Irish Potato Famine - Begging Mothers

This drawing depicts an Irish mother, from the town of Clonakilty, holding the body of her dead child (who had succumbed to the great hunger spreading through Ireland).  The mother had no money to properly bury her baby. 

An excerpt from the article provides more detail:

I started from Cork, by the mail (says our informant), for Skibbereen and saw little until we came to Clonakilty, where the coach stopped for breakfast; and here, for the first time, the horrors of the poverty became visible, in the vast number of famished poor, who flocked around the coach to beg alms: amongst them was a woman carrying in her arms the corpse of a fine child, and making the most distressing appeal to the passengers for aid to enable her to purchase a coffin and bury her dear little baby. This horrible spectacle induced me to make some inquiry about her, when I learned from the people of the hotel that each day brings dozens of such applicants into the town.

Credits

Sketch by James Mahoney, in the Illustrated London News (February 13, 1847), from the news article "Sketches in the West of Ireland."  Online, courtesy Vassar College.