ABSTRACT
It is impossible to fully understand nineteenth-century attitudes towards food, eating and consumption without considering the impact of the food adulteration scandals that plagued the century. This chapter examines the ways in which adulteration problematized acts of consumption in the nineteenth century. It also explores how the rhetoric surrounding this issue was shared by contemporaneous debates about reading, another act of troubling consumption that was becoming increasingly culturally significant due to changes in literacy and the availability of reading material. The chapter also looks specifically at how young readers were construed as vulnerable in the Victorian imagination and how ideas about the nutritive values of foodstuffs and books were particularly potent in relation to children's consumption. Reading and eating both involve the ingestion of a foreign material which, when absorbed, becomes part of us, with the potential either to nourish mind and body or to do them harm.
