'Rejoicing in Potatoes': The Politics of Consumption in England During the 'Hungry Forties'

Abstract

In the winter of 1842–3 the protectionist spokesman Robert Bullock Marsham, Warden of Merton College, Oxford, flippantly remarked that although workers could not buy bread they at least ‘rejoiced in potatoes’.1 For a while, during what were undoubtedly some of the hungriest years of the nineteenth century, the hapless Marsham — nicknamed ‘potato Dick’ — was nearly as notorious as Marie-Antoinette had been for a wrongly attributed phrase. Leaders of the Anti-Corn Law League such as Richard Cobden poured scorn on Marsham and warned in the House of Commons: ‘There are 7,000,000 or 8,000,000 of people without wheaten bread. If the people continue to descend in the scale of physical comfort, and to eat potatoes, the hope of moral improvement which the friends of humanity indulge, must be altogether disappointed’.2 Thomas Carlyle also intervened, hinting ominously that the Corn Law controversy could have far wider repercussions than was generally appreciated: ‘When two millions of one's brother-men sit in Workhouses, and five millions, as is insolently said, “rejoice in potatoes”, there are various things that must be begun, let them end where they can’.3