‘There But For The Grace of God Go I’: Middle-Class Catholic Responses to Ireland’s Great Famine*

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Enda Delaney
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Irish Nationalism ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Irish History ◽  
Irish Famine ◽  
Catholic Clergy ◽  
Great Famine ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Great Irish Famine

Abstract Over the course of the nineteenth century, the Irish Catholic middle class became more powerful in both political and economic terms. It was this group that became the backbone of Irish nationalism as it emerged in the 1870s and 1880s. But how did the Catholic middle classes respond to what was the greatest disaster in Irish history, Ireland’s Great Famine of the 1840s? This article offers an account, based on a wide range of evidence, of the responses to the events of the Famine years, focusing especially on the role of the rural middle classes and the Catholic clergy, two of the most powerful elements within Irish political and social life. The overall argument is that, while it suited later nationalists to underline the universal nature of the catastrophe, suffering during the Great Irish Famine was concentrated in the ranks of the Catholic rural underclass, which was decimated by death and emigration.

scholarly journals Charity as Social Justice: Antonio Rosmini and the Great Irish Famine

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
FRANCESCO ZAVATTI
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Irish Famine ◽  
Great Famine ◽  
Great Irish Famine

The article sheds light on the significant fundraising and relief activities for Ireland during the Great Famine (1845–50) initiated in 1847 by the Italian philosopher and cleric Antonio Rosmini and his network in Savoy-Piedmont, Lombardy-Venetia and England. By analysing Rosmini's philosophical and political writings, the article demonstrates that Rosmini considered aid in times of crisis as an act of social justice for which individuals have to take responsibility. By analysing documents from the Italian and Irish archives, the article gives an account of the fundraising effort's practices of networking, appealing, almsgiving and delivery.

scholarly journals The Next World and the New World: Relief, Migration, and the Great Irish Famine

2019 ◽  
Vol 79 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-355 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cormac Ó Gráda
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
Excess Mortality ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Public Works ◽  
Food Aid ◽  
Assisted Migration ◽  
Irish Famine ◽  
Great Famine ◽  
Great Irish Famine ◽  
Population Economics

Ireland on the eve of the Great Famine was a poor and backward economy. The Great Irish Famine of the 1840s is accordingly often considered the classic example of Malthusian population economics in action. However, unlike most historical famines, the Great Famine was not the product of a harvest shortfall, but of a major ecological disaster. Because there could be no return to the status quo ante, textbook famine relief in the form of public works or food aid was not enough. Fortunately, in an era of open borders mass emigration helped contain excess mortality, subject to the limitation that the very poorest could not afford to leave. In general, the authorities did not countenance publicly assisted migration. This article discusses the lessons to be learned from two exceptional schemes for assisting destitute emigrants during and in the wake of the famine.

Transportation Convictions during the Great Irish Famine

2006 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Woodward
Keyword(s):  
Young Men ◽  
Criminal Activity ◽  
Irish Famine ◽  
Great Famine ◽  
Great Irish Famine

Periods of famine would seem to entail not only increased criminal activity but also a greater range of people willing to commit crimes to avoid starvation. Transportation data from Ireland during the Great Famine of the 1840s confirms an increase in criminal activity, revealing that the locus of crime shifted significantly toward the areas most seriously affected by famine conditions. The characteristics of the criminals, however, did not change dramatically. Young men continued to be the main perpetrators, as they had been before the Famine, although those convicted during the Famine often received lighter sentences.

scholarly journals ‘Irish fever’ in Britain during the Great Famine: immigration, disease and the legacy of ‘Black ’47’

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (166) ◽  
pp. 270-294 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lewis Darwen ◽  
Donald M. MacRaild ◽  
Brian Gurrin ◽  
Liam Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Mortality Rates ◽  
Irish Sea ◽  
Irish Population ◽  
Irish Famine ◽  
Great Famine ◽  
Great Irish Famine ◽  
Epidemic Typhus ◽  
Deadly Disease ◽  
The Irish Sea ◽  
National Perspective

AbstractDuring the worst year of the Great Irish Famine, ‘Black ’47’, tens of thousands of people fled across the Irish Sea from Ireland to Britain, desperately escaping the starvation and disease plaguing their country. These refugees, crowding unavoidably into the most insalubrious accommodation British towns and cities had to offer, were soon blamed for deadly outbreaks of epidemic typhus which emerged across the country during the first half of 1847. Indeed, they were accused of transporting the pestilence, then raging in Ireland, over with them. Typhus mortality rates in Ireland and Britain soared, and so closely connected with the disease were the Irish in Britain that it was widely referred to as ‘Irish fever’. Much of what we know about this epidemic is based on a handful of studies focusing almost exclusively on major cities along the British west-coast. Moreover, there has been little attempt to understand the legacy of the episode on the Irish in Britain. Taking a national perspective, this article argues that the ‘Irish fever’ epidemic of 1847 spread far beyond the western port of entry, and that the epidemic, by entrenching the association of the Irish with deadly disease, contributed significantly to the difficulties Britain's Irish population faced in the 1850s.

Mortality among institutionalised children during the Great Famine in Ireland: bioarchaeological contextualisation of non-adult mortality rates in the Kilkenny Union Workhouse, 1846–1851

2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
JONNY GEBER
Keyword(s):  
Infectious Disease ◽  
Mortality Rates ◽  
Adult Mortality ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
Burial Ground ◽  
Irish Famine ◽  
Great Famine ◽  
Great Irish Famine ◽  
Mass Burial ◽  
Archaeological Excavations

ABSTRACTOver half of all victims of the Great Irish Famine (1845–1852) were children. Many of these deaths took place in the union workhouses: institutions of government poor relief which for many were the last resort in a desperate struggle to survive famine-induced conditions such as starvation and infectious disease. Archaeological excavations of a mass burial ground dating to 1847–1851 at the former workhouse in Kilkenny City have provided the opportunity to undertake a detailed interdisciplinary exploration of non-adult mortality in an Irish workhouse during the height of the Famine.

scholarly journals The lived experiences of the African middle classes Introduction

Africa ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 90 (3) ◽  
pp. 429-438 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Mercer ◽  
Charlotte Lemanski
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Group ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Individual

What are the experiences of the African middle classes, and what do their experiences tell us about social change on the continent? While there have been ample attempts to demarcate the parameters of this social group, the necessary work of tracing the social life and social relations of the middle classes is just beginning. The articles in this special issue provide compelling accounts of the ways in which the middle classes are as much made through their social relations and social practices as they are (if indeed they are) identifiable through aggregate snapshots of income, consumption habits and voting behaviours. Rachel Spronk (2018: 316) has argued that ‘the middle class is not a clear object in the sense of an existing group that can be clearly delineated; rather, it is a classification-in-the-making’. We agree, and our aim in bringing these contributions together in this special issue is to develop our understanding of how this process is emerging in different contexts across Africa. In her opening contribution, Carola Lentz suggests that we need more research on ‘the social dynamics of “doing being middle-class”’, or what we term here ‘middle-classness’, which attends to this ‘classification-in-the-making’ through urban–rural changes over intergenerational life courses, multi-class households, kinship and social relations. Such an agenda has recently been opened up by two edited volumes on the African middle classes (Melber 2016; Kroeker et al. 2018). We further develop this agenda here through a series of empirically rich articles by scholars in African studies, anthropology, literature and sociology that explicitly address the question of the lived experiences of the middle classes. Echoing Spronk's unease with taking ‘the middle class’ as an already constituted social group, what emerges across the articles is rather the unstable, tenuous and context-specific nature of middle-class prosperity in contemporary Africa. Social positions shift – or are questioned – as one moves from the suburb to the township (Ndlovu on South Africa) or into state-subsidized high-rise apartments (Gastrow on Angola). Stability gives way over time to precarity (Southall on Zimbabwe). Wealth is not tied to the individual but circulates more widely through social relations. Should one invest in the nuclear or the extended family (Hull on South Africa; Spronk on Ghana)? In a house or a car (Durham on Botswana)? And why does it matter – for the individual, the household, the family, the city, the nation and the continent? To grasp what it means to be middle-class in Africa today necessarily requires an understanding of the historical, social and spatial embeddedness of lived experiences at multiple scales.

Lying in Early Modern English Culture

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Hadfield
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Constant Feature ◽  
The Right ◽  
English Culture

Lying in Early Modern English Culture is a major study of ideas of truth and falsehood from the advent of the Reformation to the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot. The period is characterized by panic and chaos when few had any idea how religious, cultural, and social life would develop after the traumatic division of Christendom. Many saw the need for a secular power to define the truth; others declared that their allegiances belonged elsewhere. Accordingly there was a constant battle between competing authorities for the right to declare what was the truth and so label opponents as liars. Issues of truth and lying were, therefore, a constant feature of everyday life, determining ideas of identity, politics, speech, sex, marriage, and social behaviour, as well as philosophy and religion. This book is a cultural history of truth and lying from the 1530s to the 1610s, showing how lying needs to be understood in practice and theory, concentrating on a series of particular events, which are read in terms of academic debates and more popular notions of lying. The book covers a wide range of material such as the trials of Anne Boleyn and Thomas More, the divorce of Frances Howard, and the murder of Anthony James by Annis and George Dell; works of literature such as Othello, The Faerie Queene, A Mirror for Magistrates, and The Unfortunate Traveller; works of popular culture such as the herring pamphlet of 1597; and major writings by Castiglione, Montaigne, Erasmus, Luther, and Tyndale.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document