In the first act of the wittiest Irish play of the nineteenth century, Oscar Wilde’s “Importance of Being Earnest,” there is much ado about a shortage of food. The fearsome Aunt Augusta is coming to tea, but we have watched the feckless Algernon eat all the cucumber sandwiches prepared for her by his manservant, Lane. The servant saves the day when the aunt arrives, expecting her sandwiches, by lying: “There were no cucumbers in the market this morning, sir. I went down twice.” Algy responds with high emotion: “I am greatly distressed, Aunt Augusta, about there being no cucumbers, not even for ready money.”
The play, first performed in 1895, is subtitled “A Trivial Comedy for Serious People,” and this scene is an exquisite exercise in trivialization. Wilde is imagining what a food crisis might look like if it were happening among the English upper classes rather than in his home country. The panic and dread of searching for nourishment and finding none is transformed into an airy nothing: a fake story about the nonexistent dearth of a plant that has relatively little nutritional value, and a charade of great distress. The comedy is so wonderfully weightless as to seem entirely free from the gravitational pull of the history that had preoccupied Wilde’s family, and of a place called Ireland, where the unfortunately unavailable food was not the cucumber but the potato.
In 1854, when Oscar was born, his father was also engaged in the sublimation of horror. William Wilde, a pioneering surgeon and medical statistician, was the assistant commissioner for the census of Ireland that was conducted in 1851—the one that recorded the disappearance from what was then the richest, most powerful, and most technologically advanced country in the world, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, of some one and a half million people. They had died in, or fled from, what the Irish poor called in their native language An Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger, a catastrophe that was then continuing into its sixth year.
The year Oscar turned two, William published the results of his immersion in the minutiae of the famine as an official report of the British Parliament. The two-volume work is called the “Tables of Deaths.” Because the census relied on the information given by survivors, and thus did not count many victims whose entire families had been wiped out or had left Ireland as desperate refugees, it actually underestimated the number of lives lost in the Great Hunger.
William and his assistants were nonetheless able to build solid pillars of data, mass death broken down into discrete numerals to represent sexes, ages, locations, seasons, years, and causes of mortality, which included starvation, scurvy, dysentery, cholera, typhus, and relapsing fever. The tables of deaths occupy hundreds of double-page spreads, laid out with exemplary clarity and precision. They speak of order, regularity, the capacity of Victorian governance for infinite comprehension. The staggering rise in mortality may have demanded extraordinary efforts from the statisticians, but they were equal to their task. They tabulated calamity, confined it safely within vertical and horizontal lines on the pages of sturdily bound official tomes. There are no names of human beings.
This dutiful, sober, and rigorously unemotional work might also have been titled “The Importance of Being Earnest,” albeit without a hint of Oscar’s playful irony. William’s safely anonymized figures are, in their way, just as weightless as Oscar’s sharply amusing figments. In the introduction to his volume, he uses the remote and clinical language of officialdom: “The labours of the Commissioners in this particular portion of their work greatly exceed those connected with the Tables of Deaths published in the Census of 1841, chiefly owing to the extraordinary increase in the numbers of deaths.” It almost seems as though the reader’s sympathy is being evoked not for the people behind the statistics but for the commissioners who had to work so hard to categorize the circumstances in which those people expired.
There was also a third kind of language used to cloak the horrors of the famine: an accusatory rage against the British authorities who had failed to prevent it. As it happens, it was another Wilde, Oscar’s mother and William’s wife, Jane, writing as a passionate and incendiary Irish nationalist under the pen name Speranza, who helped to invent that language. In 1847, she published a poem about the famine whose voice is that of the “wretches, famished, scorned,” who warn their oppressors that their deaths will be avenged: “But our whitening bones against ye will rise as witnesses, / From the cabins and the ditches, in their charred, uncoffin’d masses, // A ghastly, spectral army, before the great God we’ll stand, / And arraign ye as our murderers, the spoilers of our land.”
Jane’s fiercely unforgiving tone was adopted by militant Irish nationalists for whom the famine stood as the ultimate proof of English perfidy. But in her poem, too, the victims appear as an undifferentiated mass. Her avenging army of the undead is in its own way just as distanced as the numbers in her husband’s tables.
One difficulty in writing about the Great Hunger is scale. There have been, in absolute terms, many deadlier famines, but as Amartya Sen, the eminent Indian scholar of the subject, concluded, in “no other famine in the world [was] the proportion of people killed . . . as large as in the Irish famines in the 1840s.” The pathogen that caused it was a fungus-like water mold called Phytophthora infestans. Its effect on the potato gives “Rot,” a vigorous and engaging new study of the Irish famine by the historian Padraic X. Scanlan, its title. The blight began to infect the crop across much of western and northern Europe in the summer of 1845. In the Netherlands, about sixty thousand people died in the consequent famine—a terrible loss, but a fraction of the mortality rate in Ireland. It is, oddly, easier to form a mental picture of what it might have been like to witness the Dutch tragedy than to truly convey the magnitude of the suffering in Ireland.
Another difficulty is that the Great Hunger was not just an Irish event. It bled far beyond its own borders, seeping into the national narratives of the rest of the Anglophone world. Only about one in three people born in Ireland in the early eighteen-thirties would die at home of old age. The other two either were consumed by the famine or joined the exodus in which, between 1845 and 1855, almost 1.5 million sailed to North America and hundreds of thousands to Britain and Australia, making the Irish famine a central episode in the history of those countries, too.
There has long been something inarticulable about this vast human disaster. In a preface to the monumental “Atlas of the Great Irish Famine,” published in 2012, the former President of Ireland, Mary McAleese, observed that “for many years the event was cloaked in silence, its memory for the most part buried or neglected.” The editors of the “Atlas” noted that, until recently, “there was a strange reluctance on the part of historians, historical geographers and others to address” the vast archival records. Right up to the nineteen-nineties, the annual rate of publication of scholarly papers on the subject of the famine never rose above a half-dozen.
The novelist Colm Tóibín suggested, in 1998, that the problem “may lie in the relationship between catastrophe and analytic narrative. How do you write about the Famine? What tone do you use?” He speculated, moreover, that the Great Hunger had created a great divide even in Irish consciousness. If, he said, he were to write a novel about his home town, Enniscorthy, that took place after the famine years, “I would not have to do much research”—because the place would resemble the one he grew up in. But he would find the years before and during the event itself “difficult to imagine.”
It is easy to sympathize with this difficulty. The famine set in motion a process of depopulation—even now, after many decades of growth, the island has a million fewer inhabitants than it had in 1841. It disproportionately affected those who spoke the Irish language, creating an Anglophone Ireland. It led ultimately to a radical reform of land ownership, which passed to a new class of Catholic farmers. The profoundly uncomfortable truth is that Ireland started to become modern when its poorest people were wiped out or sent into exile—a reality that is too painful to be faced without deep unease.
Even before the potato blight, there was a degree of hunger among the Irish rural underclass that seemed like an ugly remnant of a receding past. In 1837, two years after Alexis de Tocqueville published the first volume of “Democracy in America,” his lifelong collaborator, Gustave de Beaumont, went to Ireland, a country the two men had previously visited together. The book de Beaumont produced in 1839, “L’Irlande: Sociale, Politique et Religieuse,” was a grim companion piece to his friend’s largely optimistic vision of the future that was taking shape on the far side of the Atlantic. De Beaumont, a grandson by marriage of the Marquis de Lafayette, understood that, while the United States his ancestor had helped to create was a vigorous outgrowth of the British political traditions he and de Tocqueville so admired, Ireland was their poisoned fruit. America, he wrote, was “the land where destitution is the exception,” Ireland “the country where misery is the common rule.”
The problem was not that the land was barren: Scanlan records that, “in 1846, 3.3 million acres were planted with grain, and Irish farms raised more than 2.5 million cattle, 2.2 million sheep and 600,000 pigs.” But almost none of this food was available for consumption by the people who produced it. It was intended primarily for export to the burgeoning industrial cities of England. Thus, even Irish farmers who held ten or more acres and who would therefore have been regarded as well off, ate meat only at Christmas. “If an Irish family slaughtered their own pig, they would sell even the intestines and other offal,” Scanlan writes. He quotes the testimony of a farmer to a parliamentary commission, in 1836, that “he knew other leaseholders who had not eaten even an egg in six months. ‘We sell them now,’ he explained.”
