Elizabeth Gaskell

This chapter focuses on Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), North and South (1854–5), and Sylvia’s Lovers (1863). These works confirm Kingsley’s suspicion that a material view of starvation—and poverty more generally—offers a reasonable and reasoning interpretation of the Condition-of-England question. Starvation, or ‘clemming’, as it was known among the industrial working classes, refuses to be integrated, in Gaskell’s fictional world, into a catch-all economic or demographic theory. Instead, it is a phenomenon that paradoxically demands confrontation while evading perception through the anatomies of the workers and their surroundings. In line with the interlinking findings of biological scientists and Unitarian thinkers, Gaskell broaches the intricate questions of reform by recasting them as flesh-and-blood issues experienced through the eyes of her heroines; her novels thus ask for the sort of careful consideration advocated by science, whereby the strengths and weaknesses of subjective interpretation are tested and interpreted through the material.

Charles Kingsley

This chapter considers the conflict-laden work of Charles Kingsley. Kingsley was an avid follower of scientific developments. In 1842 he urged one of his correspondents to ‘study medicine [… I am studying it’. In the social novels Yeast (1848), Alton Locke (1850), and Two Years Ago (1857), we see the fruits of these labours, particularly in how the languages and methods of biology offer Kingsley a means of challenging views of starvation as an inevitable, necessary evil. In his portrayals of radical characters, Kingsley discusses how scientific ideas precluded the political appropriation of starvation as a means to beat the well-to-do. Famous for locking horns with John Henry Newman on the abstract question of what constitutes truth, Kingsley argues a case for seeing topics like the physiology of hunger not as a symbol of providentialist or radical thinking, but as the means of creating a more intelligent understanding of poverty.

Introduction

An outline of the way in which the nineteenth century invented the idea of hunger as a physiological and material phenomenon whose radical epistemological powers were constructed across literature, medicine, and physiology, this Introduction seeks to offer an outline of how the book’s reading of the social-problem novel will draw on the methodologies associated with literature and science, new materialism, and somatic (bodily) or anthropological realism. It also introduces how the social novels of Kingsley, Gaskell, and Dickens promoted the development of knowledge and sympathy through both an emphasis on the material sufferings of the starving and a detailed analysis of what it means to go hungry, and to observe and to write about it in a way that seeks to be truthful.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter considers the relevance of the Victorian way of thinking to the modern world. The financial crisis of 2007–8, and the resultant austerity, has lead to a resurgence of ‘Victorian’ health afflictions. In recent years we have seen a re-emergence of hunger as a humanitarian problem in the West. Neoliberalism and austerity are iterations of a conservative way of thinking that has been with us at least as far back as the New Poor Law. This chapter considers what we might learn from Kingsley, Gaskell, and Dickens, and from their intersections with nineteenth-century starvation science.

Charles Dickens

This chapter illustrates how Charles Dickens found the materiality of starvation a powerful method for addressing the social injustices that angered him. Less balanced than Gaskell and less conflicted than Kingsley, he pulled no punches when it came to the ‘Parrots of Society’—those subscribers to hypocritical, dogmatic interpretations of political economy whose efforts to deal with social problems became, he believed, abortive subscriptions to a malicious laissez faire. The chapter argues that we need to understand these red-hot polemics as a response to, and an appropriation of, the scientific registers of men like Thomas Southwood Smith. What Dickens found in science was a materialism that allowed his challenges to the shallow cant of reformers and politicians to morph into an attack on their perceived stupidity: Dickens was able to use the science of starving as a means of grounding a radical position within a thoughtful materialist one.

Starvation Science and Political Economy

This chapter suggests, contrary to views such as those expressed in Terry Eagleton’s Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (1995), that political economy was not ‘a gross, materialist language, heavy with biological ballast’, but rather a set of abstractions based on moral judgement and laissez-faire approaches to wealth and well-being. Looking at the major works that pioneered dietetics, gut physiology, and hunger therapeutics, it sets out how scientists, surgeons, and doctors offered an alternative narrative of hunger as unnecessary, unjust, and unnatural. Comparing understandings of famine and sickness during the Irish Hunger against the ill-assumed confidence of statisticians, Chapter 1 also studies how science developed a critically sophisticated, multi-textured mode of exploring the meanings, languages, and repercussions of hunger.