Feasting at the Castle: Mary Severn in Dublin, 1852

‘The effect was beautiful of the sun rising behind the blue hills.’

In August 1852, Mary Severn set off with her older brother Walter to Ireland. They were visiting her best friend Mary Palliser as well as numerous Anglo-Irish connections of the huge family of Palliser. This was the start of Mary’s fully professional career. She had been training with her father and his friend, the more successful portrait artist, George Richmond since she was in her teens and had bits and pieces of work. Now, however, she was setting out to do portrait commissions for the Pallisers and their friends, which would lead to a further eight months in Ireland and at least two to three more months than Mary expected. On 27 August, she wrote to her mother that she was ‘safe in Dublin’ and the railway journey from London to Chester was ‘not in the least fatiguing’. At Chester she had grapes and ‘a cup of hot strong [underlined] tea’, before they went to Holyhead to Dublin via steam ship, which was the main route and run by London North West Railways (LNWR). She could barely sleep on the steamer ‘as so excited’ and ‘looked at the full moon in the sea, which was like a mirror until 1 then to my cabin.’

The Custom House, Dublin

It is likely Mary docked at North Wall in the Docklands, which is incidentally where I stayed last week and part of a very large development of housing in Dublin over the last 10 years. At the same time as Mary and Walter arrived in Dublin, thousands were leaving the city and, indeed, the country due to the Great Famine (1845-52 approx) and its aftermath. The worst years of the famine were between 1846-49, but the aftermath in terms of evictions of tenant farmers from their small holdings and severe poverty continued until 1854. In those years 25,000 people were evicted, leading to a continued exodos from Ireland of 1 million people.

In his seminal article in the London Review of Books in 1998, Colm Tóibín asks:

How do you write about the Famine? What tone do you use? It is now agreed (at least more or less) that around a million people died of disease, hunger and fever between the years 1846-49.’

Eavan Boland’s poem Quarantine is a good place to start in answer to that question and is based on account she read of an old couple fleeing the famine :

In the morning they were both found dead.

Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.

But her feet were held against his breastbone.

The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.

Two episodes of the Empire Podcast on Ireland ‘The Great Famine: The Blight Strikes Ireland’, include Tóibín as a guest and are well worth a listen, though obviously harrowing.

During the period of the Great Famine (1845-1852), the writer Anthony Trollope was in the country and witnessed the effects of starvation, the Poor Law and evictions on the rural population. His Irish novels capture the Anglo-Irish world of remote homes, genteel poverty and middle- and upper-class socialising. In Castle Richmond (1860), however, he also writes about the Irish rural poor, from the point of view of a middle-class observer. His tone is pitying and humane, particularly in comparison to many 19thC writers and newspapers (as Tóibín points out).

O, my reader, have you ever seen a railway train taking its departure from an Irish station, with a freight of Irish emigrants? if so, you know how the hair is torn, and how the hands are clapped, and how the low moanings gradually swell into notes of loud lamentation. It means nothing, I have heard men say,—men and women too. But such men and women are wrong. It means much; it means this: that those who are separated, not only love each other, but are anxious to tell each other that they so love.

Anthony Trollope (1860), Castle Richmond, Chapter XXXII

On Tuesday, I remembered that description and the words of Boland when I looked at the gaunt figures of the Famine Memorial (1997), by sculptor Rowan Gillespie, outside the (rebuilt) Custom House by the Jeanie Jones ‘Coffin Ship’ on the water.

The Great Famine Memorial, Dublin

Mary’s letters to her mother do not mention the Famine while she is Dublin. It is likely she saw some evidence of the given starving and sick people flocked to the docks to escape through those years, though Tóibín has pointed out the middleclasses in the cities were removed from the worst of it and in Dublin,

Mary was related to the upper classes as her half uncle (her mother was Eliza Montgomerie – the illegitimate daughter of Lord Eglington who died before he became Earl) was the 13th Earl of Eglinton, Archibald Montgomerie (1812-1861). He was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (or Viceroy) from February to December 1852 ‘where his fairness and made him extremely popular’ (Millar, 2004). Archibald Montgomerie was known to the Severns as 'Lord E' and was at home when Walter and Mary arrived in Dublin ‘so Walter and I visited at 11 and left our card’ with the hotel address and ‘Walter took me home in an open cart, so fresh, almost as good as riding.’ Home was Dublin Castle, the ‘centre of British rule in Ireland’ since 1204 and where it officially ended on 16 January 1922. The castle was the official residence of the Lord Lieutenant and the ‘State Apartments’ used for entertaining – they are still used for special occasions by the President and Government of Ireland as well as ‘a living museum’.

Portrait Room, formerly the Dining Room, at Dublin Castle

Mary and Walter were invited by the Eglintons' to dinner and to spend the night at the Castle. They had been expecting only to go for tea and there was some ‘dread’ at the prospect of dinner. Mary wrote to her mother ‘so I dressed myself very carefully in my high white and red dress. I think I looked very well. I slept during the day at the hotel.’ Mary described the view from the drawing room of the castle as ‘one of the loveliest I ever saw’ and was invited back by Lady Eglinton to draw her in the future. The Drawing Room is deep red and has the same decoration as it did in 1838 (and 1852) – by the time the Severns visited the room would have had the portraits of Victoria and Albert in situ. What is now the portrait room at the castle was the main dining room where, in this Greek revival style room, the ‘table covered with exquisite fruits’ and Mary ate ‘a passion flower fruit’ for the first time. She ‘slept in a magnificent room’ and the next morning ‘Walter and I breakfasted alone with many servants around us to assist us’ before getting in the formal carriage ‘which made quite a furore as we went through Dublin’. Back at their hotel, the staff came out to meet them – the power of the Lord-Lieutenant was clear.'

Later in the day, Mary got a train to Clonmel with Mr Palliser where she saw ‘purple mountains in the distance and old ruins here and there.’ She ran out of time to paint Lady Eglinton as Lord E only remained in Ireland until December and Mary did not return to Dublin until March 1853. Eglinton was appointed to the same role again in 1858-9 and after his death in 1861, a statue of him was erected in St Stephen’s Green in 1866. It was subsequently blown up by Irish nationalists in 1958, illustrating that statues have long been identified as contentious, as artist Sean Lynch puts it, ‘public space is not about consensus, but contestation.’ The statues now in place to remember the Great Famine are of nameless starved figures walking beside you and impossible to ignore. There was no exquisite fruit for them in 1852.

Reading

Eavan Boland (2001), ‘Quarantine’

Mary Millar (2004) "Montgomerie, Archibald William, thirteenth earl of Eglinton and first earl of Winton (1812–1861), politician and racing patron." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. September 23, 2004. Oxford University Press.

Paula Murphy (2022): ‘Destruction and Loss’, Sculpture Dublin website: https://www.sculpturedublin.ie/destruction-and-loss/

Mary Severn to Eliza Severn, 27 August & 29 August 1852, Letters. Birkenhead Collection – Severn Family Archive .

Colm Tóibín (1998), ‘Erasures, London Review of Books, Vol. 20 No. 15 · 30 July 1998

Anthony Trollope (1860), Castle Richmond

Empire Podcast ‘The Great Famine: The Blight Strikes Ireland’: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/empire/id1639561921?i=1000698620046