4 - ‘Sugared Almonds and Pink Lozenges’: George Eliot's ‘Brother Jacob’ as Literary Confection

Summary

The consumer of sugar neither knows nor asks where the product he uses comes from; he neither selects it nor tries it out. … The person with a sweet tooth just asks for sugar, without article, pronoun, or adjective to give it a local habitation and a name. When, in the process of refining, sugar has achieved a high degree of saccharose and of chemical purity it is impossible to distinguish one from the other even in the best-equipped laboratory. All sugars are alike.

– Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint

Victorian Sugar

As Ligon notes, sugar is not indigenous to the Caribbean, but ‘brought thither as a stranger, from beyond the Line’, and, like every traveller, it has a tale to tell. This is one version of its story:

Sugar has been happily called ‘the honey of reeds.’ … Our supplies are now obtained from Barbadoes [sic], Jamaica, Mauritius, Ceylon, the East and West Indies generally, and the United States; but the largest supplies come from Cuba. Sugar is divided into the following classes: – Refined sugar, white clayed, brown clayed, brown raw, and molasses. The sugarcane grows to the height of six, twelve, or even sometimes twenty feet. It is propagated from cuttings, requires much hoeing and weeding, giving employment to thousands upon thousands of slaves in the slave countries, and attains maturity in twelve or thirteen months. […]