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

The Science of Starving in Victorian Literature, Medicine, and Political Economy is a reassessment of the languages and methodologies used, throughout the nineteenth century, for discussing extreme hunger in Britain. Set against the providentialism of conservative political economy, this study uncovers an emerging, dynamic way of describing literal starvation in medicine and physiology. No longer seen as a divine punishment for individual failings, starvation became, in the human sciences, a pathology whose horrific symptoms registered failings of state and statute. Providing new and historically-rich readings of the works of Charles Kingsley, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Dickens, this book suggests that the realism we have come to associate with Victorian social problem fiction learned a vast amount from the empirical, materialist objectives of the medical sciences and that, within the mechanics of these intersections, we find important re-examinations of how we might think about this ongoing humanitarian issue.

Andrew Mangham, Professor of Victorian Literature and Medical Humanities, University of Reading

Andrew Mangham is Professor of Victorian Literature and Medical Humanities at the University of Reading. His books on the intersection between medicine and literature include Dickens's Forensic Realism (2017) and Violent Women and Sensation Fiction (2007). He is editor of Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth Century (2020) and The Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction (2013). He has also co-edited, with Daniel Lea, The Male Body in Medicine and Literature (2018) and, with Greta Depledge, The Female Body in Medicine and Literature (2011).