THE OTHER IRISH FAMINE - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 98

CHAPTER EIGHT
THE OTHER IRISH FAMINE
There are no walls can stop hunger.
—IRISH SAYING
It is important to remember that the misery of the Tambora period in Europe—years of famine,
disease, and homelessness—was borne overwhelmingly by the poor, who left scant record of
their sufferings. For the middle and upper classes—including the Shelleys and their circle—the
social and economic upheaval of those years presented only minor inconveniences. By contrast
with the illiterate underclass, these affluent Europeans left voluminous accounts of their lives
and impressions, including great poems like “Mont Blanc.” To look at only their documentary
record, therefore, can leave one with the misleading idea that the Tambora years were not ex-
ceptional in the turbulent history of the early nineteenth century. We must scrutinize closely
what they wrote for clues to the experience of the silent millions who suffered displacement,
hunger, disease, and death in the eruption's wake. From the bubble of privilege within which
the Shelleys and their peers composed their brilliant verse and letters, it is possible to catch
gleams of this benighted other world through which they mostly passed oblivious.
The young London poet John Keats, for example—a peripheral but admired member of the
Shelley Circle—set out on a walking tour of Scotland and Ireland in the Tambora summer of
1818. In Scotland, he dedicated sonnets to Robert Burns and danced a reel with the local girls,
but his experience in famine-stricken Ireland, on the roads around Belfast, left him disgusted
and dismayed. “We had too much opportunity,” he wrote to his brother Tom, “to see the worse
than nakedness, the rags, the dirt and misery of the poor common Irish.” In a passage that
shows Keats struggling to adapt his abundant powers of lyric expression to scenes of grotesque
poverty, he describes his surreal encounter with an old woman seated in an improvised sedan
chair held aloft by two beggar children, as if in grotesque parody of aristocratic manners:
The Duchess of Dunghill—it is no laughing matter tho—Imagine the worst dog kennel you
ever saw placed upon two poles … In such a wretched thing sat a squalid old Woman squat
like an ape half starved from a scarcity of Buiscuit [ sic ] in its passage from Madagascar to
the cape—with a pipe in her mouth and looking out with a round-eyed skinny lidded inan-
ity—with a sort of horizontal idiotic movement of her head—squab and lean she sat and puff'd
out the smoke while the two ragged tattered Girls carried her along—
Keats, like any young writer might, weighs up the literary possibilities of the scene: “What
a thing,” he wonders, “would be a history of her Life and sensations.” 1 What a thing in-
deed—except, of course, he didn't write that history, and neither did anyone else. This is not
simply from a deficit of sympathy—Keats, like other middle-class tourists in Ireland in those
years, expresses “absolute despair” at what he encounters—rather, it speaks to the yawning so-