The Irish Famine: A Documentary [Hardcover]

Colm Toibin (Author), Diarmaid Ferriter (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0312300514 | ISBN-13: 978-0312300517 | Publication Date: July 19, 2002 | Edition: 1st

The Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s has been popularly perceived as a genocide attributable to the British government. In professional historical circles, however, such singular thinking was dismissed many years ago, as evidenced by the scathing academic response to Cecil Woodham-Smith's 1963 classic, The Great Hunger, which, in addition to presenting a vivid and horrifying picture of the human suffering, made strong accusations against the British government's failure to act.

And while British governmental sins of omission and commission during the famine played their part, there is a broader context of land agitation and regional influences of class conflict within Ireland that also contributed to the starvation of more than a million people.

This remarkable book opens a door to understanding all sides to this tragedy with an absorbing history provided by novelist Colm Toibin that is supported by a collection of key documents selected by historian Diarmaid Ferriter. An important piece of revisionist thinking, The Irish Famine: A Documentary is sure to become the classic primer for this lamentable period of Irish history.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Between 1846 and 1849, the potato blight left some one million Irish citizens dead of starvation or disease; Booker Prize-nominated novelist Colm Toibin (The Blackwater Lightship) and historian Diarmaid Ferriter team up to reconsider the tragedy (was it the fault of the British?) in The Irish Famine: A Documentary. Toibin pens a historiography that acknowledges "no narrative now seems capable of combining the sheer scale of the tragedy..., the complex society which surrounded it and the high politics which governed it," while Ferriter compiles a wide range of documents, including letters, newspaper articles and relief commission reports, to offer a scholarly look at the days of (in the words of a parish priest) "calamity" and "universal doom."
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Novelist Toibin (Blackwater Lightship) and historian and lecturer Ferriter (Dublin City Univ.) have edited and annotated a collection of letters, news reports, editorials, and statistics gathered from primary and published materials about the Irish famine of 1846-48. Contrary to a thesis first introduced in Cecil Woodham-Smith's The Great Hunger (1963), the editors argue that the famine was self-inflicted, shifting blame from the British government to Irish landowners and merchants, who aggravated the distress and profited from it. But this work further accuses historians of ignoring the role of class in the famine. Trying also to provide a study of Victorian language and psyche, the editors juxtapose death tolls and horror stories from the provinces with castigations of the indolent Irish and recipes for cooking rotten potatoes. Having written just 38 pages of narrative, the editors advance their argument using the words of famine eyewitnesses and contemporaries. Some of the excerpts are exceptional, and the concept is powerful, but as a result of the unconventional approach the selections look random and unstructured. Large academic collections will find this title an interesting exercise in alternative scholarly editing. Robert Moore, Bristol-Myers Squibb Medical Imaging, Billerica, MA
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books; 1st edition (July 19, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312300514
• ISBN-13: 978-0312300517
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #683,160 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Colm Toibin is the author of four previous novels, The South, The Heather Blazing, The Story of the Night, and The Blackwater Lightship, which was shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize. He lives in Dublin.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Documents concerning the Irish Famine., August 31, 2007

By 

Kevin M Quigg (Gettysburg, Pennsylvania United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Irish Famine (Paperback)

The authors have compiled a representative sample of documents concerning the Irish Famine. Not only do you get actual reports of the disease and death that is taking effect, but you also get some British authorities discounting the nature and effects of the famine and some blaming the victims for the famine. This is amazing stuff, as you can see the 19th century mind at work saying the famine is a way to combine the small holdings of the poor farmers together. In the process, millions died and millions more emigrated to countries like Canada, the United States, and Australia.

This is an OK read. The material is written in 19th century language and the reader needs to compensate for this. Otherwise, you can see the bureaucratic nature of the British Empire as it tries to figure out and fight the famine.

2.0 out of 5 stars Document collection, July 19, 2011

By 

Gene - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Irish Famine (Paperback)

While the authors may be good historians and they might even be good authors, this volume doesn't seem to present any of their own work. I'm sure that their work was work, insofar as they took the time to find these documents. But it doesn't seem that there is any value added. Some of the documents, as individual documents, are interesting. But there is no flow, no structure, that adds to my understanding of the whole picture of the famine years. In sum, this book didn't give me much.