ABSTRACT
Throughout Victorian fiction, there is an overarching and often-used theme that emphasizes human fellowship, domestic harmony, and commodity culture. Three major Victorian texts – Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, and also Christina Rossetti's poem "Goblin Market" – all emphasize that theme, but they do so not just in terms of the implied social and economic aspects, but also – quite uniquely and specifically – through food and the Gothic. The Gothic Other inevitably haunts much of Victorian food and literature, and it seems impossible to tell where self ends and other begins – the consuming is symbiotically and simultaneously consumed. Ebenezer Scrooge's change of heart in A Christmas Carol, on the basis of commodity culture and human fellowship, is book ended by alimentary allusions, as food and beverage imagery is used to describe the before- and after-change-of-heart condition of Scrooge.
