ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the historical narratives of hunger and social chaos 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. Hunger and haunting provides 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.
