The Edible Book: White Female Pleasure and Novel Reading

Abstract

In his 1853 advice book, A Daughter at School, John Todd advises young women and girls to acquire a habit for reading; he emphasizes that the young “need to know how to read to advantage, what to read, and in what proportions [they] may read for improvement and what for entertainment” (106). Todd then cautions:

Do not try to read too many books. Some seem to have the notion that if they only read,—read something, and a great deal,—they are on the high way to improvement. You might just as well say, that if you only eat a great deal, keep at it, no matter what you eat, flesh or fish, pies or pork, tomatoes or tom-tits, potatoes or pudding, sausages or sorrel, green apples or green turtle, eels or elfins,—only eat and you will be robust, fair, and in perfect health. (107–108; Emphasis in the original)

In his lengthy analogy, Todd’s fantastic pairing of alliterated edibles stands in for books to convey his opinion on the virtues of selective, moderate female reading. The figuration works broadly as an extended trope that encompasses appetite, digestion, and the health of both body and mind. Moving seamlessly between food and books, Todd asks: “Does not the merest child know that we are nourished most and best by the plain dish, and one dish at atime; that it is not,” he writes in the next sentence, “the amount that is digested and incorporated into the system, that gives us health and vigor?” Rather, the mind is fed by carefully moderated reading—the system wants “one dish at a time,” for “[t]he mind that reads a good book slowly is much more likely to be enlightened and fed than if it read ten books in the same time.”