As evidence, he offered the recollection of Benjamin Jowett, the Master of Balliol: ‘I have always felt a certain horror of political economists since I heard one of them say that the Famine in Ireland would not kill more than a million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do much good’. They had killed two million Irish people.’ And that the death toll was not higher, Taylor savagely remarked, ‘was not for want of trying’. He minced no words: ‘The English governing class ran true to form. In the late 1840s, declared Taylor with a sweeping reference to the notorious German extermination camp, ‘all Ireland was a Belsen’. At times Taylor sounded just like the famous revolutionary nationalist John Mitchel. Taylor, the distinguished if controversial historian of modern Germany, whose review of The Great Hunger appeared in the New Statesman and was later reprinted under the title ‘Genocide’ in his Essays in English History. Frank O’Connor, but cropped up repeatedly in English periodicals also, occasionally in articles by reputable historians.Īmong such reputable scholars Lyons must have had in mind A.J.P. Woodham-Smith’s work was not confined to Irish reviewers, nor even to imaginative authors like Mr. Ugly words were used in many reviews – ‘race-murder’ and ‘genocide,’ for example – to describe the British government’s attitude to the Irish peasantry at the time of the Famine, and Sir Charles Trevelyan’s handling of the situation was compared by some excited writers to Hitler’s ‘final solution’ for the Jewish problem. Lyons called attention in Irish Historical Studies to a striking aspect of the popular response: Vigorously protesting against this ‘torrent of muddled thinking’, the late F.S.L. Perhaps they envied the book’s commercial success: The Great Hunger was immediately a best-seller on two continents, and its premier status as the most widely read Irish history book of all time has only grown with the years.īut far more troubling to the revisionists was the ‘ungoverned passion’ to which numerous reviewers of the book succumbed.

Published in Features, Issue 3 (Autumn 1993), The Famine, Volume 1įor revisionist historians the publication in 1962 of The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845-1849 by Cecil Woodham-Smith was not an altogether welcome event. The Great Famine and its interpreters, old and new

The Great Hunger by Cecil Woodham-Smith