Memory initiatives after mass-starvation: mobilizing a famine past

The Causes of China’s Great Leap Famine, 1959–1961

LOCAL RELIEF DURING THE GREAT IRISH FAMINE, 1845–1850: THE CASE OF CASTLEBAR, COUNTY MAYO, 1846–1847 MICHAEL O’MALLEY the objective of this paper is to contrast the relief efforts of the British government with those of locals leaders including Church of Ireland and Catholic clergymen in Castlebar, County Mayo, during the Great Irish Famine. Between 1845 and 1850, almost every harvest of potatoes, the subsistence food for most of Ireland’s inhabitants before the famine, failed partially or totally. The potato crops’ destruction resulted in starvation and death throughout Ireland. During the crisis, both the British government and local leaders in Ireland attempted to reduce the level of suffering by providing famine relief. Five factors determined the effectiveness of these relief efforts: the relief providers’ ideology; their preferred forms of relief; their initiative in establishing effective relief schemes before starvation took place; their attitude toward the poor; and their willingness to prioritize famine relief. The government and the clergy took different stands on these issues. The government adhered to a free-trade policy and argued that direct relief would stifle private enterprise. It favored indirect relief in the form of public works to direct relief in the form of free food. In addition, the government feared that direct relief would produce a dependent public. Finally , the government believed that its first priority was to protect the immediate interests of England. As a result, the government failed to provide adequate relief in famine-stricken Ireland. In contrast, Church of Ireland and Catholic clergy in Castlebar viewed the problem of famine relief from a local perspective. Their primary goal during the late 1840s was to prevent starvation among their neighbors. As a result, the clergy favored direct relief , in the form of inexpensive food, and established soup kitchens, which provided sustenance to the poor as soon as famine conditions appeared locally in late 1846. LOCAL RELIEF DURING THE GREAT IRISH FAMINE 109 During the Great Famine, British government administrators—including Sir Charles Trevelyan, permanent secretary of the treasury, and Thomas Larcom, a poor law commissioner—criticized local relief efforts and praised those the government provided. Trevelyan argued that the government’s soup kitchens, which operated for a brief period in 1847, saved millions of lives during the famine.1 Larcom claimed that the middle classes within Irish society did not try to relieve starvation during the famine.2 These views were echoed in English newspapers such as The London Times, which reported that farmers were “capable of relief by the smallest exertion” and that this lack of generosity was “absolutely without parallel in the history of civilized nations. . . .”3 The newspaper also accused the Irish poor of being too indolent to give their dead a “decent Christian burial” and pointed out that “the brutality of piratical tribes sinks to nothing compared with the absolute inertia of the Irish in the midst of the most horrifying scenes.”4 Revisionist historians such as Roy Foster sympathize with Trevelyan’s interpretation of the British government’s role in the famine.5 According to Foster, the British did not cause mass starvation during the late 1840s. In addition, he believes that an evaluation of Britain’s famine policy must include a discussion of the ability of the state to relieve poverty as well as an analysis of the attitudes of mid-nineteenth-century English political leaders toward the poor.6 Foster asserts that the provision to the public of free food was beyond the abilities of any government at that time. He claims that political leaders rejected proposals to provide famine relief because they felt that this move would turn the Irish into paupers and make them permanently dependent on the state for sustenance. Consequently, the British adhered to the belief that private enterprise should provide most of the food required to feed famine-stricken Ireland.7 LOCAL RELIEF DURING THE GREAT IRISH FAMINE 110 1 Charles Trevelyan, The Irish Crisis (London: Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1848), 64, 65. 2 Final Report of the Board of Public Works in Ireland, September 1847, British Parliamentary Papers—Famine (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1970), vol. 8, 379–85. Quoted in Christine Kinealy, This Great Calamity: The Irish...

Women's experiences related to the ‘great famine’ in Ethiopia: A qualitative study

New edition published November 2010. In the century before the great famine of the late 1840s, the Irish people, and the poor especially, became increasingly dependent on the potato for their food. So when potato blight struck, causing the tubers to rot in the ground, they suffered a grievous loss. Thus began a catastrophe in which approximately one million people lost their lives and many more left Ireland for North America, changing the country forever. During and after this terrible human crisis, the British government was bitterly accused of not averting the disaster or offering enough aid. Some even believed that the Whig government's policies were tantamount to genocide against the Irish population. Donnelly's account looks closely at the political and social consequences of the great Irish potato famine and explores the way that natural disasters and government responses to them can alter the destiny of nations. This is unquestionably the most comprehensive single account of the Irish catastrophe... (Professor Peter Gray, Queen's University, Belfast). ...many historians have written excellent books about the great Irish famine ...Donnelly's is the best and most comprehensive of them all. (Kerby Miller, Middlebush Professor of History, University of Missouri, Columbia). James Donnelly's book is likely to become the classic account of the Great Famine, and the first port of call for both students and general readers. (Professor Peter Gray, Queen's University, Belfast).

Using findings from a qualitative investigation based on in-depth asynchronous online interviews with 425 self-identified LGB Portuguese individuals (73.9 % gay, 12.3 % lesbian, and 13.8 % bisexual), this paper explores the role of political and legislative changes in the everyday lives of LGB individuals after the implementation of recent political and legislative changes in the country, such as the 2010 law allowing same-sex couples to marry and the 2016 law allowing same-sex couples to adopt and joint-adopt children. Participants were asked to complete a structured interview online, which consisted of socio-demographic questions concerning age, sexual orientation, gender, occupation, education, relationship status, and knowledge of the legislation that affected them as an LGB person. Participants were also asked to write a response to a single open-ended and fundamental question: “As an LGB person, what was the most important thing that happened to you over the last year because of the political and legislative changes concerning LGB rights implemented in Portugal?” The content analysis of the major findings was structured around the following main thematic areas: relationships and family, coming out issues, health issues, happiness and personal development, and social and political changes. The paper concludes by highlighting the importance of political and legislative changes in the everyday lives of LGB people, as delivering this type of knowledge is a very important tool to fight discrimination against LGB individuals.

In a volume on popular politics in the Great Irish Famine, the author of an essay primarily exploring the role of Protestant clergy must confront a contradiction in terms. ‘Popular politics’ is a term that entered the English language early in the French Revolution1 to describe the politics of the ‘people’ in the sense of ‘[t]hose without special rank or position in society; the mass of the community as distinguished from the nobility or the ruling classes; the populace’.2 The largest component of the Protestant clergy in the Atlantic Archipelago-those of the Church of England and Ireland-were simply incapable of engaging in ‘popular politics’. They were, by definition, members of a ruling class, and if they were involved in protests or riots they were probably trying to minimize the harm that the populace might instigate. One might suppose that the ministers of the Church of Scotland were in the same category, but two years before the Great Irish Famine that institution had its own ‘Great Disruption’. That event, together with the Famine, led directly to important popular politics on the part of the Presbyterian clergy in post-Famine Ireland. So, whereas most of the essays in this volume address popular politics during the Great Famine, in this essay the popular politics prompted by the Famine mostly occur after it. Although I do not emphasize the Roman Catholic clergy in my treatment of the Famine, I do suggest in my conclusion that the difference between their post-Famine popular politics and that of their Presbyterian counterparts can help us understand how the Great Famine contributed to the conversion of Irish politics from largely Anglicans versus non-Anglicans in 1798 to Protestants versus Catholics in 1886.

“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...

Reviewed by: Relocated Memories: The Great Famine in Irish and Diaspora Fiction, 1846–1870 by Marguérite Corporaal Matthew A. Schownir Relocated Memories: The Great Famine in Irish and Diaspora Fiction, 1846–1870, by Marguérite Corporaal, pp. 303. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2017. $34.95. Though the Famine has long been a seminal topic of Irish Studies, a vexing misconception persists that Irish literature written during and immediately after the Famine dared not mention the cataclysmic event. The notion that survivors found the Famine too existentially traumatic an episode to recount even in fiction is an understandable, if false, assumption. In Relocated Memories, Marguérite [End Page 150] Corporaal not only sets the record straight on this matter, but recontextualizes midcentury famine fiction as a transnational exercise for Irish writers and readers to memorialize and cope with the tragedy. Drawing on an impressively broad collection of novels and stories written in Ireland, Britain, and North America, Corporaal demonstrates the extent to which Irish writers embraced the Famine as a subject of Irish storytelling and identity. Indeed, famine fiction became a site of collective memory where Irish writers who experienced the event could employ “specific narrative and generic techniques to circumvent certain agonizing details” and thus mediate and reconfigure its trauma for readers. For example, the survivor and writer Mary Ann Hoare often wrote tangentially of emotionally painful episodes in her 1851 collection of stories Shamrock Leaves. Rather than make her main protagonists describe the death of an infant or a family’s slow starvation through first-person descriptions, Hoare instead opts for her narration to make vague, passing mentions of these events in order to displace and assuage the visceral memories of characters in the broader narrative. By decentering the experientiality of particularly gruesome and emotionally taxing moments in her story, Hoare attempts to temper literary accounts of famine suffering for her Irish audience. Other authors used similar narrative methods to accomplish the same goal. The narrator of a story published in 1847 laments that the protagonist’s sufferings are “the most painful part of my sad narrative and I must hasten over it.” This is not to say that fiction writers completely avoided exposition of the Famine’s human toll. Rather, Corporaal locates in the stylistic choices of Irish authors a desire to practice emotional triage through their works, demonstrating the fluidity of famine memory and how it is expressed in fragmented ways. Corporaal argues that although trauma plays a crucial role in shaping these narratives of famine memory, it also speaks to broader notions of how the Irish made sense of postfamine politics, identity, and of their tenuous place in the Atlantic world. Borrowing Alison Landsberg’s notion of “prosthetic memory,” she examines how Irish writers who did not directly experience the Famine used mediated memories to construct their own narratives and make sense of the event from a geographic or temporal distance. This is especially evident with texts written in British Canada and the United States at the time. Corporaal notes that American Irish writers tended to use different narrative techniques, descriptions, or themes than authors in Ireland. For instance, when using the Famine as a setting or a plot device American Irish authors would omit descriptions of their characters’ emaciated bodies. In contrast, stories written in Ireland often dwelt heavily on the physical aspects of starvation to reflect the experientiality of the author’s recollections. North American writers also portrayed Irish pastoral settings in romanticized, Edenic terms that diverged from the desolated landscapes emphasized by writers in Ireland. The cumulative effect of these differences [End Page 151] is a distinctly “diasporic memory” produced by texts that enshrines a softer, more hopeful, and nostalgic image of Ireland that informed New World recollections of the Famine years. This would seem to be Corporaal’s most prominent contribution: to understand how famine memory was produced and experienced by the Irish diaspora, it must be examined in a transnational context. The rough and irregular shape of famine memory stems from its bifurcated roots on both sides of the Atlantic. As such, it is a product of two mutually informed, but characteristically distinct, worlds. To reinforce this point...

Border-Building

This descriptive pre-experimental quantitative study employing pre-test and post-test approach aimed to address low reading comprehension levels among the 39 identified non-readers in Grade 7 students at Asuncion National High School through the Strategic Use of Visual Illustration (SUVI). Statistical tools are used to analyze the data obtained from the respondents. Pre-test and post-test results across four indicators showed significant improvements. Prior to the intervention, Literal had a mean score of 31.79 (Low) in the pre-test and 62.56 (High) in the post-test; Interpretative from 26.67 (Low) to 62.05 (High); Evaluation from 31.03 (Low) to 64.10 (High); and Creative from 30.26 (Low) to 58.21 (High). These results indicate substantial enhancement in students' reading comprehension skills. A paired-samples t-test revealed a statistically significant difference between the two scores, t(38) = 17.8, p < .001, indicating a highly significant improvement in reading comprehension following the intervention that the null hypothesis will be rejected, since the p-value is less than 0.05 level of significance. In-depth interviews with grade 7 students provided further insights. Themes from the interviews included Enhancing Reading Comprehension, Improving Memory Retention, Facilitating Support for Vocabulary Enrichment, Improving Grasp of Difficult English, Lessons Providing Cues for Meaning-Making. Overall, the study underscores the success of the Strategic Use of Visual Illustration (SUVI) in significantly improving Grade 7 students' reading comprehension levels. Keywords: Reading Comprehension, Visual Illustration, Digital/Non-Digital, Project SUVI, Non-Readers, Philippines

This study sought to carry out an analysis of the effects of the social media in political mobilization. These were analyzed using the following indicators (i) the social media as a communication tool and (ii) the role of social media in political mobilization. The study was using a one-day demonstration that occurred in Zimbabwe code named #ZimShutDown2016 as a case study. In the study, a qualitative case study research design was used. Secondary data from online newspaper reports and Social Media Networks was used to analyze the effects of the social media movement in bringing real socio-economic and political change in developing countries such as Zimbabwe. In-depth interviews with five key informants from local universities helped in the analysis and they were identified using purposive sampling technique. Findings from the study revealed that social media is an effective tool of communication among citizens. Information is exchanged minute by minute among citizens, and this encourages ‘citizenry journalism.’ As such, the social media has a positive impact in mobilizing the community in bringing real social, political and economic change. The study, therefore, recommends a longer survey on the challenges of the social media movement in developing countries such as Zimbabwe.

The present study aims to analyze Himpunan Mahasiswa Islam's (HMI) development in Medan City after the reform era, employing a qualitative research design with a case study approach. This study showcases that HMI has developed significantly through in-depth interviews, document analysis, and field observations. The organization has demonstrated its ability to adapt to social, political, and cultural changes. HMI proactively participates in a wide range of social, political, and religious activities that contribute to the betterment of students, campuses, and the local community. By serving as a platform for political education, HMI in Medan City plays a pivotal role in facilitating thoughtful discussions and fostering the advancement of Islamic thought. Moreover, it acts as a catalyst for promoting constructive social change within its sphere of influence. HMI is firmly dedicated to promoting education, protecting students’ rights, and actively advocating for political and social reforms in Indonesia. This research offers valuable insights into the development of HMI in Medan City after the reform era, thereby contributing significantly to the comprehension of the role and potential of student organizations in driving social and political changes in Indonesia.

This study sought to carry out an analysis of the effects of the social media in political mobilization. These were analyzed using the following indicators (i) the social media as a communication tool and (ii) the role of social media in political mobilization. The study was using a one-day demonstration that occurred in Zimbabwe code named #ZimShutDown2016 as a case study. In the study, a qualitative case study research design was used. Secondary data from online newspaper reports and Social Media Networks was used to analyze the effects of the social media movement in bringing real socio-economic and political change in developing countries such as Zimbabwe. In-depth interviews with five key informants from local universities helped in the analysis and they were identified using purposive sampling technique. Findings from the study revealed that social media is an effective tool of communication among citizens. Information is exchanged minute by minute among citizens, and this encourages ‘citizenry journalism.’ As such, the social media has a positive impact in mobilizing the community in bringing real social, political and economic change. The study, therefore, recommends a longer survey on the challenges of the social media movement in developing countries such as Zimbabwe.

Reviewed by: The Great Irish Famine: Visual and Material Culture ed. by Marguérite Corporaal, Oona Frawley, and Emily Mark-FitzGerald Barbara M. Hoffmann The Great Irish Famine: Visual and Material Culture, edited by Marguérite Corporaal, Oona Frawley, and Emily Mark-FitzGerald (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018, 296 p., paperback, $39.95) Turning point, calamity, revolution, horror: these are but a few of the terms used to describe An Gorta Mór by the contributors to The Great Irish Famine: Visual and Material Culture, edited by Marguérite Corporaal, Oona Frawley, and Emily Mark-FitzGerald. These terms—complex and almost contradictory in connotation—speak to the difficulty of representing the Famine, both at the contemporaneous moment and for generations after living with its legacy. With this important contribution to famine studies, Corporaal, Frawley and Mark-FitzGerald offer the first edited collection devoted to an entirely visual and material culture perspective on the Great Famine. The editors have divided the collection into three sections that follow, as Mark-FitzGerald notes in her introduction to the text, a "roughly chronological sequence": Section I, "Witness and Representation: Contemporaneous Depictions of Famine"; Section II, "Negotiating Form: Famine/Post-Famine Modalities and Media"; and Section III, "Legacy: Postmemory and Contemporary [End Page 147] Visual Cultures." The collection's range comes not only from this broad temporal view but also from the diversity of perspectives of the contributors, who hail from universities across Europe and North America as well as from institutions such as Ireland's Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut and the Irish Heritage Trust and National Famine Museum in Strokestown Park, County Roscommon. Likewise, the contributed essays cover an impressive array of visual and material products: paintings and sketches, political cartoons, religious artifacts, textiles, memorials, television shows, graphic novels, and even a film that never was. This variety and diversity, looking to capture a fuller picture of the Famine in history and memory, is enhanced by another focus of the collection, as explained by Mark-FitzGerald: "prioritiz[ing] methodologically close readings of specific engagements with the famine." Rather than presenting broad or universalizing claims about the Famine and its representation, each chapter engages specific examples of visual and material culture, offering nuanced analysis of the product or production itself within its specific historical, cultural, and geographical context. Enhancing this goal, and an invaluable part of this collection, are the thirty-nine brilliant reproductions of the paintings, drawings, and artifacts discussed by the contributors. The four chapters in section one exploring contemporaneous material and visual items all deal with a predominant presumption that the Famine was a moment of aporia in terms of cultural production, not only because, as Niamh O'Sullivan points out in her chapter, "Irish artists tended to avoid the appalling conditions in which the majority lived" but also because that majority's struggle to survive supplanted all leisurely or artistic activities. The contributions in section one suggest that, while representations of the Famine by or depicting the actual suffering of the famine victims may be rare to nonexistent, exploring representations beyond that focus, both within Ireland and abroad, can offer a fuller understanding of the Famine. This suggestion to look beyond seemingly obvious images of the Famine is manifested in the first chapter, O'Sullivan's "The Bond that Knit the Peasant to the Soil: Rural Lore and Superstition in the Work of Daniel Macdonald." Rather than exploring Macdonald's famous 1847 painting An Irish Peasant Family Discovering the Blight of their Store—"renowned as the only known painting representing the blight itself"—O'Sullivan examines representations of superstition in his works from just before and during the Famine. She reveals a continuity in such representations, highlighting not only superstition's role in uniting the Irish peasantry and providing a link between life pre- and post-Famine but also its connection to sedition and proto-nationalism that heightened during the Famine. In the second chapter, "HB's Famine Cartoons: Satirical Art in a Time of [End Page 148] Catastrophe," Peter Gray explores depictions of the Famine in the political cartoons by the London-based middle-class Catholic Irishman John Doyle, known as "H. B.," aimed at a...

CURING “THE IRISH MORAL PLAGUE” MICHAEL de NIE Recent scholarship on the Great Irish Famine has begun to emphasize the importance of understanding the political and ideological context in which the British government formulated its much criticized relief policies.1 A crucial element of this context of ideas includes the views and opinions of England’s middle class. During a period of weak governments, political flux, and growing radicalism, the middle-class segment of British society exercised increasing influence in the public sphere. One of the best reflections we have of the opinions of the middle class in this period is provided by the mainstream British press. Periodicals such as the Times, the Illustrated London News, the Economist, Punch, the Quarterly Review, and the Edinburgh Review simultaneously expressed and molded the views of their middle-class readership. While British public opinion was of course composed of numerous diverse and competing elements, it is reasonably safe to argue that the major current of middle-class thought was represented in the pages of these newspapers and journals. Editorials and reports on famine policy were in turn read by members of the government for whom the popular press provided a major source of insight into the minds of their constituents. In this way, the press was fundamental in the definition of political boundaries during the famine. This essay will examine a somewhat neglected aspect of public opinion and press coverage during the famine: the wider question of Ireland’s rehabilitation and regeneration. Throughout the famine years, a vague but CURING “THE IRISH MORAL PLAGUE” 63 1 See James S. Donnelly, Jr., “Irish property must pay for Irish poverty”: British public opinion and the Great Irish Famine,” in Fearful Realities: New Perspectives on the Famine, eds. C. Morash and R. Hayes (Dublin, 1996), 60–96; and Peter Gray, “Punch and the Great Famine,” History Ireland 1:2 (Summer 1993): 26–33; “Ideology and the Famine,” in The Great Irish Famine, ed. Cathal Póirtéir (Dublin, 1995), 86–103; and “Potatoes and Providence: British Government Responses to the Great Famine,” Bullán: An Irish Studies Journal 1:1 (Spring 1994): 75–90. strongly felt need for a fundamental moral and economic transformation of Ireland informed views of Irish distress and British government relief policy. Members of the press saw the famine as an opportunity to modernize Ireland and enact a moral and economic revolution. A prostrate, dependent Ireland, it was argued, could not resist the prescriptions advocated by the press and public—and instituted by the government. It appeared that the forces that had resisted British civilization were now laid low in Ireland , and that economic and social theories could be implemented instead of merely argued. Before we examine the proposals for Ireland’s re-creation in the image of Britain, a brief description of the sources used in this examination of British public opinion will help outline the political positions and popular influences of the major periodicals of the 1840s. The Times, indisputably the largest and most powerful newspaper of this period, had a steadily growing circulation, which by 1850 had topped 38,000.2 Often described as the “Fourth Estate” or the “fourth arm of government,” the Times had unparalleled access to, and influence on, leading politicians. In the 1840s the newspaper supported repeal of the Corn Laws and remained mildly laissez -faire afterward. Politically, the Times was slightly pro-Whig, but this position did not prevent it from harshly criticizing Lord John Russell’s administration on numerous occasions. Along with the Times, the Illustrated London News and Punch, both weeklies, collectively exerted considerable sway over their London and provincial readers, who in turn formed a great portion of what was seen as national middle-class opinion.3 Each newspaper addressed a different aspect of middle-class taste. Punch, with a circulation of approximately 30,000 in the late 1840s, was at times light-hearted and satirical, but it also exhibited a social conscience with regard to the living conditions of the English working class.4 Such sympathy rarely extended to the Irish. The Illustrated London News presented its readers with a mixture of political, social , and cultural commentary.5 Politically nonpartisan...