Abstract
Children have always been one of the most vulnerable groups within society at times of food shortage and famine. In June 2017, the children’s charity UNICEF USA reported that famine endangered 2.5 million children and adolescents in Africa and the Middle East (https://www.unicefusa.org/stories/famine-threatens-25-million-children-africa-and-middle-east/32005; accessed 10 June 2019). During that same month, Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, United States, hosted a conference entitled ‘Children and the Great Hunger’, which considered the impact of the Great Famine years of 1845–52 on the youngest members of Irish society.
This multidisciplinary edited collection provides a sample of the papers presented at that conference. The book’s editors assert that ‘the historiography of how children suffered, survived or perished during the tragedy of the Great Famine remains sparse to non-existent’ (p. xxii). Despite growing scholarly interest in the history of Irish children and childhood and continuing research into the Great Famine, the experiences of children are more likely to be represented in visual images or fiction, especially children’s literature, than in publications by historians. This book seeks to address this imbalance by excavating the lives and deaths of real children during the Famine era.
The book is divided into three sections. This review focuses on the first two sections, which examine the historical experiences of children, particularly residents of Irish workhouses and Famine orphans in Canada. The final section of the book explores how the traumas experienced by children of the Famine era have been remembered (or forgotten) in fiction, folk memory and school curricula.
The Great Famine affected children disproportionately because they were particularly vulnerable to excess mortality. As the editors note, ‘children and the aged accounted for one-third of the Irish population in the 1840s, but three-fifths of the deaths’ (p. xxii). Pregnant and nursing mothers lacked enough nourishment for themselves let alone their babies, leading to high infant mortality. A dearth of food resulted in malnutrition and low energy levels, which in turn contributed to poorer personal hygiene, less effective childcare, increased susceptibility to infections and diseases and ultimately death. In addition, many children became homeless due to mass evictions and lost one or both parents as a result of death or desertion. Yet, as Christine Kinealy’s essay highlights, these vulnerable ‘children were neither protected nor privileged in the various schemes introduced by the government or local elites’ to try to alleviate suffering during the Famine (p. 22).
The Irish Poor Law of 1838, which developed a system of workhouses for the destitute, was only in its early stages of implementation when the crisis arising from the potato blight struck. The legislation made no special provision for anyone under the age of fifteen, except that children had to attend the workhouse school. Families forced by poverty to enter the workhouse were separated, with only children under the age of two being allowed to stay with their mothers. Workhouse inmates of all ages faced harsh conditions and strict discipline.
Three of the essays in the collection provide insight into the experiences of children in Irish workhouses. Gerard Moran’s essay discusses four categories of children living in them during the Famine. Firstly, there were those who entered the workhouse system as part of a family unit. The other three categories included orphaned children, who were defined as having lost at least one parent; abandoned or deserted children, whose desperate parents had migrated to North America in search of work; and finally illegitimate children, whose mothers were unable to secure assistance elsewhere.
Simon Gallaher highlights the plight of orphaned and abandoned workhouse children for whom ‘the passing of famine conditions did not mark an end to the impact of the Great Hunger on them’ (p. 51). For nearly a decade after the Famine, children were an over-represented group within the workhouse population. Gallaher’s essay examines issues regarding the hiring-out of workhouse children to factories and farms, their education and the ‘physical and psychological damage’ to the health of these children who became institutionalised (p. 67).
Jonny Geber uses the lens of bioarchaeology to investigate the experiences of children who lived and died at Kilkenny Union Workhouse. ‘An estimated 2,194 children died in the Kilkenny workhouse between 1846 and 1851, and they comprised just over 53 percent of all recorded deaths in the institution for that period’, reports Geber (p. 76). The city’s cemeteries could not cope with the high mortality of the Famine, so bodies were buried in mass graves within the boundary walls of the workhouse and fever hospital in the period 1847–51. These human remains offer insight into the experience of the Famine that archival records and folklore cannot provide. For instance, ‘the bones and teeth of the child skeletons exhibit both subtle and substantial marks of disease, malnutrition and trauma, and the manner in which they were buried has exposed how they were cared for in death’ (p. 86).
Famine orphans in Canada are the focus of three essays in the book. Mark G. McGowan’s essay challenges the rose-tinted view of French-Canadian families adopting these children and welcoming them into their homes. A study of 619 Famine orphans who arrived at Quebec City suggests that many ‘children were essentially in a semi-indentured service to the families in which they were placed’ and wanted to leave ‘their placements as soon as possible in order to secure independence or reunite with extended family members elsewhere’ in North America (pp. 96–7).
An essay by Jason King demonstrates ‘the magnitude of distress that separated families suffer during migration crises’ (p. 136). King traces the efforts made by Famine orphan Robert Walsh to find his baby sister who had been left behind in Ireland when their family migrated across the Atlantic. Walsh became an orphan at the age of seven after his parents and younger brother died in the fever sheds of Grosse Île, Quebec. He was taken in by a caring French-Canadian family, and, unusually for a Famine orphan, he received a good education and became a priest. He travelled to Ireland in 1871–2 in hopes of fulfilling his dream of finding his long-lost sister. Lacking accurate information about his family’s origins, he searched in the wrong part of Ireland and found no trace of her. Distraught, he returned to Canada and died at the age of 33, having ‘succumbed to complications of typhus from which he had not fully recovered’ as a migrant child (p. 133).
Koral LaVorgna’s essay examines the short-lived Emigrant Orphan Asylum in Saint John, New Brunswick, which was established in response to the high number of parentless children among Irish immigrants arriving in the late 1840s. The asylum, which operated for two years from 1847 to 1849, sought ‘to rescue destitute and orphaned children from the dangers of idleness’ and educate them (p. 153). The asylum closed once the Famine-driven crisis subsided, with the remaining twenty-three children transferred to the almshouse.
As these examples show, this essay collection provides an illuminating and often harrowing introduction to the ways in which children experienced the Great Hunger and how these experiences have been remembered.