The Science of Starving in Victorian Literature, Medicine, and Political Economy by Andrew Mangham

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Science of Starving in Victorian Literature, Medicine, and Political Economy by Andrew Mangham Tabitha Sparks (bio) Andrew Mangham. The Science of Starving in Victorian Literature, Medicine, and Political Economy. Oxford UP, 2021. Pp. xii +191. £58.00. ISBN 978-0-19-885003-8 (ebook). Among the many explanations for England's failure to provide adequate aid during Ireland's infamous potato famine, perhaps none is more chilling than Head of the (British) Registry Charles Trevelyan's description of the famine as a "salutary revolution" befitting a "nation long singularly unfortunate" (Mangham 23). Trevelyan, steeped in Malthusian theory, reflects an extreme version of political economists' view of starvation as a providential corrective to unruly populations. So we learn in Andrew Mangham's concise and engaging monograph, The Science of Starving in Victorian Literature, Medicine, and Political Economy, which disentangles the first two subjects of the title from the last. In jargon-free prose and with assiduous research, Mangham demonstrates how political economists deflected the reality of suffering bodies into abstractions like population growth and reproductive trends, while medical doctors and novelists foregrounded the material experience of starvation and its physical effects. Like novelists Charles Kingsley, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Dickens, each of whom commands a chapter in Mangham's book, physiologists attended to the actual horror of starving–not the impersonal contemplation of starvation. In his first chapter, Mangham unravels the various scientific, epistemological, and spiritual approaches to starvation from the late 18th through the 19th century. If starvation as a consequence of poverty may be too easily or automatically associated with a broad-strokes economic empiricism, starting with Adam Smith and moving through Malthus and Chadwick, Mangham reminds us that Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) "has very little to say about actual matter such as blood, bones, tissues, and waste" (32). In contrast, medical professionals including William Alison, James Kay, and Thomas Southwood Smith countered such conjectural thinking through painstaking studies of hunger's actual effects, establishing it as a pathological condition rather than one of nature's periodic checking mechanisms. Likewise, the following chapters align the social problem novels of Kingsley, Gaskell, and Dickens with the rise of political interventions against [End Page 471] hunger that hinge upon an increasingly physiological understanding of the starving body. Kingsley's tentative adoption of scientific principles in his novels, poetry, and sermons show the Unitarian minister struggling to reconcile materialism with spiritual and evangelical notions about natural determinism. Alton Locke, Mangham writes, "is most forceful when it focuses on bodies" (70). In his chapter on Gaskell, Mangham depicts how Mary Barton (1848), North and South (1854), and Sylvia's Lovers (1863) vividly wrest starvation from social dilemma to personal experience, facilitated by Gaskell's determination "to really SEE the scenes I tried to describe" (123). One of The Science of Starving's most interesting contributions to the Victorian novel is Mangham's argument that Gaskell's acutely realistic "seeing" and her sentimental plots are co-productive rather than contradictory. How could, for instance, the depiction of a hungry child without emotional investment and pathos be authentic? Mangham's chapter on Dickens cogently compares the novelist's representations of poverty and starvation in novels like Oliver Twist and Bleak House with historical examples, such as an 1848–49 cholera epidemic at the Juvenile Pauper Asylum in Tooting, which killed 126 boys. Criminal responsibility for such acts, Mangham explains, was mitigated by diagnostic ambiguity: the boys died of cholera, but were significantly weakened by their state-supported, subsistence-level diet. So persuasive is Mangham's thesis that at times it appears less argumentative than plucked from the novels themselves. Quotations from Mary Barton and Hard Times, for instance, explicitly castigate abstract and unfeeling political economy and invoke the suffering individual. In Mary Barton, Jeb Legh tells Mr. Carson, "I'm not given to Political Economy, I know that much. I'm wanting in learning, I'm aware; but I can use my eyes. I never see the masters getting thin and haggard for want of food," and in Hard Times we read that "For the first time in her life Louisa had come into one of the...