In this episode, I’m joined by Dr. Padraic Scanlan. Padraic is an associate professor at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the history of labor in Britain and the British empire. He’s the author of three books, including Freedom’s Debtors: British Antislavery in Sierra Leone in the Age of Revolutions and Slave Empire: How Slavery Made Modern Britain. His newest book, out this year, is called Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine, and it offers a reinterpretation of the Irish Great Famine of the mid-1800s that shows how massive income inequality, debt, housing prices, precarious employment and more contributed to the disaster. I spoke with Padraic about how he thinks about writing for a general audience, his work with a developmental editor and why he loves editors, and his writerly inspirations.
Mentioned in this episode
- Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine
- Slave Empire: How Slavery Made Modern Britain
- Freedom’s Debtors: British Antislavery in Sierra Leone in the Age of Revolutions
- Zotero
- Linda Colley
- Developmental editor Pamela Haag
- Natalie Zemon Davis
- Robert Darnton
- David Cannadine
- Terence Ranger and Eric Hobsbawm, eds., The Invention of Tradition
- Cintra Wilson, A Massive Swelling
- George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
- Susan Orlean, The Orchid Thief
- Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom
[Note: Purchases made from links to bookshop.org earn a small commission, which helps keep the podcast going.]
Transcript
Kate Carpenter 0:00
Welcome back to Drafting the Past. I'm your host, Kate Carpenter, and in each episode, I interview a historian about their writing process to learn how the magic happens. In this episode, I'm joined by Dr Padraic Scanlan.
Padraic Scanlan 0:13
Well, thanks for having me.
Kate Carpenter 0:14
Padraic is an associate professor at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the history of labor in Britain and the British empire. He’s the author of three books, including Freedom’s Debtors: British Antislavery in Sierra Leone in the Age of Revolutions and Slave Empire: How Slavery Made Modern Britain. His newest book, out this year, is called Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish famine, and it offers a reinterpretation of the Irish Great Famine of the mid-1800s that shows how massive income inequality, debt, housing prices, precarious employment and more contributed to the disaster-all things that sound awfully familiar today. I spoke with Padraic about how he thinks about writing for a general audience, his work with a developmental editor and why he loves editors, and his writerly inspirations. Enjoy my conversation with Dr. Padraic Scanlan.
Padraic Scanlan 1:05
Yeah, I mean, I think I initially I didn't intend to be an historian. I think I had planned, planned, insofar as I had a plan of any kind, on working in journalism, but I quickly learned at McGill or where I went in Canada and Canadian the best way to be a journalist in Canada is to have a parent, ideally, two parents who already work in journalism. In Canada, it is completely impossible to break into. So, you know, I was working a series, you know, it's like university is cheap in Canada, especially if you go to school in the province where you live, where you're from. So I was working a series of crummy service jobs and and then I, you know, kind of stumbled backwards into graduate school in history, which is something that I would never now, would never recommend to an undergraduate. And it's actually kind of crazy that one of my mentors at McGill said you should go to graduate school in history. And then I was like, well, where should I go?
Anyway. So yeah, so I kind of stumbled backwards into it. And, you know, as I was working, you know, I wrote my dissertation, I wrote an academic book called Freedom's Debtors, which was based on my dissertation, which was published by Yale. And I kept trying to break into popular writing, or at least writing history for a general audience. I've always kind of admired the model of staking a claim to an academic argument through a peer reviewed article and then writing a book for a bigger audience that expands on that argument. So, you know, I got lucky. Basically, I was kept pitching book reviews, kept pitching book reviews, kept pitching book reviews and essays, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. And then a senior colleague of mine basically punted a book review that they didn't want to do to me for The Guardian, and I just ripped the book apart, which I now understand you're never supposed to do for a book review. It's even worse in academic journals, where every book is a masterpiece, every argument is a gem. But I didn't understand you're not supposed to actually criticize books in book reviews. So I ripped it apart, and then I got an email from the editor or the director of the publishing house, basically, sort of saying, like, do you want to write a book? And so, so I wrote, I wrote Slave Empire based on that, which was sort of based on a lecture course that I gave at the London School of Economics, which is where I started my career as an assistant professor, there for five years. And then from there, while, you know, it did okay, and or at least it did okay for a mid list general audience book, good enough to get a contract for another book called Rot, which is about the Irish famine. And I'm also working now, and now, you know, I've sort of have a much more, I have a much more solid foundation in terms of that world of of writing for a general audience. So, you know, I have now representation. I have a more, let's say, a much less naive perspective on how publishing actually works. Because I thought, you know, having published in academic journals, having published an academic book, I live academic book, I would I just sort of had a I just knew it, but it really doesn't work like that, so I sort of ended up doing the thing that I wanted to do by accident over time.
Kate Carpenter 4:12
I always think that reviewers should maybe feel free to be a little more critical of books. Do you still review now that, now that you've published a couple of books for audience?
Padraic Scanlan 4:20
I mean, I mean, I write fast. That's, that's, perhaps I don't, maybe don't think particularly clearly, but I write really fast and I deliver clean copy. So, yeah, I do academic reviews. I do reviews for magazines and books and stuff like that. Yeah. I mean, I review books, but, I mean, I understand why, like, the academic publishing is collapsing, right? We do it for free, right? It's a thing that you do for free. And you know, not everybody, but you know, if you're the if you have a name, someone, a rich person's name in front of the word professor in your title, you're probably not writing book reviews, or if you are, you're writing book reviews of your friends, right? And you have every reason … you know? So, I mean, a lot of grad students end up having, and I wrote our book reviews as a grad student, you know? And you're not going to criticize a book as a grad student. And if you're a reviewer, you don't want to criticize someone's first book, it's their whole career, right? There's so many reasons, like, I still write much more critically. I will say I write much more critically in reviews for academic, not academic presses, for for general audiences, than I do in academic reviews. And academic reviews, I don't, I'm never gonna pan a book, because I know, I mean, I don't get, I don't get review. I don't usually get assigned, like, the big books, capital B, capital B, and the big feature reviews, where you have, you know, you can't, you're not gonna hurt somebody who's already in that position. But if I'm going to sign a book review for a journal, right? Like that's someone's career on the line, and I'm not going to, I'm not going to torpedo their career for the sake of, you know, so, so you end up kind of soft pedaling reviews, but, yeah, I still do it. I like it. I have a I have one waiting. Actually, when I get back to Toronto, I've got a book to read and review.
Kate Carpenter 6:01
Well, let's talk about kind of your process, when and where do you like to do your writing?
Padraic Scanlan 6:05
So I mean, I think as I was saying, like, I'm not I can't say that insofar as like, I can't say in terms of the kind of gifts that profit an historian, I can't say that I have a particularly intuitive grad, like, I have colleagues who understand historiography far more like they just understand it far more intuitively. They have much more recall. They have a much greater sense of the field. I mean, I'm not trying to pretend like I don't have a sense of the field. I mean, don't, don't tell the University of Toronto I don't have a sense of the field. But I, you know, that's, that's, that's not a strength of mine. But I do write quickly, and I do, I am able to, it turns out, synthesize arguments pretty well. And I don't need particularly, you know, in like, I don't need a lot of special circumstances or, you know, I don't need a particularly kind of cultivated environment to write. So I'm able to write, you know, I'm able to kind of switch into so I write a lot at our house. You know, I what I usually do when I'm beginning a book project. So I'm working on a book project now called, tentatively, called A Day's Work, which will be published eventually, but hopefully, I mean, if they like it, it will be published by profile books sometime in the future. And so for that, you know, I have, what I like to do is just gather huge quantities of primary material and secondary material in just Word files, and then kind of figure out a point in those files and start writing right, start transforming, you know, like going through, and I'll keep the basic right, I'll keep the I'll keep a copy of the pristine file, and in case I need to go back, and I always format. Over time, I've learned to kind of format the footnotes, whether they're archival or primary sources or secondary sources. I use Zotero so I have I keep the Zotero codes in so I don't have to do it later. But then I kind of work through chunks of text and kind of digest the primary and secondary sources from the inside out. And then I like to when I'm writing something, and I think that's the same process. No matter what length of piece I'm writing, as long as it's research based. Like, if I'm reviewing a book or writing an essay, I'll usually read the book and write paragraphs as I go, like, write, you know, pick some quotations and say, This is important point, and then go back and turn that into a finished product. But if it's, if it's a book length or article length project based on research, I basically follow the same process, except with longer documents. So I probably have, you know, for rot. I probably had, you know, 250,000 words, 350,000 actually, I'm not sure how long it was. It was like a six, or 700 page Word document of and I, you know, I have different ways of tagging. So if it's an argument that I'm making, I put it in square brackets. If it's something that seems like it really has to go in, like sometimes a line jumps out at you and you said, this has to be in the book. I usually put that highlight in one color. If it's a section, if it's an argument from another historian that seems analytically important, I'll highlight that in another color, so that when I go through that document, I won't miss those things, because those are things that, as I'm working I'm like, this has to go into the book. This has to go into the article. And whether that ends up being, you know, a paragraph or a page or even just a footnote, I've kind of flagged, and then I just, you know, I just sort of sit down and right through it. And then when I have a rough draft, you know, then i i try to get the rough drafts produced as quickly as I can, and spend a lot more time refining them then that actually drafting them. And actually, when I was, when I was a grad student at Princeton, I worked in the Princeton writing program for a really long time. I did like, hundreds and hundreds of hours of one on one, writing tutorials with with undergrads and grad students. And I learned a lot, actually, from the from the professional development program that they had in the writing program, about just how to not to not be precious about first drafts, right, to not pretend that the first thing that you produce is going to be crystalline and perfect, but recognize that everything is a first draft, and that there's no such thing as a final draft. And I teach writing at Toronto. I teach a writing intensive class that's an introductory kind of the equivalent of sort of a writing program seminar at an American university for first year students. That's about labor studies. And it's the same, you know, I follow the same model, and it's the same kind of basic principles, like, don't be ashamed of your first draft ever. But also, don't pretend that writing, especially nonfiction writing, but fiction writing as well, is this kind of divine inspiration, and that to criticize someone's writing, to edit someone's writing, is to somehow make a claim about their personhood, right? Like it's a craft. And you know, some, some people have more natural aptitude for it than others, but anyone can write clearly, and so, you know, if you can think, so, yeah, so that's, that's, you know, I don't have any particularly sophisticated process, and I'm lucky that I need that I can, like, kind of switch in and out. So, you know, if I'm, you know, if I've got a meeting on campus, and, like, drop the kids off at school by nine, and I've got to get in by 12. You know, I can actually sit down at home and write or work on the manuscript, or work on a manuscript for that 90 minute chunk of time, and then be able to just kind of save it and move on.
Kate Carpenter 11:14
How do you like to organize your primary sources? What tools do you use? Is that Zotero as well?
Padraic Scanlan 11:18
Yeah, I use Zotero. I gotta say I did a much better job of organizing so, I mean, I think one of the things about both Rot and Slave Empire, so Slave Empire is in the UK, and I was digesting, so Slave Empire's in many ways, like a synthetic book. There are parts of it that I'm really that were very original research that I'm really proud of, and maybe like a little bit nettled that nobody picked up on in the reviews, whatever,you know. So I think, I think in so far, like, a lot of that stuff is based on just huge quantities of reading, of printed primary sources, especially of the records of emancipation in the British Empire, which, you know, I think if you're reading a book about emancipation in the British Empire, and you check the footnotes and you see those co call letters for Colonial office papers, understand that almost everything related to emancipation was also published. And so it may be an affectation on the part of the historian to show that it's a manuscript, even though every word of those manuscripts was transcribed and published in volume after volume after volume after volume. So, you know, I try to, when I was doing my PhD research, I had an incredibly elaborate file system, and I'm not sure that it advantaged me at all. And so now I just keep it in one document. And if I have photographs from archives, I keep those in, you know, sorted files. But, yeah, I use Zotero for file management, and if something is outside of Zotero, I mature to flag it so that it doesn't end up getting being a kind of error that gets buried in the text, and then I'm never able to find it again. But yeah, Zotero is a lifesaver. I remember vividly, like that was, yeah, I mean, I when I was in stage up in because I'm from Quebec. And in Quebec, you go to community everyone goes to community college. It's College, between high school and university, either for like a three year trade program or a two year pre university program. And I had a teacher in stage up who did research methods, and she made us she had this system of how you write, sort of how you format notes that I still use in terms of, especially when I'm using library books reflect the call number in the top right corner, you know, and then all kinds and so, you know, I still have my notes from, from, from generals in grad school were organized that way across, like, 6000 notebooks. But I used to do everything longhand, but I stopped doing that. It's completely unworkable.
Kate Carpenter 13:38
Where in your research and reading process do you like to start writing?
Padraic Scanlan 13:42
I think when I start, when things stop being surprising. Sometimes that's quick. Sometimes that takes a long time when I start to see stuff that, if I see things that, if I start to see things that shocked me or surprised me or seemed unusual to me at first, if I start seeing them repeated, I think then it's usually starts. It's usually time to stop, to start writing. So for example, like in Slave Empire, when I was or in Rot, I started writing once it was clear that I had, like Rot is divided into two, into two parts, right? And I wrote them at different paces. One part is about kind of framing the context of the famine, which is something that very few books about the famine do particularly well, at least in my you know, I'm not trying to cast it. If you wrote a book about the famine, your book does it perfectly, but I'm not talking about you, but you know what I mean. But there are a lot of books about the famine that kind of start, you know, in August 1945 in August 1845 right with the discovery of bloody potatoes in Ireland. So the first half of the book was about trying to put together the world from about the 1780s but a little bit before, in terms of, just like I do, a really quick pre kind of 1770s 1780s history up until 1845 and then the second part was just laying out the the second part of the book re engages with those themes, but it it follows the a more conventional trajectory of the famine, from 45 to 1851 and so, like it was easier to start writing the second half of the book than the first, because I knew, you know, there's so many books about the famine, there's so many good narrative histories of the famine, that I knew the beats right? I knew what the beats of of the narrative would be, in a way that I didn't completely know what the beats of the world building part of the book would be. So, you know, as soon as I start to get the feeling that I'm really repeating myself, or when I'm reading secondary sources and I kind of I'm getting the same arguments back and forth at each other again and again. Then I can kind of say, Okay, this is a time when, if I miss something, I can always go back, but I have enough material now that if I start, I can make some serious progress. So it depends, it really depends, on what once I start getting that kind of, that feeling.
Kate Carpenter 15:56
I know you embrace sort of messy first drafts and getting it down on the page. So then, what on a practical level, does the revision process look like for you? How do you tackle it?
Padraic Scanlan 16:06
So I usually work through the draft from the beginning. I break it into chapters, if I'm doing it, if I'm writing an academic article, I break into sections, and I kind of have each section, you know, with a with a line break or page break, and I work from the top through to the bottom, and try to just cut and cut and cut and cut. I overwrite, usually, because I don't want to miss anything. And then I recognize and if something seems really good, like I still have a file from my doctoral dissertation, which someday I can come back to, just because I wrote about colonial Sierra Leone in my in my dissertation, in my first book, and there were a lot of animal attacks in in colonial Sierra Leone. So I still got, like the, none of them made into the book, none of them, I don't even think any of them made into the dissertation, but I still got a file of animal attacks, because they just seem too good. I may never do anything with them, but I do have them. So something, you know, sometimes, if it's just, you can just cut it and, you know, you have the Yeah. And so I work through the draft from top to bottom, and I try to spend most of my time. It's another kind of writing, writing center, writing seminar. Tick on the introduction, right, whether the introduction is a paragraph or whether it's five pages or 10 pages, or however long, to make sure that the introduction is super, super clear before I move to the rest of the text. Because when the introduction is clear, you know, it cuts both ways. On the one hand, then you have a scaffolding you can lay the rest of your work on right, and you can, know, okay, well, I've said I'm gonna say, I said I'm gonna do this. So I'd like made a contract with the reader that I'm gonna give them this information, so I have to put it in. And also, they're really forgiving, like a clear introduction, can really make slop, like more sloppy argument, seem really clear, so it cuts both ways. But then, then I work through and, you know, I I read the drafts. It takes me a long time to I spend more time, I would say, refining, than I do, I would say, like, the the longest periods, like, it kind of follows, sort of like a bell curve shape, right? Because I spend tons of time gathering information. I write as quickly as I can, knowing that it's going to be really messy, and then I spend a really long time revising. And so the actual drafting process, I try to do it quickly so that I it's just like, psychologically, it's, it's reassuring to me to know that, like, I'm not gonna be able to turn into my publishers, you know, who are expecting 100,000 95,000 word book with 5000 words of notes or whatever, I can't turn in 150,000 square bracketed mess. But knowing that I have it, that's like a neurosis from even from from undergrad and from high school, just like I would always set artificial deadlines for myself. That was that were ahead of the just infuriating everybody, you know, just like, are you done your essays? Like, yeah, I'm done my essay, because I wrote it two weeks into the semester as a draft, you know, and I'm going to come back to it later. That's like, a bit of an exaggeration, but not, not much. I'd rather have a really, like, Lumpy, garbagey draft ready that I know I can find something in rather than like, I have colleagues and friends who are able to take forever to draft, but then their first drafts are really good. My first drafts aren't good. So, you know, I think there's, there's, there's more than one way to skin a cat, but I prefer to work fast and then edit more slowly.
Kate Carpenter 19:20
As you've mentioned, Rot is your third book. It's your second book with the popular press aimed at a general audience. What'd you learn in your first book?
Padraic Scanlan 19:28
Yeah, I mean in terms of the process. So, you know, I think like, like freedoms better is my academic my first book, my academic book, has some you know, I think my supervisor and mentor at Princeton, Linda Colley writes in a way that I think I emulate, and I think all of her students emulate, really self consciously or unselfconsciously. And so, you know, there's a pattern to the way that she writes. There's a pattern to the way that many of her students write. There's a pattern to the way that I write, right, like a lot of so my dissertation is not by any stretch of the imagination, a popular book, but it has some of the features of a popular book that appear in Rot and in Slave Empire, right? So a lot of the chapters begin with a very kind of cultural anthropology style, or historical anthropology style. You know, you're suddenly put in a place, right? And you're put in either through the eyes of a person or, you know, if you're feeling like creative you can do. You know, there's, there's only really one chapter in Rot that doesn't follow that, that pattern. And it starts with a joke, right? It starts with a setup to a to like, how many potatoes could the Irishman eat, which is a, which is my favorite chapter of Rot, "The People's Potato." But, you know, I sort of set myself, and so I had an idea of what it meant to write a trade book, but then, when I started writing it, I had a little bit of extra research money at LSE, and so I hired an editor whose name is Pamela Haag, who I highly recommend, who specializes in helping academics turn like kind of recognize what parts of their books are appealing to a general audience and helping academics to keep their arguments sophisticated and interesting and true to, you know, true to the guild, without making them impenetrable and tedious for a popular audience who maybe doesn't necessarily understand states. And so I sent her the manuscript for Slave Empire, and she did a really good job kind of just, just sort of seeing the things that she cut, and her explanations for why she cut the things she cut was really, really helpful with Slave Empire. And there are still some elements of Slave Empire when I read it, you know, I can see that I that there are things that I'm doing, you know, I have another editor who I've worked with on magazine pieces. Because I think it's like, I think the idea that that you shouldn't have editing help, like, is insane, right? And the idea that look, we're the idea again, I think it's the same sense of of, like, writing as this, as this, this expression of selfhood, but you think, like the best, or even the most kind of lyrical to use, and maybe an overused adjective, but historical writing, even some of the most lyrical writers of fiction like the idea that they don't have an editor who's helping them refine their ideas is, you know, it's not true, right? Like every good writer has a good editor. So you know, seeing what Pamela cut helped me understand what I should cut. And there's still some elements of Slave Empire that I was giving. Sorry, I got a little off track. But I have an editor I work with on non fiction pieces for magazines who always calls it giving out bouquets, right? And academic writers love to give out bouquets because you want to. I mean, I do it all the time in academic writing. You like give the name of an historian because you like, you admire their work, or you went to graduate school with them, or you're their buddy, you know, or you want to get their attention right? We're always doing this, this complex, because we live in the social world of academic history, and so we're flagging. But like, general readers don't care, like they really don't care. And so one of the things that Pamela helped me to do was to understand where you can, kind of where someone's work is important enough that you should say so and so an historian at such and such University famous for X, Y, Zed argument, and when you can just kind of put that in the footnotes, even if it means that you're no longer even if it means that you're taking away a bouquet, you know. So that was the process with, and there's still some elements of Slave Empire that have that kind of So, for example, one of the things that I do in Slave Empire, that I cut was cut from the book, is I wondered, like, should I have a really long explanation at the beginning of the book for the language that I use, which is something that A lot of academic histories of slavery and emancipation, use, right? Like, should you use, you know, for example, so why, throughout the book, I write enslaved person, right? Although I am skeptical, you know, I have a different view about, like, enslaver, which has become sort of, in the field, the expected term for slaveholder. But I use slaveholder, and I had a long explanation for why I do that, right? Because I recognize that that is, at the time, was out of step with it, slightly out of step of the field, out of step with the field, and now has become quite out of step with the field. And so if I'm writing an academic book about or something academic where I'm writing about enslavement and emancipation, like I'm going to either use those conventional terms or have a, have an essay at the beginning of my piece explaining why I'm using the terms I'm using, because I'm not using conventional terms. But one of the things that got cut from Slave Empire is like, just use enslaved person, right? Just use enslaved laborer. And readers will understand like, and count on readers to kind of understand that rhythm, you know? So, you know, that's one of the things. Like, it's trying to, trying to, trying to figure out the things that are crucial for academic writing that don't really that can be occluded or submerged in, in in general, in writing for general audience, that will still be there, right? Like, so you don't want to just kind of switch to the most retrograde language imaginable, because, like, that's what the people want you. People don't really I think you know you're telling them what they want in a way, like you're telling them how they should think about the past, or giving them a version of thinking about the past that you want them to take on board or consider. But at the same time, the academic debate about terminology, or the academic debate about historiography is something for professionals rather than for for general readers. So it really helped with that. I feel like I did better with Rot from the outset, in part because, and this might come out in the reviews of rot, who knows, I'm not an historian, or I'm an historian of the British Empire, right? I'm historian of labor, especially, you know, I spent the better part of my career, at this point working on enslaved labor and the transition, especially moments of transition from enslaved to free labor. That was my, you know, the vast majority of my scholarly output has been on that theme. And so I had to teach myself Irish history. And I have a, you know, my my family is us, like, like, diasporic Irish, but not, not any kind of meaningful way, right? Like, especially not. I think it was like Irishness. I think was much more about, much more important to my my dad, his family, like my mom is French and my mom was French Canadian, you know, like really old, pure men, French Canadian. So, you know, I don't, I have this insane Irish name, but I don't feel that much, you know, in a way, like part of this was part of rot was was like trying to understand that history and trying to digest that diasporic identity insofar as I have it. And so I think Rot like I was easier to make it a trade book, because I didn't. There are a lot of books written about the famine. There are a lot of articles written about the famine, and especially, there's an especially rich and enormous archive of local histories of the famine, right? So you can, you know, you can understand what happened between 4018 45 and 1851 in really close detail in a lot of very specific places in Ireland, and in a way like I had the like, the like, the completely unearned confidence of the of the what's, what's here about the like, of the dilettant, right? Like, I didn't like, I know the historiography of British, the British Empire in this era, but this was my first real deep dive in Ireland. And so Rot was a little easier to write. And I think I, you know, I had help again. I hired Pamela again to edit the manuscript. But it was, you know, the process. I feel like, I'm like, I've, I'm getting better at it. And the book I'm working on now, I think will be easier to I can kind of see the beats, see the structures, understand the length of each chapter, understand the way chapters can fit together, understand you can have more chapters, although, like again, following in very self conscious imitation of Linda Colley, I tend to write books with really long chapters, a small number of really long chapters with like, a broad type anyway, yeah. So it's getting easier.
Kate Carpenter 27:14
To talk a little more concretely about how Padraic wrote this book, I asked him to read an excerpt from it and then answer some questions. Here’s Dr. Padraic Scanlan, reading from Chapter 5 of Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine.
Padraic Scanlan 28:00
Early in William Carleton’s novel The Black Prophet, a melodrama set during the 1817 potato failure, the ‘prophecy man’ Donnel Dhu sees a rainstorm and predicts starvation. The water, he explains, will kill potatoes and soften the earth for grave-digging. The heavy clouds are ‘death hearses movin’ slowly along.’ The novel appeared in serial in the Dublin University Magazine between May and December 1846. A pastiche of childhood memories from 1817 and reporting from 1845, Carleton hoped Black Prophet would make the suffering of the Irish poor vivid to his readers, with fictional scenes presented ‘in the midst of living testimony.’ However, by midsummer, long before the conclusion appeared in print, it became obvious that the blight had returned, just as virulent as the past year’s and more widespread. Fewer potatoes were in the ground, and a greater proportion of planted potatoes were destroyed. Inspecting a field in August, a relief official found few potatoes larger than a marble. The familiar putrid smell was everywhere. In the winter of 1846-1847, rural Ireland became a hellscape, shocking and incomprehensible. An estimated four hundred thousand people in Ireland died of causes related to the loss of the 1846 potato crop—thousands by starvation, and hundreds of thousands by disease. The bonds of social life dissolved. Mobs of the hungry marched on worksites and government offices. Parents watched their children die and were too weak to properly mourn them. Children watched their parents die and were too weak to move their bodies. Those who could fled Ireland, a panicked beginning to one of the largest waves of European migration in the nineteenth century. Everyday life collapsed, and famine-relief efforts stood in pathetic contrast. Ireland did not suffer in secret. Thanks to faster communications by steamship (and occasionally telegraph—though telegraphy was quite new in 1846) and the widespread syndication of articles from London newspapers across the British empire, in the United States, and beyond, the world knew about the ongoing catastrophe in close to real time. Moved by images and stories of Irish suffering, people and organizations around the world donated money and goods to the relief effort. In counterpoint to this public openhandedness, the Whig government that replaced Peel’s Conservatives, led by John Russell, fixated on the moral hazard of eleemosynary aid—of giving relief without labor in exchange, even to the starving. Faith in the civilizing power of austerity and even deeper faith in the power of markets remained core principles of the response to rapidly deteriorating conditions.
Kate Carpenter 30:17
Talk me through how you put these paragraphs together.
Padraic Scanlan 30:19
So when I was preparing the book, The Black prophet is the, not the, not the only famine novel, but it was a kind of, it's a really interesting, sorry, there's a lot of layers. I'll do my best. Okay, so one of the things that I wanted to bring out in the book is the way that the Irish educated middle class had a very different experience of the famine, right? They experienced it as a trauma, but not in the same I mean, many of them died of typhus if they helped people who were suffering from starvation, because typhus became epidemic really quickly. But, you know, they had a different kind of, a kind of romantic vision of Ireland that was, in my view, at least, not yet particularly deeply rooted among the ordinary working people. And so William Carleton is a really interesting guy, a prolific writer, somebody whose folkloric writing I deal with, I delve into in other parts of the book. And he wrote this book, The Black Prophet, which was set in 1817, and so that's important, because one of the arguments I make in Rot is that Ireland was very hungry long before the famine. So every season in Ireland was a hungry season, and Ireland had cyclical potato failures that were a consequence of the kind of rise and fall of the potato yields in a kind of natural cycle, especially in a natural insofar as potatoes were almost always mono crops, right? So Ireland has had these waves of of where a new potato varietal would really quickly spread across the country, and then, because all of those potatoes were planted, not from seeds, but from cuttings, and so were effectively clones. They were really vulnerable to disease. And so one of the arguments I've tried to make in Rot is that 1845 when the first wave of blight struck, was everyone, I think, in Britain and Ireland, recognized that it was a blight that would be of historic scale, but no one imagined that it would be an unprecedentedly long and brutal blight in the way that it was. And so William Carleton, his book The Black Prophet, is set in the 1817, potato failure, a major potato failure before the famine. And it's this really interesting combination of melodramatic, fictional invention and kind of verite reporting on the things that he saw during the first wave of the potato famine. So in 1845 the the potatoes failed for the first time. 1845 was a very hard year for the Irish poor, but it was much less hard in comparison to what was to come. But it was brutal. And so Carleton is kind of stitching together things that he remembered from his own childhood, living through the 1817 potato failure, with things that he saw in 1845 to kind of create this thing, this new kind of fix. So I was interested as just as somebody who's interested in the relationship between fiction and history, to think of this idea of fictional scenes presented in the midst of living testimony. The way that that that Carleton blends together past and future, because that blending together, that kind of sense, that way of seeing Ireland as a place of timelessness, that way of seeing Ireland as a place where time doesn't move, or Time moves more slowly than it does in the rest of the United Kingdom. I think that that is a characteristic of British colonialism and of the British colonial attitude towards Ireland. And so I'm trying to evoke it here, not from the side of the British but from the side of of a very kind of sympathetic and much more nationalistic Irish writer, rather than a British writer, and so it's also setting the scene to show that everybody thought like Britain, the United Kingdom, poured a lot of resources into Ireland in 1845 thinking that that would be the end, and that in 1846 the potatoes would come back, and Ireland would return to its extraordinarily precarious and easily exploited economic conditions. But you know, things could go back to normal. And so I use Carlton's novel to kind of evoke, you know, something that, like Carlton is creating a scene that is supposed to be in the past, but in fact, he's evoking a scene that would have definitely, you know, a lot of people in Ireland digging up those potatoes in 1846 would have been, you know, it's a scene of just heartbreak and horror to recognize that, like the potatoes are dead in the ground. And so I'm trying to evoke that in that first section, and then I'm trying to introduce the argument of this chapter, which is called, which is called black, 47 which is what many English speaking Irish people refer to the year as, right this. Winter, the winter of 1846 and 1847 through the summer of 1847 which was really, you know, in some ways, the potato famine didn't end in 1847 by any stretch of the imagination. But that was the year when, and in fact, in some parts of Ireland, in 1848 and especially in 1849 there was even worse kind of local, brutal local typhus and just outbreaks of profound starvation and violence and despair, like the potatoes failed in other parts of the country later. But is in some ways worse, right, like it was worse in some counties later. But a 46-47 was the year in national memory, right? That was when the crisis was at its highest at a national scale. And it was also the moment that kind of set in motion all of the features of the Irish famine that are most relevant to the diaspora, right? So this was the moment when people started leaving. So in Quebec, in Montreal, where I grew up, right? This was the, you know, this was, this was when the coffin ships set sail from Ireland with, you know, 10s of 1000s of people aboard a series of steamships. And then when they brought and then when they got to the quarantine station in the mouth of the st, St Lawrence River near Quebec City, 1000s of people were dead, you know, and they were just buried in mass graves. And it was also this moment when rural society absolutely collapsed. And that's really what this chapter is about black 47 it's about the contrast between the continuing efforts of the government of the United Kingdom to impose a very specific kind of market based order on Irish society, in contrast with the absolute devastation and collapse of civil life, right? I think one of the things that is a really good book called eating people was wrong about about famine by a very famous historian of the Irish famine and the famines in general. So this was the famine. This was the year of rumors of cannibalism. This was the year of children abandoning their parents. This was the year of the kind of thing that held rural Irish society together just coming apart. And so I'm trying to capture that absolute, utter social desolation and contrast it with what was happening in Britain. And what was happening in Britain were two things. First of all, was the Russell government, the Whig government led by Lord John Russell, like the government led by Robert Peel, the Conservative government that preceded Russell's government, they were both of both the Conservatives and the Whigs, in my view, were persuaded, were convinced that the only way to solve Ireland's problems in the long term was to ensure that Irish people lived according to the rules of the market. And I could talk at length about what I mean by that, but suffice to say that Britain believed that Ireland was trapped in the kind of pre capitalist past. And one of the things I'm trying to emphasize in rot is that, in fact, Ireland, although it looked old, because it was low technology, extraordinarily poor, almost entirely agricultural. So it looked ancient, right? It had this kind of like hedgerows and potato fields. Like it had a kind of a sort of esthetic that was picturesque and old fashioned and atavistic when people visited Ireland. But in fact, it was, I argue, on the kind of bleeding edge of capitalist modernity in the British Empire. So Irish peasants were deeply in debt. Irish peasants made incredibly complicated and very risky bets on whether or not they would earn, whether their pig would get fat enough to sell for rent, whether or not they would sell their potato crop. Right? They had all of these, these very these meager assets, right in the form of pigs, potatoes and virtually free or almost free Pete, so they have free fuel, so they have these very meager assets, and they were trying to make complicated decisions in order to survive from season to season. And so one of the big arguments of rot is that the British government, which included Irish MPs, some of many of whom agreed, you know, very broadly, with the basic principles that the Ireland was backward. The British government's only solution to Ireland's crisis was to effectively, like pour gasoline on the fire by introducing even more austere policies to encourage the forms of market life that had created the crisis in the first place. And so in 1846 John Russell emphasized public works. So Robert Peel had emphasized importing grain and encouraging the Irish to buy grain, to replace the potato, to kind of teach Irish laborers how to use the market. And Russell instead said, Okay, now that peel government fell because of the fall of the Corn Laws. So now there's free trade across the empire in grain. Russell said, Well, we're going to borrow money and establish work sites where people will get money in exchange for doing public works. And what those public works were produced a whole series of complicated debates, but in effect, many of these projects. That we're building kind of roads to nowhere and in the in the memory of the famine and the folk memory of famine, because one of the sources I use very heavily in Rot is an incredible collection that was assembled by the government of the Irish Free State in the 1930s of folk stories that were collected by it's called the schools collection because, you know, school kids in the Irish Free State were told to go and interview old people and just kind of record their stories, not just about the famine, but about almost everything. It's an unbelievable resource in both Irish and in English, you know. So in one of these folk stories there, you know, people remember these works as like digging holes and filling them back up again, right? So this chapter is about how, even in the face of the most obvious crisis, the British government continued to pour money and resources and people into a solution that was not mitigating the Irish crisis, but in fact, making it worse. And they did this in the context of probably the first in some ways, the Irish famine was the first kind of, sort of big public humanitarian crisis. So there were globally syndicated articles from the London newspapers and a series of famous etchings depicting the suffering of the Irish. So while this was happening, you know, hundreds of 1000s of pounds and dollars and goods were being donated to Ireland. So that's I'm trying to in these three press that's a long answer, but I'm trying to set up in these three paragraphs. I'm trying to create a vignette that brings readers into the moment of the potato failure in 1846 and try to get them to imagine just the profound sense of foreboding and horror that people would have experienced. You know, putting their putting their hoes into the earth in August 1846 and discovering that the potatoes in the ground were like no bigger than marbles and that there was nothing left. While also reminding readers of explaining to readers like what's going to happen in the chapter, and also reminding readers of the kind of spinal argument of the book about, on the one hand, the British misunderstanding of, like, how time worked in Ireland, and the profound emphasis on the market in how the British Empire responded to the crisis in Ireland. That's, you know, there's, I'm trying to do a lot there, whether or not to see, I think you have to remember, yeah. So that's those, are those paragraphs.
Kate Carpenter 42:20
As you've kind of explained, a lot of the argument in your book revolves around these like political, economic, labor, imperial issues and practices, which is not always in and of itself, inherently gripping, right? Like there are a lot of parliamentary debates involved. What were your strategies to make sure both that all that material was clear, that a lay reader could follow it, but also that it was interesting?
Padraic Scanlan 42:42
That's a good question. And I'm not entirely sure that I succeeded. You know, because, like chapter four of the book, which is about Peele and about the first wave of the famine, is much more about debates in Parliament than events in Ireland. Because although that first wave of the of the blight was devastating for Ireland, it was not it was a orders of magnitude less devastating than future waves of blight would be. But it also happened in the context of the very complicated but extremely important debates over the the end of the corn loss in the United Kingdom right the protectionist laws that protected United Kingdom landowners from competition from foreign grain. And so, you know, it sounds like just talking about it has a kind of like soporific effect, but it's hard to overemphasize how profoundly exercised all of Britain was by the debates over the Corn Laws. Like it was a very big deal. And so one of the things I try to do is to kind of look for, I mean, one of the things that's lucky about the Irish famine is that, as with, you know, it's a huge printed archive, a huge manuscript archive, there are a lot of sources, and so there are a lot of and they're also preserved in the sources. A lot of letters from relief officials working on the grant, and the relief officials are extremely some of those letters are really interesting and really fun. And so I use kind of the everyday off, because a lot of the relief officials who worked in Ireland were half pay naval and Royal Marine and army officers. So these were, you know, the hard men of the British Empire. These are many of them that served in the Peninsular War. And then, so that was a brutal guerrilla fighting up through Spain against Napoleon, right? These were, these were battle hardened people, but their letters are really affecting, because I don't think they they were trying to do like some of them were immediately deadened. Some of them became the indulgent graft, but a lot of them tried their best. And so those letters are an important source. The folkloric stuff is an important source. It's also like the head of relief, who kind of is between the world of the bureaucracy and the world of famine relief. Is this man, Charles Trevelyan, who is a kind of hate figure in Ireland, and not without justice. Uh, but who's a very colorful, very strange character, and who is also, like I found him. I know him, not personally, obviously, but I know him because he was part of the circle of, he was a kind of a sort of in a cadet branch of the core elite abolitionist circle, the group the Wilbur forces, the Thorntons, you know, the the this, this really tightly, the, what are the Macaulays, the Babingtons, this really insular, profoundly incestuous group of abolitionists, whose, whose mindset I think I really understand, and so I understand. And Trevelyan was, you know, an interesting guy. He was a, you know, not, he was a true believer. And so Trevelyan helps, right? Because he's a bureaucrat, but his, he's an exceptionally good writer, and his, his kind of he wrote a history of the famine before it was over, right? He wrote a book called The Irish Crisis that was published when the Irish crisis was still ongoing, and the argument of The Irish Crisis was effectively to kind of act as the mouthpiece for what John Russell wanted to be true, which was that the Irish crisis is no longer a crisis for the United Kingdom. It is a crisis for Ireland, and only Ireland. And so Trevelyan, you could always go back to The Irish Crisis for a colorful phrase. So you know, and also the debates were pretty vicious. And I read a lot of, there's a lot of very kind of catty diarists who are working in Parliament at the same time. And this was an era of, like, some of the, some of the, some very colorful parliamentarians, like Lord Broom was there with his, you know. And if you've ever read the sketches of Broom is like his bellow, instant Orion voice. And, you know, Peele was there. And Peele was a fascinating chameleon, like, kind of, sort of like a smile, like a coffin lid is one of what one of his critics said. And then there's John Russell, who's like, four foot 10, right? And everybody's kind of making fun of him for being an England look. People are shorter in the 19th century, but Russell was unusually short. Like, he's depicted in Vanity Fair, like sitting on a bench with his legs dangling, right? So there's, like, there's some colorful characters there to, kind of, you know, to kind of make the medicine go down, because to understand the Irish family, you need to understand what free trade meant in the British Empire. And at a certain point, like, you have to explain that. And it's not that, I mean, it's interesting, but it's maybe not that interesting if you're just looking for a narrative history of the Irish famine.
Kate Carpenter 47:27
Before I let you go in our last little bit of time, I'd like to hear a little bit about your own writing inspiration. So are there people or books that you turn to for inspiration?
Padraic Scanlan 47:37
I mean, I said it before, but and, and she would not like to hear it, but Linda Colley is definitely a deep, deep inspiration on my writing. And actually that the kind of the sort of coterie of historians who were revered when I was in graduate office, still the case at Princeton. But when I was in graduate school, there was, you know, Natalie Zemon Davis, Robert Darnton, the kind of historians, of historians of early modern and modern Europe who are deeply influenced by cultural anthropology, by its methods, by its writing style, by its emphasis on thick description. I think that that intellectually still structures the way I write history. I am not I'm not great at I've gotten better. I'm good at synthesizing arguments, right? So I can, I think I've gotten quite decent as a writer, at finding that, like reading a lot of books and being able, in a paragraph, to explain to both academic and general readers what the big what the stakes of those debates are. But I am not, it is not my strength to get into the details of academic argument. It's something I can do, but it takes a lot of effort, and I'm not the end product is not great. And so not to say that those historians are, those historians are much better at it than I am, but that form I look to, in terms of my kind of orientation to the past, I'm still like, I'm still stuck in the 1790s you know. And I still have a deep, deep regard for the generation of English social historians of the 60s, some of whom are still alive, the kind of EP Thompson school, you know, I still think about, you know, I really admire, I really admire David Cannadine, too, although I don't always agree with his arguments, I admire the way that he's able to write a lot of books and to switch. And I still think about The Invention of Tradition, the edited collection by Terence Ranger, in which there's a great Terence Ranger essay, there's a great canon essay, there's just that. So those are kind of, I think about those books, the kind of Natalie Zemon Davis School, EP Thompson school, for intellectual inspiration. And in terms of writing, the actual writing style. I think it's the first two writers that I read as a teenager that I recognized as having a distinct style, and I said as non fiction writers. And those are, this is going to seem a little off the page, but those are, there's a pop culture writer named Cintra Wilson who has kind of fallen off a bit, but she wrote an amazing book. I don't know if she's fallen off or just she's moved on to other projects, but she wrote an amazing book called A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Reexamined as a Grotesque Crippling Disease, which I have several copies of and which I reread all the time. And I just love her ability to just, like, select really pungent adjectives and like, lay them out in a line like, and so you'll see that in my writing all the time, that which is borrowed directly from this writer about pop culture, I think, is very like a brilliant stylist and a really interesting writer. And the other is Orwell, which sounds cliche, but you know who you're reading when you read Orwell. And in some ways, Orwell is like his the restrictions that he places on his own writing are not restrictions that I place right? So I'm not, you know, I'm not committed to always choosing, like a like a shorter word, what a longer one is available. I'm not committed to only to never using Latinate words, if I unless I absolutely have to right, like, I don't have this kind of, I don't place those kinds of restrictions on myself, but I think that there's a directness and a muscularity to Orwell's prose that I find really compelling, and that I try to like a varying in sentence structure, you know. And I so I go back to I go back to Down and Out in Paris and London, a lot. I go back to Shooting an Elephant, which I don't you know, I think is a very complicated essay about the British Empire, and definitely not like, I wouldn't teach it as a like, actually, the British imperial officials all felt really guilty, you know what I mean. But I think that no one has struggled more like No, no writer more clearly captures the combination of a sense of superiority and a profound kind of hatred of the colonized, with a sense that that hatred is corrosive and destructive, but at the same time that that hatred is the thing that makes the Empire go right. And I think that Orwell captures that, and I think that that's at work everywhere, like I talked about this with my with I, you know, I like, I I'm reading. I'm on vacation in South Florida right now, and I'm rereading The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean, which is a great book, really zippy, really fun book. And there's a chapter in it, you know, a lot of it's about contemporary orchid, orchid poaching. But there's a chapter in it about the Victorian obsession with orchids. And to me, there's something about the like the Victorians desire their their desire to know everything, to own everything, like they're they're like curious, the greedy curiosity and the violence with which they prosecute the, you know, the violence that they're willing to commit in order to satisfy their curiosity and to just possess the world like I don't. I don't admire it, you know, because it did an awful lot of deep, lasting, profound damage to the world and a lot of but I do respect it, right, like the Victorians were not. And so I think that trying to understand their minds. I think, I think, Orwell, or was writing after, you know, when the rise, you know, he has this moment, I forgetting what essay it is where he describes the end of the British Empire, and all of the kind of flower of the British Empire cut down in the trenches of the First World War. He's like men with like mustache, like eagle's wings or something. It's not, I'm not sure if that's the exact phrase, but this generation of, like, people who would have been imperial officials, who were just killed at the Somme, right? And there's a sense of respect and hatred and understand, you know. And I find that that moral complexity is really appealing. And I think if, as an historian of the British Empire. You know, I think you have to be like, you can't. You have to kind of start from, sorry, this is, I'm rabbiting on, but you kind of have to start from a position of, like, your conclusion can't be the British Empire was, was wrong, right? Like that. That might be, that could be where you start, right? You have to understand the British Empire did an awful lot of damage to the world. But if that's how you conclude you've missed something, right? Like, I think there's, there's like understanding that that should be a premise from which you work, an axiom from which you work, and then sort of understanding Imperial officialdom and understanding the interactions between and trying to understand the mindset of, I mean, look, I don't work. I work on people who left some written records, right? There's all kinds of questions about audibility in the archive that can be answered. But, you know, anyway, so those are my picks. Yeah, George Orwell and Cintra Wilson and A Massive Swelling is out of print, but it is an extraordinarily maybe it's not a good book. Maybe I just read it at a good time, but I love it.
Kate Carpenter 54:44
Well, Rot is coming out soon. It actually will be out by the time this this conversation airs. So I know you'll be focused on talking about that, but you also mentioned you have another book in the works already. Do you want to talk a little bit about what that is before I let you go?
Padraic Scanlan 54:56
Yeah, sure. I'll do real quickly. It's, it's a book called, the title tentatively is called The Day's Work. We're still thinking about a subtitle the publishers and myself, I'm very poor at titling books. My my wife titled Rot she's quite good at titles, like I'm not good at any titles. So it's tentatively called A Day's Work, and it's about, it's my first actual book about Britain, rather than about the Empire. And it is about, although it it recognizes that you can't live in Britain in the first half of the 19th century without the Empire, you know, being everywhere and nowhere all at once. But it's about kind of the experience of profound rupture in the in the structure of everyday life wrought by the Industrial Revolution. And in some ways, like, in a way, Rot is kind of secretly my COVID book, right? Like it's in both in that I wrote it, a lot of it while my then, you know, my daughter was born midway through the writing, right? My son was, like, at the heartbreaking online stupid junior kindergarten, which was a charade that we all participated in, you know. So I Rot was my kind of COVID book. And this one is kind of my, my tech book, because I think that there is both, like I think, and maybe I'm still stuck with Thomas Holt write a book that is profoundly influential on the way I think about the British Empire God, and I can't remember the title book. That's horrible, The Problem of Freedom. Sorry, I read this book like seven times, and I completely skipped my mind. But you know, near the I forget, if it's at the introduction of the conclusion of The Problem of Freedom. Thomas Holt writes, you know, we still live in the 19th century, right? Like our understanding of freedom, our understanding is still structured by the 19th century, like we are still in this century. We can't get out of it. And I'm starting to wonder if maybe we are coming to the end of the 19th century. And so I'm interested in exploring the changes to everyday life that were wrought on people, just everyday, working people at the beginning of the 19th century, to kind of point out and frame the ways that, the ways that we are still like those, those profound transformations and the understanding of what work was, what workers do, what it means to work, the mind of the worker, just the material like the way people eat, the way people structure their days. I think that's changing now, and maybe not as dramatically as at the turn of the turn of the 19th century. But I think we're in that kind of moment of transformation, and that's been shaped a lot by the fact that, you know, when I moved back from the UK to Canada, right, following my wife, who's a historian of legal British legal history, and is a professor at UT as well, I moved into a unit, an industrial relations unit, kind of, sort of equivalent to a, like an industrial and labor relations school at U of T and so, like interacting with social scientists who work on work has really shifted the way I think about it, and I think that so, you know, I'm working like I'm working with a new set of ideas. It's pretty exciting, but I'm still quite, quite early in that project.
Kate Carpenter 57:57
Fantastic. Well, I hope it continues to go well. I hope, Rot gets a lot of attention as it's released. Dr Padraic Scanlan, thank you so much for joining me on Drafting the Past to talk about writing.
Padraic Scanlan 58:06
Thank you very much for the invitation. It's really fun.
Kate Carpenter 58:09
Thanks for joining us for this episode of Drafting the Past. For links to the books Padraic mentioned, a transcript of the show, and more, visit draftingthepast.com. And a little dissertation update: since you last heard from me, I’ve reread everything I’ve written so far to try to get back into the groove, and taken some notes on books I want to reference. Some parts of revisiting what I’ve written were encouraging, others…not so much. Which is pretty much what you’d expect. Of course, then my toddler broke his leg and had a break from daycare, so life has interrupted a little bit. But I’ll be back at it next week, starting to do a little more actual writing. Stay tuned! And in the meantime, remember that friends don’t let friends write boring history—but also, it’s OK if your first drafts are a little bit boring.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
