Doughnuts and Gingerbread, Apples and Pears: Boyhood Food Economies in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals for Children

Abstract

In The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon, facing financial difficulties that put her in the position of having to “earn her own food, or starve,” opens her house to sell gingerbread and other inexpensive baked goods to boys who are on their way to school (38).¹ In this way, she ekes out a subsistence living and supplies a regular demand, shaped by schoolboy hunger and small amounts of pocket money. Nathaniel Hawthorne writes about the absurdity of economies that bring women and boys together, especially women who are associated with an “old gentility”:

a miserably absurd idea, that she should go on perplexing her stiff and somber intellect with the question how to tempt little boys into her premises! Yet such is undoubtedly her object! Now, she places a gingerbread elephant against the window, but with so tremulous a touch that it tumbles upon the floor, with the dismemberment of three legs and its trunk; it has ceased to be an elephant, and has become a few bits of musty gingerbread. (37)

While Hawthorne uses Hepzibah’s shop window to critique the corruption of New England’s “first” families, discussions of boyhood food culture published elsewhere for children serve a variety of purposes, including inculcating a sense of moral agency and social conscience in child readers.²