ABSTRACT
Hunger, taste, mobility-Hunger is one of the beneficent and terrible instincts. The word hunger, when associated with nineteenth-century Britain, conjures an array of images, from the criminal deported to the colonies for stealing bread to feed his/her family, to the iconic 1849 depiction of the starving Irishwoman Bridget O'Donnell with her waiflike children, to workhouses, settlement laws, and the general exploitation of the poor. Hunger Movements is loosely positioned between the 1832 and 1867 Reform Acts in order to emphasise the central thesis that the need to have a political voice and a sense of belonging is intrinsically connected to seasons of food scarcity, and individual and communal hunger. Within a social context built upon neo-classical economic theory, the progressive world of modernity continues, like its Victorian past, to seek to justify the existence of hunger in a world of statistical plenty.
