Ghosts and Wires: The Telegraph and Irish Space

Abstract

This account, from Shafto Adair’s pamphlet The Winter of 1846–7 in Antrim, strikes a note that can be found in accounts of the Irish Famine of the 1840s, cutting across genres. In the reports of relief organizations, in the eyewitness accounts of landlords and agents, in the fact-finding travel narratives of writers such as Thomas Carlyle, and in editorial commentaries in newspapers such as The Nation, we find images of almost unimaginable horror produce a disturbing sense of temporal and spatial dislocation. Reports of bodies rotting by the roadsides, cannibalism, and abandoned villages conjure up, as Adair puts it, “tragedies acted in remote times, or in distant regions”; but these events are neither remote in time nor space. Instead, they are taking place “within our own days, on our own thresholds.”

I do not think it possible for an English reader, however powerful his imagination, to conceive the state of Ireland during the past winter, or its present condition. Famines and plagues will suggest themselves with their ghastly and repulsive incidents—the dead mother—the dying infant—the feast of cannibals—Athens—Jerusalem—Marseilles. But these awful facts stand forth as dark spots on the illuminated chronicles of time; episodes, it may be, of some magnificent epoch in a nation’s history—tragedies acted in remote times, or in distant regions—the actors, the inhabitants of beleaguered cities, or the citizens of a narrow territory. But here the tragedy is enacted with no narrower limits than the boundaries of a Kingdom, the victims—an entire people within our own days, at our own thresholds.¹