By 1845, as a result of a complex combination of economic, political and cultural factors, some two-and-a-half million Irish peasants, small tenant farmers and landless labourers, were dependent upon the potato for their survival. Living largely outside of the money economy, they fed themselves primarily on the one crop that could grow on the often marginal lands available to them. As a consequence, no other country was so vulnerable as Ireland when the potato blight, Phytophthora infestans, reached Europe from North America in the summer of 1845. While the blight was a serious threat to other areas of Europe, Ireland was uniquely open to massive devastation.
Large-scale government intervention was required to buffer Ireland from disaster, and intervention was, indeed, forthcoming. At several points during the Famine, over three million people, more than a third of the nation, were on relief. Thus, the paradox of the Irish Famine. Faced with a food shortage of unprecedented dimensions, Britain responded with an unprecedented effort, and there can be little doubt that lives were saved. Yet, while some excess mortality was no doubt inevitable, the deaths of well over a million men, women and children out of a population of eight and a half million is astonishing.
In addition, between one million and one-and-a-half million people emigrated out of Ireland during the famine years. Some observers at the time argued that emigration was an intelligent response to the crisis. Yet, many of those fleeing Ireland were ill prepared, psychologically or financially, to leave their rural homes and crowd into the industrial slums of England and America, where cities, such as Liverpool, Boston and New York, were hardly prepared to receive them. Death, therefore, was not the only tragedy of the Famine. Unlike later generations of Irish for whom emigration was a door to opportunity, the Famine generation suffered the pain of sudden uprooting, and many of those who survived and even prospered bore the scars of a traumatic experience.
By 1852, when the potato blight temporarily disappeared, one quarter of Ireland’s population had disappeared along with it. The demographic and cultural shock to Ireland was so great that the country’s population continued to fall, thanks to emigration, until 1900, when the island could count only four and a half million people, about the same number it had in 1800. Ireland is the only European country to experience such a demographic collapse in modern times.
Therefore, while the challenge that the Irish Famine presented to Britain was enormous, and the response, in some respects, impressive, Britain, nevertheless, failed Ireland. The reasons for this failure are not obvious. Certainly it was not due to a want of knowledge about Ireland. No country had been the subject of more inquiry. In fact, one massive parliamentary report on rural Ireland, that of the Devon Commission, was issued six months before the appearance of the blight. Ignorance there was, but it was not due to a want of information. Nor were relief efforts seriously frustrated by a lack of infrastructure in Ireland. The country had a good road system and sufficient ports. The constabulary and military were spread throughout the country, and in 1838 a system of Poor Law Unions had been established, covering almost every townland with an administrative network designed to alleviate destitution. The centre of imperial administration in Dublin Castle obviously had a wide variety of sources of information at its disposal. Given British fascination with organization and administration, everything was in place for virtually any kind of response Britain wished to make.
This has prompted Christine Kinealy to argue that ‘the challenge posed by the Famine could have been met successfully and many of its worst excesses avoided, had the political will to do so existed. The question is then raised of why this political will did not exist’ (xix, xxi). In her study This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine, 1845-52, Kinealy raises the crucial question, ‘What were the forces which shaped the actual impact of the Famine and how did they interact?’ (xv).
This book explores the role that one of those forces, the British press, played in shaping Britain’s perceptions and responses to the Irish crisis. The press was the principal medium through which Irish problems were filtered and fitted into public discourse in Britain. The Famine took shape for British readers within the pages of newspapers and journals, where it was described or ignored, decried or scoffed at, explained with statistics or blamed on the Irish themselves. After 1849 the Famine began to fade from the British press, and, therefore, from British consciousness, well before it had completely disappeared from Ireland. This study argues that the types of language and images adopted by the press in its commentary on Ireland and its leadership contributed to the failure of the United Kingdom to effectively provide for its most severely stricken member.
To some extent the British discourse about the Famine is a classic example of the power differential between a metropolitan centre and its periphery. The press depicted Ireland as a peripheral entity with a different landholding system, different tenant rights, different coercion laws, different poor laws, a different government, a different agricultural system, a different food, a different language for some and a different religion for many. Difference became a screen, at some level impenetrable, between British rhetoric and Irish reality.
David Spurr in The Rhetoric of Empire considers the language of difference within a postcolonial context. Along with Edward W. Said, Spurr is concerned with western views of non-western, colonial societies. He asks: ‘How does the Western writer construct a coherent representation out of the strange and (to the writer) often incomprehensible realities confronted in the non-Western world? What are the cultural, ideological, or literary presuppositions upon which such a construct is based?’ (3). Substituting ‘British’ for ‘Western’ and ‘Ireland’ for ‘non-Western world’ in the above passage suggests how Spurr’s ‘colonial discourse’ may provide one perspective on the British views about the Irish Famine.
This postcolonial perspective, while important, is limited, however. Some historians, such as Líam Kennedy in his Colonialism, Religion and Nationalism in Ireland, have questioned assumptions that modern Anglo-Irish relations can be fully understood within a colonial context.1 Nineteenth-century Ireland was not in a position comparable to India, southern Africa, the West Indies or other far-flung parts of the British Empire. For example, the very fact that Irish politics became intertwined with British politics, with Irish-Catholic MPs sitting in Westminster, set Ireland apart from Britain’s colonies. Moreover, while British travellers often compared the Irish peasant to various ‘savage’ peoples, Paddy was still white and a Christian (although frequently of the wrong sort). Although his European status does not appear to have helped him all that much when his potatoes failed, the number of deaths during the Famine in Ireland pale beside the millions who died in India and Africa during the horrendous drought-driven and maladministered famines of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.2
Nevertheless, what Spurr calls imbalanced ‘relations of power’ seem to consistently produce certain types of language, whether or not they spring from within a recognizable colonial context. Concerning such expressions, Spurr suggests: ‘There is nothing especially conscious or intentional in their use; they are part of the landscape in which relations of power manifest themselves’ (3). This does not mean that these expressions are harmless. Spurr quotes Jacques Derrida’s argument that the colonizer’s description of the colonized involves a ‘violence of the letter’ whereby one culture imposes difference upon another (4). In spite of critical theory, it is occasionally useful to remember that, however ugly or hurtful, the ‘violence of the letter’ is nothing compared to the violence that does not require quotation marks to make its point. Nevertheless, Derrida’s statement does raise the question of where and how in the chain of events rhetoric contributes to any kind of situation involving human suffering.
This is the question that this book tries to explore, for a kind of violence was done to the Irish people during the Famine. It was neither the blind violence of nature nor the conscious intent of an evil government. It was rather the violence that resulted from imposing a set of policies based, not upon understanding and compassion, but upon preconceived assumptions, attitudes, stereotypes, and ideologies as expressed in the leading articles and cartoons in Britain’s leading newspapers and journals. And in the end, people did die.
This book’s subtitle, Killing Remarks, is not, of course, to be taken literally. The British, regardless of their biases, did not intend for the Irish to suffer, much less to die. The title, however, does invite the reader to consider the role that prejudicial language and images may play in the formation of pubic opinion and governmental policy, most especially when prejudice is so deep within a culture that those who express it are genuinely unaware of their bias. The book also questions the ways in which prejudicial assumptions, along with some careful news management, may filter out and, indeed, protect the public from the full reality of a tragic situation. For example, British citizens, having given generously early in 1847 to Queen Victoria’s first appeal for Irish aid, failed to respond to the second ‘Queen’s letter’ in October of 1847. Between the two appeals the British public had been exposed to a considerable amount of information about the Famine, but the press had offered much of it within a very negative context.
This failure of the Queen’s second letter may be the first example of‘donor fatigue,’ which should remind us that the problems investigated in this study are not peculiar to the British reaction to the Irish Famine. Today, television may bring to those of us living in the West immediate images of the skeletal living dead stumbling into relief centers around the world. On the evening news we have seen sights that were barely described for, much less actually seen by, the average citizen in mid-Victorian Britain. Yet, in spite of our greater awareness and knowledge, not to mention our greater facility for intervention in disasters, we too sometimes experience ‘donor fatigue.’
Separated from Ireland by distance and difference, the British press had to apprehend and discuss the Irish Famine within a pre-existing tangle of political, economic and cultural debates. The press played this pivotal role because it stood at the apex of a triangular relationship that linked politicians and the public, government and citizens, to each other. Hannah Barker notes that newspapers were, in the phrase of Jürgen Habermas, an ‘institutional context’ in which public discussion of events took place. According to Barker, ‘Newspapers thus became, to all intents and purposes, a major forum for the formation of public opinion and one of the main channels through which public opinion could be expressed’ (23). It is never quite clear, of course, when the press was horse and when it was cart. At one point in his premiership Lord Grey complained that there were two types of newspapers: those who sought to influence public opinion and those who were influenced by it (Aspinall, 380). Although most papers probably wanted to think of themselves as belonging to the first category, all to one degree or another were also part of the second.
A. Aspinall suggests that from the beginning of the nineteenth century increasing sales and advertising revenues made the British newspapers financially independent of subventions from governments and political factions. As The Times self-consciously asserted in 1830, ‘One single newspaper reporting, and being known to report the speeches [in Parliament] faithfully and impartially, would soon have more sale than all the other papers so shamefully bought up; and this would be better paid than ministers could afford to pay its tools.’3
Of course, politicians had not lost their voices in the press nor was the Victorian press immune to political influence or manipulation. Hannah Barker notes that, as early as the 1740s, MPs were rushing off copies of their speeches to the papers (90). Stephen Koss points out that politicians ‘took advantage of a compliant press to inspire and sometimes to write anonymously articles that were calculated either to justify their own actions or to discredit an opponent, occasionally a Cabinet colleague’ (9). Although most of the papers relied on their own reporters (and clippings from other journals) for news, it was not difficult for politicians, especially those in government, to get their views before the public (Brown, 1992, 25).
Towards the middle of the nineteenth century, the press, along with politics and public opinion, constituted the culture of governance in mid-Victorian Britain. In fact, the Victorian press virtually defined itself in relation to politics. Koss sees the political culture of nineteenth-century Britain as based upon the acceptance of Parliament as the ‘supreme political and social institution of the realm.’ It was the heart of the metropolitan centre.
It was in the shadow of the Palace of Westminster, within an insulated enclave bounded by Fleet Street and Park Lane [home of The Times], that matters of consequence were discussed and decided by individuals who may have profoundly disagreed on points of principle, but whose objectives and tactics were strikingly similar. Momentous events might inconveniently occur in distant places, but their impact was fully registered only when they were debated in Parliament and appraised by the leader-writers of the London press (23).
Because the reporting of parliamentary debates was an essential feature of many journals, the authoritative tone of the politicians often became a part of editorial style. Moreover, reporters and editors, who were members of the middle class, sought their sources for information from within the agencies of power—the political parties and their factions, the government, the military and the police. In Language in the News Roger Fowler notes that even today such institutions provide journalists with ‘modes of discourse which already encode the attitudes of a powerful elite. Newspapers in part adopt this language for their own and, in deploying it, reproduce the attitudes of the powerful’ (23). Even in the case of Punch, much of its humour was based on its ability to deploy the modes of discourse that echoed in the corridors of power.
Although many journals were financially independent of politicians, they still had their political allegiances, if not to party or faction then to ideas and movements. As Edward Royle reminds us, ‘It is always important to remember that newspapers in the nineteenth century, even more so than today, were party organs. Their owners and editors were participants in many of the events which they reported’ (54). Thus, the function of the Victorian press went beyond simple reportage. The press was a disseminator of ideas, a bulwark of values, a normative gatekeeper, and a societal barometer. In editorial content there was a desire for suasion, for effectiveness of rhetoric. The owners and editors were usually biased, opinionated, and occasionally ruthless and controlling individuals, whose own views strongly colored the production of information. Because these biases reflected attitudes of class, ideology, religion, and race or ethnicity, the newspapers were not only partisan, but often condescending and occasionally, as in the case of the Irish, sometimes fatally amusing.
Even though editorials and news items were physically separated within a newspaper, the presentation of the latter was, as Lucy Brown points out, often ‘strongly colored by the political stance of the publication.’4 Some papers were committed to one point of view held by a particular readership. A few publications such as The Times learned to seek a broader audience by tacking to the breezes from Westminster. The ‘self-serving Times,’ as Koss notes, ‘even when it had postured as being above party…was seldom above government.’ He quotes Hazlitt’s comment that The Times ‘floats with the tide; it sails with the stream’ (46). James Wilson, founding editor of The Economist, complained in 1843 that The Times was happy to keep ‘just a shade in advance in what it deems the most popular line’ (Ruth Edwards, 10).
It was significant that the Irish Famine occurred at a time when the British press was experiencing great expansion and innovation. According to Aspinall, around the beginning of the nineteenth century the British newspaper was transformed from ‘merely a small commercial speculation’ primarily concerned with attracting advertising into a medium for printing news and opinion (379). During the early decades of the nineteenth century, its growth was dramatic. In 1800 there were seventy provincial papers, all weeklies; by 1832, 130; and by the 1840s there were over 200. Circulation is more difficult to gauge. However, the sale of tax stamps grew from 16.4 million in 1800 to 39 million in 1837. The series of reductions in the stamp tax on the papers between 1833 and 1836 certainly contributed to this growth. In fact, according to Hannah Barker, the press grew at a faster rate than the population (29, 30, 35; Brown, 1992, 25).
Such figures taken alone can be misleading, however. The circulation of most papers was modest, usually limited to a few thousand. Only one newspaper experienced significant growth. By the 1840s The Times of London had become the dominant paper in Britain, its seriousness (as well as time of publication) symbolized by the clock face on its headpiece, set for almost two hundred years at six minutes after six a.m. (Morison, 208). In the 1840s the paper was selling around 40,000 copies a day, far more than any of its competitors. In fact, the number of London dailies fell between 1790 and 1855 while overall newspaper circulation, dominated by The Times, grew, spread by the rail lines that radiated from the capital. Part of the reason for The Times’ success was that its steady growth enabled it to begin acquiring steam presses as early as 1814. Throughout the years it continued to invest in technology (Barker, 30, 32, 37-38; Brown, 1992, 24).
While the cheap, ‘unstamped press’ often reveled in gossip, scandal and radical billingsgate, the taxed, ‘respectable press,’ with its middle- and upper-class readers, bore the mark of seriousness on every page. The Times introduced the five-column spread in 1819, crowding almost all available space on its expensive pages with closely-set type. This was imitated by other papers. As a result, the nineteenth-century British press had all of the visual appeal, as Stanley Morison has suggested, ‘of a fourteenth-century codex of canon law’ (206).
Some of The Times’ success was due, according to Lucy Brown, to its championing of popular causes during the first half of the nineteenth century. For example, it sympathized with the victims of Peterloo and was steadfastly opposed to the New Poor Law of 1834 (1992, 26). In 1842 the paper acquired a dynamic young editor, John Thadeus Delane. Emblematic of the Victorian work ethic and dedicated to the paper and the political and religious biases of its owners, Delane played a key role in helping to mold public opinion. Although the paper had championed Catholic Emancipation in Ireland in the 1820s and although Delane criticized the Irish Poor Law during the 1840s, The Times was generally highly critical of Ireland, of Irish Catholics and especially of Daniel O’Connell.
James Wilson’s The Economist, founded in 1843, represented a new kind of journal, one dedicated to expounding the principles of political economy. Wilson, its founder and editor, was a Scottish manufacturer who believed in the power of ideas. Although his formal education ended at sixteen, he read widely in the classic school of economics and was a tireless exponent of free trade. Ruth Dudley Edwards has called him ‘evangelical — a deeply religious man whose religion was laissez faire, whose Holy Book was The Wealth of Nations and whose Holy Grail was free trade’ (22). He founded his paper to support the repeal of the Corn Laws, but even from the start he took a broad interest in politics and economics. Inevitably, he focused a good deal of his attention on Ireland during the Famine, which, according to Edwards, presented the greatest test of his steadfast opposition to any government interference in the economy (6).
The 1840s also witnessed the introduction of new types of illustrated journals. Henry Ingram, Nottingham printer, news vendor and pill manufacturer, founded the Illustrated London News on 14 May 1842. He was among the first to grasp the potential for an illustrated journal (Bishop, 29). Edited until 1848 by Frederick W. N. (‘Alphabet’) Bayley, the ILN claimed a circulation of 100,000 by the end of the year, although the figure was probably between 40,000 and 60,000. By the mid-1850s it was selling 200,000 copies per issue (Altick, 1997, 35; Barker, 33; Griffiths, 1992, 331). According to Peter W. Sinnema, ‘Within ten years of its founding, the ILN rivaled every other major English newspaper in terms of its mass dissemination and influence on a growing reading public’ (207). Produced for the middle-class family, the journal covered a wide range of topics often illustrated by well-executed wood engravings.5 Although other newspapers had occasionally used wood engravings, the ILN exploited this medium. In the words of Virginia McKendry, ‘The ILN became a pictorial magnet for readers ravenous for visual coverage of current events and cultural topicalities’ (6). The magazine was among the first to consistently send out its artists to provide first-hand sketches related to news events (Brown, 1985, 29). Its success sparked a number of imitators, such as the Pictorial Times, most of which ended up in Ingram’s hands (Griffiths, 1992, 331).
Punch: The London Charivari a very different sort of illustrated magazine, began publishing in 1841, in part to support the Anti-Corn Law movement (Brown, 1992, 29). Mark Lemon, its principal editor, was a friend of Herbert Ingram and helped him manage the Illustrated London News (Griffiths, 1992, 368). A satiric weekly, Punch featured cartoons and decorative illustrations, along with lampoons and parodies, that were often clever attacks on most politicians who rose to speak in Westminster. A kind of comic jester to The Times, it took that august journal’s news and turned it into humour (Altick, 1997, xix). Very much aware of the low, not to say lewd, nature of earlier illustrated satiric publications, the editors and writers worked hard to keep Punch respectable, and thereby gained for the journal its role as a reflector and shaper of public opinion. Richard Altick estimates that its weekly sales in the 1840s fluctuated between 22,000 and 48,000.6
Punch called itself the ‘London Charivari’ after a French publication of that name. Yet, the magazine was as English in its tastes and prejudices as the showman’s puppet, Mr. Punch, from whom it took its name and who served as both mascot and icon. In the beginning the pugnacious and irreverent Mr. Punch was, indeed, an appropriate symbol. As Altick points out, the magazine, in its early years displayed a radical sympathy for the common people of England and (less often) of Ireland and a disdain for the aristocracy. ‘Despite the cap and bells it habitually wore, it was that rare journalistic phenomenon, a comic paper with a social conscience’ (1997, xix).
Punch’s social conscience did not quite stop at the Irish Sea. Yet, apart from the drolleries of Paddy, which William Makepeace Thackeray, one of its writers, liked to celebrate, the magazine’s staff was hard put to dredge up much consistent sympathy for their Celtic brethren. Writers and occasionally cartoonists might agree that the Irish peasant was much put upon, but how much sympathy could one generate for those who would follow the likes of Daniel O’Connell and contribute endlessly to his purse? As with Delane’s Times, Punch’s attacks on the Irish leadership were often hard to distinguish from attacks on the Irish people.
While much of this study involves an analysis of texts — leading articles, reportage and satires, as well as captions, page placement and typeface — we are also concerned with the ways in which attitudes towards the Irish were encoded in illustrations. In the wood engravings of the Illustrated London News and in the cartoons of Punch we can find many visual signifiers regarding the Irish. As Roy Douglas and his colleagues point out, ‘what cartoons tell us about the attitudes of their audience reveals an enormous amount about contemporary assumptions and prejudices. One may be tolerably certain that successful cartoonists did not stray far from the general ideas of their likely readers’ (2).
We should note in passing the ‘Celtic’ background of some of the editors, writers and cartoonists employed by the leading journals. John Delane of The Times was descended from the Delanys of Queens County in Ireland. The ‘y’ was dropped when a branch of the family migrated to Britain in the eighteenth century.7 Bayley of the Illustrated London News had been born in Ireland, and Charles Mackay, who replaced him as editor, was a Scot, as was James Wilson, founder of The Economist. On the Punch staff Joseph Stirling Coyne, an early editor, was Irish; cartoonist Richard Doyle had an Irish-Catholic background and Thackeray had married an Irishwoman. Both Coyne and Doyle eventually left the journal.
In addition to the journals mentioned above, the following papers were also consulted for various parts of this study:
The Manchester Guardian had become one of the most important of the provincial English papers by the 1840s. Established as a weekly in 1821, it became a bi-weekly in 1836 and finally a daily by 1855. Although Manchester was the birthplace of the Anti-Corn League, the Guardian was not, as Donald Read suggests, close to the League. Nevertheless, it did reflect much of the laissez-faire, reformist attitude of Manchester’s business class (Read, 67, 138, 148).
The Morning Chronicle, founded as a Whig paper in 1769, reflected Radical opinion by the 1840s, until purchased by Tory Peelites in 1848. At one time it employed Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray and was briefly edited (1849-1850) by Henry Mayhew. The paper was the most serious rival to The Times during the 1840s (Brown, 1992, 28; Griffiths, 1992, 422; Morison, 207).
The Morning Herald, begun in 1780, was acquired by Edward Baldwin in the 1830s, the owner of the Standard, as an ill-fated attempt to challenge The Times (Griffiths, 1992, 422).
The News of the World began life on October 1 1843, and within a year had a circulation of 18,000. A Sunday paper costing 3d, it included among its readers members of the ‘lower classes’ who could enjoy it during their one day of leisure. Its aim at a very broad readership tempered its radicalism (Griffiths, 1992, 437; Morison, 207, 255).
The Observer, the oldest Sunday paper in the world, was begun in 1791. The paper had strong links to some members of the Tory leadership, such as Lord Palmerston (Griffiths, 1992, 444).
The Scotsman was begun in 1817 as an independent voice in Edinburgh where most of the papers were tied to the establishment (Griffiths, 1992, 508).
The Standard, a London evening paper, was recognized as an official Tory organ with strong Protestant sympathies. It was founded in 1822 to oppose Catholic Emancipation in Ireland (The Times, History, 13; Brown, 1992, 28).
Roger Fowler argues that ‘news is socially constructed. What events are reported is not a reflection of the intrinsic importance of those events, but reveals [sic] the operation of a complex and artificial set of criteria for selection’ (2). News, once selected, is then subjected to a process of ‘transformation.’ It is ‘encoded for publication’ in terms of a journal’s political, economic, social and cultural biases (2, 11). As Fowler points out, however, the distinction between selection and transformation is not absolute. ‘[A]n item can only be selected if it can be seen in a certain light of representation, and so selection involves an ideological act of interpretation’ (19). Therefore, the reporting of news is not a ‘value free’ act. Writing from the perspective of ‘critical linguistics,’ Fowler argues that ‘News is a representation of the world in language; because language is a semiotic code, it imposes a structure of values, social and economic in origin, on whatever is represented; and so inevitably news, like every discourse, constructively patterns that of which it speaks’ (4). Like Spurr, Fowler sees the biases that shape journalistic representation of events running deep within the culture, often below the threshold of conscious propaganda (10-12).
Fowler argues that ‘Representation, in the press as in all other kinds of media and discourse, is a constructive practice.’ Events are transmitted via ‘structural features…already impregnated with social values which make up a potential perspective on events’ (25). From today’s perspective the Irish Famine looms as one of modern history’s cataclysmic events, ‘the great calamity’ as Christine Kinealy has called it. However, from the other end of history, in 1845, the news of Ireland’s crisis, like the effect of the potato blight itself, was cumulative. The crisis had to break through the usual plethora of news (which included pieces on Repeal meetings in Dublin and agrarian violence in Tipperary) before it could even register on public consciousness. The Famine, thus, emerged out of news events printed in the British papers like an iceberg out of the fog. This is because events in Ireland could only be reported in the British press in terms of already well-established contexts, attitudes, and images. British editors had to first evaluate the news from Ireland and then try to fit it into an already complex pre-existing discourse. This discourse had evolved over the centuries of England’s tangled involvement with Ireland. Yet, equally if not more relevant were the contemporary political, economic and cultural contexts into which news of the crisis in Ireland had to be absorbed and through which it was interpreted and reported.
Irish issues, including the seemingly perennial problems of local food shortages and agrarian unrest, were almost annually on Parliament’s agenda. Therefore, the crisis resulting from the potato blight was inevitably played out within the context of British politics, one of the filters through which the realities of Famine had to penetrate. In the 1840s British politics was still evolving towards the party structure that would define it for the second half of the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, politics was still characterized by the factions that resulted from the 1782-1784 division between Charles James Fox and William Pitt, the younger. Until 1806 it was common to refer to these factions as Foxites and Pittites, after which time they generally took on the names Whigs and Tories respectively (Blake, 8-9). Even so, the Liberal-Whig and Conservative-Tory coalitions had only begun their evolutionary journey towards becoming modern political parties. Men taking either one side or the other on almost any major issue were to be found in both Whig and Tory camps. As Norman Gash has observed, ‘the lines of division in the House of Commons had to be redrawn on almost every issue’ (1965, 120). The parties were defined less by social and economic issues and more by their constitutional and religious positions. As Blackwood’s Magazine stated in 1837, the Tories stood in opposition to ‘any invasion of the privileges or property of the Protestant Establishment’ within the Union. The Tories were also dedicated to the independence of Parliament, the prerogative of the Crown and, of course, the preservation of the Union. It was, in Gash’s words, the party of ‘order and authority’ (1965, 131-32).
Not that the Whigs were opposed to these values. They tended, however, to believe that order and authority were best preserved by occasional judicious reform, which might periodically involve bringing into the political arena just enough Dissenters, Catholics and middle-class business men to keep the system working. Stability could be maintained, as Gash observes by ‘representing and controlling popular movements.’ Or, in Cobden’s blunter language, the Whigs were ‘buffers placed between the people and the privileged classes to deaden the shock when they are brought into collision’ (Gash, 1965, 161-62).
Politics, of course, had long been the preserve of the landed aristocracy who dominated both parties. Only they, or those whom they supported, could afford the time and expense of sitting in Parliament. Their economic independence supposedly made them immune to public ‘clamour.’ However, by the late eighteenth century public clamour gave way to public opinion informed by the press, and gradually class interests began to insert themselves into politics. The passage of the Corn Laws in 1815 angered urban business interests because higher grain prices benefited the landed interests at the expense of employers and labourers. As a result, the members of the middle class detached themselves from their assigned position as the ‘middling ranks’ within the old eighteenth-century social hierarchy and began to assert their own capitalist interests against those of the landed aristocracy. Class divisions increased with the struggle over the Reform Bill of 1832 and the subsequent Anti-Corn Law agitation (Blake, 13-15).
Thus, the Irish Famine occurred during a period in which the parties were in transition and in which middle-class public opinion became a powerful factor in politics. The potato blight struck almost fifteen years after the enactment of the Reform Bill of 1832 and during the push to repeal the Corn Laws. Using tactics of mass meetings and organizational membership borrowed from Daniel O’Connell, the reform leaders managed to bring the urban middle class — factory owners, merchants and professionals — into the political process through the extension of the franchise. While the first ‘reformed’ parliament did not look all that different from its predecessors, England’s middle class had nevertheless become a political force. When faced with a disaster in Ireland the British Government could not ignore middle-class opinion, especially as applied to food prices, taxes, and morality.
The same spirit of Liberalism that helped to galvanize the British middle class to demand a greater voice in politics, had, therefore, implications for economic policy. Many members of the middle class were in favor of free trade. Effusive about its supposed benefits (such as world peace), the employer class was particularly interested in finding ways to reduce the price of food. If the protectionist Corn Laws that set high tariffs on grain imported from outside the United Kingdom could be reduced, or better yet, eliminated, then demands from the urban working-class for higher wages might abate. If, in the process of eliminating the Corn Laws, the political and economic power of the landed aristocracy, which had traditionally ruled Britain, was reduced, then few industrialists or merchants would weep.
The potato blight hit Ireland at the very time when agitation against the Corn Laws and landlords, especially Irish landlords, had become increasingly shrill. The shortfall in Ireland’s food supply was the ideal event on which to attach the demand for an end to protection. Under the circumstances even the Conservative prime minister Robert Peel found it necessary in 1846 to set the stage for the abolition of the Corn Laws. This split Peel’s party, and his government fell that summer. The Whigs, most of whom were free-trade supporters, took over the government and the administration of famine relief.
As has long been recognized, it was an unfortunate accident that linked the Famine in Ireland with the triumph of laissez-faire ideology in Britain. The Whigs’ responses to Ireland’s crisis were constrained by the laissez-faire attitudes of its middle-class supporters who connected morality to economics. For example, not only was government intervention in the market considered bad economics, but relief efforts were, in theory at least, morally suspect. It was assumed that such efforts involved government doing for people what they should be doing for themselves. Therefore, relief policies were too often constrained by a moralism that feared fostering dependency among the Irish more than it feared the spread of starvation.
Even before the Famine, Ireland’s economic and social structure was regarded as unstable There appeared to be a rising tide of agrarian violence in western counties. Shortfalls in the food supply seemed to occur at regular intervals. Absentee Irish landlords were depicted as draining the wealth of the country, and the peasants seemed to grow poorer as they grew ever more numerous. Many in Britain felt that changes had to be made. By the eve of the Famine, some observers had begun to see the potato itself as the source of the country’s ills. In their view it was no accident that Ireland’s potato culture yielded poverty while England’s grain-based agriculture appeared, at least to the eyes of the middle and upper classes, to produce comfort and plenty. When famine struck, therefore, some political leaders and editors in Britain were prepared to seize the opportunity to remake Ireland’s agricultural and social structure.
Irish nationalism was another major political factor that would influence British attitudes towards the Irish Famine. With the Act of Union in 1800 the British Government had sought to subsume Irish politics within the larger environment of the imperial parliament at Westminster. Having lost their own parliament in Dublin, Irish MPs, initially representing only the Protestant Ascendancy, were in a permanent minority in London. Nevertheless, their main interests in land, law and order seemed in safe hands. Unfortunately for British sensibilities and Ascendancy complacency, the Act of Union imported Irish politics, with all its raw energy, into the House of Commons in London.
Daniel O’Connell’s successful campaign for Catholic Emancipation culminated in his entrance, along with some of his Catholic supporters, into the House of Commons in 1829. While forcing Irish issues upon Parliament, O’Connell and his group also played their role in British politics. The English themselves borrowed some of O’Connell’s techniques for marshalling public opinion around key issues. O’Connell, for his part, supported parliamentary and municipal reforms, as well as the repeal of protectionism, all defining issues for British Liberalism. And although his faction was relatively small, O’Connell twice played a very direct role in forming governments by helping the Whigs into power. Although O’Connell was interested in winning reform for Ireland (as well as for Britain), by the 1840s he was also demanding the repeal of the Act of Union, which he held responsible for his country’s economic ills and poor governance.
Politics and economics were not the only issues influencing the British discourse about Ireland in the mid-1840s. Religion was also part of the discussion. The failure of William Pitt’s Government to grant Catholic Emancipation, as had been promised, in the aftermath of the Act of Union, forced the middle-class Catholics of Ireland, under O’Connell’s leadership, to agitate for full civil rights. Although necessary in order to achieve reform, the political organization of Catholics guaranteed that sectarianism would remain a major factor in Irish, as well as British, politics. In Britain, Catholic-driven Emancipation had pushed even some sympathetic British Protestants to their limit of toleration. Even liberal sensibilities were uncomfortable with the phenomenon of a post-Waterloo Europe characterized by Metternich’s authoritarianism and the Vatican’s assertions of papal power. O’Connell’s willingness to act as a spokesman for Catholic Ireland doubtlessly cut into English liberal sympathy for his reforms.
For a number of Britons many of the old bigotries of the seventeenth century had subsided. Even The Times and Punch, no great champions of Roman Catholicism, occasionally found Ireland’s more extreme Protestants, as represented by the Orange Order, a burden on their sympathies. Nevertheless, Protestantism, as Linda Colley has suggested, was still an important factor in the makeup of British national identity. Even as toleration gradually increased in Britain, Protestantism ‘served as a powerful cement between the English, the Welsh and the Scots, particularly lower down the social scale’ (23).
Within the upper echelons of society the Ultra faction of the Tory party felt that it was a constitutional duty to stand for ‘Protection, protestantism and no popery’ (Blake, 20). According to R. B. McDowell, ‘During the thirties and forties conservatives regarded suffering Irish protestants and wicked Irish papists much as liberals a generation later thought of massacred Bulgarians’ (23-24). Stanley Lees Giffard, editor of the Standard, railed against Catholicism as a ‘tyrannical, anti-social and treasonable conspiracy.’ He was so vociferous in his attacks that McDowell suggests that it sometimes seemed as if his paper had been published in Dublin rather than in London (24).
Significantly, a militant Evangelical movement had appeared in both England and in Ireland in the 1820s. Irene Whelan has argued that in response to this new ‘reformation’ the Roman Catholic clergy strongly supported O’Connell’s Emancipation movement. Catholic Emancipation in turn only spurred on conservative Protestant efforts. The Protestant Colonization Society, founded in 1830, aimed at converting the Irish-speaking counties of the west (Irene Whelan, 137-38). During the 1840s the debates over the funding of Maynooth College, the largest institution for training Catholic priests in Ireland, and the question of establishing Irish universities became major issues entangling politics with religion. One of the odder manifestations of Protestant militancy was a sense of ‘Providentialism’ (which fitted well into the morality of liberal political economy) that declared the Famine to be the will of God, a punishment laid upon an improvident and unregenerate Ireland and an insufficiently Protestant England (see Gray, 1994).
It is hardly irrelevant, then, that Protestant Britain had to administer famine relief for a largely Roman Catholic Ireland. Significantly, some of the key editors, journalists and owners behind the most important papers of the period were highly suspicious of Catholicism. The owners of The Times, John Walter II and John Walter III, and their young editor, John Thadeus Delane, were generally hostile to Ireland’s Catholics. The Tory Standard was vociferously Protestant, as was its owner, Charles Baldwin, and its Anglo-Irish editor, Dr. Stanley Lees Giffard, of whom it was said, ‘he looked upon the Roman Church as simply a political conspiracy carried on under the name of religion’ (Griffiths, 1990, 120-21). Edinburgh’s Scotsman kept a running count of the number of Jesuits in Europe and generally supported Ulster Protestants. The staff of Punch, while trying to stay within the bounds of humour, became so hostile towards Catholicism that one of its leading cartoonists, Richard Doyle (a Catholic of Irish extraction), left the magazine in 1851 over the its rabid fixation on ‘Papal aggression’ (Price, 47).
Beyond issues of politics, economics and religion, there was a seemingly unbridgeable sense of cultural difference between the peoples of the two islands. Britain and Ireland were separated by more than water. Even when the old adjective ‘wylde’ was no longer welded to the word ‘Irish,’ British imagination and rhetoric continued to invest the word with a number of negative assumptions. The Irish were deemed to be violent drunkards, impractical dreamers and ungrateful beggars, volatile, untrustworthy, lazy, and improvident. As always, in the lexicon of difference, there were some positive attributes attached to the Irish; they could be brave, loyal (to individuals), and charming, or at least entertaining. Joep Leerssen in his Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael has traced the evolution of these Irish stereotypes from the seventeenth into the nineteenth century, during which time the Irishman was moved from the category of an enemy to that of a somewhat sentimentalized incompetent. By the time the Famine struck, ‘Paddy’ had become a stock figure in jokes, cartoons, songs, plays and newspaper editorials. The image of Paddy was never stable. In the hands of British commentators he was a remarkable shape-shifter, now agitator, now clown, now pauper, now rebel. He could generate fear, laughter, outrage and pity. Neither positive nor negative stereotypes, however, could reveal a real person, who, in his humanity, if in nothing else, could be accepted as the equal of those on the larger island.
Inevitably, British discourse about Irishness found expression in ideas about race and ethnicity. Although the language and concepts of modern racism were not fully formed by the 1840s, there were frequent comparisons made between the ‘Saxons,’ a flexible term that could at times expand to include Protestant Scots, Welsh and Ulstermen, and the ‘Celts,’ a term usually reserved for Irish Catholics. Whatever traits were under discussion, those associated with the ‘Saxons’ were generally positive, while those attributed to the ‘Celts’ were invariably negative. For example, if a discussion concerned the qualities of seriousness and dedication to the task at hand, Paddy’s sense of humour, however entertaining, came across as a liability.
The deeply ingrained British sense of Irish inferiority was perhaps the most problematic context into which the Irish Famine had to be fitted. When ‘inferior’ people suffer they should be helped; yet, their inferiority itself becomes an issue. They must be helped but also improved — remade. Unfortunately, the creation of a ‘new’ Ireland took precedence over the feeding of the old. As the Famine gathered force in Ireland, there was a growing sense in Britain that the mere relief of hunger was not enough. Rural Ireland had to be changed. It needed new landlords with new investments, new types of tenants, and new types of food. The entire agricultural basis in the west of Ireland, where the effects of the Famine were most virulent, had to be completely restructured. Small tenant subsistence farmers had to become capitalist farmers, agricultural labourers, or they could emigrate. In the process it was assumed that the Irish character, always a weak vessel, might be somehow improved.
These, then, were the major contexts within which British press discussion of Ireland took place. British reportage of the Irish Famine was, therefore, based on discourse already established by these pre-existing issues. As it emerged as a major ‘event’ in its own right, the Famine in turn reshaped elements of this discourse.
This book is not intended as a history of the Famine as reported by the British press. Rather it is an inquiry into the nature of the discourse on the Irish Famine as it appeared in the press. We focus, therefore, on certain events and individuals, while only touching upon others, which in a different work might receive more attention. Since we are interested in the evolution of press reportage regarding the Famine, we have taken a largely chronological rather than topic-based approach. At the same time we have tried to provide enough narrative to show how our examples of news reports and editorial comments fit within the broader context of the unfolding tragedy in Ireland.
The first three chapters address the manner in which the British press discussed Daniel O’Connell and the politics of Repeal. O’Connell had declared 1843 the ‘Year of Repeal,’ making himself and his mass meetings in Ireland major sources of news. Chapter One discusses how The Times and its editor, John Delane, denied O’Connell and his movement any political legitimacy. Chapter Two will analyze how Punch used its satire, especially its cartoons, to discredit O’Connell and the Repeal movement. Punch’s satire, like the criticism of The Times, extended beyond O’Connell to include the peasants who supported him. Chapter Three focuses on two topics, both tied to the politics of Repeal, which dominated news from Ireland in 1844. The first deals with the state trials of O’Connell. The second concerns the debates surrounding Peel’s attempt to use educational reform to draw Roman Catholic support in Ireland away from O’Connell.
Chapter Four is concerned with The Times’ attempt to lessen the impact of the Devon Commission’s 1845 report by sending Thomas Campbell Foster to Ireland to write a series of letters on the condition of Ireland. The potato blight occurred during Foster’s visit, but it did not loom large in his reports, which were more concerned with the failures of the Irish character and the evils of potato cultivation. Foster’s articles later appeared in book form, making his negative attitude towards Irish landlords and peasants widely available during the Famine. Foster’s letters from Ireland are among the examples of how British reporting on Ireland reinforced concepts of Britishness.
The next two chapters deal with the appearance of the potato blight in the summer of 1845 and its impact upon Ireland over the following year. Drawing on a variety of newspapers, Chapter Five traces press reactions in 1845 to the spread of the blight and how the situation in Ireland became caught up in the British debates over the Corn Laws. Although there was disagreement in the press regarding the impact of the blight, a consensus did emerge as to how Britain should react if famine conditions actually developed in the sister island. In fact, the rough outlines of most of the famine policies that Lord John Russell’s Whig Government would adopt when it came to power in 1846 may be found in press commentary in 1845. Chapter Six is concerned with the first six months of 1846. It shows how the British press rarely discussed Ireland in terms of itself. Instead it was British political and economic interests, as well as British stereotypes of the Irish, that shaped the press responses to the gathering crisis in Ireland. In addition to newspaper reports, this chapter will also consider wood engravings and poems in the Illustrated London News.
With the almost total destruction of Ireland’s potato crop in 1846, famine conditions began to spread throughout the country. Chapter Seven continues to follow the tendency of the British Press to see the crisis through the lens of British politics. With the fall of Peel’s Government in the summer of 1846 and a virtual loss of the potato crop, the new Whig Government struggled to deal with the crisis. A consensus formed around the idea that some long-term solution was required for Ireland. This chapter looks at press reactions to various proposals put forward by George Poulett Scrope, John Stuart Mill and Lord George Bentinck. Chapter Eight discusses the critical debate within the British press in 1847 concerning the Government’s handling of the Famine.
At the time of the Famine Daniel O’Connell had become virtually the symbol of Ireland, both for those who opposed, as well as those who championed, Irish nationalism. Press reaction to his death in 1847 is the subject of Chapter Nine. Chapter Ten deals with the increasing negativity in the reporting of Ireland, especially following the widely reported assassination of Denis Mahon, master of the Strokestown estate in County Roscommon. By the end of the year issues regarding security in Ireland had almost drowned out discussions about feeding the starving.
In January of 1848, Charles Trevelyan, the bureaucrat responsible for administering most of the famine relief, wrote a long article for the Edinburgh Review, setting forth his view of the Famine’s causes and the Whig Government’s ‘solution’ to the crisis. An example of how the prestigious quarterly journals were used to mold public opinion, Trevelyan’s article, the subject of Chapter Eleven, is also the first narrative of the Irish Famine. The article enables us to see how its author used language to reshape events, allowing him to declare victory and an end to the crisis. Unfortunately, the Irish Famine continued.
By 1848 much of the British press had convinced itself that Ireland would follow most of Europe down the road to revolution. The Young Ireland ‘Rising’ in 1848 was a fiasco, an event blown completely out of proportion by the British press. Chapter Twelve shows how this non-event drew attention away from the Famine.
Chapter Thirteen juxtaposes two ‘events’ that suggest the difficulty the British press had in dealing with Irish realities. The Queen’s visit to Ireland in the summer of 1849 was intended to celebrate the ‘end’ of the Famine (and the failure of revolution). Towards the end of the year, however, the Illustrated London News ran several articles revealing the horrors of the evictions, as Ireland’s excess mortality approached the record levels set in 1847. Yet, although blight and famine conditions persisted in the western seaboard counties through 1852, as far as the press and public opinion were concerned the Famine was over.
The conclusion analyzes press attitudes towards Ireland in terms of the needs of British culture and British identity. The discourse about Ireland was often about Britain. Irish shortcomings clarified and enhanced British superiority.
Notes
1. Kennedy, 1996, 177. See also Bruce Stewart’s essay, ‘Inside Nationalism: A Meditation Upon Inventing Ireland.’
2. See Mike Davis (2001), Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World.
3. See Aspinall, 379, 380. Hannah Barker argues that Aspinall exaggerates the extent to which eighteenth-century papers were so unprofitable that they had to depend on political subsidies. She maintains that the press’ profitability began during the eighteenth century. Advertising and sales, she insists, were always the keys to survival, although she does admit that bribery did take place; 81-83.
4. Brown, 1985, 25. Brown points out that at this time most newspapers had similar layouts. Advertisements were on the first and last pages. Leading articles were in the middle page, usually on the left with major political issues presented on the right; 100.
5. The technique of engraving against the grain of the cut end of boxwood had been developed by Thomas Bewick (1735–1828). Wood engravings had appeared only sporadically in journals and newspapers in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Yet, the wood engraving had the advantage that, unlike the other types of engravings, it could be incorporated directly with letterpress. Engravings were generally done on small blocks. For large illustrations, the drawing would be divided among a number of these blocks, which were then farmed out to the necessary number of engravers. Once completed, these blocks were fastened together to form the picture. The Illustrated London News was the first paper to undertake the complex task of organizing a large staff of artists and engravers who could work to a weekly deadline. See Houfe, 1991, 22–25; Jackson, 295-326.
6. Altick, 1975, 37. There was a certain amount of collaboration between members of Punch’s staff and Ingram’s Illustrated London News. Mark Lemon helped Ingram set up his paper. Sterling Coyne, an early co-editor of Punch contributed to it. Ebeneezer Landells, one of the original owners of Punch, helped to organize the ILN’s engraving staff, and Kenny Meadows and John Leech produced drawings for both papers. This sort of mobility among journalists and artists was common. At one time Thackeray had contributed to The Times; Bourne, 108, 118–120).
7. Cook, 8. Dasent gives the variant of the family name: O’Delany, Delaney, Delany, and Dulany, stating that the area around Castleton in Queen’s County was still known as Delaney country in the late nineteenth century; 1.