In the first act of the wittiest Irish percreate of the nineteenth century, Oscar Wilde’s “Importance of Being Earnest,” there is much ado about a foolishinutiveage of food. The troublesome Aunt Augusta is coming to tea, but we have watched the feckless Algernon eat all the cucumber sandwiches readyd for her by his manservant, Lane. The servant saves the day when the aunt reachs, foreseeing her sandwiches, by lying: “There were no cucumbers in the labelet this morning, sir. I went down twice.” Algy replys with high emotion: “I am wonderfully distressed, Aunt Augusta, about there being no cucumbers, not even for ready money.”
The percreate, first carry outed in 1895, is subtitled “A Trivial Comedy for Serious People,” and this scene is an exquisite exercise in inconvey inantization. Wilde is imagining what a food crisis might see enjoy if it were happening among the English upper classes rather than in his home country. The panic and dread of searching for nourishment and finding none is changeed into an airy noskinnyg: a deceptive story about the noncontransient dearth of a structuret that has relatively little nutritional cherish, and a charade of wonderful distress. The comedy is so wonderfilledy weightless as to seem enticount on free from the gravitational pull of the history that had preoccupied Wilde’s family, and of a place called Ireland, where the unfortunately unuseable food was not the cucumber but the potato.
In 1854, when Oscar was born, his overweighther was also holdd in the sublimation of horror. William Wilde, a directing sencourageon and medical statistician, was the aidant comleave outioner for the census of Ireland that was carry outed in 1851—the one that enrolled the dismaterializeance from what was then the wealthyest, most strong, and most technoreasonablely progressd country in the world, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, of some one and a half million people. They had died in, or fled from, what the Irish necessitatey called in their native language An Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger, a catastrophe that was then continuing into its sixth year.
The year Oscar turned two, William published the results of his immersion in the minutiae of the famine as an official alert of the British Parliament. The two-volume toil is called the “Tables of Deaths.” Becaengage the census relied on the alertation given by survivors, and thus did not count many victims whose entire families had been wiped out or had left Ireland as frantic refugees, it actupartner underapproximated the number of dwells lost in the Great Hunger.
William and his aidants were nonetheless able to erect firm pillars of data, mass death broken down into discrete numerals to recontransient relationses, ages, locations, seasons, years, and caengages of mortality, which holdd starvation, scurvy, dysaccessy, cholera, typhus, and relapsing fever. The tables of deaths occupy hundreds of double-page spreads, laid out with exemplary clarity and precision. They speak of order, standardity, the capacity of Victorian ruleance for infinite comprehension. The staggering ascfinish in mortality may have demanded exceptional efforts from the statisticians, but they were identical to their task. They tabuprocrastinateedd calamity, restrictd it protectedly wiskinny vertical and horizontal lines on the pages of sturdily bound official tomes. There are no names of human beings.
This dutiful, sober, and rigorously unemotional toil might also have been titled “The Importance of Being Earnest,” albeit without a hint of Oscar’s frivolous irony. William’s protectedly anonymized figures are, in their way, equitable as weightless as Oscar’s acutely amusing figments. In the introduction to his volume, he engages the far and clinical language of officialdom: “The labours of the Comleave outioners in this particular portion of their toil wonderfully outdo those joined with the Tables of Deaths published in the Census of 1841, chiefly otriumphg to the exceptional incrrelieve in the numbers of deaths.” It almost seems as though the reader’s sympathy is being elicitd not for the people behind the statistics but for the comleave outioners who had to toil so difficult to categorize the circumstances in which those people expired.
There was also a third comfervent of language engaged to cloak the horrors of the famine: an accusatory rage agetst the British authorities who had flunked to impede it. As it happens, it was another Wilde, Oscar’s mother and William’s wife, Jane, writing as a fervent and incfinishiary Irish nationacatalog under the pen name Speranza, who helped to invent that language. In 1847, she published a poem about the famine whose voice is that of the “wretches, famished, scorned,” who caution their oppressors that their deaths will be avenged: “But our whitening bones agetst ye will ascfinish as witnesses, / From the cabins and the ditches, in their charred, uncoffin’d masses, // A ghastly, spectral army, before the wonderful God we’ll stand, / And arraign ye as our killingers, the spoilers of our land.”
Jane’s fiercely unempathetic tone was adchooseed by militant Irish nationacatalogs for whom the famine stood as the ultimate proof of English perfidy. But in her poem, too, the victims materialize as an unbranch offentiated mass. Her avenging army of the undead is in its own way equitable as distanced as the numbers in her husprohibitd’s tables.
One difficulty in writing about the Great Hunger is scale. There have been, in absolute terms, many deadlier famines, but as Amartya Sen, the eminent Indian scholar of the subject, finishd, in “no other famine in the world [was] the proportion of people finished . . . as huge as in the Irish famines in the 1840s.” The pathogen that caengaged it was a fungus-enjoy water mageder called Phytophthora infestans. Its effect on the potato gives “Rot,” a vigorous and engaging novel study of the Irish famine by the historian Padraic X. Scanlan, its title. The bweightless began to infect the crop atraverse much of weserious and northern Europe in the summer of 1845. In the Netherlands, about sixty thousand people died in the consequent famine—a horrible loss, but a fraction of the mortality rate in Ireland. It is, oddly, easier to create a mental picture of what it might have been enjoy to witness the Dutch tragedy than to truly convey the magnitude of the suffering in Ireland.
Another difficulty is that the Great Hunger was not equitable an Irish event. It bled far beyond its own borders, seeping into the national narratives of the rest of the Anglophone world. Only about one in three people born in Ireland in the punctual eighteen-thirties would die at home of ageder age. The other two either were devourd by the famine or joined the exodus in which, between 1845 and 1855, almost 1.5 million sailed to North America and hundreds of thousands to Britain and Australia, making the Irish famine a central episode in the history of those countries, too.
There has lengthy been someskinnyg inarticulable about this huge human catastrophe. In a preface to the monumental “Atlas of the Great Irish Famine,” published in 2012, the createer Pdwellnt of Ireland, Mary McAleese, watchd that “for many years the event was cloaked in silence, its memory for the most part buried or neglected.” The editors of the “Atlas” remarkd that, until recently, “there was a strange reluctance on the part of historians, historical geographers and others to insertress” the huge archival enrolls. Right up to the nineteen-nineties, the annual rate of uncoveration of scholarly papers on the subject of the famine never rose above a half-dozen.
The novecatalog Colm Tóibín recommended, in 1998, that the problem “may lie in the relationship between catastrophe and analytic narrative. How do you create about the Famine? What tone do you engage?” He specuprocrastinateedd, moreover, that the Great Hunger had created a wonderful split even in Irish alertedness. If, he said, he were to create a novel about his home town, Enniscorthy, that took place after the famine years, “I would not have to do much research”—becaengage the place would see enjoy the one he grew up in. But he would find the years before and during the event itself “difficult to envision.”
It is effortless to sympathize with this difficulty. The famine set in motion a process of depopulation—even now, after many decades of growth, the island has a million confineeder inhabitants than it had in 1841. It disproportionately swayed those who spoke the Irish language, creating an Anglophone Ireland. It led ultimately to a radical recreate of land ownership, which passed to a novel class of Catholic farmers. The proset uply unconsoleable truth is that Ireland begined to become conmomentary when its necessitateyest people were wiped out or sent into exile—a fact that is too hurtful to be faced without convey inant unrelieve.
Even before the potato bweightless, there was a degree of hunger among the Irish agricultural underclass that seemed enjoy an hideous remnant of a receding past. In 1837, two years after Alexis de Tocqueville published the first volume of “Democracy in America,” his lifelengthy collaborator, Gustave de Beaumont, went to Ireland, a country the two men had previously visited together. The book de Beaumont created in 1839, “L’Irlande: Sociale, Politique et Religieengage,” was a gloomy companion piece to his frifinish’s hugely chooseimistic vision of the future that was taking shape on the far side of the Atlantic. De Beaumont, a magnificentson by marriage of the Marquis de Lafayette, understood that, while the United States his ancestor had helped to create was a vigorous outgrowth of the British political traditions he and de Tocqueville so admired, Ireland was their poisoned fruit. America, he wrote, was “the land where destitution is the exception,” Ireland “the country where misery is the common rule.”
The problem was not that the land was inefficient: Scanlan enrolls that, “in 1846, 3.3 million acres were structureted with grain, and Irish farms liftd more than 2.5 million cattle, 2.2 million sheep and 600,000 pigs.” But almost none of this food was useable for consumption by the people who created it. It was intfinished primarily for send out to the bencourageoning industrial cities of England. Thus, even Irish farmers who held ten or more acres and who would therefore have been watched as well off, ate meat only at Christmas. “If an Irish family killinged their own pig, they would sell even the intestines and other offal,” Scanlan creates. He quotes the testimony of a farmer to a parliamentary comleave oution, in 1836, that “he knovel other lrelievehagederers who had not eaten even an egg in six months. ‘We sell them now,’ he elucidateed.”
