ABSTRACT
The ‘Irish diffi culty’ is one of the most elusive tropes in all of Household Words. Several Household Words articles on Ireland point out individual troubles and offer a variety of solutions to these, and virtually all articles take it for granted that there is an underlying problem with Ireland. Yet none of them defi ne what this root problem actually consists of. In other words, Household Words writers name several factors (famine, encumbered estates, Catholicism), but see these as symptoms rather than as the original problem. Thus, the journal’s fi rst article on Ireland, ‘The “Irish Diffi culty” Solved by Con McNale’, proposes a solution, but no analysis of the problem.2 In the fi rst place, the ‘Irish diffi culty’ seems to be that Ireland exists, as Pete McCarthy puts it, and that Britain, by fi rst claiming it as a colony and then making it part of the United Kingdom, has taken responsibility for it. Yet Britain’s right to rule over Ireland is never once questioned in Household Words.
