Canada and the Great Irish Famine

William Jenkins

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2025
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780228025887
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

In the summer of 1847, over four hundred ships arrived in the Gulf of St Lawrence, carrying Irish men, women, and children who were fleeing the starvation and misery of the Great Potato Famine. Tens of thousands of famine refugees rebuilt their lives in different parts of Canada, in places urban and rural, Anglophone and Francophone. Though still a young province within the British Empire, Canada would be marked permanently and in significant ways by this mass migration.

Canada and the Great Irish Famine examines how people confronted, experienced, and remembered the famine migration. Essays consider the transatlantic voyage; the collection of donations and organization of aid; the challenges encountered by the cities of Quebec, Saint John, Montreal, Toronto, Kingston, and Hamilton and their public debates over the impact of so many new arrivals; the accompanying problems of disease, destitution, mental illness, death and burial; the stories of orphaned children; and expressions of famine memory. The worst demographic catastrophe in nineteenth-century Europe inspired generations of political writings, artistic and literary endeavours, and commemorative practices, and it was woven into narratives of Irish nationalism and the founding of Canada.

Canada and the Great Irish Famine provides a new perspective on the social outcomes of Ireland's famine migration as well as on the resilience and adaptability of the receiving communities and the migrants themselves.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Canada Calls to Ireland
• Introduction: “A Calamity to the Province”
• 1 Shipwrecks and Society: Press Reports of the Irish Emigrant Passage to Canada, 1845–55
• 2 Via the Port and into the City: The Irish Famine Migration to Quebec in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
• 3 Saving Ireland from Famine: Canada’s Role in 1847
• 4 Catholic Orphans in Protestant Towns: The Churches and the Irish Famine Orphans in British North America, 1847–48
• 5 Stephen De Vere’s “Political Lesson”: A Case Study of Famine Irish Emigration, Settlement, and Political and Social Unrest
• 6 Encountering a Ravaged People in the Modern City: The Impact of the Irish Famine Migration on Montreal’s Urban Landscape
• 7 Making Space for the Irish: Toronto before and after the 1847 Migration
• 8 Madness in the Season of Famine and Distress: Famine Migration, Irish Insanity, and Toronto’s Provincial Lunatic Asylum, 1841–48
• 9 “Mournful fragments of … the Irish Exodus”? Literary Representations of Irish Canadian Famine Immigration in the Periodical Press
• 10 “A Most Historically Gruesome Ground”: The Burial and Commemoration of Famine Irish in Hamilton, 1847–1927
• Contributors
• Index