The book, Canada and the Great Irish Famine, was officially launched yesterday at the University of Toronto’s St. Michael’s College.
Edited by William Jenkins, the book is a series of ten essays written by several well-known Great Irish Famine historians.
Essay topics include Toronto’s Provincial Lunatic Asylum, press reports of the Irish emigration to Canada, Catholic orphans in Irish towns, and Irish Famine migration to Quebec in the mid-1800s.
After opening a box of newly printed books he had just received, Mr. Jenkins wrote on social media, “We hope that (this book) does some justice to the memory of those Irish men, women, and children who made their way to Canada in often harrowing circumstances in the late 1840s, many of whom did not survive long to make lives for themselves here.”
Here’s the publisher’s description of the book:
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.
The book is available from Indigo, where you can preview the table of contents, and I bet it’s at other book stores in Canada.
