5 - The Culinary Landscape of Victorian Literature

Summary

In nineteenth-century Britain, a new relationship developed between eating and reading: the cookbook emerged as a commercial form; realist novelists described meals in detail; written menus appeared on dining tables in both the public and domestic spheres. The fashion in dining style also shifted, from service à la Française, in which dishes were all served at once, to service à la Russe, in which meals were served to diners in courses. Dinner had become serialized. As this chapter reminds us, Victorians consumed much of their literature in serial form, and now mealtimes mirrored the apportioned, segregated, and suspenseful qualities of serialized fiction. Because service à la Russe was timed and choreographed by servants, the serialization of the meal played a role in the privatization of social and libidinal life. This chapter also traces nineteenth-century interests in civilized and uncivilized ways of eating, and the crucial role that diet and dining played in political protest. Industrialization had produced an era of grand excess and grisly deficits; when Charles Dickens compared capitalist and cannibal appetites he exposed the end-logic of consumer culture.