The Literature of Food

An Introduction from 1830 to Present

Nicola Humble

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780857854759
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica pubblica a livello agricolo

Why are so many literary texts preoccupied with food? The Literature of Food explores this question by looking at the continually shifting relationship between two sorts of foods: the real and the imagined. Focusing particularly on Britain and North America from the early 19th century to the present, it covers a wide range of issues including the politics of food, food as performance, and its intersections with gender, class, fear and disgust. Combining the insights of food studies and literary analysis, Nicola Humble considers the multifarious ways in which food both works and plays within texts, and the variety of functions-ideological, mimetic, symbolic, structural, affective-which it serves.
Carefully designed and structured for use on the growing number of literature of food courses, it examines the food of modernism, post-modernism, the realist novel and children's literature, and asks what happens when we treat cook books as literary texts. From food memoirs to the changing role of the servant, experimental cook books to the cannibalistic fears in infant picture books, The Literature of Food demonstrates that food is always richer and stranger than we think.

CHAPTER 1

THE POLITICS OF FOOD: HUNGER

The politics of food is a huge and multi-faceted topic, embracing questions of how food is produced, allocated, distributed and consumed locally, nationally and globally. It includes issues as diverse as state food control and subsidies, food justice, the economic case for vegetarianism, disease prevention, the adulteration of food, anorexia, obesity and starvation. As an academic topic, it ‘belongs’ to disciplines as various as sociology, anthropology, gender studies, media studies, history, geography and political economics, operating on their boundaries and frequently troubling their grounding disciplinary assumptions. And yet the politics of food is also radically simple: too little food; too much food; the wrong food. It seems ethically appropriate to begin this study of the literature of food not with excess or anxiety but with the stark absolutes of hunger and starvation. Treatments of hunger in literary studies have traditionally tended to take one of two approaches: an analysis of hunger as metaphor, or a focus on the topic of self-starvation (usually understood as rebellion and creative act).¹ While the tropic element of hunger will form a significant part of my analysis, I want also to locate it within a specifically material context, thinking of it not simply as an abstract lack but as an element of particular food cultures and politics. In recent years there has begun to be an increased literary-critical focus on hunger as historically contingent, particularly in nineteenth-century studies.² My approach is distinctive in its interest in the different ways in which hunger is understood and constructed in particular historical circumstances. To that end, this chapter will focus on two historical moments in which hunger and its effects come to the fore in people’s lives and in literary accounts: the 1840s and early 1850s in the British Isles, and the 1930s and ’40s in Europe, America and Britain. My interest is in the particularities of the response to and the construction of hunger in texts, including novels, reportage, journalism and cookbooks belonging to these two moments, roughly a century apart.

Hunger in the 1840s and ’50s

Two specific hungers befell the population of the British Isles in the mid-nineteenth century: the ‘Hungry Forties’ endured by the industrial north of England, and the Irish Great Famine of 1845–52. The term ‘Hungry Forties’ is a coinage of the early twentieth century, but discourses about hunger were a dominant feature of contemporary debates about economic distress.³ The hunger of the first half of the 1840s was felt across the country, but most deeply in the industrial north, where periods of trade difficulties led manufacturers to reduce hours and lay off workers. The industrial working class, cut off from the land for a generation, were unable to produce their own food and were uniquely vulnerable to shifts in availability caused by poor harvests and alterations in trade agreements, while the price of bread was kept artificially high by the Corn Laws, which protected British agricultural landowners by imposing high tariffs on imported wheat. The Irish Famine began in the middle of the decade, with a blight (Phytophthora infestans) hitting the potato which had been the principal food of most of the Irish peasantry since the mid-eighteenth century. The reasons for this mono-culture are complex and much debated among historians but come down in essence to the management of Irish land and agriculture in the interests of absentee English landowners, who turned much of the country over to the grazing of beef cattle for export to England, leaving only small plots of inferior soil to the peasantry. Another factor in the particularly devastating effect on Ireland of the potato blight, which affected much of Europe in 1845, is the lack of genetic diversity in the Irish potato. Whatever the reasons, the result was absolute catastrophe: between a quarter and a third of the total crop was lost in 1845, and three-quarters in 1846. The first deaths from starvation were recorded that autumn.⁴ Exact figures for the number who died in the Great Hunger are not possible: ‘accurate accounts are impossible in a world where corpses littered the road sides unburied’, but modern historical consensus puts it at about a million, with at least another million emigrating (Morash 1995: 3). Deaths resulting from the Famine included illnesses induced by malnutrition and those caused by the mass movement of the population into workhouses and to the vicinity of soup kitchens.

From the first, the hunger of the 1840s is understood as political, both in its causes and in its proximate and likely long-term effects. Hunger had already been placed clearly on the political agenda by the Chartist campaign for universal male suffrage and Parliamentary reform that had begun in the late 1830s. Although the movement was ostensibly focused on political rather than social reform, the underlying drive behind its demands was the alleviation of the dire poverty of the working class which formed the majority of its membership. Chartism, according to radical Methodist preacher Joseph Rayner Stephens, was ‘a knife and fork, a bread and cheese question’ (1838: 7). Articles, stories, poems and songs in Chartist newspapers return frequently to the issue, with the threat of starvation shown as an ever-present reality. ‘A Simple Story’, published in 1840 in The English Chartist Circular, is the tale of Joe, an apprentice, whose employer and co-workers, discovering that his family is starving, give him first their own meals, and then a portion of their wages. The story announces its aim to demonstrate ‘the patient endurance of misery, the real benevolence of heart, and generosity of action’ of the poor, as shown by the actions of the co-workers and of Joe himself, who immediately runs off with the small portion of food to share it with his siblings (Haywood 1995: 41). At the end of the story, however, the sentimental portrait of mutual aid is superseded by an impulse towards raw naturalism:

Should any readers of the CIRCULAR desire to know where poor Joe now is, or what has become of him, we regret to add that he died about three years after the incident occurred, which is related above, from a want of sufficient nourishment, the condition of two many of the working classes. It was said by the neighbours that he died in a decline.’ (45)

Thomas Cooper, one of the most prolific of the Chartist writers, offered a similarly bleak conclusion in his ‘Merrie England – No More!’, in which half-starved characters emerge from a crowd to tell their stories: the mother unable to feed her baby; the father of an adolescent boy who had almost taken the army recruiting officer’s shilling after three months resistance, because he ‘felt almost pined to death’ and the officer gave him breakfast (Haywood 1995: 55). The former is offered momentary aid by the neighbours who share morsels of food, but when her husband returns with the news that they have been refused relief and must enter the workhouse, the only comfort these friends, also ‘the children of misery’, can offer is ‘reflections drawn from despair’ of the fact that ‘they would not have to starve long, for life, with all its miseries, would soon be over’ (57). Although apparently antithetical, the swings between the themes of mutual aid and renunciation to death offer readers a single political philosophy: the workers can depend on no-one but each other, and they have nothing to lose.

For Tory Radical Thomas Carlyle, the desperate hunger of the poor is a sign of the failures of the laissez-faire economic policies of the Whig ascendancy. His 1843 Past and Present sets up an extended contrast between the charitable social structures of the medieval age, centred on the monastery, and the horrors of contemporary society, with its Poor Laws and workhouses. In the first part, ‘Midas’, he rails against the latter state of affairs, singling out for extended comment a case heard at Stockport Assizes two years earlier: ‘a Mother and a Father are arraigned and found guilty of poisoning three of their children to defraud a “burial-society” of some 3l. 8s. due on the death of each child’:

The Stockport Mother and Father think and hint: Our poor little starveling Tom, who cries all day for victuals, who will see only evil and not good in this world: if he were to be out of misery at once; he well dead, and the rest of us perhaps kept alive? It is thought, and hinted: at last it is done. And now Tom being killed, and all spent and eaten, is it poor little starveling Jack that must go, or poor little starveling Will? – What a committee of ways and means! (Carlyle 1899: 4)

The crime of these parents is uniquely personal, imagined in its slow formulation and committal, but also representative: the ‘apex’ of the enormous mountain of absolute want and by no means the only case of its type: ‘the authorities, it is whispered, hint that perhaps the case is not solitary, that perhaps you had better not probe further into that department of things’ (4). Their crime of killing their children for food edges very close to the spectre of cannibalism, which, as Gurney has shown, is frequently evoked in discourses on poverty in this decade: ‘gothic melodramatic tropes […] were […] a general feature of the highly charged atmosphere of the early 1840s, when it was feared that workers were eating carrion or even each other in order to avoid starvation’ (2009: 102). In his earlier Chartism (1839), published in the year of the first petition to Parliament, Carlyle had deployed the abject hunger of the poor as argumentative weapon wielded against both the government and the Chartist leaders. He sees it as his role to speak for the suffering masses: ‘these wild inarticulate souls, struggling there, with inarticulate uproar, like dumb creatures in pain, unable to speak what is in them!’ (1971: 155). This trope of the voiceless people he returns to repeatedly through this and other works, wilfully ignoring the fact that Chartism was an essentially textual movement, with its own newspapers, songs, poetry, fiction and political publications, in which its members expressed precisely their political, social and economic aims and ideas. The trope of the dumb, suffering, animal masses casts the poor as figures of absolute abjection, and therefore as objects of pity more than fear. The spectre of their hunger works in precisely the same way: ‘the widow picking nettles for her children’s dinner’ (163); the English workman reduced to the condition of the Irish – ‘to scarcity of third-rate potatoes for thirty weeks yearly’ (173); the Scotch farm-labourers who raise cows but ‘taste no milk, can procure no milk’ (173) are figures of pathos rather than threat. The Chartist demand for parliamentary representation he sees as a trick played upon the workers by deceitful leaders: ‘the expectant millions have sat at a feast of the Barmecide; been bidden fill themselves with the imagination of meat’ (217). Like the beggar of the Arabian Nights, given empty dishes by the Sultan and bidden to eat, the poor are cozened into agitating for the chimerical vote rather than the solid reality of food. The text circles around the fearful spectacle of violence, but continually displaces it: it is the reflected image of the French Revolution, or the petty violence accompanying the delivery of the Chartist petition to Parliament which ‘breaks out into brickbats, cheap pikes, and even into sputterings of conflagration’, or the potential violence – a ‘Berserkir rage’ – deep in the Saxon British heart, which we must be careful not to awaken. By insisting on the abject nature of the masses, their threatening ire can be explained away: they are misled, they are mad, and – crucially – they are radically undernourished and therefore weak. The hunger of the poor is threat but also opportunity: there is still time for reform. For Friedrich Engels, the hunger of the English urban poor suggests a very different political outcome. In The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844), written during a two-year stay in Manchester, Engels, the son of a wealthy German industrialist, recorded his forays into the slums of the city and the economic and political conclusions he draws from what he sees. He argues that the English bourgeoisie refuse to acknowledge the starvation of the poor, citing the fact that

during my residence in England, at least twenty or thirty persons have died of simple starvation under the most revolting circumstances, and a jury has rarely been found possessed of the courage to speak the plain truth in the matter. Let the testimony of the witnesses be never so clear and unequivocal, the bourgeoisie, from which the jury is selected, always finds some backdoor through which to escape the frightful verdict, death from starvation. (1844: 38)

‘The bourgeoisie’, he declares, ‘dare not speak the truth in these cases, for it would speak its own condemnation’. The unspeakable hungers Engels documents were, of course, to become a foundational element in Marxist thinking, which sees the interests of the capitalist and the worker as fundamentally opposed, with the only solution being the seizure of the means of production by the working class: no rapprochement is possible.

Hunger and its political implications haunt the early Victorian novel, in which scenes of unconsumable or unreachable plenty and excess are juxtaposed with almost rhythmic regularity with accounts of starvation, want and denial. One of the earliest concerted novelistic responses to the English mass food deprivation of the 1840s was Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848).⁵ Subtitled A Tale of Manchester Life, it locates itself, like Engel’s text, in the contemporary life of this centre of chaotically rapid industrial expansion, focusing on the experiences of factory worker John Barton and his daughter Mary. The novel begins in a rare moment of leisure for its working-class characters, when Barton and his family meet unexpectedly with their friends the Wilsons as they walk in fields close to the city on a half-day spring holiday. The meal to which the Bartons entertain their friends after this excursion casts a glow of loss over the rest of the novel. The description of their combined kitchen and sitting room (the ‘house-place’) emphasizes its conveniences and grace-notes: it is ‘tolerably large’, glowing by the light of fire and candle, its windows dressed with checked curtains, geraniums on the sill. A large cupboard is full of crockery and glass, proudly displayed with the doors open; a bright green-and-red ‘japanned’ tea tray catches the light. Taking great pride in treating her friends, Mrs Barton instructs her daughter to go and buy eggs and ham: ‘“a pound and a half, Mary. And get it cumberland ham, for Wilson comes from there-away, and it will have a relish of home with it he’ll like”’ (1848: 49–51). The meal of fried eggs and ham is served with tea (‘warmed’ with rum) and bread: a luxurious version of a traditional working-class high tea. It is the last moment in the novel that shopping for, cooking or eating food is described without anxiety. It is also the last moment that we see food situated into any sort of cultural meaning other than the basic binary division of plenty and lack: the nicety of Cumberland ham, chosen for its associative, mnemonic qualities for their guest, is a luxury the text soon moves beyond. Mrs Barton dies that night, late in pregnancy, and ‘one of the good influences over John Barton’s life’ (58) is lost. Gaskell’s narrative purpose, as she sets it out in her preface, is to represent to the middle class she assumes to be her readers the situation and feelings of industrial workers, whose ‘belief of the injustice and unkindness which they endure from their fellow-creatures, taints which might be resignation to God’s will’ (37). She is careful to temper any statement of the resentment of men like John Barton with elaborate explanations of all the things they do not fully understand about the economic circumstances of their employers, but, as many critics have noted, the emotional evidence of the narrative (in the first half, at least) is firmly on the side of the workers. Immediately after the account of Mrs Barton’s death the novel begins an examination of John Barton’s state of mind, tracking forward two or three years after his wife’s death, and then back to the death of his son years earlier. In these paragraphs Barton is represented as a test case (‘Among these few was John Barton’), an exemplar of the bitter attitudes of the workers towards the employers they see still affluent in times of want, but also as a feeling, suffering individual, ‘bewildered’ by his fate but willing to ‘bear and endure much without complaining’ if only he ‘could … also see that his employers were bearing their share’ (59). The careful, even-handed recognition that the workman may not see all of the story is undermined with detailed examples from Barton’s own life, beginning with the bald sentence summing up his early history: ‘his parents had suffered, his mother had died from an absolute want of the necessaries of life’. When his young son catches scarlet fever, the doctor tells him that his life depends on ‘good nourishment’; recently put out of work and unable to obtain more credit, or even to find the opportunity to steal, Barton finds himself outside the doors of a shop:

Hungry himself, almost to an animal pitch of ravenousness, but with the bodily pain swallowed up in an anxiety for his little sinking lad, he stood at one of the shop windows where all edible luxuries are displayed: haunches of venison, Stilton cheeses, moulds of jelly – all appetising sights to the common passer by. And out of this shop came Mrs Hunter! She crossed to her carriage, followed by the shopman loaded with purchases for a party. The door was quickly slammed to, and she drove away; and Barton returned home with a bitter spirit of wrath in his heart, to see his only boy a corpse! (60–1)

The sight of the wife of the factory owner who has turned him off, still able to purchase frivolous luxuries while his child dies for want of nourishing food carries such empathetic weight for the reader that the protestations of the justice of the employer’s perspective ring hollow. Such emotive narrative juxtaposition is deployed most strikingly in the chapters which follow the burning of Carson’s mill, an accident which the owners find fortuitous because ‘the mills were merely worked to keep the machinery, human and metal, in some kind of order for better times’ (95), and which allows them the opportunity to refit the factory using the insurance money. Newly leisured, they can spend time with their families, enjoying relaxed breakfasts, becoming more acquainted with their accomplished daughters. In the homes of their workers, however, ‘many a penny that would have gone little way enough in oatmeal or potatoes, bought opium to still the hungry little ones, and make them forget their uneasiness in heavy troubled sleep’ (96). Reduced to almost nothing, like the other laid-off factory hands, Barton and Wilson nonetheless take it upon themselves to offer charity to the family of a fellow worker, Davenport, who lies sick in a cellar. Barton pawns his coat and only pocket handkerchief to buy bread and meat and coals for a fire to warm the wet, fetid cellar in which the family reside, while Wilson makes his way through elegant streets to the home of Carson, the manufacturer, to ask for an ‘Infirmary order’ to get Davenport admitted into a fever ward for treatment. Carson – unthinking, if not actively cruel – refuses, claiming to need all the inpatient orders for potential factory accidents (although the factory is closed), but offers an outpatient order for the following Monday – too late to help Davenport, who dies shortly after Wilson returns to the cellar. When Wilson arrives at Carson’s house we are offered one of very few glimpses into the conventional territory of the Victorian novel – the middle-class home – as we witness the Carson family at breakfast and their servants gossiping in the kitchen. As Wilson waits in the kitchen he is overwhelmed by the smells of the cooking food:

Meanwhile, the servants bustled to and fro; an out-door man-servant came in for orders and sat down near Wilson; the cook broiled steaks, and the kitchen-maid toasted bread, and boiled eggs.

The coffee steamed upon the fire, and altogether the odours were so mixed and appetizing, that Wilson began to yearn for food to break his fast, which had lasted since dinner the day before. If the servan...