ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on dual physical and social hunger as the catalyst of protest, and the sources of responsibility that arise out of unrest within the heritage of hunger and violence in British culture. It address in the narratives by Martineau, Dickens, Gaskell, and Henry Mayhew, the tensions of physical and social hunger are exacerbated through the need to be mobile, and the implications such mobility has on one's connection to society. Criminality permeates the chapter, informing the ways in which mobile people are perceived within the community. They are outsiders; they do not belong; and by extension, they are potentially dangerous. This philosophical poverty resonates with Oliver Twist, in which members of the unfeeling workhouse committee are derided sardonically by Dickens as 'philosophers' and 'economists'. The chapter is the plight of those excluded from the national communal vision-the disenfranchised and broken; their social hunger to belong to that community; their attempts to construct their own version of national belonging.
