A good academic history of a small community in Ireland whose
inhabitants died or migrated to the US during the famine of
1847-48. Ballykilcline, a community of about 100 families,
disappeared after the famine from the local estate surveys and
ordnance maps; it survives in the records accumulated during an
11-year rent strike against the Crown, which the tenants lost in
1846, and in accounts of the 1847 murder of Denis Mahon, heir to
the area's greatest estate. The murder in particular caused a
sensation: Viewed by some as a rapacious landlord's deserved
comeuppance, and by the forces of order as a sign of widespread
conspiracy among the lower classes, it "catalyzed feelings at all
levels of local society." Using these events as a framework, Scally
(History/New York Univ.) tries to give a sense of the lives,
thoughts, and experiences of Ballykilcline's inhabitants - although
he notes that records kept by those who collected rents or enforced
the law do not give much insight into the minds of the people with
whom they dealt. It was a terrible time: The potato crop, the
staple food of the peasantry, rotted for the second successive year
in 1847, and the new notion of assisted emigration began to seem an
enlightened alternative to eviction. Emigrants walked to Dublin,
passing along the way "starving stragglers and wanderers, casual
burials, and exposed corpses, all suffused with the smell of the
decaying potato fields." The destitution of those arriving in
Liverpool prior to the Atlantic voyage stunned Herman Melville,
though he had seen poverty in New York City. Mortality on the
voyage can't, says Scally, be compared to that on the slave ships,
but one emigrant in five, by conservative estimate, died on board
or in quarantine after landing. Well written and well researched, a
distinct contribution to the subject, even if land and legal
records do not do justice to the agony of the times. (Kirkus
Reviews)
Many thousands of Irish peasants fled from the country in the
terrible famine winter of 1847-48, following the road to the ports
and the Liverpool ferries to make the dangerous passage across the
Atlantic. The human toll of "Black '47," the worst year of the
famine, is notorious, but the lives of the emigrants themselves
have remained largely hidden, untold because of their previous
obscurity and deep poverty. In The End of Hidden Ireland, Scally
brings their lives to light. Focusing on the townland of
Ballykilcline in Roscommon, Scally offers a richly detailed
portrait of Irish rural life on the eve of the catastrophe. From
their internal lives and values, to their violent conflict with the
English Crown, from rent strikes to the potato blight, he takes the
emigrants on each stage of their journey out of Ireland to New
York. Along the way, he offers rare insights into the character and
mentality of the immigrants as they arrived in America in their
millions during the famine years. Hailed as a distinguished work of
social history, this book also is a tale of adventure and human
survival, one that does justice to a tragic generation with
sympathy but without sentiment.
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