The Great Famine enters the narrative through Duncan Wedderburn’s account to Bella Baxter: a potato disease brought mass starvation, while landlords, parliamentary policy, and the movement of grain helped determine who suffered and who left. The episode makes a national catastrophe part of Bella’s encounter with the political arguments Wedderburn wants her to understand—and gives her a pointed measure of his own moral courage.

Causes and Conditions

Wedderburn begins with the dependence of the poor on potatoes: he says that eight out of ten people in Ireland lived on them, because the peasants’ poor soil grew little else. What money they earned by other means went to rent. In his account, ownership compounded that vulnerability: English-descended landlords held the fertile land on which corn was grown, while the peasants depended on a crop that could fail.

A sudden disease killed the potatoes, and starvation followed. Wedderburn places the disaster thirty-five years before his telling. He does not present the famine as crop failure alone; the unequal distribution of land and the peasants’ limited alternatives form the background to the catastrophe he describes.

Parliamentary Policy and the Grain

Wedderburn recounts that the British Parliament considered closing Ireland’s ports so that Irish grain would be eaten by the Irish population. The proposal was rejected because it would interfere with free trade. Instead, soldiers were sent to ensure that grain reached the ships. In his telling, a political commitment to trade took precedence over keeping food in a famine-stricken country.

The scale of the loss gives that decision its force: Wedderburn says nearly a million people starved to death and a million and a half left the country. Those who reached Britain, he adds, worked for such low wages that they helped drive down the wages of British workers, while British industries made greater profits. The consequences of the famine therefore extend beyond death and displacement: migration also supplied employers with cheaper labour.

Bella’s Challenge to Wedderburn

Wedderburn knows that, when his lessons become unbearable, Bella runs to the ship’s stern and leans over the rail, letting the wind carry her cries out to sea. After this account, she does not simply retreat. She asks whether he would have voted against keeping the ports open if he had been a member of Parliament. She tells herself she would not bite him if he answered yes, but would spit in his face.

Wedderburn answers quietly that he would not have dared vote against the proposal had he known he would later have to face her. Bella nearly calls him a cunning fiend, then recognizes that such language belongs to Wedderburn’s own manner of speaking; she swallows her spit and walks away. The exchange leaves his historical lesson unsettled by the question of personal responsibility: describing injustice is not the same as having resisted it.

Narrative and Political Significance

The famine episode is presented as part of Bella’s diary account of Wedderburn’s teaching, not as an impersonal historical narrative. Its details arrive through his explanation, and Bella’s response tests that explanation against the speaker himself. The movement from political history to a question about how he would have voted makes the scene both an account of mass suffering and a confrontation between the abstract defence of policy and the prospect of being answerable to its victims.

Wedderburn’s account connects famine, free trade, military enforcement, migration, and wages in a single chain of consequences. The scene’s final turn keeps that chain from remaining merely theoretical: Bella asks what he would have done, and his answer exposes the distance between knowing how a system works and daring to oppose it.