The Great Irish Famine and Social Class

Marguérite Corporaal and Peter Gray

The Great Irish Famine
and Social Class

Conflicts, Responsibilities, Representations

PETER LANG

Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • New York • Wien

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche National-bibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Names: Corporaal, Marguerite, author. | Gray, Peter, 1965- author.

Title: The great Irish famine and social class : conflicts, responsibilities, representations / Marguerite Corporaal and Peter Gray.

Description: Oxford ; New York : Peter Lang, [2018] | Series: Reimagining Ireland ; 89 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018020935 | ISBN 9781788741668 (alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Ireland--History--Famine, 1845-1852. | Famines--Ireland--History--19th century. | Famines--Social aspects--Ireland--History--19th century. | Social classes--Ireland--History--19th century. | Irish--Migrations.

Classification: LCC DA950.7 .C68 2018 | DDC 941.5081--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018020935

ISSN: 1662-9094

ISBN 978-1-78874-166-8 (print) • eISBN 978-1-78874-197-2 (ePDF)

eISBN 978-1-78874-198-9 (ePub) • eISBN 978-1-78874-199-6 (Mobi)

Cover image: An Irish Eviction (oil on panel), Goodall, Frederick (1822-1904).
New Walk Museum & Art Gallery, Leicester, UK.
Photo © Leicester Arts & Museums/Bridgeman Images.

Cover design by Peter Lang Ltd.

© Peter Lang AG 2019

Published by Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers,
52 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LU, United Kingdom

oxford@peterlang.com, www.peterlang.com

Marguérite Corporaal and Peter Gray have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this Work.

All rights reserved.

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This publication has been peer reviewed.

About the authors

Marguérite Corporaal is Associate Professor of British Literature at Radboud University Nijmegen. She is the author of Relocated Memories of the Great Famine in Irish and Diaspora Fiction, 1847–1870 (2017) and co-editor of Irish Studies and the Dynamics of Memory (2017), Global Legacies of the Great Irish Famine: Transnational and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2014), Recollecting Hunger: An Anthology (2012) and Traveling Irishness in the Long Nineteenth Century (2017).

Peter Gray is Professor of Modern Irish History and Director of the Institute of Irish Studies at Queen’s University Belfast. He is the author of The Irish Famine (1995), Famine, Land and Politics (1999) and The Making of the Irish Poor Law, 1815–43 (2009). He is co-editor of The Irish Lord Lieutenancy, c.1541–1922 (2012), Poverty and Welfare in Ireland, 1838–1948 (2011), Victoria’s Ireland? Irishness and Britishness, 1837–1901 (2004) and The Memory of Catastrophe (2004).

About the book

The sesquicentenary of the Great Irish Famine saw the emergence of seminal, often revisionist, scholarship addressing the impact of the catastrophe on Ireland’s economy (including its relations with Britain) and investigating topics such as the suffering of the rural classes, landlord and tenant relations, Poor Laws and relief operations. The Great Irish Famine and Social Class represents a significant new stage in Irish Famine scholarship, adopting a broader interdisciplinary approach that includes ground-breaking demographical, economic, cultural and literary research on poverty, poor relief and class relations during one of Europe’s most devastating food crises. The volume incorporates a comparative European framework, as well as exploring the issue of class in relation to the British and North American Famine diaspora.

This eBook can be cited

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Contents

List of Illustrations

List of Tables

Acknowledgements

Marguérite Corporaal & Peter Gray

Introduction

Part I Experiences and Representations of Poverty

Melissa Fegan

How the Other Three-Quarters Lived: The Cabin in Famine Literature

Paweł Hamera

‘[W]orse than the Great Polish and Russian Proprietors’: Landlord-Tenant Relations in Ireland and Partitioned Poland in the Pre-Famine Period

Part II The Famine and Class Relations

Ciarán Reilly

‘A Vast Waste of Pauperism’: An Examination of Irish Famine Eviction←v | vi→

Declan Curran

Organizational Narrative and Memory in Social Context: Representations of the Great Irish Famine in Official Publications of Irish Joint-Stock Banks

Peter Gray

William Sharman Crawford, the Famine and County Down

Christopher Cusack

Transformative Nationalism and Class Relations in Irish Famine Fiction, 1896–1909

Part III Poor Laws and Relief

Andrés Eiríksson

‘Paupers and Beggars Brats’: Governance and Mortality in the Parsonstown Workhouse during the Great Famine

Marguérite Corporaal

Workhouses as Heterotopic Spaces in Early Famine Fiction

Lewis Darwen & Brian Gurrin

‘Bad As It Is, We Were Better Off in England’: Locating the Famine Irish Experience in Britain through Deposition Testimony

Part IV The Famine, Class and Emigration

Jason King

‘The Atrocious Avarice of the Irish Landlords’: Canadian Public Sentiment and the Irish Famine Migration of 1847←vi | vii→

Peter D. O’Neill

The Famine Irish, the Catholic Church, and the Cultural Dynamics of the American Middle Class

Notes on Contributors

Bibliography

Index←vii | viii→ ←viii | ix→

Illustrations

Figure 1.1. ‘Worst Sort of Mayo Stone Cabin’, in John Barrow, Tour Round Ireland, Through The Sea-Coast Counties, in the Autumn of 1835 (London: John Murray, 1836)

Figure 1.2. Henry MacManus, ‘The author’s birthplace’, in Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (Dublin: William Curry Jr & Co., 1843)

Figure 1.3. William Harvey, ‘Mave Sullivan and Sarah M’Gowan at the Cottage of Condy Dalton’, in William Carleton, The Black Prophet (London: Simms & McIntyre, 1847)

Figure 7.1. Number of people receiving Famine relief in Parsonstown union, first week of each month, March-December 1847

Figure 7.2. Workhouse admissions, discharges & deaths each month, 1846–50

Figure 7.3. Overcrowding in the workhouse

Figure 7.4. Number of deaths and mortality rate in the workhouse 1846–9

Figure 10.1. Fever shed at Windmill Point along the near shore, to the right, as seen from Mount Royal in 1852 in lithograph by Endicott & Co. McGill University Rare Books and Special Collections

Figure 10.2. ‘Drawing of Sister Bourbonniere and other sisters visiting the Irish ill with typhus in Kingston, Ontario’. RHSJ St Joseph Region Archives, Kingston, ON, K-175←ix | x→ ←x | xi→

Tables

Table 4.1. Indicative statements illustrating Irish joint-stock banks’ references to famine conditions, 1846–50

Table 4.2. Indicative statement regarding Irish famine-era joint-stock banks’ objectives (as per annual reports, 1846–50)

Table 4.3. Summary of Annual Reports of Irish joint-stock banks published in Bankers’ Magazine, 1844–50

Table 7.1. Causes of death in the workhouse during the Famine←xi | xii→ ←xii | xiii→

Acknowledgements

The present volume follows from collaboration between scholars within the International Network of Irish Famine Studies, which was funded by the Dutch research council NWO between 2014 and 2017 (236–69-007), and which we co-directed with colleagues from Maynooth University, Ireland, and University of Helsinki, Finland.

First versions of some of the articles included in this volume were presented at the conference The Great Irish Famine and Social Class, hosted by Queen’s University Belfast in April 2017. We are grateful for the generous financial support from NWO and Queen’s University Belfast, which made this event possible.

Marguérite Corporaal & Peter Gray