ABSTRACT

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|48 pages

Devouring didacticism

chapter 1|23 pages

Sweet poison

Food adulteration, fiction and the young glutton

chapter 2|25 pages

Onions and honey, roast spiders and chutney

Unusual appetites and disorderly consumption in Edward Lear’s nonsense verse

part II|41 pages

An appetite for change

chapter 3|21 pages

The rhetoric of taste

Reform, hunger and consumption in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton

chapter 4|20 pages

Feeding the vampire

The ravenous hunger of the fin de siècle

part III|59 pages

The power of the printed word

chapter 5|30 pages

‘A change comes over the spirit of your vision’

Champagne in Britain, 1860–1914

chapter 6|29 pages

The language of advertising

Fashioning health food consumers at the fin de siècle

part IV|42 pages

Into the twentieth century

chapter 7|22 pages

‘Yes, we had no bananas’

Sharing memories of the Second World War

chapter 8|20 pages

Meeting Mrs Beeton

The personal is political in the recipe book 1

chapter |14 pages

Conclusion ‘All else is vain, but eating is real’

Gustatory bodies