Food, Drink, and the Written Word in Britain, 1820-1945

Mary Addyman, Laura Wood, Christopher Yiannitsaros

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781848936102
• eBook ISBN: 9781351727143
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Literature

This volume explores the intersection between culinary history and literature across a period of profound social and cultural change. Split into four parts, essays focus on the relationships between eating and childhood reading in the Victorian era, the role of hunger in depicting social instability and reform, the cultivation of taste through advertising and the formation of cultural legacies through imaginative and emotional experiences of food and drink. Contributors show that studying consumption is necessary for a full understanding of class, gender, national identity and the body. The works of writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Edward Lear, Isabella Beeton and Bram Stoker are considered alongside advice manuals, Home Front narratives and advertising to provide an innovative work that will be of interest to scholars of social, cultural and medical history as well as literary studies.

Part I
Devouring didacticism

Feeding young minds

1 Sweet poison

Food adulteration, fiction and the young glutton

Laura Wood

In 1820 analytical chemist Friedrich Accum published a book entitled Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons that was to alter the way that food was understood in Britain throughout the rest of the century. In the introduction to his book Accum writes that an ‘unprincipled and nefarious practice, increasing in degree as it has been found difficult of detection, is now applied to almost every commodity which can be classed among either the necessaries or the luxuries of life, and is carried on to a most alarming extent in every part of the United Kingdom’.¹ This nefarious practice is the deliberate adulteration of food, and it is impossible to fully understand nineteenth-century attitudes towards food, eating and consumption without considering the impact of the food adulteration scandals that plagued the century.

Anxieties over acts of consumption during this period were intensified by the widespread and indiscriminate problem of adulteration, which, as Accum acknowledges, made its way into every home regardless of its location or the social class of its inhabitants. This chapter examines the ways in which adulteration problematized acts of consumption in the nineteenth century. It also explores how the rhetoric surrounding this issue was shared by contemporaneous debates about reading, another act of troubling consumption that was becoming increasingly culturally significant due to changes in literacy and the availability of reading material. In an 1863 article in the Quarterly Review, Henry Longueville Mansel connects reading and eating when he writes that sensation novels are produced in order ‘to supply the cravings of a diseased appetite’, and that they contribute themselves ‘to foster the disease, and to stimulate the want which they supply’.² Mansel’s metaphor is a violent one, drawing on images of addiction, disease and gluttony to describe the reader’s uncontrollable appetite. Such recourse to the language of consumption in nineteenth-century discussions of reading is common, and the problem of food impurity at this time adds a significant dimension to the rhetorical interchangeability of the acts of reading and of eating.

This chapter also looks specifically at how young readers were construed as vulnerable in the Victorian imagination and how ideas about the nutritive values of foodstuffs and books were particularly potent in relation to children’s consumption. As Kimberley Reynolds notes, the assumption within children’s literature is that ‘as surely as ‘you are what you eat’, so you are what you read. The words young people read and ‘inwardly digest’ feed their image of themselves and colour their relationship with the world.’³ Reynolds’ reference to digestion gestures toward the shared transgressive properties of reading and of eating. The cultural anxieties over the act of reading that this chapter explores all share a common fear and that is a fear of this transgression. Whether it is over the line between reader and text, between consumer and consumed, between body and disease, or transgressions from the public into the domestic sphere, These concerns centre around acts of violation. Reading and eating both involve the ingestion of a foreign material which, when absorbed, becomes part of us, with the potential either to nourish mind and body or to do them harm. It is this possibility, I argue, that results in a shared language for eating and reading that is particularly significant during the nineteenth century.

Food adulteration was especially disquieting as it was staple foodstuffs that were most often corrupted. Bread, milk, tea and butter were made impure and unhealthy through the addition of chalk, alum, copper – or an incredible array of other unsavoury items – during production.⁴ The reasons for this adulteration were threefold: first, foods in short supply could be diluted to go further; secondly, food was altered to make it look more attractive; and finally, perishable items could be treated to make them last longer, or where they had already deteriorated they could be made to appear fresh.⁵

The first official census, taken in 1801, revealed that England and Wales contained a total population of 8,900,000 people – barely more than one-third the total of France – however within the next decade this figure increased by nearly another 1.5 million, and by 1851 the population reached eighteen million. This dramatic population explosion contributed to a distancing between local producer and consumer. John Burnett comments that before the rapid increase in population and move towards urbanisation, the conditions of widespread adulteration did not exist. He notes that outside of large cities ‘food producer and food consumer were still not widely separated; they generally lived in the same small market-town or village, probably on the same street, and a fraudulent grocer or brewer would quickly lose his reputation and his custom’.⁶ The separation between producer and consumer that the urban population increase entailed also inevitably led to the need to transport food over long distances which quickly began to affect the quality of the product on arrival. Milk, for example, was no longer obtained from the local dairy but was being transported into the city from surrounding countryside by train. The addition of chemicals to the milk while it was being transported became common practice, not – unfortunately – to kill the bacteria in the milk that had been on a long rail journey, but simply to try to convince consumers that the milk they bought was reasonably fresh.⁷

In 1820 a significant moment in the history of food adulteration was reached when Accum published his Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons, and the subject found itself under scrutiny from a highly-rated analytical chemist. With the terrifying subtitle of ‘Exhibiting the fraudulent sophistications of bread, beer, wine, spirituous liquors, tea, coffee, cream, confectionery, vinegar, mustard, pepper, cheese, olive oil, pickles, and other articles employed in domestic economy, and methods of detecting them’, Accum’s book left his readers in little doubt that adulteration was widespread. It explained relatively simple experiments that could be carried out at home to discover the level of adulteration in the food about to be placed on the table, and included extensive lists of druggists, grocers, brewers, and publicans prosecuted and convicted of the adulteration of beer.⁸

Accum’s book was a great success at the time of publication: in less than a month the first edition of one thousand copies had sold out, and within the space of two years, three further editions had been printed. However, in 1821 Accum’s career in England ended abruptly when he was involved in a scandal, accused of mutilating books in the Royal Institute’s library. Accum’s work fell out of favour and he left the country in disgrace. Burnett writes that ‘thereafter contemporary writers studiously avoided mentioning his name…although the facts in the case are by no means clear, there is a strong suspicion that there existed a deliberate conspiracy of vested interests determined to discredit and silence Accum, which succeeded in its object by driving him out of the country’.⁹ Whether Accum’s disgrace was deliberately engineered or not, the genie was well and truly out of the bottle, and Accum had achieved his goal of bringing the issue of adulteration into the public consciousness.

Six years later, in 1827, an open letter to conservative statesman and future prime minister Robert Peel indicates that the practice of adulteration was still a public issue and was a problem in the production of bread – a staple to which Accum himself had dedicated a whole chapter. This open letter was printed and circulated by a writer who chooses to be known simply as ‘Parent of a large family’. The author writes that ‘[t]he death of infants, through adulterated bread, has been deplored in numberless instances: and in adults, chronic diseases have been attended with the most violent symptoms; and sudden death has attacked the healthy’.¹⁰ The Parent goes on to recount the shocking tale of a ‘gentleman who recently advertised “a reward of one thousand pounds (in a newspaper) for an unadulterated quarters loaf.” and in all London, not a single baker came forward with his treasure of a loaf, which was to return him one thousand pounds’.¹¹ In fact, bread was one of the most heavily adulterated foodstuffs being sold. The reason for this, Burnett suggests, was the increasing level of competition being created in an overcrowded trade. It seems that this intense competition made it ‘all but impossible for bakers to remain honest men. When bread was sold at or below the cost of flour, as frequently happened, the baker had to devise means of making it go further or replacing it by other materials’.¹² Under such conditions as these, it is perhaps unsurprising that adulteration was so widespread.

The potential health hazards of adulteration are reiterated when the ‘Parent of a Large Family’ quotes a physician’s opinion that, ‘In consequence of these notorious practices, bread, which has justly been called the staff of life, becomes an arrow in the hand of death’.¹³ Such rhetoric raises the stakes – it positions adulteration as a matter of life and death. In fact, the ramifications of food adulteration, even those corruptions which used a seemingly harmless adulterant, reached far beyond financial deception and petty fraud. By significantly decreasing the nutritional value of such basic and staple food products, public health could be seriously jeopardised.

In 1863 noted MD, Andrew Wynter, writes of bread that the ‘process of adulteration by means of alum is not only a fraud upon the purchaser, but also positively injurious to all delicate adults and young children; indeed it is the sole cause of nearly half the troubles of babies fed upon bread and milk, since the astringent nature of the alum entirely deranges the digestion of their delicate stomachs’.¹⁴ Wynter’s statement demonstrates that contemporaneous medical opinion was that adulteration could have a significant impact on physical health. Burnett points to the potential impact of food adulteration on the figures surrounding infant mortality rates throughout the nineteenth century when he comments that ‘children reared on a diet of adulterated bread and diluted milk were ill-equipped to resist the infectious diseases and gastric complaints which took such...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Introduction
• PART I Devouring didacticism: Feeding young minds
• PART II An appetite for change: Hunger and nineteenth-century society
• PART III The power of the printed word: Advertising and markets
• PART IV Into the twentieth century: Legacies and memories
• Conclusion ‘All else is vain, but eating is real’: Gustatory bodies
• List of contributors
• Index