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

The Science of Starving in Victorian Literature, Medicine, and Political Economy outlines an important and dynamic way of discussing the humanitarian problem of hunger which emerged in nineteenth-century Britain. Whereas in previous centuries hunger had been seen as a form of moral justice, or a way for nature to create balance, the Victorians developed through medicine and literature a way of thinking about starvation more literally. Charles Kingsley, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Dickens drew upon medical ideas of hunger as a physical form of wasting, a self-cannibalisation, and a vulnerability to numerous other health problems, so that they could highlight fundamental failings in state and statute.