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Reviewed by:
  • Daniel O'Connell, the British Press and the Irish Famine
  • Elizabeth Tilley (bio)
Leslie A. Williams , Daniel O'Connell, the British Press and the Irish Famine, ed. by William H.A. Williams (Aldershot, England: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2004), pp.xvii+380, $79.95 cloth.

Books about Daniel O'Connell, the 1840s, or the Irish famine are fairly thick on the ground, and it is difficult to see ways in which a new perspective [End Page 335] might be offered on these subjects, but Leslie Williams's recent book on British periodical coverage of the 1840s is a welcome addition to the pile. Her aim is not in fact to produce a new history of the decade, but to focus on the nature of political discourse between Ireland and Britain as it appears in contemporary newspapers. The title of Williams's book is rather misleading, in that the early chapters do indeed cover the British papers' depiction of O'Connell, but he drops out of the discussion fairly early on, and the bulk of the information offered is concerned with the perception of Ireland in papers from the latter half of the decade. As an art historian, Williams's approach is visual, and the book is liberally sprinkled with full-page reproductions of cartoons from Punch and the Illustrated London News. Primary sources include substantial excerpts from the papers above, as well as from the largest of the British broadsheets of the time (Manchester Guardian, The Times, Observer, etc.) Taking a chronological approach, Williams is careful to map out trends rather than minutiae, and her control of her material makes discussion of what was by any standard a disastrous decade clear and informative.

Beginning with 1843 and periodical descriptions of O'Connell at the height of his powers, the book looks at the ways in which political legitimacy was removed from the Repeal movement, largely through the pictorial demonization of O'Connell himself. Discussing the year 1845 and the first appearance of the potato blight, Williams's focus shifts to the now infamous reports sent back to Britain by 'roving correspondents', men who sketched for the British middle class pictures of an overpopulated, lazy, violent Ireland. In considering both O'Connell and the famine, Wil-liams's argument is that concepts of Britishness are continually reinforced through a set of binary oppositions that find their way into reports about Ireland. This is certainly not new; Arnold used those same binary oppositions in On the Study of Celtic Literature in 1867. But Williams's book also contends that newspapers, as commodities, must print news items in ways likely to increase sales, and that this principle goes before all others, even in the reportage of famine. Williams says, "When publishing matter that might disturb their readership, editors and writers, consciously or unconsciously, had to find ways to enable readers to accept the information without feeling called upon to repudiate their own sense of self-inter-est and comfort or their political and economic instincts. Even discussions of poverty in England had to be presented carefully, lest grim reality intrude too much upon middle-class conscience" (p. 348). In other words, Britain's political stance, especially in economic terms, is continually used as a filter through which Ireland is observed. Again, this means that the reporting of Ireland's distress must not overwhelm the timehonoured portrayal of its citizens and their culture as picturesquely squalid, unredeemable, and always foreign. And here, perhaps, is where [End Page 336] Williams's discussion falters. Though the theory of the newspaper as politically charged commodity is declared important, the bulk of the book concerns itself largely with descriptive material; discussion of theoretical concerns is left to the conclusion. The resulting split is unfortunate, I think, as analysis of the material at hand is crucial, not incidental, to a new understanding of the use of periodical literature in historical study.

Other caveats? Though the focus is on British perceptions of Irish events, it might have been instructive to compare the rhetoric found in The Times, for example, with that of the most influential Irish papers of the day. Occasional analysis of provincial papers (The Clare Journal, the...

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