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Architect or Pawn?
Charles Trevelyan and the Irish Famine |
The ‘Great Famine’ (1845-50) will be familiar to anyone acquainted with Irish history. The scale of the catastrophe itself — roughly one million of a population of eight million perished, and a further one million emigrated — can hardly be underestimated. Nor can the long-term effects. Th population haemorrhage (mainly to the U.S. and England) that began during those years continued until the 1980s. All of this might seem unrecognisable to a country which is currently enjoying unprecedented economic success, a success which seems to have encouraged a collective amnesia regarding the darker episodes of Ireland’s history.
Nonetheless, in academic circles at least the Famine remains a subject of earnest scholarship, as Haines’ book illustrates. Sir Charles Trevelyan was the Permanent Head of the Treasury during the Famine years, and as such occupied a role akin to a purse-keeper. Ultimately, all questions regarding how much public money should be spent on relief for the victims of the crop failures went through Trevelyan and his bureaucratic brethren in Her Majesty’s Treasury. His role made him a pivotal figure for historical inquiries.
Accordingly, in tackling Trevelyan’s role in the Great Famine, Haines has entered an historiographical minefield. The Famine, as a subject of academic research, has consistently exposed the polemics of Irish history-writing, from John Mitchel’s overtly nationalist verdict that ‘God sent the blight but the British government sent the Famine’, to more recent ‘revisionist’ accounts which have tended to sanitise the event and argue that given the scale of the disaster, there was little the government could have done to prevent further death and suffering. Haines is concerned here with ‘revising’ the received view of Trevelyan, a result of the ‘half-truth, innuendo and careless repetition’ which has found its way into the secondary literature on the subject. Over six hundred pages, Haines attempts to undermine the prevalent view of Trevelyan as a dictatorial civil servant with undue influence over Famine policy who was imbued with the doctrines of classical laissez-faire political economy, racial prejudice against the Irish, and a providential view of the catastrophe as an ‘act of God’. These opinions and approaches combined to convince him that the Famine must be allowed simply to ‘run its course’. Instead, Haines’ central question is more fundamental: why is it primarily Trevelyan who has attracted the condemnation of history for the inadequate government response to Ireland’s humanitarian crisis? Haines is correct to stress the sloppiness of some research relating to Trevelyan’s policies, and to expose the negligent way historians have simply borrowed ‘facts’ from seminal articles without ever taking the time out to consult original source material. Her own scholarship is impressive. The work consists almost entirely of Trevelyan’s letters, supplemented by correspondence with the other protagonists involved in Famine relief. Her research challenges the view that Trevelyan was the key influence on the government’s Famine relief policy. She concludes that the ‘scrutiny of the unpublished and published correspondence demonstrates the extent to which Trevelyan, although an influential adviser, was carrying out the wishes of his departmental head during the Famine—fi rst Goldburn, then Wood. They, in turn, were guided by the advice, both political and economic, of their respective cabinets’.
Haines’ scrutiny suggests that the view of Trevelyan as the central relief administrator cannot be sustained. Instead, she contests, he was a centrally placed civil servant who was caught between the manoeuvrings and machinations of his political overseers in Westminster and the governing elite in Dublin Castle. It seems that Trevelyan often bore the brunt of barbs that were aimed at his superiors, barbs which historians have incorrectly taken as reflective of Trevelyan’s character. Trevelyan’s devotion to his job cannot be called into question, nor can the diffi culty of his position. He found himself liaising between Westminster and Dublin Castle, an unhappy partnership at the best of times, and arbitrating disputes within the Irish executive and the various committees, boards and commissions set up to respond to the Famine. Despite all this, he still found time, in dealing with the embryonic Irish herring industry, to have some Norfolk cured fi sh sent to Ireland to ‘excite the emulation of the Beginners in the Sister Country’ because ‘all the specimens I have received from Ireland […] have been of the most execrable kind’. It is a credit to Haines’ comprehensive scholarship that Trevelyan’s role can now be seen in all its gruelling, painstaking, everyday detail, as well as providing a valuable insight into the demands shouldered on well-placed Victorian civil servants.
Disappointingly, Haines devotes very little time to Trevelyan’s career and views outside his Famine-related work in the Treasury (only ten pages, for instance, are devoted to the thirty-eight years of his life before 1845). This is a pity, since Trevelyan had a distinguished career in India both before and after the Famine where he was involved in schemes aimed at economic improvement and had expounded forthright views on educating the native Indian population using an English system. Haines refers at one stage to his efforts to convince William Empson, the editor of the Edinburgh Review, that he was qualified to discuss problems relating to land tenure and the consolidation of small holdings in Ireland because he had served his apprenticeship on the subcontinent and was involved in serious land disputes there. In the Upper Provinces, where he had worked as settlement officer, he had presided over an area where smallholdings had ‘existed in great perfection’, he noted. In Ireland, by contrast, he felt they had proved disastrous. Haines does not expand on the comparisons Trevelyan draws between India and Ireland at all, nor does she pursue a line of inquiry that might have delved deeper into his Indian experience and the infl uence this bore on his dealings with Ireland. She also does not address other relevant biographical facts. With the exception of his views on India, Trevelyan wrote a number of pieces on pauperism in London in the guise of letters to the Times or as addresses to charitable organisations. This is a real oversight since his views on the problem of poverty in London and on ‘development’ in an imperial context would surely shed invaluable light on his approach to famine-stricken Ireland, a country which was both a part of the United Kingdom and yet resistant to the imposition of English ‘norms’ of improvement and development (much as India was).
More generally, Haines is reluctant to engage with the ideological influences that informed Trevelyan’s approach to policy, and pays little attention to the wider debates or movements of ideas that would have inevitably affected someone as well-educated and well-placed as Trevelyan. This is in contrast to most recent work on the Famine, which has focused on the ideological forces that constrained the government’s intervention in the Irish economy during the crisis. Historians have pointed to the influence of classical political economy, to prejudiced ideas about the Irish, and to the predominance of evangelical providentialism. All of these ideological forces are said to have infl uenced the government in pursuing a policy of limited state intervention in Ireland, and to favour the more hard-headed policy of ‘local responsibility’ whereby an amendment to the Irish Poor Law in late 1847 shifted burden of relief from the central government to the local ratepayers in Ireland. Haines is evidently unconvinced by most of these arguments. In particular, she not persuaded of the view that Trevelyan’s reading of the Famine was that of a ‘Whig moralist’ and ‘providentialist’. She is no doubt correct to stress that ‘providentialism’ — a belief in the machinations of God in the affairs of man — was not the sole preserve of the Whigs, but applied equally to Robert Peel’s Tory government which had overseen the fi rst year of Famine relief. However, this evidence does not disprove the fact that Trevelyan was a providentialist nor does it dispel the view that Trevelyan was a man driven by ideas which infl uenced his policy-making. He may not have been as influential as some historians have argued, but neither he nor the cabinet ministers he served under were immune to the infl uence of these political ideals.
Haines is most convincing when she debunks the view that Trevelyan was an arch-racist (though perhaps we do not need to be reminded several times that he was an ‘avid collector of Irish protest songs and nationalist literature’). It is an interesting fact but hardly establishes that he positively celebrated all things Hibernian. Her principal point, which is well sustained in this book, is that Trevelyan’s principal animus was directed against the Irish land-holding class rather than Irish Catholic tenants and smallholders. His assertions about the profl igate, slothful Irish landlords were commonplace amongst British politicians and reflected Victorian views about the educative, morally infl uential role of social elites. If the Irish tenants were averse to independent self-improvement and hard work, the blame lay primarily with their social superiors. Despite her claims that this work is for ‘general readers and specialists alike’, it will primarily be of interest to scholars of nineteenth-century Ireland. The sheer size of the book and the level of detail it provides will put off those with a more general, non-academic interest in the Famine. Moreover, the work is so consciously aware of its role in a wider academic debate that knowledge of recent work on the Famine is essential to an understanding of Haines’s intentions. In terms of her desire to lift the ‘veil of dogma’ surrounding Trevelyan, Haines has demonstrated that his role has been exaggerated in the past, and that he was much more at the mercy of his political superiors than has previously been supposed. She has, however, failed to argue convincingly that Trevelyan was not a ‘moralist’ who rationalised the government’s Famine policies as God-given opportunities for Irish economic and social regeneration.
Ciara Boylan is an Irish DPhil student in Modern History at Exeter College. Her research interests include nineteenth century Irish intellectual history.