ABSTRACT
The great central image of devouring was of course to hand both for Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens in the Appetite of Shakespeare's Ulysses, that 'universal wolf', which seconded with will and power, 'Must make perforce an universal prey,/and last eat up himself.' Carlyle's metaphors, indeed, go beyond the eating of dead flesh to sustain life, to the slaughter of the living: Thyestes' banquet is such a compounded cannibalism, and there is a nice ambiguity in the charge against Berthier that he devoured the 'substance' of the people. There are literal episodes of cannibalism in Carlyle's French Revolution. Of these, one of the most vivid facts of cannibalism is the more curious and the more significant because it is not egotistical but self-sacrificing. Cannibalism or at least its 'phantom' appears in Dickens's contribution to The Wreck of the Golden Mary, the 1856 Christmas number of Household Words.
