In the first act of the wittiest Irish play of the nineteenth century, Oscar Wilde’s “Importance of Being Earnest,” there is much ado about a shortage of food. The fearsome Aunt Augusta is coming to tea, but we have watched the feckless Algernon eat all the cucumber sandwiches prepared for her by his manservant, Lane. The servant saves the day when the aunt arrives, expecting her sandwiches, by lying: “There were no cucumbers in the market this morning, sir. I went down twice.” Algy responds with high emotion: “I am greatly distressed, Aunt Augusta, about there being no cucumbers, not even for ready money.”
The play, first performed in 1895, is subtitled “A Trivial Comedy for Serious People,” and this scene is an exquisite exercise in trivialization. Wilde is imagining what a food crisis might look like if it were happening among the English upper classes rather than in his home country. The panic and dread of searching for nourishment and finding none is transformed into an airy nothing: a fake story about the nonexistent dearth of a plant that has relatively little nutritional value, and a charade of great distress. The comedy is so wonderfully weightless as to seem entirely free from the gravitational pull of the history that had preoccupied Wilde’s family, and of a place called Ireland, where the unfortunately unavailable food was not the cucumber but the potato.
In 1854, when Oscar was born, his father was also engaged in the sublimation of horror. William Wilde, a pioneering surgeon and medical statistician, was the assistant commissioner for the census of Ireland that was conducted in 1851—the one that recorded the disappearance from what was then the richest, most powerful, and most technologically advanced country in the world, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, of some one and a half million people. They had died in, or fled from, what the Irish poor called in their native language An Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger, a catastrophe that was then continuing into its sixth year.
The year Oscar turned two, William published the results of his immersion in the minutiae of the famine as an official report of the British Parliament. The two-volume work is called the “Tables of Deaths.” Because the census relied on the information given by survivors, and thus did not count many victims whose entire families had been wiped out or had left Ireland as desperate refugees, it actually underestimated the number of lives lost in the Great Hunger.
William and his assistants were nonetheless able to build solid pillars of data, mass death broken down into discrete numerals to represent sexes, ages, locations, seasons, years, and causes of mortality, which included starvation, scurvy, dysentery, cholera, typhus, and relapsing fever. The tables of deaths occupy hundreds of double-page spreads, laid out with exemplary clarity and precision. They speak of order, regularity, the capacity of Victorian governance for infinite comprehension. The staggering rise in mortality may have demanded extraordinary efforts from the statisticians, but they were equal to their task. They tabulated calamity, confined it safely within vertical and horizontal lines on the pages of sturdily bound official tomes. There are no names of human beings.
This dutiful, sober, and rigorously unemotional work might also have been titled “The Importance of Being Earnest,” albeit without a hint of Oscar’s playful irony. William’s safely anonymized figures are, in their way, just as weightless as Oscar’s sharply amusing figments. In the introduction to his volume, he uses the remote and clinical language of officialdom: “The labours of the Commissioners in this particular portion of their work greatly exceed those connected with the Tables of Deaths published in the Census of 1841, chiefly owing to the extraordinary increase in the numbers of deaths.” It almost seems as though the reader’s sympathy is being evoked not for the people behind the statistics but for the commissioners who had to work so hard to categorize the circumstances in which those people expired.
There was also a third kind of language used to cloak the horrors of the famine: an accusatory rage against the British authorities who had failed to prevent it. As it happens, it was another Wilde, Oscar’s mother and William’s wife, Jane, writing as a passionate and incendiary Irish nationalist under the pen name Speranza, who helped to invent that language. In 1847, she published a poem about the famine whose voice is that of the “wretches, famished, scorned,” who warn their oppressors that their deaths will be avenged: “But our whitening bones against ye will rise as witnesses, / From the cabins and the ditches, in their charred, uncoffin’d masses, // A ghastly, spectral army, before the great God we’ll stand, / And arraign ye as our murderers, the spoilers of our land.”
Jane’s fiercely unforgiving tone was adopted by militant Irish nationalists for whom the famine stood as the ultimate proof of English perfidy. But in her poem, too, the victims appear as an undifferentiated mass. Her avenging army of the undead is in its own way just as distanced as the numbers in her husband’s tables.
One difficulty in writing about the Great Hunger is scale. There have been, in absolute terms, many deadlier famines, but as Amartya Sen, the eminent Indian scholar of the subject, concluded, in “no other famine in the world [was] the proportion of people killed . . . as large as in the Irish famines in the 1840s.” The pathogen that caused it was a fungus-like water mold called Phytophthora infestans. Its effect on the potato gives “Rot,” a vigorous and engaging new study of the Irish famine by the historian Padraic X. Scanlan, its title. The blight began to infect the crop across much of western and northern Europe in the summer of 1845. In the Netherlands, about sixty thousand people died in the consequent famine—a terrible loss, but a fraction of the mortality rate in Ireland. It is, oddly, easier to form a mental picture of what it might have been like to witness the Dutch tragedy than to truly convey the magnitude of the suffering in Ireland.
Another difficulty is that the Great Hunger was not just an Irish event. It bled far beyond its own borders, seeping into the national narratives of the rest of the Anglophone world. Only about one in three people born in Ireland in the early eighteen-thirties would die at home of old age. The other two either were consumed by the famine or joined the exodus in which, between 1845 and 1855, almost 1.5 million sailed to North America and hundreds of thousands to Britain and Australia, making the Irish famine a central episode in the history of those countries, too.
There has long been something inarticulable about this vast human disaster. In a preface to the monumental “Atlas of the Great Irish Famine,” published in 2012, the former President of Ireland, Mary McAleese, observed that “for many years the event was cloaked in silence, its memory for the most part buried or neglected.” The editors of the “Atlas” noted that, until recently, “there was a strange reluctance on the part of historians, historical geographers and others to address” the vast archival records. Right up to the nineteen-nineties, the annual rate of publication of scholarly papers on the subject of the famine never rose above a half-dozen.
The novelist Colm Tóibín suggested, in 1998, that the problem “may lie in the relationship between catastrophe and analytic narrative. How do you write about the Famine? What tone do you use?” He speculated, moreover, that the Great Hunger had created a great divide even in Irish consciousness. If, he said, he were to write a novel about his home town, Enniscorthy, that took place after the famine years, “I would not have to do much research”—because the place would resemble the one he grew up in. But he would find the years before and during the event itself “difficult to imagine.”
It is easy to sympathize with this difficulty. The famine set in motion a process of depopulation—even now, after many decades of growth, the island has a million fewer inhabitants than it had in 1841. It disproportionately affected those who spoke the Irish language, creating an Anglophone Ireland. It led ultimately to a radical reform of land ownership, which passed to a new class of Catholic farmers. The profoundly uncomfortable truth is that Ireland started to become modern when its poorest people were wiped out or sent into exile—a reality that is too painful to be faced without deep unease.
Even before the potato blight, there was a degree of hunger among the Irish rural underclass that seemed like an ugly remnant of a receding past. In 1837, two years after Alexis de Tocqueville published the first volume of “Democracy in America,” his lifelong collaborator, Gustave de Beaumont, went to Ireland, a country the two men had previously visited together. The book de Beaumont produced in 1839, “L’Irlande: Sociale, Politique et Religieuse,” was a grim companion piece to his friend’s largely optimistic vision of the future that was taking shape on the far side of the Atlantic. De Beaumont, a grandson by marriage of the Marquis de Lafayette, understood that, while the United States his ancestor had helped to create was a vigorous outgrowth of the British political traditions he and de Tocqueville so admired, Ireland was their poisoned fruit. America, he wrote, was “the land where destitution is the exception,” Ireland “the country where misery is the common rule.”
The problem was not that the land was barren: Scanlan records that, “in 1846, 3.3 million acres were planted with grain, and Irish farms raised more than 2.5 million cattle, 2.2 million sheep and 600,000 pigs.” But almost none of this food was available for consumption by the people who produced it. It was intended primarily for export to the burgeoning industrial cities of England. Thus, even Irish farmers who held ten or more acres and who would therefore have been regarded as well off, ate meat only at Christmas. “If an Irish family slaughtered their own pig, they would sell even the intestines and other offal,” Scanlan writes. He quotes the testimony of a farmer to a parliamentary commission, in 1836, that “he knew other leaseholders who had not eaten even an egg in six months. ‘We sell them now,’ he explained.”
In the mid-nineteenth century, Scanlan notes, fewer than four thousand people owned nearly eighty per cent of Irish land. Most of them were Protestant descendants of the English and Scottish settlers who benefitted from the wholesale expropriation of land from Catholic owners in the seventeenth century. Many lived part or all of the year in England. They rented their lands to farmers, a large majority of whom were Catholics. Scanlan points out that, whereas in England a tenant farmer might pay between a sixth and a quarter of the value of his crops in rent, in Ireland “rent often equalled the entire value of a farm’s saleable produce.”
Landlords could extract these high rents because their tenants, in turn, made money by subletting little parcels of land, often as small as a quarter of an acre, to laborers who had none of their own. The whole system was possible only because of the potato. Most years, those micro farms could produce enough of this wonder crop to keep a family alive. It provided enough calories to sustain hardworking people and also delivered the necessary minerals and vitamins. By the eighteen-forties, as many as 2.7 million people (more than a quarter of the entire population) were surviving on potatoes they grew in tiny fields that encroached on ever more marginal land, clinging to bogs and the sides of stony mountains.
De Beaumont, noting that these laboring families had to endure a “life of fasting” when their store of potatoes ran out in the summer or when the crop was scanty, grasped the precarity of this situation. One of his most striking insights was that the exceptionally cruel nature of Irish poverty made it seem incredible to outsiders: “The word famine, employed to describe the misery of Ireland, appeared to them a metaphorical expression for great distress, and not the exact term to express the state of human beings really famishing and perishing from sheer want of food.” It was, he suggested, particularly in England that “persons were pleased to keep themselves in this state of doubt.”
Yet de Beaumont himself felt he could not describe what he saw on his travels. Words were not adequate to the task. Adopting a disembodied third-person voice, he asked, “Shall he relate what he saw?—No. There are misfortunes so far beyond the pale of humanity, that human language has no words to represent them.” If he were to “recall the sinister impressions produced” by the contrasts between the wealth of the Irish landowning aristocracy and the destitution of the rural poor, “he feels that the pen would fall from his hands, and that he would not have the courage to complete the task which he has undertaken to accomplish.”
This feeling that Irish reality was at once incredible and indescribable became almost a standard response to the Great Hunger. In one of the first widely circulated eyewitness accounts, an open letter written to the Duke of Wellington by Nicholas Cummins, a magistrate in Cork, Cummins struggled to articulate what he saw when he entered a settlement outside Skibbereen, in December, 1846. “I was surprised to find the wretched hamlet apparently deserted,” he wrote. “I entered some of the hovels to ascertain the cause, and the scenes which presented themselves were such as no pen or tongue can convey the slightest idea of. . . . It is impossible to go through the details.”
Asenath Nicholson, a woman from Vermont who began a one-person relief operation in Ireland, in 1847, recorded a moment when a man invited her to inspect a cabin where a mother, a father, and their two children lay dead: “The man called, begging me to look in. I did not, and could not endure, as the famine progressed, such sights . . . they were too real, and these realities became a dread.”
The Great Hunger was excessively real to many European and North American observers because it was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was happening not in India or China but in what was supposed to be the Empire’s heartland. Its victims were white, Christian, and (notionally, at least) subjects of the United Kingdom with the same rights as the inhabitants of Hampstead Heath or Tunbridge Wells.
It was also an affront to the liberal Victorian certainty that progress was linear and inevitable. The British Prime Minister Lord John Russell told the House of Commons, in January, 1847, that “the famine is such as has not been known in modern times; indeed, I should say it is like a famine of the thirteenth century acting upon the population of the nineteenth.” What the British ruling class could not grasp was that the Irish famine was a phenomenon of “modern times,” the product, as Scanlan convincingly argues, of a particularly virulent form of exploitative capitalism that left millions of people utterly exposed to the instability of short-term rental of land, to fluctuating food markets, and to wages driven downward by the pressure of too many laborers looking for too little work.
Militant Irish nationalism would follow Jane Wilde in seeing the famine as mass murder and thus as what would later be categorized as a genocide. Under pressure from Irish Americans, this even became an official doctrine in New York, where a state law signed in 1996 by then governor George Pataki required schools to portray the famine “as a human rights violation akin to genocide, slavery and the Holocaust.”
Pataki announced that “history teaches us the Great Irish Hunger was not the result of a massive failure of the Irish potato crop but rather was the result of a deliberate campaign by the British to deny the Irish people the food they needed to survive.” But this is not what history teaches us. A much more accurate conclusion is the one drawn by the Irish historian Peter Gray, who wrote that there was “not a policy of deliberate genocide” on the part of the British. Instead, Gray argued, the great failure of the British government was ideological—“a dogmatic refusal to recognise that measures intended to ‘encourage industry, [and] to do battle with sloth’ . . . were based on false premises.” The British did not cause the potatoes to rot in the ground. They did launch, by the standards of the mid-nineteenth century, very large-scale efforts to keep people alive, importing grain from America, setting up soup kitchens, and establishing programs of public works to employ those who were starving. But they were blinded by prejudice, ignorance, and a fanatical devotion to two orthodoxies that are very much alive in our own time: their belief that poverty arises from the moral failings of the poor and their faith in the so-called free market. The famine was so devastating because, while the mold was rotting the potatoes, mainstream British opinion was infected with a cognitive blight.
It was obvious to outsiders that the root of Ireland’s misery was what de Beaumont characterized as a “bad aristocracy”—the monopolization of land by a small élite that had no cultural or religious affinity with its tenantry and little sense of obligation to develop sustainable agriculture. But an English ruling class in which many leading politicians were themselves owners of vast estates in Ireland was unable to acknowledge this inconvenient truth. Who, if not the landlord system, could be to blame? It must be the Irish poor themselves. As Scanlan puts it, “Intensive monoculture made Irish potatoes vulnerable to blight. The solutions proposed to mitigate famine were themselves the product of a kind of intellectual and political monoculture. Solutions were unimaginable outside the market that fuelled the crisis to begin with.”
In a neatly circular argument, the conditions that had been forced on the laboring class became proof of its moral backwardness. It was relatively easy to plant and harvest potatoes—therefore, those who did so had clearly chosen the easy life. “Ireland, through this lens,” Scanlan writes, “was a kind of living fossil within the United Kingdom, a country where the majority of the poor were inert and indolent, unwilling and unable to exert themselves for wages and content to rely on potatoes for subsistence.” Or, as William Carleton, the first major writer in the English language to have sprung from the Irish Catholic peasantry, put it with withering sarcasm, the Irish poor had not learned “to starve in an enlightened manner”: “Political economy had not then taught the people how to be poor upon the most scientific principles.”
Civilized people ate meat—England’s unofficial national anthem was “The Roast Beef of Old England.” The desire to consume animal flesh stimulated effort and enterprise. Thus, the destruction of the potato crop, however terrible and regrettable its short-term effects, would teach the Irish to crave meat instead and become proper capitalist wage earners so that they could afford to buy it. “When the Celts once cease to be potatophagi,” wrote the editors of the London Times, “they must become carnivorous.” Let them, as Marie Antoinette did not say, eat steak.
This arrant nonsense obscured the reality that the Irish had no particular love of potatoes. Their historically varied diet, based on oats, milk, and butter, had been reduced by economic oppression to one tuber. Nor were they reluctant to work for wages. Many travelled long distances to earn money as seasonal migrant laborers on farms in England and Scotland, and Irish immigrants were integrating themselves into the capitalist money economy in the mills of Massachusetts and the factories of New York.
Yet, as stupid as this bigotry undoubtedly was, it was also deadly. The idea of Irish indolence fused with a quasi-religious faith in the laws of the market to shape the British response to the famine. In its first full year, 1846, Robert Peel’s Conservative government imported huge quantities of corn, known in Europe as maize, from America to feed the starving. The government insisted that the corn be sold rather than given away (free food would merely reinforce Irish indolence), and those who received it had little idea at first how to cook it. Nonetheless, the plan was reasonably effective in keeping people alive.
The general assumption, however, was that the blight of 1845 was a one-off event. At the end of July, 1846, it became crushingly obvious that the blight had spread even wider, wiping out more than ninety per cent of the new crop. By then, most of the poor tenants had sold whatever goods they had, leaving nothing with which to stave off starvation. Fishermen on the coasts had pawned their nets for money to buy maize. The terrible year that followed is still remembered in Ireland as Black ’47, though the famine would, in fact, last until 1852.
In London, the realization that this was not a temporary crisis coincided with the coming to power of a party with a deep ideological commitment to free trade. The Liberals, under Lord John Russell, were determined that what they saw as an illegitimate intervention in the free market should not be repeated. They moved away from importing corn and created instead an immense program of public works to employ starving people—for them, as for the Conservatives, it was axiomatic that the moral fibre of the Irish could not be improved by giving them something for nothing. Wages were designed to be lower than the already meagre earnings of manual workers so that the labor market would not be upset.
The result was the grotesque spectacle of people increasingly debilitated by starvation and disease doing hard physical labor for wages that were not sufficient to keep their families alive. Meanwhile, many of the same people were evicted from their houses as landowners used the crisis to clear off these human encumbrances and free their fields for more profitable pasturage. Exposure joined hunger and sickness to complete the task of mass killing.
“Rot” provides a convincing answer to Tóibín’s question of what tone you should use in writing about the famine. Scanlan’s voice is cool but never cold. The book is richly underpinned by research in contemporary sources and firmly rooted in historical scholarship, and it does not fall into the trap of oversimplifying the famine as deliberate genocide. But a proper sense of outrage runs between the lines and carries a consistently high voltage.
Above all, “Rot” reminds us that the Great Hunger was a very modern event, and one shaped by a mind-set that is now again in the ascendant. The poor are the authors of their own misery. The warning signs of impending environmental disaster can be ignored. Gross inequalities are natural, and God-given. The market must be obeyed at all costs. There is only one thing about the Irish famine that now seems truly anachronistic—millions of refugees were saved because other countries took them in. That, at least, would not happen now. ♦
–newyorker.com
