The Great Hunger: Ireland: 1845-1849 | 
| Author: Cecil Blanche Fitzgerald Woodham-smith
Publisher: Penguin Group
Category: Book
List Price: $17.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  14 reviews
Sales Rank: 45119
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 528
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 4.8 x 1
ISBN: 014014515X
Dewey Decimal Number: 941.5081
EAN: 9780140145151
ASIN: 014014515X
Publication Date: September 1, 1992
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Binding tight, clean pages, no writing on text, average cover wear on glossy cover, front cover creases, good book.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 9 more reviews...
 "Low lie the fields of Athenry" September 17, 2007
11 out of 11 found this review helpful
"By a lonely prison wall, I heard a young girl calling
'Michael, they have taken you away
For you stole Trevelyan's corn
So the young might see the morn'
Now a prison ship lies waiting in the bay..."
THE GREAT HUNGER is the definitive history of the Irish Potato Famine of 1845-1849. When the Englishwoman Cecil Woodham-Smith published this book in 1962 she was vilified and branded a Communist by the British establishment which had spent the previous 120 years explaining away what is undoubtedly the greatest European famine since antiquity. Estimates of the dead are difficult to quantify. Conservative historians put the number at 1-2 million; others place it closer to 6,000,000. At least another 1.5 million Irish fled their homeland.
Like most disasters, "An Gortha Mor" seems both inevitable and avoidable in retrospect. The Irish population exploded in the first half of the 19th century reaching an official 8.2 million (and an unofficial ten million) just before the Famine. But unlike Britain, which had become heavily industrialized and was moving confidently into the modern and scientific Victorian Era, Ireland was sunk in a morass of poverty and dejection. The average Irish countryman led a life no better than the poorest serfs of Imperial Russia of the day, and the Irish were subject to all manner of legal restrictions, mass unemployment, subsistence agriculture, exploitation by landlords, and eviction at whim from the land and their homes, often just a rude mud cabin. With no education, and few skills other than potato farming, eviction meant almost certain death for husbands, wives and children. Often, they were driven even from the bogs where they'd found shelter after being put out.
The Blight, too, meant certain death for far too many. Eating nothing but potatoes and buttermilk, these most wretched people literally had nothing at all to sustain them after the crop turned into a glutinous, stinking mass of black rot. They died in droves, particularly in the poor west of Ireland, bleak and rocky Connaught. The typhus which followed killed more.
As hideous as all this seems, Cecil Woodham-Smith tells us that the Blight was only one factor in the disaster that overtook the Irish. More insidious was the attitude of the British administration which largely stayed hardset in its laissez-faire attitude, refusing to step in and feed the Irish, refusing to interfere with the free market economy of the day, and worst of all, refusing to grasp that the market economy only works when people have money or skills to trade for products and services. In 1845, Ireland was still a pre-capitalist economy, and the mercantile approach of the British simply could not be applied there; still, the British tried, and blamed their own failure to address the Famine on their convenient perceptions of Irish intransigence and laziness.
Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan may be one of the most hated figures in Ireland even to this day. Effectively the head of British efforts at Famine Relief, Trevelyan was unenamored of the Irish, he was a rock-ribbed capitalist, and, though moral and moralistic to a fault, was also just as singleminded, blind to the suffering of the populace, but fixed on promoting Irish efforts at self-help. He bought a parsimonious 100,000 Pounds Sterling worth of unmilled American corn, and doled it out to provide for the eight million Irish. Amazingly, Trevelyan kept food EXPORTS flowing out of the country at pre-Famine levels throughout (!) Nothing could interfere with trade.
A disciple of the philosopher Thomas Malthus, Trevelyan cast a cold and dispassionate eye over Ireland's circumstances, seeing them as a form of natural population control. At the same time, the British placed the country under virtual martial law, decreeing "seven long years Transportation way on down to Van Diemen's Land" (Tasmania) for minor infractions and acts of desperation (such as stealing corn).
Was this, as many have posited, an organized genocide? Certainly, there were those among the British who despised the Irish to that extent. On the other hand, if this had been an organized killing field, then why did the British do anything at all to help the Irish, little as it was?
Woodham-Smith's tales of people living in bogs, of coffinless mass funerals, of fever patients being abandoned by their terrified relations, of Ireland starving to death, cannot help but touch the reader. The British are presented as less calculating than more stupid, unable to adjust their thought processes to meet the crisis. Conditions were so awful and the Irish were so reduced and brutalized, forced to filthiness, criminal desperation and hair-trigger violence that when the Irish left Ireland (on rotten-bottomed Coffin Ships, like as not), their arrival in American and Canadian ports can be summed up shortly: NO IRISH NEED APPLY. "Paddy Wagons" were so named because they carried Irish miscreants almost exclusively for a time. Miraculously, the Irish rose, and rose all the way to the U.S. Presidency in just three generations.
More than just a history of the Potato Famine, THE GREAT HUNGER is an indictment of the too-common human propensities of blaming the victim, making gestures instead of taking action, and that of ultimately doing nothing. The truth behind every human tragedy can be found in the pages of THE GREAT HUNGER.
This is an essential read.
A Masterpiece May 24, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I have read and reread this history several times and bought copies for
my sons.
I don't believe anyone can understand the Ireland of today without
this touching and tragic reference.
FACTUAL ACCOUNT OF THE FAMINE March 16, 2006
6 out of 9 found this review helpful
In this account of the Famine,the author paints a picture of events which led up to ,and caused the Famine, the international poliics of the day, the weather patterns, the logistics of providing relief to so many destitute people.
Written factually and without blame it is a most interesting and informative read, I am glad I bought it.
Worthwhile Reminder February 3, 2006
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
This history book reminds us that the Irish were mistreated in their homeland and in the USA when they first arrived. It tells of the heroic efforts to help the impoverished, illiterate populace and of the failed attempts by the British government to deal with a culture so foreign to their own.
It is a reminder of how far the Irish have come since the Celtic Tiger is rampant and people from Eastern Europe and the third world are going to Ireland for jobs and better lives.
Cecil Woodham-Smith is a British woman.
 Had to read it for class September 19, 2005
4 out of 11 found this review helpful
I had to read this novel for a college course on the British Empire. It is definitely not an easy read, but is extremely interesting if you can get through it (which I of course had to, to write a paper on it..). It is definitely one of the better assignments I have had to do.
Anyway, I just wanted to leave a comment, that I think its ridiculous that a handful of people that reviewed this book did not even realize that the book is written by a woman...
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