Children and the Great Hunger in Ireland ed. by Christine Kinealy, Jason King, and Gerard Moran (review)

Since the 1990s, there has been a veritable explosion of scholarly studies of the Great Famine in Ireland (An Gorta Mór in the Irish language) approaching the catastrophe and ensuing trauma from a variety of disciplinary frameworks. What began as a largely historiographical project—to recuperate and to document the human losses due to food scarcity and starvation between 1845 and 1852 and to develop arguments about its causes—has expanded to many fields and to the consideration and analysis of numerous archives. However, as Christine Kinealy, Jason King, and Gerard Moran, the editors of Children and the Great Hunger in Ireland, rightly contend, children's experiences of the Irish Famine, their subsequent emigration, and their central place in contemporaneous and later literary and cultural representations of the Great Famine have received scant attention in the scholarly works of the last three decades. That absence is striking on its own. It is all the more so when we bear in mind developments in childhood studies in Ireland and recent urgent attention to infants and children propelled by inquiries into the Magdalene Laundries, Irish child homes, and other church-run institutions in which abuse and high infant and child mortality occurred. These contexts make this volume an especially important contribution to our understanding of the Great Famine itself and the ways in which this cataclysm dramatically changed the cultural, social, linguistic, religious, and demographic landscape of Ireland and the Irish diaspora to the present.

This volume is multidisciplinary in unexpected and exciting ways, but it opens with a series of primarily historical essays that establish the experiences and fate of children during the Famine, in particular the many who ended up in workhouses established by the Irish Poor Law of 1838. While there is some unnecessary overlap in these contributions, they do an excellent job of setting the stage for the remainder of the collection. In particular, the juxtaposition of Kinealy's reading of firsthand accounts of the suffering of children with the more quantitative and bureaucratic-focused work of Moran and Simon Gallaher provides a rich and multifaceted foundation for what follows. In a fine essay on children abandoned in workhouses for the two decades after the Famine, Gallaher posits workhouses as sites of biopolitical experimentation concerning the management and containment of parentless children. Another crucial intervention of this essay, and of several others in this collection, is the extension of a timeline of famine inquiry, arguing that the immediate impact, trauma, and multiple "scars" of the Famine continued into the 1850s and 60s and well beyond (52). This first section is rounded out by Jonny Geber's fascinating essay on how bioarcheology—the study of bones found at mass graves—can illuminate childhood physiological experiences of the Famine in ways that other methodologies cannot. Taken together, these opening contributions reveal the contours and the extremity of the physical and psychological suffering of children during the Famine in Ireland.

The remaining essays in the volume are organized into two sections. The first focuses on children who immigrated to Canada as a result of the Famine. The specificity of this section is quite different from the other two in its concentration on one very particular instance in the history of famine emigration. At the same time, the cluster of essays functions as a kind of case study that elucidates the experiences of children who traveled across the Atlantic in coffin ships. Together and individually, these contributions provide a rich historiographical picture of the often harrowing lives of the Irish Famine orphans who were resettled in Eastern Canada as well as a vivid account of the institutions that managed them and determined their fates. These essays also provide larger insights beyond the specific context of Irish children who ended up in Quebec and New Brunswick. For example, Mark McGowan offers a transformative analysis of the ways that...