Daniel O’Connell, the British Press and Irish Famine: Killing Remarks
by Leslie A. Williams; edited by William H. A. Williams. (Ashgate/Rutledge)
The potato blight of 1845 and the subsequent food crisis in Ireland did not occur in a political, economic or cultural vacuum. Centuries of Anglo-Irish hostility and tensions contributed to Britain’s reaction to the sudden loss of so much of Ireland’s food supply. Moreover, political events immediately preceding the crisis provided the immediate context within which famine relief policies had to be shaped. Leslie A. Williams explores these issues within the context of Daniel O’Connell’s Repeal campaign and the reactions of the British Press. As the crisis persisted, comments in the British Press produced a series of what Williams calls “killing remarks.”
In 1843 Daniel O’Connell, the leader of Ireland’s Roman Catholics and chief spokesman for constitutional nationalism, led an attempt to repeal the Act of Union and to reestablish the Irish parliament in Dublin under the Crown. Although the movement failed, the hostility focused on O’Connell by the British press carried over to the people whom he led. Cartoon images invested the figure of O’Connell with many of the anti-Irish stereotypes long entertained by the British. Moreover, O’Connell, whose health was failing around the time the potato blight struck in 1845, was a major spokesman for Irish relief. Distrusting O’Connell, many Britons suspected that the Irish were exaggerating the severity of their plight in order to extract aid. Even after O’Connell’s death in 1847, negative attitudes towards the Irish continued to get in the way of Britain’s efforts to deal with the on-going famine in Ireland.
Starting with O’Connell, this book presents a detailed study of how the British press reacted to the potato blight in Ireland in 1845 and the subsequent crisis that continued until 1852. In addition to providing close readings of reports and editorials in British newspapers and journals, the author examines cartoons and woodcut illustrations from periodicals such as Punch and the London Illustrated News. Forty-one illustrations, most of them full page, are analyzed in the book.
In addition to the obvious political and economic contexts in which the Irish Famine occurred, the author also discusses other relevant topics such as the evolution of British public opinion, changes taking place within journalism, and the innovation of reportorial illustrations. Drawing upon various aspects of critical theory, the author concludes that the British used Ireland and the Irish as a kind of reverse mirror, in which they saw the characteristics they most feared within their own rapidly changing society.
CONTENTS: 1, The Times, O’Connell and Repeal—1843; 2, Punch, “Rint,” and “Repale”—1843; 3, Traversers and Priests—1844-1845; 4, “The Commissioner”—1845; 5, Imagining a Famine/Imaginary Famine—1845; 6, “The Battlefield of Contending Factions”—January to June 1846; 7, Parsing Pharaoh’s Dream—July to December 1846; 8, “A Transition of Great Difficulty”—January to March 1847; 9, The Death of O’Connell—May 1847; 10, “A Conspiracy Against Life”—June to December 1847; 11, Charles Trevelyan and the “Great Opportunity”—January 1848; 12, The Uprising in Boulagh—1848; 13, A Dream of the Future—1849.