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Ireland's Great Famine generated Western Europe's most devastating
social crisis of the nineteenth century, a crisis that created
enormous and transformational upheaval. In Travel Narratives of the
Irish Famine: Politics, Tourism, and Scandal, 1845-1853, author
Catherine Nealy Judd proposes that a new literary genre emerged
from the crucible of the Great Famine, that is, the Irish Famine
travelogue. In her keenly argued and thoroughly researched book,
Judd contends that previous scrutiny of Famine travel narratives
has been overly broad, peripheral, or has tended to group Famine
travelogues into an undi erentiated whole. Judd invites us to
consider Famine-era travel narratives as comprising a unique
subgenre within the larger discursive - eld of travel literature.
Here Judd argues that the immensity of the Famine exerted great
pressure on the form, topics, themes, and goals of Famine-era
travelogues, and for this reason, Famine travel narratives deserve
detailed and organized consideration, as well as critical
recognition of their status as an unprecedented subgenre. Drawing
on an extensive array of underutilized sources, Travel Narratives
of the Irish Famine adumbrates the Irish Famine travelogue canon.
Sidney Godolphin Osbornes eyewitness famine narrative Gleanings in
the West of Ireland is a text that is currently both neglected and
misunderstood. Written and published in July of 1850, Osbornes
Gleanings recounts his summer 1850 journey with an unnamed friend
into the heart of late-stage famine Ireland. Most Irish Famine
scholars have overlooked Gleanings, but those few who have examined
Osbornes work tend to portray him as an unsympathetic, or even
voyeuristic, famine tourist. This is a mischaracterisation, for in
fact Osbornes aim in his 1850 Irish visit was to report on the
condition of Western Irelands famine victims. Far from touring
Ireland for pleasure, Osbornes primary goal was to examine eleven
Poor Law Unions in counties Limerick, Clare, Galway, and Mayo, and
secondarily to ascertain the amount of recent evictions in those
counties and the circumstances of the newly houseless tenants.
Osborne journeyed into western Ireland in both 1849 and 1850 in
order to gather information with which to rebuke current
governmental relief schemes and the Irish Poor Laws of 1838 and
1847, and also to attempt to stir compassion in his English readers
in the hopes that their outrage would result in Parliamentary
action to increase, clarify, and better administer Famine relief
aid: as to the Irish peasantry being deserving of the sympathy I
and very many others would seek to excite in their favour, I can
only say, that I can conceive no class of human beings on this
earth, whose condition, every way, can be worse. I know no one
ingredient in the catalogue of those dark ingredients which enter
into the composition of human suffering, which is not to be found
in the cup from which they have, of late years, been compelled to
drink.
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