ABSTRACT
Fish seemed acceptable to eat not only on the authority of Scripture but also because fish are so cruel to each other in their ordinary course of existence that human predation can scarcely make matters worse. A mathematician and logician Lewis Carroll's attitude to eating fish is in keeping with that of his contemporaries: fish cannot be taken seriously as victims. Nonetheless, for both Carroll and the Victorians more broadly, the comic impulse to joke about fish follows from residual unease about how human rapacity aligns with the rapacity of fishes, as evidenced by the over-indulgence of the diners at the whitebait dinners. Victorians primarily drew their ethics of diet from the Christian inheritance, which held that any sort of animal might be eaten, assuming it wholesome and assuming the eater kept spiritual things above concerns of the belly.
