On the front page of its 10 February 1849 issue the Illustrated London News’ leading article noted that, during the first week of the new parliamentary session, two measures concerning Ireland had been debated — coercion and the Poor Law. As usual, the continuation of coercion (centered on the suspension of habeas corpus) passed quickly and with little opposition. Mackay’s writer insisted that such measures were necessary. He went out of his way to praise Lord Clarendon, ‘who by the judicious use of the powers in his hands’ had prevented in Ireland the kinds of insurrections that had convulsed Europe during the previous year. (There was no credit given to the Irish themselves or to their leaders.) This rather elaborate praise turns out, however, to have been a polite way of preparing the ground for the ILN’s major dissent from governmental policy.
Beginning with John O’Connell’s statement to the House, ‘We are a perishing people,’ the Illustrated London News succinctly reviewed the desperate condition of the country, concluding: ‘…it seems that the Poor-Law — so just in theory, so desirable in principle, and so well intended, has but aggravated all of these evils and extended the misery, if not the demoralization, of Ireland to the middle and the higher classes’ (81). Clearly, Mackay‘s focus was not on the condition of the peasants who deluged the workhouses in a last despairing attempt to survive. ‘The true object of a Poor-Law is to diminish pauperism, and to transform the unproductive pauper into a productive labourer. But a Poor-Law that is oppressive upon the owner of the soil fails in this object’ (82). The ILN maintained that the Government, by attempting to use the Poor Law as the foundation for famine relief, was threatening the survival of the landlords who could not afford the ever-rising rates. ‘A mere Poor-Law will not create wealth, except there be a proprietary solvent enough and sensible enough to employ the people productively rather than feed them idly. A Poor-Law that is too stringent and oppressive upon the rate-payer, defeats its own intention in this respect’ (82). Perhaps because the Irish landlords had not generally enjoyed a good press, the ILN’s writer apparently felt it necessary to suggest that it was in England’s self-interest to take their plight seriously.
England and Ireland are like the Siamese twins. The gangrene of the one must extend to the other; and the social pestilence that attacks the life of Ireland must of necessity make some inroad upon that of England…. [I]t would be cheaper for us to aid the Irish landlords in cultivating Ireland than to allow their estates to be confiscated for the present necessities of an enormous pauperism (Illustrated London News, xiv., 10 February 1849,82).
Concern for Irish proprietors was not the direction in which British public opinion had been moving, however. As the Famine had progressed, critical attention had been increasingly focused on the Irish landlords. Allegedly greedy for rents, they had allowed their lands to become overpopulated without investing in them (or compensating their tenants for any improvements). Worse, some of them had mistaken status for wealth and so indulged themselves or mismanaged their estates that they were now hopelessly in debt. Their only response to their difficulties was to evict their hapless tenants, forcing them into the workhouses, and, thus, throwing them upon the poor rates. Whether a cruel evictor, a fox-hunting ne’er-do-well, or an absentee enjoying life in London, the Irish landlord was blamed for Ireland’s poverty and its seeming inability to move itself beyond the crisis.
For many British commentators the obvious solution to Ireland’s problems was to rid the country of indebted, incompetent landlords, just as the landlords were ridding themselves of unwanted tenants. Reporting on the very eve of the Famine, the Devon Commission had encouraged changes in the law to facilitate the sale of estates encumbered with debt, so that they would not be tied up in the Courts of Chancery.1 The British public had been generally in favor of an encumbered estates act as early as 1847 (Gray, 1999, 199). Russell’s Government did pass a bill in 1848, but it was too weak to have any real impact upon the problem. As a result, it was the Tory leader, Sir Robert Peel, who seized the issue in the spring of 1849 and embraced the idea of an encumbered estates commission that would bypass the Courts of Chancery.2
At first, Russell’s reaction was negative in spite of popular enthusiasm for Peel’s idea. Punch ran a cartoon, ‘Peel’s Panacea for Ireland,’ depicting Peel and Russell as two old women. In the caption, Russell, clutching a cloth to a swollen jaw, complains, ‘Oh! this dreadful Irish Toothache!’ Peel, holding ajar labeled ‘Sale of Encumbered Estates,’ replies, ‘Well, here is Something that will Cure you in an instant’ (xvi., 149).
Peel intended the bill to be more than a massive book-keeping exercise to purge the Irish land system of accumulated debt. He wanted the commission itself to be able to buy land, to have control over the rates and even to have the funds to facilitate the purchase of land by new owners. More than anything Russell and the Whigs had previously proposed, the act was intended to pave the way for injecting new capital and new management into the West of Ireland’s agricultural economy. It would be, as Peel himself announced, the ‘plantation of Connaught,’ an obvious reference to the seventeenth-century plantation of Ulster. This time, however, the driving force would be economics rather than religion. Ardent investors and capable English and Scottish farmers and managers would bring Connaught’s agriculture, like England’s, into the capitalist sphere.3
The Times was initially skeptical about Peel’s proposal, suggesting that the former prime minister try living in Connaught himself before inviting in new proprietors. However, as public opinion clearly backed the idea of a strong encumbered estate act as a solution to Ireland’s problems, the paper took up the cause, cleverly portraying it as offering ‘free trade in land.’ To Delane the whole idea now seemed providential. Commenting on 2 April 1849, The Times enthused: ‘Has not Providence, in the course of its mysterious dispensations brought about again an extraordinary conjuncture of circumstances so near akin to those which opened Ulster to the British settler as to encourage a like attempt?…Has not the crisis come for a new ‘plantation’ of Ireland?’ (Gray, 1999, 214). Punch saw Peel’s proposal as an exercise of new imperial power in Ireland. The paper published a full-page cartoon by Richard Doyle titled, ‘THE NEW ST. PATRICK; OR, SIR ROBERT TURNING THE REPTILES OUT OF IRELAND’ (Figure 13.1). A variation on an already well-worn subject, the drawing shows Peel as the near twin of John Bull, with a watch chain draped across his ample paunch, striding across Ireland with a set of rolled-up papers labeled ‘New Plantation’ in his right hand like a scepter or wand. Before him, a snake labeled ‘Destitution’ and a toad-like creature labeled ‘Usury’ and ‘Mortgage’ creep away.4
Figure 13.1: Punch, xvi. (1849), 119.
In spite of its initial misgivings the Whig Government was forced to adopt Peel’s core concept of a land commission, while quietly rejecting the more expensive and riskier parts of his proposal. The new Encumbered Estates Act, passed in July of 1849, established a body that, upon submission by creditors, had the power to force the sale of deeply indebted estates.
Peel’s vision of a new ‘plantation’ was enthusiastically taken up by some members of the Irish executive in Dublin. The 7 July issue of the Scotsman published an appeal from Lord Clarendon to the London Common Council, inviting them to help increase English investment in Ireland. The Encumbered Estates Act now made it possible to sell off the land of ‘those proprietors who are now in a state of hopeless embarrassment.’ Essentially, Lord Clarendon called for a new ownership of Ireland with the nation as a whole being treated as a commodity:
…some change in the proprietary class is indispensable to the progress and prosperity of this country…. In fact, the whole social system of Ireland has been based upon the potato, and the failure of that root has consequently entailed universal distress. Hence so many landed proprietors are now unable to keep down the interest on their mortgages…. It is manifest, then, that a complete change of system as regards agriculture, the tenure of land, and the social habits of the people, has become indispensable, and that the change can only be effected by the introduction of English capital, enterprise, and skill… (Scotsman, 7 July 1849, 2).
Later in July, Punch ran a cartoon titled, ‘GOG AND MAGOG GIVING PADDY A LIFT OUT OF THE MIRE’ (Figure 13.2). The twin giants, representing British commerce and trade, stand on firm ground as they pull a child-sized, tattered Paddy out of a bog. The sun rises in a new dawn behind the two giant figures. The drawing reflects the expected purchase of Irish estates by members of the London Council and other businessmen from ‘The City.’ Beneath the caption there is a quote from The Times. ‘A special Court of Common Council was held on Thursday to consider the propriety of purchasing estates in Ireland, with a view to cultivate and improve the same…. That London can and will do this work, her own history affords the most abundant guarantees.’5 Interestingly, Gog and Magog are dressed in Roman costumes, reminiscent of the oldest imperial power to reach Britain. Magog carries a large mace in his left hand, perhaps a classic reminder that force was available to insure that Paddy stayed out of the mire.6
Figure 13.2: Punch, xvii. (1849), 37.
As proof that Ireland was a safe place for investment, the Government renewed plans for a visit to Ireland by the Queen. A royal tour had been set for 1846, but first the Famine and then fear of revolution in 1848 had delayed the trip. Now that Parliament had passed the Encumbered Estates Act with widespread support, the Queen’s visit could provide a series of cheerful, positive and noticeably peaceful images that would attract the attention of potential investors. Her visit was intended to demonstrate that Ireland was an integral part of the Union and a place hospitable to Englishmen and their money. The safety of the Queen implied safety as well for new landowners and their investments in Ireland. As Margarita Cappock suggests, the visit was a mixture of pageantry and propaganda (86).
The Queen was to travel by royal yacht, stopping at cities along the Irish coast — Cork, Dublin and Belfast — before heading for Scotland and Balmoral Castle. The visit was set for early August of 1849. On Monday, 1 July 1849, a letter to Lord Clarendon from Sir George Grey, the Home Secretary, was read at the meeting of the Dublin Corporation informing its members that
her Majesty hopes to be able in the course of the present summer to fulfil [sic] the intention which you are aware she has long entertained, of visiting Ireland. The distress unfortunately still prevalent in that country precludes the Queen from visiting Dublin in state, as any large expenditure on mere ceremony would be ill-timed, and inconvenient to her subjects. Yet her Majesty does not wish to let another year pass without visiting a part of her dominions with which she has for so long a time been anxious to become acquainted (Scotsman, 7 July 1849, 2).
Perhaps as proof of Ireland’s desperate need for change, the same issue of the Scotsman published part of a private letter from an English woman visiting County Kerry, concerning the continuing famine conditions there. Dated 27 June 1849, the woman gave a grim account of the lasting effects of the ‘universal distress,’ the on-going starvation and fever still ravaging the West of Ireland.
My host says they are dying in far greater numbers than most people have any idea of…if this state of things shall continue much longer, the country wil [sic] be cured in the only effectual manner by an immense depopulation…the bishop’s revenues from marriages and baptisms, generally about £150, is this year only £10. So you see how depopulation advances …. Gradual starvation kills a great many, the fever of the country a great many more, and dysentery, brought on by eating half-cooked Indian meal, a great many more still.
Our family are all forbid from going into the village, or near the fever hospital or the graveyard. Yet, even at the distance of several fields, we sometimes smell the latter. There are so many corpses that half of them are exposed above the ground without any coffins, others in open coffins…. This whole country could make one doubt the goodness of God more than you can believe, unless you had seen it….
The writer recalled that, on an earlier visit to County Meath before the Famine, the Irish children had appeared ‘fair, fat’ and ‘happy,’ in spite of their poverty, while the people, in general, although ‘ragged’ and ‘dirty,’ had been ‘handsome’ and ‘healthy.’ Now, however, ‘there is no beauty among the women, still less among the wretched children’ (Scotsman, 7 July 1849,2).
In preparation for the Queen’s visit, Punch published a cartoon that emphasized the economic gulf separating England and Ireland. Britannia is shown paying ‘A MORNING CALL’ on Hibernia at her rustic cabin (Figure 13.3). Britannia is fashionably accoutered with gloves, parasol and Roman helmet. Victoria’s young Prince Edward, clad in a sailor suit, stares wide-eyed at his scrawny and ragged Irish cousin, who crawls on the floor at his mother’s feet. The table at the center of the cottage is almost bare, except for a very small teapot. The walls are cracked, and the chairs roughly fashioned. Beautiful Hibernia, bare-footed like her famished son, says, ‘Sure, Sisther, dear, it’s not what you’ve been accustomed to exactly. but anyhow you’re welcome.’ Unlike Punch’s Britannia, the Queen did not visit any cottages during her tour. Her itinerary was strictly limited to the urban areas on the southern and eastern coasts of Ireland. It did not involve the famine-ridden areas of Kerry, mentioned in the above letter, nor would she travel to any area in the West of Ireland.
Figure 13.3: Punch, xvii. (1849), 25.
Parliament rose for the summer, and the Queen proceeded by royal railway car to Holyhead, and then set sail on 6 August for the sister isle. The Illustrated London News, for which, as Virginia McKendry has written, ‘images of sovereignty became the bread and butter’ on which the paper depended, reported extensively on the Queen’s trip (11). As McKendry points out, ‘One direct effect of the coverage of Royal Visits was to bring visual representations of the countryside and faraway corners of the realm into the common cache of popular knowledge’ (12). Therefore, the ILN prepared its readers for the Irish visit with a series of articles and illustrations, beginning on 21 July, of the Irish landscape, little of which the Queen would see on this trip. Nevertheless, with the Continent seemingly still too unstable for the less adventurous English tourist, the ILN series, ‘Excursion to Killarney,’ offered scenic Ireland as an alternative. The pieces featured romantic illustrations of the glories of the Lakes, already entering their second century as a mecca for tourists.7 By now, however, the Londoner could travel by steamship and by rail to within 42 miles of Killarney, reverting to the more traditional coach for the rest of the journey (21 July 1849, 41).
As frequently happened in the Illustrated London News, the text did not sit comfortably with the illustrations. The paper’s wood engravings depicted well-known picturesque ‘sights’ around Killarney. However, while ‘our own Correspondent’ provided the customary tourist information, he did not hesitate in the first article to note that on the road from Mallow to Millstreet in West Cork, he encountered the ruins of thirty or forty eviction sites. ‘Houses, cottages, huts, and wigwams (for the dwellings of the peasantry are of all styles, though the wigwam or mud-hovel predominates) lay in ruins by the road-side, dismantled, unroofed and overthrown, the very pictures of desolation’ (21 July 1849, 41). Almost as disturbing were the substantial farm houses, abandoned by middling farmers who had emigrated. Like all English travellers to Ireland the writer was appalled by the poverty, the rags and the beggars.
After having dealt in some detail with the appealing sights around the Lakes, the correspondent visited a nearby graveyard. The sight of cattle eating grass growing on the graves of the dead nearly made him ill. Worse, he also witnessed two funerals for children. He described one of them.
In a little donkey-cart, bending over a small coffin of plain deal, without a pall or covering of any kind, were seated a woman of about forty, and a girl of eleven or twelve. The woman was howling in the most dismal manner, and raised the peculiar ‘coronach’ of the Irish ‘keens.’ Behind the cart followed a man clad in the usual tatters of the peasantry, and with him two boys…. The wardrobe of the whole family would have been dear at sixpence.
On arriving at the edge of the graveyard the man took the coffin from the cart…. The whole family followed him…. The youngest child shouldered a pickaxe, and tripped along apparently with much enjoyment of the novel scene; the remainder of the family giving vent to their sorrow by sobs and moans. The coffin was then placed in the ground. The wife recommenced her coronach over it…. The woman’s wail lasted [as they dug the grave], and the man occasionally left off digging to join in it. The woman clapped and wrung her hands as if keeping time to the rhythm of her wailing, and bent her body backwards and forwards…she lifted up the coffin-lid more than once, uncovered the face of the corpse, and talked in Irish to it, invariably ending her addresses to it by a passionate howl of lamentation…. We asked of the guide why the coffin was not nailed down; and were informed that the Irish peasantry have a superstition which forbids the nailing or screwing of coffin lids, lest the corpse at the last day should be impeded in its efforts to escape from the tomb (Illustrated London News, xv., 28 July 1849, 51).
Although his images are vivid, the correspondent’s language served to distance this disturbing scene from his middle-class readers. The family was clad in rags. The youngest child’s behavior was inappropriate. The woman’s grief was portrayed as outlandish: ‘howling in a dismal manner’ and speaking to the corpse in an unintelligible language. Finally, the event was encapsulated within a classic example of Irish superstition. Although the word ‘savage’ was not used, the people and situation described did not seem to belong to a civilized society. As described, they must have seemed distant from the experience of the Illustrated London News’ readers. While the correspondent had given those readers a horrific glimpse of Irish reality, he had done it in the manner of an anthropologist describing the death rites of some primitive tribe on another continent.
In his next article, the Illustrated London News’ correspondent stuck to the conventional tourist’s path, although he did offer one rather grimly humourous reference to the Famine that lurked in the background. He complained to Spilane, the well-known Killarney bugler (whose task it was to ‘awaken’ the echoes of the Lakes) about the bites of the ‘midges’ or gnats. The musician denied that they were a common pest and accounted for their present virulence ‘by explaining that the poor peasantry having scarcely any blood left since the failure of the potato, the flies were so reduced in circumstances as to be glad to get a bit out of a full-blooded Sassenagh’ (4 August 1849, 67).
The Illustrated London News dedicated its 11 August issue to the Royal visit, even altering its familiar masthead by inserting an Irish harp between the words ‘London’ and ‘News,’ over a banner reading ‘The Queen’s Visit to Ireland. Cead Míle Faílle [sic].’ The whole was festooned with shamrocks (82). There was even a song with piano accompaniment, with lyrics such as:
Exult, then, O Erin! VICTORIA shall bring,
For the winter now passing, the glories of spring —
For the dark-beating tempest, clear vistas of blue; —
and the myriads now weeping shall smile as they sing, —
Cead mile failte [sic], Erin aboo.8
Next to the song is an illustration of the Queen’s carriage passing the Rotunda Lying-in Hospital in Dublin. Other illustrations show Her Majesty’s procession through arches festooned with swags and garlands. An earlier wood engraving, ‘The Procession Passing through the Mardyke, Cork,’ shows cheering well-dressed men, women and children on both sides of the road with only one barefooted beggar to the far right of the picture. Another illustration depicts Dublin’s ladies being presented to the Queen in the throne room of Dublin Castle.
Punch covered the visit from its offices in London, but was generally positive about the event, although it did not abandon its satire. The irrepressible magazine commemorated the Royal visit with a long broadside-type ballad set in its most outrageous stage-Irish brogue.
How the Phanix Park, sir, was like NOAH’s ark, sir,
Wid clane and unclane that did to it resort;
How she [the Queen] stayed a long while in the famed
Blind Asylum
And how at the Castle she held her noble Coort.
Where, besides Lords and Ladies, I saw the O’GRADY’S
(That only in thrade is, set them up wid the great!)
And a dale of Docthors and Ginirals and Procthors,
And loyal repalers, with their coats turned mighty nate
(Punch, xvii, 1849, 81).
The alleged coat-turning of ‘repalers’ anxious for a Royal introduction was not as good a joke as it seemed, since Daniel O’Connell and most of his party had always been monarchists. The emphasis on the middle-class invasion of the Castle was, on the other hand, pure snobbery, acceptable to its middle-class British readership, perhaps, because the upstarts here were Paddies. The fact that the poem, with its traditionally interior rhyming vowels, scans to the tune of Richard Alfred Milliken’s well-known comic song, ‘The Groves of Blarney,’ reveals another layer of Punch’s on-going Irish jokes.9
Such humour appears again in the cartoon, ‘LANDING OF QUEEN VICTORIA IN IRELAND’ (Figure 13.4). The drawing depicts a handsome, curly-headed Irishman, identified as ‘Sir Patrick Raleigh,’ down on one knee before the royal couple. He spreads out his tattered coat on the ground, with the invitation, ‘May It Plase Your Majesty to Tread on the Tail of My Coat.’ The drawing plays on both Sir Walter Raleigh’s legendary act of spreading his cloak before Queen Elizabeth I, and Paddy’s equally legendary offer to fight anyone who dared ‘to tread on the tail o’ me coat.’ Indeed, Sir Pat holds his shillelagh in his other hand, although its club end is covered by his hat. Punch’s theme here is one that would be echoed enthusiastically but briefly throughout the British press: how the Queen’s presence tamed the wild Irish and turned them into loyal subjects.
Figure 13.4: Punch, xvii. (1849), 47.
In addition to the sale of encumbered estates, Punch anticipated other changes that the Queen’s visit might realize. In the cartoon ‘IRELAND — A DREAM OF THE FUTURE’ (Figure 13.5), an evicted family, sitting desolately by the smoking ruin of their home, provides a dim, ghostly background for Queen Victoria as she peers into the waters of Lough Neagh in County Antrim. The idea of a vision seen in the lake was based on one of Thomas Moore’s Irish melodies, ‘Let Erin Remember the Days of Old.’ In the second verse of his song, Moore referred to the ancient legend about fishermen on the Lough who sometimes saw a drowned landscape of round towers and ruined churches beneath the waters:
Thus, sighing, look through the wave of Time
For the long-faded glories they cover.
Figure 13.5: Punch, xvii. (1849), 87.
Punch pointedly banishes Moore’s dreamy appeal to memory of the past — to ‘Catch a glimpse of the days that are over,’ — and instead has the lake reveal the future.10 In the cartoon the Queen gazes into the water and sees men ploughing with horses (instead of spading potato beds), sheep and cattle grazing, and a dairy farm in the foreground. There are an Irish piper and dancers in the drawing as well, but also a train, steam ships and a great city looming vaguely in the distance. The only things missing from the vision of prosperity were the smoke stacks of industry. The Queen’s vision was the replication of England’s agricultural rather than her industrial revolution.
The Times tried to maintain its traditional suspicion of Irish ebullience. Commenting on the royal arrival in Waterford, the writer noted that Prince Albert had taken the steamer Fairy up the river to the town ‘so famous for butter and bacon and Young Irelandism.’ As night fell, even the small villages at the mouth of the river were ‘illuminated’ in honour of the Queen’s presence.
Those poor small villages! Yes, indeed, not a window but exhibited its candle at every pane, while bonfires blazed on the quay and gleamed away up the dark sides of the distant hills. Every credit is due to those people for their respectful loyalty. For hours the population gathered around those great fires flickering about in the wind, and strangely suggestive of mystic rites and unhallowed creeds, of African fetishes, of those sacrifices to Baal, which antiquaries assign as their origin – there could be no mistake about the sincerity of their cheering or the power of their lungs, for the whole Channel echoed for hours with the cries of joy with which they hailed the presence of their Queen (The Times, 7 August 1849).
Even while recognizing the ‘respectful loyalty’ of the peasantry, the pseudo-anthropological comparison of the Irish bonfires to ‘savage’ and ‘pagan’ ‘mystic rites’ provided the usual distance of Irish behavior from civilized, i.e. British, habits.
Nevertheless, the Queen’s triumphant progress from Cork to Waterford to Dublin did prompt even The Times’ leader for 9 August to declare that the Royal visit to Ireland was ‘The concluding chapter of the history of the Irish rebellion.’ The ‘cheerful and heartfelt greeting of the thousands and thousands of Irishmen’ were evidence of Irish loyalty in the face of repeated pressure from a host of now-discredited nationalist sources. The Times’ writer listed the villains who had for so long misled the Irish:
The priest from the altar, the rebel press…the itinerant political propagandist from the hill side or the market place, the archbishop by his rescripts, the arch-agitator by his promises…all were equally interested in keeping the minds of millions of Irishmen in darkness, in fostering their prejudices, and pandering to their passions. Did scarcity fall upon the country? — straight this was the consequence of an act of the Imperial Legislature. Did grief and penury do their work upon some poor unfortunate in the further districts of the island? — it was the First Minister of the Crown who was to be brought in by the verdict of a jury as guilty of his blood….
In attaching the phrase ‘further districts of the island’ to an oblique reference to famine mortality The Times’ writer unwittingly demonstrated how hard it was for the paper, even in 1849, to take seriously the extent of suffering and death in famine-stricken Ireland.
According to the paper, the Irish had been living under a system of lies. Now, however, that system ‘has, in great measure, lost its power over the minds of our Irish fellow-subjects. Adversity has had its uses in their case.’ ‘Adversity’ was a useful euphemism for the Famine because it precluded the idea that Ireland’s woes could be blamed upon England.
They [the Irish] will not, cannot any longer be induced to believe that Englishmen wish for the continuance of their misfortunes. Englishmen, have, even from their enemies, enjoyed the credit of being shrewd calculators, and…it must be evident that they would rather that Ireland should enrich than impoverish them.
There were, of course, higher grounds upon which to base England’s best intentions: ‘…we have accepted the sorrows of Ireland as our own…. [W]hen Englishmen are charged with indifference to the calamities of Ireland, we think the history of the last five years may furnish a very satisfactory reply.’ The article ended with an endorsement of English investment in Ireland. Until now, anyone venturing to put money into Ireland ‘would have been reckoned a madman….’ Capital would follow only ‘in the steps of confidence,’ and the loyalty demonstrated by the Irish for the Queen formed the basis for such confidence. According to Delane’s paper, the Queen’s visit cleared the way for English post-famine investment (9 August 1849).
Around the time of the Queen’s visit, Punch published a cartoon by John Leech titled, ‘The New Irish Still. Showing How All Sorts of Good Things May be Obtained (by Industry) out of Peat’ (xvii., 67). A brawny young Irishman with a spade labeled ‘industry’ shovels peat into a furnace. A cornucopia on the other side spills food and new clothes to a young woman and four cheerful urchins. Two boys try on new clothes while another holds a platter containing a suckling pig. The fourth seems to hold a foaming tankard. A man in the background raises his hat to salute a huge bag of flour being carried past by a dudeen-smoking laborer. This was, apparently, a bread-eater’s utopia.
Presumably, the cartoon was meant to imply that the Irish were capable of working hard, and, with proper resources, could provide for themselves. Yet the meaning behind the cartoon remains unclear. The image of peat being shoveled into the machine-like cornucopia suggests industrialization. When the word ‘industry’ appeared within an Irish context, however, it usually meant sustained effort, not industrial enterprise. Outside of the area in and around Belfast there was little industry in Ireland. Land rather than factories was the destination of the much-anticipated British capital that was supposed to flow into Ireland. Like many observers in Britain, Leech and the editors of Punch seemed to have had trouble keeping Irish realities in focus.
This difficulty is seen in a small but interesting way in the 15 September issue of the Illustrated London News, which carried a wood engraving titled, ‘An Irish Harvest Home.’ The illustration was from ‘a drawing by an Irish artist,’ as the editors took pains to tell their readers, invoking a native source for authenticity.11 The text described how a landlord had put on ‘a night’s amusement for the boys and girls who assisted in reaping and securing the gifts of Ceres’ (188). Ceres was, of course, the goddess of grain. The text was, apparently, intended as a propaganda piece, re-enforcing the benefits of a grain-based economy, the object of new English investment. However, in the wood engraving the candlesticks surrounding the hall are all draped with potato plants, rather than the sheaves of grain that would have been a customary decoration at an English Harvest Home celebration.
On the whole the impact of the Queen’s visit was scarcely noticeable once the monarch and her royal entourage departed, leaving behind no more food and no less distress than had existed before their arrival. With uncharacteristic seriousness and realism Punch commented on the sanitized nature of the Queen’s visit. In a dialect poem, ‘Hibernia to Victoria, Being an Omitted Passage in the Royal Irish Progress,’ the paper reminded its readers of the Ireland Victoria did not see.
Sure, it wasn’t Repealers alone, dear, but more,
That turned their ould coats, wid the best side before;
So list while I tell, what’s less pleasant than thrue,
What sights ye ne’er saw, what your visit can’t do.
Ye saw me, asthore, in my moment of mirth,
Not crouched in my dwellin’ of darkness and dearth;
Ye heard the loud cheers of my young and my ould,
Not their moans for the hunger, their cry for the could.
Ye walked in my palaces, cushla macree
But divil a cabin, at all, did you see;
Ye took bite and sup from my alderman’s dish,
But not the black roots [blighted potatoes]
from my cottier’s kish [basket] (xvii., 103).
Even before its misplaced celebration of the Irish harvest, the Illustrated London News had returned to a more jaundiced view of Ireland. Just a month after the Queen’s visit, ‘The Land Question in France and Ireland’ headed the issue for 8 September. Blaming the Famine on ‘the trade of political agitation,’ the writer both confirmed and ridiculed Young Irelander Gavin Duffy’s ‘vivid picture of the social condition of the people.’ The ILN quoted from an article in the Nation in which Duffy described nightmarish images of the starving.
The famine and the landlords have actually created a new race in Ireland. I have seen on the streets of Galway crowds of creatures more debased than the Yahoos of Swift—creatures having only a distant and hideous resemblance to human beings. Grey-headed old men, whose idiot faces have hardened into a settled leer of mendicancy, simeous and semi-human; and women filthier and more frightful than the harpies, who, at the jingle of a coin on the pavement, swarmed in myriads from unseen places, struggling, screaming, shrieking for their prey like some monstrous and unclean animals. Beggar children, beggar adults, beggars in white hairs, girls with faces grey and shrivelled, the grave stamped upon them in a decree which could not be recalled…. I have seen these accursed sights and they are burned into my memory for ever!
Duffy’s passage demonstrates the difficulty anyone has in trying to suggest the reality of extreme suffering without at the same time making the victims seem grotesque and removed from the common human experience.
In response to Duffy’s images Mackay’s journal was viciously sarcastic. While agreeing that ‘we could…depict many scenes as fearful and striking,’ the editor turned Irish suffering back upon itself.
We think it is well for Ireland that these things have made such an impression upon a man who has so much influence as Mr. Duffy [who] has determined to devote his energies for the future to…the land question …it will become apparent that an inordinate subdivision of the soil, rendering good and profitable farming impossible, preventing pasturage, and filling the land with a potato-eating population, barely removed above pauperism at the best of times, has caused…Ireland [to become] the most unhappy and most degraded among the nations of Christendom (Illustrated London News, xv., 8 September 1849, 162).
Although the ILN’s principal target was the ardent nationalist, Gavin Duffy, the magazine easily slid into blaming the ‘potato-eating’ victims.
As the number of evictions grew, the lower ranks of the Irish tenantry faced an increasingly grim future. After its ferocious attack on Gavin Duffy, the Illustrated London News reverted to a more objective voice to delineate the tragedy taking place in Ireland. The leader for 20 October returned to a topic the publication had featured almost a year earlier: ‘Irish Evictions:’
Nothing like the misery of the Irish people exists under the sun. Even the gleam of hope that appeared to brighten their prospects a few weeks ago, when a harvest more than usually abundant was ripe for the sickle, has disappeared…. The landlords evict their miserable tenants by hundreds and by thousands; the miserable tenants go to the Union [workhouse], or receive out-door relief at the rate of seven-eighths of a penny a day, til the munificent allowance lapses in the grave… (xv., 30 October 1849, 257).
In reference to the sickle, there is, again, the Englishman’s usual fixation with grain.
The Illustrated London News then quoted from a recent piece written by George Poulett Scrope regarding the evictions. Scrope argued that the evicting landlords (as opposed to agents for absentees and the Courts of Chancery) were themselves under such pressure that they had little choice but to clear the paupers from their lands. The landlords themselves were ‘engaged in a life-and-death struggle with their creditors.’ The blame lay elsewhere.
All is done in the sacred name of the law…. It is to the law, or rather to the Government and Legislature which uphold it, and refuse to mitigate its ferocity, that the crime rightly attaches; and they will be held responsible for it by history…and perhaps before long, by the retributive justice of God, and the vengeance of a people infuriated by barbarous oppression… (257).
Mackay’s leader agreed with Scrope’s ‘strong words,’ but found it ‘impossible to see how evictions were to be entirely prevented.’
If a landlord’s property swarms with a tenantry too ignorant and dispirited to cultivate the land, and too poor or dishonest to pay the rent agreed upon, he must evict them, or become a pauper himself…. The truth is, that these evictions…are not merely a legal but a natural process; and, however much we may deplore the misery from which they spring…we cannot compel the Irish proprietors to continue in their miserable holdings the wretched swarms of people who pay no rent, and who prevent the improvement of property as long as they remain upon it (257-58; italics added).
While the plight of the landlords was understood, their tenantry was completely objectified, depicted as ‘wretched swarms’ in the way of progress, ‘ignorant,’ ‘dispirited’ and in many cases ‘dishonest.’ The Illustrated London News’ language comes down on the side of the landlords.
Nevertheless, the Illustrated London News did suggest two things that could be done. First, evicting landlords should be held responsible for the maintenance of their former tenants, and should not be allowed to escape paying their share of the rates. Second, the Poor Law Unions should be allowed to spend some of their funds in buying land and putting their charges to work cultivating them. In arguing this second solution, the ILN’s writer, like so many English commentators on Ireland, assumed that the bogs of the West of Ireland were simply ‘waste land’ that merely wanted drainage and cultivation. ‘A starving people, and millions of waste, but cultivable lands, are two co-existent facts which disgrace our civilization’ (258). In imagining a connection between the two the writer ignored a third factor — that boggy soil not only needed to be drained but also carefully and painstakingly built up, rendered less acidic and provided with more nutrients.
Ironically, that is exactly what the ‘wretched swarms’ of peasants had been doing on their small plots through careful spade cultivation. Investing the only resource they had at their disposal, their labour, the farmers in the rundale communities managed, drained and enriched their soil, growing grain to pay the rent and potatoes to feed themselves. In 1853 Thomas Colville Scott, an agent evaluating the lands of the former Martin Estate in Connemara, marveled at the ‘beautifully tilled’ small plots he encountered. Yet he regarded them as examples of ‘misapplied labour,’ since such small holdings could not pay for themselves. At best, the land could be consolidated and put to grass for cattle (8, 28). In terms of the large-scale, English-style agriculture that was to replace the old pyramids of tenancies in Ireland, the wet, poorly-drained soils that predominate in the West were generally best suited to pasturage, as an increasing number of landlords were coming to realize. Cattle and sheep required little investment in the land and far fewer labourers than did grain cultivation. The Illustrated London News’ writer was, therefore, indulging in a fantasy when he claimed that Ireland had ‘resources and fertility so great as to be able to afford, with ordinary good management, a comfortable subsistence for double or even treble her present population’ (258).
Whatever Mackay’s bias in favour of the landlords, he apparently felt compelled to run a series of year-end reports on Ireland, focusing on Kilrush, County Clare, on the west bank of the Shannon. The area provided a striking example of the failure of Ireland’s Poor Law to deal with the crisis. The first part of ‘Condition of Ireland’ ran in the Illustrated London News’ 15 December issue. At the top of the page is a panorama of the seemingly prosperous town of Kilrush. At the bottom is a wood engraving of the nearby village of Tullig, in which virtually every cottage had been unroofed in the process of evictions.12 The illustration in the middle of the page is of a ‘Scalpeen,’ an improvised thatched hut built in the ruins of a cottage that had been half-tumbled in the process of an eviction. The inhabitant, a shaggy, tattered barefoot man, stands before it, his hat in his hands (Figure 13.6). The text identified him as Brian Connor and described his type of dwelling as resembling the ‘ant-hills of the African forests.’ He had, the writer stated, nowhere else to go.
Yet the instinctive love of life is so great, so strong is the sentiment by which Nature ensures the continuance of the race, that Brian Connor dreads nothing so much as that he shall not be allowed, now that his hut has been discovered, to burrow longer in security; and like a fox, or some other vermin, he expects to be unearthed, and left even without the shelter of what may be called a preparatory grave (394; italics added).
Figure 13.6: Illustrated London News, xv. (1849), 393.
In one sentence, the ILN’s writer managed to evoke the absolute desperation of the situation and then to compare the victim to a ‘vermin,’ a word hardly calculated to attach human sympathy to Brian Connor’s plight.
There were worse dwellings, the journal informed its readers, such as ‘scalps,’ mere holes in the earth, barely covered, to which some evicted tenants had fled, finding shelter from the winter wind if not the rain. Under such circumstances eviction, especially in winter, was a death sentence.
Even from the Scalps the poor are hunted. ‘None of the homeless class,’ says Captain Kennedy, the poor-law inspector, ‘can now find admittance save into some over-crowded cabin, whose inmates seldom survive a month.’ A month’s agonies — the result of hunger, dirt and fever — after being expelled from a home suffices to destroy life (394; italics original).
The Illustrated London News reminded its readers that, before the Famine, travellers to Ireland had described the mud cabins of the peasantry as the worst habitations on earth. ‘[B]ut the Irish have proved that in their lowest deep there is still a lower deep — that a Scalpeen is worse than a mud-hut, and a Scalp worse than a Scalpeen…. There must be more hope of the savages of New South Wales or the Brazils…’ (394).
It was the Illustrated London News’ second part of ‘Condition of Ireland,’ appearing in the 22 December issue, that contained what was the most effective visual reporting on the Famine since James Mahony’s sketches for the magazine in 1846. In a double-page inside spread (Figures 13.7, 13.8) the journal provided six disturbing illustrations by an unnamed artist-reporter. Given the size of the ILN’s pages, 40 cm. by 26.5 cm., the illustrations would have had some impact. Across the top of the first page (404; Figure 13.7) is a startling wood engraving of ‘Miss Kennedy Distributing Clothing at Kilrush’ (see also Figure 13.11). Although the eye is at first drawn to the little girl, the daughter of Captain Kennedy, standing in the centre handing out clothing, she quickly appears almost overwhelmed by the close grouping of paupers pressing around her. The women and children are thinly clad, bare-legged and without shoes in winter. A woman with a child in one arm holds her head in apparent anguish.
Further down the page is a picture of Bridget O’Donnel and her children (see Figure 13.9). The woodcut is 13 cm. high and 7 cm. wide. The elongated triangle formed by the three scantily-clad figures seems to emphasize the thinness of their bodies, which, while not skeletal, suggests extreme want. In spite of the limitations of a relatively small woodcut, the artist has managed to convey a desperate look of want on the face of Mrs. O’Donnel. The fact that she is named adds a degree of humanity to what many of the Illustrated London News’ readers may have found a shocking picture.13 The sketch at the bottom left of the page shows a woman and child before the ‘scalpeen’ of Tim Downs, at Dunmore. The woman raises her hands as if in despair. A few pieces of battered furniture represent the spare contents of the destroyed cottage in the background.
Figure 13.7: Illustrated London News, xv. (1849), 404.
Figure 13.8: Illustrated London News, xv. (1849), 405.
Figure 13.9: Illustrated London News, xv. (1849) 404.
Across the top of the next page (405, Figure 13.8) Mackay ran an illustration of another roofless eviction site, the village of Moveen. Two years earlier, the views of Skibbereen drawn by James Mahony had shown houses still under thatch. Now, in 1849, most of the houses shown in the illustrations are roofless. Such evictions, on the heels of repeated crop failures from 1845 to 1849, meant the destruction of whole communities, such as Tullig and Moveen.
Below and to the left of the ruined village is the picture of a woman and some children ‘searching for potatoes in a stubble field’ (see Figure 13.10). In this woodcut, which is 12.5 cm. high and 7.5 cm. wide, one child sits dejected in the background, while the other scrabbles on his hands and knees, placing what potatoes he finds in a hat by his side. Through the acute angle of her right arm and the stringy hair blowing about her, the artist has managed to suggest a desperate energy in the woman‘s efforts, as she wields her slane. This and the picture of Bridget O’Donnel and her children are among the most striking illustrations of the Famine.
At the bottom of the page, a strong-looking young man is seated in a pose of despair, his head on his hand. Next to him is the entrance to his ‘scalp.’ A pitcher, perhaps one of his few remaining possessions, stands empty before him. In the background stands a figure beyond the wall with his back turned to the scene. Near him is an bare, scraggly tree. Both the figure and the tree emphasize the sense of the evicted man’s isolation.14
Figure 13.10: Illustrated London News, xv. (1849), 405.
In his text, the Illustrated London News’ artist-reporter allows convention and fancy, as well as the censorship of ‘taste,’ to get in his way. In discussing the ruined villages he sketched, he cannot resist the hint of a romantic, even Gothic tone, giving the scene a slightly theatrical cast.
…[T]he ruthless destroyer, as if he delighted in seeing the monuments of his skill, has left the walls of the houses standing, while he has unroofed them and taken away all shelter from the people. They look like the tombs of a departed race, rather than the recent abodes of a yet living people, and I felt actually relieved at seeing one or two half-clad specters gliding about as an evidence that I was not in the land of the dead (Illustrated London News, xv., 22 December 1849,404; italics added).
Even those passages that occasionally manage to suggest the real horror of famine are burdened with the cliches of gothic fiction.
The once frolicsome people — even the saucy beggars — have disappeared, and given place to wan and haggard objects…. One beholds only shrunken frames scarcely covered with flesh — crawling skeletons, who appear to have risen from their graves, and are ready to return frightened to that abode (404).
Figure 13.11: Illustrated London News, xv. (1849), 404.
The writer also found it difficult to maintain his focus on the humanity of the famine victims he had pictured in his illustrations. He mixed sympathetic sentiments with demeaning verbal images, describing those living in the ‘scalps’ as sharing the ditches and bogs with ‘otters and snipes.’ He also calls attention to one woman in the ‘Miss Kennedy’ picture as ‘crouching like a monkey, and drawing around her the only rag she had left to conceal her nudity. A big tear was rolling down her cheek, with gratitude for the gifts the innocent child was distributing’ (Figure 13.11).
The interaction between the text and the illustration at this point is significant. The Miss Kennedy picture is disturbing in several ways. It shows destitute people half-naked in a winter landscape. It also shows a tiny middle-class girl in the midst of this terrible scene. We are uncertain upon what to focus: the painful images that surround the girl or the girl herself, as she dispenses charity. The text, however, by describing the peasants’ poverty through references to animals, in essence dehumanizes them. Miss Kennedy on the other hand is described as a ‘saint.’ As a result the text resolves the tensions between the picture’s center and its periphery in favor of the center, in which we see a symbol of order and middle-class benevolence surrounded by chaos and suffering. The real message of the picture, when considered along with its text, is the contrast between the helpless Irish and the good-hearted but also effective and efficient British for whom apparent action is always the proper response to difficulty.15
As it had in its earlier articles, the Illustrated London News attacked the Government for its ‘ignorant and vicious legislation.’
When more food, more cultivation, more employment were the requisites for maintaining the Irish in existence, the legislature and the landlords set about producing a species of cultivation that could only be successful by requiring fewer hands, and turning potato gardens, that nourished the maximum of human beings into pasture grounds of bullocks, that nourished only the minimum (xv., 15 December 1849, 394).
This time one of Mackay’s writers appears to have recognized that the result of the evictions would be a shift towards pasturage rather than grain.
Mackay seems to have had difficulty in maintaining a unified editorial policy concerning Ireland. Back in September his paper had recommended grain cultivation and had severely criticized the reliance on potatoes. By December, however, the realities of maintaining the West of Ireland’s population through another severe winter seemed to make the nourishment of human beings at least as compelling as political economy. A few weeks later, however, the journal then attacked the Poor Law, the only source of relief for the destitute, for somehow keeping them poor. Returned to the Kilrush area in the 5 January 1850 issue, the Illustrated London News insisted:
…[I]t is plain that a Poor-law which provides for idleness and destitution, and lessens the natural stimulus to industry; which decreases wealth and devotes it to unproductive consumption, is one of the last measures any reasonable being would have had recourse to for the purpose of regenerating Ireland…the Poor-law is only the climax of the ignorant legislation that, operating in silence through the ages, has perverted the Irish, and made their naturally fertile abode one scene of desolation (xvi., 5 January 1850,3).
The most significant thing about this passage is not the attack on the Government but the way this attack somehow managed to rebound back upon the victims. Reliance on the Poor Law has promoted ‘idleness’ and had discouraged industry. Even in this sharp critique of Government policy, Paddy is still to blame.
The article was illustrated with more scenes of roofless, tumbled cottages, pictures of landlord’s agents driving cattle for rent, and more ‘scalps.’ Centered within the text was an engraving of a four-storied workhouse, the destination for many evicted tenants (444). The writer pointed out that one in five in County Clare had already died or emigrated and that nearly half of those left were dependent on the Poor Law.
With a few exceptions the Illustrated London News’ illustration for the series on Kilrush fell into four categories: roofless villages (containing few if any people), scalps with their inhabitants, eviction activities, and in two cases, distressed but not emaciated famine victims shown with no reference to habitation. For the most part the illustrations were relevant to the subject and some of them were effective in suggesting the desperate nature of the situation around Kilrush. The proliferation of tumbled and ruined structures seem intended to emphasize for the ILN’s readers the destruction of ‘home,’ an institution at the very heart of their middle-class culture.
There were, however, other potential subjects that were generally ignored or only occasionally illustrated. There is only one illustration of famine victims receiving relief, and in that case it was an act of private charity represented by a little girl. Although the journal’s readers were shown the exterior of the Kilrush workhouse, they were not taken inside. Nor did the artist sketch the fever hospitals, the removal of cholera victims, or the mass graves. Apart from the difficulties presented in drawing crowded masses in interior settings, any attempt to illustrate the reality of such conditions would have threatened the readers’ sensibilities. Just as the artists of the period did not really depict the starved human body, neither were they willing to depict the institutionalized suffering that the Poor Law imposed on the people.
Moreover, if we consider the layout of the pages reproduced in Figures 13.7 and 13.8, we become aware of another factor that might have diminished the impact of the articles. In his study of the Illustrated London News Peter W. Sinnema demonstrates how the aesthetic arrangement of letterpress and pictures on the journal’s pages often threatened to soften the impact of the illustrations themselves (41-44). Although the journal’s page was large enough to allow the wood engravings to draw in the viewer, the carefully balanced layout of the page produced an overall reassuring sense of symmetry, order and control. In this way the ILN simultaneously disturbed and calmed its middle-class readers.16
With the end of the 1840s and the start of a new decade, the Government had something to celebrate. As Punch pointed out in its ‘Political Summary’ of the first six months of 1850: ‘At the commencement of 1850 the excess of income over expenditure was announced to be two millions [pounds sterling], and the increase of exports in 1849 above those of 1848 was nearly ten millions.’17 After all of the diatribes against Ireland for draining the Treasury, the United Kingdom had finished the year in the black.
In Ireland those marginal people, whose agricultural methods and blighted crops could not be measured in terms of surplus and exports, continued to die. The old Tory policy of maintaining lives and communities through governmental compensation to even out the vagaries of a subsistence farming economy had ended in 1846. The Whig dedication to an unfettered grain market and to individual enterprise represented to Russell and his Cabinet the only legitimate approach. For the long term, Russell’s Government insisted that Irish agriculture would become grain-based. Legislation made it easier to sell encumbered estates, and the police and army were ready to support any necessary evictions. The way was cleared for English investors to provide the necessary capital. The British press greeted this policy with approval.
Yet, the outcome was not what either Peel or Russell had imagined. English investors generally failed to take advantage of the opportunities they were offered in Ireland. Of the 7,489 purchasers of land under the Encumbered Estates Acts, only 309 or around four percent of them were English, Scottish or foreigners. The vast majority were Irish farmers and investors (Donnelly, 2001, 166). Perhaps the continued negative representation of Ireland in the British press had some effect, and The Times, Punch, the Standard, the Illustrated London News and the other metropolitan papers could share some credit for helping to keep Ireland for the Irish.
As far as the British press was concerned the Famine was winding down. After the end of the Illustrated London News’ series on eviction around Kilrush, coverage of Ireland, what there was of it, tended to focus on the phenomenon of large-scale emigration. Nevertheless, the potato blight remained active in the counties on the western seaboard. The Poor Law Unions there still continued to struggle with massive destitution, and people still died of hunger and disease. It was not until 1852 that the blight temporarily subsided in all of Ireland. By then, the country had been transformed in ways that few nations experience without undergoing the horrors of fire and sword.18 In the case of Ireland blight, bureaucracy and the press had proven sufficient.
Notes:
1. Gray 1999, 70. Cormac Ó Gráda suggests that the enormous debt burden on many Irish landlords, although no doubt exacerbated by reduced rents and rising rates, was not due to the Famine. Mismanagement had taken its toll over time. At best, Ó Gráda suggests, ‘the famine’s true role was that of a catalyst: getting rid of landlords who were doomed in any case.’ He also notes that landlords who were already seriously in debt by 1845 were in too weak a position themselves to help their tenants; see 1999, 133, 134.
2. Peel’s intervention is interesting. He had not established his faction in formal opposition to the Government. Therefore, while his proposals were not welcomed by Russell, neither were they part of an attempt to bring down his Government. In fact, one of the reasons for Peel’s action at this point was to forestall the toppling of Russell’s Whigs by a new Protectionist-led coalition; see Gray, 1999, 211-215.
3. See Gray, 1999,213-14. Of course, most English and Scottish buyers would have been Protestant. Several books promoting English investment and settlement in the West of Ireland appeared in the wake of the Encumbered Estates Act of 1849. Among these were George Preston White’s A Tour in Connemara, with Remarks on its Great Physical Capacities, 1849; and John Harvey Ashworth’s anonymously published A Saxon in Ireland: or the Rambles of an Englishman in Search of a Settlement in the West of Ireland, 1851. See W. Williams, 1998, ‘Into the West,’ 79-83.
4. Peter Gray suggests that the face on the toad represents a Jewish stereotype; 1993,31.
5. Government negotiations with the London Corporation eventually broke down, partly because of historical associations with the old Irish Society of London, one of the original group of Protestant proprietors in the seventeenth-century plantation of Ulster; see Gray, 1999,220-21.
6. Punch liked to employ the imperial theme in this context. In ‘A PARALLEL BETWEEN PEEL AND CAESAR,’ published 28 April 1849, a Punch cartoonist depicts Peel, in a Roman vessel, landing on a beach presumably in the West of Ireland. Mr. Punch, wearing a Roman helmet, leads an army of spades ashore to invade the ‘Bogs’ and ‘Wastelands.’ Before them flee what the accompanying text called ‘biped livestock,’ represented by two-legged hats or up-turned potato baskets. One carries a pike. See Gray, 1993, 31.
7. See W. Williams (1998), ‘Blow, Bugles, Blow,’ passim.
8. See 100-101. Céad míle fáilte means ‘a hundred-thousand welcomes.’ ‘Aboo’ is the anglicized form of abú, meaning ‘for ever! to victory!’ See Terence Patrick Dolan, A Dictionary of Hiberno-English. The song was probably written by the editor, Charles Mackay, who regularly contributed verses and music to the journal; see Bishop, 36.
9. For the ‘Groves of Blarney,’ see Healy, 21. For the original on which the parody was based, see ‘Castlehyde’ in Joyce, 203-204.
10. The verses accompanying the drawing are a parody of Moore’s lyrics, as well as a satire on his sentimentality.
Let Erin forget the days of old
When her faithless sons betrayed her.
When Charlatans wrung from her hand the gold,
Which with ‘Blarney’ they repaid her;
When her sons as green as the flag they unfurl’d,
Were led into anarchy’s danger,
By those who abuse at the Saxon hurl’d —
As a tyrant, a foe and a stranger.
On Lough Neagh’s Banks where our good Queen Strays,
Now that faction’s heat’s declining,
May she see the bright promise of better days
In the wave of the future shining.
Thus Erin look forward with faith sublime,
Forgetting the days that are over;
And allow the stream of a brighter time
In oblivion the past to cover.
The second verse is repeated within the cartoon; xvii, 1849, 86; italics added.
11. The costumes of the figures are somewhat outmoded, and their poses suggest an academic drawing in the style of Sir David Wilkie’s Penny Wedding (1819) rather than a contemporary sketch.
12. The cottages were unroofed so that the former inhabitants would not return. Tenants who cooperated with their eviction and did the unroofing themselves were allowed to take the thatch with them to cover whatever hole or ditch into which they settled.
13. Margaret Crawford points out that, with the exception of the Bridget O’Donnel sketch, the figures in this series do not really suggest the degrees of severe emaciation that physicians and those ministering to the starving describe. Most of the figures, although ragged, have the rounded, fully-fleshed limbs that artists and engravers had no doubt been trained to reproduce; 1994, 82-83. One must wonder, however, what editor would have published truly realistic depictions of the starving, even if an artist had produced them.
14. This wood engraving is captioned ‘Scalp of Brian Connor, near Kilrush Union-house.’ The evicted man in this picture looks nothing like the bearded pauper of that name depicted in the previous week’s issue (Figure 13.6). While there could have been two or more Brian Connors in the area of Kilrush, it would appear that the editor or his assistant got confused when they divided the text and illustrations between two separate issues. Or two different London-based artists and/or engravers may have been assigned to complete the drawings from rough sketches furnished them by the artist/reporter in Ireland. The two engravings look as if they were the work of different hands.
15. For a discussion about the interaction between text and illustration in the ILN see Peter W. Sinnema, 35-37.
16. The aesthetic arrangement of the ILN’s pages, including those depicting poverty and suffering, is particularly evident in the arrangement of illustration and letterpress on a page dealing with pre-famine Ireland, iii., 12 August 1843, 101. See Sinnema, 42.
17. Punch, ‘Introduction…January to June, 1850,’ [first January issue] xviii., 1850, no page number.
18. For the continuation of the famine conditions after 1849, see Kinealy, 272-296.