Early in William Carleton’s novel The Black Prophet, a melodrama set during the 1817 potato failure, the “prophecy man” Donnel Dhu sees a rainstorm and predicts starvation. The water, he explains, will kill potatoes and soften the earth for grave-digging. The heavy clouds are “death hearses movin’ slowly along.” The novel appeared in serial in the Dublin University Magazine between May and December 1846. A pastiche of childhood memories from 1817 and reporting from 1845, Carleton hoped Black Prophet would make the suffering of the Irish poor vivid to his readers, with fictional scenes presented “in the midst of living testimony.” However, by midsummer, long before the conclusion appeared in print, it became obvious that the blight had returned, just as virulent as the past year’s and more widespread. Fewer potatoes were in the ground, and a greater proportion of planted potatoes were destroyed. Inspecting a field in August, a relief official found few potatoes larger than a marble. The familiar putrid smell was everywhere.1
In the winter of 1846–1847, rural Ireland became a hellscape, shocking and incomprehensible. An estimated four hundred thousand people in Ireland died of causes related to the loss of the 1846 potato crop—thousands by starvation, and hundreds of thousands by disease. The bonds of social life dissolved. Mobs of the hungry marched on worksites and government offices. Parents watched their children die and were too weak to properly mourn them. Children watched their parents die and were too weak to move their bodies. Those who could fled Ireland, a panicked beginning to one of the largest waves of European migration in the nineteenth century.2
Everyday life collapsed, and famine-relief efforts stood in pathetic contrast. Ireland did not suffer in secret. Thanks to faster communications by steamship (and occasionally telegraph—though telegraphy was quite new in 1846) and the widespread syndication of articles from London newspapers across the British Empire, in the United States, and beyond, the world knew about the ongoing catastrophe in close to real time. Moved by images and stories of Irish suffering, people and organisations around the world donated money and goods to the relief effort. In counterpoint to this public openhandedness, the Whig government that replaced Peel’s Conservatives, led by John Russell, fixated on the moral hazard of eleemosynary aid—of giving relief without labour in exchange, even to the starving. Faith in the civilising power of austerity and even deeper faith in the power of markets remained core principles of the response to rapidly deteriorating conditions.
Some historians speculate that had Peel remained in power, Ireland might have suffered less in 1847. This argument echoes wishful thinking from the Irish intelligentsia of the 1840s, some of whom argued that the Conservative prime minister had “recognized the duty of government to feed the people to the utmost extent.” However, differences between the Tory and Whig approaches to relief were practical, not principled. Where Peel emphasised managing the food supply, Russell focused on labour. The 1846 Labour Rate Act, which established a new famine-relief system based at government-sponsored worksites, passed quickly in August, before the parliamentary recess. Public works, financed primarily by Irish taxpayers, would provide Irish labourers the means to buy the food that free trade would bring to Irish ports. By raising local taxes to pay for public works, the slogan went, “Irish property would support Irish poverty.” Reasoning from the principles of political economy, Russell’s government hoped that the famine would make Irish workers more dependent on wages.3
The Labour Rate Act was written to make public works a last resort. The law echoed the workhouse principle of less eligibility by limiting access to public jobs to those labourers unable to find work from private employers and by mandating that public wages always be set lower than the lowest local private wage. Despite these provisions, by March 1847 more than seven hundred thousand people had jobs on the works, supporting millions more. Facing ballooning costs and few returns, and thrown off-balance from the spring of 1847 by a financial crisis, the Whig government declared an end to the famine as a national emergency for the United Kingdom. Local authorities in Ireland, rather than national bodies like the Treasury, would be responsible for famine relief. The government quickly wound down the public works and sponsored a temporary program of local soup kitchens, financed directly by grants and public donations. At their peak, the kitchens distributed daily rations to some three million people. The poor—those who did not die or flee—spent the winter growing weaker and fighting for work, and the summer shuffling in line for soup.
The tragedy of Black ’47, as it came to be known by many, is not that the government of the United Kingdom did nothing, but that it did so much to so little effect. The British government recognised the depth and urgency of the crisis. What 1847 shows instead is the poverty of an early Victorian political imagination that could only see a solution to famine that depended on market principles and the disciplinary power of supply and demand. When the Irish poor did not behave in ways that confirmed the predictions of political economy, it was the people, not the predictions, that needed correction. Under famine conditions, relief plans that required work in exchange for food or money left the people vulnerable to die first. The potato famine reached ghoulish depths in basements and hovels and fields, places hidden from officials supervising worksites and soup kitchens. People on the margins—the disabled; the very young and the old; the geographically, socially, or politically isolated—were helpless. One relief officer estimated that in his district no more than one out of every seven destitute people earned wages, and that hundreds of people with jobs on the works ate nothing from morning until nightfall. Although some died on the works, most died in secret. “The imploring look or the vacant sepulchral stare,” of the starving, one witness wrote, “once fastened upon you, leaves its impress for ever.”4
After Peel resigned in June 1846, Lord John Russell became prime minister. Russell, the third son of the Duke of Bedford, was, like Peel, a career politician. Like Peel, he entered the House of Commons at twenty-one. Russell, a slight man belittled by critics for his “solemn gibberish,” became prime minister while still wounded and gun-shy after his failed attempt to form a government in December 1845. Russell was unsure if he could control his cabinet, much less his backbenches. To keep his government together, Russell needed the consistent support of a core of free-trading “Peelite” Tories.5
Russell was confident that without the Corn Laws in place, trade would supply Ireland with enough cheap grain to meet demand. “A government,” The Economist concurred, “may be perfectly easy while it is totally ignorant of the source whence the people’s food is derived.” Russell also insisted (correctly) that Peel’s large-scale purchases and imports of maize were never intended to be permanent. Russell’s ministry scaled down the government’s grain-buying and marketing, keeping open only the depots in the most impoverished southern and western districts. “This is a special case,” Russell admitted, a chance for Parliament to show “the poorest among the Irish people that we are not insensible, here, to the claims which they have on us.” But those claims had natural limits, he argued. Even in the face of desperate need, relief had to be parsimonious, to prevent the Irish poor from swapping dependence on potatoes for dependence on the government. “The infliction of Providence,” Russell reflected, would be worth the pain, if the consequence was a transition to dependence on wage labour.6
Free trade could not bring grain into Ireland fast enough to meet profound need—and it was ironclad doctrine that Ireland export food while waiting for grain from the United States and Black Sea ports. That Ireland should continue to export cash crops despite the near-total destruction of its subsistence staple was the same principle, on a macro scale, that demanded that the starving work for money and food. It was better to endure famine in the near term than to retreat from the rigour and civilising power of the market in the long term. Laissez-faire, as usual, required bureaucracy. The public works established under the Labour Rate Act were designed to be self-limiting; the lower-than-average wages mandated by the statute were meant to deter people from seeking public works jobs if other employment was available. Works were funded by loans that would have to be repaid from local taxes, to encourage landlords to offer private employment. Russell’s government spent four times as much on relief in nine months as Peel’s government had spent in over a year.7
The global market for grain in August 1846 was very different than it had been a year earlier. Lower tariffs made transatlantic trade cheaper. The grain supply, however, was constrained by limited infrastructure. Though there may have been enough grain for sale on the world market to satisfy every buyer, there were nowhere near enough quays to load it or ships to carry it. In the United States a similar number of merchants and shipping firms were filling many more orders, and British buyers competed with other European governments. The cost of freight doubled in Europe and tripled in the United States. The price of grain in ports on the Danube and in the Black Sea more than doubled. This bottleneck in supply created a bubble in grain prices, which worsened the Irish food supply crisis. There were accounts, possibly apocryphal, of ships laden with wheat crossing and recrossing the Irish Sea, killing time as merchants watched prices rise. In Sligo, as many as ten thousand barrels of maize and other grains were kept in warehouses to appreciate. As for demand, it was endless. “Ireland would swallow all that could be thrown into it,” Charles Trevelyan wrote, “and remain still unsatisfied.” The government’s rules for marketing grain, meant to protect private trade, set the price of grain from government stores based on local markets, which increased the price of grain sold by the Commissariat by as much as 30 percent.8
The remaining government depots received hundreds of requests for grain from relief committees and workers. In autumn 1846, officers struggled to explain why the government was selling grain at nearly the same price as profiteering merchants, and why most of its supply was still on American docks. The poor battered at the doors. “I never witnessed anything like it,” a Catholic priest wrote of a night he spent inside a locked storeroom near Loughros, County Leitrim, “and hope I never will again.” A crowd of as many as a thousand people attacked the Cahersiveen depot, in County Kerry, smashing at the barred windows and heavy doors with crowbars until the storekeepers surrendered and gave out meal and biscuit. In Blacksod Bay, County Mayo, occupants of some twenty small boats pulled alongside a schooner, boarded it, and carried away seventy tons of meal.9
By mid-1847, however, the government’s faith in the capacity of free trade to supply grain to Ireland was partially vindicated. Food came in quantities, albeit months after the crisis had begun in earnest, and the bubble burst—the price of maize, for example, fell from £19 a ton in February 1847 to about £7 six months later. In the first six months of 1847, nearly 2.85 million quarters of grain (nearly 79 million pounds) worth nearly £8.8 million had been imported. Ireland, Lord Clarendon wrote, had a market that was “freer, cheaper, and better supplied, than that of any country in Europe where distress prevailed, and where those measures of interference and restriction had been unwisely adopted which were successfully resisted here.” To free-traders it was a victory, proof that markets could supply cheap food, and that Providence rewarded patience.10
A good supply of food in the ports, however, did not mean a good supply of food in the backcountry. In many remote parts of Ireland, the Commissariat stores had been the only facilities with the capacity to bring imported grain to market. Yet they were mostly closed by the time affordable grain arrived on Irish shores in 1847. Said one official, “The machinery necessary for the new state of things does not exist.” Even in the coastal towns in the west of Ireland, where depots were open, there were few commercial mills able to grind maize. “The ordinary mercantile machinery,” Trevelyan worried, “even of the greatest trading nation in the world, is unequal to such a novel emergency.” Even when there had been enough grain on the market months earlier, there were not enough ships to carry it to Ireland. And now, when there was enough grain in Irish ports, there were few ways to carry it to the people who most needed it.11
The pressure of famine conditions compounded these complex logistical problems. Even in places with plenty of grain and the means to market it, social collapse kept food out of the market. Warehouses, wagon trains, farms, and stores were robbed in daylight. In Tralee, County Kerry, a crowd ransacked the town and the ships in the harbour, taking bread, bacon, and other food. Farmers and shopkeepers sold off their whole stock as fast as possible to prevent theft, which temporarily lowered prices but emptied inventories. The Irish clung to “a general expectation, or rather desire” that the government continue to bring grain to sell to the starving.12
In practical terms, before this grain arrived there was nothing to eat for many of the Irish poor. People ate the eggs of wild birds, seaweed, grass, leaves, roots, carrion, and dirt while waiting for supply to catch up with demand. For the 1846 harvest, only three hundred thousand acres of potatoes had been planted—a seventh of the acreage planted in 1845, and the smallest planting since perhaps the mid-eighteenth century. What food there was in Ireland was still sold by farmers to pay rent—the rent market did not stop, even at the nadir of the famine. Slightly better-off tenants sold their oatmeal but could not afford to eat it.13
Ireland continued to export food. In 1846, 3.3 million acres were planted with grain, and Irish farms raised more than 2.5 million cattle, 2.2 million sheep, and 600,000 pigs. Waterford alone exported more than 20,200 barrels of wheat and nearly 59,000 barrels of oats from May 1846 to February 1847. Despite the continuing flow of exports from Ireland, 1847 was the first year since 1842 when imports of grain exceeded exports, with Ireland exporting about 1.96 million quarters of grain (mostly wheat and oats) and importing about 4.52 million quarters (mostly maize). Ireland remained a net importer of grain until at least the early 1850s. This shift in the balance of exports was caused by the effect of famine conditions on the availability of labour to sow and reap, not by farmers holding back their crops or selling them on the Irish market. As one of the leaders of the Young Ireland movement reflected, Irish trade was wholly dependent on British demand. “England has bound this Island hand and foot,” he wrote. “She robs the Island of its food, for it has not the power to guard it.”14
Livestock exports testified to this geography of suffering. From 1846 to 1847, exports of Irish cattle fell 8 percent and of sheep 58 percent, while the number of pigs exported rose 23 percent. Sheep and cattle were the livestock of wealthier graziers, who could afford to husband their flocks, wait for prices to rise (and perhaps take advantage of the glut of imported grain to use as fodder). The poor, however, were liquidating their assets, trading the certainty of a small return on a pig against the possibility of a total loss. In Cork alone, thirty-one thousand pigs were brought to market, nearly five times as many as in the years before. This was not an unfamiliar phenomenon in Irish agriculture. Past shortages of potatoes and increases in rent had often forced Irish farmers without reserves of cash—that is, most Irish farmers—to sell their crops and animals at a steep discount, flooding markets and driving down prices even further. “The pig can no longer find a home in the Irish cabin,” mourned the author of a guide to commercial pig breeding. Without potatoes to feed them, and in desperate need of money for imported grain and rent payments, tens of thousands of hungry pigs, “half-famished animals” with “semi-wolfish eyes,” were exported. In some parts of Ireland, piglets could be had for a sixpence each—no one could feed them, so no one would buy them.15
As ever, there was food in Ireland—but not for the hungry.
With the food supply left to the market, the government focused on encouraging the poor to find wage work. Although the Labour Rate Act established public works on an unprecedented scale, the act also included provisions that, paradoxically, were supposed to deter Irish labourers from taking on publicly funded work. In each district, works were paid for with government loans, to be repaid by local taxpayers who owned or leased land worth more than four pounds in annual rental value. Labourers were to be paid at least twopence less than the average local daily wage. As a Whig MP explained, when the “maintenance of the poor was not derived from the land,” society was “in an unnatural and in a diseased state.” The works were a treatment for the “social body” of Ireland rather than for individual starving workers.16
The idea that wage labour was civilising had anchored one of the Whigs’ signature policies of the 1830s: the abolition of chattel slavery in the colonial empire. Under the 1833 Abolition of Slavery Act, the majority of formerly enslaved workers in the British Caribbean were declared to be apprentices. They were expected to work for a wage during “free” time while also continuing to work without wages for the people who had once claimed to own them. In theory, apprentices would learn the value of time and of money, and would ensure “the continued cultivation of the soil, and good order of society, until all classes should gradually fall into the relations of a state of freedom.” The Irish poor, who were fair-skinned Europeans and had never been enslaved by the modern English or British Empires, were considered to be higher in the imagined hierarchy of civilisation than formerly enslaved people in the Caribbean, but perhaps not by much. Teaching the Irish to prefer wages to potatoes for subsistence, Russell wrote, would impel them “to study economy, cleanliness, and the value of time; to aim at improving the character of themselves and their children.”17
Every new public work required approval from the lord lieutenant and the Treasury. The Treasury expected loans to be quickly repaid, in half-yearly installments and at rates of interest as low as 4 percent and as high as 20 percent. Relief committees were told to keep lists of the destitute, subject to auditing by relief officials. The free market and its natural healing properties were administered by nearly twelve thousand clerks and officers. Their workload was astonishing. In the field, officials supervised worksites, liaised with relief committees, managed lists of approved workers, audited accounts, arranged for security for engineers and pay clerks, negotiated with subcontractors, arranged to distribute food from commissary stores, and more. Each was also expected to file regular reports. An average of eight hundred letters a day came through the Relief Commission offices, with a peak on May 17, 1847, of 6,033.18
There was an odd symmetry between the harried paperwork of relief officials and the listless manual labour of the people employed on the public works. Both groups moved through a bureaucracy designed to make sure that no hungry person got something for nothing. In folk memory, relief work was nothing more than “digging holes and filling them up again.” Labourers did the purposeless work, and relief workers wrote the reports that proved the work had been done. In addition to requiring a staff of thousands to facilitate and manage wage labour, the Labour Rate Act forbade “productive works,” or public works that might enhance the value of private land. On October 5, 1846, faced with heavy criticism, the government climbed down from this part of its policy. Henry Labouchere, the chief secretary for Ireland, wrote a circular letter (the “Labouchere Letter”) that allowed productive works so long as the costs were eventually repaid by landlords.19
Labourers resented the low wages offered on the works. In Clover Hill, County Roscommon, three hundred people surrounded a surveyor and threatened to kill him, convinced that he had told the Board of Works that tenpence a day was the usual private wage in the county, in order to set their wages at eightpence. Wages were set by the market price of labour, not of bread or potatoes—and private wages (if there were any on offer) remained low, even when the price of food increased. Many worksites were especially tense in the autumn of 1846, when grain prices were very high and before famine conditions deteriorated to the point where labourers were too ill and hungry to strike collectively or to attack a foreman or engineer. Ratepayers, in turn, resented being taxed for projects they believed ought to be paid for by the entire taxpaying public of the UK.20
The public works were shambolic as well as bureaucratic. Presentment sessions to propose new projects often dissolved into rowdy chaos. Labourers packed the meetings, and grand jurors hastily approved proposals, regardless of cost. The Anglo-Irish politician and Treasury official Thomas Spring Rice compared the initial wave of presentment sessions to the Australian gold rush, a stampede “to the diggings.” In Kilmacthomas, County Waterford, a large group of unemployed workers crowded the presentment sessions to demand food and fixed prices for essential goods. Sixty dragoons sent to restore order were overwhelmed and had to call for reinforcements. When the leader of the mob, “Lame Pat” Power, was captured, the soldiers were pelted with rocks by the crowd and in turn fired warning shots. Even when they were not shouted down at packed meetings, many grand juries approved nearly every project they were presented with, however implausible or expensive. These proposals, when sent to Dublin for approval, were rejected or reduced. Anger at the government grew. It was easy for relief committees to paint the Board of Works as tight-fisted and intransigent. Taxpayers could claim that they had been generous while Dublin Castle and the Treasury had been miserly.21
As more worksites opened, relief officials worried that too many workers would abandon farm labour in exchange for jobs on the works. A shortage of agricultural workers would prolong the famine and potentially destroy the export trade. Many grand juries assumed that they would never really be asked to repay the loans they were rapidly accumulating. Commissary-General Randolph Routh warned that unless the Labour Rate Act were amended to allow the government to seize the property of individual ratepayers who defaulted on their rates, the government would never be made whole. Thomas Carlyle complained that presentment sessions would vote away £28,000 in a morning’s work (“English have plenty of money”) and complain when the bill came due (“Had we known that!”).22
Potatoes were essential to rent, essential to export agriculture, and essential to family and social life. Without them, social and economic life in rural Ireland imploded. In this period of utter misery and desperation, the public works provided a scant but relatively reliable income to people able to get on and stay on the rolls of eligible workers. Despite the emphasis among the leaders of the Relief Commission that the public works were to be a school of industriousness for the Irish poor, there is ample anecdotal evidence that most workers who managed to get on the books did as little as they could possibly do to keep earning wages without being sacked. Political economy predicted that higher-paying private employment would draw down the numbers on public works, but the general crisis suppressed the private labour market. For their own security, larger farmers reduced their operations. It seems most Irish workers understood “that the work was provided for the people and not the people for the work.” Why would someone exert themselves to earn a pittance while starving to death? Canny landlords, in turn, used the works to shelter their money. They spent government loans freely and deposited their own receipts in savings banks. Weekly deposits doubled in many counties, an increase driven by wealthier tenants, professionals, and middlemen, not landless workers. One relief official despaired that the didactic purpose of the public works had been turned inside out. Employers and workers had each abdicated their place in the social order, taking “the whole moral training of the people out of the hands of society at large” and imposing the burden “upon the Government.”23
Labourers on crowded worksites oscillated between enervation and irritability. Workers sat around waiting for shovels, wheelbarrows, or gunpowder to use for quarrying. Historians have criticised the works for having too many staff, but in truth there may have been too few to manage the crush of mostly adult men (but also some women and boys) looking for jobs on more than five thousand worksites. One official wrote that the crowds were so large that staff were “completely in their hands.” The Board of Works, an overwhelmed official wrote, employed more men “than the whole British Army all over the world.” Theft by workers as well as supervisors was ubiquitous, and illicit distillers enjoyed a thriving trade. Pay clerks, perhaps in exchange for a kickback from the receipts, sometimes distributed wages from “offices” set up at the makeshift bars that mushroomed around worksites. When wages were due, paymasters sent identical carts onto the road at the same time, of which only one was laden with cash, in the hope that the decoy would be robbed instead.24
The famine destroyed mutual support and solidarity in the countryside. The works program was dominated by the stronger and better-connected among the poor—the able-bodied, the relatively better-off, the cunning, and the lucky. Larger tenant farmers, according to reports from the Board of Works, negotiated with their landlords to have their sons put on the rolls. Regulations required that even people without any access to land prove they could find no other employment before being eligible for a job on the works. Those with land needed to prove their hardship to an even greater extent. In practice, oversight was uneven—excessively scrupulous in some cases and absent in others. The system thrummed with graft and favour-trading.25
The rush to the public works was inexorable. Gentlemen complained that they could not find tradesmen to mend their shoes and coats. Some ratepayers complained that the staff of the Board of Works were too cowardly to stare down the numberless poor; others considered relief officers pompous idiots methodically laying out roads that could just as easily be plotted by “a countryman with a straw rope.” The Board of Works, in turn, complained about ratepayers, especially those who played the role of the “spouting patriot” at presentment sessions, loudly condemning the government and the Relief Commission “through the broken pane of glass to the poor creatures outside.” Many migrant workers in Britain returned to Ireland, giving up an end-of-harvest windfall of several pounds or more for a few coins paid for the pretense of work. One contractor in Dundee complained that in a single day, twenty workers, all of whom earned a minimum of sixteen shillings a week, quit to return to Ireland.26
To orthodox political economists, this was irrational, barbaric. No civilised man would sacrifice a high wage paid for skilled work to earn pennies breaking rocks. The migration back from England proved, Nassau William Senior wrote, that the Irish needed coercion to be industrious, since they would give up well-paying work for “an eleemosynary allowance, under the name of wages.” And yet, returning to Ireland made perfect sense from a worker’s perspective. Migrant labourers had gone to England to earn security for their families. They returned to Ireland for the same reason. The market moved faster for the poor than for the rich. Just as Irish farmers sold their crops even when prices collapsed in the years before the Great Famine, during the famine, Irish labourers could not afford to wait to be paid. In October 1846 there were no potatoes, and a few pence every week was worth more than five pounds in a few weeks or months. The government, however, was anxious to encourage workers to plant potatoes and grain for the 1847 harvest. In response, in autumn 1846, the government and the Relief Commission agreed that instead of daily wages, wages on the public works should be paid by the task.27
Working by the task or by the piece was not an innovation in Irish labour; it had been common in Ireland before the famine, especially among workers taking conacre. Under the conditions of Irish labour before the famine, task work was worth the effort. However, risking exhaustion, injury, or illness labouring harder or faster under a task-work scheme during famine struck many as an intolerable threat. Riots broke out. On one Skibbereen site, four hundred men went on strike after being told they would have to work by task. When threatened with removal from the lists, they attacked the overseer, who “had to run for his life.” At a Coshlea presentment session, a grand juror blamed a Board of Works surveyor for the rollout of task work. The surveyor, named Kearney, was “hunted like a mad dog by the whole country population” and only escaped death by leaping into a speeding carriage. In Tipperary, workers rioted, declaring they would never give the government “the sweat of their bodies,” even for double wages. In Limerick, nine hundred workers marched to the courthouse, brandishing shovels and spades and pickaxes and chanting, “No task work!”28
For their part, Relief Commission officials struggled to maintain their sanity as they coped with shifting and sometimes ambiguous regulations; febrile, hungry, and sometimes violent labourers; and intense pressure to keep costs low. Like many British colonial officials in the early Victorian era, many of the staff hired for the works were half-pay military officers, from the ranks of the Royal Navy, Royal Marines, and British Army. They were hard men, but the works were an exceptionally difficult assignment. One official, after cutting names from a relief committee’s list of approved workers, was asked where he was staying, so the committee might “send the… dead bodies in carts” and leave them at his door. “I cannot see my way out of this labyrinth of work,” another officer wrote. The day before, he had signed sixteen thousand tickets for labourers on the works, and had gone to bed at 4:00 a.m. before waking with the winter sunrise four hours later. The job was “one long continuous day, with occasional intervals of nightmare sleep.” Many officers resigned; others did the minimum to draw their pay. Officials in Dublin worried that unless something changed, there would be no qualified engineers available to survey new worksites. In Galway, an officer shot himself in the head, but the bullet glanced off his skull, ripping through his nose and cheek. He was alive, but his colleagues were sure he would try again.29
In Ireland, both the unemployed and hungry rural majority and the thousands of officials and engineers sent to manage them were depleted and disoriented by the depth of the crisis. The reports from the public works were grim, but Parliament had few alternatives to the system on offer, even from the Opposition. The famine, the Tory leader George Bentinck declared, was “a calamity unexampled in the history of the world” that required abrogating “the severe rules of political economy.” He was probably right in principle. However, the policy he and his party proposed as an alternative to public works—a massive loan tender to pay for railway construction in Ireland—was insincere and self-dealing. Railway construction appealed to the Irish middle class, who saw rail as a symbol of modernity and independence and a good investment. Landlords also liked the potential rewards of railway construction and were eager to have railway shareholders absorb the risk, and cost, of employing the poor. The government objected that a great deal would be spent on materials and equipment, not labour, and that speculators would be the greatest beneficiaries. The plan was crushed in the House, but—like the fantasy of an alternative timeline where Peel, rather than Russell, served as prime minister through 1847 and rescued the Irish with a steady supply of cheap cornmeal—Irish railway investment became a Great Famine counterfactual, symbolic of another reality where the right kind of capitalists saved the day with a spectacular private alternative to the moribund public works. The railroad idea “was, indeed, a brilliant bubble,” the Bristol Mercury wrote.30
By March 1847, the public works system was still growing. Designed to save money, it had run for seven months and cost the government more than £944,000—about £102.4 million in today’s currency when adjusted for inflation alone. However, if reckoned in proportion to increases in gross domestic product, a government project on a similar scale to the 1846–1847 public works would cost the United Kingdom more than £3.83 billion if launched today. The public works were designed to encourage unemployed labourers to seek private employment, but by March, more than 708,000 people were on the lists. Based on the population from the 1841 census, the works employed as much as 26 percent of the population of County Clare, more than 20 percent of the population in Tipperary and Roscommon, and about 15 percent in Counties Cork, Galway, and Mayo. The average labourer supported a family—and often also an extended family. In Ireland’s poorest counties, the works effectively had become the only reliable source of income. The Board of Works had lost control. “What was possible and practicable with 50,000 men,” an officer wrote, “is no longer so with seven times that number.” Nearly every worker was getting weaker, and injury was a death sentence. As one relief officer wrote, idleness was no longer a problem. Instead, he wrote, “there is a physical incapability.”31
Hundreds of thousands of workers and their families had become completely dependent on public worksites for survival, the opposite of what the policy had been intended to encourage. “It is impossible,” an officer conceded, to “limit… the dependence of the people upon the Government.” Russell and his cabinet looked for a way to take the costs of famine relief off the government’s balance sheet and transfer responsibility for relief to local authorities. Relief officers, inspired by the work of the Quakers and other groups, pressed for a plan that would directly feed the hungry. Russell and his cabinet resolved to allow direct aid in the short term and to devolve the relief program to the Poor Law unions before the next harvest. A Board of Works official, relieved, insisted that Poor Law guardians had always been “the natural channel for investigating distress.” Charles Trevelyan concurred. More spending, he wrote, would “exhaust and disorganise society throughout the United Kingdom, and reduce all classes of people in Ireland to a state of helpless dependence.” Even if the potatoes kept failing and the people kept starving, the famine could no longer be a crisis for the United Kingdom.32
In the winter of 1846–1847, on the public worksites, in drafty cabins and wind-bitten lean-tos, in crowded urban rooms crammed with families, hundreds of thousands of human bodies were eating themselves. Starving bodies and minds are ill-suited to hear a gospel of industriousness and forbearance. Without sufficient nourishment, the body can no longer metabolise, converting food to usable energy, and it shifts to catabolism, consuming first fat and then muscle to keep the brain and vital organs functioning. Over days or weeks, the starving person becomes irritable, weak, and tired. Ideas of food and eating become intrusive obsessions. The heartbeat accelerates and breathing becomes shallow. Some people develop a constant thirst. Some become constipated; others develop chronic diarrhea. Children’s bellies swell, as do the ankles of both adults and children. Skin flakes. Hair falls out or turns white. Starvation puts pressure on the heart and kidneys, weakens the immune system, and slows wound healing. Starving people usually die of organ failure or infection.
The effects of fasting on the body were the object of scientific curiosity throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “Hunger artists” who starved themselves for a living were a fixture in carnival freak shows. Nineteenth-century physicians understood the stages of starvation and that starvation was psychologically as well as physically harrowing. Twentieth-century experiments showed even more starkly the changes in motivation and mood that accompanied catabolism. In 1944 and 1945, at the University of Minnesota, thirty-six men, conscientious objectors conscripted into the Civilian Public Service (CPS) in lieu of military service in the Second World War, volunteered to endure semi-starvation for six months. Ancel Keys, an expert on nutrition who developed food rations for the US Army, was the lead researcher on the project, which is often called the Minnesota Starvation Experiment. Keys has a seedy reputation—he relied on the CPS as a source of human subjects for experiments that included exposing test subjects to extreme cold, months of enforced confinement to bed, and diets deficient in specific vitamins.33
Nutritionists and physiologists place the Minnesota Starvation Experiment in a canon of research on the biochemistry of ketosis (the metabolism of fat instead of glucose for energy) and other metabolic processes. However, in its own time, the experiment’s findings on the psychology of starvation were considered as significant as those on metabolism. Test subjects never suffered malnutrition; they were fed a restricted but nutritionally complete diet intended to cause them to lose 25 percent of their body weight over six months, considered a safe proportion that would simulate starvation without putting the subjects at risk of serious illness. Although the men were not at risk of actual starvation, they reported increasingly strange eating habits—taking hours to eat small meals, licking dirty plates, “[toying] with their food, making weird and seemingly distasteful concoctions.” Some, for example, crushed potatoes, jam, gingerbread, and sugar into a paste and spread it on bread. “Hunger! Hunger! Hunger! They wondered whether this horrible nightmare would ever end.”34
Now consider the effects of starvation—the physical debility and decay, paranoia, depression, and desperate, manipulative solipsism—spread across a population of millions that had already endured a year of chaos, epidemic disease, and widespread food shortages. The everyday activities of household economy—cutting turf; weaving grasses into tools and furniture; maintaining iron tools, thatch roofs, and stone walls—slowed or stopped as people grew weak and hungry. “Society stands dissolved,” wrote James Fintan Lalor. It was a horrific time, recorded in the archives in nightmarish impressions. Families fell apart. Children were abandoned. Bodies rotted on the ground, gnawed by dogs and rats that were hunted, in turn, for meat. In the last years of the blight, especially in 1848–1849—a year that in some counties was nearly as bad as 1846–1847—the utter destruction caused by famine was visible in the workhouses that became centres for organising relief. In contrast, during Black ’47, the worst happened in “derelict cabins and overgrown lanes,” in the places where the most vulnerable tended to live.35
A medical officer remembered a thousand men marching on Skibbereen, “once stalwart… now emaciated spectres,” with spades and shovels on their shoulders, “in the glitter of a blazing sun.” In Schull, County Cork, a relief officer looked the other way when locals slit open bags of grain and gathered spilled meal and flour off the ground. Commissary-General Richard Inglis found a young woman collapsed on a road. Her family had died in the weeks before. Unable to move their bodies, she watched as rats and insects “nightly held their disgusting banquet.” The dead were buried without coffins or thrown unburied in ditches. In February, a farmer named Thomas Millar was arrested for trying to sell the corpse of his seven-year-old nephew to an apothecary in Youghal. Typhus, relapsing fever, dysentery, cholera, and flu broke out. Even those who could afford grain did not always have the means to cook it because cutting and drying turf consumed too much energy. Crime increased dramatically, from eight thousand reported offences in 1845 to twenty thousand in 1847—and unreported offences must have been orders of magnitude higher. The rate of robbery, theft, and other crimes against property, with or without violence, rose especially sharply. A carman pulling a load of flour from Derry had his skull broken with a rock. Another carrying money was ambushed by three men whom he fought off with a whip. The offenders could not be traced.36
The Irish poor were notorious in Britain for making a “poor mouth,” that is, exaggerating their poverty to grift the English. In 1846–1847, however, reports—especially from Skibbereen, the County Cork town whose name became a synecdoche for the worst of the famine—drew attention and sympathy, even from Britons sceptical of Irish hyperbole. In December 1846, Nicholas Cummins, a magistrate from Cork, wrote a public letter to the Duke of Wellington that was widely reprinted, including in the Christmas Eve edition of the Times. In a village near Skibbereen, in an apparently deserted cottage, he found “six famished and ghastly skeletons” covered in a horse blanket—a man, a woman, and four children. They were feverish and barely responsive. To Cummins’s shock, some two hundred people soon emerged out of other cottages, “delirious, either from famine or from fever. Their demoniac yells are still ringing in my ears.” He turned, ready to run. A woman who appeared to have just given birth, her breasts bare, her newborn in her arms, and her bloodied thighs half covered with a sack, grabbed his collar. He fought her off and fled. The next morning, Cummins returned with an escort of police. The party opened one locked house to find two frozen, rat-bitten corpses. Outside, a woman dragged the corpse of her twelve-year-old daughter, naked, into the street and covered the body with stones.
Cummins implored Wellington to deliver his letter to Queen Victoria: “She will not allow decency to be outraged.” He begged the duke, as commander-in-chief of the British Army, to remember his own Irish origins and the many Irish soldiers under his command, “the gallant Irish blood… lavished to support the honour of the British name.” He described how an old man had died next to his son, who was too weak and too traumatised to move him; the body was “nearly putrid when discovered by the dispensary doctor.” Ireland had served the British Empire, Cummins insisted—now that loyalty should be repaid. Irish folk memory dramatised Skibbereen and the impression the town’s desperation made on the British public consciousness. A ghost story claimed that when Queen Victoria—who did visit Ireland, but in 1849, not 1847—stepped off her yacht in Cobh, she saw an inscription that read, “Arise ye Dead from Skibbereen, / And come to Cork to welcome your Queen.” Terrified, she turned around and sailed back to Britain.37
The days were dull and dreary, but also agitating and unsettled. As the Minnesota experiments showed, starvation tends to produce a mental state that combines irritability and apathy, weakness and anger, and “overpowering frustration.” Hunger made sufferers sluggish and inert, except when the boredom and pain of sitting in a cold, wet cabin watching children shiver or shit blood grew intolerable. “Groups of men and women almost naked” were seen along the roads, “running up and down in a frantic state (as if they were all the inmates of a Bedlam, from which they suddenly burst forth, impatient of restraint), crying to every person they meet for bread.” Folk memory of the famine is wild and hallucinatory. In some stories, people eat grass and turn green after death. In others, Catholic priests curse their parishioners for going to Protestant churches for food. In another story a man is pronounced dead, and just as he is about to be put in the coffin, he calls out. The doctor tells him he is lying (“The doctor knows best”), and the man is buried alive. Folktales of the famine also celebrate rough justice—the good are rewarded and the greedy and unscrupulous punished (in reality, the unscrupulous were probably more likely to survive). An old woman in one story, “who had a stocking full of gold hidden,” tries to boil the gold, like cornmeal. A landlord who tips an evicted woman’s pot of cornmeal stirabout onto the ground is cursed, and after his death he haunts his land with a heavy iron pot hung forever around his neck. In another, a woman found dying in a chapel yard perishes with her mouth full of banknotes. A virtuous woman boils a pot of stones to make her crying children believe a meal is coming. When the woman empties the pot, a pile of fine, whole potatoes spills out.38
In an editorial, the Times condemned what the editors took to be the self-destructive laziness of the Irish in the face of starvation, their “national thoughtlessness, the national indolence.” The Irish appetite, trained on apocryphally gargantuan servings of potatoes, needed to be reformed. The famine might be a work of Providence after all, if it could encourage the Irish to want more than potatoes. “When the Celts once cease to be potatophagi,” the editors wrote, “they must become carnivorous. With the taste of meats will grow the appetite for them.” “Potatophagi,” with its ancient Greek flavour, was an allusion to the English myth that the pagan Irish had been cannibals before their conversion to Christianity. In a widely reprinted Puritan tract about the Irish, published just before the Cromwellian conquest, they were “anciently called Anthropophagi, man eaters.” Conversion, the use of “potatophagi” implied, had only swapped an obscene appetite for human meat with an obscene appetite for potatoes.39
Cannibalism was a common metaphor for class conflict in Ireland during the famine. An inspecting officer wrote, “If the graziers do not break up some of their farms to allow employment the labourers will eat the farmers, and the farmers will eat the landlords.” But real cannibalism is famine’s open secret: there are few recorded famines without at least rumours of the desperate eating human flesh, sometimes that of people already dead, sometimes freshly killed. It seems to have been rare in Ireland, but not unheard of. “People killed and ate anything they could catch,” a folk history relates, “pigs, rats, cats, cattle, sheep, and finally their own children.” There are references to mothers eating their infants and to fathers “known to make a wolfish meal” of dead children. In May 1849, in Ballinrobe, County Mayo, a priest reported that a starving man had eaten the heart and liver of a man who had died in a shipwreck. Later, a relieving officer reported that a man had seen the same man “cut up a shipwrecked human body,” apparently intending to eat the thigh, until his neighbours stopped him.40
As food dwindled, disease surged. Many clergy and gentry who volunteered in hospitals contracted typhus and died. The more profound the epidemic and the more severe the lice infestation, the more flecks of typhus-infected louse feces scatter in the air, turning an insect-borne disease into an airborne disease. The Society of Friends gave clothing away to the poor to try to reduce lice infestations. Many pawned the new clothes to buy food. The Irish poor well knew that the dirty clothes of a feverish person needed to be cleaned or destroyed, and that the clothes that had belonged to the sick had “the venom of the sickness in it” and could easily make others sick. But what could they do? Without the means to wash, much less replace, louse-infested clothes, most wore what they could scavenge, weighing the possibility of contracting an epidemic fever against the more immediate risk of death from exposure. Typhus and other illnesses, as one historian puts it, “pauperized, when they did not kill.” Weekly mortality rates in workhouses rose from about four in one thousand in October 1846 to twenty-five in one thousand by April 1847. Most of the (at least) one million Irish fatalities in the course of the famine died not of organ failure caused by starvation but from infectious diseases worsened by hunger and wasting. Of 140,000 reported deaths in 1840, starvation was listed as the cause of death in 17 cases. In 1847, out of 250,000 reported deaths (the real death toll was much higher), 6,000 were attributed directly to starvation. Scurvy and other syndromes caused by malnutrition were common. In Mayo, between 1846 and 1850, historians estimate, about 41 percent of all deaths were “hunger-sensitive,” and another 30 percent were partially hunger-sensitive. In Clare, about 65 percent of deaths were either wholly or partly sensitive to hunger, and in Tipperary, 66 percent.41
To fight epidemics, relief committees had the power to build temporary hospitals, ventilate and cleanse cabins, and bury the dead. During the crisis, at least three hundred hospitals and dispensaries opened, taking in some twenty-three thousand patients. However, fever hospitals were targets for sabotage. Many believed they accelerated the spread of disease; some suspected they were part of a wider plot to exterminate or expel the poorest Irish labourers. In Killeshandra, in summer 1847, a mob attacked a field hospital and promised to pull down any “fever shed” built in the district. In Tipperary, priests condemned the local fever hospital from the pulpit and prayed to “see grass growing at the door of the hospital.” In Donegal the poor built huts out of sod and wood to isolate the sick—similar to shielings, the rough shelters used by shepherds—and pushed food through the doors with the long-handled spades used to dig potatoes. Digestive diseases and accidental poisoning killed many others. People ate wild plants, decomposing carrion, the eggs of seagulls and other birds, moss, uncooked seaweed, cats, worms, insects, dogs, and rats. Livestock that had not been sold or slaughtered died as quickly as their owners. In Claremorris, the flayed corpse of a horse was left on the road. Relief officers found a family of eight eating its rotting flesh. In County Sligo, orphaned children gnawed on the bones of a pig that had died in an outbuilding. Grinding hunger and disease stripped relationships down to a bare and cutthroat struggle, “a sordid avarice, and a greediness of disposition to grasp at everything in the shape of food.”42
The famine killed the weakest and most vulnerable. The strong were more likely to survive, and survivors were likely to flee. Among the one million excess deaths (that is, deaths above the expected annual average number) from 1846 to 1851, the fewest were among people ages ten to fifty-nine. They composed some 68.5 percent of the population but roughly 40 percent of the excess deaths. Children died at the highest rate; carpenters built special two-and-a-half-foot coffins for babies. There were too many deaths for individual burial plots, and some workhouses dug mass graves eight bodies deep. Religious rituals all but stopped. Rumours circulated about reusable coffins, their bottoms supported by hinges and hook-and-eye clasps, that could be carried to graves or to large pits, and the bodies dropped through the trapdoor into the hole.43
The scenes in the Irish countryside, reported with unprecedented detail and often accompanied by graphic and affecting sketches, reinforced the idea for many British readers that the Irish were a people foreign to British modernity. In March 1847, the Times condemned “the astounding apathy of the Irish themselves to the most horrible scenes immediately under their eyes.” Instead of British spine and resilience, “all that we read of in [Ireland is]… Turkish or Chinese fatalism, of the indifference to life on the banks of the Ganges, or the brutality of piratical tribes.” Irish suffering was marshalled to reinforce and retroactively justify conquest. The Irish needed management and always had. The Great Famine had proved the case. Britons would never starve, one commentator wrote, because they had “landed two or three merchants on the banks of the Hoogly, and in a century called India our own.” The degradation of the Irish invited comparisons with the most oppressed victims of British imperial and colonial rule. The “wasted remnant” of the Indigenous peoples of Canada and the “degraded and enslaved African,” a Quaker philanthropist wrote, were appalling to consider, “but never have I seen misery so intense, or physical degradation so complete, as among the dwellers in the bog-holes of Erris.” A relief committee official placed the Irish between civilisation and barbarism, with “neither the pleasure of savage liberty, nor the profit of English civilization.”44
The horrors reported from Ireland shocked the world. Donations of food and money arrived in unprecedented quantities. From spring 1847, many of those donations went to support an ambitious program of soup kitchens that gradually replaced the public works. The soup kitchens were a rare example of a policy that began at the grass roots in Ireland before being endorsed by the government as official relief policy, promoted by Commissariat officers in their letters to their superiors. The Quakers ran soup kitchens from relatively early in the crisis until July 1847, with operations underway long before relief committees could get their kitchens running under the government’s scheme.45
The soup kitchens were more pragmatic than many other relief policies—less means-tested, more universal, more directly focused on feeding the hungry. Ireland was an uneven landscape of suffering. Survivors clung to public works, storm-tossed but afloat. Others sank into the depths. Fields were abandoned. Farmers could not find workers, conacre stopped, no potatoes were planted. Without a harvest, there would be even less food, no exports, and no employment. The works had to close so that the poor could plant potatoes and other crops, but they had to be fed in the meantime.
Free food, however, was considered by political economists to threaten the smooth operation of the market, and to undermine the motivation and work ethic of the poor. Soup kitchens were a short-term compromise of the principle that relief had to be earned, rather than given without conditions, in order to make sure that potatoes and other crops were planted. As historians have shown, even opening soup kitchens was, in effect, seen as something of an experiment in political economy. Food grants, by definition, were nontransferable. Giving food directly to the hungry could be understood as an attempt by policymakers to meet the Irish where they were in the hierarchy of civilisation. If the Irish poor could no longer be trusted to spend the money they had earned on public works, they could be fed directly.46
On January 25, 1847, the government presented its plan to the House of Commons, a plan later enacted as the Temporary Relief of Destitute Persons (Ireland) Act. The act permitted the lord lieutenant to establish another set of relief committees to establish soup kitchens “so that labouring men should be allowed to work on their own plot of ground, or for the farmers, and thus tend to produce food.” The act also excused half the extant debts owed by local committees for public works, provided the first half was paid. Beginning in February 1847, the act permitted Poor Law unions to offer food as outdoor relief—the first outdoor relief permitted under the Irish Poor Law. The soup kitchens were inexpensive compared with the public works. In all, they cost about £3 million to operate, about £1.6 million of which was paid by the government. Only cooked food could be distributed, and only to people who had been vetted and officially recorded as destitute.47
The new system required a new set of bureaucratic tools. By March 1847, more than ten thousand account books and three million tickets that could be exchanged for soup had been printed. New regulations required committees to separate the poor into four classes: the destitute and disabled or otherwise unable to help themselves, with or without access to land; the destitute and landless but able-bodied; the destitute and able-bodied with access to land; and the able-bodied employed at insufficient wages. The first three were entitled to free rations at soup kitchens, and the final category to rations at a nominal price. The worries about outdoor relief that shaped the Irish Poor Law—and the public works—remained evident in the provisions of the act. Without means testing, policymakers reckoned, outdoor relief would become nearly universal, and “the whole country will become pauperised.”48
In January 1847, with the announcement of the Temporary Relief Act, the government indicated that it planned to shut down the public works. Financial pressure on the government made closing the works even more urgent. The government was handcuffed by its dependence on Peel’s breakaway free-trade Tory followers. Under the 1844 Bank Charter Act, the Bank of England was required to hold gold reserves equal to circulating banknotes. Peelites in Parliament considered the Bank Charter Act an essential part of their leader’s legacy. If the Whigs moved to repeal it, the Peelites promised a vote of no confidence. By the beginning of 1847, bankers estimated that the government had committed to spend about £13 million in Ireland. Despite a large subscription campaign, it was clear that the government would have to borrow a great deal of money to pay for famine relief. On March 1, Baring Brothers and the Rothschild banking group agreed to loan the government £8 million.49
The large loan put the government in what seemed to investors like an invidious position. If it was spent on Ireland, the £8 million was likely to pay for provisions and materials for soup kitchens—most of which were ordered from the United States. In theory, if American merchants held enough banknotes from the Bank of England, the bank, already low on reserves, might not have enough bullion to cover the money circulating in the UK. When the loan became public knowledge, investors panicked, beginning a bank run. It was followed by a wave of bankruptcies of major merchant houses as creditors called in their debts to protect themselves from the possibility that the Bank of England might stop payments. The government now had to shut down the works as quickly as possible. And yet without the ability to borrow, Russell wrote, “we could have no great plan for Ireland.”50
Unfortunately, the financial crisis and the Whigs’ panicked cuts occurred at the peak of the public works. On March 20, responding to the crisis, the government announced that 20 percent of the works would close immediately. The consequence was that works closed before many soup kitchens were open, “a hideous interregnum” when many were left without any support. A Catholic priest in County Mayo compared John Russell to Tzar Nicholas I of Russia, sardonically referring to the order to reduce the works as an ukase, a declaration from the tzar with the force of law. In Eyrecourt, County Galway, as many as eight hundred attacked the Commissariat food depot. Other labourers discharged from the works rushed the workhouses; two women were trampled to death in a stampede at the Dungarvon Union workhouse in County Waterford. Several attacks on soup kitchens occurred in Clare; a crowd in Meelick smashed soup boilers and shredded the records of the relief committee, and in Kilfenora, about sixty kilometres away, a crowd hurled soup boilers into a lake. Where possible, new soup kitchens were established near police stations.51
As the government stumbled, reports out of Ireland caused many in the Irish diaspora, as well as other sympathetic people, to open their pockets to help. As early as January 1846, Sir John Peter Grant, the lieutenant governor of Bengal, chaired a fundraising committee in British India that brought in nearly £15,000. The Society of Friends convened its own relief committee. In January 1847, prominent men in British politics and finance, including Thomas Baring and Lionel de Rothschild, convened an umbrella organisation, the British Association for the Relief of Extreme Distress in Ireland and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (usually abridged as the British Association), to act as a clearinghouse for publicity and donations. On January 13, 1847, Queen Victoria published a letter urging the public to give to the British Association and declaring March 24, 1847, a day of General Fast and Humiliation in the Church of England. She also made a £2,000 donation.52
The queen’s letter and the vivid, heartbreaking reports from Ireland taken from wire services and published around the world added to the wave of donations. The Quaker committee alone distributed more than £200,000 in relief. In total, some £171,533 was raised directly in response to the queen’s letter, with the British Association’s fundraising adding a further £263,000, including considerable sums from foreign donors, such as the Ottoman sultan, Abdulmejid I. Five-sixths of the donations were sent to Ireland and one-sixth to Scotland, where the Highlands were also stricken by blight. Other major donors included the East India Company, the Bank of England, and the Corporation of the City of London. Towns across Britain formed subcommittees. In the empire, nearly every colony sent a donation, from Newfoundland to South Australia, Jamaica to India. Smaller donations became human-interest stories. The congregation of a missionary church in Basseterre, Saint Kitts, composed of formerly enslaved people and their descendants, took up a collection, as did the ordinary sailors of HMS Hibernia, the constables of the Metropolitan Police of London, and the labourers at Dowlais Iron Works, in south Wales. The plight of the Irish resonated with the oppressed and dispossessed, especially in the United States. Enslaved workers in Alabama, “told of the distressed condition of the Irish poor,” raised $50. The Choctaw Nation donated $710, roughly $20,440 in today’s money.53
Once again, the Great Famine, understood by many in the British establishment as the consequence of Ireland’s backwardness and evidence that Ireland was asynchronous with the rest of the United Kingdom, was surprisingly modern. It was among the first international humanitarian crises to be widely publicised in newspapers worldwide and among the first to anchor a global fundraising effort. “The English people,” Trevelyan reflected in 1880, “may be said to have relieved the distress caused by this mighty famine… through the columns of The Times.” The centre of the fundraising effort was the British Association, technically a private organisation but one that had very close connections to the Treasury. The timing of the campaign and the impressive size and geographic diversity of donations were a boon to the government, a distraction from the failures of relief policy and a financial cushion, as Trevelyan wrote, “useful in bridging over the fearful interval between the system of relief by work and relief by food.”54
Following the queen’s letter, and amid the outpouring of donations, the government supported a publicity stunt meant to show the world how modern and efficient a soup kitchen could be. In February 1847, Alexis Soyer, head chef at the Reform Club, the exclusive private club on Pall Mall in London and the semiofficial headquarters of the Whigs, wrote a public letter containing an offer to publish soup recipes for the use of relief committees.55 Soyer was famous for his banquets at the club, including a feast in honour of the Ottoman general Ibrahim Pasha, which featured seven main courses and more than fifty different entremets. Soyer, supported by Trevelyan and others, proposed to establish a model soup kitchen in Dublin. Trevelyan was excited—he instructed a Liverpool ironworks to prepare for bulk orders of custom-designed boilers and arranged for Soyer’s passage to Dublin.56
The chef arrived on March 1. A crew set up his kitchen on the Croppies’ Acre, parkland rumoured to be the site of a mass grave from the 1798 rebellion, just in front of the Royal Barracks (now renamed Collins Barracks, and the site of a branch of the National Museum of Ireland). Soyer’s rectangular kitchen measured about two thousand square feet and was framed with wood and partly covered in canvas. Benches and narrow tables, roughly eighteen inches wide, were set up around the walls of the space. The benches could seat one hundred; in front of each place was an enamelled iron soup bowl, with a spoon attached by a chain to the rim. In the centre was a three-hundred-gallon boiler, mounted on wheels, some thirteen feet long and four feet wide, as well as a portable oven able to bake one hundred pounds of bread at a time. The boiler was surrounded by bain-marie pans, each holding a thousand gallons of water. Worktables with cutting boards were set up near the pans. Locked safes in the corner held soup ingredients. Leading into the space, a passage of wood and canvas was arranged in a zigzag so that most of the people waiting in line could not see into the kitchen and dining hall. When the kitchen was in operation, a hundred people at a time filed in at the sound of a bell, picked up a bread roll at the entrance, sat down at the benches, and ate a bowl of soup each. After six minutes the bell would ring again. The diners exited from the far side of the hall, and the bowls were rinsed in specially built basins near the benches. One hundred more would file in.57
The boiler and steam pans Soyer designed for his soup kitchen were at the cutting edge of catering technology, and the poor who visited the kitchen sat around the boiler as spectators to Soyer’s ingenuity as much as objects of relief. A visit to the kitchen became an important social occasion for wealthy Dubliners, who made a donation of five shillings to watch. Cynics complained it was a raw deal, “when the animals in the Zoological Gardens can be inspected at feeding time for sixpence!” The shuffling poor of Dublin were set dressing for wealthy donors and government officials, who might consider hiring the chef, or his equipment, for other projects. Soyer is fascinating—an early celebrity chef, born and trained in France and sent into self-imposed exile after the July Revolution of 1830, a relentless self-promoter and tireless inventor with a charitable streak. Soyer would later volunteer to modernise British Army catering in the Crimean War, saving many soldiers from foodborne illness. As a manufacturer of portable catering equipment, he also had a financial stake in the success of his model kitchen. Soyer walked the line between selflessness and self-interest. He was devoted to charitable work, but most especially when giving something to the poor would then help him sell something to the rich.58
Soyer later claimed that his Dublin kitchen served more than 1.14 million bowls of soup between March and July 1847. Soyer, alert to his real audience, claimed his soup cost about three-quarters of a penny per quart, compared with “our Irish soupmakers,” whose soup cost twice as much. Before he left Dublin he was fêted at Freemasons’ Hall, and then in London at a party with 150 guests, the meal served on gold and silver plates. “It was a most fitting ovation to the unbought talents of the chef.” After returning from Ireland, Soyer published The Poor Man’s Regenerator, an inexpensive cookbook of ostensibly simple and inexpensive recipes. The poor could buy it themselves, or middle-class reformers could buy it in bulk to give away. According to the advertising copy, a penny from every book sold was given to the poor. Many Dubliners were less enthusiastic. “Sup it up,” sarcastic balladeers sang. “It will keep the hunger out, / It will cure you of the faver, an’ the cholic, an’ the gout.” The most famous street-singer, known as Zozimus, reportedly ended his version of the song with “My curse on such imposters and bould Sawyer and his soup.”59
Soyer saved money by stretching the vegetables and protein in the soups served on the Croppies’ Acre, testing how much flavour could be squeezed from the fewest ingredients. Medical journals criticised Soyer’s recipes as “soup-quackery… taken by the rich as a salve for their consciences.” They found that every quart of soup had at most three ounces of solid food—grains, vegetables, or meat, far less than necessary for adequate nutrition. There are about four servings of soup in a quart, so if Soyer’s critics were right, each bowl of soup contained about twenty-one grams of solid food (for reference, twenty-one grams of mixed vegetables provides about fourteen calories of energy). Soyer replied that “a brother artiste” had been unable to tell the difference between his soup and another made with more ingredients. He used gelatin to add meat flavour, increasing what he called a dish’s “osmazome,” or umami flavour. Soyer proved he could do more with less—an achievement appealing to any government but acutely appealing to an austerity government in a financial crisis. Still, the Irish poor needed food, not demonstrations of culinary finesse or economy. They needed more.60
Soyer’s soup kitchen was the most famous in Ireland yet merely one among thousands. The kitchens might have saved or prolonged lives, but they were not remembered fondly by the people they fed. Late in 1846, inland in County Galway, a relief committee established a soup kitchen. Starving people milled around, standing in lines for bowls of stirabout that was made with maize or oatmeal, was served from boilers, and quickly congealed in the damp and cold. Gulls, rarely seen so far from shore, circled overhead. One called loudly, and the poor regarded it as another bad omen—the bird was “laughing at their misery.” It landed, and someone shot it. Perhaps they ate its oily flesh in revenge.61
The soup kitchens began to open in substantial numbers in the spring and reached their peak in the summer of 1847. The first three months of 1847 had the highest excess deaths of the year, a trend that began to decline in April. Some historians—and some contemporaries—praised the soup kitchens for slowing the death rate by a “unique but short-lived… direct attack on starvation.” Others argue that the kitchens opened too late to save the most vulnerable, and that they were more significant as a bridge from a centralised approach to famine relief, directed from London, into a decentralised system of Poor Law unions. Statisticians of excess mortality identify a phenomenon they call mortality displacement—or, more grimly and evocatively, the “harvesting effect.” In a crisis, mortality often spikes early as vulnerable people die quickly, which front-loads excess deaths, followed by a sudden drop in the death rate because the people most at risk of death are already dead. The soup kitchens might have saved lives—or they might seem to have been effective only because of a statistical illusion.62
The soup kitchens kept bellies full, but the soup was not always nutritionally complete. In summer 1847, health officials recorded outbreaks of scurvy. The board of health insisted that relief committees include fresh vegetables in the soup, although the regulation was not enforced. The kitchens, along with the closing of the works, succeeded in pushing many workers back into farm labour, reassuring relief officers and the government. But the degrading experience of standing in line, watched and pitied and carefully means-tested in exchange for the cheapest possible food, was humiliating. “The feeding of dogs in a kennel was far more decent and orderly,” one observer wrote. Some walked up to ten miles to get their soup during this summer of indignity and boredom. A letter to the Times complained, “This supply may keep our people from dying—but it certainly is not a supply for the sustenance of working men.” The soup kitchens, for all that they were publicised in their time, and for all that some historians have praised them as innovative and lifesaving, had a basic similarity to the disastrous public works program. They kept people alive but not healthy; they forced people seeking relief to humiliate themselves to meet their basic needs.63
On my father’s side of my family, it was established lore that anyone with the surname Scanlon (as opposed to Scanlan) had “taken the soup” in Ireland and ransomed their Catholic faith in exchange for thin gruel from Protestants. However, “souperism”—Catholic apostasy in exchange for food—is more folklore and folk memory than historical reality. Irish Catholics were among the targets of energetic Protestant evangelism in the nineteenth century. In March 1849, the Society for the Irish Church Missions to the Roman Catholics spun off from the largest Anglican missionary organisation, the Church Missionary Society, and became very active across Connaught, which was hard-hit by the last seasons of blight. There is little evidence that the mission demanded conversion in exchange for food, although the militance of the new society’s leadership angered Catholic authorities. So if souperism did take place, it was rare and was most likely to have happened nearly two years after the last soup kitchens sponsored under the government’s scheme had closed. But after the famine, the legend felt true. In one story, a Catholic bids God a friendly farewell as he gives up his faith for a meal. “Good bye, Godeen,” he says, using a diminutive, “till the praties grow again.” In another story, a woman takes the soup and becomes a Protestant. Then she dies, and a black moth flies to the foot of her deathbed, putting out six candles with its wingbeats.64
Taking the soup was a legend that expressed a deeper truth. The soup kitchens forced the poor to make humiliating and self-abasing choices to survive. The poor did not have to abandon their religion for food, but they had to lay their lives open to the scrutiny of religious and administrative officials who would measure whether their need for relief was “genuine.” Generally, soup kitchens imposed not a religious test but a means test—bad enough for the starving. To receive food, at least according to the letter of the law, aid recipients needed to be on the relief committee’s list of the destitute, and then have their names called out. Everyone needed to be present to receive rations. If they did not hear their names called, they went to the back of the queue, “obliged to remain until the entire parish in which they resided had been gone through, they all that time suffering cold and hunger.”65
The giving campaign for Ireland was an early example of public generosity in response to widespread press coverage of a humanitarian crisis. It soon became an early example of how such flushes of generosity end, with the public losing patience with the cause and writing it off as an intractable crisis. Some donors, expecting gratitude from the Irish and rapid improvement in famine conditions, wearied of terrible stories from a place that had been the object of so much generosity. After a report from Skibbereen in the late spring of 1847 of unburied corpses on the roads, a journalist commented, “The Government have been sending in large supplies; private benevolence has been liberally adding contributions; and yet Skibbereen will not even bury its dead.” A second queen’s letter, published in October 1847 to raise a second round of funding, failed to reinvigorate the campaign. Donations fell off.66
In many newspaper reports, the Irish went from pitiable objects of charity to ingrates slapping away a helping hand. Many observers seized on an upsurge of agrarian crime in late 1847 as proof of either the barbarity of the native Irish or the selfishness of Irish landowners. “It was generally felt,” a historian comments, that Ireland ought “to be left to the operation of ‘natural causes.’” There are more than a few books celebrating how the world gave to Ireland. But charity is provisional and temporary, a matter of marketing as much as need, and the problems in Ireland were structural. The solution, if there was one, was more than cash donations.67
Just as the soup kitchens were opening, a stream of evictions turned into a torrent. In 1847, at least 11,166 evictions were processed in Irish courts, including the Court of Queen’s Bench, the Exchequer, the Court of Common Pleas, and the quarter sessions. Recall that an eviction of one tenant generally resulted in the removal of more than one family, as subtenants and labourers taking conacre also lost their land, and that there were many ways to remove a tenant other than through a court proceeding. The number of eviction proceedings continued to grow, increasing to 16,349 in 1848 and then to 16,979 in 1849. The overwhelming majority of cases were decided in favour of landlords and their agents, leading to tens of thousands of recorded evictions.68
Evictions contributed to an exodus from Ireland. Ireland had long been an important source of immigrants to Britain’s colonies, but previous waves of Irish immigration had been much smaller and less desperate. Beginning in 1846, many raced to leave, in “panic and hysteria,” as one historian writes. John Russell believed that emigration would be useful as a means of reducing the pressure on Irish land, but also that the government ought not interfere. He was sceptical that mass emigration would have much effect on wages. In addition, Russell argued that “to convey a million of persons at once across the ocean” at the government’s expense would anger officials in the United States, who would believe that Britain had “cast our paupers on her shores, to be maintained by her.” But even as other sources of donations dropped, Irish emigrants continued to send money back to Ireland, especially to assist in emigration; remittances grew from £460,000 in 1848 to £990,000 in 1851. Lord Monteagle wrote, “What had been looked upon as banishment was now regarded as release.”69
In 1846, 129,851 Irish emigrants went to Britain; in the first three-quarters of 1847, more than 240,000 went to Canada and the United States. So many emigrants arrived in Liverpool, both to resettle in Britain and en route to North America, that the city was divided into thirteen districts, each with a relief station. In 1846–1847, as much as 3 percent of the population left Ireland. Many were desperately ill, and as many as 40,000 people—about 20 percent of all emigrants that year—died on the voyage. A deck passage to Liverpool cost about five shillings, but some steamship and sailing-ship captains offered free passage for the Irish poor, who could provide living ballast in their ships, because they were “cheaper to ship and unship… than… lime or shingle.” Others went as ballast in coal ships to Newport, South Wales, where a flophouse owner claimed they would eat rotten cabbage and potato peelings from garbage heaps. Ships carrying grain to Ireland to feed the hungry returned to Britain with starving people in the holds who kept the keels level in the water.70
In Britain, mass immigration led to terrible overcrowding, especially in Liverpool, where in some neighbourhoods people were reputed to be living one hundred thousand to the square mile, with at least forty thousand people living in cellars. In Ireland, landlords were divided on whether emigration boded good or ill. Some complained that their tenants were taking “French leave” of them—that is, departing without paying years of back rent. Landlords complained that the “best” of the tenants were leaving, although officials in Canada and the United States complained that the Irish immigrants were sick, weak, and restive. Some American states attempted to expel the new immigrants as quickly as possible. Some Irish landlords helped their tenants emigrate, while others evicted their tenants without much thought as to where they would go. Still others pleaded with their most trusted tenants to stay. Emigration varied in intensity across Ireland. In poorer counties there were reports of roads crowded with emigrants, mostly young men but also young women and children, heading for the towns to catch a ship to Liverpool and then, if they were lucky, another to New York or Montreal or New South Wales.71
Only a few months into the parliamentary session for 1847, the government was stunned by ongoing famine and spiralling financial crisis. The Whigs, who had dominated the politics of the 1830s, now depended on Tory followers of Robert Peel to pass legislation. In the pages of Punch, to the tune of the “College Hornpipe,” John Russell was made to sing:
My accounts when I examine, I perceive, on Irish famine
I have spent about a dozen million sterling pounds or so;
For the whole of which outgoing—an amount that we are owing—
’Twill be next to nothing, I’m afraid, that we shall have to show.
The public works had been a disaster; the soup kitchens had been a very qualified success. The Whig government, devoted to free trade and laissez-faire policy, had spent so much borrowed money that the announcement of another loan for Irish relief had almost caused the collapse of the British banking system. Lifted by a wave of public interest and sympathy, the government had shifted to a plan—soup kitchens—that attracted international praise and support but was designed to be time-limited. The Whigs needed a permanent solution. In April 1847, the government introduced the Poor Relief (Ireland) Bill, designed to make famine relief the responsibility of Poor Law unions rather than the central government. In a well-received speech, Russell had urged the Irish to act in “the spirit of self-reliance and the spirit of co-operation,” to remember to “‘Help yourselves, and Heaven will help you.’”72
In the midst of the debates, William Henry Gregory, MP for the City of Dublin, and later for County Galway, proposed an amendment to exclude anyone holding land of a quarter acre or more from eligibility for poor relief. Gregory apparently had wanted to set the floor for relief at less than a half acre but told the House that “people [in Ireland] who had more knowledge of the subject, told him half an acre was too extensive.” The so-called Gregory Clause passed easily. The endgame of the UK’s response to the famine was about to begin. The blight would return, and so would all the attendant misery. The workhouse would be open to the Irish poor, but only if they gave up their land. Sir George Grey, the home secretary, supported the clause, he declared, “because he had always understood that small holdings were the bane of Ireland.”73
John Russell described the chaos of 1846–1847 as “a famine of the thirteenth century acting upon the population of the nineteenth.” But the Great Famine was not an anachronism. Relief was a sophisticated, expensive, and bureaucratic national program that took place within a precociously modern media environment. Around the world, sympathetic people donated money and food to help the starving, taking part in one of the first coordinated international charitable campaigns. And all the horrors—the filth and blood on cabin floors, the whispers of cannibalism, the riots, the unburied bodies and abandoned children—could not have happened exactly as they did outside of capitalist modernity. To put brakes on the wheels of capital was unthinkable and impossible. It was a nineteenth-century famine, after all.74