“In the Dawn of a Brighter Day”: Re-presenting the Famine at the Irish International Exhibition of 1853

In late 1852, these optimistic stanzas announcing Ireland’s emergence from the darkness of famine greeted the middle-class readers of the Illustrated London News:

Though kindred fled from kindred dead,They have found a home afar;They have labour and rest in the beautiful West,Where trusty brethren are.And those who remain in their own dear landWhile justice bears the sway—Have prosperous lives;For labour thrivesIn the dawn of a brighter day.¹

The poem was accompanied by an inspiring sketch of a healthy and happy peasant gleaning the fields for “ears of grain” left by the harvest reapers. Not merely resilient, but resourceful, “The Irish Gleaner” (see figure 1) mirrored the Victorian readers’ own ideals of self-reliance and improvement. And these same notions, the poet assures the reader, inspire Ireland’s emigrants to “the beautiful West”—North America—as well as those who survived the Famine’s “breath of poisonous wind” and remain in the West of Ireland where, surprisingly, a “spirit of love in labour thrives.” Here, then, Ireland’s “extraordinary emigration mania” and the relentless persistence of mass eviction, two current crises that had generated considerable controversy in the Illustrated London News, are brought to a tidy resolution.² Famine mortality and emigration had in fact rendered rural occupations like “gleaning” obsolete, but the poem nevertheless concludes on a confident note: the tragedy is over; the “night has flown” and “the light has shone.” Taken together, the poem and illustration replace the stereotypical image of the idle and dependent Irish laborer with a new peasant “type,” an exemplary model of self-improvement.

Figure 1.

“The Irish Gleaner,” Illustrated London News (November, 1852)

Against the background of the nightmarish iconography of sheer scarcity, starvation, and social catastrophe that had circulated in the popular press since 1846, it is tempting to conclude that this new, and seemingly sudden, appearance of such a benign and hopeful representation of Ireland signaled the beginning of what ultimately became a systematic, and primarily British, attempt to evade the tragic dimensions of the Famine.³ Yet, a review of comparable periodicals, newspapers, and magazines in Dublin indicates a similar determination to represent the future in a positive light and complicates the binary categories that have been used to explain postfamine Irish culture: English versus Irish, Anglo-Irish versus native Gaelic, or Protestant versus. Catholic.⁴ In a seminal editorial of 1851, “The Day After the Storm,” for example, a contributor to the Dublin University Magazine proclaimed that it was time to create a “new nation” despite the cataclysm, which had “burst over the island.” Fortunately, as he concluded, the storm had ebbed but left in its wake “all the constituent elements necessary to the formation of a great and happy country chaotic and confused.”⁵ The article bespoke a confidence in the capacity of cultural institutions like the Dublin University Magazine to “glean” the scattered remnants of Ireland’s former life, distinguishing between those which had contributed to its “sickly existence” and those which contained “the germ of happiness and prosperity.”⁶ Though he admitted that Ireland existed in a perilous state of transition between an epoch of tragedy and loss and an unknown future, the author concluded on a note of unprecedented optimism: “Crime has almost ceased, the poor-rate is decreasing, civilisation is spreading, education is advancing, our manufactures are making gigantic strides, our rich mines are unappropriated and our lands ready to yield their grateful produce; capital only is wanting.”⁷

Given these apparently improved social and economic conditions, the Dublin University Magazine no longer seemed as preoccupied with assigning blame for the failure of famine relief schemes or with the demise of traditional institutions, such as the landed estate, which had guaranteed the supremacy of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy for more than a century.⁸ The editors, like many in Ireland’s professional and business classes, who had visited London’s Crystal Palace and been mesmerized by the...