The Hungry Child

As we move into the 19th century, novels begin to take more of an interest in childhood. Whilst Jane Austen touches on the childhood of some of her protagonists (Emma Woodhouse, Catherine Morland and Fanny Price), novelists writing slightly later develop the childhood of their protagonists as a key element in their plots. Such writers include Charlotte Bronte in Jane Eyre (1847), and Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist (1837), David Copperfield (1850) and Great Expectations (1860).

Food is a key element in childhood. When we look back on our childhoods we often remember what we ate and we associate events and places with food. We remember the food we loved as a child, and the food we hated but were forced to eat. So it is no surprise that food is a recurring feature in many of these novels about childhood.

The absence of food – and its consequence, hunger – is also a frequent occurrence. Perhaps that is no surprise with Bronte and Dickens whose child protagonists experience abuse and poverty: from Oliver Twist’s plea for more food in the workhouse, to David Copperfield having to sell his clothing in order to buy food, the scarcity of food is only one of many ways in which the children suffer. Critics have also argued that the preoccupation with food and hunger in Victorian novels reflects both contemporary changes in food production and distribution brought about by the Industrial Revolution, and moments of terrible food scarcity, such as the potato famine of the 1840s (http://www.victorianweb.org/science/health/hunger.html). A national obsession with food in the first half of the nineteenth century makes its way into the literature of the period.

Oliver Twist asks for more by George Cruikshank (1846)