Daniel O'Connell, The British Press and The Irish Famine

Through an investigation of the reportage in nineteenth-century English metropolitan newspapers and illustrated journals, this book begins with the question 'Did anti-O'Connell sentiment in the British press lead to "killing remarks," rhetoric that helped the press, government and public opinion distance themselves from the Irish Famine?' Continuing her survey of the press after the death of O'Connell, Leslie Williams demonstrates how the editors, writers and cartoonists who reported and commented on the growing crisis in peripheral Ireland drew upon a metropolitan mentality, in which anti-Irish bias was deeply embedded in language and images. She concludes, however, that the real 'subject' of the British Press commentary on the Irish Famine was Britain itself. Ireland was used as a negative mirror to re-enforce Britain's own commitment to capitalist, industrial values at a time of great internal stress.