This soaring passage comes from Max Müller's celebrated 1855 essay on linguistic anthropology. I start with it because no brief text better captures the import of Swinburne's poetic manifesto “Hertha.” And “Hertha” is important because, like “Anactoria,” it is pivotal in Swinburne's ambitious poetic program.

The enclosed having come into my hands being a Letter written by my Son to a Literary gentleman who had lent him a Work of Dr. Croly containing some remarks on your Rel Deluv, I having thought it might amuse you to see the Zeal of one of your Disciples, & therefore take the liberty of sending it, but I have a twofold motive believing that should your leisure ever allow of your glancing at the paper you might have an estimate of my Sons Knowledge of the Science he takes such delight in & aid him the more easily by occasional hints which the Intercourse so indulgently granted him by you may afford him the means of deriving.

InImperialism at Home, Susan Meyer explores Charlotte Brontë's metaphorical use of race and empire in Jane Eyre. In particular, she is struck by Brontë's repeated allusions to bondage and slavery and wonders, “Why would Brontë write a novel permeated with the imagery of slavery, and suggesting the possibility of a slave uprising, in 1846, after the emancipation of the British slaves had already taken place?” (71). Meyer speculates, “Perhaps the eight years since emancipation provided enough historical distance for Brontë to make a serious and public, although implicit, critique of British slavery and British imperialism in the West Indies” (71). Perhaps. More likely, I would argue, is the possibility that Brontë was thinking not of West Indian slavery, but of American slavery.

About a decade after Waterloo, there arose in England a subgenre of fiction that can be called the military novel. George Robert Gleig is credited with originating the genre with a fictionalized autobiography entitled The Subaltern, which appeared serially in Blackwood's Magazine in 1825 and was subsequently published as a book. Military memoirs were appearing from soon after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and the military novel was an outgrowth of that literature. Many of the authors of military novels had themselves served in the army, but the most notable of them all, Charles Lever, had not been a military man, though he consorted with officers often enough. Beginning with The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, which was serialized first and then appeared as a single volume in 1839, Lever produced a string of popular novels about the army, with young officers as their heroes. The novels of this subgenre concentrated on officers, though there are amusing rankers, that is, enlisted soldiers, as well in Lever's novels likely to be clever Irishmen. For the most part, though, rankers are background figures and have largely stereotypical lower class ways. There are obligatory romance and inheritance plots in these narratives, with the hero usually ending up married and with an estate of his own, either through direct inheritance, or the discovery of a hitherto unknown fortune. This genre lasted about fifteen years, petering out by mid-century.

When Rudyard Kipling offered his wry observations on officialdom in Imperial India to his cousin, Margaret Bourne-Jones, in 1885, he might have been toying with the kernel of one of his more perplexing stories on race and hybridity, written for his 1888 anthology, Plain Tales from the Hills. When Kipling actually came to address this theme fictionally, in his short story entitled “His Chance in Life,” he made one crucial change: he substituted a dark-skinned telegraphist of mixed race for an Englishman, thereby engaging with the illogics of character that hybridity posed for narratives on race and Empire. In Kipling's story, his hybrid hero, stationed in the mofussil town of Tibasu, experiences a sudden surge of Britishness in the mixed blood flowing in his veins at the moment when crisis strikes, and leads a group of terrified policemen in quelling a communal riot between Hindus and Muslims. He is found guilty of exercising unconstitutional authority by a Hindu sub-judge, but the verdict is set aside by the British Assistant Collector. As a reward, he is promoted to an up-country Central Telegraph Office, where he proceeds to marry his ugly sweetheart, also of mixed race parentage, and live happily with a large brood of children in quarters on the office premises, a loyal government servant, “at home” with officialdom and Empire.

About a decade ago, I discovered an unknown poem attributed to Robert Browning in two New York abolitionist periodicals, and published an article about it here in Victorian Literature and Culture. I made the case that the poem, a dramatic monologue entitled “The King is Cold,” sounds like Browning in ways that suggest either its authenticity or the early familiarity of an American audience with Browning's style; and I closed the article with the statement, “By bringing ‘The King is Cold’ to light, I hope to encourage further speculation and inquiry as to its place either among Browning's collected works, or within the larger field of Browning scholarship that includes the study of his American reputation” (469). Since then, electronic databases have automated broad, sweeping searches of periodicals, and now the relevant information is easily discovered: the poem was in fact written by Richard Henry Stoddard, the American poet and man of letters. It was first published under Browning's name in the New York News sometime late in 1857, and was correctly ascribed to Stoddard in Russell's Magazine in December of that year; I found this information by searching in the American Periodicals Series Online, 1740–1900. The abolitionist reprintings (in the National Anti-Slavery Standard and the Liberator) apparently followed the version in the New York News, and the misattribution was perpetuated. Indeed, the poem reappeared in another New York periodical, Munsey's Scrap Book, in 1909, where it was still being given out as Robert Browning's. “The King is Cold” was also included as Browning's in William Cullen Bryant's oft-reprinted New Library of Poetry and Song.

In perhaps her most famous comment, Isabella Beeton, the doyenne of Victorian cookery, proclaimed, “Dining is the privilege of civilization” (363). Dinner, she went on to explain, “is a matter of considerable importance; and a well-served table is a striking index of human ingenuity and resource” (363). That “much depends on dinner” has been widely recognized in a variety of contexts since Beeton made this pronouncement in her Book of Household Management in the mid-Victorian era. From Upton Sinclair's exposé of the meat industry in The Jungle (1906) to the more recent fascination with Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation (2001) and Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006), food – and particularly its mismanagement – has become a positive obsession with the public at large. Anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and psychologists – from Claude Lévi-Strauss to Mary Douglas to Sidney Mintz to Sigmund Freud himself – have long engaged in commenting on what Beeton asserts in her chapter on “Dinner and Dining”: that distinctions in food preparation, eating habits, and modes of dining are a crucial axis around which cultures and groups consolidate themselves. Similarly, organizations like Stanford University's now defunct Food Research Institute have investigated food's centrality to “human ingenuity,” in this case through the study of agricultural practice and policy.

In 1893, overwhelmed by readers' insatiability for Sherlock Holmes stories, Arthur Conan Doyle killed his detective off at the height of his popularity. Writing to a friend in 1896, Doyle described how literally sick he was of the figure he had created: “I have had such an overdose of him that I feel towards him as I do towards pâté de foie gras, of which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day” (Chabon 17). Holmes's (first) literary demise was marked by his creator with a culinary simile, one which recalls that his literary debut was made under the name that, above all others, stood for the culinary in late nineteenth-century Britain: Isabella Beeton. The first Sherlock Holmes story, “A Study in Scarlet,” appeared in the 1887 edition of Beeton's Christmas Annual. Three other editors had rejected the story before the Beeton Annual accepted it. This Doyle-Beeton publishing encounter was an instance of one publishing phenomenon recognizing another one and ushering it into the limelight. When Doyle's reflections on his huge publishing success turn to a gustatory memory of overindulgence in a purposefully overdeveloped organ, it raises the following question: what were the relationships between the mass market, the culinary, and the production and adjudication of judgment and refinement in the nineteenth century?

In his bookDistinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argues that in order to understand the workings of culture “in the restricted, normative sense” we must not only relate our discussion to the broad anthropological meanings of the concept, we must also relate it to “taste” in the physical sense. We must, he argues, bring “the elaborated taste for the most refined objects . . . back into relation with the elementary taste for the flavours of food” (Bourdieu 99). Bourdieu is writing of twentieth-century France and not nineteenth-century Britain. It may seem anachronistic to juxtapose a quotation from his work with one from an 1861 volume of domestic advice. However, his argument that social distinctions can be understood through a discussion of the material and cultural values attached to food resonates with Beeton's argument that “the rank which a people occupy . . . may be measured by their way of taking their meals.”

In 1529, Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur, descendant of the Timurid dynasty and founder of the Mughal empire, wept at the sight of melons. A mere fruit had reminded Babur of the homeland he had left behind in central Asia. In a letter to Khwaja Kalan, the emperor writes of the drudgeries of a ruler in a foreign land, who is forced to do without the tastes of home: “How can one forget the pleasures of that country? . . . Recently a melon was brought, and as I cut it and ate it I was oddly affected. I wept the whole time I was eating it” (423). The Baburnama, a personal record of the establishment of a new empire in the subcontinent, might seem like an unusual place to begin an essay on Victorian India. But Babur's nostalgia for the home left behind in Samarkand poignantly anticipates some of the hidden longings of the British as Company Raj gave way to Crown Raj in India. While the East India Company attempted to oust the Mughal rulers between the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, after India was incorporated into the Empire, the British would also attempt to don the mantle of the Mughals. On 1 November 1858, when India officially became part of Queen Victoria's Empire, the British inherited the Mughal's melons. Whether it was roast beef or mulligatawny, a pint of pale ale or a chhota peg, the British discovered their own versions of Babur's melons over time – an idea of homeland contained in a mouthful.

In the century and more since Joseph Conrad first published “Falk: A Reminiscence,” his tale has been examined from a variety of critical perspectives. I would like to begin by reviewing some of these responses in order to locate this paper's perhaps surprising claim that “Falk” is a story about dining.

Drinking was a serious preoccupation for mid-century English Victorians, and Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a novel sodden with drink. This startlingly explicit novel is a troubled and troubling anatomy of upper-crust drunkenness, obsessed with issues of control and productivity, of appetites and class, as they play out across the body of its prime sot, the wealthy playboy Arthur Huntingdon. In telling her drinking tale, Brontë is doing more than simply crafting a prurient morality story, meant to scare drinkers straight. Arthur's fall into the bottle is emblematic of the increasingly untenable role of the landed gentleman in Victorian culture, and the dire consequences of his appetites suggest the possibility of a radical social revisioning across that gentleman's prone, overstuffed body.

Attitudes toward the consumption of alcohol by the British working class had begun to shift during the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, as the environment and working conditions were gradually recognised as being a major contributory factor in drunkenness. Friedrich Engels had raised the environmental issue in 1845 in The Conditions of the Working Class in England, arguing that cramped, uncomfortable living conditions and harsh working practices drove the worker to drink. Engels states of the worker, “His enfeebled frame, weakened by bad air and bad food, loudly demands some external stimulus; his social need can be gratified only in the public house, he has absolutely no other place where he can meet his friends. How can he be expected to resist the temptation?” (133). But the power of the temperance movement's focus on individual responsibility and self-help during the mid-nineteenth century meant Engels's focus was not widely accepted until the resurgence of socialism at the end of the century. By then resentment was rising within both the working class generally and the socialist movement against the imposition of abstinence, especially when the consumption of other classes remained steady. As Brian Harrison states, “it was now suspected that [the workers] were being hypocritically inculcated by self-interested capitalists,” (402) and British socialists were keen to promote this perspective.

It may seem that Christmas literature, with its glorified descriptions of overflowing tables and conviviality, has no place in a discussion of that other extreme, starvation. However, much of the nineteenth-century literature containing narratives of Christmas speaks directly to national fears of famine. Starvation entered the print matter of Christmas first as part of a social argument and later as a concern for the abiding national identity that had become intertwined with Christmas itself and, more symbolically, Christmas fare. Writers including Charles Dickens, Benjamin Farjeon, Augustus and Henry Mayhew, the creators of Punch, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon authored Christmas pieces that showcase literary reactions to the developing issues of hunger throughout their century. This essay offers an overview of the treatment of starvation in the Christmas literature of the nineteenth century.

When Isabella Beeton wrote in her Preface to Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management (1861) that, in order to compete with the attractions of clubs, well-ordered taverns and dining-houses that serve men so well, the mistress must be conversant with cookery and all other arts of making and keeping a comfortable home, she was making use of a narrative that would have been familiar to many of her readers. Both male and female writers of etiquette and cookery books aimed at the bourgeoisie attempted to persuade their readers of the necessity of household management by drawing on this narrative.

These words were penned by a professor of the Royal Medico-Botanical Society in the late 1830s to commemorate the “recent discovery in British India of the Tea Plant” (vii). Yet although written near the beginning of the Victorian era, their sentiment – that tea was both an element of national self-definition and a stimulator of the individual prosperity and wellbeing on which that polity was based – nonetheless epitomizes the broader sweep of the nineteenth century's engagement with that article of consumption. How tea came to occupy this role, and why, is the subject of this essay, which focuses on the book-length tea history – a slightly peculiar genre that blurs the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, advertisement and travelogue, personal account and scientific treatise. These histories appeared throughout the nineteenth century and often were explicitly funded by various segments of the tea industry (thus resembling the nineteenth-century equivalent of an infomercial). Because of their direct relationship to commercial and trading concerns, their role in recording and shaping the taste for the beverage, and their dissemination across a fairly broad public, tea histories offer an important, intertextual index of the Victorians' relationship to the beverage, as well as the way in which the relationship between home and Empire was constituted and changed over the course of the century.

Hetty Sorrel's economic self-interest is impossible to ignore, as is its sexual nature. George Eliot tells us that Hetty is “quite used to the thought that people liked to look at her” and is determined to exchange her physical charms for a life of luxuries (96; ch. 9). Hetty's attraction to the young, wealthy Arthur Donnithorne is unabashedly opportunistic. While Hetty is searching for Arthur, once she is aware of her “swift-advancing shame,” the narrator reveals the turn of her thoughts: “He would not marry her and make her a lady; and apart from that she could think of nothing he could give her towards which she looked with longing and ambition” (364; ch. 35, 372; ch. 36). And it is certainly not unusual for economic considerations to figure in the Victorian marriage plot; Mary Barton's attraction to Harry Carson is predicated on his ability to make her a lady; Rosamond Vincy marries Lydgate in the hopes that his relationship to the landed gentry will, quite literally, pay off. It is the lethal turn of Hetty's material self-interest – the murder of her illegitimate child – that makes her story exceptional. I suggest that Hetty's desire to “purchase” Arthur's social prestige and her ultimate rejection of maternal responsibility intersect with Malthusian economics. The central action of the story, infanticide, signifies one of the chief topics of Malthusian debate. T. R. Malthus and his followers suggested that economically imprudent marriages were akin to an unthinking infanticide because the newlyweds would likely be unable to feed the children that would arise from their conjugal relations; they also registered child-murder as one of the checks to population, classifying it as “one of the worst forms of vice and misery” (1803: 71; ch. 3). In this essay, I read food and the life-and-death economics of food in Adam Bede as a register for Malthusian concerns about sex, family, responsibility, and dependence. In the novel, these concerns are not only for fathers – which is Malthus's own emphasis – but also for mothers. Although published in 1859, the novel is set in 1799, a year after the first publication of Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population, and three decades before the Poor Law reform developed in response to Malthusian analysis. It is in this context that I propose reading Adam Bede alongside Malthus's Essay.

When called upon to host a banquet celebrating the forthcoming Great Exhibition of 1851, the world's first display of international industry, the Mayor of York turned to the period's most renowned chef for the catering. The Frenchman Alexis Soyer, who had recently resigned from his position at the Reform Club in Pall Mall, had made a name for himself in Britain through a combination of extravagant culinary endeavours and popular household cookery books. The banquet at York was an important occasion; joining Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's Consort, was a long list of national luminaries from Victorian high society and the political world. Soyer did not disappoint the Mayor, or his guests. The Times commented that amongst the vast array of international cuisines on offer was featured “one dish, to which turtles, ortolans, and other rich denizens of land and sea had contributed, [which] cost not less than 100l.” The paper noted with satisfaction that the feast was consumed before an “emblematical device representing Britannia in her conventional attire receiving the industrial products of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America” (“The Banquet at York” 5). That this emblem provided the backdrop to such cosmopolitan fare was salient: it spoke to the way in which the production and consumption of food would become a crucial motif in the positive representation of globalisation as it was understood at the Exhibition; it also highlighted the important role that the Victorian metropolis would fulfil in the realisation of this new world order. Certainly, the internationalist bent of Soyer's cooking seemed entirely appropriate to the luminaries gathered at the York banquet, and it was no doubt with the French chef's culinary scope in their minds as well as their stomachs that the Exhibition's organisers invited Soyer to submit a tender to provide refreshments at the display itself (Soyer 197).

“London, for some time previous to the opening of the Great Exhibition, has been a curious sight even to Londoners,” Henry Mayhew declared in 1851, or the Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys and Family, Who Came Up to London to “Enjoy Themselves,” and to See the Great Exhibition, his comic instant novel about the transformation of London in the year of the Great Exhibition. Mayhew proceeded to detail what had grown curiouser and curiouser about the London scene in that climactic year: “New amusements were daily springing into existence, or old ones being revived. The Chinese Collection had returned to the Metropolis, with a family from Pekin, and a lady with feet two inches and a half long, as proof of the superior standing she had in society; Mr Calin [sic; he means Caitlin] had re−opened his Indian exhibit; Mr Wyle [sic; he means Wyld; instant novels apparently did not allow much time for proofreading] had bought up the interior of Leicester Square, with a view of cramming into it – ‘yeah, the great globe itself’” (132). Elsewhere in Mayhew's parodic panorama of London's exhibition mania, he offered a view of other globalized London scenes, focusing on celebrated chef Alexis Soyer's new restaurant, “where the universe might dine, from sixpence to a hundred guineas, of cartes ranging from pickled whelks to nightingale's tongues . . . from the ‘long sixes,’ au natural of the Russians, to the ‘stewed Missionary of the Marquesas,’ or the ‘cold roast Bishop’ of New Zealand” (2). Mayhew's imaginary menu, with its cannibalistic extremes, expresses a wider concern about the deluging of London by foreigners come to see the Great Exhibition (some 60000 “extra” foreigners – beyond, that is, standard visiting numbers – were estimated to have actually visited, mostly from the Continent, that year, roughly doubling the existing foreign population of London; see Auerbach 186), which found expression in an amused (when not more genuinely terrified) xenophobia that often focused on foreign foodways.

With the publication ofThe Tale of Mr. Tod (1912), Beatrix Potter articulated her impatience with “goody goody books about nice people” (Linder 210) and declared her intention “to make a story about two disagreeable people” (Potter, Tale of Mr. Tod 7). Yet although the subjects of the story, Tommy Brock and Mr. Tod, might be the most viciously disagreeable protagonists in Potter's children's stories, her readers were already acquainted with characters who challenged the boundaries of propriety, graciousness, and respectful deference to authority. Throughout her oeuvre, many such characters are not entirely punished for their trespasses, a pattern which often surprises modern readers who blithely assume that the daintily-illustrated books about woodland critters and barnyard creatures affirm conservative Edwardian conventions of behavior and standards of decorum.