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Haines Robin. Charles Trevelyan and the Great Irish Famine. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004. Pp. xvii+606. $85.00 (cloth).
Charles Trevelyan, assistant secretary at the treasury (1840–59), is probably the best-known nineteenth century British civil servant. He was the author of the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms of the civil service and a key figure in the British government's relief programs during the Irish famine of the 1840s. Robin Haines believes that historians have caricatured and maligned Trevelyan, that “on the evidence of a few selected passages, their authors have convinced themselves and others, that Trevelyan was the fiend he was held to be” (xii). Haines sets out “to test the well-known proposition that Trevelyan was more powerful than the politicians he served, a despot calling the tune in Westminster” (xiv). He also questions “the received view that there were major differences in the development and implementation of relief policy between the Conservative government under Peel, from 1845, and the Whig government under Russell, from mid-1846” (xiv). Haines's assertions might well have been valid in the 1960s, but not today.
Haines traces the origins of this caricature of Trevelyan to Jennifer Hart's article on “Sir Charles Trevelyan at the Treasury,” published in English Historical Review in 1960; this article undoubtedly influenced the portrayal of Trevelyan in Cecil Woodham-Smith's best-selling book, The Great Hunger (1962). Woodham-Smith saw Trevelyan as the architect of Liberal government's famine relief policies, and she praised Peel's relief program while condemning the harsher regime of the...