In February 1845 a royal commission headed by the Earl of Devon, an Irish landowner, published its report on the condition of Ireland. Peel formed the Devon Commission in 1843 hoping to counter Repeal ‘agitation.’ O’Connell had added land-reform issues, such as fixity of tenure, to his Repeal platform, and Peel wanted a public relations exercise that would weaken the Liberator’s hold on the land question. The Commission was charged with examining Irish land-holding practices. O‘Connell characterized the Commission as ‘a board of foxes deliberating gravely over a flock of geese,’ but he cooperated with the body, giving testimony before it (Gray, 1999, 58). The Commission did take its work seriously, visiting ninety towns all over Ireland and interviewing over a thousand witnesses. Although carefully avoiding any hint of radical reform, the report nevertheless angered many Irish landlords because of the public scrutiny given to their practice of subdividing their holdings at ever-increasing rents. Nor were the proprietors happy with the publicity given the arbitrary nature of Irish laws for ‘Cheap Ejectment’ — eviction.
The response of the London papers to the Devon Commission’s work was predictably biased according to the political views of their respective owners and editors. The Morning Chronicle, whose owner was a leading Whig, Sir John Eastwood, condemned the practices of the Irish landlords. The paper, edited by John Black, stated that evicting tenants-at-will onto the road to starve was ‘wholesale, unmitigated murder’ (22 February 1845). James Wilson of The Economist, whose devotion to free trade superseded all other considerations, was willing to acknowledge ‘misgovernment’ by the Irish landlords. He was convinced, however, that laissez-faire and self-reliance were the keys to improving the Irish economy, rather than legislation to control the relations between landlord and tenant (Gray, 1999, 76).
Although The Times published the Devon Commission’s Report over 21 and 22 February, John Delane seems to have found it far too sympathetic to the Irish. No doubt both the paper’s editor and its owner feared that, unchallenged, the Devon Report might lead to unwise legislation (Gray, 1999, 78). Seemingly determined to prove that the Irish themselves, tenants and landlords, were to blame for impoverishing the country, Delane decided to hire an investigative reporter from London to write a series of ‘letters’ from Ireland. Delane’s choice was Thomas Campbell Foster, a thirty-three-year-old English law clerk. Foster had some experience documenting other isolated areas of the kingdoms. He was in Wales during the Rebecca riots and had traveled in the Scottish Highlands, sending back to the metropolis some ‘not very flattering descriptions of the Highland cottiers’ (Foster, 716; Gray, 1999, 76).
It is hard to characterize the choice of Foster or the nature of his role as a judge of conditions in the Celtic fringes of Her Majesty’s islands. Was it a sense of conservative, urban smugness that sent this young Londoner out into the marches of Wales, the mountains of Scotland and then to the bogs of Ireland? Or was it a sign of Victorian confidence in a kind of egalitarian expertise, the belief that any rational observer, preferably English, could look into a ‘condition’ and suggest its proper solutions?
Whatever Delane’s underlying motivations may have been, the idea of sending a correspondent to report on Irish conditions was sound and more timely than he could have imagined. Foster‘s task was to bypass ‘the ponderous and unreadable Blue-books’ produced by the Devon Commission in order to ‘lay out the simple, basic facts’ for The Times’ readers (The Times, History, 9). Foster himself, acknowledging the amount of information that various Royal commissions had gathered on Ireland, claimed that ‘hitherto that evidence has been locked up in unreadable and undigested masses, and has been sifted only by partisans for party objects…’ (The Times, 24 August 1845).
By dubbing him its ‘Irish Commissioner’ rather than the usual ‘Special Correspondent,’ Delane seemed to imply that Foster’s investigations were somehow the critical equivalent of, if not, indeed, a corrective to, the work of the Government’s own body. Foster’s title also seemed to guarantee his objectivity and to place him beyond criticism. In his first report, Foster formally accepted his ‘commission,’ addressing his editor, but also his readers:
You have done me the honour to commit to me the responsible and arduous task of endeavouring to sift that evidence, in order to lay it before the public, and in each locality to hear the feelings and views of the people, and to make them known to the world through your columns (The Times, 21 August 1845).
Foster‘s series, titled ‘The Condition of the People of Ireland,’ ran from August 1845 through January 1846 in The Times. Later his pieces were collected and published in a 771-page volume with extensive notes and appendices. The book ran to two editions, published in 1846 and 1847, enabling Foster’s generally hostile views of Ireland to reach a wide audience during the first years of the potato blight. Foster himself claimed in October 1847 that it was his work that generated the ‘honest indignation’ over the Queen’s second letter appealing for funds for the starving Irish (The Times, 12 October 1847). According to Peter Gray, Foster and The Times ‘had the effect of moulding opinion on Irish land and society at a time when interest in the economic character of the “Irish question” was growing and was about to be propelled to the centre of the political agenda by economic catastrophe’ (Gray, 1999, 78).
Foster maintained that his purpose was ‘not only to depict the actual condition of the Irish people, but to examine into the causes which led to that condition, and to suggest…what appeared to me to be the most feasible remedies’ (Foster, v). He began the series by reassuring his readers that he would be perfectly objective, although he expressed this in an odd way, claiming that he was a ‘stranger in Ireland and wholly devoid of Irish prejudices, with no motive whatever save an earnest desire to ascertain the truth, and to state it with strict impartiality’ (21 August 1845; italics added). It is interesting, given The Times’ long-standing, highly critical positions concerning Ireland, that Foster assumed that any prejudices regarding Ireland were of Irish origin. Certainly, the implication that he and his paper were neutral enabled him to pledge that he would ‘endeavour to convince by argument and by evidence; if wrong, argument and evidence will be conclusive against me’ (21 August 1845). This was the Victorian voice of authority, supposedly free of bias and dedicated to rational analysis. With his self-proclaimed bona fides in place The Times’ ‘Commissioner’ could proceed unchallenged by any right-thinking readers.
In his first letter, written from County Cavan on 14 August 1845, Foster began with a tabloid approach — a murder. His first letter described the recent assassination of a County Cavan magistrate. The onlookers had allowed the assassin to walk away through the crowd.
[I]t follows…clearly that this community is divided, and that one part of it tacitly permits an assassination which the other part of it wants the power to prevent. What can a Government do in such a case as this? That which one half the community abhors the other half of the community looks approvingly on…one half of the community lives by intimidation and the other by force? (The Times, 21 August 1845).
Foster’s initial analysis of the situation demonstrated an awareness of the economic forces underlying social tensions in Ireland. In his second letter he stressed the economic roots of the ‘bitterness of estrangement and conflict’ that produced such ‘atrocities’ as he had previously described.
[T]he real origin of every disturbance, and of almost every crime, is the want of employment…that religious differences but exacerbate the irritation which this unvarying cause produces — and that ‘as drowning men catch at straws,’ the remedy of Irish ‘nationalism’ meets with support amongst desperate men, whose circumstances cannot be worse…
Ejected from his land, without other means of living, the Irish tenant is rendered desperate by the prospect of starvation…. Bitter sectarian hatred, rebellion and assassinations are the result. But would the foolish and wicked talk about Protestantism, or Popery, or Saxon rule, or harsh landlords, whether true or false, produce such results without the pre-existing, all-exciting cause of mischief — desperation founded on hopeless starvation? (The Times, 25 August 1845; italics original).
The phrase ‘without other means for living’ referred to the lack of industrial or even extensive agricultural employment opportunities in Ireland. As the Devon Report had emphasized, tenancy on the land was the only means of survival for several millions of subsistence farmers and their families.
Early in his reports, Foster accurately explained that most tenants received no compensation for any improvements they might make on the land.
The man who has reclaimed a red bog or a barren hillside, whose sons and daughters have often carried blue gravel on their backs [making] land not worth 2s. an acre…worth 20s. an acre…gets not a farthing allowed him by his landlord for the improvements…and…must pay the utmost farthing in rent for that which his industry alone has made worth anything (Foster, 37).
Foster validated this point by quoting from the Devon Report. One witness had stated that if a tenant made improvements during a lease, ‘in the course of time, he was turned out…or the rent was raised to what they were not able to pay’ (Foster, 37).
Foster seems to have believed that the best means for accumulating capital in Ireland would have been to extend to all of Ireland Ulster’s traditional system of tenant rights. Writing from Ballinamore, Co. Leitrim, on 22 August, he praised the situation in northern Ireland where the ‘tenants [are] most industrious, because [they are] paid for their improvements, and because their possession of the Land is secure.“1 In Foster’s wages fund theory, the expenditure of labour to produce such improvements constituted capital. All the landlords had to do to increase their capital was to hire labourers to improve their estates.
Up to a point, Foster understood the way in which the lack of compensation for improvements affected the lives of the peasantry. As one of Foster’s informants, a small-holder in Donegal, told him:
Not a bit of bread have I eaten since I was born…we must sell the corn and butter to give [rent] to the landlord…. The people do what they can to improve, but the landlord does nothing, and they have not the ability to improve. They are tenants at will; and if they improve, their rent is raised accordingly at the next valuation (The Times, 9 September 1845).
Foster clearly reported the discouragements facing the smallholders if they tried to improve the land they worked. Yet, ‘The Commissioner’ chose not to connect this situation with the apathy he claimed to have seen among the peasantry.
Perhaps under pressure from his editor, Foster shifted rapidly from his initial economic focus on land to an attack on the character of the Irish peasantry. ‘The people themselves are not blameless, and it would be neither impartial nor just to attribute their wretchedness, which in great measure is the fault of their own apathy and indifference, entirely to the fault of the landlords’ (Foster, 286). Questions concerning the alleged laziness and dependence of the Irish would soon become an important part of the British discourse about the Famine. Foster’s and The Times’ view that the Irish were deliberately failing to provide for themselves, and were wrongfully attempting to wring charity from England, would reecho in Foster’s popular book after death and eviction came to haunt Ireland in 1846 and 1847. As Peter Gray argues, for all of Foster’s attempt to unite his ‘labour theory of value with the idea of an elastic wages fund,’ his attitude toward Ireland rested upon a ‘populist moralism’ (Gray, 1999, 77, 78).
In part, what Foster saw as Irish indolence and lack of energy was the result of a relentlessly seasonal economy that required intense periods of labor followed by long intervals of underemployment or no employment whatsoever. There was hard spade work in preparing the soil and planting the crops in spring. The harvest came in fall. During the summer months the cottiers and conacre farmers had less to do and could generally find little employment around their cabins.2 In these ‘hungry months’ prior to the potato harvest the men would often leave to find work elsewhere, some journeying as far as England or Scotland. The women and children would close their cabins and take to the road to beg from their neighbors. It was in August, towards the end of this time of seasonal begging, when Foster arrived in Ireland.
Foster’s expectations of what agrarian activity was supposed to look like were based upon England’s grain-based agriculture, which required ploughing, harrowing, sowing, reaping, transporting for threshing and storage, transporting again for milling, and again for baking, all to produce the main foodstuff of the English, bread. Auxiliary manufacture and trade were required to support the growing of grain. There had to be smiths, farriers, cartwrights, millers, and bakers. Ireland, of course, grew grain on appropriate soil and exported much of it to England. As Foster himself reported, even those small farmers who grew grain seldom ate it, selling it instead for rent. Several millions of people, almost the bottom third of Ireland’s population, ate little more than potatoes. In this potato-based agriculture of the cottiers and conacre tenants, the tasks were hard but relatively simple: building soil, digging, planting, harvesting, and storing. Transportation was necessary only for the better quality potatoes that were marketed. Most of the potato crop was eaten by the same people who planted it. The tools required were few and simple. Rather than requiring a plough, a horse, harness, harrow, sickle and scythe, carts for transportation and ovens for baking, one’s own spade and an iron pot in which to cook potatoes might be all a family might need.
Foster insisted that Ireland wanted ‘proper cultivation,’ i.e. ploughed wheat fields rather than spade-raised potato beds. This agricultural and dietary bias ignored the fact that the wet, boggy, acid soil and the cooler climate of the West of Ireland were not generally suited to grain cultivation, except for oats or barley in some sheltered areas. Moreover, like many other visitors to Ireland, Foster ignored (or did not understand) the food value of the potato, assuming that England’s grain culture was not only more profitable than potato growing, but also more nutritious, as well. He apparently did not know that when accompanied by some sour milk, the potato provided most of the necessary nutrients. It was a monotonous but very healthy diet that had sustained Ireland’s rising population.3
Foster affected a tone of disbelief in reporting the huge quantity of potatoes that an Irish family consumed:
I am assured that eight pounds of potatoes per day is but a small allowance for a labouring man. The quantity seems extraordinary to English habits; but I am assured by an eminent surgeon here that nature accommodates herself to this kind of food [by distending the stomach]…be this as it may, I am informed on good authority that a labouring man requires eight pounds of potatoes per day when they form the sole diet. Taking an average family — a wife and four children, and allowing the wife six pounds and the children three pounds each of potatoes per day — we have a consumption of twenty-six pounds of potatoes per day… (Foster, 75-76; italics added).
Foster also ca1culated that ‘a middling pig will require, I am informed, about twenty pounds of potatoes per day to feed it.’ Based on his numbers, Foster concluded that a family of six with one pig would require approximately 14,000 pounds (seven tons) of potatoes a year. In spite of his apparent astonishment, Foster’s estimate of eight pounds of potatoes a day for a labourer was at the low end of consumption. A man might eat fourteen to fifteen pounds of potatoes in a day, if he could get them (Kennedy, et al., 1999, 69; Burke, 92).
Foster’s greatest culinary shock came when he entered one Donegal cabin and found a woman preparing —
and—what, think you? seaweed. They gather, I was told by some 20 of them (and saw them using it), a kind of seaweed called ‘dillisk,’ which they dry, and boil as ‘kitchen’ [flavoring] with their potatoes. It boils down to a kind of gluten which…they say, makes the potatoes more palatable’ (italics original).
Maintaining this attitude of disbelief, Foster assures his readers, ‘above a dozen of them [peasants] told me the same story; in fact, every one that I asked about it confirmed it.’ His guide, ‘a coast-guard man, and a respectable able seaman,’ granted additional confirmation (9 September 1845). The whole tone of Foster’s description of the Donegal peasant’s diet emphasized the ‘otherness’ of the Irish and underscored what must have appeared to his readers as an enormous gulf between English and Irish culture. One wonders how many of Foster’s readers remembered, or, perhaps, even knew, that their cooks used carrageen or ‘Irish moss’ in their own kitchens?4
Foster‘s repetition of the phrases ‘I am assured’ and ‘I am informed’ had several rhetorical functions. First, they placed Foster at the center of his own reportage. Although he relied upon the information given to him, the phrase ‘I am assured’ made him the agent of the sentence and gave his authority to the statement. Secondly, these phrases helped establish what Roger Fowler calls ‘the ideology of consensus.’ Foster’s choice of words signified an incredulity, which he assumed that his readers would share. Especially in the phrase ‘and — what think you?’ he invited them to be as appalled as he was at the idea of people eating seaweed. Fowler suggests that the use of such phrases ‘direct the reader to adopt a distanced and voyeuristic site of observation…’ (186). In this way Foster forged himself and his readers into a ‘we’ that was willing to find an Irish ‘them’ wanting in the ways of civilization. More importantly, as Fowler explains, ‘The ideology of consensus—“Everyone agrees that…”…is political and economic in origin…’ (49). Foster sought to bind the reader to his (and The Times’) cultural, social and economic opinions, leaving the Irish outside the sacred circle. Food customs lie at the heart of any culture, and there was nothing like a report of the ‘strange’ diets of ‘natives’ living on the periphery to turn the stomachs of readers in the metropolitan center. Strange food makes for strange people, and strange people are bound to be irrational and even morally suspect in their behaviors.
Discussing in his 30 August report from Donegal the vast tracts of undeveloped bog land, Foster insisted: ‘Skill and Industry [are] the great wants of Ireland.’ Yet, he then went on to describe the peasants’ reclamation techniques: the use of raised beds (unhappily named ‘lazy beds’) to prepare fields that were used the first year for potatoes, the second year for oats, and the third year left fallow. Foster was actually looking at the real productivity of Irish peasant agriculture. Under the constant pressure of population growth, they continued to bring the marginal lands of the West into production through intense spade cultivation. However, the great effort that went into this work was largely invisible to Foster, perhaps because such production was primarily for survival and was only marginally tied to markets. Foster’s ideas of agricultural productivity appear to have been based on the concept of ‘high farming’: large-scale capitalist agriculture that depended, in part, on expensive tile drainage systems installed under the land.5
Foster estimated that two million workers could be employed in Ireland each year in reclaiming land, if the landlords were willing to pay for the labour, which, according to ‘The Commissioner’s’ wages-fund theory, represented capital itself.
Why, here is a perfect mine of capital, waiting to be realized; and more employment for the people than there are people for employment…. Oh, how exquisitely absurd appear college bills, and Repeal demonstrations, and Orange demonstrations, to obtain peace, and order, and prosperity to Ireland, after contemplating such a palpable and straightforward means as this for insuring plenty, and occupation, and wealth, and consequent contentment and peace!
Yet the remedy is a social one; a Government can do little here. If Irish gentlemen and Irishmen will not put to use those means of prosperity and greatness which are abundantly given to them, it is difficult to conceive with what face they can ask Englishmen to help them. Why whine about ‘English capital,’ when you have capital at your very doors whenever you choose to win it? It was not thus that Englishmen won their capital (The Times, 4 September 1845, 6; Foster, 94-95).
In the 30 August letter from Donegal, Foster had criticized the money spent on the ‘college bills’ (the funds allotted to Maynooth and on the Queen’s colleges) as an apparent effort to ‘exasperate Ireland, in wounding her religious prejudices.’ Yet, Foster’s own religious prejudices appear in an elaborate footnote in his book. He visited Station Island in Lough Derg, one of Ireland’s oldest pilgrimage sites, where the faithful walked on their bare knees in a circle over the rough, stony ground. Foster’s description reveals a Protestant sense of distaste and superiority:
I came away with certainly no very exalted idea of the Roman Catholic faith, which could thus degrade the intellect of man into the belief that personal torture changes the heart, or that cut feet and bleeding knees are acceptable sacrifices with God…. Far be it from me, however, to ridicule the Roman Catholics for their faith… The amount of money thus realized by the priesthood, from about 20,000 pilgrims yearly, may be easily estimated (Foster, 85-86).6
As his series progressed, Foster’s pose of impartiality dissipated as he struggled with what appeared to him as an alien culture. He was annoyed and suspicious when Daniel O’Connell’s tenants insisted on speaking Irish, requiring the London reporter to use interpreters. He was surprised at meeting intelligent, respected Roman Catholic priests who supported Repeal of the Union. He condemned bad landlords but was outraged at the tenants who rebelled against them. He was shocked at the peasantry’s strange diet and their terrible cabins with pigs and people all jumbled together.
Like many outsiders who scrutinize the poor, Foster was ignorant of the tight logic of their struggle for survival. Echoing the horror of most British travellers in pre-famine Ireland, he was appalled at the dungheaps near the Irish cabin doors. For all of his very Victorian love of facts and figures, Foster rarely penetrated through surface appearances to reach the underlying reality of life in the West of Ireland. If he had, he would have learned, as did Irish-born writers Samuel and Anna Hall, that the offensive dungheap was one of the peasant family’s most prized possessions. It was the accumulated manure without which their potatoes would not grow in the acid, boggy soil (Hall, 2:421-22). Ignorant of such details of peasant life, Foster too frequently titillated his English readers with the outlandish customs of the inscrutable Paddy.7
Time and again Foster’s descriptions carried a moralistic subtext. At Dunloe in County Donegal Foster was forced to take a room at the only inn available. Although the floor was boarded and sanded, ‘a luxury not to be met with everywhere in Ireland,’ he was appalled to see ‘Two large and apparently much frequented rat-holes in the floor…. The table was propped; its cover torn and dirty; one of the windows had before it a broken lookingglass to dress by.…’ ‘It was,’ wrote Foster, summing up not merely a room but a whole nation, ‘perfectly Irish’ (9 September, 1845; italics added).
While in County Donegal Foster wrote several articles intended to contrast the estates of absentee and resident landlords. However, even after praising an allegedly improving landlord, such as Lord George Hill, Foster still marvelled at the absolute overall wretchedness among the peasantry of Donegal, comparing them to the most destitute people of his own society, the beggars of London. Arriving with a guide and translator on Arran Island just off the Donegal coast, Foster described the scene: ‘I landed in a village called Labgarroo, containing 24 cottages, and almost the whole of its shockingly destitute and half-naked shoeless population immediately swarmed out and surrounded me…such an assemblage of wretched beggar-like human beings I never saw.’ At this point Foster directly addresses his readers to pull them into consensual agreement regarding Irish barbarism.
Picture to yourself the beggars who sometimes on Sundays lie about the pavements in the streets of London, dressed up to excite commiseration, and who write with a piece of chalk on the flags ‘I’m starving,’ and then lay themselves down beside this scrawl crouched up in a violent shivering fit as the people pass them from church, and you will have an exact fac similes [sic] of the kind of looking people around me — the tenants of the Marquis of Conyngham (italics original).8
Foster’s comparison of Labgarroo’s inhabitants to London beggars was a rhetorical slight-of-hand that presented the peasants as parasites seeking charity, when, in fact, they were working very hard to survive. The phrase ‘dressed up to excite commiseration’ implied that the peasants, like London’s beggars, chose their appearance for effect. However, the rags of the denizens of Labgarroo represented their only clothing. Foster invited his readers to assume that begging was a form of deception, a moral farce, rather than a miserable necessity. Then, by implying some similarity between London’s beggars and Labgarroo’s paupers, he made their poverty seem immoral.9
In his account of Labgarroo, Foster exhibited both his strengths and weaknesses as a reporter. He noted that Labgarroo was a ‘clachan’ or rundale settlement, a communal type of agrarian social structure which, according to Kevin Whelan, was commonly used in the West of Ireland during the pre-famine period to ‘pioneer’ the cultivation of marginal land. Foster’s explanation of the rundale system is brief, but reasonably accurate. Pooling its one resource that was plentiful, its labour, the community did some of the work in common, while families tilled individual open, unfenced strips scattered throughout the holding. Each household had its share of good, middling and rough land. The most arable land was given over to grain that was sold to pay the rent. The members of the community grew their own food, potatoes, on more marginal land, leaving the roughest for pasturage. The sales of community produce and the payment of rent was handled by a head-man or ‘king.’
Without additional explanation, however, Foster’s term ‘village’ would have misled many of his readers. Most rundale communities had no infrastructure, such as shops, taverns and churches, as might be found in a prosperous English or Irish village. Instead of being organized along a road, rundale cabins were frequently situated in such a way as to occupy only the less arable land, leaving the better land for crops. The whole place would have had a jumbled, haphazard and careless look (Kevin Whelan, 60-78). The term ‘village’ evoked in the reader’s imagination an inappropriate comparison with the picturesque villages of England.
In fairness to Foster, the ultimate condemnation in his Donegal reports was reserved for the Marquis of Conyngham, whose aristocratic pleasures were bought at the expense of his impoverished tenants. Foster described the Conyngham estate as having
its thousands of acres of land capable of profitable cultivation, and its everywhere apparent neglect, mismanagement, and misery…. The tenants are not helped or put in the way of improving, and it is evident that every shilling beyond bare subsistence is extracted from them and spent elsewhere…. Some may say that the Marquis of Conyngham has a right to do as he likes with his property…. [But] the empire has a right to complain if he so manages his large estate, that he produces general destitution and misery and discontent—if, in fact, he helps make Ireland that scene of poverty and wretchedness and disturbance which makes it a shame and a source of weakness, instead of its being a pride and source of strength to the empire (The Times, 9 September 1845).
Foster was frustrated by seeing what he regarded as so many missed opportunities for improvement due to lack of investment or want of ‘industry,’ by which he meant moral effort. On 23 September he addressed his readers:
In former letters I have shown to you what the energy and persevering attention of good landlords is [sic] capable of accomplishing in benefiting themselves, the people and their country. I have also endeavoured to show that the prevailing wants or failings of the population of the west coast of Ireland are want of energy and want of enterprise….
Tucked away in this statement was an assumption that Ireland’s problem was partially one of class. ‘Energy’ and perseverance delineated the ‘good’ landlords; the want of energy and enterprise defined the peasantry of the West.
The small farmers and labouring classes in everything about them exhibit this habitual want of energy and enterprise, though at certain periods capable of great exertions. An hour’s labour of the wife with a needle and thread would prevent the man’s torn coat hanging in shreds about him. An hour’s labour of the man would fill-up the puddle-hole at his door, through which his children paddle every day in and out of his cottage, rendering it and themselves filthy (23 September 1845).
Foster’s reports shared with most travel accounts of Ireland one basic organizing principle: an acute awareness of the differences between England and Ireland. Ireland was depicted in most travel books as a culturally distant country with distinctly different customs that appeared obscure, irrational and strange (although sometimes humourous). These differences then reflected back to the readers the cultural, indeed, the moral superiority of Britain.10
Criticism of Foster’s reporting came from several sectors, but most vocally and angrily from Daniel O’Connell, who felt that the Englishman and his paper were once again attacking the Irish people. At Repeal meetings in Dublin, O’Connell denounced Foster as ‘the gutter Commissioner’ of ‘the infamous Times’ (The Times, History, 9). In defense of Foster The Times began a new editorial attack on both Ireland and O‘Connell on 2 October 1845. ‘If ever there is a country in the world which does not know that 5 and 7 make 12 to any practical purpose,’ insisted The Times’ leader, ‘it is that unthrifty, squandering, blundering Ireland.’
Unfortunately, the battle between Delane/Foster and O’Connell began to involve concepts of race. In response to Foster’s allegations of Celtic inferiority, O’Connell’s maintained that the Celt was a finer man than the Saxon. Incensed at this statement, The Times’ leader thundered:
If he [the Celt] is more than equal to the Saxon, why is he not as industrious, as decent, as civilized? Why does he still suffer the shameful stigma of being ill-fed, ill-clothed, and ill-housed? Why does he not set to work at once, like a man and a Christian, to clear away the dunghill, to drain the cesspool, to sweep the floor, to mend the thatch, to cover his own and his wife’s and his children’s nakedness?…Our ‘Commissioner’…was accounting for the miseries of Ireland,’and mentioned the physical inferiority of the Celt as contributing, with other causes, to the grievous defects of his social condition. For all the world it is just as if our hall door was assailed by the importunities of a filthy, half-naked mendicant. ‘Poor fellow,’ we say when offering him a plate of broken victuals, ‘whatever his faults, one can easily see he is not fit for work.’ ‘But I am,’ he replies; ‘I am as strong and hearty as any one of your own carters and ploughman.’ Of course, any Englishmen [sic] would answer, ‘Are you? Then why do you make yourself so disgusting an object and go around begging’ (The Times, 2 October 1845).
The quality of Foster’s angry exchanges with O’Connell may be ascertained from one of his rebuttals:
In one of the early letters the writer [Foster] made the comparison which every Englishman with eyes in his head, and wits in his brain has always made, and will always make, between the physical characteristics of the Saxon and the Celt.11 If the Celt is the smaller, the less robust, and less upright of the two, it is his misfortune rather than his fault, and may also serve to excuse his inferior habits of life. O’Connell denied the fact…. He proposed a peculiar test…. It was that representatives of the two races should alternatively kick the writer of the letters, in order that he might report the comparative force of their kicks…he pictured the whole Celtic population kicking him in universal competition…. When we hear any one talk of kicking, we involuntarily look to see hoofs. If Nature has not shod Mr. O‘Connell’s feet with horn, she has done him a great injustice (Foster, 664-667).
Peter Gray notes that this was a ‘transition period between the dominance of environmentalism and racialism as the leading discourse regarding Ireland…’ (1993, 29). As Roberto Romani points out, ‘race’ was a very loose concept around the mid-nineteenth century. It included not only physical characteristics but ‘also climate, language, and perhaps also religion and primitive mode of government…. “Race” was a catchword which resists any attempt at deconstruction….’ According to Romani, there was ‘a grey area in the British attitudes to the Irish’ where ‘the ambiguities of both race and religion’ mingled (202). Much of Foster’s use of the term ‘Celt’ suggests that he was writing about national character. However, whatever he meant by ‘race,’ Foster’s attempt to distinguish between the ‘Saxon’ and the ‘Celt’ suggests that he harboured a deep sense that Ireland’s woes were based on an inherent and unalterable inferiority of her people.
For example, in one of his earliest reports, Foster insisted that ‘the lower class of the Celtic population…[is] content to live hardly and upon little…the lower class of the Saxon race…will live comfortably and well.’ Writing from Ulster, ‘The Commissioner’ compared Irish Catholics to Protestant Ulster Scots, upon whom he seemed prepared to bestow honorary Saxonhood. Foster declared that ‘race had more to do with the distinguishing characteristic of Ulster than either politics or religion.’ In the introduction to his book he quoted with approval from a travel account by a German visitor, J. G Kohl, who claimed: ‘The vociferous, speculative, and persevering Anglo-Saxons force the indolent and unenergetic Celts with them on the road of glory and national greatness’ (The Times, 28 August 1845; Foster, 43-44).12
By late October the potato blight was becoming the subject of an increasing number of reports in the British papers. Neither The Times nor its ‘Commissioner’ seemed much interested in the problem, however.Instead, when Foster reported from Thurles, County Tipperary and from Roscrea on 27 and 30 October respectively, he returned to his earlier theme of agrarian unrest. Back in August he had seen economics as the basis for rural violence. By fall these arguments had vanished. Want of employment, the competition for land, and threat of eviction were no longer offered as explanations for agrarian ‘outrages.’ The source of violence was to be found within the character of the Irish peasants themselves.
By November the extent of the potato blight in Ireland could no longer be ignored. Foster’s way of dealing with it reveals his own deep cultural bias. Numerous ideas were being floated in the various papers for saving something of the potato crop, if only its starch; none were effective, since the fungus was all-pervasive and eventually destroyed all infected potatoes. Without inquiring into the feasibility of any of these suggestions, Foster simply assumed their efficacy and attacked the peasantry for not trying them. On 7 November a point at which all potatoes would have been lifted and the extent of the crop failure obvious, Foster reported that the peasants had observed All Saints Day instead of trying to salvage their blighted crop:
…[W]ith famine before them, it will hardly be conceived in England that Saturday last, a fine bright, sunshiny day, when the potatoes might have been exposed to the wind and sun and the worst grated into flour, was proclaimed a holiday (no doubt for some good purpose), and not a man was to be seen at work in the whole county whilst their potatoes were rotting. Some will not even take the trouble to dig them, because they are diseased, though there is no question about it but much of them, though rotten may be saved. The town of Limerick was like a fair. There were thousands of people idling about in the streets… (7 November 1845).
Had Foster been better acquainted with Catholicism, he might have understood the nature of All Saints Day as one of holy obligation. Faced with a massive crop failure, it might have seemed to the Irish-Catholic farmers an appropriate time for prayer. Had Foster been better acquainted with potatoes, he might have refrained from attacking the Irish for not attempting an impossible salvage.
A few weeks later, on 21 November, The Times printed a report from an English correspondent, Robert Parker, who lamented, accurately, that ‘If they [the potatoes] are infected, nothing can save them.’ Foster acknowledged no correction. Indeed, by the time Parker’s report was published, ‘The Commissioner’ and his paper had moved on to a far more promising topic. In November of 1845 Foster had headed south to Kerry to challenge the Liberator on his own ground. With much of Ireland’s potato crop destroyed, Foster and Delane decided that the real news lay in the poverty of the Liberator’s tenants and in his own record as a landlord (see Chapter Six). The timing of Foster’s reports on O’Connell and the Irish peasantry could not have been worse. As the results of the bad harvest threatened to deepen into famine, the images of Ireland that Foster presented to his metropolitan readers were calculated to engender disgust and disbelief.
It was easy for Foster to blame the Irish for their own plight. In his letter of 22 November he excused his relative silence about the potato blight because of the lack of agreement as to its cause and cure. He then predicted:
such is the general apathy, want of exertion, and feeling of fatality amongst the people…such the disunion among the higher classes, with similar apathetic indifference, that unless the Government steps forward…nothing will be done…for, such is the character of the people, that they will do nothing till starvation faces them.
In a footnote in the 1846 edition of his book, Foster, impressed by his own prediction, launched into a tirade against the Irish, who by then were indeed starving:
[A] panic is beginning to seize on men’s minds, which is being turned to the extraction of money from England to keep the poor of Ireland from starving, whilst not a word is being said about the shameful apathy and neglect which permitted such a state of things to come about. I do not hesitate to state my conviction…that for the greater part of the severity of this unhappy calamity, the people of Ireland have themselves to blame, and their own disgraceful apathy and laziness (Foster, 443).
‘The Commissioner’ obviously felt vindicated, and perhaps that was the purpose of the whole exercise in the first place. In his reports, Foster’s metropolitan audience read not about Ireland but about the superiority of their guide and of their own culture, the real subject of the whole series. Indeed, it is hard to read Foster without the feeling that here was a man, still young enough to combine ego with great energy, who was eager to demonstrate his mastery, both in concepts and in details, of the problem of Ireland; a problem no one else had yet managed to solve. In this respect he seems to represent a certain type of colonial mentality. Thomas Campbell Foster did not, of course, risk life and limb crossing the burning sands of Arabia or court madness by peering into the heart of darkest Africa. Nevertheless, he bore, according to his own account, a heavy burden. As he stated to his editor and his readers upon accepting his ‘commission,’ ‘With almost an oppressive sense of the difficulties which I may have to encounter, I enter upon the duty you have committed to me…’ (The Times, 21 August 1846).
In discussing the relationship between those western writers who had explored ‘exotic territories’ and the metropolitan societies to which they reported, David Spurr recalls the parallel Claude Lévi-Strauss found between such western, journalistic enterprises and tribal rites of puberty. Tribal youth withdraw from their society, venturing, in Lévi-Strauss’ words, into ‘hazardous marginal areas where social norms cease to have any meaning,’ in hopes of gaining prestige and acclaim from their village. Likewise, ‘A young man who lives outside his social group for a few weeks or months, so as to expose himself…to an extreme situation, comes back endowed with a power which finds expression in the writing of newspaper articles and best-sellers and in lecturing to packed halls’ (quoted in Spurr, 149). Spurr goes on to suggest that this process leads to the ‘insubstantialization’ of the exotic peoples and places visited, eclipsed by the ‘self-dramatization’ of the returned traveller, who substitutes his own inner life for any real understanding of his supposed subject.13
Given the middle-class assumptions about the norms of behavior and standards of living embedded in the metropolitan culture he represented, Foster’s encounter with the poverty and the culture of the Irish peasantry presented him with a perceptual abyss. He seems to have lacked the personal empathy and the cultural insights that would have enabled him to look sympathetically at a different society and to try to understand it. He could bridge the abyss only by ignoring any attempt to understand Irish reality and by asserting, instead, the values of his own English society and his mastery of its values. His reports are really about Foster himself, the instant expert, who can quickly but accurately observe, analyze and assess blame and, by doing so, imagine that he has found solutions to the problems on which he has reported.
Foster wrote from a metropolitan perspective, which the cultural critic Edward Said identifies as ‘exteriority.’ Said’s view of the exteriority of the Orientalist closely parallels Thomas Campbell Foster’s approach to the Irish. Said suggests that the outsider or western writer ‘is never concerned with [the subject] except as the first cause of what he says. What he says and writes, by virtue of the fact that it is said or written, is meant to signify that [the writer] is outside [his subject], both as an existential and as a moral fact’ (1978, 121). Said sees the ‘orientalist’ as the outsider, who describes the Orient without having any concern for it except as a source, as a sort of literary reference.
In very much the same way, what Foster said and wrote, ‘by virtue of the fact that it was said or written,’ was meant to indicate Foster’s exteriority to Ireland. In Foster’s writing (as in the writing of The Times generally) there was simply no capacity for acknowledging the validity of another culture’s practices. Applying Said’s words to ‘The Commissioner’ (and inserting ‘Ireland’ for the ‘Orient’), Foster was ‘in his view, a hero rescuing…[Ireland] from the obscurity, alienation, and strangeness which he himself had properly distinguished’ (Said, 1978, 121).
In its 16 October issue The Times reprinted the Belfast Chronicle’s laudatory comments about Foster’s reports.
It is impossible to deny that this gentleman brings to the consideration of his subject an impartial judgment, and a mind skilled to the habits of close investigation. He possesses, too, that critical discrimination which enables him to seize on the salient features of the picture, and engrave them, so to speak, on the feelings of those to whom he addresses himself…(italics added).
The Belfast Chronicle’s use of visual terms provides a clue as to the impact that Foster’s reports might have had upon his readers. Since Foster’s pieces contained little in terms of landscape description, the ‘picture’ engraved upon the reader’s imagination would have been that of the poverty-stricken Irish peasant standing alone in cultural isolation. As Spurr notes, in descriptions of gross poverty and suffering, ‘The visual enframing and metaphorical transformation that characterize such images have a distancing effect: while calling attention to suffering, they also show it as out there; contained, defined, localized in a realm understood to be culturally apart’ (25; italics original).
In considering Foster’s work it is important to remember that he was acting within the already well-established formulation of what Sinnema calls ‘news-as-truth within the British Press.’ Sinnema emphasizes the ‘link between seeing as it is constitutive of both knowledge and power and the prerogatives assumed by the newspaper….’ Journalism had taken on a quality of ‘surveillance.’ ‘Everything seemed to disclose itself to the artist and reporter, to transmogrify itself into news to be consumed by the British reading public,’ leading to a ‘pervasive culture of indefatigable observation’ (95).
It is significant, therefore, that the Belfast Chronicle admired Foster’s ‘impartial judgment,’ his skill in ‘close investigation,’ and his ‘critical discrimination.’ These were cultural tools typically brought to bear by metropolitan investigators upon their observations of colonized natives. The result was a sort of anthropology of difference. This emphasis on difference established, according to Spurr, ‘a notion of the savage as other, the antithesis of civilized value’ (7).
Foster’s reports did contain a good deal of information. He had a sharp eye for detail, and he could skillfully describe a scene. However, in his series the Irish peasants were left incomprehensible; their lives inconceivable. Foster’s insubstantialization of the Irish peasantry lay not only in his descriptions of their poverty — their rags, their miserable hovels, their wretched dependence upon potatoes. Throughout Foster’s reports there seems to lurk the question: ‘How can human beings live like this?’ Eventually, one senses the implied answer: ‘Human beings can not.’
Notes
1. This was often called the ‘Ulster right’ or the ‘Ulster custom,’ being associated with the terms granted tenant farmers in the more Protestant north. Around this time the whole concept of tenant rights was beginning to expand into what became known as the ‘three Fs’ — fixity of tenure, free sale of a tenant’s interest in his holding, and fair rents. See Gray, 49-50, 72-73.
2. A ‘cottier’ had access to a small patch of land, big enough for a cabin and some sort of ‘pratee garden.’ He might have been a squatter, or he might have rented his land in return for his labour. ‘Conacre’ refers to the wide-spread Irish custom whereby a man without any other access to land would rent a few acres, primarily to grow potatoes, and possibly grain, on speculation. The farmer from whom he rented would manure the land and plough it in return for a portion of the crop or his tenant’s labour. If the crop was good, the renter could pay the rent in kind and would retain enough potatoes to feed his family. He might even have something to sell in order to raise money for the following year’s rent. However, by the 1840s many farmers who rented out conacre demanded cash rent in advance, in which case, if the crop was bad, the renter starved. Usually the conacre was held for less than twelve months, so that the family could never stay on the land. Pressure for land kept the conacre rents climbing. The ‘landlords’ were often only middling farmers themselves, who, if they decided to remove the land from cultivation for pasturage, might find themselves the target of agrarian violence. Some historians regard the conacre people as even worse off than the cottiers, with whom they shared the bottom of Ireland’s agricultural pyramid. See Bourke, 58-61; Cullan, 104-105; also the essays by Ó Gráda, 115 and MacDonagh, 219, in Vaughan.
3. Kennedy, et al., 1999, 69. Kennedy and his colleagues point out that in terms of nutrition, Ireland was not a poor country, at least up into the 1830s; 65. See also Kinealy, 15; Bourke, 53-54.
4. ’Irish moss’ is a jellifying agent made from a type of seaweed known as carrageen (Chondrus crispus). While eating seaweed may have sounded barbaric to Foster, ‘dillisk’ or ‘dulse’ (Rhodymenia palmata), a red edible seaweed was and has remained an important ingredient in traditional Irish cookery. Theodora Fitzgibbon states that it is used in fish and vegetable stews. No less a figure than the celebrated chief Soyer, who concocted the watery soup given out during the Famine, used dulse in his ‘St. Patrick’s soup.’ Seaweed is, in fact eaten in many parts of the world. Rich in vitamins, edible seaweeds have been used as seasoning and thickeners for centuries. See Fitzgibbon, 81, 136.
5. ‘High’ in this context meant ‘excellent’ farming, and was applied to ‘an intensive system of farming with high inputs and high outputs,’ which, as it reached its apogee after 1850, often did not produce a high return on the invested capital. See Overton, 192-93.
6. The Protestant sense of horror and outrage at the conduct of worshipers at pilgrimage sites in Ireland, as well as the disclaimer of prejudice, also may be found in Thackeray’s Irish Sketch Book. Here for example is his reaction to his visit to Croagh Patrick on the shores of Clew Bay, still the site of an important pilgrimage every July. Referring to the custom of climbing the rocky ‘reek’ barefoot, Thackeray thundered
Religious duties! Heaven help us! If these reverend gentlemen were worshippers of Moloch or Baal, or any deity whose honour demanded bloodshed, and savage rites, and degradations, and torture, one might fancy them encouraging the people to the disgusting penances the poor things here perform. But it’s too hard to think that in our days any priests of any religion should be found superintending such a hideous series of self-sacrifices as are, it appears, performed on this hill…. Better have over a company of Fakeers at once, and set the Suttee going; 236-37.
7. Punch could not resist turning Foster’s discovery of Irish dungheaps into humour at the expense of Irish poverty.
Now, a dunghill in England is an offensive, foetid thing — at least to my nose. How very different are the dunghills in Ireland! They positively steam with sweetest odours; to which circumstance may, I think, be attributed the lovely complexions and seraphic looks of the swarms of children that abound in the village. They are all, too, so scrupulously clean — and so comfortably clothed; Punch ix., 1845, 176
8. The Times, 9 September 1845; italics original. In his study of the Illustrated London News Peter W. Sinnema reprints a wood engraving, ‘The Inscription on the Pavement,’ that illustrates the scene Foster evoked in this passage. It appeared in the ILN in the 17 January 1849 issue. The poem (by Charles Mackay) that accompanies the picture, while suggesting sentiments similar to those of Foster, 124 Daniel O’Connell, The British Press and The Irish Famine also articulated the moral quandary that begging presented to the middle-class citizen; see Sinnema, 32-35.
9. Foster’s cultural reaction to begging did not take into consideration the Irish-Catholic view of beggars as recipients of an act of Christian charity and, thus, as indirect instruments of grace.
10. See W. Williams, 1998, passim.
11. Ó Gráda’s research shows that Irish recruits in the East India Company had a small but measurable height advantage over recruits from England and Scotland, although the differential diminished as Irish poverty increased; 1994, 18-23, 106-10. While the height advantage was never great, it does cast strong doubt on the contention of Foster and others that the potato diet rendered the Irish physically smaller and weaker than England’s bread eaters.
12. Kohl’s book, Reisen in Irland, was published in 1843.
13. For Spurr’s discussion of ‘insubstantialization,’see 141-55.