One Man’s Trash Is Another Man’s Dinner: Food and the Poetics of Scarcity in the Cheap Repository Tracts

Abstract

This essay looks at Hannah More’s Cheap Repository Tracts as part of the literary response to the controversial food scarcities in the late 1790s, and in the context of larger, politicized efforts to reform the diet of the poor. More’s dietary advice in The Way to Plenty and The Cottage Cook has often been criticized as part of her reactionary social agenda that sought to keep the class status quo. However, in letters she expresses opinions that are much more radical than the Tracts would lead us to believe: she is critical of low wages, price gouging, and the greed of the rich. In the Tracts, More deploys the rhetoric of scarcity reflexively and subversively to highlight the insufficiency of the very recipes she is advocating. She does so in an effort to encourage greater charities from the rich and to criticize their consumption patterns. At the same time, she uses hunger as a trope to justify her own literacy project, which presented the Tracts as “wholesome aliment” for an increasingly restive working class population. While certainly aligned with conservative thinkers of her day, More simultaneously expresses a critique of consumer culture analogous to the one mounted by the canonical Romantic poets.