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Authors: Thomas Keneally
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they should be deprived of knowing that they are suffering from an affliction of God’s providence.’ Since God had ordained the famine ‘to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated … the real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.’
Trevelyan stuck to his views in various media – for example, in a famous letter to Lord Monteagle, a Whig politician, chancellor of the exchequer from 1835–9 and a progressive Irish landlord. Unlike many landlords, Monteagle – in between sittings of Parliament – actually lived on his land in the west of Ireland. On 9 December 1846, while a remarkablysevere winter began to bring the first outbreak of famine disease to the Irish, sheltering, wild-eyed, by peat fires, Trevelyan wrote in reply to Monteagle’s appeal on behalf of the peasantry: ‘It forms no part of the functions of government to provide supplies of food or to increase the productive powers of the land. In the great institutions of the business of society, it falls to the share of government to protect the merchant and the agriculturalist in a free exercise of their respective employments … the cure has been applied by the direct stroke of an all wise providence in a manner as unexpected and un-thought as it is likely to be effectual. God grant that we may rightly perform our part, and not turn into a curse what was intended for a blessing.’
Again, Trevelyan was not alone in these views. The diarist (and racing aficionado and cricketer) Charles Greville said of the Irish in perhaps the darkest year of 1847 that they ‘never were so well off on the whole as they had been in this year of famine. Nobody will pay rent, and the saving banks are overflowing.’ Besides, they spent their money to buy guns with which to ‘shoot the officers who were sent over to regulate the distribution of relief’. If a subtle intelligence such as Greville’s thought such things, one can imagine the opinions of others.
There were more humane and instinctively compassionate voices in Britain. Charles Dickens later condemned Trevelyan’s view. In Bleak House (its first instalment appearing in 1852), he would mock ‘the gentle politico-economic principle that a surplus of population must and ought to starve’.
As well as his philosophic conditioning, Trevelyan brought to the famine some impressive, though not abnormal, prejudices against the Irish. First of all, the peasantry clung to Catholicism, with its debilitating irrationalities, its superstitions, its hostility to progress in thought, and the brake on inventiveness and adaptability it was seen to impose on people. Trevelyan believed the Irish too indolent to farm like civilised people, and in that regard the potato-growing term ‘lazy row’ seemed to confirm some of his prejudices. A lazy row or lazy bed was, in fact, quite a rational method, in which the potatoes were planted in a mound as a result of the planter shovelling out a row of sod and piling it on the planting mound after breaking any of its grass roots in the sod with a mallet. This was the best method for the Irish, who dug up the potatoes as they needed them and left the rest in the ground. It was true that growing potatoes did not require as much effort as growing oats, but the image of Irish laziness must be surely alleviated by that of the hundreds of thousands of Irish males who looked for harvest work during the summer, frequently travelling to England as deck cargo to do so.
For Trevelyan and many others, the devilish laziness of the race ran hand in hand with the unrest of the Irish in the face of God’s will. This unrest manifested itself in ‘rural outrages’. Landlords and their agents, and tithe proctors who collected tithes for the Established (non-Catholic) Church, were threatened by notices hammered to doors and trees demanding improved and
Trevelyan stuck to his views in various media – for example, in a famous letter to Lord Monteagle, a Whig politician, chancellor of the exchequer from 1835–9 and a progressive Irish landlord. Unlike many landlords, Monteagle – in between sittings of Parliament – actually lived on his land in the west of Ireland. On 9 December 1846, while a remarkablysevere winter began to bring the first outbreak of famine disease to the Irish, sheltering, wild-eyed, by peat fires, Trevelyan wrote in reply to Monteagle’s appeal on behalf of the peasantry: ‘It forms no part of the functions of government to provide supplies of food or to increase the productive powers of the land. In the great institutions of the business of society, it falls to the share of government to protect the merchant and the agriculturalist in a free exercise of their respective employments … the cure has been applied by the direct stroke of an all wise providence in a manner as unexpected and un-thought as it is likely to be effectual. God grant that we may rightly perform our part, and not turn into a curse what was intended for a blessing.’
Again, Trevelyan was not alone in these views. The diarist (and racing aficionado and cricketer) Charles Greville said of the Irish in perhaps the darkest year of 1847 that they ‘never were so well off on the whole as they had been in this year of famine. Nobody will pay rent, and the saving banks are overflowing.’ Besides, they spent their money to buy guns with which to ‘shoot the officers who were sent over to regulate the distribution of relief’. If a subtle intelligence such as Greville’s thought such things, one can imagine the opinions of others.
There were more humane and instinctively compassionate voices in Britain. Charles Dickens later condemned Trevelyan’s view. In Bleak House (its first instalment appearing in 1852), he would mock ‘the gentle politico-economic principle that a surplus of population must and ought to starve’.
As well as his philosophic conditioning, Trevelyan brought to the famine some impressive, though not abnormal, prejudices against the Irish. First of all, the peasantry clung to Catholicism, with its debilitating irrationalities, its superstitions, its hostility to progress in thought, and the brake on inventiveness and adaptability it was seen to impose on people. Trevelyan believed the Irish too indolent to farm like civilised people, and in that regard the potato-growing term ‘lazy row’ seemed to confirm some of his prejudices. A lazy row or lazy bed was, in fact, quite a rational method, in which the potatoes were planted in a mound as a result of the planter shovelling out a row of sod and piling it on the planting mound after breaking any of its grass roots in the sod with a mallet. This was the best method for the Irish, who dug up the potatoes as they needed them and left the rest in the ground. It was true that growing potatoes did not require as much effort as growing oats, but the image of Irish laziness must be surely alleviated by that of the hundreds of thousands of Irish males who looked for harvest work during the summer, frequently travelling to England as deck cargo to do so.
For Trevelyan and many others, the devilish laziness of the race ran hand in hand with the unrest of the Irish in the face of God’s will. This unrest manifested itself in ‘rural outrages’. Landlords and their agents, and tithe proctors who collected tithes for the Established (non-Catholic) Church, were threatened by notices hammered to doors and trees demanding improved and
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