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The Great Hunger: Ireland: 1845-1849

4.11 of 5 stars 4.11 · rating details · 311 ratings · 45 reviews

The Irish potato famine of the 1840s, perhaps the most appalling event of the Victorian era, killed over a million people and drove as many more to emigrate to America. It may not have been the result of deliberate government policy, yet British 'obtuseness, short-sightedness and ignorance' - and stubborn commitment to laissez-faire 'solutions' - largely caused the disaste...more

Paperback, 528 pages

Published September 1st 1992 by Penguin Books (first published 1962)

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Feb 21, 2013 Viola rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: http-www-solidarityforeverbook-com

'Is Britain’s cover-up of its 1845-1850 holocaust in Ireland the most successful Big Lie in all of history?

The cover-up is accomplished by the same British terrorism and bribery that perpetrated the genocide.
Consider: why does Irish President Mary Robinson call it “Ireland’s greatest natural disaster” while she conceals the British army’s role?

Potato blight, “phytophthora infestans”, did spread from America to Europe in 1844, to England and then Ireland in 1845 but it didn’t cause famine anywh...more

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Nov 10, 2011 Arwen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: historical-biographical

I picked this book up at a time when I am researching my family history and at the moment in particular my 3 x great grandparents Hugh and Catherine who came from Roscommon, Ireland, to England in 1852. They would have been teenagers at the time of the great famine.. Having read the book, I'm surprised they or anyone else lived to emigrate. I know my ancestors were humble people who couldn't read or write, and I really wonder how they survived, and how many of their families perished.
It's easy h...more

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Mar 20, 2013 DoctorM rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: history-and-historiography

A fine introduction to one of the great disasters of the modern world--- the Irish Famine of the mid and late 1840s. Woodham-Smith tells the tale with both compassion for a land where perhaps a quarter of the population was destitute even in good years and with a subtle, icy coldness for the administrators in London who refused to take any of the steps that seem so obvious today. (Yes, I'm New Orleans-born, and my thought while reading "The Great Hunger" was that the relief efforts undertaken in...more A fine introduction to one of the great disasters of the modern world--- the Irish Famine of the mid and late 1840s. Woodham-Smith tells the tale with both compassion for a land where perhaps a quarter of the population was destitute even in good years and with a subtle, icy coldness for the administrators in London who refused to take any of the steps that seem so obvious today. (Yes, I'm New Orleans-born, and my thought while reading "The Great Hunger" was that the relief efforts undertaken in Ireland after 1845 managed to make the way the American administration handled the Katrina disaster seem like a model of planning and efficiency)

Woodham-Smith was writing at the end of the 1950s--- before demography and statistics were assimilated by historians, and she relies on prose rather than statistics to tell her tale. The more recent, more social-science look at the famine is Kinealy's "The Great Calamity, which should be read in tandem with Woodham-Smith. But Woodham-Smith's account is telling--- powerful and poignant both ---and she lays out a clear account of a period when one disaster (the potato blight, extreme weather, typhus, cholera) followed close on another, and where horror spread not only across Ireland, but to Montreal and New York as well, where refugees from the famine carried plague to new shores.

Woodham-Smith lays out the sheer backwardness of Ireland in the 1840s, of a land so impoverished that when the British government did import American wheat for famine relief, there were no mills to grind it--- since the bulk of the rural population could afford nothing but potatoes and almost never had bread. She points out the paradox of continuing grain exports at the height of the famine, since many small and middling landlords had no domestic market for grain, and were themselves dependent on exports to pay their own rents to the largely absentee big landlord class. She also skewers the bland, blind belief of the Treasury mandarins in London, with their unquestioning belief in free trade and laissez-faire that kept them from distributing free or cheap seed or provisions lest it "undermine the market". She catches the blindness, too, of the Young Ireland revolutionaries of 1848, who tried to lead a peasant uprising with no planning or weapons, and with no conception that the rural population were too starved and broken to have any energy for rebellion.

A fine book, and a fine introduction to a ghastly topic. Very much worth reading.(less)

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Oct 21, 2009 Louise rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

After reading this book I'm amazed my Irish ancestors survived long enough to be able to emigrate to England and for that I am truly thankful or I wouldn't be here to write this review. Truly harrowing in it's detail of the sufferings of the Irish people and what we now see as their callous treatment by the British government. I also hadn't realised that famine was a regular occurence in Ireland because of their reliance on the potato, although in this case it went way beyond anything that had e...more

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Mar 10, 2012 Meryem rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: ireland-history

This is the best book I have ever read in my life. It is extraordinarily informative, gripping and horrifying. The catastrophe developed after centuries of colonialism, where the bountiful agricultural resources were extracted from Ireland while the Irish people were reduced to barely subsistence level lives: diet of one staple (in spite of the variety of exports they raised), starvation every year before the potato crop was ready, work to pay rent with hardly any currency exchanged, education a...more This is the best book I have ever read in my life. It is extraordinarily informative, gripping and horrifying. The catastrophe developed after centuries of colonialism, where the bountiful agricultural resources were extracted from Ireland while the Irish people were reduced to barely subsistence level lives: diet of one staple (in spite of the variety of exports they raised), starvation every year before the potato crop was ready, work to pay rent with hardly any currency exchanged, education and language outlawed, no professions allowed. The way the government handled the crisis is an early example of the deliberate subjugation of human suffering to the dynamics of market forces and profiteering. After a complete failure of the potato crop, the government expected the people to recover themselves with no seed and no currency to buy it. The people had sold even their clothes to get food.

The flight to America usually offered no relief as the people were sent off with little or no food for the voyage and insufficient water. Most arrived as skin and bones, many naked or nearly so, with typhus or cholera spreading through the ships. There was no welcome for these immigrants. They were detested for their extreme neediness and the disease they brought to American cities (Canada and US). There was no infrastructure to receive such an influx of destitute, unskilled, starving people. They died, along with their doctors, nurses, and priests in filthy off-shore fever hospitals or they were exploited in miserable death-trap slums.

The author uses primary sources, such as letters, newspapers, and government edicts to tell the story. Names are mentioned, both the good guys and the bad guys. (However, the author did miss the story of the Ottoman Sultan's exchange of letters with Queen Victoria and the assistance he sent to Drogheda secretly so as not to upstage her contribution.) Everyone who has Irish blood in their veins needs to know this story, which is much more complex and significant than the words "Irish potato famine" convey. This book should be life-changing for whoever reads and understands what happened and why. (less)

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Jan 02, 2013 Phillip Kay rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

How equipped are our governments to deal with emergencies? Supposing a worldwide epidemic, which many scientists forecast, or even a tornado, were to strike, would there be an effective support system with adequate funds to spring immediately into action? Do we want this to happen? Have we learnt anything from the past?

Cecil Woodham-Smith wrote a book in 1962 called The Great Hunger which implicitly asks these question. She had shown how slow the British Government was to learn from the mistakes...more

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Jun 10, 2013 Matthew Bartlett rated it 5 of 5 stars

A heart breaking, step by step retelling of how the Great Famine afflicted Ireland, causing a mass exodus by the population. It reveals a poor response to the famine as well as what diseases resulted and what happened to many who tried to flee and survive.

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Sep 14, 2012 Nelleke rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 19th-century, non-fiction, favourite, government, history, ireland

A terrible but good book. About the patato-famine in Ireland. The book explains how it could happen and what the awful consequences were. A great part is about politics, that part was hard for me to understand (probably because in general I am not interested in politics). But the other part was about the irish people and how they lived in the country. This part is terrible, because people were so poor they only possessed a pig and a dungheap and patatoes. Even before the famine many people did l...more

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Jan 04, 2011 Leslie rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: history, 19th-century

This is an older history of the famine (first published 1962), a good example of well-written general history. Its subject is, of course, thoroughly horrifying. What struck me as I read was how much history repeats itself and how little some learn from it. The Irish died not really because of the potato blight but because of insanely stupid laws governing land ownership and tenancy that were set up to benefit a tiny few and to exploit and degrade the many and were subsequently defended, even at...more

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Jan 02, 2012 Timothy Riley rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: european-history, ireland

I had always wanted to know more about this sad topic. One of the things I learned was how complicated it all was. Lots of people unilaterally blame the british, but it was more complicated than that. It as caused by centuries of british repression that caused huge land ownership problems and dependence on one crop because the people were so poor and treated so badly by the landlords who were mostly british or scottish protestants. Trevelyan was the biggest bastard of all the british bureaucrats...more

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Dec 20, 2009 Bernadette rated it 5 of 5 stars

I've had this book on my shelves for too many years now but for some reason decided to take it on hols to Ireland in October. For a serious work on a tragic period in Irish history, it was a very accessible read. What was fascinating for me was that the reasons for what happened during 45-49 were many and complex - far more subtle in some cases than simply a failure of the potato crop and cruelty by UK politicians. But the consequences of a failure of nature and of people who should care was bre...more

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Apr 20, 2012 Mark Oconnor rated it 5 of 5 stars

An amazing account of the events from 1845-1849 of the Irish Famine. The amount of correspondence that survived from that era is impressive, and the author is very thorough at establishing the conditions immediately preceding the famine that provided the perfect storm for this tragedy. Trevelyan comes out as the chief villain for his utter callousness towards the Irish, with his lieutenant Charles Woods coming in at a close second during the second half of the book. The author also spends a grea...more

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Oct 07, 2012 Suzanne rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: serious students of European history

Shelves: history, non-fiction

Well , that wasn’t pretty. Well-researched, informative, and educational, but definitely not pretty.

I’d always wondered how the Irish potato famine happened, how a country could depend so heavily on one crop, one food source so completely, that its failure could have the kind of devastating effect this one did. The Great Hunger explains the perfect storm of conditions and forces that resulted in starvation for millions of people, emigration for hundreds of thousands more. At the time, all of Ir...more Well , that wasn’t pretty. Well-researched, informative, and educational, but definitely not pretty.

I’d always wondered how the Irish potato famine happened, how a country could depend so heavily on one crop, one food source so completely, that its failure could have the kind of devastating effect this one did. The Great Hunger explains the perfect storm of conditions and forces that resulted in starvation for millions of people, emigration for hundreds of thousands more. At the time, all of Ireland was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland under the 1801 Act of Union, with a combined Parliament in Westminster that had assimilated the Irish economy and legislature with that of England. The famine was a result of, cumulatively: land use policy, landlord- tenant relations, cycles of repression and rebellion, political and religious strife, bureaucracy, the ease with which potatoes could be cultivated and therefore the extent to which the Irish poor with very little land became dependent on that crop, administrative ineptitude in averting anticipated disasters, export policy, food distribution snafus and public works mismanagement, and conservative laissez faire economic policy by the English Treasury. The head of the English Treasury did not want to interfere with commerce with too much welfare --when there was no commerce to interfere with and absolutely no money at all for people to engage in commerce. The situation was complicated by simultaneous crop failures all over Europe the same year the Irish potato fell to serious blight (1846), and a serious financial crisis in England in 1847. Soup kitchens and the distribution of imported corn meal, which was nutritionally inadequate anyway, didn’t make a dent in the vast need. It became impossible to collect taxes to fund relief efforts among the landed Irish gentry who were becoming insolvent. After two years of this, a second round of the potato blight occurred in 1848. A pathetic attempt at an uprising by the Young Irelanders led by William Smith O’Brien failed, as it’s pretty hard to get people who are literally starving very organized, but resulted in further animosity between the Irish and English as the insurrection was put down. It was a mess. Even children were so eager to get out of Ireland they would commit crimes serious enough to result in sentences of exile or “transportation” that would get them sent to North America or Australia.

Some parts of the book get a little dry, with talk of legislative acts, politics and taxation rates, but there are also heart-breaking stories about the people: terrible descriptions of starving people, especially the children, and of the horrendously bad living conditions of the destitute, sick and dying, landlords turning people off of their little plots for non-payment of rent and tearing down their homes. Whole families were living in tiny windowless cellars or literally in ditches and bogs, many “half-naked” because they’d sold all their clothes along with everything else that wasn’t nailed down or even remotely edible-- and the definition of “edible” became increasingly flexible as the crisis deepened. People were actually dying by the side of the road of starvation. Epidemics of dysentery, typhus and “ship fever” decimated not only the emigrants travelling to North America in horribly ill-equipped ships, but also the towns where they landed, because there were not enough quarantine sites or hospitals to control the spread of disease. This did not endear them to their new neighbors.

The complete devastation occurring over the four years covered was so extreme it’s hard to realize it was only 165 years ago, in a Western country. Sir John Russell, the Prime Minister at the time, said the famine was “such as has not been known in modern times, indeed . . . like a famine of the 13th century acting upon a population of the 19th.” The book points out that the English tried to help for the first couple of years, but seriously faltered in their later attempts. The author credits not maliciousness on the part of the English government, but rather “obtuseness, short-sightedness, and ignorance.” But she generously allows that “it is doubtful if any Government in Europe, at the time, could have done more.” Still, the English don’t really come off looking that good.
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Oct 15, 2012 Karen rated it 4 of 5 stars

I have learned so much from this book about Ireland and it's history. A little heavy reading for me, but I like this type of book, even if it's a bit over my head at times. My eyes have been opened with regards to the misconceptions surrounding the Irish potato famine. Reading a historian's perspective is so enjoyable because you are reading a well researched historical account, and this author writes in a style that I can grasp. I would highly recommend it, really interesting!!

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Mar 03, 2013 D.j. Kelly rated it 5 of 5 stars

Although there are more recent works on An Gorta Mor - the Irish Famine, which of course wasn't a famine per se but an induced mass starvation of a food producing nation, this book is the definitive account and one which anyone interested in the period ought to have on their bookshelf. Cecil Woodham-Smith's book is an erudite account yet is clearly written and illuminating.

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Dec 02, 2012 Kath rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

An informative account of tragic human suffering and a government that could have prevented a good portion of that suffering but chose not to. It's still difficult for me to grasp how deeply the Irish were despised, both at home and abroad. And this book as well as several others I've read makes me wonder if immigrants stopped thinking of America as "the land of opportunity" as soon as they hit our shores. We didn't welcome them at all!

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Oct 31, 2012 Tom rated it 5 of 5 stars

This was a dense, factual book with a solid analysis of Potato Famine. It covered so much material that it was a hard slog. Some of the run-on sentences made it hard to follow in segments as did antiquated British terms for property and currency. It was however incredibly insightful. If you want to know more about the Potato Famine, this is the definitive resource.

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Aug 11, 2011 Jo rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is excellent, a really comprehensive account of the famine. The digression about the life of the Irish emigrants in New York is too long, but on the other hand there's a good explanation of contemporary theories about the cause of the potato blight, and of the discovery of the real cause in the 20th century.

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Mar 30, 2013 Englisharchaeologist rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: worst-books-ever

honestly? I'm a Brit, and all this portrays us as is evil, short sighted lunatics. Britain didn't control Ireland in the Victorian era. this is racist to Brits and extremely convinced that the Irish are a superior race. Bet you the guy who wrote this was Irish! PLEASE, FOR YOUR SAKE, NEVER READ THIS BOOK!

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May 11, 2013 Eddy Allen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: arts-and-historical

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Aug 27, 2012 Mark O'hagan rated it 4 of 5 stars

It was only after visiting the Famine museum in Strokestown House that I felt compelled to investigate the full story of the famine. This book is an outstanding piece of research into Ireland's darkest hour and should be considered as essential reading for every student of Irish history

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May 15, 2011 Katy Walters rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is such a heartbreaking and emotional read. It is also full of history, politics of the time and an indepth soul searching account of the suffering of the Irish people.It is a book that I keep close as my family suffered in that period.

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Jun 01, 2011 Des rated it 5 of 5 stars

I didn't give this book 5 stars because I thought that it was amazing , but because it provides the grim truth about an event which is drowned in myth and which basically made the Irish the Irish.

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Jun 12, 2013 Trinity School Summer Reading added it

Shelves: classics-department

The story of the potato famine in Ireland and why so many died or emigrated and the factors that led to the collapse of a country and the response of the British government are detailed so well that one sympathizes with all the sides involved.

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Aug 05, 2012 Patty Wehrli rated it 2 of 5 stars

This book was a big disappointment, the reviews were great, but basically it is a fictional fantasy of the author and has little to do with what actually happened in Ireland.

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Jun 13, 2011 Randy Cauthen rated it 4 of 5 stars

OK, two inevitable things about this book: 1. It's largely drawn from the perceptions/experiences of relative outsiders; 2. It's pretty damn depressing.
It's still worth it, though, if you brace yourself.

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Feb 24, 2008 Bap rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: ireland, non-fiction

It was the worst of all possible worlds. The potato crop, the mainstay for th e Irish underclass, fails not once but repeatedly. The English are hobbled by their antipathy for the Irish and their devotion to unvarnished capitalism and millions die and millions emigrate at a time when the Ireland is actually producing a surplus of food that is exported the England. Any possibility of a continuation of unification with England is extinquished by this four year period and its aftermath even though...more

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Jun 25, 2007 Grumpus rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: history

This really explained the Irish Potato famine. What led up to it and the British response to it. I never knew the politics and political structure behind it and how that exacerbated the situation there.

I was always curious about why the Irish were always so hated in America around the turn of the century. Many of the Irish were shipped to America with disease and were the illiterate poor that were "kicked to the curb" by being offered free passage to American and Canada. There they were held in...more

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Oct 26, 2012 Leslie marked it as to-read

Referenced in An Irish Country WEdding. I'll read anything the good Dr Fingal Flahertie recommends.

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Jan 14, 2010 ResoluteReader added it

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