A friend, known for his pessimism, says that he will be digging up his lawn and planting it with spuds when the first sign of the inevitable downturn in the economy, which he sees on the horizon, manifests itself more clearly. The potato has been a great standby for us, but a notable writer on the English countryside, William Cobbett, best known for Rural Rides, also produced a book, recently republished, Cottage Economy, in which he damned the same.
Of his book, he wrote, "I purpose to show that a large part of the food of even a large family may be raised from forty rod, or a quarter of an acre". And so he goes through a list of aids to self-sufficiency from homebrewed beer, making bread, keeping cows (on commonage, one must presume), pigs, bees, ewes, poultry, rabbits and goats. The blurb says of the book, first published in 1831-2 as a series of pamphlets, that it shows Cobbett's "typical wit and bulldog curmudgeonliness." As far as the potato and Ireland is concerned, the curmudgeon side of him is to the fore.
He had read evidence given before "the Agricultural Committee" that many labourers, especially in the west of England, used potatoes instead of bread to a very great extent. "And I find from the same evidence that it is the custom to allot the labourers `a potato ground' in part payment of their wages. This has a tendency to bring English labourers down to the state of the Irish, whose mode of living is but one remove from that of the pig, and of the ill-fed pig too." He was glad, he wrote, to see that one Mr Edward Wakefield, "The best-informed and most candid of the witnesses, gave it as his opinion that the increase which had taken place in the cultivation of the potatoes was injurious to the country, an opinion which must, I think, be adopted by everyone who takes the trouble to reflect a little upon the subject."
More then about the Irish, apparently, at times, hauling the potatoes out of the ground with their hands and shovelling them into their mouths. A bit farther on he quotes a Dr Drennan, who, apparently urged people to "leave Ireland to her lazy root".
Reminds one, all this, of the Punch cartoons which showed the Irish as a sort of ape creature. What did Ireland ever do to Cobbett? Bread, of course, home-baked, is his own idea of the staple food. But his book is not all pugnacity and racism. We'll come back to some of the more equable and interesting ideas of cottage economy on another day. Y