language fomented a struggle among defenders of the republic seeking permanent institutionalization of a specific cultural agenda.23 Within such an apprehensive climate, nativist forces found a ready opportunity to exacerbate their negative sentiments tenfold by the later

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1840s, and the ‘wretched refuse’ imagery rose to public prominence with the reality of the famine influx.24 Appalling conditions in the urban ghettos seemed to further validate the popular view that the Irish were unsuited to any but the most menial tasks.25 The frightening spectacle of so large a contingent of starving people in the major port cities dominated streetscapes and headlines, and even sympathetic responses to the worsening famine turned to disbelief as the influx persisted through successive years. 26 Contemporary public testimony revealing some of the darker reaches of the immigrant world institutionalized the episode not only within the ethnic enclaves but within broader transatlantic cultural spheres. News of devastation in autumn 1845 reaching the East Coast of the United States via mail carriers, bearing word of Ireland’s severe food shortage and accompanying suffering made for extensive press coverage, as pioneering fundraising drives launched an early response to the horrific conditions across the Atlantic.27 Clashes over how to expedite assistance maintained coverage of the Famine on the front pages of the Boston press. Politicizing its context by late 1845, for example, the young ex-Boston Pilot editor Thomas D’Arcy McGee favored taking aim at the Act of Union rather than funneling occasional charitable aid to Ireland.28 Given that Boston could anticipate a considerably larger onslaught of the destitute if crop failure persisted into 1846, the heated nature of famine-related dialogue is unsurprising, even during the period of early impact. Long-term political strategy versus short-term need characterized a situation rapidly degenerating into an unprecedented state. As 1845 turned into 1846 and the potato crop rotted in the fields, the Irish in Boston and in the other large settlement regions witnessed inscription of the Famine within the public domain of their ethnic culture. Spearheaded by prominent local leaders such as Boston’s Bishop John Fitzpatrick, the involvement of churchmen in fundraising took on new urgency and generated consistent publicity as their compatriots proved increasingly unable to withstand the adversity. 29 Envisioning disaster on an unprecedented scale, the bishop encouraged his flock to surrender the broader political context in favor of concentrating more rigorously on the hunger rife throughout Ireland. Sympathetic Bostonians regularly furnished charitable assistance and enlisted the help of Congress in 1847, as accounts detailing the scenes of unmitigated disaster poured into newspaper offices and reached the transplants through correspondence and consistent solicitations for aid.30 Contemporary author William Bennett personally traversed the worst-hit localities in 1847 to witness extraordinary devastation. “My hand trembles while I write,” he observed, lacking adequate words for the horrific nature of the scenes he faced and urging readers to look to Christian charity to alleviate the plight. 31 Although crop failures had regularly disturbed Ireland’s past and shortages would certainly affect subsequent decades of the nineteenth century, the scale of the 1840s disaster overshadowed all other crop-failures in the

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modern era. As private testimonials grew longer and more despairing, the wave of appeals aimed at fending off the worst excesses marked the public course of an episode rapidly identified as calamitous. From the poignant efforts of the Choctaws in raising $170 for famine relief32 to the work of associations and clubs serving the needy, the sympathetic response accorded solid structure to the Famine’s formative stage. Thousands of dollars poured into campaigns launched by politicians, county organizations, ladies charitable groups, mercantile entities, and private citizens, to generate a transatlantic lifeline of significance.33 Underpinned by the private letters and remittances entrenching links with home, the public operations of agencies and concerned individuals solidified the new phase of the Irish-American narrative and further entrenched the transatlantic relationship.34 In Ireland, those with the wherewithal to organize large-scale emigration schemes removed thousands of potential victims from the ruinous forces. Landlords with charitable dispositions provided transportation fares, contacts, employment opportunities, and prospects for men and women who otherwise risked perishing on landholdings too small or too devastated to sustain them.35 Such activism contrasted with another key agency in the grounding of the Famine narrative: the shrill antiCatholic agenda epitomized by Know-Nothingism and nativist invective in general.36 As the arrival of the huddled masses threatened the very fabric of the cities they crowded into, in the eyes of the guardians of the republic, nativist hostility made a distinct contribution to the mid-century settlement process and to the institutionalization of the Famine’s public narrative.37 The burgeoning record also included a smattering of voices issuing beyond East Coast ports and Irish enclaves. Frederick Douglass, to take a prominent example, chanced to visit Ireland in November 1845. Evading the tumult ignited by his autobiography, Douglass witnessed the first flush of hunger in the winter and early spring of the first famine year. Initially doubting that conditions would reach the abysmal levels reported in the press, his personal visitations throughout Dublin convinced him otherwise. Witnessing the devastation throughout the eastern counties, Douglass compared the traumatic conditions with the slave experience as he mobilized public discourse on morality and responsibility. In the volatile political climate of the 1840s, the testimony publicizing famine horrors provided new material for anti-Irish demagogues while adding new layers to the Great Hunger record.38 Another source of publicity overshot with sensationalist appeal echoed an equally familiar brand of rhetoric for newly-arrived Catholic immigrants. Archbishop John Hughes of New York lost few opportunities to invoke his ambitious personal agenda in the cause of Ireland. Renowned for his crusading zeal and fiery diatribes, the prelate addressed contemporary conditions in oratory infused with thoroughgoing nationalist propaganda. His Lecture on the Antecedent Causes of the Irish Famine in 1847 first breathed life in the

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Broadway Tabernacle on March 20, 1847. The speech expounded on Ireland’s national condition two years into the potato failure. He appealed to charities for funds while expressing concern for his Catholic compatriots in strong patriotic tones. Reverend Hughes’s comprehensive history of the island and the relationship with England from its inception held the power to entrench a Famine narrative cornerstone centering on Ireland’s broader political context. Collectively, his rhetoric marked a point of transition for the ethnic group. Hughes’s dictates accorded national and transatlantic attention to Ireland’s political status. Few could deny his claim that a compelling juncture had been broached for Irish Catholics, on both sides of the Atlantic. With characteristic brio, the Archbishop regaled his audience with evocative testimonies to Ireland’s traditional beauty and richness, now destroyed by English authority; highlighting the “tributary streamlet(s) of bitterness” that flowed down the centuries. He deplored the Elizabethan havoc wreaked on native Gaelic culture, and transported listeners through Penal Law terrors threatening the Catholic faith but for the special strength of the Gael. As a commanding figure integrating the twin motivators of hunger and contemporary nationalism, his vision rooted a potent dimension of the Famine narrative within Irish-American consciousness, even before the end of the episode anchoring his discourse. Lest his flock fail to foreground a litany of institutional oppressions that, in his view, should not be relegated to the private reaches of Irish-Catholic memory, the Archbishop invigorated the national birthright in the minds of his listeners and readership. For those familiar with Ireland’s heritage, his use of language supportive of the expanding nationalist sensibility lent a dramatic political pitch to his message; no small feat in a decade when such speechifying could generate grounds for treason in Ireland. He considered it “manifest,” no less, “that the causes of Ireland’s present suffering” at a moment of national calamity “have been multitudinous, remote, and I might almost say, perpetual.” Since 1801, he charged, England ransacked the smaller island of her resources, leaving Ireland vulnerable to present distress. The prelate considered his native home a land that “sinks beneath the last feather,” as “the burthen previously imposed was far above her strength to bear.”39 As contemporary press and pamphlet testimony blurred into a tapestry reflective of increasingly latent nationalist appeal by the mid-1850s, additional information on conditions and casualties further entrenched a public narrative sustained by a constant stream of press reports, public pronouncements, and political references. Dailies and weeklies intent on keeping readers up to date, and mail steamers feeding regional and city newspapers lent a sense of urgency to its expansion, while pressures of competition leading to tales of famine bulletins being traded between reporters and publishers added to the profile of the burgeoning narrative.40

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As the legacy of O’Connellite activism and Young Ireland insurgency sustained within the ethnic enclaves across the Atlantic, the effects of the Famine within the Irish-American public record became more evident. Within the broad spectrum of impact, the association of nationalist activism with the traumatic events of the 1840s rose as a prominent dimension of the historical experience, and frames the second key element in the narrative. What better vehicle than the Great Hunger to visibly express Ireland’s political agenda on the streets of safe harbors such as New York and Boston and Philadelphia? As the headline-generating heavyweights characterized the Famine as a bloody fount of British perfidy, the nationalist strain institutionalized within the teeming streetscapes of urban America.41 The prominent voices capitalized on their ability to push the agenda in rhetoric regularly referencing the broad parameters of the calamity, shifting Ireland’s political condition to the forefront of the immigrant mentalité. Laying the foundation for the Home Rule campaigns of the later nineteenth century and imbuing Irish-American political culture with a spirit of notoriety and occasionally, celebrity, a variety of Fenians and Clan na Gaelers enhanced their recruitment and fundraising capabilities by sustaining the memory of the Famine through decades when relegating it to the nether regions of immigrant identity held obvious appeal. John Mitchel, to take a prominent example, merged the romantic appeal of radical nationalism with a compelling tragedy too expansive to forget, yet too terrible to publicly remember, for immigrants invested in upward mobility within city administrations and in the political system in general. His work cemented the new chapter in Irish-American famine history over the course of turbulent post-famine decades.42 The ex-Young Irelander deployed his Jail Journal and The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps) as a testament to the long struggles of the past and those yet to come in what has been characterized “a defining document of modern Irish nationhood.”43 Under Mitchel’s tutelage, prioritization of the Great Hunger in the nationalist consciousness roved beyond more commonplace activist invective to entrench the episode as a key plank in the Irish-American political platform, and his fresh “morality” perspective struck a chord of endurance on both sides of the Atlantic.44 With Mitchel, John Devoy, Jeremiah O’Donovan-Rossa and the diverse array of demagogues as figureheads, the Fenians, Clan na Gael, the Land League organizations and the Friends of Irish Freedom expanded the public record of Famine reference and rooted its legacy at the forefront of Irish-American consciousness. Hooking his dramatic revolutionary experience onto the fate of a homeland struck low by the force of brutal hunger enabled Mitchel to achieve “a suspension of history,” forging his personal agenda within the contemporary record and in the annals of the permanent.45 As the proud transporter of a Tone and Emmet-inspired platform, he and his cohorts reenergized

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O’Connellite activism and Young Ireland impetuosity within an updated republican schema. Overshot with a sense of derring-do more usually confined to the pages of fiction, Mitchel’s influence, in particular, together with that of his wife, Jane Verner Mitchel, lent a powerful imprimatur to Ireland’s continued struggle towards independence on both sides of the Atlantic. Recorded with the flourish of a revolutionary pen in his signature Trinity style, his narrative played a significant role in sustaining public memory of the watershed event. In an era studded with professional wordsmiths, John and Jane Mitchel’s superior ability to distill diverse dimensions of a long-held nationalist tradition empowered a strong political connection between a traumatized Ireland and her distanced compatriots in the United States, consciously incorporating the Famine into their experience decades after the mid-century episode. Updating the rhetoric of Catholic Association days, the standard-bearers of the IRB and the Clan and fellow-travelers such as Michael Davitt infused the devastation of the potato blight with a new chapter in Ireland’s history as the nineteenth century entered its final decade.46 Prominent politicos and journalists foisting reactionary agendas on immigrant contingents fashioned a usable past out of sensationalist evocations of an event still publicly accessible, and still alive within the immigrant memory. The failures of the past should not condemn Ireland’s future, according to those strengthening famine-fed transatlantic connections.47 Although escape from hunger meant fewer compatriots committed to the cause at home, Ireland’s cultural loss might yet be staunched by the power of IrishAmerican support and influence. Meanwhile, the parade of Irish-based dramatists, poets and men and women of letters earning acclaim within the urban centers of America also reinforced cultural connections across the Atlantic, but, as Irish success dulled the overarching memory of famine, references to the national tragedy within this milieu abated accordingly. They were still evident, as the case with Margaret Anna Cusack, or the Nun of Kenmare, who referred to the blight as a cornerstone of Ireland’s heritage, and regularly referenced the nationalist agenda, but popular theater and the public lecture halls hosting the latest celebrities for an evening’s evocation of old Ireland tended to steer clear of the dark chapter.48 The melodramatic rhetoricians dealing in high-blown sentimentality sidestepped the atrocities of the 1840s. Boucicault’s colorful prose echoing around Gaelic League halls and parlors depicted a romanticized, stock-in-trade native land, at once maudlin and histrionic, while avoiding direct reference to the mid-century devastation. Dancer and music-hall star Kitty O’Neil and showman Ned Harrigan popularized a similar brand of entertainment on the New York stage during the 1870s and 1880s, charming audiences with the lilting and the tuneful and away from the shadows of the past. By the early twentieth century, as nativist pressures combined with in-

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creasing Irish silence to mute the tragedy in the public eye, the more attractive and more affirmative evocations of home contrasted with the tough tone of nationalist rhetoric within the intellectual record.49 As the dream of a free Ireland transitioned into a reality of sorts with the dramatic events of the 1910s and 1920s, Irish-America and its famine narrative broached another transition-stage. Although deeply flawed, from any number of perspectives, the reality of Ireland’s independence was now reflected in a name and an administrative apparatus although the burden of civil strife persevered into the 1920s. The authenticity of the Free State government (at least for a majority of the country’s electorate) and that of another great figurehead in Éamon de Valera abruptly relegated the Famine’s public record to the Irish-American past. With the dramatic events of the 1920s, the memory of the Great Hunger could finally be retreated to the margins of the rapidly-assimilating ethnic group in the United States. The demise of the colorful marquee speechmakers allowed the 1840s and the years of hardship to ebb from public view, and the cornerstones of church and party and the promise of a rosier future sidelined the mid-century episode. The ethnic Irish in New York, Boston, Chicago, and the other major centers now focused on immediate challenges and long-term plans. The image of the Famine as a “cultural guillotine”50 enveloped the Irish-American public record in decades-long silence, notwithstanding the persistence of Gaelic Revival writing and artistic output seeking to fill a transatlantic cultural vacuum. The folk traditions, native customs, and panoply of cultural practices articulated in Revival artistry highlighted a survival motif now at odds with the contemporary twentieth-century public immigrant persona.51 For an Irish-American culture busy relegating its immigrant status to the past, much of this work, although heavily political in nature, remained confined within the realms of the evocative and the sentimental, in contrast to the hard edge of Gilded Age and later nineteenth-century rhetoricians.52 In effect, the later nineteenth century produced a public famine record visible through nationalist politics and an occasional artistic reference, but otherwise obliterated from the more visible parameters of Irish-American consciousness. By 1921, the narrative appeared to be safely relegated to the margins of ethnic life. The fledgling Free State marked a turning point on both sides of the Atlantic and a new chapter in the Irish-American experience as a successful ethnic profile rose out of the ashes of the dark past. As a potential liability, the Famine’s force had to be relegated to that past. Passé now, with at least partial recognition of nationalist dreams, the Great Hunger shifted out of sight. As Mick Mulcrone suggests, silence overhung the Great Hunger’s American and transatlantic legacy. Coffin-ship memory held the potential to destroy the fragile lace curtain-cultural associations of the early twentieth century such that, by the 1920s, a reality significantly more palatable than the gloom of mid-century past replaced

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the dark chapter. Mulcrone’s argument that “middle-class respectability” forced the Famine away from the ethnic consciousness is borne out by the public silence. But, he was careful to summarize, “the memory of the Great Hunger has faded, but a powerful residue remains.53 Publications offering readers a foray into “non-fiction” Ireland portrayed a vision of the native home consistent with this sanguine phase in Irish-American history. Hibernophilic authors carved out a profitable section of the book market with publications romanticizing the native home. Wallace Nutting’s Ireland Beautiful in 1925, for example, described a land of beauty and mystery filled with the charming character of the Gael. “The thought of Ireland,” Nutting enthused, “is accompanied by a tingle and a thrill. It appeals to all our being.” His honeyed tone advocated that the country’s history and heritage rendered the Irish “perhaps the most interesting people on earth.”54 Interesting stuff in the late 1920s, as the land in question struggled through civil war and battled to sustain vulnerable independence. But the vexations of realism rarely troubled those fixated on an emerald isle unfettered and free. Irish-American acculturation and integration progressed similarly through the 1930s and 40s, as the forces of Depression, wartime, and the glister of a rising cultural movement foregrounding Kennedy glamour relegated public famine recollection and reference to the point of virtual oblivion. The issue of ethnic assimilation and integration remained much more prominent than any form of public commemoration, or even reference to the lack of attention on the events of the previous century, across the United States, on the occasion of the Famine’s centenary. The historical record’s evasion of reference to the Famine, its memory, or its status within mid-twentieth century Irish-America is conspicuous, but hardly surprising, given that evocation of the Great Hunger basically lacked a public role within the Irish-American mindset. President John F. Kennedy’s characterization of Ireland as a nation blessed with a bright future reinforced the darkness of the previous century and safely relegated the memory of the distant past to the past on both sides of the Atlantic.55 Efforts in Ireland during the same mid-twentieth century era to generate the first comprehensive history of the event proved challenging enough.56 As Susan A. Crane advanced, the historian may be challenged by a past “lying everywhere in ruins,”57 but surely a century’s worth of reflection proved sufficient to empower public remembrance? Evidently not, as the case for ethnic Irish who successfully assimilated into the commonality of the culture, but had not yet reached the point where the Irish-American historical narrative could publicly include the Famine.58 Even by the 1960s, the ethnic community could not yet build on the “moral unity” necessary to formalize public recognition of the Famine in its past.59 By the late twentieth century, indeed, the ethnic culture still lacked what Crane termed “form for the content,” with regard to Famine memory and

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reference.60 Those aspects of Ireland’s heritage surviving the transatlantic crossing sufficiently well to take root in the United States played a significant role in its shaping, and men and women from the four provinces institutionalized cultural phenomena directly representative of their counties and locales of origin, as the historical record shows. But the scar of Famine and its intellectual and cultural baggage occupied a separate place in the immigrant consciousness to that of the religious, labor, and political affiliations publicly defining the Irish-American experience. If the forms and structures necessary for cultural remembrance were not yet evident by the years of the Kennedy presidency and the turbulence of 1960s activism, it is clear they required a stimulus, as yet unformed, under which to mobilize. What is clear, at least, is that the close of this particular Irish-American century marked a transition toward a later stage that would not only include but embrace Famine remembrance as a major component of its intellectual and cultural foundation.

NOTES 1. See David Eltis, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson, “Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas,” The American Historical Review 112 (2007): 1329–1358. The article maps out key approaches, highlighting the debate over the primacy of “Old World influences” versus “New World environment” in shaping immigration and settlement in the United States. Alison Games, “Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities,” The American Historical Review 111 (2006): 741–757, discusses coherence within the field, among other focuses. 2. John Higham’s 1961 argument that “states of mind” and “the appeal of an idea” contribute significantly to “a distinctive subject matter” is still useful. See his “American Intellectual History: A Critical Appraisal” in American Quarterly 13 (1961): 219–233. For an update, see Eric Miller’s “Intellectual History after the Earthquakes: A Study in Discourse,” in The History Teacher 30 (1997): 357–371 and Geoffrey Cubitt’s overview in History and Memory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). 3. Classics include Lawrence McCaffrey’s The Irish Diaspora in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), and Dennis Clark’s Erin’s Heirs: Irish Bonds of Community (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991). 4. The limited parameters of this essay preclude attention to recent developments in Irish history, but R. F. Foster’s Modern Ireland 1600–1971 (London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1988) is still a useful introduction. See newer material such as Patrick Maume, ed., D. P. Moran, The Philosophy of Irish Ireland (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2007) for perspective. 5. See Eric Miller’s definitions of “contextualism” and “the new cultural history” in “Intellectual History after the Earthquakes.” 6. As examples see Michael Doorley’s Irish-American Diaspora Nationalism: The Friends of Irish Freedom, 1916–1935 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005), as well as

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my The Shamrock and the Lily: The New York Irish and the Creation of a Transatlantic Identity, 1845–1921 (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2005). 7. Conor Cruise O’Brien, God Land: Reflections on Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 33. 8. As with recent attention to transatlantic history, transnational history has expanded significantly; see C. A. Bayly, et al., “AHR Conversation: On Transnational History,” The American Historical Review 111 (2006): 1440–1464. Chris Bayly’s interpretation encompasses “a sense of movement and interpenetration,” (1442) and diasporas within different national contexts. Sanjeev Khagram and Peggy Levitt’s The Transnational Studies Reader: Intersections and Innovations (New York: Routledge, 2008) includes key contributions to the field. 9. Christopher Morash usefully discusses “canon formation” in famine writing, and speaks to recent interdisciplinary efforts to this end. See his essay “An Afterword on Silence” in George Cusack and Sarah Goss, eds., Hungry Words: Images of Famine in the Irish Canon (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006), 300–308. 10. David Hackett Fischer discusses reduction, among other hurdles to good history. Somewhat reassuringly, he states that “The reductive fallacy…exists in several common forms, none of which can be entirely avoided in any historical interpretation” in his Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 172. 11. Cultural history is, by now, a remarkably expansive field, and the confines of this essay preclude thoroughgoing documentation. From the wide literature, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991); Peter Burke’s Varieties of Cultural History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), and Joe Cleary and Claire Connolly, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005) are useful starting points. 12. Susan A. Crane, Collecting and Historical Consciousness in Early NineteenthCentury Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 80. Gabrielle M. Spiegel provides a useful update on key debates in her “Comment on A Crooked Line,” The American Historical Review 113 (April 2008): 406–416. See also the focus of that forum: Geoff Eley’s A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005). 13. The vogue for transatlantic history is now evident for some time, and new material adds deeper understanding. Steven G. Reinhardt and Dennis Reinhartz, eds., Transatlantic History (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006) is useful in this regard. 14. R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 5. 15. See Gearóid Ó Túathaigh, Ireland Before the Famine, 1798–1848 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1972) for coverage; and also more recent interpretations such as Eóin Flannery’s Versions of Ireland: Empire, Modernity and Resistance in Irish Culture (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2006). 16. Barry Cunliffe, The Celts: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 122. 17. Robin Kelley’s consideration of African-American intellectual history and tradition within the larger American historical context contains useful parallels to the Irish Famine case. See his “Afterword,” The Journal of American History 87 (2000): 168–171.

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18. For famine historiography, see Ruth-Ann M. Harris’s Introduction in Arthur Gribben, ed., The Great Famine and the Irish Diaspora in America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 1–20 and, more recently, Cormac Ó Gráda’s Ireland’s Great Famine: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2006). 19. On the contemporary Famine record, see Christine Kinealy’s “The Stricken Land: the Great Hunger in Ireland,” in Cusack and Goss, eds., Hungry Words, 7–28. 20. See Christopher Morash, “Making Memories: the literature of the Irish Famine,” in Patrick O’Sullivan, ed., The Irish World Wide, History, Heritage, Identity, Vol. 6, The Meaning of the Famine (London: Leicester University Press, 1997) to start. More recently, the politics of the Providential rationale for the onset of Famine are referenced throughout Cusack and Goss, eds., Hungry Words. 21. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 15–17; but Conor Cruise O’Brien’s God Land provides valuable context. 22. Hasia R. Diner, “The World of Whiteness,” Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of The Historical Society 9 (2007): 20–22. 23. See Philip Gleason’s essay “American Identity and Americanization,” in Petersen, William, Michael Novak, and Philip Gleason, Dimensions of Ethnicity: Concepts of Ethnicity (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1982): 57–143. 24. On this, see Eric Arnesen, “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination,” International Labor and Working-Class History 60 (Fall 2001): 3–32; and Kevin Kenny, ed., New Directions in Irish-American History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). 25. Jacobson, Whiteness, 48. Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 115–16. David Bennett, The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 35 and passim. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860–1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 7. 26. Robert Dunne, Antebellum Irish Immigration and Emerging Ideologies of “America”: A Protestant Backlash (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002), explores this argument. See also Kevin Kenny’s New Directions in Irish-American History, and his The American Irish: A History (New York: Pearson Education Limited, 2000) for further input. 27. Francis Costello, “The Deer Island graves, Boston: the Irish famine and IrishAmerican tradition,” in O’Sullivan, ed., The Meaning of the Famine, 113. 28. Costello covers the episode in “Deer Island graves,” The Meaning of the Famine, 114. See David A. Wilson’s Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Volume I: Passion, Reason, and Politics, 1825–1857 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008). 29. Donal Kerr, “The Catholic Church and the Famine,” in Breandán Ó Conaire, ed., The Famine Lectures; Léachtaí an Ghorta (Roscommon: Cómhdáil an Chraoimbhín, 1995–97), 127. 30. Costello, “Deer Island graves,” The Meaning of the Famine, 115–117. 31. William Bennett, Narrative of a Recent Journey of Six Weeks in Ireland (London: C. Gilpin, 1847), 25–26. 32. Kinealy quotes $170 as the figure in question. Christine Kinealy, “The Great Irish Famine: A Dangerous Memory?” in Gribben, ed., The Great Famine and the Irish Diaspora, 251; also quoted by Kinealy in “Potatoes, providence and philanthropy: the

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role of private charity during the Irish Famine,” in O’Sullivan, ed., The Meaning of the Famine,163. 33. Kinealy, “Potatoes, providence and philanthropy,” O’Sullivan, ed., The Meaning of the Famine, 159. 34. See Kerby Miller’s Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), and Edward McCarron’s “Famine Lifelines: The Transatlantic Letters of James Prendergast” in David A. Valone and Christine Kinealy, eds., Ireland’s Great Hunger: Silence, Memory, and Commemoration (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2002). 35. Ruth-Ann M. Harris provides an overview in “’Where the poor man is not crushed down to exalt the aristocrat’: Vere Foster’s programme’s of assisted emigration in the aftermath of the Irish Famine,” in O’Sullivan, ed., The Meaning of the Famine, 172–194. 36. See David Bennett, The Party of Fear, for details. 37. Miller in Emigrants and Exiles discusses pressures borne by Famine survivors. 38. Patricia Ferreira, “All But ‘A Black Skin and Wooly Hair’: Frederick Douglass’s Witness of the Irish Famine,” in American Studies International, 37, (1999): 77. 39. Right Reverend John Hughes, D.D., Bishop of New York, A Lecture on the Antecedent Causes of the Irish Famine in 1847, Delivered under the Auspices of the General Committee for the Relief of the Suffering Poor of Ireland (New York: Edward Dunigan, Fulton Street, 1847), final page. 40. See Neil Hogan’s “The Famine Beat: American Newspaper Coverage of the Great Hunger,” in Gribben, ed., The Great Famine and the Irish Diaspora, 155–179. Quotation, 158. 41. See Chapter 9 of James S. Donnelly’s The Great Irish Potato Famine (Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 2002), on the generation of Famine memory up to 1900. 42. Patrick O’Farrell’s “Whose Reality? The Irish Famine in History and Literature,” Historical Studies 20 (1982): 1–13 is useful here. 43. Michael D. Higgins and Declan Kiberd, “Culture and Exile: The Global Irish,” in New Hibernia Review 1 (1997): 11. 44. Graham Davis underscores the importance of the “Mitchel thesis” in “The Historiography of the Irish Famine” in O’Sullivan, ed., The Meaning of the Famine, 15–19. See also O’Farrell’s “Whose Reality?” in Historical Studies 20 (1982): 1–13. 45. Christopher Morash, “Making Memories: the literature of the Irish Famine,” in O’Sullivan, ed., The Meaning of the Famine, 42. See also Graham Davis, “Making History: John Mitchel and the Great Famine,” in Paul Hyland and Neil Sammells, eds., Irish Writing: Exile and Subversion (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991). 46. Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996), 148. Christine Kinealy references Mitchel in A Death-Dealing Famine: The Great Hunger in Ireland (London: Pluto Press, 1997), 6. See also Donnelly’s The Great Irish Potato Famine, Chapter 9. 47. Kerby Miller and Bruce Boling, “Golden Streets, Bitter Tears: The Irish Image of America During the Era of Mass Migration,” in Journal of American Ethnic History 10 (1990–1991): 16–36. 48. See my New York-based The Shamrock and the Lily for more on nationalist dramatic output.

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49. See Don Meade, “Kitty O’Neil and Her ‘Champion Jig’: An Irish Dancer on the New York Stage,” New Hibernia Review 6 (2002): 9–22 on O’Neil’s career; also Úna Ní Bhróiméil, “The Creation of an Irish Culture in the United States: the Gaelic Movement, 1870–1915,” New Hibernia Review 5 (2001): 87–100, and her Building Irish Identity in America, 1870–1915: The Gaelic Revival (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), on language and ethnic identity. 50. Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination,105. 51. Ní Bhróiméil’s “The Creation of an Irish Culture,” New Hibernia Review 5 (2001): 87–100, addresses the revival within Irish-America. 52. Arguing that the Famine was solely responsible for the destruction of the traditional native world over-simplifies factors of significance. Was a decline in native Irish language usage not already evident prior to the Famine? Were many of the traditional customs not already disappearing? Did others not survive past the Famine decade? Louis M. Cullen raises these issues in “The Politics of the Famine and of Famine Historiography,” in Ó Conaire, ed., The Famine Lectures, 166–188, especially 179–180. See too Kevin Kenny in Chapter 3 of The American Irish. 53. Mick Mulcrone, “The Famine and Collective Memory: The Role of the Irish American Press in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Gribben, ed., The Great Famine, 234–35. 54. Wallace Nutting, Ireland Beautiful (New York: Bonanza Books, 1925), 3, 19. 55. See President John F. Kennedy’s “Address Before the Irish Parliament,” Leinster House, Dublin; June 28, 1963: http://www.jfklibrary.org/ 56. See Chapter 12, “Making Famine History in Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s” in Cormac Ó Gráda’s Ireland’s Great Famine, 234–250. 57. Susan A. Crane, Collecting and Historical Consciousness, 36. 58. The idea of a “national literature” is discussed in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin’s The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 16 and passim. 59. The term “moral unity” is used by Arthur G. Neal in his National Trauma and Collective Memory (New York and London: M. E. Sharpe, 2005), 20 and passim. 60. Crane, Collecting and Historical Consciousness, 105.

9 Remembering Homelessness and the Great Irish Famine Niamh Ann Kelly

At the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin hangs a painting by the Scottish artist Erskine Nicol called An Ejected Family, 1853 [Fig. 9.1]. A family of seven make up a portrait of hopelessness: they have been evicted from their cottage, on the viewer’s left. The woman is pieta-like and cradles her swaddled baby. The central male figure stands the tallest, no doubt indicating that he is the breadwinner of this family. As he casts a doleful look back at his former home, his wife and his young daughter gaze at him appealingly. An elderly man stands to his right, with downcast posture. He leans heavily on his walking stick and the shoulder of the younger man. Dark clouds loom over the family group and dominate the foreground. By contrast, in the background the thatched cottage they have left has gathered about it the aura of a classical scene. The break in cloud and relative sunlight bathe the cottage in a nostalgic glow of what has forcibly become the past for this family. Even the trees behind it suggests an earlier calmer time when compared to the windbent tree on the right. Further back in the distance golden fields provide a peaceable view of the Irish midlands. Meanwhile in the present, it is a stormy outlook for this stricken peasant family, homeless and on the move. In remembering the Famine many emotive devices and cultural forms have been used in various representational strategies. A recurring theme that has demonstrated an uncanny power to evoke a nostalgic type of remembrance is homelessness and, in particular, eviction. From nineteenthcentury art, such as Nicol’s image, through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, cottages have been appropriated and interpreted in representations of eviction. Importantly, their context in the Irish landscape 140

Figure 9.1. Erskine Nicol, An Ejected Family, 1853. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Ireland. Photo © The National Gallery of Ireland.

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and correlation to human presence are pivotal to how these small dwelling structures function as indicators of homelessness in remembering the Famine and poverty more broadly. In this paper I will explore how historical landlessness and contingent ideas of dispossession are re-presented in memorials relating to the cottage. As dispossession was usually predicated by landlessness and resulted in homelessness in nineteenth-century Ireland, I will first discuss homelessness as it appears in nineteenth- and twentieth-century painting. I will focus on how the motif of the cottage is deployed in such art. I will then consider how more recent commemorative sites have engaged with conventions of historical documentary to transform cottages into locations of collective memorial. Finally, I will look at the ways in which disintegrating dwelling structures resonate in processes of memorial through their dis-location and eventual absence. Perceptions of visibility, authenticity and the complex relationship between past and present all contribute to my analysis of how homelessness has been variously addressed through the cottage: its representation, remnants and where it is has disappeared. The cottage has been read as an image, an icon and an index,1 a historical document, a trace of, or in its absence a missing link to, the past. I want to focus on what I argue is a core duality at the heart of interpretations and appropriations of the cottage in remembering famine-era homelessness. On the one hand, cottages symbolize tragic loss: ruined shells stand throughout Ireland as reminders of the violence and tragedy of poverty in famine times. On the other hand, cottages remain as positive signifiers of a way of life interrupted by the Famine and its aftermath. I suggest this duality is derived from a modern philosophical tension between positive material identity and associative non-identity. This reflects, respectively, on the fraught nature of obvious or visible memorial practice more widely, with its inherent implication of forgetting and the promise of letting go of a painful past, and on affiliations made through time between a subject and a location collectively deemed as ‘historic.’ To provide a useful analysis of the implications of this duality in how homelessness is remembered, I need to begin with an account of what ‘the cottage’ refers to in an Irish historical context. This raises difficult questions about allusions to the cottage and its images as means of looking back to the past. A structure long-associated with Ireland and pioneered as such by tourism trades, the thatch-roofed cottage is an idiosyncratic take on a basic domestic dwelling. It is a quintessentially Irish-looking home and, significantly, a rural one. Bothán—an Irish Gaelic word for it—connotes in Ireland a sense of historical poverty related to the lives of our Irish forebears.2 Its rudimentary form and cheap materials point to a meager standard of living. A census in 1841 described four types of dwellings in Ireland. The third and fourth smallest of these were the living accommodation of over

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three-quarters of the Irish population.3 The lowest class of hut was typically a one-roomed mud cabin, while the second lowest varied between two to four rooms in size and had windows. In these cabin cottages, the cottier class—non-property-holding land workers who lived in cottages—lived during Famine times. Parents, children (an average of eight per family), older family relatives and animals slept in close proximity at night. Built around a large hearth, the cabins were typically bereft of furniture, made of stone and had a thatched roof.4 The Irish cottage then can be described as a material cue to a historically impoverished lifestyle. However, it does so by suggesting relativities on two distinct levels. Alongside its negative memory of poverty and penury, lies a positive affiliation between the cottage structure and a time before the population depletion of famine times. At the heart of this duality ‘regarding’ cottages is the double standard of early modernist thought, articulated most clearly through ideas of primitivism. In this regard, the cottage’s form can imply a lack of societal advancement in an urban modernist sense, and can also convey a positive statement of cultural identity. From the outset of early modernism, primitivistic outlooks encourage a restricted view of rural life and are definitively constructed from outside such working communities.5 However, looking back at accumulative conditions arising from a situation of mass hunger in nineteenth-century Ireland today presents the cottage as also emblematic of a way of life destroyed by and during the famine period. Before I proceed further with my analysis I want to tease out these two understandings more fully as they frame how the cottage is read and re-constituted in famine memorials. The first reading—the cottage as a reminder of penury—is both historically and geographically contingent. Specifically, in many representational displays relating the narrative of the Famine, from the anecdotal to the national, ideas of difference are invoked to create a them-and-us paradigm in which to tell, or rather construct, the story, based on differences made apparent between eras and/or locations.6 This paradigm exists as: the colonizer and colonized; the wealthy and impoverished; the landed and landless and; latterly with more controversy, the survivor and victim. In today’s media climate this strategy is common also. For example, the locations of today’s famines outside of the so-called West are often reported in comparison to the Europe’s past.7 In this context, named sites of cottages and their images become triggers for neo-colonial associations between ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘identity’ and ‘non-identity’, that in effect realign old lines of colonial differentiation through a system of positivism, literally, on display. The second reading—the cottage as a signifier of a location specific cultural identity—relates directly to the impact of emigration during and after the Famine on retrospective ideas of homelessness in Ireland. During the Famine, a £4 Rating Clause meant landlords were responsible for holdings

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under £4, while the Gregory Quarter Acre Claim decreed that there was no relief for a cottier who held more than a quarter acre. As a result, small farmers caught in-between these descriptors became ‘a parasitic encumbrance’ for landlords—being neither self-sufficient nor usefully dependent.8 This resulted in both voluntary migrations and forced evictions for many farm-labouring families from their homes. Those who could headed to the coast for better luck elsewhere, adding to large waves of emigration noticeable since the 1830s.9 At home, overdue rents on the land, along with faltering system of crops for cover and growing social unrest, contributed to increasing numbers of evictions. Some landlords encouraged emigration as a means of reducing population density on their lands, even using force of fire to ensure a dwelling could not be returned to. As one official measure of addressing this dire situation, the Relief Commissioners to Ireland set about attempting to coordinate food aid around the country in conjunction with local workhouses and manual labor programs through amendments to the Poor Law.10 In parts of the west of Ireland the land was so poor and rocky that stonewalls were built instead of roads, in a landscape increasingly depopulated and interspersed with burnt out cottages and emptying villages. Therefore the image of an Irish cottage is readily aligned with the loss of not only a specific family’s home but also of a collective way of life. Indeed today, similar looking cottages dotted around the Irish countryside—typically much larger, warmer and generally better facilitated than those that previously stood in their place—are likely to be understood as symbols of a chosen cultural association rather than habitations resulting from financial paucity.11 Central to these alternate associations of the cottage is a critique on the place of authenticity and its substitute in remembrance. Postmemory is often summoned in related discussions on negative, or bad, histories, for example on Holocaust memory. Ideas of postmemory offer a means of recall for events that were not directly experienced by the subject in contemporary life. Marianne Hirsch discusses the example of a photograph that, as the viewer looks at it, looks back through the eyes of those depicted in it, thus creating what she terms “the visual space of postmemory.” She writes: the relationship of children of survivors of cultural or collective trauma to the experiences of their parents, experiences that they ‘remember’ only as the stories and images with which they grew up, but that are so powerful, so monumental, as to constitute memories in their own right. The term is meant to convey its temporal and qualitative difference from survivor memory, its secondary or second-generation memory quality, its basis in displacement, its belatedness. Postmemory is a powerful form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through projection, investment and creation.12

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By pointing to the visual space of postmemory, Hirsch suggests a useful starting point for my analysis of representations of homelessness in famine memorial practices. In the case of the Famine, those who survived it are long gone, and those who now ‘remember’ the event are at best some four or five generations removed. Still, the Famine and its echoes are felt throughout the country and among emigrant populations outside Ireland, noticeably so since the time of the 150-year commemorations in the mid1990s. With these thoughts in mind, the questions I want to address also relate to commemorative practices broadly. What are the implications of postmemory for concepts of authenticity so favored, for example, by much museum practice? How can a history of homelessness, defined by absences on many levels, be commemorated by an exhibition culture in thrall to signifiers and positivism? What do these considerations mean for sites of dispossession that have been appropriated, through time, in famine remembrance? In other words, how can we look back? I will start by returning to focus on an artwork from the nineteenth century to see firstly how an “other” looked in, and relate my example to other relevant works to illuminate my reading of it. The sense of dislocation and uncertainty brought about by circumstances such as eviction has become a potent symbolic moment in famine representations. On a wider art commentary, according to Pamela Gerrish Nunn emigration in the mid-nineteenth century was “one of the most resonant themes that painters of modern life could tackle.”13 In this context Nicol’s image of an evicted family painted in the sustained aftermath of the famine years can be read in correlation to other works on emigration more broadly and on the Famine in particular. For example, Robert G. Kelly’s An Ejectment in Ireland (also known as A Tear and a Prayer for Ireland), 1848–51, Lady Elizabeth Butler, Eviction 1890, George Frederic Watts’ The Irish Famine, 1850, Maurice McGonigal’s An Gorta 1847, c. 1947 and Seán McSweeney’s Deserted Dwellings, c. 1995, all focus on dispossession in their painted representations of destitution during and following the Famine. I want to focus on Nicol’s work as it is on continuous prominent display in Dublin, and more importantly, because it introduces ideas of how landscape, figuration and the cottage inter-relate to create an image of dispossession. Nicol was 21 years old when he first came to Ireland at a time when the Famine had already spread throughout the country. It is likely that he did not witness the worst affected areas in the rural west and south, but would have been aware of the Famine through contemporay print media. An Ejected Family was painted after the Famine but is clearly an account of its effect in relation to dispossession. As discussed by art historians, often inclined to be apolitical in his images, what he compromised on harsher depiction he made up for in meticulous contemporary description. Nicol repeatedly painted the Irish landscape with the same focussed passion he

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applied to genre scenes. According to Brendan Rooney, he even had a studio built near the Bog of Allen in the midlands of Ireland.14 The landscape in An Ejected Family is more than the setting of the scene. As well as Nicol’s clear desire to capture the elemental description of rural Ireland through his depiction of the changeable climate, the painting addresses a retrospective gaze of modern romanticism. A dramatic use of contrasts provides a narrative scheme for the work: the future is dark and uncertain while the past glows golden. Nicol has further complicated his artistic language beyond a Romantic preoccupation with pathetic fallacy. Specifically, in his rendering of the cottage and its surrounds he brings to mind the pastoral idylls of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin a century earlier. And so the past, despite its impoverishment, has quickly become a glowing memory. These interpretative possibilities also acknowledge a notion of landscape as a product of an enlightenment connection to individual experience. As Simon Schama has phrased this: “[b]efore it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock.”15 In this work Nicol has generated a ‘landscape of the mind’ for both his protagonists and his viewers in which the cottage plays a defining role. Marking the point of departure for this family from the life they have known, the cottage is activated as a sign of homelessness by both its landscape context and the presence of the family. The predominant sense of doom arising out of these pictorial elements implies Nicol’s sympathy for his Irish subjects and sets the image apart from his other less congenial representations of Irish people.16 There is an air of nobility in the triangular composition of the figures, contrasting with the implied despair of what has just happened. Despite the individual portraits of dismay, their apparently sturdy physiques and the compositional strength of the group implies they will survive this ordeal. The biblical suggestion of the figuration of the woman and baby augments this tone. At the very least, Nicol presents them in a heroic light at the moment of their dispossession. The biblical suggestion in Nicol’s painting is also apparent in works by Kelly, Watts, and McGonigal. Preston writes of the priest in Kelly’s painting, with his hand raised in hopelessness: “He is symbolically represented through Christ-like imagery—invoked by a second woman’s postures, her head deferentially bowed to kiss his hand; by the lamb and child; and the parting skies above.”17 Kelly depicts a family on the point of eviction. Watts’ concern with aesthetically inscribed heroic victim narrative beatifies his depiction, recalling artistic formulations of the resting Holy Family on their flight into Egypt.18 As in Nicol’s and Kelly’s works, displacement following the Famine is Watts’ central theme, though he omits any visual reference to a home or dwelling, focusing simply on the family resting in a nightmarish

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no-place. McGonigal’s painting provides a religiously evocative symbol of hope in the form of a Madonna and Child–like figuration: a traditionally dressed young Irish woman holds a baby in the very centre of the painting’s composition.19 Presumably a local woman of more wealth than those that surround her, she suggests both the helplessness of aid and with her pictorial positioning and her strong erect pose, the survival of Ireland as a woman—Cathleen Ní Houlihan—beyond the Famine.20 McGonigal’s image is an action-packed canvas containing a myriad of representations of famine suffering, which are all rendered in some way connected to the land. In the background the deserted shell of a stone cottage indicates the poverty that has affected all in the painting’s depiction. A stream of solemn-looking grey hunched figures march by it as they head to the shore and an uncertain future beyond Ireland’s coast, leaving behind them the destitution and desperation presented in the foreground. These images by Nicol, Kelly, Watts and McGonigal reclaim the intimate tragedy of personal dispossession and familial dislocation as active positions of collective unbelonging. Their visual representations seek out an empowered reaction to the loss of home by referring to religious idioms in art. As artists who did not suffer the Famine first hand (because of either social position during the Famine or due to living later), these painters could only look on as outsiders to an event they wished to explore in their work. And so, in choosing affirmative representations of Irish victimhood, they firmly positioned ideas of homelessness through images of cottages and/or their displaced occupants as emotive signifiers of what they perceived to be an unjust period in Irish history. Not all paintings of the Famine’s aftermath, however, presented the possibility of hope following the loss of home. Painted in the 1890s, Butler’s image of a grieving woman presents a tragic figure without obvious religious or heroic overtones. The woman is alone beside her razed cottage, as a group of figures walk away from her. She stands windswept on a hilltop in an unsympathetic and indifferent landscape of remarkable beauty.21 Striking a similarly forlorn note, though in an entirely different pictorial language, McSweeney presents an image of elegiac despair in Deserted Dwellings.22 He has painted bare forms of two cottages with no human presence in sight, and so denies the narrative implication of Butler’s work. In a lusciously coloured painting the structures are situated in a green field in front of a thick striking horizon line of red below a stormy looking sky. The compositional harmony in the work belies the implication of its title and the image is easily enveloped into a formalist poetics. Importantly, however, in the context of my discussion these two works do not romanticize the loss of home by presenting heroic evictees. Instead, Butler and McSweeney’s images are connected as they evoke the viewer’s recognition of the contradiction inherent in such memorial images: the landscape’s resilient attractiveness at once

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hides and reveals the ominous historical trauma in which the sorrowful emptying of such homes occurred. This brings me to consider how cottages function in Famine remembrance beyond their pictorial presence: as sitespecific artefacts. On Slea Head, in Fahan, County Kerry, in the south west of Ireland, the Kavanagh Famine Cottage [Fig. 9.2] is promoted as a site of famine representation. The signage up to the cottage clearly denoted it as a heritage tourist attraction. The cottage’s official website draws attention to its idyllic situation on the Dingle Peninsula overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.23 Originally, the dwelling consisted of two rooms and a loft, but now has three rooms and two outhouses. Inside there is a selection of furniture largely contemporary to the early twentieth century. On the way up the hill to the cottage an entrance cabin has a book for sale called Famine in Ireland and West Kerry by Gordon Kavanagh. A fascinating and at times disturbing account, the book outlines several anecdotes from the area as well as statistical information on the demographics, circumstance and outcomes of the Famine on the locality.24 Also in Fahan stands a group of well-preserved beehive huts, a clochán,25 thought to date from the twelfth century. The cottage then and its location point to the wider heritage of a national culture that also functions as a set of international tourist attractions. Meanwhile, a set of local histories in the book elucidate the historical complexity surrounding the interpretation of the cottage with tales passed down from previous generations. As a ‘Famine cottage’, this site is a restoration of history that re-iterates the preferred positivism of historical understanding, most ardently indicated by heritage practice’s love affair with artifacts. In its current material form, the cottage and its surroundings are a compound of times since the famine era; the accumulation of buildings and the amount of furnishings indicate a greater physical content than typical during the 1840s in that area. Relative to today’s standard of living, it appears as a depiction of poverty and as a site of early twentieth-century living points to a lifestyle of meager material wealth. This is in keeping with traditional models of documenting historical events which repeatedly and, arguably with good reason, prioritize the materiality of the past in order to eulogize the physical remnants of previous eras. However, in the process of pointing to the visible evidence of the past, the apparent distance between history and memory is often considered to be wider than it might actually be. Kevin Whelan writes of a perceived distinction between history and memory that creates, what he calls, “revisionist myopia about myth”. He describes this myopia as functioning in the following way: “history privileges events, whereas memory is attached to sites; history is experiences as a product, whereas memory exists as process.”26 By implication, an inability to distinguish usefully between history

Figure 9.2. Kavanagh Famine Cottage, Fahan, Slea Head, Country Kerry. Image courtesy of Gabriel Managh, www.irishfaminecottage.com.

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and memory fosters an unworthy faith in so-called historical truth and a contingent undermining of the role of memory in historical accounts. The corollary to Whelan’s suggestion indicates that the construction of history is as ongoing as that of the processes of memory. At a site such as the Kavanagh Famine Cottage these issues seem to collide with the pointed availability of the book and its collection of stories underlying an awareness of the limitations of the more static ‘displays’ of history provided by the cottage and its contents. Furthermore, this implies, as Hirsch suggests, that projection, creation and invention might effectively supersede recollection in remembering poverty, as they do so affectively on Slea Head. Within Ireland and its heritage tourism, this cottage functions in relation to many famine dwellings as sites of a fundamentally intangible memory or postmemory. Other cottages and clusters of cottages throughout rural Ireland are not as overtly marked as the Kavanagh Famine Cottage. Emptied of dwellers over long periods of time, many suffered their most significant population depletion during and in the immediate aftermath of the Famine. Some have since been transformed, as at Cill Rialaig on Bolus Head, County Kerry. This once entirely deserted prefamine village now has a double life. Part of it has been converted into an artists’ residency and another section has been left in a ruined state, from when it was last vacated. High on a peninsula at times shrouded in fog, with breath-taking views of the Atlantic Ocean, the ‘famine village’—as it is referred to locally and in tourist information—is set in a perversely sublime environment. Its context also means that as the village is situated in an area of attraction for tourists, there is a delicate balance to maintain between its various functions.27 This is increasingly critical in Ireland, as in recent years rural tourism has arguably declined in face of growing urban tourism. Other so-called famine villages remain entirely uninhabited and largely unaltered. Slievemore in Achill County Mayo [Fig. 9.3], for example, is comprised of a huddled group of the shells of former homes, nestled silently in the landscape. In fact, the village is overgrown and so appears to be at one with its natural context. It is widely regarded as a site of famine remembrance though, as Bob Kingston points out, “the date and reasons for the demise to this village are unclear.”28 He writes that “social disruption caused by . . . increased rents, the Famines and the Great Hunger may all have contributed.” There is little signage and no interpretative centre within sight. To find it visitors must seek the area out on a map, ask locals or stumble across it on a country walk. A place that has not yet been overtly manipulated into a memorial, the Slievemore village remains the opposite of representation: a tacit repository defined by what remain but more significantly, by what is missing and who was there before we were.

Figure 9.3.Deserted Village Cottages, Slievemore, Achill, County Mayo. Image courtesy of www.achilltourism. com. Copyright John McNamara.

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Uninhabited famine cottages or ‘deserted’ villages become just that in the naming of them, reflecting to some degree on Schama’s articulation of the idea that the act of identifying a place presupposes our presence and the “cultural backpacks” we carry.29 The Kavanagh Cottage, Cill Rialaig and the Slievemore village are representations of what stood in their place and were once lived in. The respective site-specific cumulative histories of these cottages, as they emptied of human presence, today reside somewhere in the visual-physical space of postmemory, beyond formal representation. To varying degrees the ways in which these sites are promoted, or not, acknowledge that as visitors stand by in or among the restorations and remnants of these cottage structures, they engage with a memory of homelessness that was never actually theirs. Beyond these site-specific histories of dispossession, however, lie other, apparently arbitrary, means of commemorating homelessness. Not only has the cottage been appropriated in famine art and transformed in Ireland as a site of famine remembrance, it has also been, literally, transported. The Irish Hunger Memorial [Fig. 9.4] by artist Brian Tolle and landscape architect Gail Wittwer-Laird was opened in 2002 in Battery Park, New York City. The memorial consists of a grassy quarter-acre site and a cottage that were originally situated in Carrodoogan, Attymass, near Ballina in Co Mayo Ireland, donated by Chris and Tom Slack and families. Reflective of the passage made by thousands of immigrants from Ireland to the U.S., the relocation of the cottage creates an unexpected famine memorial. The cottage is thought to have been first constructed as early as the 1820s and is made up of three rooms. Though this means it is larger in size than the average holding of a rural-based family during famine times, it is, like the Kavanagh Famine Cottage, associated in the eyes of today’s viewers with a generalized sense of past Irish poverty. On the west side of the memorial is a cairn-like entrance reminiscent of a Megalithic structure in Ireland.30 This is comparable to the Kavanagh Famine Cottage’s serendipitous location near beehive huts. As the proximity of beehive huts lend the weight of an older heritage to the Kavanagh Famine Cottage, the cairn association of the Irish Hunger Memorial positions it in a lineage of Irish architectural structures that make up an Irish cultural heritage, recognizable at home and abroad. The court cairn element was originally incorporated into the New York design to satisfy the city authority’s desire to build the monument at an angle so that a scenic view of the water could be assured for the visitors. It also recalls an ancient burial chamber situated near the Slack cottage’s original site in Mayo. By its inclusion, this form of entrance definitively adds an overtly symbolical form of representation to the memorial’s claim to authenticity or the ‘real’ suggested by the painstaking relocation of stones and clay across the Atlantic. Exported shining Kilkenny limestone cladding lines the corridor and adds to the self-consciously Irish

Figure 9.4. Brian Tolle and Gail Wittwer-Laird, The Irish Hunger Memorial, 2002, Battery Park, New York City. Reproduced with permission of Brian Tolle and the Battery Park City Authority. Photo by Stan Ries.

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elements of the memorial. The entrance is banded with frosted glass text panels and a changing audio plays, with music and various people speaking about poverty. This memorial follows on a period beginning in the mid-1990s, when a number of memorials and exhibitions were organized to coincide with the 150-year commemoration of the Irish Famine. Interestingly, at the same time, as Andreas Huyssen describes it, a “monumental mania” hit Germany. In his critique of this period he refers to Robert Musil’s comments that “there is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument.”31 Huyssen suggests that monumental architecture seems to guarantee permanence and provide a bulwark against the speed-up of time, the shifting ground of urban space and the “transitoriness of modern life.”32 He argues for a more ephemeral memorial practice to be pioneered that would engage with remembrance in ways that might reflect on memory as a process.33 This contention closely relates to Whelan’s critique of reductive simplifications of understanding history as a product of time that might otherwise be negotiated as an ongoing process or a continuous mesh of memory and events. Monuments and demarcated memorial sites then, such as the Irish Hunger Memorial, arguably provide viewers with an opportunity to forget, as well as to remember, and in that sense become emblems of collective catharsis. However, as a so-called imported memory, the Irish Hunger Memorial sits decidedly and no doubt intentionally at odds with its situation—a downtown business district. This contextual contrast forces visitors to consider distances in time, between the past and the present, and in geography, between Co Mayo and New York. Equally, these contrasts forge links between perceptions of then and now; there and here. In this way, the site conveys both the existence of a historic past and that past’s intangible nature. This correlates to Hirsch’s account of photographs in her thesis on postmemory as: “fragmentary sources and building blocks of the work of postmemory, they affirm the past’s existence, its ‘having-been there,’ and in their flat twodimensionality, they also signal its insurmountable distance.”34 In Battery Park layers of history and problematic patterns of memorial are intertwined with a profound sense of dislocation in the present. As with the cottages in Ireland I have discussed, the stones and clay of the Irish Hunger Memorial are, paradoxically, positive material proof of poverty. More significantly, the alterations and symbolic transformation of the Mayo site into a New York memorial points to a conjured memory of homelessness, similar to the effect of gazing at a photograph from another era. Playing with a tension between presence and absence, the Irish Hunger Memorial points to the tentative positions of cottages as artifacts, in the Irish context. The imminent threat to Famine cottages as sites of collective postmemory of dispossession is that of finally becoming, literally, invisible. But what does this mean for sites that are almost invisible to start with?

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In his introduction to a discussion on the Irish Hunger Memorial, David Frankel raises the specter of silent memory, by recalling an earlier visit he made to rural Ireland: Visiting family in Tipperary a few years back, I was told of a place somewhere close—though I doubt I could find it again—that was described as a kind of memorial to the Irish Famine of the 1840s and ‘50s. In a history populous with trauma, the famine—the Great Famine, it is called—is a vaster one; spend time in Ireland and you will likely hear talk of it eventually, but it drifts on the edge of memory and visibility, everywhere and nowhere, present in vacancy, in the spaces marked by the ruined cottage and field walls of the emptied western counties more than in any solid monument. I decided to see this memorial, which was actually a graveyard for the famine’s local dead. It was down a lane, which quickly turned unpaved; and since the day was wet—in fact it was pouring—the lane was mud, impassably so. We never reached the cemetery itself, but we got to a place where we could see it through the rain. There was no monument nor even any gravestone. What we saw was an empty field [ . . . ] I can’t say that the field in Tipperary was the best way to commemorate such suffering, but even so the place, or the circumstance, had a sharp intensity.35

Frankel articulates a silent inactive memorial that lies in and on the land of Ireland. The unmarked burial sites throughout the countryside are even less visible than the unnamed ruins of deserted cottages. Frankel’s story points to a conundrum for commemorative practice more generally: at a collective level, can loss or absence be presented at all? Could such a presentation avoid being symbolically transformed, and thereby potentially compromised, into a mere representation? Retrospective memorials are about the invigoration of history: their construction involves a conscious process that provokes a visibly described identification with the past. In accounts of homelessness, cottages as complex embodiments of the Famine find a meaningful source in both their positive and negative identity associations. Firstly, they act as material signifiers of the impoverishment in which those most severely hit by the Famine lived. At the same time, as emptied structures, they became emblematic of a rural community lifestyle eventually defeated by the same poverty that had defined it. To consider the lifestyle lost, with its implications of domestic simplicity and societal purity, encourages a neo-primitivist retrospective view or even nostalgia. In what terms then can we consider the fields where cottages once stood, were once lived in, but are no longer visible? How can we name the roads walked by dispossessed families? And what crosses our minds when we climb over stonewalls built by those displaced in the 1840s and after? I started this paper by suggesting that memorial practices reflect on a modernist dilemma between positive material identity and associative non-identity. On further consideration, how readings of commemorative art and sites of memorial negotiate this duality can also be recognized as a critique of the

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place of authenticity in strategies of remembering. When considering how homelessness is represented in Famine remembrance, the reality of dispossession further undermine ideas of history as visibly presentable at all. Rogoff describes dispossession: “[t]he moment in which loss is clearly marked and articulated is also the moment in which something else, as yet unnamed, has come into being.”36 My analysis addressed what has ‘come into being’ in terms of art and memorials that represent dispossession resulting in homelessness. Homelessness appears through the form of the cottage in art that, self-consciously or otherwise, represents famine themes. In the examples I have looked at the loss of home is depicted through representations of the cottage at the point of a family’s departure; after it has been emptied or damaged; or of families on the road. Cottages themselves have also become sites for projected, or conjured, remembrance in Ireland and abroad. My account of the cottage as an image, as an artifact and interpreting its own site of memory raises the question: is it possible to elide the reductive potentials associated with positivism when looking at homelessness in famine art and memorials, or bad histories more widely? Perhaps embracing a meaningful practice of remembrance can only involve the ongoing construction and deconstruction of concepts of memorial and how that process may or may not relate to visible or monumental forms, as Huyssen indicates. Hirsch puts the problem another way, writing of a challenge for the postmemorial artist “to find the balance that allows the spectator to enter the image, to imagine the disaster, but that disallows an over-appropriative identification that makes the distances disappear, creating too available, too easy an access to this particular past.”37 In representations of famine-era homelessness, the cottage has been evoked, alluded to, appropriated and transformed. I began by looking at painted representations of the Irish cottage at the point of emptying and ended by indicating unmarked locations where dispossession ‘occurred’ (leaving cottages) and where its social consequences were ‘enacted’ (roads walked, walls built). In between these counterpoints, the rural contexts in which ruins of deserted cottages still stand compete with powerful traditions of Romantic and picturesque viewpoints but remain, nonetheless, resonant with an affective atmosphere of absence. This absence is articulated by human presence and promotes the illusion of proximity to authentic experience which the makers and viewers of conventional painted representations and constructed memorials can only dream about; these ruins appear as the ghosts of memory.

NOTES 1. Robin Lydenberg outlines the difficulty of static representations in relation to the Irish landscape and explores how cottages have been variously utilized as

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indexical traces in contemporary art: “pointing always towards an irrecoverable elsewhere” in ‘From Icon to Index: Some Contemporary Visions of the Irish Stone Cottage’ Eire/Land: Depictions of the Irish Landscape from Medieval Manuscripts to Contemporary Paintings, ed. Vera Kreilkamp (Boston: McMullen Museum of Art & Boston College, 2003), 132. I am interested in this observation also, and in this paper I am keen to delve beyond representational practices and will progress from a consideration of images of cottages to explore their implications as artefacts and the resonance of memory in their absence. 2. Literally translated bothán means small dwelling, or hut. Brian P. Kennedy discusses the connotations of the cottage in the early 20th century: “‘Cottage’ became almost a pejorative word, especially in the west of Ireland, where everyone wanted to live in a ‘house.’ The term ‘cottage’ referred to a dwelling that was rented from someone else, whether a landlord or a farmer in the past, of a local authority more recently.” Brian P. Kennedy, “The Traditional Irish Thatched House: Image and Reality, 1793–1993.” in Visualizing Ireland—National Identity and the Pictorial Tradition, edited by Adele M. Dalsimer, (London: Faber & Faber, 1993), 173. 3. James S. Donnelly, The Great Irish Potato Famine (London: Sutton Press, 2001), 2. In 1845, cottiers formed the bulk of the Irish population of 8.2 million. Alvin Jackson, Ireland 1798–1999 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1999). 4. Stephen J. Campbell, The Great Irish Famine, Words and Images from the Famine Museum Strokestown Park, County Roscommon (Strokestown: The Famine Museum, 1994), 15. Kennedy also discusses the centrality of the hearth to the cottage design, “The Traditional Irish Thatched House,” 169. 5. I am referring here to ways in which artists and, more powerfully, the art market and related histories of art exhibition since the nineteenth century have emphasized the ‘looking in’ at a rural culture, primarily differentiated as alternative to the urban origin of both artists and art markets. The ways in which Paul Gauguin’s work is promoted and historicized exemplifies this. 6. Johannes Fabian discusses this more fully in his book Time and the Other, How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). Ideas of difference are also apparent in some displays at the Strokestown Famine Museum, for example, which utilizes visible differentiation between landowners and land workers in order to tell the story of that estate during the Famine. 7. Fintan O’Toole acknowledges by implication the recurrence of this outlook. In a review of a 1995 production of Tom Murphy’s play, Famine, he writes: “Famine is simply unique as a western representation of hunger that is about ‘us’ not ‘them’. All our images of starvation, even the most compassionate, journalistic representations, are images of the suffering to be consumed by the relatively comfortable.” Fintan O’Toole, “Some Food for Thought” in the Irish Times Theatre Festival Guide, 1995. Fabian’s book also elaborates on this concept. He correlates the equivalences we, the ‘West’, create with astonishing ease between time and space in the implication that the other is back there; the other was. Fabian, Time and the Other, 6, 16–18. 8. Kevin Whelan, “Immoral Economy: Interpreting Erskine Nicol’s The Tenant” in Boston College Museum of Art. America’s Eye: The Irish Art of Brian P. Burns (Massachusetts: Boston College Museum of Art. 1996), 59. 9. In Rowan Gillespie—Looking for Orion (Dublin: O’Brien Press, 2007), Roger Kohn writes that during the Famine: “Some two million refugees boarded ships for Liverpool, en route to the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand,” 86, and later:

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“As a result of Ireland’s diaspora, there are now an estimated forty million people of Irish descent around the world, compared to a home population of just over four million,” 91. Overcrowding and lack of adequate sanitation on the part of shipping companies led to the so-called Coffin Ships that set sail for the US and Canada during the years worst affected by the Famine. 10. Stuart McLean discusses the family’s centrality in Irish life in his reference to the fact that when Ireland was divided into 130 unions, each with their own workhouse, admission to the workhouses was strictly by family though internally families and gender were separated. Stuart McLean, The Event and its Terrors—Ireland, Famine, Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 59. The increase in unions was a result of the Poor Law Amendment (Ireland) act of June 1847. Jackson, Ireland 1798–1999, 75. In Donnelly, The Great Irish Potato Famine, he notes: “the 130 poor law unions into which Ireland was divided were each self-contained raisers and spenders of their own tax revenue; the poorest unions in the country had to go it alone, even though their ratepayers might well sink under the accumulating weight of the levies needed to support a growing mass of pauperism” (22). From August 1846, labor programs or relief works were administrated by the Board of Works, with the building or repair of roads and bridges the main activities. Ibid., 71. 11. In fact, in recent years the Department of The Environment, Heritage and Local Government has offered Thatching Grants as an encouragement to restore the traditional roofing method throughout the country. 12. Marianne Hirsch, “Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy” in Acts of Memory. Cultural Recall in the Present, edited by Mieke Bal, Jonathon Crewe, Leo Spitzer (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999), 7–8. 13. Pamela Gerrish Nunn, Problem Pictures, Women and Men in Victorian Painting (Menston: Scolar Press, 1995), 125. 14. Rooney discusses this in relation to Nicol’s The Old Cabin Door, a painting of an Irish bothóg interior with three small children. In it, Nicol provided a startling visual account of the poverty of the hut and its basic utensils, only to distract the viewer with a chirpy little bird perched at the doorway. Brendan Rooney, “Erskine Nicol R.S.A. A.R.A. 1825–1904,” in Irish Paintings in the National Gallery of Ireland, vol. I, edited by Nicola Figgis and Brendan Rooney (Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland, 2001), 14–17. 15. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Vintage, 1996), 6–7. 16. For example, Nicol tended to satirically stereotype the Irish male peasant and usually presented him wearing a long coat, breeches and hat, often with a slightly buffoonish aspect to indicate the supposed delusion of grandeur associated with the Irish peasant. Marie Bourke and Sighle Bhreathnach-Lynch, Discover Irish Art at the National Gallery of Ireland (Dublin: The National Gallery of Ireland, 1999), 116. 17. Margaret Preston, “Visualizing the Famine in County Mayo,” in Eire/Land: Depictions of the Irish Landscape from Medieval Manuscripts to Contemporary Paintings, edited by Vera Kreilkamp, (Boston: McMullen Museum of Art & Boston College, 2003), 80–81. This work focuses on the moment of dislocation itself. The sky metaphorically betrays the gloom of the moment and the darkness of the immanent future. Preston writes: “Although only statistical works can reveal the

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scale of Kelly’s subject matter, his image offers a human face to the trauma of eviction.” The interaction between the British soldiers enacting their command and the evictees is forefronted as the kneeling woman begs for a different circumstance and the small child presses away one soldier. In Kelly’s depiction the emphasis moves, more blatantly than in Nicol’s, from the violent act of dispossession to the creation of martyrs. 18. This work is indicative of Watts’ interest in the plight of the poor, more universally. He was much traveled and renowned for his portraiture, and though friendly with the Pre-Raphealites, his interest was more clearly developed in his allegorical—and often blatantly moralistic—works. In this painting the art historical reference is apparent in the composition and lack of contextual specificity. This recalls many artistic formulations of the migrating Holy Family. For example: John Valentine Haidt (Rest on the Flight into Egypt, 1754–1774) and Rembrandt van Rjin (Rest on the Flight into Egypt, 1647). Watts’ image, however, is distinctly modernized by comparison in the directness of the man’s gaze at the viewer, thus implying the viewer’s responsibility to him and his family. 19. For example, see the works by Raphael (Madonna del Granduca, 1505), Filippo Lippi (Madonna and Child, 1440–45). This work was submitted to the 1946 “Exhibition of original paintings of Irish Historical Interest.” This was organised in connection with the Centenary Commemoration of Thomas Davis and the Young Ireland Movement and held in National College of Art and Design, Dublin. 20. Cathleen Ní Houlihan is a personification of Ireland—usually, but not always—as an old woman in need of the aid of young Irish men to free her from British Rule. She is often homeless and is sometimes referred to as Sean-Bhean Bhocht (poor old woman). William Butler Yeats wrote a play Cathleen Ní Houlihan in 1902 on the theme of heroism and Irish nationalism. 21. Anne Crookshank and the Knight of Glin recount an unfortunate impact Butler’s rendering of the landscape had on the British Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury: “he remarked on the ‘breezy beauty’ of the landscape, which almost made him wish that he could take part in an eviction himself” in Ireland’s Painters 1600–1940 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 263. 22. This work was exhibited in the 1995 exhibition ‘Famine,’ organized by the George Moore Society in Claremorris. 23. http://www.faminecottage.com/ 24. Many of these stories refer to burial and one, for example, tells of a man in nearby Kenmare who came upon a dog dragging the head of a child along the road: “After a struggle, he took the head from the dog and buried it nearby. The family who owned the child did not report its death as they were claiming outdoor relief for the child.” Gordon Kavanagh Famine in Ireland and West Kerry (Kerry: Gordon Kavanagh and Gabriel Kavanagh, 2003), 77. 25. Clochán is an Irish Gaelic word describing stepping stones, but is also used to refer to a group or cluster of dwellings. 26. This, Whelan suggests, is why “Irish historians are in thrall to an even more striking myth—that history itself is not a form of myth, and that it alone can escape the constructive element of narrative form.” Kevin Whelan, “Between Filiation and Affiliation, The Politics of Postcolonial Memory,” in Ireland and Postcolonial Theory, ed. Clare Carroll & Patricia King (Cork: Cork University Press, 2003), 98.

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27. Noelle Campbell Sharpe, gallery owner and formerly a magazine magnate, has been the key motivator behind the partial renovations. A local concern regarding access rights to the peninsula draws attention to an economic factor. Careful monitoring of the crumbling road is constantly needed so as to avoid overuse of the route along the precipice by busloads of international tourists, eager to ‘snap’ the beautiful view. This arose in conversation with Noelle Campbell Sharpe, while I was researching an article on Irish Art Residencies. Naimh Ann Kelly, “Chinese Whispers, A Portfolio of Residencies. Circa 93,” (Autumn 2000):15–17. 28. These quotations are taken from Kingston’s text to his Map of Achill. Bob Kingston, Achill Island Map and Guide (Achill Island: Bob Kingston, 1988). 29. Schama, Landscape and Memory, 7. 30. Court cairns are megalithic monuments based on a rounded forecourt with a flat-roofed gallery leading to a usually ovoid chamber. The purpose of the court cairns are uncertain, they may have been used for burial, but more likely were sites of ritual cult ceremonies for scattered populations. Peter Harbison, Pre-Christian Ireland - From The First Settlers to the Early Celts (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), 47, 50–51. These and later related structures of passage tombs, such as Newgrange and others in the Boyne Valley, are cherished by Irish heritage groups and central to touristic promotion of Ireland’s historic architectural past. 31. Robert Musil, Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, trans. by Peter Wortsman (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Archipelago Books 2006), 64. 32. Andreas Huyssen, “Monumental Sedcution,” in Acts of Memory. Cultural Recall in the Present, edited by Mieke Bal, Jonathon Crewe, and Leo Spitzer (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999), 200. 33. In many ways the projects of Jochen Gerz translate these ideas into a memorial practice that shifts between visibility and invisibility. 34. Hirsch, “Projected Memory,” 10. 35. David Frankel, “Hunger Artist: David Frankel on Brian Tolle—On Site.” Art Forum 40 (2002):35. 36. Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma (London: Routledge, 2000), 3. 37. Hirsch, “Projected Memory,” 10.

10 “She must have come steerage”: The Great Famine in New England Folk Memory E. Moore Quinn

In the first stanza of “The Voice” by Irish songwriter Brendan Graham, one encounters the following lines: Listen my child you say to me I am the voice of your history Be not afraid; come follow me Answer my call and I’ll set you free.

Later lines identify the speaker as “the voice:” I am the voice in the wind and the pouring rain I am the voice of your hunger and pain I am the voice that always is calling you I am the voice I will remain.

The song concludes with a reminder: I am the voice of the past that will always be Filled with my sorrows and blood in my fields I am the voice of the future Bring me your peace and my wounds They will heal.1

On a number of levels, we might consider why this song won the Eurovision song contest in 1996. One reason is undoubtedly its veiled reference 161

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to famine and suffering. Especially in lines such as “I am the voice of your hunger and pain” and “I am the voice of the past that will always be/Filled with my sorrows and blood in my fields,” attention is drawn to an ancestral speaker who self-identifies as “the voice” of former times. Not only describing it as one of hunger and pain, but also asserting that blood and sorrow have been linked to the past for aye, the speaker’s voice is not unlike recent discourses by commemorative speakers chosen to speak at dedications of famine memorials, parks, and theme-oriented tourist attractions in Ireland and the United States. We witness in Graham’s song and in famine discourses generally an insistent urge to remember and to open up a discussion about what was once a highly tabooed topic, that of the Famine. Named, appropriately, “The Great Silence,”2 its reverberations were felt around the globe. In this paper, I explore three key aspects of this discussion. First, I argue that by looking at narrative memoirs collected from New England informants who were either children or grandchildren of famine emigrants, one finds a continuum of silence that ranged from a total (perhaps intentional) “forgetting” to what Elie Wiesel refers to as “gasping for breath” images.3 Silences between words and halts between sentences surrender to haikulike pictures of social reality that reveal how famine survivors collectively bequeathed legacies of memory to their offspring. Bernstein notes that in narrative self-reflection, past events are “rehearsed as turning points in a life-history”4 and it is from this lens that we might view highly truncated snippets about a dramatic and eventful Irish past. Irish-American narratives were fragmented and anecdotal. Although in no part of the folklore collection was a full-blown description of the Famine revealed, brief sketches might be interpreted as the circulation of selected stories, told at family gatherings and elsewhere and shared within the confines of small-group culture. Arguably, in order to persist through future generations, these narratives were an important resource for group identity, stored until the time was right to share their “too important” secret with outsiders.5 The second part of the paper considers some possibilities as to why the Great Silence ensued. In so doing, it contributes to a larger academic discussion by suggesting that Irish and subsequent Irish-American proverbial lore transmitted an ingrained belief system patterned on self-reliance, fatalism, trust, justice, and, most saliently, “holding one’s tongue” in the face of personal difficulty. Not unlike other societies that cherish their belief systems and hold them dear,6 the Irish maintained explicit cultural ideas concerning time, history, patience, honor and fair play. These views, many of which came to the fore at salient junctures of Irish history, functioned as an interlocking set of values that were reproduced verbally in the New World; as such, they informed immigrants’ behaviors and contributed to a

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sense of stability. Simultaneously, the penchant for practicing the caveat, “Whatever you say, say nothing”7 persisted. Finally, in sesquicentennial and post-sesquicentennial periods, speeches from the dedications of famine memorials such as those in New York City, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and elsewhere are noticeable for how they express difference from former Irish and Irish-American ideologies.8 Clearly resonating with certain lines of Graham’s song, these newer discourses indicate how and in what manner a narrative shift is unfolding. Thwarting the older belief system regarding silence and self-reliance, these narratives are couched within a larger global rhetoric, one that aligns itself with Holocaust and refugee stories and revelations of other kinds of catastrophic events. In so doing, the narratives eschew the warning that Binn béal ina thost: “The silent mouth is sweet.” As a byproduct, they index, especially as Irish Americans relinquished certain aspects of their ethnic identity to larger, predominantly American, cultural ideologies, a lack of interest in the retention of certain expressive and proverbial forms. Over a number of years, I gathered Irish-American folklore from New England residents born in the United States who were descendents of immigrants from Ireland. Contacted via public forms of communication like radio stations, newspapers and Hibernian Hall bulletins, informants provided memories of the verbal expressions and personal recollections of parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends and family members. My methods included individual and group interviews and a questionnaire. Of the thirty-two counties in Ireland, all but two (Louth and Meath) are represented in the collection. Cork, Mayo and Galway figure predominantly. The questionnaire included name and address, place and date of birth, rearing, family information (i.e., size of family, ethnic heritage and language spoken at home), education, apprenticeship, and training. Questions were asked regarding circumstances of familial emigration, immigration, and United States travel. Other important points focused upon church and organizational membership, special interests, and the importance of material culture. I asked my informants about their repertoires of oral and traditional lore. What folklorists and anthropologists refer to as “floating material,” local expressions and idioms, was suggested. During the process of collecting wisecracks, folk and popular jokes, similes and metaphors, I inquired into samples of speech and conversation, sermons and prayers, nicknames, proverbial and popular sayings, and curious mottoes and slogans. The following is indicative of the types of questions posed: “Where, when and from whom did you get this story (tale, proverb)?” “Are there other versions?” “Do you like any others more (or less) than this one?” “Why do you feel the way you do about them?” “Do these tales or stories ‘belong’ to any specific person or family?” “What is the (tale, story, proverb) about?” “What do you

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think of it?” “When do you think about it?” “When did you tell it in the past?” “When do you tell it now?” “What else would you like to say?” Questions such as these were expanded, depending upon the nature of the material that arose. I utilized Kenneth Goldstein’s “finding lists” technique, whereby I attempted to “jog memory” by mentioning motifs and themes that had already surfaced from other informants.9 When appropriate, I described the atmosphere of the surroundings. I recorded who gathered around in house, hall or building, how the person was questioned, what physical and other attributes characterized my informant(s), and how the oral lore was gathered. Heeding the vast and varied collecting scope of Seán O’Súilleabháin, I queried my informants about livelihood and support, settlements and dwellings, communications and trade, and rites of passage. Historical, religious (or mythological) traditions were solicited, as were the principles and rules governing popular beliefs and practices.10 This holistic approach took place over a number of years; as often as possible, I attempted to collect speech in action, as it occurred in particular situations and moments in time. For example, in one instance of gathering memories about the Famine, an informant who had been talking about his mother’s memories added an emotional piece of collateral information about British colonial authorities. He exclaimed, “Now you understand why we’re the way we are. Sure wasn’t it them that did it to us?” Despite such an outburst, the folklore collection as a whole reveals that “The Great Silence” was alive and well in the United States. This is not surprising in light of the fact that the Famine precipitated the disruption of social standards and mores.11 In an interview with Boston College Magazine, Kevin O’Neill goes so far as to suggest that the discussion of the Famine was verboten: The memories were awful, and one way to deal with awful memories is simply to suppress them. But another reason for the taboo was that to broach the subject of the [F]amine was to open [up] a very serious problem to discussion. And the problem was the breakdown of the social system.”12

Even a cursory glance at the folklore collection reveals that O’Neill is correct; it appears that many of the Irish in America were reluctant to contribute to the further disintegration of their cultural beliefs by discussing the Famine. Informants repeatedly confessed: “I don’t think I have enough information.” “I hardly remember much.” “Not much!” Such comments were coupled with a sense of self-deprecation in the admission of not being able to provide assistance: “It’s a sparse store . . . . ” “[I] don’t believe I’d be of much help.” These quotes may represent an honest lack of remembrance or they may be the result of “intentional forgetting,”13 a reluctance to open old wounds and revisit a painful past. One informant queried, “What’s the point of recalling all of that?”

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Other consultants, however, were inclined to reveal something. From a thorough lack of knowledge and/or complete unwillingness to speak emerged what I refer to as “sound bite memories.” For example, many Irish Americans recalled having heard only two words from parents and/or grandparents: “coffin ships” (or, as Daniel O’Connell referred to them, “ocean hearses).”14 Sound-bite memories survived in such irreverent nicknames as “Paddy’s Wigwam,” a reference to the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Liverpool, England, where many Irish worshipped before setting sail for America. Likewise, the sailors’ slogan, “Emigrants out and timber back” aptly described the practice of using Irish women, men and children for human ballast in the crossing.15 Sound-bite memories are not unlike what Greenspan, in writing about Holocaust narratives, describes as “a staccato of snapshot images . . . in a state of rising extremity, without plot development.”16 The power of the sound bite makes its impression despite its brevity; the starkness of the image leaves an impression not likely to be forgotten. The next verbal position along the continuum of silence is what I call “the coming over” narrative. Almost as silent as the aforementioned, it was an attempt on the part of informants to explain famine situations via very limited remembrances of dates, events, or reasons for leaving: “1845–1847. Famine. Irish fled to America.” “My great grandfather came during famine. Nine children scattered to Australia and the (United) States; one stayed [behind] to care for parents.” “[My] maternal grandfather’s family came (to the United States) as a result of [her] father’s death and Potato Famine.” “Mother came out when she was eighteen years old . . . .” “She hated trip on boat.” “She hated the boat–[she] must have come steerage.” Like sound-bite memories, coming over narratives are, as Greenspan notes, “terse, sharp, and etched in stone. Every word contains a hundred, and the silence between the words . . . becomes a fully palpable, sometimes consuming, presence.”17 However, what differentiates this set of memories is a context, an attempt to build a brief narrative of what happened. The tiniest of details was provided, such as the age of coming over, the manner by which one traveled, the whereabouts—and even the number—of family members forced to scatter to Australia and the United States. The phrase, “one stayed to care for parents,” strikes as a poignant recollection, especially in light of what scholars of this volume and others have discerned about Ireland’s distraught situation.18 The final two quotations, replicated in nearly identical words, are gendered narratives, revealing children’s memories of mothers’ and grandmothers’ expressions of intense dislike for the vessels upon which they traveled. Despite its brevity, one coming over narrative condenses information in a format that seems to function according to the rules of a well-made

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play: “Grandmother Curran . . . Family . . . How poor . . . How glad she was to be able to ‘get out and come to the states.’” Providing only essential information in a highly crystallized manner, the informant named her ancestor, situated within a family blighted and highlighted by poverty. We grasp the weightiness of the situation in the words “how poor,” which function as the turning point and lead to resolution of conflict in the final act: the emotional response that emerged from being able to “get out.” Grandmother Curran’s gladness resonates with the “emigration proverb,” “There is hope from the mouth of the sea but none from the mouth of the grave.”19 Denny Mumby notes that narrative is a symbolic act that acquires meaning within a social context. Yet at the same time narrative also plays a role in the construction of that context. The latter becomes “a site of meaning within which human actors are implicated.”20 What is even more interesting is the fact that, rather than being monolithic in structure, narrative is an emergent, co-creative endeavor, one that generates, reproduces, and legitimates both speakers and listeners. This perspective serves as a heuristic by which to understand narratives about familial behaviors in Irish America. For instance, another grateful, albeit self-centered, response to being able to escape hunger and death came from an informant who described her father’s personal “grace after meals.” “This is the grace my father said after each meal: ‘Thanks be to God for the next meal, I’m sure of this one now.’” The informant added: “Must be a throw-back to the Famine days.” Due to the fact that the informant indicated the repetitive nature of her immigrant father’s grace/prayer, its ritualistic element is easily recognized. In it is the perceived need to express thanksgiving for the future boon of being well fed, in contrast to uttering thanks for the presently received meal. Such an irreverent verbal strategy runs counter to the normal functioning of ritual language, which tends to address the distant past with a “special behavioral and attitudinal context.”21 However, it is easy to perceive how important it was for this father to stave off feared future hunger. Via the utterance of a very few words, he invoked heavenly forces to grace him with blessing and provide him with a prophylactic against future doom. Roger McHugh notes that, in Ireland, the older generation dated “a decline in Christian charity” from the time of the Famine.22 By being forced to horde, to deny rather than to extend generosity, community integrity in Ireland suffered.23 The next formulaic was reported as a grace before meals: God bless me and my wife, My son John and his wife, Us four And no more. Amen.

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Clearly the speaker, a father, sought from God a blessing for a highly restricted set of persons, one that included himself as the petitioner, his wife, his son, and his daughter-in-law. At the time, asking for favor for a very narrowly defined group ran counter to the tenets of Irish hospitality. We have only to think of such customary greetings as Céad Míle Fáilte (“A Hundred Thousand Welcomes”) to understand how Irish culture deemed it proper to treat both friends and strangers. As early as the eighth century in Ireland, hospitality was “a legal obligation and a social duty.”24 The refusal to offer the appropriate hospitable response carried extreme cultural censure and disapprobation. In the aforementioned grace/prayer, however, rejection of one’s fellows gains momentum. With such words as “Us four/And no more,” the prayer requests that anyone beyond the limits of the small family be excluded. In effect, then, the father prayed that his little clan be promoted at the expense of others and that the latter be prevented from gaining access to good fortune. By extension, wishing that God refuse to others the blessing that (hopefully) would be granted to the seeker, the latter attempted to insure that misfortune would in effect befall those outsiders. The closing word “Amen” in this context strikes as the final curse, the ultimate act of social denial. Such were the depths, in the context of a former welcoming culture, into which Irish Americans had fallen as a result of the Famine. As this example indicates, some not only thought in illiberal terms; they lived by them and even transmitted them to children. By repeating and remembering this ritual prayer said by a parent, my informant revealed how she mastered one type of language acquisition, the manner by which personal benefit for herself could be sought and how she might beseech God to prevent from betterment those not of her ilk. A longer plea of this type, one with a number of variants, hoped that enemies might be identified: “May those who love us, love us, and those that don’t love us, may the Lord turn their hearts toward us, and if he can’t turn their hearts, may he turn their ankles, so we know them by their gimp.” In what at first appears to be a set of hierarchical requests, this prayer-like blessing operates via a set of “boons,” favors oriented toward a sense of survival. It appears as if the one in prayer is saying, “If I’m asking too much, may I get this, and if even that is too much, I’ll retreat; I’ll ask for and settle for less.” The irony and humor, of course, are to be found in the fact that even receiving the lowest request on the hierarchy gives the petitioner great advantage: the ability to be apprised of one’s enemies. In effect, then, what might at first appear to be the least important of requests turns out to be the most salient. Moreover, from the rather abstract notion of “turning their hearts” to the more practical behavior of “turning their ankles,” the blessing turns to curse, morphing from the petitioning

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of good for oneself to what is perceived by the petitioner as the greater good: the granting of an infliction of infirmity upon one’s soon-to-berecognized enemies. As this last example indicates, the ability to identify one’s foes played a key role in Irish-American famine survival lore, even when the name of the Famine itself was not mentioned. Kenneally notes that, “The question of whether and to what extent the Famine was a willed attempt at genocide still—rightly or wrongly—teases the Irish mind.”25 However, in many examples from the Irish-American folklore collection, there was little doubt, for in it appear the aforementioned, “Sure, wasn’t it them that did it to us?” I also heard the very similar, “Twas the British who did it to us” and the oft-repeated, “God sent the blight, but the British sent the Famine.” This latter expression gained popular parlance both in Ireland and in America.26 Other informants linked the Famine to the British in more highly emotional outbursts: “’The only good Englishman is a dead Englishman.’ [This was] said with much bitterness left over from famine. Family Split up. Tragedy.” Another commented that there was “A hatred toward the English for the inflictions of their race. Loss of religious practice, suppression of Gaelic language, starvation, killings, loss of homeland, etc.” This informant’s recollections presented a succession of painful episodes, only one of which provided an implicit reference to the Famine. However, the use of the word “starvation” speaks volumes, assuming a greater weightiness when couched within what might be dubbed a “litany of grievances” against the British. It also provides further insight into how the IrishAmerican belief system functioned cognitively. Not unlike other social groups’ ideals, its assumptions and predispositions were both prescriptive and proscriptive, enabling societal members to operate with a collective, predictable worldview.27 In many discussions of the Irish homeland in general, the suffering inflicted upon County Mayo as a specific location of aggrieved memory figured predominantly. For example, the expression, “Mayo, God help us!” surfaced as one of the most recollected memories in the collection. Some consultants provided additional explanations: “When people would mention County Mayo, most Irishmen would add, ‘God Help Us!’” One informant connected the Famine directly to Mayo: “The Famine in Ireland. County Mayo was the hardest hit.” The equating of the Famine with a severe blow returns us to the aforementioned concept of the enemy. The polysemic metaphor “hardest hit” refers not only to “natural” forces such as blight and weather; it also references physical body blows that might be received in fighting or combat. Another informant, providing a sketch-like narrative of Mayo, explained why the blessing in the second half of the statement was added, and how the poor “ranked” those more

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destitute than they: “My grandmother said [that], when asked where you were from, ‘County Mayo, Oh my God’ was the customary reply. She said [that adding] ‘Oh my God’ was a blessing on the painful memory, as they believed that they [the inhabitants of Mayo] were the poorest of the poor.” With its implication that the responder to the question may have been the informant’s own grandmother who herself hailed from County Mayo, this quote affirms the realization that Mayo immigrants were seeking a way to “bless themselves,” that is to say, to create a ritualistic formula to enhance their own well-being when confronted with having to respond to the painful memory of physical and territorial loss. Another informant, revealing that his intention was to redirect attention away from seeking salvation and towards requesting protection, revealed that he had altered the expression to “Mayo, God bless us!” In the larger context of his knowledge about Mayo and the memories told by his parents, however, it is clear that such a move changed the meaning but slightly. On the other hand, such word replacement sets at some remove the sense of guilt that the Irish who escaped death via starvation and illness are said to have shared, both in Ireland and in the United States. The assignation of blame upon the Irish themselves for the Famine has been documented by a number of scholars. Priests, for example, faulted parishioners for wasting surplus potatoes, explaining that the Famine was God’s punishment for profligacy. The British accused the Irish of causing their own problems;28 famine victims were castigated for consuming a “morally inferior food.”29 Two different and separate examples from the folklore collection indicate how Irish Americans reproduced the rhetoric of blame, shame, and overall inferiority for the situation in which they found themselves. Interestingly, it is here that we recognize an opening up of the continuum of the discourse of silence, a movement away from strictly staccato-like images witnessed in sound bites and coming over narratives and towards short narratives: “There was the Irishman that thought the epitome of being well-off was to be able to afford roast beef. Whenever he saw a new invention he would say, ‘I bet the man that got that up has eaten roast beef!’” During the Famine, agrarian unrest in Ireland, rather than the shortage of food, was the topic that made headlines. The rhetoric of a violent people and their “backward” dietary habits worked successfully as a strategy by the British to retard relief efforts.30 Such discourse had its psychological repercussions in America as well as in Ireland. As this anecdote suggests, certain “potato-eaters” internalized notions that cleverness or intellectual acuity resulted from eating “superior” foods (like roast beef) which were, as this case indicates, thought by some to be “the food of inventors.” Another informant, in a discussion of the Famine, told me: “Many of the Irish died because they refused to eat the skins of potatoes.” She concluded: “Everyone

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knows that all of the nourishment [of the potatoes] is in the skins.” This variety of the “blaming the victim” policy reproduced the rhetoric of the ignorant Irish unable to recognize the virtues of their most staple foodstuff. Unquestionably, however, over a number of generations Irish women and men had arrived at an empirical understanding of how various parts of the potato affected their overall health and well-being. A number of scholars, for example, have documented many aspects of potato planting and harvesting;31 others have drawn attention to the importance of landscape in the Irish worldview.32 Antain Mac Lochlainn disputes the charge that the Irish during the time of the Famine were feckless: It’s very easy to think of these people as just sort of a pathetic group . . . dull, suffering, as if they weren’t really capable of trying to protect themselves or do anything for themselves . . . as if this Famine came and they died. That’s demeaning, dehumanizing, for those people to be regarded like that, because they did try to protect themselves and they did try to defend against disease.33

Coupled with the assumption of guilt for the Famine was the Irish American penchant for belittling personal difficulties. For instance, the frequently recalled expression “That’s small potatoes” was uttered to indicate the unimportance of some situation or episode occurring in everyday life. Of course, as those in folklore studies know, it is not uncommon to find similar expressions in a variety of places and among disparate groups: folklore in general recognizes no geographic nor political boundary. However, the “staying power” of this expression and others like it in Irish-American folklore lends credence to the fact that they figured predominantly in the overall belief system of this emigrant ethnic group. Returning to the subject of The Great Silence, it is important to note some of the many theories proffered in terms of its perpetuation. Experimental psychologists Margaret Matlin and David Stang label as “the Pollyanna Principle” the human penchant for recalling the positive rather than the negative.34 Perhaps this sheds some light on the rather curious fact that in Ireland, a country that seems preoccupied with its own history, no commemoration marked the hundredth anniversary of the catastrophe. Some theorists argue that the travail of a world at war precluded such memorials;35 others recognize that the descendants of strong farmers, agents and shopkeepers who had “grabbed” land from evicted cottiers were reluctant to revisit or interrogate ancestral exploits. As regards the latter, the aforementioned codes of Irish courtesy militated against indicting neighbors or drawing attention to the history of increased estates.36 If silence among the folk resulted from collective guilt or fear of causing chagrin among the more well-to-do, one must inquire into the reason be-

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hind the academic silence which accompanied the marking of the famine’s centennial. Apart from the fact that little university or government support existed for such a project, few Irish historians were qualified for the task of reconstructing the evidence. When a major work did appear on the subject in 1956, its tone was unemotional and restrained: It may be that [the authors] tended to internalize the assumptions of the English historiography of their generation. [The authors] did their doctorates in London . . . and Cambridge. The external examiners in all Irish universities came from England. Irish historians of that generation were bound to be conscious of the widespread English assumption that they might be prone to wild flights of exotic Celtic fantasy, that any claims that sounded remotely exaggerated were in danger of being dismissed as extravagant.37

Recoiling from familiar images of the Irish by the British, Irish historians of the mid-twentieth century developed a highly detached approach. This strategy was in keeping with the scholarly methodology of the time, which devalued oral history as an important historical resource despite its possible usefulness in helping researchers apprehend the psychological particulars of the Famine. Moreover, fearful of escalating the continuing troubles in the North of Ireland, Irish historians tended to downplay the horrors of the famine years, a policy which was tantamount to exonerating the British for their famine policies.38 While accepting these probable explanations as to why the Great Silence occurred, I suggest that attention to Irish and Irish-American lore indicates that, engrained in the Irish belief system were proverbs and sayings, many with Irish language equivalents, which proscribed verbalizing personal difficulties in any overt and continuing sense. For the most part, belief systems reside at the level of assumptions and predispositions rather than at the level of constructed explanations.39 Most obvious in terms of Irish lore were everyday expressions such as Ná bí [ag] cainte: “Don’t be talking” and philosophical comments on life like Ceileann súil an ní ná feiceann: “The eye shuns what it does not see.”40 In Irish-American recollections, this proverb became “What the eye does not see, the mind does not remember.” Other Irish American proverbs operated with what amounted to an ethical mandate to advance or impede group behavior. They fell into five broad categories: a sense of self-reliance; a fatalistic attitude toward life; a recognition that patience and justice would be rewarded; a sense of trust that circumstances would improve; and, perhaps most important for any understanding of the continuum of silence, an injunction against the verbalization of one’s difficulties. First, a sense of self-reliance, with slight variation in interpretation, was conveyed in Cuidich fein leat, is cuidichidh Dia leat: “Assist thyself, and God will aid thee.”41 In Irish-American circles, the language of the proverb Cuidigheann

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Dia leis a té a chuidigheas leis féin42 was forgotten, but the translation “God helps him who helps himself” and its variant “God helps those who help themselves” were retained. In Ireland, the proverb, Níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán féin: “There is no fireplace like your own fireplace,”43 conveyed not only the value of one’s hearth and home, but the wish that a daughter would be able to find a proper match in order to be spared the need to emigrate.44 In light of the circumstances of emigration, it is no wonder that Irish Americans retained this proverb as they attempted to elevate their circumstances in An t-Oilean Úr, the New World. Second, a broad sense of fatalism, characterized by injunctions to keep expectations in check, accept what is given, put things in perspective, and be content with little, was contained in proverbs like Ní buintear fuil as tornap:45 “One cannot draw blood from a turnip,” Glac an rud do gheobhair:46 “Take what you get” (sometimes said with the additional words, “and be glad you’ve got it”), and Is dénta áil d’égin: “A virtue must be made of necessity”47 (or, as many Irish Americans recalled it, “Do the best you can with what you’ve got).” Likewise, the recognition “There’s nothing so bad that it could not be worse”48 and the counsel “When all else fails, welcome haws”49 emphasized the importance of taking difficulties in stride. Third, the adherence to patience in the face of difficult circumstances was expressed by Is subhailce an fhoighid nach d-tugann náire: “Patience is a virtue that causes no shame,”50 shortened in Irish-American circles to “Patience is a virtue.” A trust that good would emerge from trouble, that misfortune would be reversed, and that justice and fair play would triumph appeared in the Irish proverb Is olc an ghaoth nach séideann do dhuine éigin: “It is a bad wind that doesn’t blow for someone;”51 this was reiterated in Irish America as “It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good.”52 “However long the road there comes a turning”53 and its variant, “It’s a long road that has no turning”54 indicated how Irish Americans rationalized injustice and redirected their sights toward retribution. Similarly, a belief that situations would improve on their own and a faith in divine intervention manifest in such bons mots as Dá fhad lá, tagann oíche: “Even the longest day has its end”55 and Giorra cabhair Dé ná an doras: “God’s help is nearer than the door.”56 Irish American proverbial expressions that guarded against discussions of trouble are most telling for they reveal how women and men were cautioned against verbosity. Bíonn cluasa ar na clathacha: “Fences have ears” or “Walls have ears” served as cautionary tales to guard one’s tongue.57 The Irish expression, Is minic a ghearr teanga dhuine a scornach: “Don’t let your tongue cut your throat” was mentioned along with Ná gearradh do theanga do shrón féin: “Don’t let your tongue break your nose.” Is furas beagan cainte a leasughad: “It is easy to mend little talk”58 and its variant “Least said, soonest mended”59 were remarked upon with a great deal of frequency, as was

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Labraid duine, innisid Dia: “Man talks, but God sheweth the event”60 and its variants “Man talks but God directs”61 and “Man makes plans and God laughs.” Clearly, external forces were not the only operatives insuring the persistence of “The Great Silence;” Irish and Irish American familial and group constraints operated at the level of language and had a significant impact on the cultural acquisition process. I turn now to my third focus, the emergence of a new set of discourses that may be interpreted as the culture’s willingness to entertain and address previously “forgotten” and neglected information. Over the last few years, the rhetoric of civic leaders and politicians appears to be reversing the aforementioned caveats against discussion of the Famine. For example, on July 23, l997, the first American Famine Memorial was dedicated in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At this event John Flaherty, President of the Cambridge Celtic Arts Society and co-founder of the Memorial, referred frequently to not only remembering but to “proper” remembering. He also linked the Famine to events in the modern world: We are all familiar with the results of the Famine and our human population. What we are not so familiar with is the brutalizing results it had on our culture, on our language, on our music, and on our very way of life. One Famine survivor, an old woman, summed this up in a handwritten memoir. She wrote, ‘Sport and pastimes disappeared. Poetry, music and dancing all stopped. They lost and forgot all. The Famine killed everything.’ Very shortly, with the unveiling of this monument we are making sure that the memory of the Famine will not become a casualty as well. It is crucial that we remember and acknowledge this painful history. As John Fitzgerald Kennedy once said, ‘A knowledge of the past prepares us for the crisis of the present and the challenge of the future.’ . . . Today, however, we gather to commemorate an event that is not remembered to the triumphant tunes of drums and bugles and bagpipes. Today, we gather to commemorate An Gorta Mór, The Great Hunger. . . . We remember, we remember the children who died with their mouths stained green from eating the grass, we remember the decision-makers in London, who could have fed the starving Irish but decided it would be good economics to clear the land of the Irish peasant class. We remember the soup being extended, but only if you would give up your land or religion, and yes, we remember those Irish, we remember those Irish who refused to give up their Irishness. We remember those Irish who chose death rather than to give up their Irishness. . . . So today, through the dedication of this monument, we are insuring that the victims of the famine will not be disregarded as neighborless numbers on a ballot sheet. They will be properly remembered with dignity and respect, as children of God. . . . In the universal spirit of both our coalition and our memorial, we note that just as it is important to remember our humble ancestors, we must also remember the brutal injustices suffered by our neighbors. The genocide against the Armenians, the enslavement of the Africans, and the almost unspeakable horror of the Jewish Holocaust. . . (italics added).62

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Following Flaherty was Mary Robinson, performing her final official act in the role of President of Ireland. Like Flaherty, she used the occasion to link commemoration of the Famine to world hunger: We share, all of us of Irish heritage, share, as part of a shaping of ourselves, an understanding now of how deeply devastated as a people we were by that Famine, how much it gives us a special empathy with developing countries . . . and I’m glad that we’re not looking back either in nostalgia or simply for Irish purposes of identity or to commend ourselves that we came through all that. We have a much more serious purpose. Why have we had a three year commemoration of An Gorta Mór, the Great Potato Famine? Because we as Irish people and people of Irish heritage have a particular reason to link with hunger and lack of safe water and malnutrition and diseases related to all of that in our modern world. And I wish we could say, as indeed is inscribed there, that in a world of plenty, there would be no famine. But . . . there is famine in our world. There is malnutrition. Hundreds of thousands, millions of children die because they don’t have access to safe water. And if anything makes me really proud as President of Ireland, it’s a sense I have that Irish people on the island of Ireland and the extended Irish family worldwide will have a particular interest and concern for those who struggle now. . . . Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir (Thank you all very much).63

Five years later, on July 16, 2002, at the dedication of the Irish Hunger Memorial Park in Battery Park, Manhattan, attention was drawn repeatedly to remembrance of famine victims. Then President of Ireland Mary McAleese stated: “We will not forget the tragedy that brought so many Irish immigrants to these shores, nor will we forget the great embrace of this wonderful country.” New York Governor George Pataki said: “The memorial will serve as a reminder to millions of New Yorkers and Americans who proudly trace their heritage to Ireland or those who were forced to emigrate during one of the most heartbreaking tragedies in the history of the world.” And like Mary Robinson, Mayor Michael Bloomberg drew awareness to suffering souls in the present day: “The memorial should remind people of those who are going hungry in the modern world. By evoking the suffering of the past, the memorial forces us to confront the suffering of the present” (italics added).64 Encountering these discourses of memory of the Famine, an aural/visual public both saw and heard its civic and political leaders entering formerly tabooed verbal arenas, speaking the unspeakable in domains of historical and cultural preservation and recalling facts once relegated to “sound-bite” status only. In addition, the populace witnessed their leaders’ attempts to link the struggles of one ethnic group to another and to recognize people’s travail in the contemporary world-at-large. In many ways, such narratives reversed the formerly described politics of exclusion and extended Irish American cognitive hospitality to those facing contemporary catastrophes. That welcoming focus had been, as Lisa Bitel asserts, the core of the Irish honor code:

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The composers of saga considered inhospitality a serious taboo; the ‘six sons of Dishonour’ included ‘Niggardliness and Refusal and Denial, Hardness and Rigour and Rapacity.’ They understood that only those who gave hospitality received it when they themselves needed it. . . . The system functioned to protect all against the hostilities of the wilderness through which they passed.65

I make three main points in this paper, which may be summarized as follows: First, in Ireland, it might have been the case that, in Petrie’s famous lines, “’The land of song’ was no longer tuneful; and, when the human sound met the traveler’s ear, it was only that of the feeble and despairing wail for the dead.”66 It may also have been true that, in Ireland, “This awful . . . silence . . . struck more fearfully upon the imagination, and gave a deeper feeling . . . than any other circumstance which had forced itself upon the attention.”67 However, as this collection of folklore demonstrates, “The Great Silence” on American soil appears to have been much more nuanced, taking on a continuum-like direction. This spectrum ranged from the near total lack of any kind of memory to “sound-bite” and “coming over” narratives revealing in miniature key turning points in emigrants’ lives, to short aphoristic prayers, blessings and historical memories having to do with both the assignation and acceptance of blame. The continuum came to light when informants were asked to recall the contexts of the past in which parents, grandparents and significant others engaged in speech acts that revealed their general assumptions and underlying ideologies.68 Second, in attempting to add to theories as to the maintenance of the Great Silence, I look at Irish-American verbal art for clues. Enshrined within it was a set of belief paradigms that emphasized self-reliance, fatalism, patience, and perhaps most important, trust that injustice would be redressed. Many oral traditions were condensed in proverbial forms that militated against “troubles-talk” in conversation ritual.69 Repeatedly, informants told me that “We didn’t air [our] dirty laundry on the line.” Third, indicative of the fact that oral tradition is always in flux, this paper makes clear, by considering rhetoric of some important famine memorials in the United States, that a strong focus on remembering is emerging. As Irish-Americans attempt to restore some sense of understanding of their past, they allow us to discern that a continuum of memory existed for their ancestors, one which enabled them to forget as well as remember. As Kirstin Langellier and Eric Peterson note, storytelling in families and other small-group cultures involves “a multileveled strategic process constrained by social and historical conditions, oriented by a variety of narrative means and structures, framed by the interactional dynamics of telling and audiencing, and punctuated by particular choices and actions.”70 In Storytelling in Irish Tradition, Seán Ó Súilleabháin tells the story of an old man who, long after the great narrative tradition had fallen into ruins, attempted to

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recite an Irish tale “in traditional fashion.” Although no one paid him any mind or thanked him when he had finished, suddenly “a voice was heard to speak three times from the chimney: “Faid saoil chugat, a fhiannaí!” (sic; “Long life to you, storyteller!”). Ó Súilleabháin asserts, “[It was] as if some dead narrator had returned to pay him due tribute.”71 The ongoing shift of Great Famine discourse allows for a linking of one’s ancestral past to other catastrophic events in the here and now. The contemporary subverting of the paradigm of silence obviates the ancestral necessity for it, redresses famine emigrants’ painful recalcitrance to involve themselves with others’ plights, and provides for the restoration of values endemic to pre-catastrophic Ireland. Again, the opening lines of “The Voice” prove instructive: Listen, my child, you say to me I am the voice of your history Be not afraid, come follow me Answer my call and I’ll set you free.72

“The Voice” seeks to distance its offspring from the silence-inducing ideologies that informed so much of the past. The initial lines ask the child to listen, yet it is the descendant who does the advising. The words seek a retreat from fear, as if listening to the voice of history will provide a path that will be both redemptive and liberating, Similar to the repetitive focus on memory experienced in the speeches of John Flaherty, Mary Robinson, Mary McAleese and others, the focus on being “set free” in the last line of “The Voice” harks to the notions of service and attentiveness to those in Third World countries suffering from hunger today.

NOTES I would like to thank the Irish American Cultural Institute for the financial support to undertake this project. I extend special thanks to the innumerable contributors to the folklore project. I also owe a debt of gratitude to David Valone for his patience and advice. 1. Brendan Graham. The Voice. Peer Music, Inc., 1996. 2. Seán De Fréine, The Great Silence (Cork: Mercier Press, 1965). 3. Cited in Henry Greenspan, “Lives as Texts: Symptoms as Modes of Recounting in the Life Histories of Holocaust Survivors,” in Storied Lives: The Cultural Politics of Self Understanding, ed. George C. Rosenwald and Richard L. Ochberg (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 145–164. 4. J. L. Bernstein, “Self Knowledge as Praxis: Narrative and Narration in Psychoanalysis,” in Narrative in Culture: The Uses of Storytelling in the Sciences, Philosophy and Literature, ed. Cristopher Nash (New York: Routledge, 1990), 51–77.

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5. Kristin M. Langellier and Eric E. Peterson, “Family Storytelling as a Strategy of Social Control,” in Narrative and Social Control, ed. Dennis K. Mumby (London: Sage, 1993), 49–76. 6. Marilyn Trent Grunkemeyer, “Belief Systems,” in Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology, ed. David Levinson and Melvin Ember (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996), 1:125. 7. “Whatever you say, say nothing,” sometimes abbreviated to the simple, “Say nothing,” is a well-known expression in the North of Ireland in particular. It treats the practice of reticence as a virtue. 8. For example, see Lorrie Blair, “(De)Constructing the Irish Famine Memorial in Contemporary Quebec,” in Ireland’s Great Hunger: Silence, Memory and Commemoration, ed. David A. Valone and Christine Kinealy (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2002), 324; Sylvie Gauthier, “Le Mémorial: An Irish Memorial at Grosse Ile in Quebec,” in Ibid., 296, and Kathleen O’Brien, “Famine Commemorations: Visual Dialogues, Visual Silences” in Ibid., 272–3. 9. Kenneth Goldstein, A Guide for Fieldworkers in Folklore (Hatboro, Penn.: Folklore Associates, 1964), 156–159. 10. Seán Ó Súilleabháin, A Handbook of Irish Folklore (Detroit: Singing Tree Press, 1942). 11. For examples, see Kevin Whelan, “Settlement Patterns in the West of Ireland in the Pre-Famine Period,” in Decoding the Landscape, ed. Timothy Collins (Galway: Centre for Landscape Studies, 1994), 60–78; Kevin Whelan, “Pre and Post-Famine Landscape Change,” in The Great Irish Famine, ed. Cathal Póirtéir (Dublin: The Mercier Press, 1995), 19–33; Cathal Pórtéir, “Introduction,” in The Great Irish Famine, ed. Cathal Póirtéir (Dublin: Mercier Press, 1995), 9–17; Cathal Póirtéir, Famine Echoes (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1995), and Cormac Ó Grada, Black ’47 and Beyond (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 210–212. 12. Kevin O’Neill, “The Great Divide: A Discussion with Ruth-Ann Harris and Kevin O’Neill,” moderated by Bruce Morgan, Boston College Magazine 55 (1996): 34–39. 13. For example, a traditional Irish blessing preserves the idea of remembering to forget: “Always remember to forget/The things that made you sad . . . Always remember to forget the friends that proved untrue . . . Always remember to forget the troubles that passed away.” See Michael Washburn, ed., A Treasury of Irish Blessings (Philadelphia: Courage Books, 2002), n.p. 14. Quoted in George Potter, To the Golden Door: The Story of the Irish in Ireland and America (Boston: Little, Brown and Company1960), 155. 15. Edward Laxton, The Famine Ships (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996), 233–34. 16. Greenspan, “Lives as Texts,”149. 17. Ibid., 146. 18. There are many fine collections and works on the Great Famine, each with its own slant and perspective. In addition to the aforementioned, see Peter Gray, The Irish Famine (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1995); Margaret Kelleher, The Feminization of Famine (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997); Christine Kinealy, This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845–52 (Boulder: Roberts Rinehart

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Publishers, 1995); Robert Scally, The End of Hidden Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), and Colm Tóibín and Diarmaid Ferriter, The Irish Famine: A Documentary (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2001). 19. Seán Gaffney and Séamus Cashman, eds. Proverbs and Sayings of Ireland. (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1979), 31. The Irish equivalent of this proverb is Bíonn súil le muir, ach cha bhíonn súil le cill. See Fionnuala Carson Williams, Irish Proverbs (Dublin: Poolbeg Press, 1992), 131. 20. Dennis K. Mumby, “Introduction,” in Narrative and Social Control: Critical Perspectives, ed. Dennis K. Mumby (London: Sage Publications, 1993), 5. 21. John W. DuBois, “Ritual Language,” in International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, 2nd edition, 4 vols., ed. William J. Frawley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 3:463. 22. Roger J. McHugh, “The Famine in Irish Oral Tradition,” in The Great Famine: Studies in Irish History 1845–1852, ed. R. Dudley Edwards and T. Desmond Williams (Dublin: The Liverpool Press, 1994), 435. 23. De Fréine, The Great Silence, 82. 24. Lisa M. Bitel, Isle of the Saints: Christian. Settlement and Monastic Community in Early Ireland (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 196. 25. Quoted in Michael Padden and Robert Sullivan, May The Road Rise to Meet You (New York: Penguin, 1999), 90–91. 26. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995), 140. 27. Grunkemeyer, “Belief Systems,” 126. 28. Leslie Williams, “Irish Identity and The Illustrated London News, 1846–1851: Famine to Depopulation,” in Representing Ireland: Gender, Class and Nationality, ed. Susan Shaw Sailer (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997), 61. 29. Mary E. Daly, “The Operations of Famine Relief, 1845–1857,” in The Great Irish Famine, ed. Cathal Póirtéir (Cork: The Mercier Press, 1995), 126. 30. Peter Gray, “Punch and the Great Famine,” History Ireland 1 (1993): 29. 31. Conrad Arensberg, The Irish Countryman (Garden City: The Natural History Press, 1968); Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball, Family and Community in Ireland (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968); E. Estyn Evans, Irish Folk Ways (New York: Dover Publications, 2000). 32. Whelan, “Settlement Patterns in the West of Ireland in the Pre-Famine Period,” in Decoding the Landscape, ed. Timothy Collins (Galway: Centre for Landscape Studies, 1994), 60–78; Breandáin Ó Madagáin, “The Picturesque in the Gaelic Tradition,” in Decoding the Landscape, ed. Timothy Collins (Galway: Centre for Landscape Studies, 1994). 48–59. 33. Antain Mac Lochlainn, personal communication. 34. Marigold Linton, “Phoenix and Chimera: The Changing Face of Memory,” in Memory and History: Essays in Recalling and Interpreting Human Experience, ed. Jaclyn Jeffrey and Glenace Edwall (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1994), 86. 35. Breandán Mac Suibhne, personal communication. 36. McHugh, “The Famine in Oral Tradition,” 430. 37. Joseph Lee, “The Famine as History,” in Famine 150: Commemorative Lecture Series, ed. Cormac Ó Gráda (Dublin: Teagasc, 1997), 165.

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38. Lee, “The Famine as History,” 166. 39. Grunkemeyer, “Belief Systems,” 125. 40. Thomas O’Rahilly, A Miscellany of Irish Proverbs (Dublin: The Talbot Press, 1922), 21. 41. Donald Macintosh, Macintosh’s Collection of Gaelic Proverbs and Familiar Phrases (Edinburgh: Charles Stewart, 1819), 45. 42. Laurence Flanagan, The Irish Spirit: Proverbs, Superstitions and Fairy Tales (New York: Random House, 1999), 43. 43. O’Donnell, James, Classic Irish Proverbs in English and Irish (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1998), 69. 44. Liam Mac Con Iomaire, Ireland of the Proverb (New York: Roberts Rinehart Publishers, 1994), 8. 45. O’Rahilly, A Miscellany, 42. 46. Ibid., 27, 47. Flanagan, The Irish Spirit, 62. 48. Pádraic Ó Farrell, Gems of Irish Wisdom (Dublin: The Mercier Press, 1980), 51. 49. “Haws” refer to hawthorn berries that, when properly prepared, can be eaten for nourishment. 50. Flanagan, The Irish Spirit, 67. 51. Gaffney and Cashman, Proverbs and Sayings, 45. 52. Ó Farrell, Gems of Irish Wisdom, 53. 53. Mary Murray Delaney, Of Irish Ways (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1973), 333. 54. Its Irish language equivalent is Is fada an bóthar nach mbíonn casadh ann. 55. O’Donnell, Classic Irish Proverbs 16. 56. O’Rahilly, A Miscellany, 1. 57. Ibid., 21. 58. Flanagan, The Irish Spirit, 81. 59. Gaffney and Cashman, Proverbs and Sayings, 74. 60. O’Rahilly, A Miscellany, 105. 61. Gaffney and Cashman, Proverbs and Sayings, 50. 62. John Flaherty, remarks delivered at the dedication of the Great Famine Memorial in Cambridge, MA. July 23, 1997. Author’s transcription. 63. Mary Robinson, remarks delivered at the dedication of the Great Famine Memorial in Cambridge, MA. July 23, 1997. Author’s transcription. 64. Mary McAleese, remarks delivered at the dedication of the Great Famine Memorial in Battery Park, NY. July 16, 2002. Author’s transcription. 65. Bitel, Isle of the Saints, 197. 66. Petrie; cited in Breandáin Ó Madagáin, “Functions of Irish Song in the Nineteenth Century,” Béaloideas 53 (1985): 197. 67. Petrie; cited in Breandáin Ó Madagáin, “Functions of Irish Song in the Nineteenth Century,” Béaloideas 53 (1985): 197. 68. Joel Sherzer, Speech Play and Verbal Art (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 123; see also Michael J. Toolan, Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1988).

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69. Gail Jefferson, “On the Sequential Organization of Troubles-Talk in Ordinary Conversation,” Social Problems 35 (1988): 418–441. 70. Langellier and Peterson, “Family Storytelling,” 73. 71. Ó Súilleabháin, Handbook, 12. 72. Graham, “The Voice,” 1.

11 Towards a Famine Art History: Invention, Reception, and Repetition from the Nineteenth Century to the Twentieth Emily Mark-FitzGerald

In the mid-1990s, Ireland and Irish diasporic communities worldwide marked the sesquicentennial of the Famine; the manifold and diverse commemorations included academic conferences, musical performances, art exhibitions, new historical publications, and a dizzying variety of cultural activities.1 Yet of all the famine projects, from the terribly mawkish to the indisputably moving, one type of commemoration has dwarfed all others in terms of numbers, profile and budget: the construction of over eighty permanent famine monuments and memorials since 1990. While many of these monuments are relatively small, local affairs, others represent major public artworks, particularly those located in North America. From one perspective, it might be considered surprising or ironic that the most durable of the 150th commemoration’s productions are works of visual art. The Famine has long had the reputation as an “unrepresentable” event, one that did not excite the imagination of nineteenth-century artists, and found little visual expression. It is my contention, however, that this is a visual history still yet to be defined, not absent in its entirety. A quick sampling of contemporary famine memorials, for example, illustrates how heavily many of these commemorations have relied upon nineteenth-century models and representational tropes [Fig. 11.1]. Such borrowings suggest that a long genealogy of famine visuality is already in place, though its specific branches and relationships have only recently attracted critical attention as a subject of inquiry. If twentieth-century attempts to give visual form to famine memory are to be understood within a tradition of famine image-making, 181

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Figure 11.1a. ‘Bridget O’Donnel and Children’, Illustrated London News (22 Dec. 1849). Image courtesy of National Library of Ireland.

Figure 11.1b. Maurice Harron and Elizabeth McLaughlin An Gorta Mór Memorial, Roscommon, Co. Roscommon (1999). Photograph: Emily Mark FitzGerald.

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Figure 11.1c. ‘Searching for Potatoes in a Stubble Field’, Illustrated London News (22 Dec. 1849). Image courtesy of National Library of Ireland.

Figure 11.1d. Glenna Goodacre, Irish Memorial, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2003). Photograph: Emily Mark FitzGerald.

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the obvious antecedents lie in the paintings, drawings, engravings, and photographic representations of the Famine from the nineteenth century. Perhaps no single source has contributed more to the visual history of the Famine than the illustrated periodical press. Newspaper woodblock engravings have emerged as the iconic visual images of the Famine, whether serving as chapter dividers for Joseph O’Connor’s recent bestseller The Star of the Sea or as inspiration for contemporary children’s book illustration.2 Yet the proliferation of these graphic images is mainly due to the simultaneity of the Famine with the rise of illustrated popular weeklies; had the Famine occurred fifty, even twenty years earlier, its visual history would have been unquestionably poorer. The enthusiastic search for interdisciplinary and cross-media famine source material as a refutation of the “famine silence” cliché is to be welcomed. However, one must proceed cautiously with respect to famine imagery’s value as historical evidence as an unmediated “voice from the past.”3 The proximity of newspaper illustration to a textual component has perhaps contributed to its being cannibalized by other media that portray it as some kind of mimetic reproduction of factual truth. In fact, the shifting location of newspaper illustration along the continuum of factually reliable source material emphasizes the intense subjectivity of this visual form. From an art historical perspective, meanings communicated by newspaper illustration can only be articulated from within a dense network of image production and consumption. This paper seeks to support this critical history of newspaper illustration by looking at famine-era examples from the Illustrated London News with respect to their emphasis on factuality, relationship with the viewer, status as visual units within a larger textual publication, and the representational conventions which link them to painting. Although several illustrated periodicals had attempted an entry into the competitive Victorian news market, none met lasting success until the launch of the Illustrated London News in 1842.4 The remarkable innovations of the ILN in the realm of production, marketing and distribution helped to make it the most widely-known illustrated publication of the nineteenth century in both England and Ireland. By 1863, circulation had peaked at over 300,000 copies, and its successful format was copied by a slew of imitators. As one of the first periodicals to prioritise illustration over text5, the ILN championed the medium of “Art” as an unassailable and unique conveyor of truth, and ceaselessly promoted itself as the organ poised to deliver this intellectual and spiritual manna to the masses: “Art—as now fostered, and redundant in the peculiar and facile department of wood engraving—has, in fact, become the bride of literature; genius has taken her as its handmaid; and popularity has crowned her with laurels that only seem to grow the greener the longer they are worn.”6 The premise of the publication was to offer richly illustrated, varied news reports that ran the gamut from Parliamentary proceedings to scientific ex-

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periments to royal balls and pageants. The newspaper prided itself on the vast scope of subject material under its gaze, dispatching reporters and artists to exotic locations and loudly extolling its virtue in doing so. During a period when many publishers considered themselves not simply purveyors of the news but as philanthropists or social crusaders, their mission to the public was keenly felt and floridly stated, as in the first edition of the Illustrated London News: Here we make our bow, determined to pursue our great experiment with boldness; to associate its principle with a purity of tone that may secure and hold fast for our journal the fearless patronage of families; to see in all things to uphold the great cause of public morality; to keep continually before the eye of the world a living and moving panorama of all its actions and influences; and to withhold from society no point that its literature can furnish or its art adorn, so long as the genius of that literature and the spirit of that art, can be brought within the reach and compass of the Editors of the Illustrated London News!7

The reference to a family audience and the cause of public morality set the tone for the types of illustrations that would grace the pages of the periodical, and served to distinguish the sixpence paper from its competitors in the mass market: the cheap penny weekly (like its immediate predecessor The Penny Magazine) or more serious broadsheets like The Times. The selectivity of imagery found in the pages of the illustrated periodical was frankly acknowledged, even celebrated, as a hallmark of responsible journalism: “The literature—the customs—the dress—say, the institutions and localities of other lands, shall be brought home to you with spirit, with fidelity, and, we hope, with discretion and taste.”8 The unbounded exuberance of the ILN in its vision of a new form of journalism combining art, news, and moral edification culminated in a groundbreaking publication, but one which is fundamentally distinct from our modern conception of a newspaper. The eclectic result conformed to the tastes of a staunchly middle-class audience, yet the newness of the medium allowed considerable room for experimentation by its stable of mostly anonymous writers and artists. A single feature might combine straight news reporting with a poetic ode to the event, accompanied by a dramatic and engaging illustration of the principal protagonists. In the case of Ireland, this format might hold true whether the subject of the piece was a simple travel narrative, or in keeping in line with the ILN’s interest in social reform, the Famine. Margaret Crawford’s essay concerning the illustrations of the Famine found in the ILN constitutes one of the few explorations of these printed images.9 Crawford asserts in her examination of ILN engravings that “a precise representation of Famine was less important than the overall atmosphere of misery that the engravings were seeking to portray;”10 she also points to the necessity of the written word which “conditioned the response of readers to the visual image” and to the symbolic use of elements which

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suggest starvation as opposed to objectively recording it. Her defence of the sanitization of famine scenes by ILN artists appeals to the combined rationale of artistic license, the conscious or unconscious “filter of the artist’s imagination,” and the suggestion that “what an artist perceives at any given time is conditioned by experience and purpose rather than by his/her mental mirror of the scene.”11 As opposed to Crawford’s privileging of the artist’s prerogative, others have persuasively argued that periodical illustration, particularly that of the ILN, involved so many agents of production (artist, engraver, editor, printer, etc.) that it is inaccurate to truly speak of a singular “artist” in reference to these visual productions, and by extension, a mistake to argue for the value of artistic “intent” as usually understood by art historians.12 Peter Sinnema suggests a mode of inquiry that takes into account the reality of the ILN as “vitally productive of, as well as constituted in, ideology,” and hence provides a bridge to a politicised and culturally grounded understanding of famine visuality.13 This phenomenological approach acknowledges the reciprocity of the image/audience relationship, and further allows for the construction of the famine image not only by the artist, but also by the viewer, through the act of looking. The serial form of the newspaper means that its content and identity can be interpreted diachronically or synchronically via the single issue.14 This formal quality has implications not only with regard to the interpretation of illustration, but also in the way forces within the marketplace (i.e. the demands of its collective viewers) determine the content. The requirement of the periodical (as constructed over time) to maintain an overall consistency and identity is thus wrapped with its creation of a readership. The “positioning” which it adopts through its manipulation of “price, content, form, and tone” represents an ongoing negotiation with the reader.15 It is in this sense that we may understand the periodical as a special visual form created by the audience and not simply for it. While the same argument might be pursued for oil painting (similarly affected by the ebbs and flows of the art market and the demands of patronage), the newspaper’s constant shifting to these forces renders them more immediately palpable. In nearly every modern usage of ILN engravings, images are reproduced singly, losing any sense of scale and relationship with one another as was established by their initial publication in the newspaper. A brief analysis of one of these “despatches from Ireland,” considered holistically, may go some way toward rectifying this imbalance in famine visual history. The principal Irish correspondent-artist for the ILN in the first decades of its publication was the Cork-born James Mahony (1810–79), author and illustrator of one of the best-known “famine features”: “Sketches in the West of Ireland,” which appeared in two parts in February 1847.16 The format of both segments is a full sheet, two-page facing spread. In the case of the 13 February issue, seven engravings are featured. [Fig. 11.2]

Figure 11.2.

Illustrated London News, 13 February 1847. Image courtesy of the Trinity College Dublin

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The layout of the pages carefully balances images and text: two large, identically centred illustrations anchor each page. The smaller illustrations inserted at the top and bottom of each page counterbalance each other, and create visual consistency within the article’s spread. The engravings dominate the page, and the two largest illustrations both offer broad views of a main road into town. Beginning on the fourth page of the issue, the article is visually quite striking; the technique of the double-spread and large central images enhance its attractiveness and signal it as an important despatch. Particularly determinative of the meanings generated are the constitutive elements of the page: the internal composition of the engravings themselves, their choice of subject and style, and the interpretative function of the text in relation to the image it inspires. The conscription of famine journalism within familiar rhetorical modes is evident from the gothic and heavily romantic poetic ode that opens the news report: Uncoffin’d, unshrouded, his bleak corpse they bore, From the spot where he died on the cabin’s wet floor, To a hole which they dug in the garden close by; Thus a brother hath died—thus a Christian must lie! ‘Twas a horrible end and a harrowing tale, To chill the strong heart—to strike revelry pale. No disease o’er this Victim could mastery claim, ‘Twas Famine alone mark’d his skeleton frame! The bones of his Grandsire and Father too, rest In the old Abbey-yard, by the holy rites blest; Their last hours were sooth’d by affections fond cares, Their last sighs were breath’d midst their Friends tearful prayers! Unshriven, untended, this man pass’d away, Ere Time streak’d one hair of his dark locks with gray. His requiem the wild wind, and Ilen’s hoarse roar, As its swollen waves dash on the Rock-girded shore.17

Such text serves to immediately frame the article in a dramatic context, calling to mind similarly theatrical paintings of famine and eviction that draw from nineteenth-century traditions of Irish stage acting and poignantly “picturesque” representations.18 The text is structured as a narrative journey, allegedly in Mahony’s own words, though not without uneasy overtones of macabre entertainment. A preface to Mahony’s account offers the rationale for the assignment: The accounts from the Irish provincial papers continue to detail the unmitigated sufferings of the starving peasantry . . . With the object of ascertaining

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the accuracy of the frightful statements received from the West, and of placing them in unexaggerated fidelity before our readers, a few days since, we commissioned our Artist, Mr. James Mahoney, of Cork, to visit a seat of extreme suffering, viz., Skibbereen and its vicinity; and we now submit to our readers the graphic results of his journey.19

This language of legitimisation is a common feature of ILN reports, an assurance to the reader of both the validity of the report and the credentials of the author. Anxiety related to the perception of authenticity is discernable, and may represent the ILN’s attempt to reconcile the two antagonistic concepts of ‘Art’ and ‘Truth’ while granting its readers the individual pleasures of both. The ILN fashioned itself the democratic conduit of art and knowledge, making available to the middle-class viewer what was hitherto the realm of the privately wealthy and classically educated. The paradox of this promise was that in order to preserve what Walter Benjamin has termed the “aura” of art and hence its desirability, its authenticity as a unique object had to be defended.20 Clearly this was to prove problematic for an object defined by, and indeed celebrated for, its mass reproduction: how could each individual reader equally possess the original object?21 Although ILN issues were offered by the publisher as “collectible” items to be retained, bound and reread, the mere fact of possession was inadequate to confer the elevated state of authenticity articulated in the text. The ILN’s solution to this dilemma was to remove the mark of authenticity from the physical object itself (the newspaper, incapable of possessing an artistic “aura”) and relocate it in the intangible idea of the original creation (i.e. the artist’s sketch made on the spot). The vigorous defence of artistic fidelity found in the rhetoric of ILN prefaces and editorials thus works to reaffirm its cultural authority and desirability in the wake of disturbances roused by its technology. Also interesting in the above passage is the implication that visual evidence is somehow more persuasive than textual description, as if engravings of the Famine would convince viewers of the desperate situation where text did not suffice. Yet Celina Fox’s study of illustrated social reportage in the 1840s notes that engraved reports did not always possess impeccable claims to accuracy; additionally, they rarely escaped criticism when imagery was deemed overly explicit.22 While it may be impossible to discern the precise accuracy of Mahony’s engravings, to what extent do they reflect the text? Is the claim of “unexaggerated fidelity” and the implied objectivity of the images a reality? The articles feature two images frequently reproduced in twentieth-century commemorative material—“Woman begging at Clonakilty” (Feb. 13) [Fig. 11.3] and “Boy and Girl at Cahera” (Feb. 20) [Fig. 11.4]. In each, the isolated subject gazes directly at the viewer, forcing a discomforting confrontation: in the case of the Clonakilty woman, she entreats the viewer/author for money to bury the dead child she holds in her arms. The

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boy at Cahera similarly gazes out with a haggard and gaunt expression, as he and the girl beside him scratch at the ground for food. The emotion is unequivocal, the renderings iconic and reliant on the evocation of women and children’s suffering, and the graphic style (consisting of strong linear contrasts and simple compositions) renders them easily readable.

Figure 11.3. “Woman begging at Clonakilty” (13 February 1847), Illustrated London News. Image courtesy of National Library of Ireland.

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Figure 11.4. ‘Boy and Girl at Cahera (20 February 1847), Illustrated London News. Image courtesy of National Library of Ireland.

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Of the ten remaining illustrations, only two directly feature clear representations of the suffering Mahony floridly describes (“Funeral at Shepperton Lakes” and “Mullin’s Hut, at Scull”). Three others feature exterior representations of dwellings (“The Hut or Watch-house in the Old Chapel Yard,” “Harrington’s Hut,” and “The Village of Mienies”) that are associated with horrific scenes either witnessed by or told to Mahony, but are related only through narrative and are not in evidence visually. The other five illustrations are views of villages set into the landscape, one of which (‘Old Chapel at Skibbereen’—Fig. 11.5) suggests the poverty of the locale through a few crumbling buildings and an overturned cart, but on the whole are incongruous with the gruesome text and descriptions like “abode of death” and “filthy sepulchre”. Furthermore, the inclusion of extraneous details and expanded perspective of the compositions mute the emotional impact of most scenes, and robs them of their ability to transfer well as purely visual pieces without their textual component. With the two most affecting images considerably outnumbered and outsized by scenic views, the evincing of an emotional response to these articles is almost entirely reliant on the narrative, with the images functioning primarily as triggers for the reader’s imagination. Likewise, Norman Bryson’s comments on the discursivity of captioned/textually explicated images suggests such representations have limits to their autonomy: “The path of the glance to the final destination of the signified must be smoothed of all resistance. Temporally, reduction from two sides: by the past, in that the image must recall and reinforce the family of representations of the scene already encountered, like a memorandum; and by the future, since the present existence of the image, here and now, is subordinated to a proleptic place within future memory. In the face of this double assault, its existence is reduced to that of an increment or interval.”23 The “increment” occupied by figural imagery in Bryson’s schema is subsequently subsumed by text; the image no longer exists at the locus of meaning but is ancillary to it. Textually the ILN also engulfs a pure visuality and circumscribes it within language: the ravaging of a man’s corpse by dogs is shocking enough to be featured in both segments of the article, and the description by Dr. Donovan (Mahony’s guide in the region) is graphically retold: “A man by the name of Leahey died in the parish of Dromdeleague about a fortnight ago; his wife and two children remained in the house until the putrescent exhalations from the body drove them from the companionship with the dead; in a day or two after, some persons in passing the man’s cabin, had their attention attracted by a loud snarling, and on entering, found the gnawed and mangled skeleton of Leahy contended for by hungry dogs.”24 The sketch accompanying this tale (a bare rendering of the exterior of the cottage with two impoverished figures adjacent, Fig. 11.6) leaves the reader to imagine the scene as played out within the crumbling structure;

Figure 11.5. ‘Old Chapel Lane, Skibbereen’, 13 February 1847, Illustrated London News. Image courtesy of National Library of Ireland.

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Figure 11.6. ‘The Village of Mienies, 20 February 1847, Illustrated London News. Image courtesy of National Library of Ireland.

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the viewer escapes a visual assault and responds with an indignant imagination. A certain distance between the human victim and the sympathetic reader is thus created, and the sensibilities of the audience simultaneously offended and protected. Other later publications more sophisticated in their visual offerings (such as The Graphic) were far more explicit textually and visually on the subject of famine and poverty, especially within a non-European context.25 The ILN, however, in appealing to a sentimental Ruskinian morality, deploys theatrical and/or picturesque aesthetics in the service of creating appropriate and familiar conditions for the expression of sympathetic and charitable feelings. This charitable orientation is explicitly acknowledged in the text as the desired outcome: “We resume from our Journal of last week our Artist’s Sketches of Scenes and Incidents from the distressed district of Skibbereen, and its neighbourhood; premising that our main object in the publication of this Series of Illustrations is to direct public sympathy to the suffering poor of these localities, a result that must, inevitably, follow the right appreciation of their extent and severity.”26 The intention of these articles to function as motivators for charitable action further limits the possible modes of representation; too graphic an image, and the viewer moves quickly past pity or sympathy through to disgust.27 Far from a simple exchange of funds from wealthy to poor, the codes of charitable intent and action are inextricably constituted in the ideological system inhabited and imposed by the donor. As Margaret Kelleher has noted, “the relationship of famine victim and potential donor emerges, not as a simple form of superiority, but as a complex form of interdependence.”28 Paul Barrell’s declaration that the “act of benevolence is itself an act of repression”29 underlines the distinction upheld during the Famine that two categories of the needy existed: the deserving and undeserving poor.30 With women and children usually falling into the first category, it is not surprising to find they predominate in famine engravings where human figures are foregrounded.31 The discomforting representation of hungry women and children, opportunity for social recognition afforded to charitable donors, and complex exchange between text and image is nowhere better encapsulated than in an image featured in a subsequent ILN ‘Famine feature’ of 1849–50 [Fig. 11.7]. Another Sketch follows (of Miss Kennedy), which shows that, amidst this world of wretchedness, all is not misery and guilt… She is represented as engaged in her daily occupation of distributing clothing to the wretched children brought around her by their more wretched parents. In the front of the group I noticed one woman crouching like a monkey, and drawing around her the only rag she had left to conceal her nudity. A big tear was rolling down her cheek, with gratitude for the gifts the innocent child was distributing . . . The Sketch will, I hope, immortalize the beneficent child, who is filling the place of a saint, and performing the duties of a patriot.32

Figure 11.7. ‘Miss Kennedy Distributing Clothes at Kilrush’, 22 December 1849, Illustrated London News. Image courtesy of National Library of Ireland.

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While these later series of articles are more exacting in detail and precise in comment and illustration, their images are also clearly problematic in the animalisation of the poor (here verbalized as a “woman crouching like a monkey”) and painterly tendency to place the poor in dramatic, sublime landscapes and poses. The ILN was a relatively young publication in the famine period, solidifying its readership and creating a unique identity for itself within the middle-class market, could not afford to alienate or overly shock its readership with graphic (and hence brutally realistic) imagery. Where shock resides there is always an element to counteract it, a way to resolve viewer unease or distaste into a more pleasurable emotional activity, such as the charitable exchange or the activity of spectatorship. Thus, despite the frequent use of ILN engravings to accompany contemporary famine histories based on documentary resources, the visual record of the Famine is fraught with inconsistencies, limited by imposed standards of taste and the unequal relationship between viewer and subject, and affected by the hybridised visual/textual experimentation of this emergent journalistic form.33 It would be an overstatement to assert all forms of illustrated social reportage during the Famine operated under the same limitations at work in ILN; indeed, the ILN itself was frequently inconsistent in its reporting of the Irish situation. However, a recognition that enormous limitations on image-making did in fact exist, and left an immutable mark on periodical illustration, surely would caution us to be more skeptical in our subsequent encounters with them. One anomaly evident throughout the preceding analysis is the identity of the viewer: with few exceptions, no nineteenth-century famine-related pictures of the Irish were executed with the Irish viewer exclusively in mind. Because each of these artistic works existed as products in the commercial art marketplace (whether or not they proved ultimately profitable), they all pander at some level to the sensibilities of the contemporary English audience, around whom that marketplace revolved. The Illustrated London News and Punch waffle on the “Irish Question,” but their images also conform to viewer expectation, and hardly bear the mark of radical social realist journalism and illustration that is exemplified a few decades later with the advent of The Graphic in 1869. Whether implicitly or explicitly acknowledged, the Victorian English viewer hovers over all famine-era imagery. It is pertinent to return now to an issue posed in the introduction: the recurrence of nineteenth-century images in sesquicentennial commemorations. Catherine Marshall is correct in highlighting representations from the ILN as the most familiar of these images, and this has proved true across all media.34 Certainly the black-and-white, graphic simplicity of such engravings makes their ease of reproduction obvious; they also manage to convey emotion without the formal trappings of sentimentality worn heavily by their painted counterparts. Yet it is important to re-emphasize that reliance on a

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small body of famine engravings familiar through repetition is perhaps more indicative of commemorative organizations’ own preoccupations and concerns, than it is reflective of those engravings’ reliability as images. Engravings like Woman at Clonakilty or Digging for Potatoes resonate where Mullins’ Hut does not, yet they can both be regarded as units in a similar problematic. Instances of the modern reproduction of these ILN images can be found in a diverse range of media, from commemorative monuments, public murals in Belfast [Fig. 11.8],35 to newspaper caricatures [Fig. 11.9]; usually with the nineteenth-century source images are deemed iconic enough to require no referencing. Yet the continued publication and usage of ILN engravings as single images fractures their initial existence as part of a more complex narrative; it divorces them from their precise historicity and engenders them as more easily manipulated, less ideologically charged images, and allows them to absorb the projections of new ideologies without protest. The ubiquity of their use as illustrations for histories, no matter how divergent those same histories might be in their own perspectives and conclusions, demonstrates how orphaned these pictures have become. The danger in all this, of course,

Figure 11.8. Mural, Whiterock Road, Ballymurphy, Belfast. Photographed June 2003, Emily Mark FitzGerald.

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Figure 11.9. Caricature by Wendy Shea, accompanying the article ‘A Famine feast of self-righteousness’ by Conor Cruise O’Brien, Sunday Independent, 22 October 1995. Image courtesy of the Sunday Independent.

is that over time knowledge of the determinative conditions of their creation, and hence an acknowledgment of their subjectivity and limitations, is lost. If we seek to understand the Famine by looking at these images in isolation, we will come away with a very poor understanding indeed. The replication of famine-related images further demonstrates the inversion of relationship which has occurred in the modern period between viewer and subject: no longer do we wish to stay outside that cottage door, or maintain a distance from the famine sufferer. Writing of eighteenth-century painting, Paul Barrell commented that for the modern viewer “to identify with the exhausted and underfed labourer is impossible…and would be insulting if it were not.”36 Yet the case of 150th commemoration in the mid-1990s would seem to contradict this observation entirely. This essay has endeavoured to demonstrate the mechanics underlying nineteenth-century famine representation as ideologically based; to this end the nineteenth-century viewer was an active participant in creating the visual image of the Famine, a position which

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denies the possibility of a firm detachment. Twentieth-century commemorations, for all their mantra of “never forget” and the overflow of monuments and the performance of memory, inevitably operate under many of the same constraints at work in the nineteenth century. Whether or not contemporary commemorations reflect dominant historical famine visual texts and memory, they too exist as discourses which are inescapably a product of their temporal and spatial contexts. The reactions of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century viewer to famine visuality might be construed as two extremes of viewer identification with subject; but the particulars of each dynamic still await further examination. Other work waits to be done on the reconstruction and analysis of nineteenth-century famine visuality. From a cross-disciplinary perspective, literature and its methods of famine representation might constitute a fruitful comparative model. Additional areas for future research include detailed analyses of emigration imagery, particularly with respect to the emergence of photography and the manner in which it both influenced painted and engraved work, and came to surpass it as the preferred medium for social documentation and criticism. Fuller investigations of the ethnocentric and gendered construction of the famine subject could complement studies of this kind recently executed on similar topics.37 If the contributions of nineteenth-century visuality to commemoration can be broadly sketched as both iconographic and philosophical, further comparison of their messages may aid in understanding the diverse legacy of the Famine in Ireland and its grip on the politics of memory.38

NOTES 1. For a sampling of those events proposed for the commemorative period see Don Mullan, ed., A glimmer of light: an overview of Great Hunger commemorative events in Ireland and throughout the world (Dublin: Concern Worldwide, 1995). 2. See Joseph O’Connor, Star of the Sea (London: Secker & Warburg, 2002), and David Ross, Children of the Great Hunger (New Lanark, Scotland: Waverly Books, 2002), illustration page 14 by Robert Farley. 3. Melissa Fegan, Literature and the Great Irish Famine 1845–1919 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002); see also Margaret Kelleher, The Feminization of Famine: Expressions of the Inexpressible? (Cork: Cork University Press, 1997). Cathal Póirtéir, Famine Echoes (Dublin: Gill &Macmillan, 1995) gives voice to handed-down recollections of the Famine as recorded by the Folklore Commission in 1945. Colm Toíbin and Diarmaid Ferriter, The Irish Famine: A Documentary (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001) similarly advocate a renewed look at folkloric sources. 4. The other great illustrated publishing success of the early nineteenth century was The Penny Magazine, founded by the philanthropist Charles Knight in 1832. Unfortunately, the paper’s folding in 1845 limits its usefulness for discussing the Famine period. Similarly, the major Irish illustrated periodical The Irish Penny

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Magazine ceased publication in 1846; in any case, its format dealt rarely with contemporary news items. 5. Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 244. 6. The Illustrated London News, 14 May 1842. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Margaret Crawford, “The Great Irish Famine 1845–9: image versus reality,” in Ireland: Art into History, ed. Raymond Gillespie and Brian P. Kennedy (Dublin: Town House, 1994), 75–88. 10. Ibid., 82. 11. Ibid., 87–88 12. See Celina Fox, “The Development of Social Reportage in English Periodical Illustration During the 1840s and Early 1850s” Past and Present 74 (1977):90–111; and Peter W. Sinnema, Dynamics of the Pictured Page: Representing the Nation in the Illustrated London News (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998). 13. Sinnema, Dynamics of the Pictured Page, 2. 14. Margaret Beetham, “Towards a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre,” in Investigating Victorian Journalism, ed. Laurel Brake, Aled Jones, and Lionel Madden (London: Macmillan, 1990), 26. 15. Ibid., 28. 16. “Sketches in the West of Ireland,” The Illustrated London News (London), 20 February 1847; “Sketches in the West of Ireland,” The Illustrated London News, 13 February 1847. 17. “Sketches in the West of Ireland,” 13 February 1847. Poem credited to C.C.T. 18. Examples of this genre include the oeuvre of Erskine Nicol; Robert Kelly’s An Ejectment in Ireland or A Tear And a Prayer for Erin (1847), Frederick Goodall’s An Irish Eviction (1850). See also L. Perry Curtis Jr., “The Land For the People: Post-Famine Images of Evictions,” in Éire - Land, ed. Vera Kreilkamp (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); and Emily Mark, ‘Pathos and Paddywhackery: Erskine Nicol and the Painting of the Irish Famine’, Cross-currents in Irish and Scottish Studies, ed. Shane Murphy (Belfast: Queens University Belfast, 2005). 19. “Sketches in the West of Ireland,” 13 February 1847. 20. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations (London: Pimlico, 1999), 215. 21. In Benjamin’s analysis, this conjoining of authenticity with the mass-produced work ultimately proves untenable and aids in the dissolution of traditional definitions of art. 22. Fox, “Social Reportage in English Periodical Illustration,” 90. 23. Norman Bryson, Word and image: French painting of the ancien régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 3. 24. Quoted from Dr. Donovan’s Diary, originally published in the Cork Southern Reporter, 26 January 1847, reprinted in “Sketches in the West of Ireland,” Illustrated London News, 13 February 1847. 25. As The Graphic did not begin publication until 1869, no images of the Irish Famine from its pages exist. See Julian Treuherz, Hard times: social realism in Victorian art (London: Lund Humphries in association with Manchester City Art Gallery, 1987).

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26. Illustrated London News, 20 Feb. 1847. 27. A recent exhibition at The Guardian’s newsroom juxtaposed nineteenth century and contemporary famine images/photography to similarly question the ethics of Famine representation. David Campbell and others, “Imaging Famine Exhibition,” (London: The Guardian Newsroom, Archive and Visitor Centre, 2005). See related article: Luke Dodd, “Whose hunger?” The Guardian (London), 6 August 2005. 28. Kelleher, The Feminization of Famine, 54. 29. John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: the rural poor in English painting 1730–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 82. 30. Often the most oppressive forms of relief during the Famine were defined by this distinction, in particular the Poor Law of 1838 and the workhouse system derived from it. See Christine Kinealy, “Potatoes, providence, and philanthropy: the role of private charity during the Irish Famine,” in The Irish World Wide: Vol. 6: The meaning of the Famine, ed. Patrick O’Sullivan (London: Leicester University Press, 1997); Tim P. O’Neill, “The charities and famine in mid-nineteenth century Ireland,” in Luxury and austerity, ed. Jacqueline Hill and Colm Lennon (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 1999). 31. Fintan Cullen alternately reads Irish family themes of the period as representations of Ireland’s ‘quasi-familial’ relationship to Britain. Fintan Cullen, Visual Politics: the Representation of Ireland, 1750–1930 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1997), 146. 32. The Illustrated London News, 22 December 1849. 33. Consider, for example, a full-page highly romantic engraving of St. Patrick’s Day on 13 March 1847 (also by James Mahony) that combines (in ekphratic description, ballad, and image) sympathy for the Famine, a virulent condemnation of intemperance, and an illustration of the amazement of the “aborigines” of Ireland at the advent of St. Patrick. In the same issue also appeared a report entitled “The Progress of Starvation” and one that reported on an incident of food theft in Rosscarbery that resulted in the beheading of two children. The Illustrated London News (London), 13 March 1847. 34. Catherine Marshall, “Painting Irish History: The Famine,” History Ireland 4 (1996): 46–50. 35. At least four murals have copied ILN engravings; Dr. Jonathan McCormick has compiled an online directory of approximately 2,000 entries on Northern Irish murals, including photographs, and graciously offered his assistance in tracking Famine-themed murals: http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/mccormick/. 36. Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape, 5. 37. Joel Hollander, “Beauty and the Beast: Depiction of Irish female types during the era of Parnell, c. 1880–1891,” in Images, Icons, and the Irish Nationalist Imagination, ed. Lawrence McBride (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999); Kelleher, The Feminization of Famine. 38. Patricia Anderson’s terms this “the literal, the linguistic, and that which is derived from the socio-cultural symbolic context.” Patricia Anderson, The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 58–59.

Selected Bibliography

Akenson, Donald. H. Being Had: Historians, Evidence and the Irish in North America. Port Credit, Ontario: P.D. Meany Publishers, 1985. Altick, Richard. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 1991. Anderson, Patricia. The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Arensberg, Conrad. The Irish Countryman. Garden City: The Natural History Press, 1968. ——— and Solon Kimball. Family and Community in Ireland. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968. Arnesen, Eric. “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination.” International Labor and Working-Class History 60 (Fall 2001): 3–32. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. New York: Routledge, 1989. Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1996. Backus, Margot Gayle. The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Barrell, John. The Dark Side of the Landscape: the rural poor in English painting 1730– 1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Bauman, Richard. Verbal Art as Performance. Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press, Inc., 1977. Bauman, Zygmunt. Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Reality. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. ———. Modernity and Ambivalence. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991. 203

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Bayly, C. A. et al. “AHR Conversation: On Transnational History.” The American Historical Review 111 (2006): 1440–1464. Beetham, Margaret. “Towards a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre.” In Investigating Victorian Journalism, edited by Laurel Brake, Aled Jones, and Lionel Madden, 19–32. London: Macmillan, 1990. Bell, David. An Introduction to Cybercultures. New York: Routledge, 2001. Benedikt, Michael. “Cyberspace: First Steps.” In The Cybercultures Reader, edited by David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy, 29–44. London: Routledge, 2000. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations. London: Pimlico, 1999. Bennett, David. The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Bennett, William. Narrative of a Recent Journey of Six Weeks in Ireland. London: C. Gilpin, 1847. Bernstein, J. M. “Self Knowledge as Praxis: Narrative and narration in Psychoanalysis”. In Narrative in Culture: The Uses of Storytelling in the Sciences, Philosophy and Literature, edited by Cristopher Nash, 51–77. New York: Routledge, 1990. Bhreathnach-Lynch, Sighle. “Framing the Irish: Victorian paintings of the Irish peasant.” Journal of Victorian Culture 2 (1997):245–260. ———. “Revisionism, the Rising, and Representation.” New Hibernia Review (1999): 89. Bitel, Lisa M. Isle of the Saints: Christian. Settlement and Monastic Community in Early Ireland Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. Blair, Lorrie. “(De)Constructing the Irish Famine Memorial in Contemporary Quebec.” In Ireland’s Great Hunger: Silence, Memory and Commemoration, edited by David A. Valone and Christine Kinealy, 311–333. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2002. Botting, Fred. Gothic. London: Routledge, 1996. Bourke, Maire and Bhreathnach-Lynch, Sighle. Discover Irish Art at the National Gallery of Ireland. Dublin: The National Gallery of Ireland, 1999. Boyce, Gerald E. ed. Hutton of Hastings: The Life and Letters of William Hutton, 1801– 1861. Belleville: Hastings County Council, 1972. Brewster, Scott and Virginia Crossman. “Re-writing the Famine: Witnessing in Crisis.” In Ireland in Proximity: History, Gender, Space, edited by Scott Brewster, Virginia Crossman, Fiona Becket, and David Alderson, 42–58. London: Routledge, 1999. Bryson, Norman. Word and image: French painting of the ancien régime. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Burke, Peter. Varieties of Cultural History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. Campbell, Stephen J. The Great Irish Famine, Words and Images from the Famine Museum Strokestown Park, County Roscommon. Strokestown: The Famine Museum, 1994. Chabonneau, André and André Sevigny. Grosse Île : A Record of Daily Events. Ottawa: Canadian Heritage, 1997. Clark, Anna. “Wild Workhouse Girls and the Liberal Imperial State in Mid-Nineteenth Century Ireland.” Journal of Social History (2005): 389–409. Clark, Dennis. Erin’s Heirs: Irish Bonds of Community. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991.

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Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Preston, Margaret. “Visualizing the Famine in County Mayo”. In Eire/Land: Depictions of the Irish Landscape from Medieval Manuscripts to Contemporary Paintings, edited by Vera Kreilkamp, 79– 83. Boston: McMullen Museum of Art & Boston College, 2003. Quigley, Michael. “Grosse Ile: Canada’s Famine Memorial.” Éire-Ireland 32 (1997): 20–40 Reinhardt, Steven G. and Dennis Reinhartz, eds. Transatlantic History. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006. Richards, David Adams. River of the Brokenhearted. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2003. Rogoff, Irit. Terra Infirma. London: Routledge, 2000. Rooney, Brendan. “Erskine Nicol R.S.A. A.R.A. 1825–1904”. In Irish Paintings in the National Gallery of Ireland, vol. I, edited by Nicola Figgis and Brendan Rooney, 14–17. Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland, 2001. Ross, David. Children of the Great Hunger. New Lanark, Scotland: Waverly Books, 2002. Scally, Robert. The End of Hidden Ireland: Rebellion, Famine and Emigration. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. New York: Vintage, 1996. Schmitz, Nancy. Irish for a Day: Saint Patrick’s Day Celebrations in Quebec City 1765– 1990. Sainte Foy, Quebec: Carraig Books, 1991. Shaw, Douglas. The Making of an Immigrant City: Ethnic and Cultural Conflict in Jersey City, New Jersey, 1850–1877. New York: Arno Press, 1976. Sherzer, Joel. Speech Play and Verbal Art. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. Sinnema, Peter W. Dynamics of the Pictured Page: Representing the Nation in the Illustrated London News. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998. Smart, Robert and Michael Hutcheson. “‘Negative History’ and Irish Gothic Literature: Persistence and Politics” Caliban 15 (2004):105–118 Sneidern, Maja-Lisa von. “Joined at the Hip: A Monster, Colonialism, and the Scriblerian Project.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 30 (1997): 213–231 Spiegel, Gabrielle M. “Comment on A Crooked Line.” The American Historical Review 113 (April 2008): 406–416. Stewart, Frances. Our Forest Home: Being the Extracts from the Correspondence of the Late Frances Stewart. ed. Ellen Dunlop. Toronto: Presbyterian Printing and Publishing, 1889. Takaki, Ronald. Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Tanguay, Mary. Be at the Windmill. Maitland, Ontario: Voyageur Publishing, 1996. Tisseyre, Michelle. Divided Passions. Toronto: Key Porter Books Limited, 1999. Tóibín, Colm and Diarmaid Ferriter. The Irish Famine: A Documentary. London: Profile Books, 2001. Toolan, Michael J. Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction. New York: Routledge, 1988. Treuherz, Julian. Hard times: social realism in Victorian art. London: Lund Humphries in association with Manchester City Art Gallery, 1987.

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Urquhart, Jane. Away. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1993. Valente, Joseph. Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, And the Question of Blood. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Walsh, Kevin. The Representation of the Past: Museums and Heritage in the Post-Modern World. New York: Routledge, 1992. Washburn, Michael, ed. A Treasury of Irish Blessings. Philadelphia: Courage Books, 2002. Webre, Stephen. “Among the Cybercajuns: Constructing Identity in the Virtual Diaspora.” Louisiana History 39 (1998): 443–456. Webster, Frank. “Cybernetic Life: Limits to Choice.” In Living with Cyberspace: Technology and Society in the Twenty-First Century, ed. John Armitage and Joanne Roberts. New York: Continuum, 2002. Whelan, Kevin. “Between Filiation and Affiliation, The Politics of Postcolonial Memory.” In Ireland and Postcolonial Theory, ed. Clare Carroll & Patricia King, 92–108. Cork: Cork University Press, 2003. ———. “Immoral Economy: Interpreting Erskine Nicol’s The Tenant.” In Boston College Museum of Art. America’s Eye: The Irish Art of Brian P. Burns, 57–67. Massachusetts: Boston College Museum of Art. 1996. ———.The Memories of ‘The Dead’” The Yale Journal of Criticism 15 (2002): PAGES?? ———. “Pre and Post-Famine Landscape Change.” In The Great Irish Famine, edited by Cathal Póirtéir, 19–33. Chester Springs, Pennsylvania: Dufour Editions, 1997. ———. “Settlement Patterns in the West of Ireland in the Pre-Famine Period.” In Decoding the Landscape, edited by Timothy Collins, 60–78. Galway: Centre for Landscape Studies, 1994. Wilson, David A. Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Volume I: Passion, Reason, and Politics, 1825–1857. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008. Williams, Fionnuala Carson. Irish Proverbs. Dublin: Poolbeg Press, 1992. Williams, Leslie. “Irish Identity and The Illustrated London News, 1846–1851: Famine to Depopulation.” In Representing Ireland: Gender, Class and Nationality edited by Susan Shaw Sailer. 59–93. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997. Wills, Gabrielle. A Place to Call Home. Lindsay, Ontario: Mindshadows, 2003. Woodham-Smith, Cecil. The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–1849. London: Penguin Books, 1962. Zalis, Elayne. “At Home in Cyberspace: Staging Autobiographical Scenes.” Biography 26 (2003):84–119.

Contributors

Mary Fitzgerald-Hoyt is a Professor of English at Sienna College in Loudonville, New York. She is the author of William Trevor: Re-Imagining Ireland (The Liffey Press, 2003), and her articles on contemporary Irish writers have appeared in New Hibernia Review, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Colby Quarterly and other journals. She is currently engaged in research about contemporary writers’ interpretations of the Famine. Jefferson Holdridge is associate professor of English at Wake Forest University and is the Director of Wake Forest University Press. He is the author of Those Mingled Seas: The Poetry of W.B. Yeats, the Beautiful and the Sublime Dublin (University College Dublin Press, 2000) as well as the editor of The WFU Series on Irish Poetry, vol. 1 (Wake Forest University Press, 2005). Niamh Ann Kelly is an art writer and researcher. She lectures in Critical Theory at the School of Art Design and Printing at the Dublin Institute of Technology. She also works as a freelance art critic and is completing her PhD “History by Proxy - Imaging the Great Irish Famine” at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam. Mary C. Kelly is Associate Professor of History at Franklin Pierce University, New Hampshire. She is the author of The Shamrock and the Lily: The New York Irish and the Creation of a Transatlantic Identity, 1845–1921. She is currently writing a book on the relationship between the Great Famine 217

218

Contributors

and Irish-American identity and researching in the area of Irish-American intellectual history. Michael Kenneally is the Chair of Canadian Irish Studies and Director of the Centre for Canadian Irish Studies at Concordia University. He has served as President of the Canadian Association for Irish Studies, President of the St. Patrick’s Society, and Chair of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures. He is also the founding Chair of the Council of Montreal Irish Societies and the Executive Director of the Canadian Irish Studies Foundation. He is the author of Portraying the Self: Sean O’Casey and the Art of Autobiography (Rowman and Littlefield, 1988). Rhona Richman Kenneally is an Associate Professor in the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University, where she is also a member and serves on the Advisory Board of the Centre for Canadian Irish Studies. Her publications explore aspects of commemoration in Canada and Ireland at such venues as Grosse Île, Quebec; Expo 67, Montreal; and The Quiet Man Museum in County Mayo. She is currently writing a book on Canadian food culture during the mid-twentieth century. Emily Mark-FitzGerald is Lecturer in Art History and Cultural Policy at University College Dublin. She is the recipient of major fellowships from the US-Ireland Alliance (Mitchell Scholarship), Mellon Foundation/Social Science Research Council, Humanities Institute of Ireland, Royal Hibernian Academy and Woodrow Wilson Foundation. She is currently finishing a book on the commemoration and visual culture of the Irish Famine; her research interests include public art, memory and commemoration, and contemporary Irish and international art. E. Moore Quinn teaches linguistic anthropology, Irish and Irish American folklore, and ethnographic film at the College of Charleston, South Carolina. She specializes in Irish and Irish American verbal art and has published in Éire/Ireland, New Hibernia Review, Anthropological Quarterly, Anthropology and Humanism, Museum Anthropology, The Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, and The Journal of the Society of the Anthropology of Europe. Currently, she is guest-editing a collection of articles on the American Civil War for Irish Studies Review. Her monograph, Irish-American Folklore in New England, will be published in 2009. Robert Smart is professor of English at Quinnipiac University and Director of the Quinnipiac University Writing Across the Curriculum program. He is the co-editor with Mary Segall of Direct from the Disciplines: Writing Across the Curriculum (Boynton/Cook, 2005) as well as articles on the Great

Contributors

219

Hunger and on the Gothic literature. He is also the founding editor of The Writing Teacher. Harvey Strum is a professor of history and political science at the Sage Colleges teaching on the Albany campus. His research interests are the American response to the Irish Famine, the War of 1812 and American Jewish history. He has previously published on the American response to the Irish famine in Virginia (Southern Studies), Rhode Island (Rhode Island History), South Carolina (South Carolina Historical Magazine), and Illinois (Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society). Margaret Preston is an associate professor of history at Augustana College where she has taught since 2001. She is the author of Charitable Words: Gentlewomen, Social Control and the Language of Charity in Nineteenth-Century Dublin (Praeger, 2004), and had has published book chapters as well as a variety of articles in academic journals including the New Hibernian Review, The Historian and Eire-Ireland. David A. Valone is associate professor of history at Quinnipiac University. He has co-edited volumes on Anglo-Irish Identities, 1543–1845 (Bucknell, 2008), Philanthropic Foundations and the Globalization of Scientific Medicine and Public Health (University Press of America, 2006), and Reverence for Life, Revisited: Albert Schweitzer’s Relevance Today (Cambridge Scholars, 2006). He has published articles on the religious and intellectual climate of early nineteenth century Britain and on various aspects of the history of the human sciences.

Index

1798 rebellion, 50, 96 1841 census, 142 “A Ghostly Alhambra” (Ní Dhomhnaill), 107 A Tour In Ireland, in 1813 and 1814 (Staples), 58 Aaron Ward and Company, 13 Abel, 43 absentee landlords, 22–23, 44, 84 abuse, in workhouses, 21 Achill, County Mayo, 150–51 Act of Union, 22, 39, 60, 126; as fornication, 41; as marriage, 58; repeal efforts, 84, 128 Adams, Richard David, 77 adaptation, Irish, to America, 123 Adele (ship), 13 agriculture, 22, 42, 97, 99 Akenson, Donald H., 75 Alias Grace (Atwood), 76 Almost There: The Onward Journey of a Dublin Woman (O’Faolain), 108 American Consul in Liverpool, 6 American Party. See Know-Nothings American Republican Party, 4

An Gorta 1847 (painting), 145 An Gorta Mór, 175–76. See also famine An Gorta Mór memorial, 182 Anglo-Irish, 48–49, 78, 82, 84, 93, 97, 102 Anglo-Irish war. See War for Independence, Irish animalisation, 197 anthropology, 61 anti-Catholic sentiment in America, 6, 127, 129 Arcadia, (ship), 5 Are You Somebody? (O’Faolain), 89, 108 Armstrong, General Robert, 6 Arnold, Matthew, 46 Ashland Hall School, 11 Asia, depotic governments in, 116 assimilation, 123, 134 Atwood, Margaret, 76 Australia, 27 Away (Urquhart), 76 Aylward, Margaret, 24 Ballina, county Mayo, 152 Ballymurphy, 198 Baltimore, 5

221

222

Index

banking, Irish, 22 Baptist Irish Society, 10 Baptists, 10, 15 barbarians, Irish as, 41, 44 Barclay, George, 8 Barrell, Paul, 195, 199 Battery Park, Manhattan, 152–54, 176 battle of Kinsale, 126 battle of the Boyne, 126 Bauman, Zygmunt, 113 bay of Naples, 42 beans, 13–14 Belfast, 78, 198 Belleville, N.J., 11 Benedikt, Michael, 113 Bennett, James Gordon, 9 Bergen county, N.J., 14 Betts, Feederick, 6 Bewley, Joseph, 14 Bildungsroman, 100 Black and Tans, 103 The Black Prophet (Carleton), 39–41, 49, 52 Bloomfield, N.J., 11 Boland, Eavan, 107 Boru, Brian, 126 Boston (Mass.), 51, 127, 131, 137, 156–58, 166, 178–79; Arcadia arrives in, 5; ethnic Irish in, 128, 133; famine relief in, 4; newspapers, 128 Boston Pilot (newspaper), 128 Bothán, 142 Botting, Fred, 68 “Boy and Girl at Cahera,” 189, 191 “Bridget O’Donnel and Children” (illustration), 182 Britain, 22, 24, 60, 67 British Empire, 82, 84 British North America, 74, 84 Broadway Tabernacle, 130 Bryson, Norman, 192 Burke, Edmund, 39, 40, 48–49, 51 Burlington Gazette (newspaper), 5 Burlington, N.J., 4, 11 Burroughs, Charles, 11 Butler, Lady Elizabeth, 145

Cain, 43 Caliban, 63 Cambrensis, Giraldus, 58 Cambridge, Mass., 165 Canada, 111–22; agricultural practices in, 84; Irish emigration to, 73, 75, 85; Upper (see Upper Canada) Canadian Bureau of Agriculture, 83 Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 73 Carleton, William, 40, 49 Carrodoogan, Attymass, 152 castle Inismore, 40, 43 Catholic Association, 132 Catholic Church, 3–15, 125; and refief efforts in New Jersey, 4; in Ireland, 4; in Jersey City, 10 Catholicism, 125 Catholics, 79, 97; and anti-Catholicsm in America (see anti-Catholics sentiment in America); and disease, 74; and Protestants working together, 6; and relief efforts in New Jersey, 10; as famine victims, 126; as Irish immigrants, 75; as other, 85; as poor immigrants, 80; debate with Protestants, 6; German, 10; immigration of, 127; in America, 125; in Liverpool, 167; Irish, 4, 7, 15, 6, 49, 75, 78, 130; Irish speaking, 126; majority in Ireland, 84; religious leadership of, 127 Celtic Cross, 115 Central Relief Committee, Dublin, 4 charity, 6, 9, 15, 24, 28, 128, 168 Charleston, S.C. 3 Cherokees, 3 Chicago, 133 Choctaws, 3, 129 Christianity, 7, 15 Cill Rialaig, 150, 152 Clan na Gael, 131 Clare, John, 48 Clinton, N.J., 4, 12 clochán, 148 Clontarf, 68 coffin ships, 124, 126–27, 133, 167 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 58, 61

Index Coleridge, Samuel, 48 colonial visual politics, 61 commemoration, 97, 134, 145, 172, 181, 200; at Grosse Île, 77; famine, 96, 106, 112, 154, 176, 197, 199– 200; of 1789 rebellion, 96; of Easter Rising, 90 Connaught, province of, 42 The Cork Examiner (newspaper), 64, 65 The Cork Reporter (newspaper), 13 Cork, Ireland, 8, 13–15, 80 cornmeal, 10, 12–14 cottages, 140, 142–44, 147–48, 150, 152, 154–56 cottiers, 23, 143–44, 172 county Londonderry, 15 Courter, James, 7 Crane, Susan A., 134 Crawford, John R., 12 Crawford, Margaret, 185 Crimea, the, 60 Croagh Patrick, 60 Cromwell, Oliver, 41, 43 Cromwellian wars, 39 Cullen, Fintan, 58 Curtis, L. Perry, 58 Cusack, Margaet Anna, 132 cyberidentities, 113 cyberspace, 112–14, 117 cybertheory, 112 Darcy, John S., 8 Davin, Nicholas Flood, 76 Davitt, Michael, 132 de Nie, Michael, 58, 65 de Valera, Éamon, 133 “The Dead” (Joyce), 117 DeKay, George C., 13 Democrats, 7 depopulation, 90, 103 Depression, the Great, 134 Dereste, Camille, 57 Derricke, John, 58 Deserted Dwellings (painting), 145 “Deserted Villiage Cottages” (famine site), 150, 151 Devoy, John, 131

223

Dickens, Charles, 21 Digging for Potatoes (engraving), 198 Dinan, John, 112 Diner, Hasia R., 127 Dingle peninsula, 148 disease, 52, 81, 83, 124, 172, 176, 188; among the poor, 26, 60, 74, 89, 115; immigrants and, 76; improper sanitation and, 28 dispossession, ideas of, 142 Doane, George Washington, 4, 7–8, 10–11, 14 Dodd, Luke, 107 Donegal, Ireland, 13 Donnelly, Edward, 15 Douglass, Frederick, 129 Douro, Ontario, 78 Dracula, 68 dried beef, 13 Dromdeleague, parish of, 192 Dublin, 10, 14, 33, 104, 135–36, 138– 39, 157–58, 178–79; Anglicization of, 42; architecture of, 22; economic decline of, 22; experience of the Famine in, 28; Frederick Douglas visits to, 129; growth of, 21; higher food prices in, 26; housing situation in, 28; Irish Relief Association, 6; philanthropy in, 24; Quakers in, 3, 8, 13; relief committee, 4, 5, 25; workhouses in, 21, 23, 28 Dublin bay, 42 Dummer, Phineas C., 5 Duncan, Kenneth, 75 Dunn, Clarkson, 12 Eagle (newspaper), 5 Easter Rising, 90 economy, Irish, 22, 59 education, 51, 127, 165 An Ejected Family (painting), 140, 141, 145 An Ejectment in Ireland (painting), 145 Elizabeth I, queen of England, 41 Elizabeth, N.J., 6, 8–9, 11 Elizabethan wars, 39 Elizabethtown, N.J., 4

224

Index

Ellmann, Maud, 53 emigration, 57, 63, 68, 73, 74–8, 83, 85, 93–94, 99, 100, 106, 116, 129, 138, 143–45, 165, 168, 174, 200 Emmet, Robert, 131 England, 40, 58, 60, 84, 88, 90–91, 94, 97, 101, 104–6, 130, 157, 159, 173, 184; colonial history with Ireland, 59; familial and national ideals of, with Ireland, 41; Irish exports to, 22; relief in, 23; relief organizations in, 4 “The English Labourer’s Burden,” 149 Episcopalians, 4, 10, 15 evictions, 89, 94, 99, 103, 140, 144– 46, 188 Fahan, county Kerry, 148 “The Fairy Thorn” (Carleton), 49 famine: commemoration (see commemoration, famine); conditions, 3, 9; engravings, 195, 198; historical analysis of, 21; historical views of, 63, 74, 89, 109, 131, 134, 171; immigration, 73, 76, 77, 85; literature, 108; memorials, 143, 145, 152, 164–65, 177, 181; memory (see famine memory); narratives, 65, 75, 126, 129–30, 133; relief, 4–8, 10–11, 15, 129; remembrance, 135, 145, 148, 150, 156; reporting, 57, 61, 65, 68, 188; representation, 145, 148; sesquicentennial, 106, 145, 154, 165, 181, 197, 199; suffering, 57, 59–63, 65, 67, 81, 147, 199; survivors, 164, 175; victims, 49, 52–53, 60, 63, 68, 81, 89, 171, 176, 195; visuality, 181, 186, 200 Famine in Ireland and West Kerry (Kavanagh), 148 famine memory, 124, 134 Famine Museum at Strokestown, 92, 107 Fegan, Melissa, 106 The Feminization of the Famine (Kelleher), 52

Fenians, 131 Fennario, David, 116 Ferguson, Samuel, 49 First Nations Peoples, 84 Fitzpatrick, David, 27, 83 Flanagan, Thomas, 51 Flemington, N.J., 9 Flight of the Earls, the, 126 floating material, 165 foreign aid, 3 Foster, J. W., 48 Four Courts, 95 Fox, Celina, 189 Frankel, David, 155 Frankenstein (Shelley), 63 Frankenstein, Victor, 63 Frankenstein’s monster, 59, 63, 64 Free Trader (ship), 14 Freehold, N.J., 12 Frelinghuysen, Frederick T., 8 Friel, Brian, 97 Fryatt, Horatio, 6 Funeral at Shepperton Lakes (illustration), 192 Gaelic football, 95 Gaelic Gotham exhibition, 117 Gaelic Ireland, 126 Gaelic League, the, 132 Gaelic order, in Ireland, 39 Gaelic Revival, the, 133 Gallagher, Thomas, 58 Gandon, James, 22 General Relief Committee of New Jersey, 8 German immigrants, 15 Germans, 3 Gibbons, Luke, 62 Giddens, Anthony, 113 Gilded Age, the, 133 Gleanings in the West of Ireland (Osborne), 62 Gloucester County, N.J., 9–10, 12 Goldsmith, Oliver, 39 Goodacre, Glenda, 183 Gothic, 43, 61–62, 69 Graham, Brendan, 163–65

Index

225

The Graphic (periodical), 195, 197 Gregory Quarter Acre Claim, the, 144 Grenier, Mario, 114 Grosse Île, 73–74, 76–77, 111–17 Grosse Île and the Irish Memorial, 77 Guinnane, Timothy, 28 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 40, 43

Hungry Words (Cusask and Goss), 65, 106 Hurley, Kelly, 61, 68 “The Hut or Watch-house in the Old Chapel Yard” (illustration), 192 Hutton, William, 82 Huyssen, Andreas, 154, 156

Halberstam, Judith, 61 ham, 13–14 Hamilton County [Ohio] Communications Center, 111 Harrigan, Ned, 132 Harron, Maurice, 182 Harrington’s Hut (illustration), 192 Harvey, Jacob, 4, 5 Hayes, Oliver, 3, 7, 13 Heaney, Seamus, 39 Hibernian Provident Society, 9 Hibernians, 3, 115–16 Hibernophilic authors, 134 Hirsch, Edward, 63 Hirsch, Marianne, 144–45, 150, 154, 156 historiography, 21, 73, 74, 89, 93, 117, 173 history, 51, 69, 115, 124–27, 130–34, 145–48, 150, 154–56, 164, 172–76, 181, 184, 186; Canadian, 75; colonial, 57, 59, 61, 68; European, 42; famine, 63; Irish, 46, 50, 67, 89, 93, 96, 97, 117; Irish-American (see Irish-American history); IrishCanadian, 115; of the Irish view of nature, 39; public, 40 Hodgins, Jack, 76 Hollingsworth, Joseph, 7 Holocaust memory, 144 Home Rule movement, 131 homelessness, 142 Hottentots, 58 House of Commons, 28 Houston, Ceil J., 74 Huet, Marie-Helene, 63 Hughes, archbishop John, 129 Hughes, bishop John, 4 The Hunger Artists (Ellmann), 53

identity, 53, 61–62, 77–79, 80, 82–84, 105, 111, 113, 197; cultural, 143; emigrant, 116; ethnic, 165, 176, 186; group, 164; immigrant, 75–76, 84–85, 131, 142; Irish, 89, 104, 108, 112, 117; material, 155; national, 89; self-defined, 114; sexual, 61 The Illustrated London News, (newspaper), 58, 60, 182–87, 189–98 immigrant experiences, 80 immigrant mentalité, 124 immigrants, 124; Catholic, 129; consciousness of, 135; descenents of, 165; effect of famine on, 126; experience of, 127; in America, 125, 127; Irish, 176; Irish, in America, 123; memory, 132; mentalité, 131; mindset, 124; persona, 133; twentieth-century, 125 incest, 47 integration, 123 “Interior of a cabin” (illustration), 66 The Invention of the World (Hodgins), 76 Ireland Beautiful (Nutting), 134 Irish Civil War, 95 Irish diaspora, 123 The Irish Famine (painting), 145 Irish football, 107 Irish Free State, 133 The Irish in America (Maguire), 75 The Irish Hunger Memorial (New York City), 152, 153, 154 Irish language, 95 Irish Literary Revival, 117 Irish literature, contemporary, 39 Irish Memorial (Philadelphia), 183

226

Index

Irish Poor Law Act, 23 Irish Poor Relief Act, 23 Irish Question, the, 197 Irish renaissance, 39 Irish Republican Army, 97 Irish Republicans, 95 Irish-American: folklore, 165, 170, 172; history, 124–26, 129, 131, 133–34 Irish-Americans, 4, 7, 96, 132, 173, 174, 177 The Irishman in Canada (Davin), 76 Jacksonian era America, 127 Jacobite tradition, 39 Jail Journal, (Mitchel), 131 James, Kevin, 73 Jersey City, N.J., 5–6, 11, 15 Jews, 3 John Welsh (ship), 13 Johnson, Thomas V., 3, 7, 13 Joyce, James, 117 Kavanagh Famine Cottage, 148, 149, 150, 152 Kavanagh, Gordon, 148 Keats, John, 48 Kelleher, Margaret, 52, 63, 195 Kelly, father John, 3, 6 Kelly, Robert G., 145–47 Kennedy, John F., 134–35 county Kerry, 148–50 Key Port, N.J., 12 Kilkenny limestone, 152 King, Jason, 73 Kingston, Bob, 150 Kingston, Ont., 74 Knott, Wilson, 7 Know-Nothings, 4, 129 Krantz, Judith, 88 Kristeva, Julia, 53, 62 La Balade Irlandaise (website), 114 Lady Morgan. See Owenson, Sydney Laird, Gail Wittwer, 152 laissez-faire economics, 25 Lake District, 48 landlessness, 142

landlords 48, 50; absentee (see absentee landlords); Irish, 23, 98, 103, 129, 143, 144 The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps) (Mitchel), 131 Le Fanu, Sheridan, 61 Lecture on the Antecedent Causes of the Irish Famine in 1847 (Hughes), 129 The Liverpool Journal (periodical), 59 London, 22; decision-makers in, 175; Irish politicians move to, 22; poor in, 68; poor law commissioners in, 24; Wesleyan Methodist Relief Fund home, 10 Londonderry, 13 Longley, Michael, 39 Lorrain, Claude, 42, 146 Louisiana, 11 Lydia Ann (ship), 13 Macedonian (ship), 13 Madigan, Laura, 111 Mafia, the, 42 Maguire, John Francis, 75 Mahony, James, 60, 186, 188, 192 Malabar (ship), 14 Malthusianism, 126 Mangan, James Clarence, 49 Marshall, Catherine, 197 county Mayo, 150–52, 154, 165, 170– 71, 175 McCormack, W. J., 69 McCuaig, Carol Bennett, 77 McGonigal, Maurice, 145–47 McLaughlin, Elizabeth, 182 McNamara, John, 151 McPherson, Tara, 114 McSweeney, Seán, 145, 147 Meadows, Kenny, 58 Mearns, Andrew, 68 Meehan, Paula, 39 Megalithic structures, 152 memory, 48, 50, 65, 85, 124, 132–34, 143–46, 155–56, 178 (see also postmemory); and history, 148, 150; as a process, 154; coffin-ship,

Index 133; community, 77; famine (see famine memory); folk, 163–64, 166, 170–71, 175, 177; fragmented, 109; future, 192; ghosts of, 156; historical, 97; imported, 154; IrishCatholic, 130; of homelessness, 152; of the Famine, 74, 131–34, 175–76; of the Holocaust (see Holocaust memory); performance of, 200; politics of, 200; public, 132; role in historical accounts, 150; selective, 96; silent, 155; strata of, 146 metanarratives, 113 Methodists, 10, 15 Mexican-American War (1846–48), 5 Middletown Point, N.J., 12 Milesians, 46 “Miss Kennedy Distributing Clothes at Kilrush” (illustration), 196 Mitchel, Jane, 132 Mitchel, John, 131 Monmouth county, N.J., 12, 14 Monmouth County, N.J., 12 Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Cohen), 62 Montreal, 74, 115 Montreal Mirror (newspaper), 116 monuments, 152, 154–55, 175, 181, 198, 200 Moran, Patrick, 9 Morash, Christopher, 106, 108–9 Morgan, Lady. See Owenson, Sydney Mortimer, Henry, 44 Mount Holly, N.J., 4, 9, 10–11 Moynahan, Julian, 51 Mulcrone, Mick, 133 Mullin’s Hut, at Scull, 192, 198 Murrisk Abbey, 60 Museum of the City of New York, 117 Musil, Robert, 154 My Dream of You (O’Faolain), 88–109 Napoleonic wars, 22 narcissism, 104 National Gallery of Ireland, 140 National Library of Ireland, 182–83, 190–91, 193–94, 196

227

National Standard (newspaper), 8 nationalism: contemporary, 130; cultural, 49; Gaelic, 126; Irish, 58; in Quebec, 115; radical, 131 nativism, 4, 6, 127, 129, 132 naturalization, 127 neo-Confederate websites, 114 New Brunswick, Canada, 76 New Brunswick, N.J., 5 New England, 164, 165 New Jersey Committee for the Relief of Ireland and Scotland, 3, 9 New Jersey Mirror (newspaper), 9 New Poor Law, 23 New York City, 3–5, 8, 13–14; Battery Park, 152–53; ethnic Irish in, 133; famine relief fundraising in, 4; the Irish famine memorial in, 152–54, 165; Irish Famine Relief Committee, 8; port of, 127; theater in, 132 New York Herald (newspaper), 9, 13 New York State, 11 Newark, N.J., 3–15; cholera epidemic of 1832 in, 8 Newfoundland Insectarium, 115 newspapers, 57–69; American, 3–5; Boston, 128; British, 58, 65; caricatures in, 198; English, 57; illustrations in, 184; illustrations of the Famine, 184; in New Jersey, 8, 9; nineteenth century conception of, 185; serial form of, 186; woodblock engravings in, 184 Newtoninan science, 52 Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala, 107 Ní Houlihan, Cathleen, 147 Nicholson, Asenath, 60, 65, 67 Nicol, Erskine, 140 Nightingale, Florence, 60 North Africa, 116 North Dublin Union, 21–28, 29–31 Nun of Kenmare, 132 Nunn, Pamela Gerrish, 145 Nutting, Wallace, 134 Ó Gráda, Cormac, 28 O’Brien, Conor Cruise, 125, 199

228

Index

O’Connor, Joseph, 184 O’Day, Alan, 74 O’Donovan-Rossa, Jeremiah, 131 O’Faolain, Nuala, 88–109 O’Neil, Kitty, 132 O’Neill, Hugh, 126 Oakland, N.J., 11 O’Connell, Daniel, 131 “Old Chapel at Skibbereen” (illustration), 192, 193 On the Study of Celtic Literature (Arnold), 46 Ontario, Canada, 74, 76 ordnance survey, 48 original sin, 40–44, 47–50, 52 Osborne, Sidney Godolphin, 60, 62 Our Forest Home (Stewart), 78, 82 Overmann (ship), 3, 8, 10, 12, 13 Owenson, Sydney, 39, 40–41, 46 painting, 140, 145–47, 184; eighteenthcentury, 199; homelessness in, 142; nineteenth century, 184; oil, 186; theatrical, 188 Parks Canada, 77, 111–16 Parliament, British, 23, 26, 184 Parsippany, N.J., 14 Passaic Chemical Works, 10 Paterson, N.J., 4–8, 11, 15 peasantry, Irish, 48 Peel, Sir Robert, 24 Penal Laws, 126, 130 Pennington, William, 11 The Penny Magazine (periodical), 185 Pentland, H. Clare, 75 Perth Amboy, N.J., 4 Peterborough, Ontario, 78 Philadelphia, 5, 10, 12; Essex Street, 5; port of, 127 Philadelphia Friends Committee to Ireland and Scotland, 12 philanthropy, 9, 24, 28, 185 Philippines, the, 107 Plainfield, N.J., 4, 6–7, 9–12 Poor Law, 28, 144; commissioners,23– 25, 27, 28; guardians, 23; unions, 26 poor, the, 3, 23–24, 27, 60, 170–71, 197

population: Catholic, 84, 126; density, 144; dependent on agriculture, 22; growth in Ireland, 22; in poverty, 22, 24–25; Irish, 1840 census, 68; Malthusian, 126; monstrous, 57; of Dublin, 26; of immigrants, 5; starving in Ireland, 3; subaltern, 85; wealthy, 22 postcolonial politics, 57 postcolonial representation, 57 postmemory, 144–45, 150, 152, 154 potato blight, 4, 83, 132 Potts, Joseph C., 11 Potts, Stacy G., 11 Poussin, Nicolas, 146 Presbyterians, 10, 12, 15 press. See newspapers Princeton, N.J., 5, 10, 11 Progreso, Mexico, 115 Protestants (see also Quakers): and Catholics working together, 6; as Irish immigrants, 75; debates with Catholics, 6; landed class in Ireland, 82 Providence, 111 Providentialism, 58, 127 Provost, Gilbert, 114 public works, 25 Punch (periodical), 59, 63–64, 197 Quakers, 3–5, 7–8, 12–13, 4–5, 15, 36 Quebec City, Canada, 111 Quebec, Canada, 74, 76, 111; adoption of famine orphans, 114; nationalism in, 115 Rahway, N.J., 4, 7, 10 Rancocas, N.J., 11 Readington, N.J., 14 Red Bank, N.J., 12 Reflections on the Revolution in France (Burke), 45 Relief Commissioners, 144 relief efforts, 3, 6, 11, 171 Repeal Association, 5 Repeal movement, 131 Richmond, 3

Index

229

Ricoeur, Paul, 108, 109 River of the Brokenhearted (Adams), 77 Robinson, John T., 11 Robinson, Mary, 107 Robinson, Peter, 78 Rogers, David L., 8 Rogoff, Irit, 156 Roman Catholics (see also Catholics): churches, 4; in New Jersey, 4; religious leaders, 3 Romantic viewpoints, 156 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 46 Rooney, Brendan, 146 Rosa, Salator, 42 Russia, 58 RV travels across North America with Bob and Laura Madigan (website), 115

Spenser, Edmund, 41 St. George (ship), 13 St. Mary’s Church, 10 St. Peters Church, 10 Staples, John Alexander, 58 The Star of the Sea (O’Connor), 184 Stephens, John, 3, 7–8 Stewart, Frances, 78, 80–83 Stoker, Bram, 61, 68 Stoker, Charlotte, 68 Strangers to Ourselves (Kristeva), 53 Stratton, Charles, 11 subaltern populations, 85 Sunday Times [London] (newspaper), 90 Sunday Independent (periodical), 199 Sussex county, N.J., 12, 14 Swift, Jonathan, 39, 49

saints, medieval, 39 Salem, N.J., 8 Schama, Simon, 146 Scotland, 3, 8–9, 12; relief in, 23; relief organizations in, 4 “Searching for Potatoes in a Stubble Field” (Illustration), 183 Sentinel (newspaper), 5, 11 Shea, Wendy, 199 Shelley, Mary, 63 Shelley, Percy, 48 Siberia, 58 Sinnema, Peter, 186 “Sketches in the West of Ireland” (Mahoney), 186 Skibbereen, 60, 195 Slack, Chris, 152 Slack, Tom, 152 Slater, Patrick, 77 Slea Head, 148–50 Slievemore village, 150, 151, 152 smoked shoulders, 13 Smyth, William J., 74 Society of Friends. See Quakers Somerset County, N.J., 12, 14 Somerville, N.J., 14 soup kitchens, 25 Spectator (periodical), 67

Tanquay, Mary, 77 Temporary Relief Act of 1847, 26 Tenniel, John, 58, 64 textile industry, Irish, 22 The Times (periodical), 185 Tisseyre, Michelle, 77 Tóibín, Colm, 61 Tolle, Brian, 152–53, 159 Tone, Wolfe, 131 Topography of Ireland (Cambrensis), 58 Toronto, Canada, 74 Trenton, N.J., 4, 8, 10–12 Trevor, William, 97 Tribune [New York] (newspaper), 6 Trinity College Dublin, 22, 187 Twisleton, Edward, 28 Unitarian Universalists, 15 United Irishman, 50, 126 United States, 167; and Ireland, connections between, 124, 132; Congress, 128; famine centenary in, 134; famine memorials in, 177; government, 3; Great Silence in, 166; immigration to, 127; Irish arrival in, 123, 127; Irish assimilation in, 133; Irish cultural transition in, 126; Irish descenents in, 165; Irish in, 75,

230

Index

135, 171; national context of, 125; news of the Famine in, 128; tourist attractions in, 164 Universalist Church, 10 Upper Canada, 74, 82–83, 85 Urquhart, Jane, 76 Vail, Nathan, 7 Valente, Joseph, 68 Vanderpool, Beach, 4, 7, 10–11, 14 VDARE.com, 116 Victorian era, 57, 61, 63, 68, 105, 184, 197 “The Village of Mienies” (illustration), 192, 194 Virginia, state of, 11 visual politics, 58 von Sneidern, Maja-Lisa, 63 Vroom, Peter D., 11 War for Independence, Irish, 104 Washington, D.C., 7, 11 Watts, George Frederic, 145 Webster, Zechariah, 7 “The Welshmen of Tirawley” (Carleton), 49

Westminster, 23, 25, 28 wheat flour, 13 Whelan, Kevin, 102, 116, 117, 148, 154 Whig party, 7, 11 The Wild Irish Girl (Owenson), 39, 40–41, 46, 52, 54 “Wildgoose Lodge” (Carelton), 40, 41, 49 William Dugan (ship), 14 Wills, Gabrielle, 77 Wilson, rev. James, 15 the Wines School, 11 Wittwer-Laird, Gail, 153 “Woman at Clonakilty” (engraving), 66, 189, 190, 198 Woodbury, N.J., 12 Wordsworth, William, 48, 50 Working Men’s Protective Benevolent Society, 5 Writing the Irish Famine (Morash), 106 Yahoos, 43 The Yellow Briar: A Story of the Irish on the Canadian Countryside (Slater), 77 Young Ireland insurgency, 131