The Irish Potato Famine started to occur in 1848, this caused many people to go hungry and lose a lot of money in Ireland as most of the Irish crop was potatoes. I thought that this was relevant to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, because Gilbert Markham is a farmer and he could have easily been affected in some way, probably by people from Ireland wanting to get some potatoes so they don't lose as much money or go hungry.

Jack, mostly everything is fine here at Linden-Car Farm, Mom's good, Rose and Fergus are still concerned about that darn famine with the potatoes in Ireland, Fergus doesn't really understand what's going on or where our potatoes are going, that boy's too young to understand. They say there's almost a million victims of the whole thing, think last I heard it was around 840,000. This season's been pretty rough, but we'll be okay...famine won't hit us too hard. Though apparently there's some new thing called potato blight affecting what potatoes and tomatoes we do have and also cholera is coming back, so it looks like we might be in for a quarantine here pretty soon. Should only last for 3-4 weeks as long as everyone does what they're supposed to do.