1st Edition
Food, Drink, and the Written Word in Britain, 1820-1945
This volume explores the intersection between culinary history and literature across a period of profound social and cultural change. Split into four parts, essays focus on the relationships between eating and childhood reading in the Victorian era, the role of hunger in depicting social instability and reform, the cultivation of taste through advertising and the formation of cultural legacies through imaginative and emotional experiences of food and drink. Contributors show that studying consumption is necessary for a full understanding of class, gender, national identity and the body. The works of writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Edward Lear, Isabella Beeton and Bram Stoker are considered alongside advice manuals, Home Front narratives and advertising to provide an innovative work that will be of interest to scholars of social, cultural and medical history as well as literary studies.
Introduction
Mary Addyman, Laura Wood, and Christopher Yiannitsaros
Part I – Devouring Didacticism: Feeding Young Minds
Chapter 1 – Sweet Poison: Food Adulteration and Fiction
Laura Wood
Chapter 2 – Onions and Honey, Roast Spiders and Chutney: Unusual Appetites and Disorderly Consumption in Edward Lear’s Nonsense Verse
Charlotte Boyce
Part II – An Appetite for Change: Hunger and Nineteenth-Century Society
Chapter 3 – The Rhetoric of Taste: Reform, Hunger and Consumption in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton
Lesa Scholl
Chapter 4 – Feeding the Vampire: The Ravenous Hunger of the Fin de Siècle
Angelica Michelis
Part III – The Power of the Printed Word: Advertising and Markets
Chapter 5 – ‘A change comes over the spirit of your vision’: Champagne in Britain
Graham Harding
Chapter 6 – The Language of Advertising: Fashioning Health Consumers at the Fin de Siècle
Lesley Steinitz
Part IV – Into the Twentieth Century: Legacies and Memories
Chapter 7 – ‘Yes, We had no Bananas’: Sharing Memories of the Second World War
Corinna Peniston-Bird
Chapter 8 – Meeting Mrs Beeton: The Personal is Political in the Recipe Book
Margaret Beetham
Conclusion
‘All else is vain, but eating is real’: Gustatory Bodies
Mary Addyman
Biography
Mary Addyman recently completed her PhD at the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, UK
Laura Wood recently completed her PhD at the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, UK
Christopher Yiannitsaros recently completed his PhD at the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, UK
