Poverty in Ireland, 1837

In 1837, the power of Daniel O'Connell's oratory focused the attention of Europeans on Ireland. They were horrified at what they saw there. The Irish poor - a third of the population - had no food except the potatoes they grew, and not enough clothing to cover themselves. They went hungry for two months of the year, and half-naked for all the year. Yet this would be their last 'good' decade before more than a million of them would vanish into unmarked graves in the 1840s. The idealistic young Baron Eotvos - a humanitarian and already a much-praised poet - struggled to understand how Ireland could have been reduced to this state under English rule, and why English journalists wrote with such bigotry about the Irish. In Hungary, he was a campaigner for the freedom of serfs, but conceded that those serfs lived in better conditions and had more protection than Irish tenants and labourers. The only protection for the Irish poor came from illegal organizations such as the Whiteboys.His visit coincided with a pivotal moment in Irish history, when debate was raging about the introduction of a 'Poor Law' (with Poor Tax to pay for it) - a charitable-sounding term for a cruel Act aimed at clearing the land of people who had no other means of survival.His deeply researched summary of the English occupation of Ireland - uninfluenced by modern revisionism - makes compelling, often harrowing reading.

Baron Jozsef EOTVOS - whose statue stands in Budapest in the square that bears his name - was one of the most interesting and appealing Hungarian public figures of the 19th century: a statesman driven by deep humanitarianism, a much-admired political thinker, and the first master of the Hungarian realist novel. He was born to a noble family in Buda in 1813, at a time when Latin was the official State language and German the language encouraged by the Habsburg monarchy. He did not learn Hungarian until he was 13. By the time Jozsef visited Ireland, he already had a reputation as a poet; and over the next ten years, he would publish a number of novels, including Hungary's first realist novel - The Village Notary /A falu jegyzoje (1845) - which was immediately hailed as a classic and translated into many languages. He campaigned for the freedom of the serfs and the emancipation of the Jews. As a government minister, he introduced ground-breaking proposals for universal education. He died in 1871.