Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T08:45:45.590Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

MATTHEW ARNOLD'S DIET

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 January 2016

Kate Thomas
Kate Thomas*
Affiliation:
Bryn Mawr College
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The objective of this article is to connect Matthew Arnold, that statesman of culture, with a tin of Tate and Lyle's Golden Syrup, a by-product of industrial sugar refining that has been named Britain's “oldest brand.” Bringing the lofty to the low, the sage to the sweetener, is an exercise in willful materialism. Reading Arnold's “sweetness and light” literally, as comestibles, and “culture” as a term that engages the culinary, puts Arnold into conversation with revolutionary nineteenth-century materialist theorists, in particular the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. Although not commonly read now, Feuerbach's work was translated by George Eliot and influential on that of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: it is his materialism and his atheism that we see, modified, in their work. In his own time, he was also known for theories about diet and this article will, in part, show how these theories are inseparable from both his materialism and his atheism. True to its viscous, tacky nature, Golden Syrup arrives slowly and emerges late in my argument, but it will adhere Arnold to Feuerbach, and to an intellectual tradition that holds that what we eat, and whether and how we can eat, is as world-making as what we read. Sitting Feuerbach's self-avowed extreme materialism down at the table with Arnold's self-avowed extreme anti-materialism, I will show that they grapple with the same gods – the gods of Christianity, capitalism, and cultural immortality – and that they both conclude that we make and remake our world by digesting it.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , March 2016 , pp. 1 - 18
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Arac, Jonathan. “The Arnoldian Prophecy: Making Critical History.” Boundary 2 12.3 (1984): 143–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arnold, Matthew. Arnold: Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings. Ed. Collini, Stefan. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Arnold, Matthew. “Copyright.” Fortnightly Review Art 159 (March 1880): 319–34.Google Scholar
Arnold, Matthew. English Literature and Irish Politics. The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold. Vol. 9. Ed. Super, R. H.. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1973.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arnold, Matthew. Reports on Elementary Schools 1852–1882 New Edition, with additional matter and appendices and introduction by F. S. Marvin. London: Printed for His Majesty's Stationary Office, 1910.Google Scholar
Arnold, Matthew. The Letters of Matthew Arnold. Ed. Lang, Cecil Y.. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1996.Google Scholar
Arnold, Matthew. Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold. Ed. Culler, A. Dwight. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961.Google Scholar
Arnold, Matthew. Passages from the Prose Writings of Matthew Arnold. London: Smith, Elder, 1880.Google Scholar
Bacon, Francis. Complete Essays, Including the New Atlantis and Novum Organum. New York: Washington Square, 1963.Google Scholar
Black, Mary J. “Matthew Arnold and Proficiency Testing.” English Journal 71.1 (Jan. 1982): 18–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boswell, James. The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson. 1785. Ed. McGowan, Ian. Edinburgh: Cannongate Classics, 1996.Google Scholar
Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthelme. The Physiology of Taste: Or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy. 1825. Trans. Fisher, M. F. K.. New York: Counterpoint, 1999.Google Scholar
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. Selected Poems. Introd. Margaret Forster. London: Everyman's Library, 1988.Google Scholar
Carlyle, Thomas. Sartor Resartus. Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 1987.Google Scholar
Caufield, James Walter. Overcoming Matthew Arnold: Ethics in Culture and Criticism. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012.Google Scholar
Cherno, Melvin. “Feuerbach's ‘Man Is What He Eats’: A Rectification.” Journal of the History of Ideas 24.3 (July 1963): 397–406.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Kubla Khan: or, a Vision in a Dream: A Fragment.” 1816. The Complete Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Keach, William. London: Penguin, 1997.Google Scholar
Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species. Amherst: Prometheus, 1991.Google Scholar
DeLaura, David J. “Arnold and Carlyle.” PMLA 79.1 (Mar. 1964): 104–29.Google Scholar
Disraeli, Benjamin. The Young Duke. New York: M. Walter Dunne, 1904.Google Scholar
D'Israeli, Isaac. Curiosities of Literature. 3 vols. London: Frederick Warne, 1868.Google Scholar
Dowling, Linda. The Vulgarization of Art: the Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1996.Google Scholar
Ellman, Maud. The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing, and Imprisonment. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. London: Penguin, 1987.Google Scholar
Engels, Friedrich. Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy. New York: International, 1941.Google Scholar
Feuerbach, Ludwig. “Das Geheimnis des Opfers oder Der Mensch ist, was er ißt (The Mystery of Sacrifice or Man is what he eats).” Trans. Levitt, Cyrill. n.p.: 2007. Web. 29 Aug. 2015.Google Scholar
Feuerbach, Ludwig. Schriften zue Ethik und nachgelassene Aphorismen von Ludwig Feuerbach. Ed. Jodl, Friedrich. Suttgart: Frommann Verlag, 1960.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume III (1893–1899). Trans. Strachey, James in collaboration with Freud, Anna, assisted by Strachey, Alix and Tyson, Alan. London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1962.Google Scholar
Fromm, Erich. Marx's Concept of Man. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1961.Google Scholar
Gallagher, Catherine, and Greenblatt, Stephen, eds. Practicing New Historicism. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garval, Michael. “Alexis Soyer and the Rise of the Celebrity Chef.” Romantic Gastronomies: A Volume of the Romantic Circles Praxis Series. Ed. Gigante, Denise. January 2007. Pars. 1–51. Romantic Circles. Web. 29 Aug. 2015Google Scholar
Gigante, Denise. Taste: A Literary History. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
King, C. Richard. “The (Mis)Uses of Cannibalism in Contemporary Cultural Critique.” Diacritics 30.1 (2000): 106–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Litvak, Joseph. Strange Gourmets: Sophistication, Theory, and the Novel. Durham: Duke UP, 1997.Google Scholar
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I. Trans. Fowkes, Ben. London: Penguin, 1976.Google Scholar
Marx, Karl. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Ed. Struick, Dirk J., Trans. Milligan, Martin. New York: International, 1973.Google Scholar
Marx, Karl, and Engels, Fredrich. Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels: Collected Works. Vol. 3. New York: International, 1975.Google Scholar
Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking, 1985.Google Scholar
Morton, Timothy. The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.Google Scholar
Morton, Timothy, ed. Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Randall, Marilyn. Pragmatic Plagiarism: Authorship, Profit, and Power. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robson, Catherine. Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2012.Google Scholar
Russell, G. W. E.Matthew Arnold. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1904.Google Scholar
Sussman, Charlotte. Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Slavery, 1713–1833. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Swift, Jonathan. A Tale of a Tub to Which Is Added the Battle of the Books and the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1958.Google Scholar
Tennyson, Alfred. The Poems of Tennyson. Ed. Ricks, Christopher. London: Longmans, Green, 1969.Google Scholar
Tillotson, Kathleen. “Matthew Arnold and Carlyle.” Watson Lecture on English Poetry. Proceedings of the British Academy 42 (1956): 133–53.Google Scholar
Tinker, C. B., and Lowry, H. F.. The Poetry of Matthew Arnold: A Commentary. New York: Russell and Russell, 1940.Google Scholar
Vogeler, Martha Salmon. “Matthew Arnold and Frederic Harrison: The Prophet of Culture and the Prophet of Positivism.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 2.4, Nineteenth Century (Autumn 1962): 441–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society: 1780–1950. New York: Columbia UP, 1983.Google Scholar
Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985.Google Scholar
Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.Google Scholar