"On Fire": The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–1849

Cecil Woodham-Smith's background would not, on the face of it, suggest much interest in Ireland. Born in North Wales into a military family, her father had served for many years in the British army in India, while her mother's family had significant military connections extending back to Waterloo. She attended St. Hilda's College, Oxford, but did not shine academically; and in 1928, following a series of office jobs, she married a successful London solicitor. Thereafter she led an upper middle-class life, raising her two children,while amusing herself writing what a friend later called "pot boilers."¹ In the early 1950s, however, she published two well-received books about the Crimean War in quick succession: a biography of Florence Nightingale and an account of the famous charge of the Light Brigade during the battle of Balaclava in 1854.²

Yet, Woodham-Smith's maiden name was FitzGerald, and her father claimed descent from Lord Edward FitzGerald. Moreover, at Oxford, she had been sent down for a term after joining a street demonstration in support of Irish nationalism; and from the 1940s on, she and her husband visited County Mayo regularly in connection with research for her books. That she identified with the Irish, rather than the English, is obvious in her third book, The Great Hunger. Her view of Ireland was clearly informed by romantic nationalism,with strong echoes of W. B. Yeats and the Celtic Twilight movement, especially in her approach to race, class and culture.³

Early in The Great Hunger she informs readers that the centuries-long "hostility" between Ireland and England "had its roots first of all in race," but was "disastrously strengthened" in the sixteenth century by "religious enmity," resulting in a gulf that "could never be bridged."⁴ However, the Irish "peasantry"—despite being "one of the most destitute in Europe"—was noted for its hospitality and gaiety, and its love of music, dancing, and storytelling. Although forced into "dissimulation" and "evasion of the law" by persecution, the Irish nevertheless retained their "dignity" and their "easy good manners," which are still able "to charm the modern traveller." In Woodham-Smith's mind, these qualities essentially resulted from the fact that the "native aristocracy"—or, at least, the part of it that had not fled to Europe—had been "forced down by poverty and penal legislation to the economic level of the peasantry (GH 26). An "underground gentry," to use a more recent popular phrase employed by Kevin Whelan to describe eighteenth-century Ireland, lurked among the impoverished peasantry, and it was the manners of this declassed "native aristocracy" that had shaped the Irish national character and culture.

On the other hand,Woodham-Smith accuses the English of having driven the Irish "to the verge of extinction" (GH 15) during the seventeenth century; put down the 1798 Rebellion with"savagery"; and by the 1800 Act of Union performed, not a "marriage," but a "brutal rape" (GH 16).When she comes to the early nineteenth century, it is the milder word"ignorant" that she applies repeatedly to English attitudes to the Irish—though at times she goes so far as to label this ignorance "fatal." For her, the supreme cause of the repeated failures of early Famine relief measures was "the ignorance of the British government" (GH 82) about conditions in Ireland.

Woodham-Smith introduces each important English politician and administrator to the reader with a telling thumbnail character sketch. Robert Peel, unlike most, is credited with "considerable experience of Ireland," but he "had no liking for the Irish character, no sympathy for Irish aspirations" (GH 42).His successor in 1846 as prime minister, Lord John Russell, was "arrogant,"with an "overweening sense of rank"—perhaps partly to compensate for the fact that he was "little more than a dwarf" (GH 103). She judges that Charles Trevelyan was "by far the ablest man concerned with Irish relief," but he was "proud" and "rigid" with a mind full of schemes for "improvement," while in public affairs he was "rash and uncompromising" (GH 58). Like Peel, Trevelyan...