THE OTHER IRISH FAMINE - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 99

cial gulf that existed between the educated metropolitan classes of Europe and the poor rural
masses in the early nineteenth century.
Much emphasis in recent historiography has been placed on the problematic European en-
counter with different races and nations around the world in the colonial period. This focus
can mute our sense of the heterogeneity of the European order itself, and the extraordinary
mutual alienation that existed between geographic regions within Europe, even before the
mass industrialization ofthecities forwhichMarx developed histheory ofclass struggle. Even
to a sensitive, liberal-minded city poet such as Keats, the poor Irish peasant appeared barely
human, “like an ape half starved.” Can it be any wonder then that the English rulers of mostly
rural Ireland, with less than poetic souls, were able to justify to themselves their indifference
to the deaths of tens of thousands of their Irish subjects during the Tambora emergency of
1816-18?
“A SEASON DREADFUL AND MELANCHOLY”
William Carleton, the most popular Irish writer of the first half of the nineteenth century, had
already overcome his humble beginnings in the rural north to achieve literary celebrity in
Dublin when, in 1847, he made a return pilgrimage to his birthplace in the Clogher Valley.
There, among the mountain villages of County Tyrone, he found tragic signs of the Great
Famine. Landlords had taken advantage of the penury of their smallholding farmers to launch
wholesale evictions on their properties, literally casting their tenants out to the wind and
weather. One once populous village near Carleton's childhood home, called Ballyscally, “was
now a scene of perfect desolation. Out of seventy or eighty comfortable cottages, [the land-
lord] had not left one standing.” 2
Carleton's rage and despair over the fate of the inhabitants of Ballyscally, and the millions
of others of his countrymen in the grip of the Great Famine, fired his literary imagination.
Instead of writing a novel about the current crisis, however, he looked back to the period of
famine and pestilence of which he had firsthand experience, the Tambora years of 1816-18,
which he had passed as an itinerant witness to the suffering of the rural poor in Ulster. He
dedicated his 1847 novel, The Black Prophet: A Tale of Irish Famine , to the British prime min-
ister Lord John Russell because he
knew that the approaching destitution and misery would require all possible sympathy from
every available source; and he hoped … that by placing before the eyes of those who had
only heard of such inflictions, faithful and unexaggerated pictures of all that the unhappy
people suffer under them, he might, perchance, stir that sympathy into active and efficient
benevolence. 3
Carleton's plea fell on deaf ears. It is a matter of historical record that Lord Rus-
sell—encouraged by an influential laissez-faire ideologue in Treasury named Charles Trevely-
an—allowed a million British subjects to perish on the doorstep of the most powerful and
affluent empire on Earth in the years 1845-49. It was a providential corrective—Trevelyan
not-so-secretly believed—to the imperial burden of Irish overpopulation and underdevelop-
ment.