Table Of ContentFOOD IN THE
NOVELS OF
THOMAS HARDY
Production and
Consumption
Kim Salmons
Food in the Novels of Thomas Hardy
‘Food in the Novels of Thomas Hardy is an original and insightful study of
an often overlooked area of Hardy’s work. As Salmons masterfully dem-
onstrates, Hardy’s depiction of food has a meaningful role in illuminat-
ing issues concerning national identity, patriotism, and the nature of the
rural idyll. This elegantly written book offers a close and careful reading
of Hardy’s novels and is keenly alive to the subtleties of Hardy’s percep-
tions and his use of symbolism.’
—Dr. Rebecca Welshman, Honorary Fellow, University of Liverpool, UK
‘“Food”, says one of Hardy’s rustic characters, is “the gospel of the
body, … without which we perish”. This study sets out chapter and verse
of that gospel, in a series of richly textured and suggestive analyses of
the part played in Hardy’s fiction by the production, distribution, and
consumption of food, from making furmity to butchering pigs. It is a
welcome addition to Hardy studies.’
—Phillip Mallett, University of St. Andrews, UK
‘A successful contribution to the fields of literary criticism and food stud-
ies, offering original insights into the representation of food production
and consumption in Hardy’s works.’
—Charlotte Boyce, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, University of
Portsmouth, UK
‘Kim Salmons describes wonderfully the role that food played, not
only in Hardy’s novels, but in the author’s own life, from childhood
to deathbed. The preparing of dishes, the sounds of food cooking and
the culinary smells that Hardy loved are so evocatively brought to life in
Salmons’s text, that the reader can understand with all their senses what
the preparation and serving of food was like in Thomas Hardy’s era.’
—Lucinda Hawksley, author of Charles Dickens and his Circle
Kim Salmons
Food in the Novels
of Thomas Hardy
Production and Consumption
Kim Salmons
St. Mary’s University
Twickenham, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-63470-8 ISBN 978-3-319-63471-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-63471-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017947744
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For my family.
F
oreword
Thomas Hardy’s novels respond to, and chart changes in, the
nineteenth-century British countryside. Often elegiac in tone and mood,
these hymns to a passing age are, nonetheless, sustained by social and
historical realism. Collectively they bear witness to an environment in
transition, with Wessex providing the locus for the great forces of migra-
tion from rus to urbs and the relentless mechanization of agriculture. In
Hardy’s blend of social and individual life, food production is interro-
gated with an historian’s sense of context and a painter’s eye for detail.
Here, new forces and new practices at work in the countryside are delin-
eated, as bucolic stability encounters the ‘ache of modernism’ in com-
edies of enduring value and tragedies of class and culture.
Under Hardy’s pen, the ‘partly real, partly dream country’ of Wessex
witnesses the correspondence between not only the rural and urban
spheres, but also the national and international worlds. Across the
nineteenth century, food production in Britain became acutely politi-
cized, fuelled by the need to feed a rapidly expanding and increasingly
urban population. So much so that, by the century’s close, the nation
depended on her colonies for two thirds of her food. Hardy’s novels are
shaped by late-nineteenth century impulses without ever losing sight
of the local and individual; in their preoccupation with a countryside
in transition, they yet find, and offer, solace in what remains. He is the
great poet of change who, in works that reflect the era’s definitive spirit
of unrest, also finds in the ordinary and enduring purposes of agriculture
vii
viii FOREWORD
a bulwark against the threatening tide: ‘The mill still worked on, food
being a perennial necessity; the abbey had perished, creeds being tran-
sient’ (Tess of the d’Urbervilles).
In their fine detail, Hardy’s narratives ponder food and the occa-
sion of food, both its production and its consumption. Meals double
as connotators of realism, conjuring up the historical and cultural con-
texts from which they emerge, without ever losing sight of the human
predicaments, the tragi-comic patterning of the rural lives that they
reflect. Thus, social concerns, such as those voiced by Arabella Donn’s
‘Pigs must be killed’ and ‘Poor folks must live,’ take their place along-
side affairs of personal and private moment, as when the slug in the
‘few leaves of winter-gree’ on Grace Melbury’s plate–albeit ‘well boiled’
according to Robert Creedle–dashes Giles Winterborne’s romantic
hopes.
In this volume, Dr. Kim Salmons critically examines the presentation
of food in the works of Thomas Hardy. Her broad historical approach
serves the argument well, articulating the production, distribution and
consumption of food in nineteenth century England. Bringing into the
foreground what for too long has been in the background, Salmons
revisits familiar texts to offer new perspectives and open up new inter-
pretive frames. The result is a study that is both welcome and timely: it
makes a serious contribution to the growing literature on food politics
whilst, simultaneously, demonstrating how Hardy’s fictions are continu-
ous with the quotidian realities from which they emerge, reinforcing the
place of these novels in the development of literary modernism.
Allan H. Simmons
St. Mary’s University
Twickenham, UK
P
reFace
This book offers a sustained investigation of how food contributes to a
deeper and wider understanding of the novels of Thomas Hardy by dem-
onstrating how food references facilitate a discussion about the historical,
sociological, and political changes of the nineteenth century in England.
Hardy’s novels will provide the backdrop for the modernization of the
rural countryside and the movement of the population from the rural to
the urban. This in turn provokes a discussion about the changing meth-
ods of food production and the increasing need to look to the British
colonies for foodstuffs, substantiating the claim that the integral but
hitherto largely neglected place of food in late-Victorian fiction offers a
new way of reading this period through the prism of its literature.
By historically contextualising Hardy’s novels against the chang-
ing methods of food production through the nineteenth century, pre-
viously overlooked aspects of his novels—such as the representation of
field-women through references to food in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and
issues surrounding humane animal slaughter in Jude the Obscure—come
to light. The progression through the century, marked by the fol-
lowing selection of novels, provides a unique vision of how modernity
changed the lives of labourers, the food that they ate and the means
by which they obtained it. The changed attitude to food production is
most remarkable when comparing John Loveday’s childhood days spent
chasing the birds in The Trumpet-Major—‘I used to make trumpets of
paper, eldersticks, eltrot stems, and even stinging-nettle stalks, you know.
Then father set me to keep the birds off that little barley-ground of his,
ix
x PREFACE
and gave me an old horn to frighten ‘em for miles and miles’ (1987, p.
120)—with that of Jude in Jude the Obscure who ‘sounded the clacker till
his arm ached, and at length his heart grew sympathetic with the birds’
thwarted desires’ (1985, p. 53). Land and the process of food produc-
tion is no longer considered as a setting for ‘energy, gaiety, horse-play,
bickering, weariness’ (TM, 8), but a place which is now ‘deprived of all
history beyond that of a few recent months’ (Jude, 221).
Acknowledgements are due to those who have patiently and gener-
ously shared their knowledge in the conception and completion of this
book, namely, Prof. Allan Simmons, Prof. Laurence Davies and Dr.
Hugh Epstein. I would like to thank St. Mary’s University, Twickenham
for funding much of this study; and Laura Minogue and Kathryn
Enticott for their friendship and encouragement. My lifelong thanks go
to my parents, Frank and Sylvia Bunce; my brothers, Lee Ash and Stuart
Bunce; Anastasia, Cy and Ayla. My love and admiration go to my hus-
band, Robert Salmons, and my wonderful daughters, Bibi and Dusty
Salmons.
Twickenham, UK Kim Salmons
c
ontents
1 Introduction 1
2 Historical Context 13
3 Undermining the ‘Pastoral Idyll’: The Trumpet-Major
and Under the Greenwood Tree 37
4 The Decline and Fall of the Corn King: The Mayor
of Casterbridge 65
5 Food Production and the Feminine Pastoral:
Tess of the D’Urbervilles 85
6 Pig Killing and Surviving Modernity: Jude the Obscure 105
7 Conclusion 121
Index 125
xi
