Just Published: Dr. Mary Mullen on the Irish Famine and Fast Days in Victorian England

It's been a busy month for Dr. Mary Mullen: not only has Edinburgh University Press just published her book Novel Institutions, but her article, "'A Great Public Transaction: Fast Days, Famine, and the British State,"" was just published in the journal Victorian Studies.

The article considers the National Day of Fast and Humiliation, observed in 1847 on the occasion of the Irish Famine. Dr. Mullen studies the literature that fast days produced—poems, pamphlets, newspaper articles, political cartoons—as well as how fast days become a narrative device in fictional narratives like Elizabeth Gaskell’s Lois the Witch (1859) and historical accounts like Charles Trevelyan’s The Irish Crisis (1848). Ultimately, she suggests that fast days help us think about conceptions of the public in Victorian Britain. Although fast-day literature works to foster public unity during times of heightened social divisions, it ultimately distinguishes between publics and populations: groups of people that find expression through the state and groups of people that are managed by the state. Trevelyan’s The Irish Crisis reveals the inherent violence of this distinction. Through his representation of the fast day, Trevelyan works to integrate Ireland into a British public in order to justify the devastating population loss of the Famine.