“In Ireland I’d Have Starved”: North American Fiction about the Great Irish Famine, 1850–1918

Abstract

“In Ireland I’d Have Starved”: North American Fiction about the Great Irish Famine, 1850–1918 Christopher Cusack (bio), Marguérite Corporaal (bio), and Lindsay Janssen (bio) this dossier brings together popular fiction originally published between 1850 and 1918 in the United States or Canada that represents, in various ways, the Great Irish Famine, a watershed event in Irish and Irish-diasporic history.1 The Great Famine (1845–51) was caused by successive failures of the potato crop and the seriously inadequate government response to this agricultural crisis, and resulted in at least one million deaths. Moreover, between 1845 and 1855 over two million Irish emigrated, mainly to the United States, Canada, and Great Britain.2 Though Irish emigration figures had been increasing before the Famine, the crisis drastically accelerated out-migration. By 1890 about 40 percent of Irish-born people were living outside of Ireland, mainly in the United States and Great Britain.3 Not surprisingly, the Famine is generally considered one of the formative events at the heart of Irish American and Irish Canadian identities.4 In many ways, it has become what Margaret Kelleher calls a “charter myth,” even though Irish migration to America significantly predates [End Page 129] the mid-nineteenth century and even though millions more actually came over after rather than during the Famine.5 Despite its centrality in Irish-diasporic history, the notion that the memory of the Famine was so traumatic that it has been culturally repressed persists in popular understandings of the Irish-diasporic past and in some scholarship on the North American Irish diaspora.6 This notion, however, is not borne out by the available source material. On the contrary, during the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, the Famine was a prevalent theme in journalism and fiction written by Irish-diaspora authors based in the United States and Canada, as well as in Irish-interest material produced by North American writers without Irish ancestry. However, most scholarship on diasporic identity formation during this era focuses primarily on journalism and contemporary historiography, and literature in particular remains a sorely neglected resource.7 This contribution showcases a considerable yet largely unknown corpus of popular fiction published between 1848 and 1918 in the United States or Canada that engages with the legacy of the Famine. In particular, our work underscores the added value of fiction for examining processes of diasporic identity formation and affiliation. In so doing, it also offers starting points for critical reconsiderations of established narratives regarding the position of the Great Famine in the diasporic imagination. This body of fiction is valuable not only because it comprises a sizable repository of materials that imaginatively engage with the Great Famine but also because these texts once reached a substantial and diverse audience. Recollections of the Famine can be found across the full range of fictional genres during the period, including romantic didacticism, regionalism, (urban) realism, and [End Page 130] “lace curtain” fiction, as well as in texts that straddle multiple genres.8 For the Irish characters in works by romantic-didactic authors, such as Mary Francis Cusack’s From Killarney to New York (1877) and Mary Anne Sadlier’s Bessy Conway (1861), the Famine provided an opportunity to overcome adversity and demonstrate their steadfast Irish Catholic faith. Nationalist writers employed famine memory and the charge of British responsibility to justify Fenianism, the campaign for Home Rule, and later republicanism. For political novels like James Doran’s Zanthon (1891), famine suffering served as a first step on the journey to the United States for its eponymous protagonist. Moreover, novels such as Zanthon and John Brennan’s Erin Mor (1892) cast US republicanism and its doctrine of liberty as the solution to Ireland’s colonial hardships. Conversely, Irish American (urban) realism was more critical of diasporic self-presentations and, as shown by John Talbot Smith’s story “How The McGuinness Saved His Pride” (1891), excerpted below, Irish American intolerance toward other immigrant communities. Such examples indicate that in the United States and Canada, as in Ireland, famine memory was deployed for a variety of objectives.9 Authors assimilated such memories into their preferred genres and...