ABSTRACT
Following the so-called ‘consumer revolution’ of the eighteenth century (discussed in the previous chapter), the inhabitants of nineteenth-century Britain had access to a greater range of foodstuffs than ever before. Trans-global trading networks combined with technological advances in food production and preservation to provide Victorian consumers with such far-flung produce as bananas and pineapples from the West Indies, corned beef from Uruguay and frozen lamb from New Zealand. 1 Yet, as the literature of the period makes clear, access to the basic staples of sustenance, as well as to these transoceanic imports, was unequally distributed amongst the population. In his 1844 essay on National Distress, Samuel Laing pointed to one of the fundamental contradictions structuring Victorian society: that ‘amidst the intoxication of wealth and progress’, ‘destitution … preys, like a consuming ulcer, in the heart of our large cities and densely-peopled manufacturing districts’ (1844, 8). Of course, the bodily hunger of the lower classes had long been a matter of literary concern, influencing texts as diverse as Piers Plowman (Chapter 1), The Faerie Queene (Chapter 2), Swift’s ‘Modest Proposal’ (Chapter 3) and More’s Cheap Repository Tracts (Chapter 4). Following on from these examples, in Victorian literature issues of access and entitlement to food shape some of the most iconic moments in Dickensian fiction, in particular: the eponymous Oliver Twist’s petition for ‘more’ gruel while incarcerated in the workhouse, Ebenezer Scrooge’s haunting encounter with the ghostly figures of ‘Ignorance’ and ‘Want’ in A Christmas Carol, and Abel Magwitch’s menacing demand for victuals in Great Expectations all highlight hunger’s status as an entrenched social problem, underwriting the representations of sumptuous feasting located elsewhere in Dickens’s novels.
