The text is a letter written by Nicholas Cummins, a county magistrate from Cork, in the end of 1846, and addressed to Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington. Cummins also sent the same letter to the London Times in a desperate attempt to call upon the sensitiveness of the readers in London, in order to fight against the public disbelief about the magnitude of Irish suffering, acting as an eyewitness of the horror lived by peasants, children and women, in the south west of Ireland, namely in Skibbereen, the hamlet he personally visited and described in his letter.
The text could be classified as a literary-journalistic one; journalistic according to the descriptive nature of the facts related on the letter and the public whom it is addressed; …show more content…
The Great Irish Potato famine was a lack of food suffered by the Irish peasants, that started in the autumn of 1845 after a new blight ended with the crop that provided almost 60 per cent of the nation’s food needs.
Some historians say that it was not a real famine but a case of neglect, considering that Ireland was exporting most of its grain and meal to other countries –mainly England- even during the worst years of the Famine, instead of closing the ports to keep the food for the Irish, as had been done in previous famines. The actual problem was not a lack of food but the price of it, which was far beyond the reach of the …show more content…
If this doctrine was not inactive enough, we must add what has been called “Providencialism”, the widespread belief among members of the British upper and middle classes that the famine was a divine judgement against the kind of Irish agrarian regime, allegedly abusive and inefficient. After the Laissez-faire and the Providencialism, the third main cause of the British Government’s inaction was the Moralism: the Irish were seen as freeloaders in that time, full of flaws such as disorder, filth, laziness and a lack of self-reliance. The famine was seen as an opportunity for the Irish to be taught to stand on their own feet and to facilitate various long-desired changes within
The text could be classified as a literary-journalistic one; journalistic according to the descriptive nature of the facts related on the letter and the public whom it is addressed; …show more content…
The Great Irish Potato famine was a lack of food suffered by the Irish peasants, that started in the autumn of 1845 after a new blight ended with the crop that provided almost 60 per cent of the nation’s food needs.
Some historians say that it was not a real famine but a case of neglect, considering that Ireland was exporting most of its grain and meal to other countries –mainly England- even during the worst years of the Famine, instead of closing the ports to keep the food for the Irish, as had been done in previous famines. The actual problem was not a lack of food but the price of it, which was far beyond the reach of the …show more content…
If this doctrine was not inactive enough, we must add what has been called “Providencialism”, the widespread belief among members of the British upper and middle classes that the famine was a divine judgement against the kind of Irish agrarian regime, allegedly abusive and inefficient. After the Laissez-faire and the Providencialism, the third main cause of the British Government’s inaction was the Moralism: the Irish were seen as freeloaders in that time, full of flaws such as disorder, filth, laziness and a lack of self-reliance. The famine was seen as an opportunity for the Irish to be taught to stand on their own feet and to facilitate various long-desired changes within