1840-50 The 'Hungry Forties'

This decade has gone down in history as a time of extreme poverty and deprivation, of widespread shortages and even, in some areas, of starvation. William Cobbett, grand old man of English radicalism, asked, “Why should those that raise the food be subject to begging for relief, emigration schemes, and gaols and transportation vessels for taking what they produce when no project is on foot…for transporting pensioners, parsons or dead weight people?”. The subject of endless coverage in literature, the period was clearly etched into the collective memory of earlier British generations. But is this memory reliable? 

Origin of 'hungry memories'

To start with, the term ‘Hungry Forties’ was not used by contemporaries, nor by anyone in the 19^th century. It was first coined in 1903, 60 years after the relevant decade. It served as propaganda in the renewed Edwardian political contest between free trade and tariff reform, Joseph Chamberlain’s plan to re-impose protective import duties. A key text, The Hungry Forties: Life under the Bread Tax: Descriptive Letters and Other Testimonies from Contemporary Witnesses, came out in 1904. Based on the memories of people who had lived through what they recalled as a time of poverty and starvation, the authors were Jane Cobden Unwin (daughter of Anti Corn Law hero Richard Cobden) and her husband, publisher Thomas Fisher Unwin.

Jane Cobden

With the electoral battle between Free Trade and Imperial Preference fought again before World War I, The Hungry Forties went through several editions. It was key to the radical Edwardian agenda (Jane herself was a suffragist) to avoid what were seen as the 1840s’ mistakes. So the book’s ideas became embedded in political and social memory, and even late into the 20^th century it was treated as if it were a contemporary source.

Inadequate reforms

In fact the 1840s saw a struggle between the ruling landed class and more liberal elements. The big disappointments of the 1832 Reform Act spawned two main groups. The Chartists wanted full male suffrage, secret ballots and annual parliaments. The single issue Anti Corn Law League wanted to lift tariff protection for British landowners/farmers to reduce food prices. In the short term the ACLL was the more effective.

Meeting of the Anti Corn Law League, Exeter Hall 1846

In 1843 protectionist spokesman Robert Marsham, Warden of Merton College Oxford made the flippant remark that if workers could not buy bread they at least ‘rejoiced in potatoes’. He predictably got some stick from the ACLL, for whom it was a propaganda boost, similar to Marie Antoinette's supposed 'qu'ils mangent de la brioche' line. Thomas Carlyle joined in to mock the phrase. With 7-8m people short of ‘wheaten bread’ the descent into potatoes was scorned. Note that it was less hunger and more a change of diet that outraged people.

The Irish position

But in Ireland it was the potato crop that was the problem. The blight in Europe from the autumn of 1845 hit Ireland particularly hard. Its population was far more dependent than England or other European countries on potatoes for its basic diet - a problem exacerbated when hunger struck both through the role of absentee landlords, and the lack of real city-based alternatives to rural work. Little in the way of grain, like wheat and oats, was grown for substitutes. The dreadful Irish catastrophe is not only very well known, but was a running sore in Anglo-Irish relations for ages. 1m people died from starvation or related conditions. Another 2m emigrated, mainly to England, Scotland, North America, Australia and New Zealand.

Famine memorial, Dublin

It's easy to be misunderstood here, and there's certainly no wish to sound at all glib. No-one argues about the scale and consequences of the Irish potato famine. It was truly terrible. But was this a feature in the rest of Britain? When historian Chaloner analysed the period, he pointed out that hunger was much greater between 1837 and 1842 than during the economic recovery from 1843. Ireland hardly featured in the Unwin tract, nor in general debate on the ‘Hungry Forties’. And the Irish famine, or harvest crises in general, perhaps surprisingly, were barely mentioned by Marx and Engels in their Communist Manifesto, published in 1848.

Europe's revolutionary mood

A Europe-wide scarcity of grain was given as one reason for the 1848 Revolutions, but of course Britain avoided all this. Peel’s repeal of the Corn Laws helped alleviate the 1846 food threat to the British Isles, a year when continental grain supplies took a huge hit with scarcity and resulting distress. Despite shortages in mainland Europe, and excess deaths, actual starvation was largely limited there. And Britain could import grain from the new American and Canadian prairie producers.

Poster for the Great Chartist Demonstration, 1848

Despite some attempt to link these events as part of a single whole, the strong evidence points to a set of regional factors at play. Scotland also suffered from the potato blight but was able to substitute this crop with oats and other grain. People affected often moved to the lowland cities where industrial growth offered employment. Large numbers of highlanders did in fact emigrate but this seems to have been mainly due to the Highland Clearances rather than purely hunger distress.

Britain's economic arithmetic 

The UK population grew consistently in the 1840s, reaching 27m by 1850. This figure includes Ireland, despite its obvious loss of so many people. The total was less than both France (36.3m) and Germany (33.7m), but GDP per capita was higher than in most of Europe except the Netherlands. Employment in agriculture at around 30%, was half the rate typical in continental Europe. 40% of the UK population lived in cities of more than 10,000. Only the Netherlands approached this level of density. It testified to rapid industrialisation and urbanisation.

Annual per capita GDP growth in Britain was an average 2.5-3.0% during the period according to Maddison. This, despite poor figures in the early years of the decade, and again in the British banking crisis of 1847 (dealt with by raising liquidity through suspending the 1844 Bank Charter Act). These figures were much higher than for mainland Europe. In fact, with some major construction projects, the frantic development of railways, and new communications like the telegraph, economic growth was turbocharged. Add rising industrial capacity to serve an expanding Empire, and these were boom times in Britain.

'Postmemory'

Clearly some people in some areas during this period struggled with extreme poverty and even starvation. But it wasn't a universal problem. Most historians to be fair, avoided the term ‘Hungry Forties’. John Clapham, first professor of economic history at Cambridge, said the 1840s ‘were no hungrier than the 1830s or 1850s’. TS Ashton repudiated the term as it ‘fastened on the decade that saw the railway boom and the repeal of the Corn Laws the stigma of the “hungry forties”’. 

Penny edition of 'The Hungry Forties'

But Eric Hobsbawm seemed convinced and used the term confidently. He had his blindspots though - for instance he found it hard to see why anyone should start and build a business other than for profit. Like many, he perhaps viewed hunger as a handy way of showing the scale of discontent and deprivation in 19^th century Britain. Well into the 1980s this propaganda term was still used as if it were contemporary. But, like many myths, it was ‘postmemory’, used by a later generation, though not by those who had lived it. As historian Anthony Howe pointedly writes, “A folk narrative was effectively relayed as a democratic history of the British people”.