Abstract
When Henri Misson de Valburg, a Frenchman, visited London in 1698, he waxed eloquent on the subject of, of all things, pudding: “BLESSED BE HE THAT INVENTED pudding, for it is a manna that hits the palates of all sorts of people; a manna, better than that of the wilderness, because the people are never weary of it. Ah, what an excellent thing is an English pudding! To come in pudding time, is as much as to say, to come in the most lucky time in the world.”1 Though one is inclined to think that the Frenchman was being sarcastic, he appears to have been perfectly earnest. Misson’s rhapsody encapsulates much that the British like to declaim and disseminate about their national identity: that pudding is manna that appeals to all palates, regardless of rank or station; that Londoners are the most
John Leech, “Too Civil by Half!,” 1852. Courtesy of Andrew Cates.
fortunate citizens in the world; and that the British are the beneficiaries of providential grace. A Victorian cartoon proudly illustrates this relationship between food and English identity, and how that identity is explicitly defined against foreign hunger (see figure 2.1).
The enemies of the people of England who would have them considered in the worst light represent them as selfish, beef-eaters and cruel. In this view I resolved today to be a true-born Old Englishman. I went into the City to Dolly’s Steakhouse in Paternoster Row and swallowed my dinner by myself to fulfill the charge of selfishness; I had a large fat beefsteak to fulfill the charge of beefeating; and I went at five o’clock to the Royal Cockpit in St James Park and saw cock-fighting for about five hours to fulfill the charge of cruelty. A beef-steak house is a most excellent place to dine at… Thus did I complete my true English day and came home pretty much fatigued and pretty much confounded at that strange turn of this people.
—James Boswell, 1762–63
Dis moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es.
—Brillat-Savarin, Physiologie du Goût, 1825
He isn’t our sort. He’s too clever, too cosmopolitan,— a sort of man white-washed of all prejudices, who wouldn’t mind whether he ate horseflesh or beef if horseflesh were as good as beef, and never had an association in his life.
—Anthony Trollope, The Prime Minister, 1876
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Notes
Quoted in Richard Tames, Feeding London: A Taste of History (London: Historical Publications, 2003), 23.
Gwen Hyman’s Making a Man: Gentlemanly Appetites in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel (Athens: Ohio UP, 2009)
Sander L. Gilman’s Fat Boys: A Slim Book (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2004)
J. C. Drummond and Anne Wilbraham, The Englishman’s Food: A History of Five Centuries of English Diet (London: Alden Press, 1939), 299.
Asa Briggs, How They Lived: An Anthology of original documents written between 1700 and 1815, Vol. III (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), 289.
Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (London: Penguin, 1985), 103.
T. C. Barker, J. C. McKenzie, and John Yudkin, eds., Our Changing Fare: Two Hundred Years of British Food Habits (London: MacGibbon&Kee, 1966), 20.
Gail Turley Houston’s Consuming Fictions: Gender, Class, and Hunger in Dickens’s Novels (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1994).
Francis Miltoun, Dickens’ London (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1904), 205.
Cf. Tobias Smollett’s description of London in The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998)
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (London: Penguin Books, 1996), 74–75.
John Burnett, Plenty and Want: A social history of diet in England from 1815 to the present day (London: Scolar Press, 1979), 214.
W. Hamish Fraser in The Coming of the Mass Market (Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1981)
Dena Attar in “Keeping Up Appearances: The Genteel Art of Dining in Middle-Class Victorian Britain,” The Appetite and the Eye, ed. C. Anne Wilson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1991)
Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988), 6.
John A. Taylor, Popular Literature and the Construction of British National Identity, 1707–1850 (San Francisco: International Scholars Publications, 1997), 181.
Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998), 299–300.
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (Boston: Bedford, 1996), 131.
Hilary Schor, “ ‘If He Should Turn to and Beat Her’: Violence, Desire and the Woman’s Story in Great Expectations” Great Expectations (Boston: Bedford, 1996), 547.
Steven Earnshaw’s chapter “Dickens” in The Pub in Literature: England’s altered state (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000).
Samuel Pepys, The Shorter Pepys, ed. Robert Latham (Berkeley: U of California P, 1985), 770.
Rebecca L. Spang discusses the rise of restaurants in The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000).
Charles Marsh, The Clubs of London; with Anecdotes of Their Members, Sketches of Character, and Conversations (London: Henry Colburn, 1828), 2.
According to Charles Graves in Leather Armchairs: The Book of London Clubs (New York: Coward-McCann, 1963)
John Timbs (the name on the flyleaf), Club Life of London with Anecdotes of the Clubs, Coffee-Houses and Taverns of the Metropolis During the 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries (London: Richard Bentley, 1866), 6.
Denise Gigante’s Taste: A Literary History (New Haven: Yale UP, 2005)
Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984).
Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Frontiers: Essays on Bodies, Histories, and Identities (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 1.
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (London: Penguin, 1966), 47.
John K. Walton, Fish and Chips and the British Working Class, 1870–1940 (Leicester: Leicester UP, 1992), 4, 1.
Nick Groom’s “From Forgery to Fish ‘n’ Chips” in Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite, ed. Timothy Morton (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
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© 2010 Annette Cozzi
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Cozzi, A. (2010). Men and Menus: Dickens and the Rise of the “Ordinary” English Gentleman. In: The Discourses of Food in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117525_3
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