The Depiction of Eviction in Ireland, 1845–1910 by L. Perry Curtis, Jr. (review)

One of the great achievements of modern capitalism has been to turn economic decisions into the apparently agentless movements of ineluctable economic laws. The decisions of some bankers and financial executives have provoked public odium in recent years. However, it remains the case that when a factory closes, the owner is rarely attacked and murdered, in part because the owner tends to be a corporation. And when an unemployed family is evicted from its home, its members generally shrug their shoulders and accept the apparently inevitable.

None of this was the case in nineteenth-century Ireland where sporadic and intense conflict between landlords and tenants ended in the tenants, with legal and financial backing from the government, becoming owner-occupiers of their small farms and with the eclipse of the landlord class. During the Famine of the 1840s and thereafter the eviction of tenants for the non-payment of rent (and for other reasons) added—or was used to add—fuel to the fire of popular anger against landlords. This provoked reprisals, known as agrarian outrages, against landlords and their agents in a continuum of responses from threatening letters and cattle mutilation to murder. L. Perry Curtis, Jr., the distinguished author of The Depiction of Eviction in Ireland, 1845–1910, accepts, though it would seem with a certain reluctance, that the old nationalist story of villainous and vicious landlords oppressing hapless tenants is untrue. He suggests that an analysis based on statistics alone—beloved, he believes, of modern revisionist historians—omits a lot of the human story. He argues that there is much to be learned from the depiction of evictions. It is a story he systematically follows from the time of the Famine, paying particular attention to the turbulent years of the Land Wars of the 1880s. His account is both an assessment of eviction itself as a social and economic reality and an attempt to assess the ways in which eviction was depicted both visually and through the written word. In each period covered he focuses on the principal or notorious instances of large-scale eviction.

For the Famine period itself Curtis considers formal paintings such as George Kelly’s An Ejectment in Ireland (A Tear and a Prayer for Erin) (1848) and Erskine Nicol’s An Ejected Family (1853). Powerful narrative works though they are, they are ultimately sentimental when compared with the drawings that appeared in the Illustrated London News. These latter were certainly more stark in their depiction of those evicted in the midst of Famine suffering, though there was a tendency for victims still to be depicted as relatively strong limbed, no matter how anguished their facial expression. In the period between the Famine and the Land Wars Curtis focuses on a number of notorious incidents such as the eviction of the Glenveagh tenants by John George Adair in 1861, after the murder of his steward, in order to turn his County Donegal estate into a haven for sheep and gentlemen’s shooting parties. The only consolation for the tenants was the offer of a free passage to Australia. Around the same time the Donegalborn poet, William Allingham, published a long poem containing an idealised portrait of a good landlord, Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland (1864).

The Land Wars of the 1880s, organised by the Land League following agricultural depression, were notable for the increase in tenants’ rights and for moves that led ultimately to the beginnings of tenant proprietorship. It was also noteworthy for the neologism of boycotting, for the practice of ostracising those associated with landlordism. Curtis devotes an entire chapter to resistance strategies specifically aimed at those engaged in evictions. They included the burning of hedges in the very narrow roads found in rural Ireland, in order to singe eviction parties.

Depictions of eviction crowds by Aloysius O’Kelly, an Irish nationalist artist working for the Illustrated London...