ABSTRACT
John Hollingshead, who was mentored by Dickens at Household Words, importantly notes that this is the first famine wherein lack of food was the consequence rather than a primary site of ‘famine’. While Hollingshead has no systemic response to the Dickensian ‘hard times’, he does recognise that a major question facing the Victorians was how they treated the workers who, through no fault of their own, lost their jobs in times of calamity. The heavy distress which is falling upon Lancashire, and those portions of Yorkshire, Derbyshire, and Cheshire, which come within the cotton manufacturing district, is now the talk of the world. Few right-thinking men can prevent its black shadow flitting across their minds, and haunting them like the wailing of sick children, or a corpse in the next room.
