The Irish Through British Eyes: Perceptions of Ireland in the Famine Era (review)

In 1852 Henry Mayhew observed, with some surprise, the "household care and neatness" of London's "Street-Irish." He had "little expected" such domestic propriety (Mayhew 58). The men and women living in these "nests of Irish" in "the poorer districts of London," however, met with Mayhew's expectations(Mayhew 56). He described "the low foreheads and long bulging upper lips" of the Irish immigrants he encountered, noting the exceptions of one or two "pretty ... girls," whose "large feet" nonetheless gave away their membership in "the same class" as their fellow Irish (Mayhew 58). Punch cartoons from the mid-1840s, at the onset of the potato famine, confirm the prevalence of physical stereotypes of the Irish. In 1846, Punch published four full-page cartoons featuring similar caricatures of Irishmen. Not all of these cartoons were unsympathetic to the plight of starving Irish peasants. One, titled "Justice to Ireland," casts Peel as a punitive mother wielding the Coercion Bill to force her ragamuffin Irish children into bed. Another reverses such caricatures, depicting instead "The Irish Cinderella and Her Haughty Sisters, Britannia and Caledonia."

Although it does not allude to them, Edward Lengel's book on British perceptions of the Irish from 1840 to 1860 makes sense of these representations, arguing that the famine (1846–52) marks a watershed in ideas about Irish difference and English-Irish relations, and exploring the complex relationship between public opinion and official policy on Ireland. Lengel takes issue with earlier studies (e.g., those by L. P. Curtis and R.

N. Lebow) that generalized about English perceptions of Irish inferiority in the nineteenth century. Because English opinion on Ireland was "highly volatile rather than stable" (x), he asserts, analysis of these two decades provides a more nuanced picture of mid-Victorian attitudes.

Lengel traces the changing charge of gendered language used to describe Ireland throughout this period. Before the famine, the English used the metaphor of marriage to justify union and to promote assimilation. After the famine, Ireland's feminization in public discourse no longer articulated complementarity but subordination. The rhetoric of husband and wife was displaced by that of master and servant, colonizer and colonized. Similarly, the romantic assessment of Irish peasant culture prevalent in the 1840s gave way to its perception as "wretched and degraded" (138) in the 1850s; the Irish "noble savage" was now understood as irretrievably degenerate. Lengel attributes this shift in part to the increasing force of racialism in the 1850s as the "dominant factor in English thought on Ireland" (14).

The Times emerges as a powerful disseminator of racialist theories about innate Celtic inferiority. Lengel documents how the newspaper helped to harden English attitudes, thereby exacerbating the famine. His scathing critique is grounded in careful research, the breadth of which is admirable: he has surveyed fiction, political and economic tracts, travel writing, historical and scientific monographs, select periodicals, and manuscript sources (including Peel's, Russell's, and Times editor Delane's papers, as well as Home Office files at the Public Records Office). The parameters of his study also suggest interesting avenues for further research, including poetic, working-class, and Irish representations of Ireland during this period.

Lengel's disavowal of theory in his Preface is perhaps overly modest. Indeed, Lengel adroitly maneuvers between a traditional historical approach and a poststructuralist sensitivity to the implications and consequences of language for policy makers and the Irish poor. His analysis shows how English discourse on Ireland in the famine period both reflected and created public opinion, directly affecting government policy and therefore the lives of starving Irish peasants. The book's price may unfortunately discourage individual scholars from purchasing this valuable contribution to the fields of nineteenth-century Irish studies, political history, and the Victorian periodical press, but university libraries will undoubtedly wish to add it to their collections.