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In the age of empire, Victorians and Romantics over the long 19th
century faced issues of governance that no other society had faced
on such a massive level, causing socio-political questions that had
to be addressed based on sheer necessity but little governmental
experience. In an age in which there was a decade referred to as
"the Hungry Forties," and in which the Great Famine in Ireland
occurs as well, there are high rates of poverty across the whole
century in Britain and its colonies. At the same time that hunger
and famine were intractable issues, irresolvable across
nineteenth-century Britain, socio-political entities had little
stomach for solving the problem and few technocrats had economic
answers based on real world experience. This four-volume collection
of primary sources examine hunger and famine in Britain and its
empire across the long nineteenth century.
This volume examines the sub-topics on the use of the metaphor of
hunger to describe the condition of women as well as to a sub-topic
on invisible poverty and hunger after Chartism failed. As Disraeli
noted, there were still two Englands "fed by a different food."
The Hungry Forties and the Great Famine, with their horrifying
monikers, deserve a section just for the many voices engaged in
political, humanitarian, and social venues in juxtaposition to the
voices of the starving. This volume shows how rhetoric itself
experiences a crisis of representation in the face of such
dramatic, tragic events: how does a culture deal with its own
chosen guilty and irrational psychological motives for casting a
blind eye to famine within its own borders?
Capturing Dorothy Hartley's point that there was "a dislocation of
the food supply" during the Industrial Revolution, which occurred
through the enclosure movement, the poor laws, the game and corn
laws (qtd. in Consuming Fictions 8), this section would begin with
the date of Thomas Malthus's "Principle of Population" (1798) to
capture voices invoked during the lead up to the Reform Bill of
1832.
This volume examines the rhetorics used around race and famine in
the colonies vis-a-vis the persistence of hunger and poverty in the
island nation/empire. As William Booth reminded the British in his
aptly titled In Darkest England (1890), one need not look further
than London's underbelly to find intractable hunger.
Ranging from the panoramic novels of Dickens to the horror of
Dracula, Gail Turley Houston examines the ways in which the
language and imagery of economics, commerce and banking are
transformed in Victorian Gothic fiction, and traces literary and
uncanny elements in economic writings of the period. Houston shows
how banking crises were often linked with ghosts or inexplicable
non-human forces and financial panic was figured through Gothic or
supernatural means. In Little Dorrit and Villette characters are
literally haunted by money, while the unnameable intimations of
Dracula and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are represented alongside realist
economic concerns. Houston pays particular attention to the term
'panic' as it moved between its double uses as a banking term and a
defining emotion in sensational and Gothic fiction. This
stimulating interdisciplinary book reveals that the worlds of
Victorian economics and Gothic fiction, seemingly separate,
actually complemented and enriched each other.
Ranging from the panoramic novels of Dickens to the horror of
Dracula, Gail Turley Houston examines the ways in which the
language and imagery of economics, commerce and banking are
transformed in Victorian Gothic fiction, and traces literary and
uncanny elements in economic writings of the period. Houston shows
how banking crises were often linked with ghosts or inexplicable
non-human forces and financial panic was figured through Gothic or
supernatural means. In Little Dorrit and Villette characters are
literally haunted by money, while the unnameable intimations of
Dracula and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are represented alongside realist
economic concerns. Houston pays particular attention to the term
'panic' as it moved between its double uses as a banking term and a
defining emotion in sensational and Gothic fiction. This
stimulating interdisciplinary book reveals that the worlds of
Victorian economics and Gothic fiction, seemingly separate,
actually complemented and enriched each other.
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