2012 in Review PT 5: “Harsh attitudes crushed the less-fortunate in the past”

Do you have a library card? If so, I recommend you borrow a book by Bill Bryson entitled At Home: A Short History of Private Life.

As I’ve been writing and thinking about the demise of good jobs in this decade (particularly in 2012), I’ve noticed that Bryson’s book occasionally provides evidence of several harsh attitudes that crushed not only the spirits but the bodies of the poor and less-fortunate. (As mentioned in an earlier post, the poor made up the majority of citizens for many centuries).

For example, I recently wrote that the consideration of even the most basic human rights in the mid-1800s was hindered by cruel attitudes from unexpected quarters. Reverend T. R. Malthus (1766 - 1834), for some reason, blamed the poor for their own hardships and opposed the idea of relief for the masses on the grounds that it simply increased their tendency to idleness.

And regarding Ireland’s Great Famine in 1845 - 46, I came across the following lines in Bryson’s book:

From the moment of the potato’s introduction to Europe, failed harvests became regular... Three hundred thousand people died in a single failure in 1739. But that appalling total was made to seem insignificant by the scale of death and suffering in 1845 - 46... It wasn’t just in Ireland that the crop failed - in fact, it failed across Europe - but the Irish were especially dependent on the potato.

Relief was infamously slow to come. Months after the starving had started, Sir Robert Peel, the British prime minister, was still urging caution.

“There is such a tendency to exaggeration and inaccuracy in Irish reports that delay in acting on them is always desirable,” he wrote.


[Monument beside Lake Ontario near downtown Kingston, Ontario]

Lest we say that it was only misguided or uninformed public servants that opposed the idea of relief and delayed any meaningful action on behalf of the less-fortunate, we must hear the following about big business interests of the day:

In the worst year of the potato famine, London’s fish market, Billingsgate, sold 500 million oysters, 1 billion fresh herrings, almost 100 million soles, 498 million shrimps, 304 million periwinkles, 33 million plaice, 23 million mackerel, and other similarly massive amounts - and not one morsel of any of it made its way to Ireland to relieve the starving people there. (pg. 84, At Home)


[Enlargement of monument script: Photos by G. Harrison, 2006]

By now some readers are likely wondering, “What do these harsh attitudes of the past, whether demonstrated by public or business leaders, have to do with the decline of good, secure jobs in the modern era?”

To be sure, I think that’s a very good question as well.

More to follow.

FYI - periwinkles are any small marine snail belonging to the family Littorinidae (class Gastropoda, phylum Mollusca)

- plaice is the common name used for a group of flatfish. There are four species in the group, the European, American, Alaskan and scale-eye plaice.

So now you know!

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Please click here to read 2012 in Review PT 4: “Grandparents will recall the worst of times”

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