Talk:Anti-Irish sentiment

Trevelyan 'judgement of God' quote

I tried to find the context for the Charles Trevelyan 'The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson' quote currently in the article. Here is what I found: the given reference, Writing the Frontier: Anthony Trollope between Britain and Ireland, by John McCourt, checks out. However, McCourt in turn sources this to The Great Hunger by Cecil Woodham-Smith. McCourt's reference is:

Quoted in Cecil Woodham Smith, The Great Hunger (London: Penguin, 1991), 156.

This reference may be seen (in slightly mangled form) on archive.org [1]

I have the 1991 Penguin edition of The Great Hunger. On page 156 we have:

These complications confirmed Trevelyan in his low opinion of the Irish. 'The great evil with which we have to contend,' he wrote to Colonel Jones, on December 2, is 'not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.'

This quote is presented by McCourt as following (with ellipsis) the 'judgement of God' quote. There is no mention of the 'judgement of God' on page 156 of this edition of The Great Hunger or the previous page or the next page. I don't know where McCourt got the 'judgement of God' quote from, but it was not from where he said he got it. The quote apparently does not appear in The Great Hunger book at all, as can be seen by a Google Books search [2] For context, Smith gives the following reference for the 'turbulent character' quote:

Trevelyan to Jones, December 2, 1846, P.L.B., Vol. X.

As far as I can see, there is no bibliography in my edition of The Great Hunger, and no other explanation of what 'P.L.B., Vol. X' is. I assume 'P.L.B.' is 'Poor Law Board', but beyond that I cannot guess. 'Jones' was Colonel Harry Jones, Chairman of the Board of Public Works in Ireland from 1845. - Crosbiesmith (talk) 16:53, 2 September 2019 (UTC)

@Crosbiesmith: The first edition of The Great Hunger is available on the Internet Archive. P.L.B. is defined on page 426 as "Sir C. E. Trevelyan's Private Letter Books [...] by permission of the late Sir Charles Trevelyan, Bt." (The latter being the grandson of the original Trevelyan.) If anyone wants to verify whether the "judgement of God" quote does in fact appear in the Jones letter, or another letter of Trevelyan's, then it seems they'll need to get in touch with the present custodian of the Private Letter Books. For the moment I think it can be removed from Wikiquote, since the McCourt citation is clearly junk and we don't as yet have a better one. Zacwill (talk) 00:33, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

I note, incidentally, that the "judgement of God" quote appears prominently on Trevelyan's Wikipedia page. The source used there, an article in the Independent by an author of historical fiction, is no more reliable than the one used here. Zacwill (talk) 01:18, 14 September 2023 (UTC)