providence, progress and silence: writing the irish famine in mid-victorian belfast

Canadian Journal of Irish StudiesCanadian Association of Irish Studies

Providence, Progress and Silence: Writing the Irish Famine in Mid-Victorian BelfastAuthor(s): Sean FarrellSource: The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 36, No. 2 (FALL/AUTOMNE 2010), pp. 100-113Published by: Canadian Journal of Irish StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41955431 .

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Sean Farrell

Providence, Progress

and Silence:

Writing the Irish

Famine in Mid-

Victorian Belfast

In the late fall of 1858, the Reverend Abraham Dawson completed the Annals of Christ Churchy a history of the Anglican church critically situated between the edge of Belfast's mid- Victorian city center and Sandy Row. Dawson dedicated the book to the Reverend Thomas Drew, Christ Church's energetic and controversial minister, introducing the work as an affectionate description of twenty six years of God's husbandry in that place.1 The bound manuscript was given to the Reverend Drew and remained with the minister of Christ Church until the unholy trinity of Belfast's shifting demographics, vandalism, and resultant neglect led to the church's closing in 1993. A typescript of the manuscript is housed in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland and a number of historians interested in politics and religion in Victorian Belfast have used Dawson's church history to good effect.2

My aim in this essay, however, differs from these previous efforts. In the midst of his rather conventional if useful local church history, Dawson constructs a nineteen page narrative of the Irish Famine, a report replete with the language of Victorian medical science, statistics, and moralism,

I 101



that curious amalgam of providence and progress that Boyd Hilton termed "Christian economics" in his important examination of the impact of

evangelical Protestantism on nineteenth-century British economic thought.3 The first part of this essay charts this dynamic, exploring the ways that Dawson used data from Sir William Wilde's famous 1851 census and other reports to craft an optimistic but not particularly inhumane interpretation of the Great

Hunger. It thus stands as an immediate testament to the power of Wildes monumental work, first published in 1856, only two years before Dawson's

history was finished. Historians long have understood the critical roles that key figures like Wilde and Sir Charles Trevelyan played in framing the ways that British and Irish men and women made sense of the Famine.4 Few historians, however, have examined how Irish writers translated and reconfigured these texts, and Dawsons narrative illustrates the speed with which these key Famine narratives were translated into local accounts of the Great Hunger.

But the famine narrative in the Annals of Christ Church is more than that; there is an important regional dimension to Dawsons story, one that locates the Famine as something that was largely "out there," foreign to the east Ulster counties of Antrim and Down. A great deal of work has been done on the ways that the Irish Famine has acted as a lieu de mémoire , but Dawsons treatment reminds us that the Great Hunger could also act as a locus of forgetting, of exclusion and silence.5 This essay concludes with a consideration of the ways that Dawson constructs the famine as something that occurred outside of Bel- fast. This has been replicated in part by modern Irish historical writing, which until recently has paid less attention to the Irish Famines impact on Ulster

society.6 Given the key role that different imaginings of the traumas of the Irish

past played in the evolution in modern nationalism and unionism, I think this

strategic silence is a critical variable in the complex formation of mid- and late-Victorian Ulster politics, a fiction that proved to be vital in sharpening the deepening sectarianism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Abraham Dawson was born in 1826, the son of William and Elizabeth Dawson of Bovaine, County Tyrone. After graduating from Trinity College Dublin in 1850, he was ordained as a deacon for the curacy of Christ Church in 1851. In many ways, this was an exciting first assignment for the young clergyman. Founded in 1833 to cater to a working class Anglican population with very little church provision in the northern capital and led by one of the Church of Ireland's most dynamic and controversial ministers, the Reverend Thomas Drew, Christ Church quickly became one of the largest Church of Ireland congregations on the island; a community synonymous with a sharply

102 I CJIS Vol. 36, No. 2



conservative and sectarian working class politics. By all accounts, Dawson was an effective curate. Among many projects, he administered the 1852 census of Christ Church District, a thorough and revealing report on Anglican working class life in rapidly industrializing Belfast.7 Dawson clearly shared the Rever- end Drew s practical evangelicalism, conservative politics and commitment to

working class improvement; he was an active member of the Christ Church Protestant Association and gave a number of lectures before the Church of Ireland Working Mens Society. Dawsons politics sometimes emerged in novel

spaces. A report on his 1853 lecture on George Walker and his times reveals a rather peculiar personal connection and affinity for the clerical hero of the

Siege of Derry.8 By his own account, Dawson had participated in the 1838 reinternment of this key historical figure in Ulster Protestant mythology in Castlecaulfield, County Tyrone, and counted among his prize possessions one of the plaster casts of Walkers skull that had been made on that occasion. He also seems to have had something of a scholarly bent, publishing two articles on Walker and other short essays on Irish antiquities and local history in the Ulster Journal of Archaeology and the the Journal of the Historical and Archae-

ological Association of Ireland.9 Whatever his phrenological eccentricities or

scholarly inclinations, however, Dawson seems to have been a rather conventional conservative Anglican minister, an idea reflected across the pages of the Annals of Christ Church . Dawson left Belfast shortly after he finished the

history, moving to Gilford, County Down in 1857 to become the perpetual curate and then rector of Knocknamuckley Parish on the Armagh/Down border. After marrying Charity Wade in Tullylish, County Down in 1862 (they had six children), he moved to Seagoe Parish Church in County Armagh before end- ing his very successful clerical career as Dean of Dromore. He died in Belfast on November 20, 1905.10

As the title implies, Dawsons church history is written in annal form, featuring a chronologically arranged series of typically short and largely descriptive narratives of key events in the churchs history (particularly important events are given more extended treatment). On several occasions, the historical narratives momentum is interrupted by longer interpretative discussions of Irish events that are seemingly unconnected with the history of Christ Church. These breaks in the narrative flow of Dawsons history reinforce the sense that these events occurred in the distance, outside of the experience of this Anglican congregation in Belfast. The longest of these sections is Dawsons treatment of the Irish Famine.

In the Annals of Christ Churchy Dawson opens his famine narrative with a

Farrell Providence, Progress and Silence | 103



clear statement that frames the event as a kind of beneficial catastrophe - one that would have a net positive impact on Ireland's economic, moral and political state: "The following details of this calamity - which yet seems destined to mark a beneficial crisis for Ireland-..."11 This was a clear echo of Sir Charles

Trevelyans classic justification of British policy in Ireland, The Irish Crisis , which opened in a similar vein:

Unless we are much deceived, posterity will trace up to that famine, the commencement of a salutary revolution in the habits of a nation

long singularly unfortunate, and will acknowledge that on this, as on

many other occasions, Supreme Wisdom has educed permanent good out of transient evil.12

If Dawson lacked Trevelyans strident panache and tight focus on the moral deficiencies of the Irish people, they shared a commitment to the notion that the Famine ultimately would act as an engine of progress - that a new and better Ireland would emerge from this horrific episode of mass death. This optimistic view of the Irish Famines impact was broadly shared across

significant sectors of the British and Irish intelligentsia in the 1850s. In fact, it is interesting to note that Dawsons narrative largely replicates what Peter Gray has described as the dominant registers of Sir William Wildes 1851 Census- the scientific/medical, the gothic, and the rational/philanthropic13- albeit with

something of a northern accent. One of the obvious points that stems from

any reading of Dawsons famine narrative is the hegemonic position occupied by Wildes work, which operates as a kind of prototype and database for

optimistic interpretations of the famines impact. In sum, for Dawson, this was

providential progress at work; an interventionist God s terrible but ultimately productive plan.14

If Dawson introduced his narrative of the Irish Famine within a framework of Christian political economy, he quickly moved to reinforce that perspective by shifting into a longer scientific history of disease and starvation in Ireland. Like Wilde and other optimists, Dawson rooted his discussion of the Irish Famine in a much longer history; one that in some ways equated Ireland (and particularly the west of Ireland) with poverty and disease. In the short run, he argued that the famine was preceded by a deadly succession of epizootics, a term that refers to the outbreak of the equivalent of a human epidemic within an animal population.15 In sketching the thick history of epizootics in Ireland, Dawson pointed to various ailments that affected swine, horned




cattle, oxen, sheep, and domestic fowl between 1832 and 1851. Predictably, this was followed by a discussion of the onset of a remarkable array of ephybytics (epidemic diseases that affected potatoes, wheat, oats, turnips, beans, onions, and even larch trees in the years before the Famine), before the onset of the

potato blight, which combined with the spread of the epidemic human diseases to create the tragedy of Great Hunger.

If Dawsons discussion of epizootics predated the conventional origins of the Famine by thirteen years, his dispensation on the potato, that "most fickle of foodstuffs," was rooted in a much longer history indeed. His rather conventional history of the potato in Ireland asserts that it was first cultivated around 1600 on Sir Walter Raleighs estate in Youghal, County Cork; by 1725 the potato had become the dominant food for the Irish poor in extensive parts of the

country.16 While the historic sweep of Dawsons history here is not quite as extensive as the annals of Irish poverty stretching back to the eighth century that frame Wildes Census, the effect is much the same. For Dawson, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Ireland existed in a state of chronic famine due to an improvident reliance on the potato: "For upwards of a century, in all weather, during the extremes of heat and cold, in dryness and in moisture, whether planted early or late, the potato was destined to fail either in whole or in part, leaving those who trusted to its support for food and maintenance, nearly destitute for months together . . "17 As Christopher Morash has noted, the effect of this type of long historical narrative (particularly when written in annal form) is to undermine a sense of causality or development. Set in this

long perspective, the Irish Famine seems unavoidable, inevitable, completely natural - certainly not something that could have been prevented by government action or linked to the historic maldistribution of land and wealth.18

And yet we should also acknowledge what this document is not. For all its optimism about the impact of this beneficial crisis, Dawsons narrative does not link the Irish Famine to any notion of national sin, a framework that was widely adopted in the late 1840s and 1850s, most famously by Sir Charles Trevelyan. As Morashs work has made clear, the idea that the Famine was inextricably connected to character flaws peculiar to the Irish was also particularly attractive to premillennial evangelical Protestants. It is also worth noting a broader strand of Christian discourse here, since scholars often overlook the fact that the sectarian and/or colonial stereotypes wielded against Irish Catholics during and after the Famine were strengthened by a potent discursive association in Judeo -Christian thought between natural disaster and human sin that dates back to the Old Testament. Given the Reverend




Thomas Drews sympathies and Christ Churchs close ties to the Reverend

Hugh McNeile, the Antrim-born millenarian who saw the Famine as a "rod of

god" designed as a kind of national punishment for Irish sin, Dawsons refusal to blame the Irish explicitly for the Famine is at least worthy of note.19 Although Dawsons famine narrative featured a sense of regional moralism that we shall later examine in some depth, there is little sense that Irish men and women

brought the suffering of the Irish Famine on themselves in the Annals. What is featured here is a full accounting of the dead. Dawson spares no

detail, providing a thick statistical breakdown of Irish death and emigration between 1845 and 1851. Using Wildes innovative nosiological work in the Census of 1851 s Tables of Deaths,20 he breaks the deaths down by disease, detailing the men, women, and children lost to fever, scurvy, dysentery, diarrhea, cholera, influenza, and epidemic opthalmia. A wide range of governmental reports and census returns are then employed to erect a kind of mathematical framework for making sense of the Irish Famine and the resultant depopulation of the island. But this was no heartless legitimating exercise. Dawson makes that clear in his discussion of the nearly one million people estimated to have died in the last five years of the 1840s. Moving beyond his numbers, he argued that the totals were not sufficient to engage the almost inexpressible suffering of the Irish people: "But no pen has recorded the numbers of the forlorn and

starving, who perished by the wayside; or in the ditches; or of the mournful

groups, sometimes of whole families, who lay down and died one after another, upon the floor of their miserable cabin, and so remained, uncoffined and unburied, till chance revealed the appalling scene."21 What is striking here is the remarkably sudden register shift from the statistics of scientific analysis to the inexpressible and emotional pathos of the gothic.

Like Wilde and other optimists, Dawson seems determined to emphasize the good works done by both British and Irish men and women in response to this catastrophe. His text highlights the vigorous and generous activity of both the British government and private philanthropy throughout the crisis. Dawsons assertive support for British policy initiatives is particularly striking: "The exertions, indeed, made by the State, and by all classes of men within it were as unprecedented as the disaster which evoked them." While his narrative mentions the creation of public works and the distribution of both food and medical relief, he focuses in particular on two legislative initiatives designed for the benefit of the country: the repeal of the Corn Laws and the Encumbered Estates Act.22 According to Dawson, these measures allowed for the free

importation of critical grain supplies into Ireland and dramatically improved




the efficiency of Irish property transactions. By creating a free market in food and land, the Irish Famine could thus be rationalized as a modernizing agent for the island, the laws of political economy moving forward. On the ground, of course, the governments commitment to this path to modernity had a more

deadly provenance in Ireland.23 But it was not just the state that acted to reduce human suffering, the crisis

also allowed private individuals to do good works. Dawson mentions the un-

precedented donations that came to Ireland from private benevolence across the British Isles, Empire, and the world, but his real focus is much closer to home- the Belfast General Relief Fund (operated from January 1847 to May 1848). Initiated at the suggestion of Belfasts famed temperance advocate, the

Presbyterian minister, the Reverend John Edgar,24 and supported by many of the city s leading business, political, and religious elites, the Fund was designed to provide aid to the distressed population of Ireland as well as provide relief for paupers who had been removed to Belfast from England and Scotland. Dawson had a close connection to the Fund; his minister at Christ Church, the Reverend Thomas Drew, was one of two secretaries for the organization, and played a prominent role in the distribution of relief.25 Not surprisingly, Dawson highlights the hard work (four to seven hours a day) and sacrifice that Drew made in this time of need: "It was a time, indeed, of generous self-denial, and as the crisis demanded, many were willing to make sacrifice of property, time, and feelings, and not a few of health and even life itself, in their desire to

lighten to others the most woeful visitation known for many generations."26 If this lacked the aggressive confidence of Trevelyans The Irish Crisis, it is easy to see why this famine narrative from Sandy Row failed to resonate with broad sectors of the Irish population at home and abroad.

Predictably, Dawsons famine had a strong regional bias; in these pages the famine was something that happened "out there" and had little direct impact on Christ Church District. The narrative in question is almost a separate document from his history of the church. No mention is made of how this crisis impacted the life of the congregation; Christ Church only appears in the section through Drews dedicated public service to Belfast, Ulster, and Ireland. More tangibly, all of the particular events described in the text occur in the South and West of Ireland: Galway, Mayo, Cork, Kerry, Roscommon and Clare.27 At one level, this emphasis might simply reflect an important truth: there were strong regional dimensions to the deadly impact of the Irish Famine; Connacht and Munster had much higher death rates per population than Leinster and Ulster. But Dawsons regionalism is more than that. In his narrative, east Ulster is




almost exempt from the Famines impact, a "fact" that Dawson attributes to the

superior moral habits and work ethic of its inhabitants:

The counties of Down and Antrim were, in great measure, exceptions to the extreme destitution suffered in other localities. Their inhabitants possess, in general, more energy of character than their countrymen of the South and West, and are of more

untiring industry. They had long found, in various branches of manufacture, resources independent of the soil, or, at least not

immediately affected by the destruction of its products.28

It would be hard to find a clearer statement of the notion of ethnic difference at the heart of the Scots-Irish myth.29

For Dawson, certain responsibilities came with these cultural and material

advantages. If God had favored east Ulster, it was up to its inhabitants to share

generously with people suffering across the island in this time of need.30 Dawson was hardly alone; his comparatively modest expression of Ulster

exceptionalism was on full display at the first subscribers meeting of the Belfast General Relief Fund in March 1847. The meeting featured a spirited discussion about the distribution of the Funds resources, with J. F. Ferguson and R. J. Tennant challenging the notion that Belfast should share its good fortune with the rest of the island, arguing that the city should concentrate its limited resources on helping its own. Several evangelical ministers, most

notably the Reverend Thomas Drew and the Reverend John Edgar, fought back effectively for continuing the distribution of relief across Ireland, arguing that all of the island s poor deserved support and reminding participants that Belfast (and Ulster more generally) had received the lions share of funding, including a grant of one thousand pounds to keep the Belfast soup kitchen

open.31 While the evangelicals won the rhetorical day, what is interesting is that no one questioned the notion that Belfast and to a lesser extent, Ulster, stood

apart from the remainder of the island.32 Even a cursory glance at the operation of the Belfast General Relief Fund

reveals the degree to which Dawson diminished and/or whitewashed the Belfast experience of the Great Hunger. After all, both of Drew s reports on the distribution of the Funds grants make it quite clear that the vast majority of all moneys went to Belfast and its surrounding northern counties. While it may have been partially hidden by Belfasts urban industrial landscape, the famine was hardly something "out there." The critical fictions at the heart of




his account are only reinforced by an examination of the records of the city s Poor Law Board of Guardians.33 In January 1846, weekly admissions to the workhouse averaged between five and twenty; by May 1847, weekly admissions

ranged from one hundred and fifty to three hundred. A February 1847 medical attendants report stressed the need for expansion due to the pressure increased numbers placed on the workhouse system. Extension was needed, he argued, because of the

nature of the disease many most offensive in smell and so many huddled together, renders any attempt to supply the necessary comforts and proper medical treatment utterly fruitless and fear

dysentery which in a neighbouring workhouse is carrying off from 50 to 60. Each week is likely to become epidemic among us. It is admitted by everyone acquainted with the arrangements of

hospitals, that the more crowded the sick are, the higher is the rate of mortality and in this infirmary there are 10 in a space that should not admit more than 65.34

While matters were certainly not as dire as they were in West Cork in February 1847, the impact of the Irish Famine was real enough in Belfast.

Many of these same dynamics (the assertion of Ulster exceptionalism through the silencing of northern suffering during the famine) were at play during the great rate-in-aid controversy of 1849, only referenced obliquely in Dawsons text when he asserts that "The country, through the Poor Law Unions, taxed itself to the utmost of its capabilities."35 What is interesting here is the way that an edited famine experience in east Ulster is already being wielded as a sign of difference in 1858. This is by no means a full blown articulation of two nations theory, the political underpinning of later debates over Home Rule. Here the suffering of people in Belfast- Catholic, Dissenter and Protestant - is diminished or silenced to generate a sense of cultural superiority that for Dawson, justifies the movement of resources to help relieve suffering throughout the island. Others would use this sense of difference for less humane purposes.

Given the important role that memory of the Irish famine played in the construction of modern Irish nationalism and unionism, Dawsons silencing of Belfast suffering seems to be of acute interest and points to a need to chart the evolution of the construction of such silences much more carefully. And that really is the central point here. While Dawsons book can be cited as an




excellent example of the hegemonic position that Wildes 1851 Census occupied in the construction of optimistic interpretations of the Irish Famine, as an un-

published manuscript housed in an Anglican church in Belfast, it can hardly be said to have wielded too much influence over popular understandings of the Great Hunger. It is, however, an interesting testament to the ways that the Famine could act as a locus of exclusion, of silence - and points the way toward

understanding how that exclusion might be employed to reinforce or reinvent

potent divisions through different imaginings of the traumas of the Irish past. If David Nally is right that scholars have not devoted sufficient energy to exam-

ining how the Famine was "sanitized and naturalized" as the event unfolded,36 it is also true that we should play closer attention to the ways that local writers took up the challenge of translating and integrating aspects of these dominant famine narratives into their own stories. By looking closely at smaller histories like Dawson s Annals of Christ Church , we move beyond our traditional preoc- cupation with national and colonial discourse, and in the process gain a keener sense of the issues operating at the local and regional level, J

ENDNOTES

1 Reverend Abraham Dawson to the Reverend Thomas Drew, February 12, 1859 (loose leaf letter enclosed in the manuscript copy of the Annals of Christ Church). I'd like to thank Dr. Brian Walker and especially the Reverend S. Niall Bayly (the final minister of Christ Church) for allowing me to consult the original manuscript.

2 Most recently Mark Doyle in his Fighting Like the Devil for the Sake of God: Protestants, Catholics and the Origins of Violence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010).

3 Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785-1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 36-70. For examinations of the ways that these approaches shaped thinking about the Irish Famine, see Peter Gray, "Potatoes and Providence: British Government's Responses to the Great Famine," Bullán: an Irish Studies Journal 1, no. 1 (1994)» 75-90; Christopher Morash, Writing the Irish Famine (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 11-29 and 99-127.

4 The best treatment of the ways that ideology and politics shaped British policy- making during the Famine is Peter Gray, Famine, Land and Politics: British Government and Irish Society, 1843-50 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999)- Trevelyan is placed at the centre of the story in Cecil Woodham Smiths The Great




Hunger: Ireland, 1845-49 (London: H. Hamilton, 1962), and in David Nally s recent Human Encumbrances: Political Violence and the Great Irish Famine (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011). For Wilde, see Peter Gray, "William Wilde, the 1851 Census and the Great Famine," in Power and Popular Culture in Modern Ireland: Essays in Honour of James S. Donnelly ; Jr. :, ed. Michael de Nie and Sean Farrell (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2010), 57-58. The classic portrayal of Trevelyan is Cecil Woodham Smith, The Great Hunger: Ireland , 1845-49 (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). For an excellent overview of Famine historiography, see James S. Donnelly, Jr., The Great Irish Potato Famine (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 2001), 1-40, 209-46.

5 My thinking on this issue was sharpened by the work of Grace Neville, whose work on French responses to the Irish Famine is forthcoming with New Hibernia Review. For the foundational essay on contemporary memory studies, see Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire ," Representations , no. 26 (Spring 1989), 7-24.

6 For a thoughtful essay that examines these same types of erasures, see Kerby A. Miller and Bruce D. Boling with Liam Kennedy, "The Famines Scars: William Murphys Ulster and American Odyssey," in New Directions in Irish American History , ed. Kevin Kenny (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 36-60. For a capable survey, see Christine Kinealy and Gerard Mac Atasney, The Hidden Famine: Hunger, Poverty and Sectarianism in Belfast, 1840- 50 (Dublin: Pluto Press, 2000). While certainly a solid introduction, this book underlines the fact that serious research into the Belfast famine experience is desperately needed.

7 Christ Church Census of 1852 (Public Record Office of Northern Ireland [hereafter PRONI], CR1/13D/1). Volume 1 of the census provides information for over seven thousand individuals living in the far-flung district. Unfortunately, the second volume is missing. For two contemporary investigations of proletarian life in mid- Victorian Belfast, see Reverend William O'Hanlon, Walks Among the Poor of Belfast (Belfast: Henry Grier, 1853) and Andrew Malcolm, The Sanitary State of Belfast, with suggestions for its improvement (Belfast: Henry Grier, 1852). Dawson seems to have had a particular affinity for census work; he completed a useful and thorough census for Knocknamuckley Parish in 1857.

8 Annals of Christ Church , 152-53. Dawson also included a facsimile of Walkers handwriting in the text (found by the author between pages 221 and 222 of the original manuscript).

9 Abraham Dawson (Reverend), "Biographical Notice of Governor of Derry during the Siege of 1688 and 1689 - Part I and II," Ulster Journal of Archaeology [hereafter UJA], ist ser., no. 2 (1854): 129-35, 261-77; "Clog Ban, the name given to a handbell anciently used at funerals, and on solemn religious occasions," The Journal of the Historical and Archaeological Association of Ireland [hereafter JHAAI ], 4th ser., 6, pt. 1 (1883): 126-60; "Notes relating to the re-afforesting of Ireland, thru the Parish Records of Seagoe," JHAAI, 4th ser., 6, pt. 2 (1884): 351-53; "Terrier of the parish of Seagoe, Diocese of Dromore, 1742: A fragment," UJA, 2nd ser., 3, no. 4 (1897): 224-26; "St. Patricks View of the Braid Valley, and the burning of Milchu's homestead," UJA, 2nd ser., 3, no. 2 (1897): 113-19.




io E. D. Atkinson, Dromore: An Ulster Diocese (Dundalk: W. Tempest, 1925), 71, 76, 131.

11 Annals of Christ Church , 142.

12 Charles Trevelyan, The Irish Crisis (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1848), 1.

13 Gray, "William Wilde, the 1851 Census and the Great Famine," 57-58.

14 As Boyd Hilton has made clear, the overlapping registers of early nineteenth-century political economy and evangelical economics makes for some interesting twists and turns. See Hilton, Age of Atonement, 66-70. This was certainly true in Victorian Belfast. The Reverend Thomas Drew, for example, was a clear and regular critic of Malthusian doctrine (because its pessimistic vision failed to account for the work- ings of an interventionist God), but strongly agreed with many of the basic notions of political economy in which it was typically embedded.

15 For Mid- Victorian understandings of epizootics, see Michael Worboys, Spreading Germs: Disease Theories and Medical Practice in Britain , 1865-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 47-56.

16 Annals of Christ Churchy 144. In its general outlines at least, Dawson's account accords pretty well with scholarly consensus about the introduction of the potato into Ireland. For an excellent overview, see Austin Bourke, The Visitation of God?: The Potato and the Great Irish Famine (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1993)» 9-16.

17 Annals of Christ Church, 145.

18 Morash, Writing the Irish Famine , 12.

19 Hugh McNeile, The Famine A Rod of God: Its Provoking Cause - Its Merciful Design (London and Liverpool: Seeley, Burnside and Seeley; Arthur Newling, 1847), 8, 23. Drew saw McNeile as one of the true Christian figures who was fighting the good fight. In 1839, he attempted to get the Protestant press to stop advertising for theatre and other sinful amusements by pointing out the contradiction of telling readers to

go see "some representative of Jim Crow" in the theatre on Saturday and then attend the "Christian oratory of Revd Hugh McNeile" on Sunday. See Ulster Times , January 12, 1839. The following year he identified McNeile as the true Protestant champion against Popery. Not surprisingly, McNeile blamed the famine on a sinful toleration of Roman Catholicism. At the same time, it is also worth noting that he supported relief. See Jennifer Fegan, Literature and the Irish Famine, 1845-1919 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 60-61.

20 Census of Ireland 1851: Part V: Tables of Deaths, PP 1856 [2087].

21 Annals of Christ Church, 153-54-

22 Ibid., 155-57.




23 For a recent study, see Nally, Human Encumbrances , 129-73.

24 The Reverend Thomas Drew s overview of the Funds history can be found in a report reprinted in the Belfast Newsletter. See Belfast Newsletter , January 5, 1849.

25 Ibid. For an interim report, see coverage of the initial subscribers meeting: Belfast Newsletter , March 23, 1847. A general overview can be found in Kinealy and Mac Atasney, The Hidden Famine , 114-20.

26 Annals of Christ Church , 159-60.

27 Ibid., 151.

28 Ibid., 157. For a brief review of claims of Ulster exceptionalism during the Famine, see Nally, Human Encumbrances , 84-85.

29 See Kerby A. Miller, "'Scotch-Irish Myths' and 'Irish' Identities in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth- Century America," in New Perspectives on the Irish Diaspora , ed. Charles Fanning (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 75-92. For the continuing vitality of these ideas, see the popularity of James Webb, Born Fighting : How the Scots Irish Shaped America (New York: Broadway Books, 1994).

30 Annals of Christ Church , 158-59.

31 Belfast Newsletter , March 23, 1847.

32 Cooke's famous riposte ("Look at Belfast and be a Repealer if you can") to O'Connell's visit to Belfast was popularized in William McComb's The Repealer Repulsed , often cited as a foundational text for Ulster Unionism. See Patrick Maume, "Repelling the Repealer: William McComb's Caricatures of Daniel O'Connell," History Ireland 13, no. 2 (2005), http://www.historyireland. com/volumes/volumei3/issue2/features/?id=ii38i6.

33 See the Belfast Newsletter or the Northern Whig for general press coverage. While the Poor Law records are not complete until the 1850s, the Famine's impact can be charted through the minutes of the Board of Guardians; see Belfast Poor Law Union Board of Guardians, Minutes, 1842-60 (PRONI, /BG/7/1-12). For an overview, see Kinealy and Mac Atasney, The Hidden Famine.

34 Medical Attendant Report, February 3, 1847, Belfast Poor Law Union Board of Guardians (PRONI, BG/7/A/5/183-4).

35 Annals of Christ Church , 156. For a solid treatment of the politics of the rate-in- aid issue, see James Grant, "The Great Famine and the Poor Law in Ulster: The Rate-in-Aid Issue of 1849," Irish Historical Studies 27, no. 105 (1990): 30-47.

36 Nally, Human Encumbrances , 175.




providence, progress and silence: writing the irish famine in mid-victorian belfast

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