Elizabeth Malcolm

On Fire: The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–1849

“combination of great literary power and great learning.”41 The Penguin Books author’s biography describes The Great Hunger as being “formidable and moving”’ while Florence Nightingale and The Reason Why are described as “masterpieces.”42 Her obituary in the Times also described the earlier books as “masterpieces,” and reported “there was a slight falling off in the two later books.” Echoing one of the revisionist criticisms it went on to say “in The Great Hunger she was writing of the subject perhaps nearest to her heart, the distress of Ireland, and did not always know when to let well—or rather, ill—alone, and get on with the terrible tale.”43 In both life and death, controversy surroundedWoodham-Smith’s study of the Famine. It is a work that is admittedly flawed, partial, limited, and—especially in the conclusion—overly emotional. Nonetheless, as a critique of government policies and as a testimony to famine being politically derived, it continues to be essential reading.Moreover, it is a book that deserves to be read and reread. In 1962, Woodham-Smith wrote an article for an English newspaper about the pleasure of re-reading books.“Re-reading,” she observes,“is an unfailing and savage test of the quality of a book, and books which are worth reading at all both deserve and require to be read more than once.”44 While re-reading The Great Hunger for this article, I was once again struck by how fresh her research remains—and of my own personal debt of gratitude to the historian, Cecil Woodham-Smith.

A new age or just the same old cycle of extirpation? Massacre and the 1798 Irish rebellion

Although the 1798 rebellion seldom figures prominently in histories of the Revolutionary Wars, it was probably the bloodiest political upheaval to occur in Ireland between the 1640s and the 1910s. The rebellion was largely inspired by the French Revolution, yet many had long anticipated such an event. They saw it as another round in a struggle that would only end with the extirpation of either Catholics or Protestants. Such beliefs lent ferocity to the fighting and encouraged massacre. Yet, at the same time, individuals on all sides sought to prevent or at least restrain bloodshed. Enlightenment and republican values and the ties of family and community were by no means submerged, and many marked for death were saved, although often deeply traumatized by their experiences. For, while the rebellion looked back to the sectarian massacres of the seventeenth century, it at the same time looked forward to the much less violent Irish nationalist struggles of the nineteenth century.

Book Reviews: Madness in the Family: Insanity and Institutions in the Australasian Colonial World, 1860–1914

During the 1970s and 1980s, psychiatric histories tended to stress the key roles played by the state and the medical profession in the growth of nineteenth-century lunatic asylums. But, in recent years, attention has turned increasingly to the involvement of families in the committal process. Catharine Coleborne draws on a vast literature dealing with asylums, medicine, families, emotions, colonialism and race in order to examine the relationships between families and four Australasian asylums during the period 1860–1914. The asylums were located in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Auckland. Coleborne aims, among other things, to see what the records of these institutions have to tell us about the nature of families in white-settler British colonies. The book examines ‘colonial psychiatry’ and its influence in constructing a ‘white’ identity (p. 42). It shows how psychiatry, with its growing emphasis on the hereditary nature of mental illness, began to focus on the family and was concerned especially by settlers who lacked colonial families. However, at the ‘centre of this book’, according to Coleborne, is an analysis of the ways in which ‘lay descriptions’ of insanity were used by doctors, both before and during committal (p. 147). Thus, chapters investigate family inputs into case records, correspondence between families and asylums, disputes over maintenance payments, and schemes whereby families could take back patients on temporary release. The concluding chapter devotes space to critiquing asylum archives and ends on a rather equivocal note. It states confidently that ‘families were in fact present at committal, discharge, and during patients’ stays in the institution’, but argues that examining asylum sources with the ‘theoretical tools to discover patient and family “agency”… may not by itself be enough to reshape either histories of the colonial family, or histories of insanity’ (p. 152). This, of course, begs the question: what is required to ‘reshape’ such histories? While well written, the book is quite repetitive. As well as the basic contents of the six main chapters being rehearsed in both the introduction and conclusion, each individual chapter has an introduction and conclusion setting out its main arguments. Thus, most key points are discussed at least four times. A looser, more flexible structure would have made for a pleasanter read. There are also rather a lot of factual, spelling and printing errors, plus some problems with the maps and statistics. For example, Yarra Bend Asylum in Melbourne is said to have opened in the 1850s – in fact it opened in 1848. It was then in the Port Phillip District – not ‘Philip’ (p. 23). In the first map, Australian towns are misplaced and their names misspelled. New South Wales is described as the ‘hub’ of Australasian ‘intellectual exchanges’ about insanity. The map displaying this ‘hub’ has a series of arrows apparently illustrating the directions of these exchanges, yet Melbourne and Brisbane are shown influencing Sydney, not vice versa (p. 26). As for the statistical tables, they all relate to ‘c.1905’ (pp. 37 and 136). This is very late in the period under study: some matching statistics from the 1860s would have been informative. In addition, the bibliography contains a significant number of misprints (pp. 199, 203, 206–13). These blemishes aside, this book accomplishes a great deal in tracing the complex relationships that existed between families and asylums in the Antipodes. Yet Coleborne is right to call for more research. Her book demonstrates that much remains to be done before we can thoroughly understand the family–asylum relationship and what exactly it meant for patients.

The Irish sweep: a history of the Irish Hospitals Sweepstake, 1930–87

and self-advancement – are traced. The innovativeness of Petty’s methods – from the survey of confiscated Irish lands to the campaign to express all phenomena in ‘number, weight and measure’, so pioneering quantification and statistics – is demonstrated. On occasion, Petty’s willingness to think (and write) the unthinkable, particularly in the seemingly sympathetic milieu of James II’s reign, is stressed. His schemes for Ireland, including the exchange and transmutation of its inhabitants, were at once draconian and utopian. Listing with the prevailing wind, Petty suggested how a Catholic Ireland could be made to work within the Jacobean empire. McCormick, while acknowledging that Petty’s ambitions prefigure later social engineering and reminding that his analyses impressed Marx, insists on the centrality of seventeenth-century chemical and alchemical theories to Petty’s sensational proposals for Ireland. Writing with clarity and authority, McCormick brings together what hitherto has been fragmented. He imposes order on the multifarious and apparently inconsistent ideas and actions of Petty. He suggests the reasons, mainly personal and political, why Petty was disappointed in his hope of framing policy under the later Stuarts. He allows that Petty’s obsessions and political suppleness hampered his campaigns. To some in high places, Petty was a troublesome bore. His one spell in public office – as an Admiralty judge – was an embarrassing fiasco. Yet, within a circle of intimates, mostly public servants and (like Petty) fellows of the Royal Society, he was venerated. A little of Petty’s private and family life is sketched, but the main focus is on his thinking. Interestingly, McCormick emphasises Petty’s reluctance to allow his principal writings on Ireland to be published, preferring instead that they should circulate in manuscript among a select readership of the powerful. Successors, such as Charles Davenant and Gregory King, who embraced political arithmetic, while admitting their debt to Petty, knew only the published treatises. Ironically, they made a greater impact on the British government than Petty had. It was not until a descendant and inheritor of much of Petty’s huge Irish estate – Lord Shelburne, the future Marquis of Lansdowne and prime minister – consciously revived some of his ancestor’s nostrums and recovered unpublished writings that the extent of Petty’s polymathic energy could start to be gauged. This fine book may not have ended the process, but it is likely long to remain the essential account. Even for those who have not grappled with the technical and psychological challenges of Petty and his activities, this study constitutes one of the most original and illuminating publications on the histories of both thought and Ireland in many years.

Essay Review: Psychiatry in colonial Australia: mad women and their attendants in Victoria’s asylums, 1848—88 Catharine Coleborne, Reading ‘Madness’: Gender and Difference in the Colonial Asylum in Victoria, Australia, 1848—1888, API Network: Perth, 2007; 219 pp.: 9781920845346. Lee-Ann Monk, Attending Madness: At Work in the Australian Colonial Asylum, Rodopi: Amsterdam and New York, 2008; 270 pp.: 9789042024199

In 2003, an important collection of articles was published entitled ‘Madness’ in Australia (Coleborne and MacKinnon, 2003). This collection, aside from the intrinsic interest of its individual articles, offered a handy overview of the current state of the historiography of madness in Australia. The book began with two general articles written by leading scholars in the field, Mark Finnane and Stephen Garton. Of the remaining 16 articles, 14 dealt with particular Australian colonies or states – nine with Victoria alone – and most covered part of the period between 1850 and 1950. A number examined one or more asylums within a colony or state, while at least six articles addressed the topic of gender. The two books now under review fit neatly within the various frameworks evident in ‘Madness’ in Australia. This is hardly surprising as both authors had articles in the earlier collection, and one was an editor of the work. The latest publications by Catharine Coleborne and Lee-Ann Monk are similar in many respects. Both books are based on PhD theses completed at La Trobe University in Melbourne, in 1997 and 2001, respectively. Both study the four main public asylums operating in the colony of Victoria during the period from 1848 to 1888, and both have a good deal to say on the topic of gender. However, within these broad similarities, there are also significant differences in both approach and subject matter. Coleborne’s work is strongly influenced by the theories of Michel Foucault. As she acknowledges in her concluding essay on sources, his importance will be ‘obvious’ to her readers (p. 211). Thus the book begins by announcing that: ‘The lunatic was “invented” through increasingly complex legislation that named, described and captured the insane person in its language’ (p. 5). There follows a good deal of jargon in the form of references to ‘texts’, ‘spaces’, ‘discourses’, ‘constructions’, ‘performances’ and ‘sexed bodies’. But what is on offer is far from pure Foucault, Essay Review

Religion and Identity in the United Kingdom and the USA: Turn-of-the-Century Perspectives

Marianne Elliott, The Catholics of Ulster: A History, London, Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, 2000; pp. xliii + 642; ISBN 0 713 99464 9 Egal Feldman, Catholics and Jews in Twentieth-Century America, Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 2001; pp. xiii + 323; ISBN 0 252 02684 5 Michael P. Hornsby-Smith (ed.), Catholics in England, 1950-2000: Historical and Sociological Perspectives, London, Cassell, 1999; pp. xvii + 334; ISBN 0 304 70527 6 Robert Pope (ed.), Religion and National Identity: Wales and Scotland, c. 1700-2000, Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2001; pp. xii + 355; ISBN 0 7083 1662 X