Hunger Movements in Early Victorian Literature

Want, Riots, Migration

Lesa Scholl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472457158
• eBook ISBN: 9781317119340
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In Hunger Movements in Early Victorian Literature, Lesa Scholl explores the ways in which the language of starvation interacts with narratives of emotional and intellectual want to create a dynamic, evolving notion of hunger. Scholl's interdisciplinary study emphasises literary analysis, sensory history, and political economy to interrogate the progression of hunger in Britain from the early 1830s to the late 1860s. Examining works by Charles Dickens, Harriet Martineau, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry Mayhew, and Charlotte Bronte, Scholl argues for the centrality of hunger in social development and understanding. She shows how the rhetoric of hunger moves beyond critiques of physical starvation to a paradigm in which the dominant narrative of civilisation is predicated on the continual progress and evolution of literal and metaphorical taste. Her study makes a persuasive case for how hunger, as a signifier of both individual and corporate ambition, is a necessarily self-interested and increasingly violent agent of progress within the discourse of political economy that emerged in the eighteenth century and subsequently shaped nineteenth-century social and political life.

1 Rewriting riots past

‘What!’ exclaimed the Ghost, ‘would you so soon put out, with worldly hands, the light I give? Is it not enough that you are one whose passions made this cap, and force me through whole trains of years to wear it low upon my brow!’

(Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843), 27)

In relation to the violence of the past, we seem helpless, impotent to set right the injustice that has so forcefully shaped the very times that we inhabit.

(David Lloyd, ‘The Indigent Sublime’ (2005), 152)

When the Ghost of Christmas Past manifests before Ebenezer Scrooge, Dickens’s masochistic, self-starving protagonist responds with a near-visceral need to extinguish the ghost’s light. His lack of desire to revisit his past is inherently linked to his self-starvation: he is deliberately disconnected from his community, and there is a sense of fear in acknowledging the existence of a past that includes family relationships, love, and friendship. His hunger for those relationships works in tense opposition to his self-denial, as his ‘melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy tavern’ is juxtaposed with ‘having read all the newspapers’ before going home to bed.¹ Scrooge eats alone. He wants to be aware of what is happening in the world, but resolutely determines to have no part in it. Yet much as David Lloyd powerfully suggests our investment in the history of the ‘times that we inhabit,’ the Ghost’s claim that Scrooge’s ‘passions made this cap’ forbids such determination. The desire to stifle the past speaks to the repression of trauma, and a ‘retreat to omnipotent fantasy’ in which ‘one possesses . . . powers over the limitations of the real world.’² Scrooge’s masochism exemplifies the ‘preoedipal origins of masochism in narcissistic trauma’ that John Kucich attributes to Edmund Bergler’s mid-twentieth-century work on psychoanalysis and megalomania; his ‘feelings of abandonment, deprivation, and injustice’³ are the miser’s self-inflicted means to rationalise his placelessness and powerlessness within the present.

Scrooge provides a provocative illustration for early Victorian Britain’s approach of repressing and disconnecting the past in order to rationalise the present. In The Burdens of Perfection (2008), Andrew H. Miller identifies the need in nineteenth-century moral perfectionism to remove oneself ‘from reality to seek company outside this time and space.’⁴ Historical fiction played a crucial role in creating this distance, for, as John Bowen observes in his introduction to Dickens’s historical novel Barnaby Rudge (1841), ‘[m]odern history rests on our sense that the past is safely over and can become the subject of disinterested knowledge.’⁵ Yet this disinterestedness, for the Victorians as much as it was for Scrooge, was a myth of separation. Miller emphasises that the act of distancing in this way actually creates an ‘uneasy sensitivity to exposure,’ as the consciousness of an audience, and the awareness of other possible narratives outside the constructed ones, evokes self-reflection.⁶ Such self-reflection is further complicated, not just by the transient quality of memory, but by hindsight. Simon Dentith reveals the ‘threat that hindsight poses to the authenticity or adequacy of the knowledge or feelings that were available to the original actors,’ for ‘the benefit of hindsight is precisely that more is known now, at the moment of recall, than could possibly have been known at the time.’⁷ Indeed, the past can be retold from the safe distance of moral judgement; and within this context, historical fiction, with its self-consciously flexible relationship between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction,’ focalises and critiques the rationalising, stabilising effects of hindsight. For imperial Britain, the nostalgia of looking back is disrupted by the very distance it seeks to create through ‘optative reflections’ upon what could have been: ‘[t]o the extent that realism proposes to give us stories about how things really were, a space naturally opens up within that mode to tell us how things might have been, but were not.’⁸ In this way, Victorian Britain is haunted by the past, and the past’s investment in the present and future.

Strategies of denial and repression arose in the wake of food riots, machine breaking, Reform Acts, and Chartism, elements of social unrest that seeped from the past into the present, challenging the stability and civility of the British imperial vision. Jeff Nunokawa speaks of the fear of loss in the Victorian consciousness, referring to ‘the inevitable loss of property in the nineteenth-century imagination,’ written through the literature with the conviction that ‘nothing gold can stay.’⁹ In this construction, the fear of loss also speaks to the fear of a return to the past, a past of scarcity and violence. However, this fear is problematic in two key ways: first, it denies the present-day existence of scarcity and violence; and second, more crucially, it unwittingly acknowledges the cultural heritage of violence within the civilised British imagination. Therefore, scarcity and violence must be displaced, repressed, or at least rationalised, in order for the empire to maintain its vision of moral and civil superiority. Yet just as Scrooge is haunted by his past, present, and future, so too was Victorian Britain haunted by its heritage of hungry violence, not just relegated to the past, but speaking into the present and defining the nation’s future. The nation is defined as much by what it was not as what it was. Speaking of the construction of Dickens’s realism, Miller writes: ‘there are counterfactual lives each character is pointedly not living, defining mirror existences that have branched off along other lines than that down which he or she is, in fact, traveling.’¹⁰ Scrooge’s ghostly visitations are the epitome of this kind of optative exploration. As Avery Gordon suggests, ‘the ghost is primarily what is missing. . . . What it represents is usually a loss, sometimes of life, sometimes of a path not taken.’¹¹ In the case of Scrooge, the ghost is also the figure of that which is denied. It is necessarily from an Other time, a time that should be safely distant, but invades and shapes ‘the very times that we inhabit’; and, as David Lloyd posits, ‘that other time is not necessarily the past, but may intimate an only fitfully imaginable possible future.’¹²

Dickens makes it very clear that the ghostly manifestations are not events that merely happen to Scrooge, but are constructed in varying degrees of consciousness by his self-imposed physical and social hungers. As much as he denies himself the nourishment of food, he denies himself the nourishment of human sympathy. This miserly attitude extends into the comfort of home. He does not care for light, for ‘[d]arkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it’ (13), but his fire reveals a desire for warmth: ‘It was a very low fire indeed; nothing on such a bitter night. He was obliged to sit close to it, and brood over it, before he could extract the least sensation of warmth from such a handful of fuel’ (14). While his meanness triumphs in that he refuses to build a larger fire, the fact that Scrooge leans in and broods over his fire suggests that there is a hunger there, one that he will not let himself sate. It therefore follows that A Christmas Carol’s cheerful ending is written in terms of Scrooge accepting his own hunger, both physical and social, and being willing to sate it. His transformation is marked in three key ways: by his purchase of a Christmas turkey for Bob Cratchit’s family that is too large to be carried by any means other than a cab; by being willing to donate money to the poor; and by unexpectedly taking up his nephew’s invitation to Christmas dinner.

Tara Moore observes that ‘much of the nineteenth-century literature containing narratives of Christmas speaks directly to national fears of famine,’ focusing on the ‘developing rhetoric of benevolence’ toward the hungry poor.¹³ However, presenting Scrooge’s transformation in terms of sating his own social and physical hunger highlights the tensions between liberalism, capitalism, masochistic self-sacrifice, and altruism that inevitably contribute to dialogues between the needs of the individual and the broader needs of the community, which figure throughout this study, and were at the heart of early political economy. In this chapter, hunger and haunting provide a unifying factor in the wake of riots and social unrest. Nostalgia for an imagined past can become a form of hunger, but denying the past also creates a counter-hunger, a type of haunting in which the denied past seeks to reassert itself through the collective memory. The disruptive presence of the Gordon Riots in the late eighteenth century, amongst other uprisings, belied the stability of mid-nineteenth-century Britain, as well as the purity and legitimacy of Britain’s global dominance. Through Parliament and the legal system, as well as through the media, the nation sought to redefine its heritage by displacing the threat of current instability onto foreign shores (France being the most common scapegoat), by repressing historical national conflicts, and, where this repression was not possible, by creating rationalising narratives to explain away internal unrest in a way that made it belong to another time and place.

There is a powerful reason, then, for the success and popularity of historical fiction throughout the nineteenth century. While Bowen suggests that mid-century novelists tried their hands at historical fiction in order to acquire the gravitas of history,¹⁴ the genre of historical fiction has an agility of purpose that historical writing is often denied. Its affective nature gives individual voice and interiority to historical events, encouraging empathy rather than the safety of objective distance. Historical fiction rewrites the past to address the present, the narrative voices overtly looking back from a space that is contemporary to the reader. Deliberate references and parallels to the present are drawn, reminding the reader of their unbreakable connection to the narrated past, so that the narratives themselves become an act of haunting. The historical narratives of hunger and social chaos I explore in this chapter, by Dickens, Harriet Martineau, and George Eliot, were each written with an explicit purpose to address the social conditions and injustices that were contemporary to the writer, and specifically challenge wilful acts of displacement, repression, and rationalisation. They reassert the past into the present in ways that counter both a nostalgic historical imagination, and a determined blindness to the traumas and hungers of the present. Furthermore, in looking back to address the present, these texts take on a kind of prophetic role, challenging the progress of Britain’s future. In these narratives, it is possible for Britain to see, as Scrooge does, that the ‘air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. . . . The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever.’¹⁵ Thus the resurrection of the chaotic past offers the possibility for the nation to reconnect to its cultural heritage, and allow that acknowledgement to inform its approach to the community, in a way that is not possible while that past is being denied. A present disconnected from the past is ineffectual and always under threat, for the past is hungry to be heard.

The dangers of France

‘Sir, At this late hour, in this exhausted state of the House, and exhausted state of the debate. . . . I pass by the exciting topics of the French revolution—I say not a word on the details of the Bill—they have been treated already with consummate ability. . . . ’

(Sir Robert Peel (22 September 1831))¹⁶

On 30 January 2014, Conservative Home Secretary Theresa May proposed a new clause to the Immigration Bill first presented to the House of Commons on 10 October 2013. This amendment, ‘NC18: Deprivation of Citizenship,’ would ‘enable the deprivation of citizenship in cases where a person’s conduct had been determined by the Home Secretary to have been seriously prejudicial to the vital interests of the UK, even if doing so would make the person stateless.’¹⁷ The dispossession and demonisation of the foreign immigrant has a long history, and I will return to these narratives in later chapters. What I want to focus on here is the continuing narrative, evident in this recent amendment, that circumvents the possibility of the ‘homegrown terrorist.’ Because it is contained within an Immigration Bill, terror arising from those who are British by birth does not have to be considered.¹⁸ This kind of avoidance and denial of domestic terror resonates strongly with the early Victorian governments that saw the threats to Britain as originating in the foreign place, as if denying that violence and unrest could be born organically out of Britain’s own socio-political environment.

The most-referenced locus of terror for the mid-century Victorians was France. In Writing Against Revolution (2007), Kevin Gilmartin refers to fellow historian Ronald Paulson, who terms the presence of revolutionary experience in British Romantic literature as ‘a secondary French reality—history at second hand in written reports.’¹⁹ Yet even this idea of secondary history tends to displace and diminish Britain’s own revolutionary history. Gilmartin’s assessment becomes more acute ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Hunger Movements in Early Victorian Literature
• Title
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Hunger, Taste, Mobility
• 1 Rewriting Riots Past
• 2 Humanising the Mob
• 3 Disenfranchised Communities
• 4 Educating Transgressive Tastes
• 5 Social Communion
• Conclusion: ‘Taste them and try’—the Risks of Tasting in an Insatiable Market
• Bibliography
• Index