Conclusion: Britain’s biggest economic-policy failure

Summary

Behold this place, of a terrible mystery the witne[ss],

Advance! but a secret horror thrills my heart.

These cloisters, these graves, cause my heart

To beat involuntary with horror.

I perceive this redoubted talisman

Who is to bestow upon me

Great power and immortality.

Robert the Devil, in Eugène Scribe and Germain Delavigne’s Robert le Diable: An Opera in Five Acts [1831] (version playing at the Haymarket Theatre in London in May 1847).

Many of the illustrations used throughout this book are cartoons published in London that ridicule the policy responses of British politicians to the problems they faced in the 1840s. That may, at first, seem an odd choice for a book about the Irish famine. Nevertheless, they show that the British press was always as willing to criticise and denigrate their own political leaders as much as they were those of the Irish, if not more so. Altogether, the cartoons suggest a significant level of contemporary unease in London with the direction of British economic policy, which was often seen as being carried out in a way bordering on the farcical.

The Irish famine was, and is, no laughing matter. Between 1841 and 1851, as Nusteling has put it, ‘nearly 4 million of the original population of about 8.3 million had definitively emigrated or unexpectedly died’ in Ireland. Those circumstances changed the course of the history of Ireland as well as that of the United Kingdom. The cartoons reinforce the message of this book: that British governments launched a set of untried and untested economic policies in the 1840s, many of which were intended to help Ireland through significant intervention in its economy during the famine, yet most of which badly backfired. That government policy failed to save as many lives in Ireland as was intended has been shown to have been as much the result of the failure of government intervention as it was a story of laissez-faire.

Perhaps no cartoon published during the famine encapsulates this book’s description of British economic policy as well as the one that appears on the cover. Only caricature would have got away with the serious point it makes; a normal newspaper article laying out similar accusations may well have been considered libellous at the time.