‘The Battlefield of Contending Factions’ — January to June 1846
In mid-June of 1846, as the Whigs, in conjunction with O’Connell’s faction, were preparing to bring down Peel’s Tory Government, The Times found a certain irony in the situation. In one of its more insightful moments, the paper declared that Ireland seemed destined to be ‘always the battle-field of contending factions…. Is it her eternal destiny to arbitrate on the rise of parties and the fall of Cabinets, but form no Cabinet and form no party to get relief for her own sufferings…?’ (15 June 1846).
In reading through the commentary about Ireland in the British press, it becomes obvious that Ireland was rarely presented in terms of itself. When not viewed through British-made stereotypes, Ireland and its people were discussed in terms of British interests or concerns. Therefore, the scarcer food became in Ireland, during the first half of 1846, the more the British press and politicians focused on the Corn Laws. The questions regarding protection were by no means irrelevant to Ireland, especially not its landlords. Teetering on the brink of famine, however, the country was too often a mere function in the debate over free trade.
On 4 December 1845, in the midst of Foster’s campaign against the landlord of Derrynane, The Times pulled a coup when it announced, ‘The decision of the Cabinet is no longer a secret.’ Peel, the paper stated, with the support of Wellington in the House of Lords, had decided to lower significantly the Corn Laws in preparation for their complete repeal (The Times, History, 12). There were, of course, vociferous denials on the part of the Government and choruses of anger from the protectionist press. Peel resigned in January, but Russell was not yet able to form a Whig government. Peel then returned, determined to repeal the Corn Laws. In the meantime, however, The Times’ premature announcement had served only to tie Ireland’s food crisis tighter to the politics surrounding protectionism.
As a result, some protectionists still persisted in denying that there was any real problem in Ireland. On the last day of 1845, the Whig Morning Chronicle angrily condemned the Tory squires of England, whom, it argued, still insisted that the potato blight was not serious and did not warrant repeal of the Corn Laws. ‘They are quite clear that the famine panic is all nonsense’ (31 December 1845, 4). A few weeks later, the Morning Chronicle reprinted the Sligo Champion’s complaint that
Some heartless miscreants there are who have endeavoured to give the potato failure a political aspect. They pretend that there is no such thing — that there is abundance of food in the country, and no prospect of want, and this is done to stifle what is called ‘the famine cry,’ and save the government and the landlords from embarrassment (quoted in the Morning Chronicle, 12 January 1846).
By denying the possibility of famine, the protectionists represented any attempt to abolish the Corn Laws as driven by ignorance and irrational fear. Reports of crisis were written off as fabrications or as typically exaggerated Hibernian alarms. This fitted into the well-established British assumption that a truthful Irishman was an oxymoron. For years O’Connell and his Irish followers had been depicted as untrustworthy, inaccurate and deceptive. Any information from Ireland was, therefore, automatically suspect. This set the stage for a situation in which victims could not exist because their cries were not genuine, as the writer for the Sligo Champion seemed to sense. ‘One half of the staple food of the people is gone in this country, and the people not only run the risk of starving, but also of being deprived of all sympathy and aid, in consequence of the base misrepresentations of designing politicians’ (quoted in the Morning Chronicle, 12 January 1846).
For free-trade journals the potato disease was a heaven-sent opportunity to repeal the Corn Laws. Therefore, hungry people had at least a temporary reality in the free-trade press, more especially if they were English. James Wilson, editor of The Economist, a leading anti-protectionist paper, believed in a strict policy of laissez faire as the rational basis for trade. In January 1846 Wilson preferred, however, to base his argument on a sentimental, chauvinistic appeal regarding the suffering of the English rather than of the Irish poor. On 10 January The Economist complained:
[English] agricultural labourers, in many districts, get only 6s or 7s a week…. The very shame of its being told to the world that the very men who are held up as deriving strength and courage from roast beef never taste meat, and, like the Irish, live almost on potatoes, while they are worse off than the Irish, for they have not in general enough of them, must make the aristocratic and middling classes anxious to wipe off the reproach [by repealing the duties on grain].
The Economist apparently believed that English deprivation, rather than Irish hunger, would make a stronger argument for supporting free trade and cheaper grain for the English market.
Wilson was not disinterested in Ireland, however. Right next to his paper’s reference to the comparative richness of the Irish diet there appeared a report about the visit to the Queen, paid by the Lord Mayor of Dublin and members of that city’s corporation. According to the paper, the Dubliner’s petition read, in part:
May it graciously please your majesty, under an all wise Providence, to be the saviour of your Irish people from the scourge of famine, and that, having been the instrument in his hands to avert the threatened calamity from Ireland, you may for many, many years govern a loyal, happy and contented people.
In return, the Queen is reported to have replied:
The welfare and prosperity of Ireland are objects of my constant care and earnest solicitude; and the failure of the last potato crop, and its apprehended consequences have not escaped my attention…. I shall rejoice if measures can be devised which, under the blessing of Divine Providence, may relieve the want of my Irish people.… (The Economist, 10 January 1846; italics added).
Although part of the rhetoric of the day, it is significant to see at this early date the tendency to place the potato blight within the context of Divine intent.
In attacking protectionism, The Economist continued to stress the plight of the English laborer. The leader for 31 January sympathized with the suffering of the English workers in order to shame the Government into repealing the Corn Laws:
Who can for one moment remember the suffering of the [English] manufacturing labourers and their families from 1838 to 1842, gradually sinking in the social scale, selling off or pawning all their little stock of furniture, parting from clothing and from bedding to obtain high priced food…taking up their abodes in hovels, destitute of covering and firing, and at last having recourse to nettles and other green herbage to continue existence or drinking water to still their hunger, and then lying down…who can recollect the description of those vast sufferings…and not feel indignation at the author of them?
Although this could have been an accurate account of the situation facing many in Ireland, The Economist did not use any similarly appealing language on their behalf.
The spokesmen for the protectionist Tory faction continued to do their best to cast doubt on free-trade propaganda. This was evident in the almost daily reports of the meetings of the landlord-dominated county Agricultural Societies. Queen Victoria’s uncle, the Duke of Cambridge, attended an Agricultural Society meeting on 5 February where he insisted that Ireland was in no danger of famine. This statement annoyed Daniel O’Connell, who according to the Observer, told his followers that the Duke had insisted: ‘Ireland was in a very comfortable situation compared with the statements made concerning her in the newspapers. It was true that many of their potatoes (he thought they called them potatoes, and if he was wrong he was open to correction) were rotten.’ According to O’Connell, the Duke then asked,
do we call them potatoes?…He understood from the professors…that rotten potatoes and sea-weed or even grass, properly mixed, afforded a very wholesome and nutritious food. They all knew that Irishmen could live upon anything, and there was plenty of grass in the fields, even though the potato crop should fail.
Having given his version of the Duke’s speech, O’Connell then observed caustically: ‘There is the son of a king, the brother of a king, the uncle of a monarch — a man to whom we pay an immense sum for doing nothing…there is his description of Ireland for you [hisses]’ (Observer, 26 February 1846, 4).
The Observer was a protectionist Sunday newspaper that prided itself on its special attention to the royal family. Reacting to O’Connell’s attack on a relative of the Queen, the paper claimed that, ‘We are authorized to state that there is not the slightest foundation’ for O’Connell’s version of the Duke’s speech. The paper then gave what it felt was ‘the most authentic’ record of the Duke’s remarks, which, it claimed, had been ‘warmly received.’ His Royal Highness
believed that no class in the country had any reason to complain. He had inquired a good deal about potatoes, and he was convinced the state of things was by no means so bad as had been generally believed. It was his wish to state that fairly, and he could rejoice in being able to state that the panic had really been a false one [cheers] Observer, 26 February 1846, 4).
These arguments about the Duke of Cambridge’s speech represent just one instance of the way politics interposed itself between the British public and events in Ireland.
There were, of course, some serious discussions about the larger issues concerning Ireland’s future. In March of 1846 the Whig Morning Chronicle sounded a note that within a year would swell into a chorus. As the blight spread to the seed potatoes, the paper declared: ‘No reliance can now be placed upon potatoes as a staple food for any part of our population; and the sooner effectual measures shall be adopted to provide a substitute the better. The case is one involving the actual experience of millions of human beings’ (4 March 1846, 5). The Morning Chronicle did not spell out the ‘effectual measures’ nor the substitute food it had in mind. At this point there does not seem to have been a consensus in the British press concerning the specifics for restructuring rural Ireland. There was growing agreement, however, that Ireland had to be changed. On 4 April, the Chronicle stated that the ‘ordinary condition’ of the Irish peasantry was always ‘on the verge of famine.’ The potato blight, while the drop that caused the cup of misery to overflow, was not the main problem. The blight would end, but what then?
[W]hen we find a Government accepting the enormous responsibility of protecting from absolute want some millions of people, who live within a hair’s breadth of destitution, it becomes an imperative duty to examine whether the responsibility cannot be discharged without a periodic drain upon the national exchequer…England pays 5 or 6 millions a year to support her poor and she ought not to be permanently burthened with the pauperism of Ireland….
Even before the crisis, it was generally assumed in Britain that the Irish landlords were to blame for Ireland’s poverty. Now, with disaster looming many in Britain seemed to assume that relief sent to that country ended up in the landlords’ pockets. The Morning Chronicle, for example, complained that government efforts ‘to spare the Irish landlord by mulcting the English trades man, whose whole life is one series of tax-payings, is a kind of…absurdity’ (4 April 1846, 4).
Disdain turned to anger after a series of well-publicized evictions took place in Ireland during the spring. The Morning Chronicle deplored the power of Irish landlords to evict their tenants without compensation.
We have been made distinctly aware that the main evils which afflict Ireland are not political nor ecclesiastical…. We all know why, amongst the most affectionate and warm-hearted people of Europe, murder is popular…. It is now understood that there are two parties to agrarian crime and outrage in Ireland, and we know which of these two parties is the aggressor…. We have now distinctly present to our minds the awful fact, that the Irish peasant has no legal right to existence — and that the murderous agrarian law…is but the corrective supplement to that law of Parliament which gives the landlord a discretionary power of life and death… (Morning Chronicle, 4 May 1846).
When a lease was up the landlord was under no obligation to renew it. Tenants-at-will existed at the landlord’s pleasure. He had absolute power to continue them on their holdings or put them out on the road at any time. His power was enforced by the constabulary, backed up, if necessary, by the military. For tenants who had no resources other than their labour, denial of access to land deprived them of their livelihood. Thus, their term for eviction — ‘extermination.’
Many Victorians assumed that ‘political economy,’ with its emphasis on the rights of property, defined a moral as well as economic order. Eviction, however, was a concept in which property rights and morality appeared to clash. In its issue of 4 April the Illustrated London News provided vivid accounts of the evictions carried out on the Gerrand estates in County Roscommon. The correspondent noted that the land the former tenants had reclaimed from the bog was in a ‘state of high cultivation’ (viii., 227). Yet, when questions were raised in Parliament about the eviction of two thousand hungry peasants in County Roscommon, the Government replied that ‘however much they may deplore and disapprove of the exercise of rights of this kind by power, it was impossible for Government to interfere to prevent the exercise of rights which were unquestionably attached by law to property’ (Morning Chronicle, 21 March 1846, 4).
In its 18 April 1846 issue, Punch, a friend of property but not of Irish landlords, ran a satire, ‘Landlord Ejectment in Ireland,’ which invited the reader to ‘think of the suffering of the Irish landlord.’ In this satiric inversion of tenant eviction, Punch described the heart-rending case of Sir Donatus Dunbilk, ‘a fine portly man with a red nose,’ who was evicted from Castle Dunbilk.1 Sir Donatus was ejected with ‘utter disregard to the natural rights of landlords to unlimited credit, founded on the length of time they have gone without paying bills.’ The Dunbilk family was thrown upon ‘the mercies of a Boulogne Hotel-keeper or a Baden Gasthoff.’ Punch’s reporter interviewed several of Dunbilk’s fictitious tenants, who responded in the magazine’s stage-Irish brogue: ‘Sure this is a retribution for him driving the widow Bradon’s cow for the thrifle rint she owed him!… ‘Twill tache him to be ever at me wid his huntin’ whip, when he rode over my acre and ruined me lumpers [potatoes] for me.’ As though objecting to these complaints, Punch concluded: ‘And this is the lower class of the Irish population, for whom our sympathies are demanded! What gentleman would live in such a country?’ (x., 170).
Immediately across from the satire on Castle Dunbilk Punch ran a cartoon by John Leech titled, ‘JUSTICE TO IRELAND,’ one more ironic play on O’Connell’s famous demand (Figure 6.1). Here Sir Robert Peel, feminized as the Old Woman in the Shoe, holds up a broom marked ‘Coercion Bill’ with which he has been beating the Irish, who are here reduced to children. The multitude of children, accompanied by a sow and a piglet, file into a thatched cottage. The child-sized women are wistfully beautiful, while the men are ape-like and wear ragged, patched clothing. None could be considered competent adults. Their inadequate diet is humourously recognized in the well-known couplet printed below the cartoon:
She gave them some Broth without any Bread,
Then whipp’d them all Round, and sent them to Bed (x., 171).
While aimed at Peel, the cartoon tended to reduce Ireland’s social and economic disaster to the level of a pantomime skit.
The cartoon was a commentary on Peel’s coercion bill for Ireland, first put forward in the spring of 1846. While pushing ahead with the repeal of the Corn Laws, which threatened the Irish landlord’s already diminishing income, Peel felt obliged to react in some way to the growing unrest in rural Ireland. As ‘improving’ landlords tried to consolidate their holdings by evicting their tenants, there was a good deal of resentment and some attempts at retaliation. Much of the violence was concentrated in Tipperary and adjacent counties. To provide protection for the landlords and their agents (as well as for the shipment of grain bound for Irish ports), Parliament took up the ‘Protection of Life’ bill that would have allowed arrest upon the accusation of a policeman (Gray, 1999, 138).
Figure 6.1: Punch, x. (1846), 171.
O’Connell, of course, was opposed to the very nature of the bill. He also sensed that Peel, his old antagonist, having lost the support of many Tories over the issue of the Corn Laws, was about to fall. According to a letter printed in the Morning Chronicle, O’Connell insisted that
No minister would dare propose such a bill for England. No minister would dare propose such a bill for Scotland. It is only poor, trampled upon, and oppressed Ireland that is obnoxious [sic] to measures of this kind. It is only Ireland, with which it is calculated there will be no sympathy or support. It is only wretched Ireland that can be crushed with perfect impunity (Morning Chronicle, 4 March 1846, 5).
Peel had intended to follow his coercion bill with a compensation act for some of the evicted tenants. However, his Government fell before he had a chance to introduce it (Gray, 1999, 91-93). The protectionist Tories, infuriated at Peel’s abandonment of the Corn Laws, refused to support him any longer. When the Coercion Bill came up they voted with the Whigs and O’Connell’s faction and brought down Peel’s Government. As the Whigs prepared take office, The Times made a prediction. The new Whig Government, the paper cautioned, would soon weary of O’Connell and Ireland and the ‘unprofitable concessions and rejected advances.’ The Whigs would eventually be forced to seek ‘aid against its own habitual allies,’ i.e., the O’Connellites, and would end up imposing its own coercion bills to meet continued Irish unrest (15 June 1846).
Irish issues had taken a good bit of Parliament’s time during the first half of the year, and by June The Times had enough. The leader for Monday, 15 June objected to ‘the tedium which weighs down all discussions on Irish subjects.’ The paper’s leader voiced metropolitan frustration with Ireland, which, in view of what was to come, makes interesting reading. The never-ending Irish problems were
…not our [England’s] fault as a nation. Grant we are…ignorant about Ireland…. Yet we have done our best to make our selves informed on the subject. We have sent commission after commission to inquire, examine and report; we have had evidence from every kind and class of witness; we have had the condition of the Irish peasant described so frequently, and in language so uniform, that it might be stereotyped (The Times, 15 June 1846).
The Times was hardly a journal to confess ignorance or incompetence. The ironic disavowal in its leading article was not of knowledge but of responsibility. One can hardly be responsible for something that is, to its very core, incomprehensible. Worse, if something cannot be understood, then what is the reality of its existence? Here was an attitude that threatened to erase a whole nation. The Times’ picture of Ireland blurred into a repetitive, unproductive, indecipherable sameness. The condition of the Irish peasantry was no longer news. On the edge of famine, Ireland was becoming boring.
The Times then claimed that
there are men born, bred and living in Ireland, with Irish names, estates, and associations, who know just as little about their own country as ourselves!… What Minister will ever be able to manage a country which can be understood neither by English judgment nor Irish acuteness, by Saxon inquiry or Celtic experience, by its own people or by aliens? (15 June 1846).
Although ‘men…with Irish names, estates, and associations’ would seem to refer to the landlords, the writer subtly shifted from class to race, descending through a series of national/racial dichotomies — English/Irish, Saxon/Celt. He contrasted the English-Saxon intellectual, analytical techniques (‘judgment’ and ‘inquiry’) with the supposed Irish-Celtic reliance upon intuition (‘acuteness,’ which carries the connotation of sensory perception) and ‘experience.’ These contrasts implied a superiority of Saxon rationalism over the Celt’s unreflective and, no doubt, emotional, reaction to events.
The leader concluded: ‘The destiny of such a country must be an eternal puzzle; and being this, it suggests to the mind the most fearful solution which the analogy of history contains, or the baffled ingenuity of man can resort to’ (The Times, 15 June, 1846, 4d; italics added). The ending left The Times’ reader to contemplate the nature of ‘the most fearful solution.’
The ease with which discussions about Ireland could shift from politics and economics to issues of race, ethnicity, culture and morality suggests the extent to which stereotypes of the Irish seemed to distract the British from the growing crisis created by the potato blight. During the discussion about the Coercion Bill in the House of Lords, the Earl of Clancarthy was reported to have urged their lordships to set aside the common English assumptions about the Irish.
As an Irishman, he could not sit down without expressing his deep regret that the case of Ireland should be so often, from year to year, dragged before the people of this country [England] in a manner calculated to produce so unfavourable an impression of the habits of Irishmen. They were not so bad as they really seemed to appear, and he would ask their lordships to look even at the very cause of these outrages (Morning Chronicle, 24 February 1846, 2).
The Earl was asking his peers to see through the stereotype of the Irish to the grim reality of their lives. He seems to have understood that perceptions about the Irish would be of enormous importance if the situation in Ireland worsened.
Even ‘benign’ stereotypes could obscure the picture. Only weeks after carrying Foster’s scathing critique of O’Connell’s estate, along with wood engravings depicting the poverty around Derrynane, the Illustrated London News presented a vision of an impoverished but happy pair of Irish peasant children in a poem titled, ‘A Mountain Cabin — Ireland.’ The poem begins by reassuring its readers that ‘Joy liveth where he lists…/Making the creatures [the children] glow, like southern skies/That burn with sunshine — Joy in every part.’ The children’s poverty is extreme. ‘A floor of mud, and wretchedness — and still,/The tiny boy looks fat and full of glee….’ In spite of this comforting conceit, however, the author hints of the unhappiness that may lurk unseen in the background.
It is an Irish Cabin — Passion’s strife
Converts the Child’s home darkly to the lair;
With grief the Peasant’s soul is rife,
For Agitation’s storm hath reach’d even there.
Hate hath gone up where Love was meant to dwell,
Loosing the evil spirits of its wrath;
Childhood and Joy grow dim before the spell,
And Hunger moans along a foodless path! (viii., 24 January 1846, 61).
By this time the word ‘agitation,’ when applied to Ireland, no longer simply referred to O’Connell’s Repeal movement, but represented an attempt to connect his movement to agrarian violence. While there is a hint of famine in the last line, the poem suggests that the major threat to the Irish peasantry would come from revolution. This linking of hunger to politics, the suggestion that the malcontent would become the malnourished, was a reoccurring theme in British newspapers and journals. The difficulties that plagued Ireland were frequently reduced to a logic in which the victim, seduced by false leaders and bad politics, became the perpetrator of his own demise.
The Illustrated London News’s poem is accompanied by an illustration: ‘A Connemara Cabin. —Drawn by Topham’ (Figure 6.2), a woodcut engraved by Landells, one of the original founders of Punch. The cabin is representative of the worst types of dwellings found among Ireland’s poor. It is a long, windowless, almost tubular hovel half dug into the earth, with a low door and badly thatched roof. The vague outline of a wooden chimney suggests the cabin’s only amenity. In some parts of Ireland these dug-in dwellings were called ‘scalps.’ While the cabin suggests wretchedness, The Illustrated London News’s poem is accompanied by an illustration: ‘A Connemara Cabin. —Drawn by Topham’ (Figure 6.2), a woodcut engraved by Landells, one of the original founders of Punch. The cabin is representative of the worst types of dwellings found among Ireland’s poor. It is a long, windowless, almost tubular hovel half dug into the earth, with a low door and badly thatched roof. The vague outline of a wooden chimney suggests the cabin’s only amenity. In some parts of Ireland these dug-in dwellings were called ‘scalps.’ While the cabin suggests wretchedness, the artist has chosen not to present the children in a comparable condition. Instead of the rags described in so many accounts of the West of Ireland, the barefoot girl feeding chicks in the foreground is decently dressed. Her hair is tidy, and her limbs do no suggest want. The shirt of her brother, who is stretched out flat on the dirt entrance to the cabin, also seems intact. While the faces of the children are indistinct, one can imagine that they are smiling. The picture replicates the surprising contrast, often mentioned by travellers in Ireland, between the wretched poverty of the peasantry and their rude health and good humour. As if to accentuate the somewhat exotic nature of these poor but happy Irish children, the same page carries an illustration of some merry ‘Ethiopian Serenaders.’
Figure 6.2: ‘A Connemara Cabin. — Drawn by Topham,’ Illustrated London News, viii. (1846), 61.
The combined messages of the poem and the drawing are confusing. The Illustrated London News’s readers were presented with a picture of two apparently happy and healthy representatives of Ireland’s poor, who seemed quite unconnected to the wide-spread accounts of hunger and privation in Ireland (only hinted at in the accompanying poem). The real threat to their happiness, the poem suggested, came from politics rather than from hunger. The journal’s readers could well have wondered about the seriousness of the threat of famine.
St. Patrick’s Day provided another opportunity for Bayley’s Illustrated London News to present the sentimental stereotype of the Irish peasant, this time as pious and playful, unmixed with references to violence. Again, however, there was the hint of impending disaster. The front page for 21 March 1846 displayed a wood engraving of the national patron saint in the center, surrounded by scenes typical of an Irish Catholic ‘pattern.’2 At the bottom left devotees pray at a station or perhaps a holy well. Above them are seen the vaguely sketched throngs of pilgrims arriving for the‘pattern.’ At the right there is a group of peasants dancing. In the background stand the vendor’s tent where food and drink could be purchased. However, neither the picture nor the accompanying poem carry the usual Protestant rancor at the Irish Catholic’s alleged ability to combine ‘superstitious’ devotions with wild, uncontrolled exhibitions of drunkenness and frolic. Here the stereotype is sentimentalized. The accompanying poem does allude to the alleged contradictions in the Irish character, in this case likened to the month of March itself. The poem described Pat with
His caubeen [hat] gay with Shamrock,
His heart with a dram,
Pat ‘comes in like a lion,
Goes out like a lamb.’
Nor to mirth and good fellowship
Sacred alone,
There are prayers breathing lowly
Round font and by stone.
Nevertheless, the food crisis hovering over Ireland is allowed to momentarily cloud the picture.
And now, when the terror,
Aye, near and more near,
Of fever and famine
Is lowering drear —
On this eve of St Patrick Bend,
Erin, the knee
That the hand of thy patron
Be stretched over thee!
While some British journals pooh-poohed the threat of famine, Frederick Bayley’s Illustrated London News could not resist the temptation to toy with an imaginary tragedy. It was as though poor Erin with her hapless children was a ragged damsel in distress. The ILN’s gothic hints of horror to come smacked more of popular literature than of analysis.
The poem ends with an apparent appeal for temperance.
And for those of thy children,
On alien earth,
Let a sober thought chasten
Their madness of mirth
(Illustrated London News, viii., 21 March 1846, 188).
Erin’s poor children! Their happy-go-lucky nature made them aliens on an earth that threatened them with famine. The best one could hope for was that some ‘sober thought’ concerning their plight might interrupt their merry round of drams, dances and quaint religious customs.
It seems to have been difficult for some in Britain to be overly concerned about the threat of famine in Ireland. It is interesting to read about the shock registered in the House of Commons when, according to the parliamentary report in the Morning Chronicle for 14 March,
Sir James Graham [Home Secretary] rose from his seat last night to claim the indulgence of the house…to make temporary provision for the treatment of destitute persons affected with fever in Ireland…adding an apprehension that the fever would become general…. There was a considerable pause when he had concluded his speech, as though the House had been taken unawares, and were now for the first time brought face to face with the calamity, about which so much had been said that the honourable members seemed…to disbelieve in its existence (italics original).
Occasionally Parliament and British public opinion did see through the politics and stereotypes to catch a glimpse of the disaster building in Ireland.
Notes:
1. While ‘Dun’ is frequently found in Gaelic place names in Ireland, Punch was also punning on ‘dun,’ meaning repeated attempts at begging or at bill collection. To ‘bilk’ is to defraud someone.
2. ‘Pattern’ refers to pilgrimages made to holy sites, often associated with local saints. The word apparently comes from ‘patron,’ meaning a patron saint; see Dolan, 195. The pattern often consisted of making the rounds to various ‘stations’ where prayers were said. Sometimes holy wells with their healing waters were the focal point of a pilgrimage site. Once the devotions had been made, there were usually tents where one could purchase food and drink and enjoy dancing.
