Food, Bodies, and Social Attention in Modern Britain by Alice Tsay A dissertation submitted in ...

240 Pages·2017·3.81 MB·English

by  Alice Tsay

Absorbing Fare:
Food, Bodies, and Social Attention in Modern Britain

by

Alice Tsay

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
(English Language and Literature)
in The University of Michigan
2017

Doctoral Committee:

Associate Professor Andrea P. Zemgulys, Chair
Professor Daniel S. Hack
Professor Adela N. Pinch
Professor David L. Porter
Professor Susan L. Siegfried
Alice Tsay
[email protected]

ORCID ID: 0000-0002-5977-8111

© Alice Tsay 2017
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project bears the traces of many individuals whose generosity can be tabulated here
in only the most cursory and inadequate way.
First and foremost, I have been incredibly lucky to undertake this dissertation under the
collective care of five wonderful committee members: my incomparable committee chair, Andrea
Zemgulys, who saw a coherence in the dissertation even in its roughest stages and drew it out
with rigor and grace; Danny Hack, a valued source of forthright advice throughout my graduate
studies; Adela Pinch, for mentoring me with candor and acuity not only through this project but
also countless other endeavors; David Porter, whose capacious expertise and probing questions
have guided me from before I stepped foot in Ann Arbor; and Susan Siegfried, who engaged
fully and generously with my dissertation from the first day she signed on as my cognate
member.
My fellow graduate students at the University of Michigan unfailingly embodied the
vitality and collegiality of the humanities, and this dissertation would not have been possible
without the community they provided. Deepest thanks go to my stalwart writing group, Eliza
Mathie, Aran Ruth, and Pam Wolpert, who kept me writing and helped me think through each of
those written words. Additionally, Julia Hansen, Amrita Dhar, Adam Sneed, Logan Scherer,
Kathryne Bevilacqua, and Emily Waples offered friendship, perspective, and even housing at
critical times.
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Mike Schoenfeldt provided warm encouragement and wise counsel throughout the years.
I am glad I found a place here for Marvell and Donne.
Par Cassel got me thinking about the circulation of patent pills five years ago, while my
interest in the British Empire Exhibition germinated in Valerie Traub and Karl Longstreth’s
cartography course.
Carla Sinopoli, Brad Taylor, and the Museum Studies Program shaped my thinking about
the history of exhibitions as well as the future direction of my own career.
Additionally, I am grateful to the many individuals at The Huntington who have offered
me advice, friendship, and an intellectual home away from home: Catherine Allgor, Sue Hodson,
Peter Blodgett, Anna Engstrom, Brandi Shawn-Chaparro, and many more.
Many librarians opened their collections to me and shared their expertise, including
Caroline Warhurst at the London Transport Museum, Max Hopkinson at the Brent Museum and
Archives, and Nick Millea and Stuart Atkinson at the Bodleian Library.
Funding from the Rackham Merit Fellowship, Rackham Humanities Research
Fellowship, Rackham Travel Grant, and Fellowship for Doctoral Research in Museum kept food
on the table and allowed me to complete the research for this project.
Finally, I am unspeakably thankful for Mike, my parents, my brother, Emily, and many
other dear friends for continuously pulling me back into the wider world when this dissertation
felt like the narrow horizon of my days.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................................ ii
LIST OF FIGURES ....................................................................................................................... vi
ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................. viii

INTRODUCTION..........................................................................................................................1
Setting the Table

PART I: CONSUMERS CONSUMED ......................................................................................14

CHAPTER ONE ......................................................................................................................15
Man is but a Crab: Crustacean Kinship and Its Perils

These His Good Creatures ................................................................................................ 15
The Inaugural Worm ......................................................................................................... 18
Clawing up through the Ranks .......................................................................................... 22
Crustacean Science ........................................................................................................... 25
Being Crabby .................................................................................................................... 27
Cannibal Monkeys of the Sea ........................................................................................... 35
The Future behind Us........................................................................................................ 44
Making It Modern ............................................................................................................. 48
Shells and Selves............................................................................................................... 57

CHAPTER TWO .....................................................................................................................61
Pills for Our Ills: Diagnosing Self and Society

Negative Space.................................................................................................................. 61
Doctoring .......................................................................................................................... 69
Naming and Unnaming ..................................................................................................... 76
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Bottled Nonsense .............................................................................................................. 80
The Stakes of Mishearing ................................................................................................. 87
Sounding True ................................................................................................................... 90
Social Maladies ................................................................................................................. 94
Alterative Futures.............................................................................................................. 98
Of Codfishes and Curates ............................................................................................... 104

PART II: PRODUCERS AND PRODUCTION ......................................................................108

CHAPTER THREE...............................................................................................................109
Weariness and Watercress: Temporalities of Gender, Temporalities of Class

Going to Market .............................................................................................................. 109
Green Stuff, Good Stuff ...................................................................................................116
Showing the Work ........................................................................................................... 122
Past Eight ........................................................................................................................ 133
Preservation..................................................................................................................... 151
A Nosegay for the Nation ............................................................................................... 159
Bloom and Bust............................................................................................................... 166

CHAPTER FOUR .................................................................................................................169
Between World’s Fairs and Warfare: Ordering Food at the British Empire Exhibition

Going Big and Scaling Down ......................................................................................... 169
The View from Above .................................................................................................... 173
Food Uncontained .......................................................................................................... 177
Placing ............................................................................................................................ 186
Eating for Empire ........................................................................................................... 190
Forwards but Backwards ................................................................................................ 196
Leftovers ......................................................................................................................... 202

CONCLUSION ......................................................................................................................204
Ruminations

BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................209

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. Advertisement for Madame Babault, the lobster-clawed lady, (c.1898). Print, Engraving
on Paper. Credit: Look and Learn, Peter Jackson Collection/Bridgeman Images. ............... 34
Figure 2. Photograph of a Golden Crab by Venus Flower Baskets. Credit: NOAA Okeanos
Explorer Program, Gulf of Mexico 2012 Expedition. .......................................................... 53
Figure 3: Hostetter’s Bitters Advertisement in an 1867 issue of Harper’s Weekly. ...................... 62
Figure 4: John Knowles Paine, “Radway’s Ready Relief: Male Quartet with Bass Solo,” mm.15-
29 (1883). .............................................................................................................................. 92
Figure 5: Johan Zoffany, “The Watercress Girl” (1780). Oil on Canvas. Private Collection.
Credit: Bonhams / Bridgeman Images. ................................................................................113
Figure 6: Way Bill for the Midland Railway, in E.M. Needham, “Train Workings upon an
English Railway” (1889)......................................................................................................119
Figure 7: Joseph Mallord William Turner, “The Watercress Gatherers” (1819). Etching and
mezzotint on paper, 188 x 265 mm. Credit: Tate Britain. ................................................... 124
Figure 8: Detail from James Ward, “The Watercress Girl” (1830). Watercolor on paper, 16.25” x
12.25”. Credit: Victoria and Albert Museum. ..................................................................... 125
Figure 9: Artist Unknown, Printed Illustration of a Watercress Seller from T.L. Busby’s
Costumes of the Lower Orders of London (1820). Credit: New York Public Library. ....... 127
Figure 10: Detail from M. Vizetelly, llustration from first edition of Thomas Miller’s “The Water-
Cress Seller” (1850). Print, woodcut on paper, 18 cm. ....................................................... 139
Figure 11: Artist Unknown, Illustration from an 1863 version of Thomas Miller’s “The Water-
Cress Seller.” Print, woodcut on paper, 13 cm. ................................................................... 140
Figure 12: Detail from William Dickes,“Water-cress-e-s!” (c. 1869). Print, chromolithograph on
paper, 16 cm. ....................................................................................................................... 147
Figure 13: “What is done for the Crippled Girls” Appeal pamphlet circulated by the Watercress
and Flower Girls’ Christian Mission (c. 1903). Credit: London Metropolitan Archives .... 153
Figure 14: Detail from Photograph of “John Groom with Girls Making Flowers” (c.1900s).
Credit: London Metropolitan Archives. .............................................................................. 155
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Figure 15: Woodblock print reused in multiple appeal pamphlets (c. 1896-1919). Credit: London
Metropolitan Archive. ......................................................................................................... 157
Figure 16: Promotional Card for John Groom’s Charity (later renamed John Groom’s
Crippleage) at the 1909 Imperial International Exhibition ................................................. 162
Figure 17: Photograph of Artificial Flowers Display at the White City Exhibition, c. 1910.
Credit: London Metropolitan Archives ............................................................................... 165
Figure 18: “Plan of Restaurants and Cafes” in The Official Guide to the British Empire
Exhibition (1925). ............................................................................................................... 183
Figure 19: Kenneth S. North, Official Map for the British Empire Exhibition (1923). Color
Lithograph, 29.5 x 19.5 inches. Credit: Museum of London, 83.819/4. ............................. 188
Figure 20: Illustrations of Meat Consumption, Production, and Import from a Guide to the
Oversea Settlement Gallery (c.1924). Credit: Brent Archives. ........................................... 193
Figure 21: Campbell Grey, “H.R.H. The Prince of Wales in Butter,” (c. 1924-5). Photographic
postcard. Credit: Brent Archives. ........................................................................................ 199
Figure 22: Campbell Grey, “H.R.H. The Prince of Wales in Butter…As Chief Morning Star.
Stoney Indians” (c. 1924-25). Photographic postcard. Credit: Brent Archives. ................. 200

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ABSTRACT

Absorbing Fare examines the imaginative functions of food and ingestion within the
discourses of difference that emerged in modern Britain. Using four historical instances of
cultural fixation, I argue that these seemingly anomalous moments illuminate a conceptualization
of identity as constituted, for individuals as well as communities, by acts of exclusion as well as
incorporation.
The first half of my dissertation focuses on two disparate types of foods whose distinctive
properties activated questions about the ethics of eating and the ways in which the object of
ingestion could act upon the consuming body. Chapter 1 (“Man is but a Crab: Crustacean
Kinship and Its Perils”) pries into the crustacean’s place in Victorian marine biology and
evolutionary theory, situating it in the context of a long tradition of literature that uses ingestion
to visualize the origins and ends of human life. Chapter 2 (“Pills for Our Ills: Diagnosing Self
and Society”) listens in on the clamorous conflict between purveyors and critics of patent
medicines, showing how both sides claimed likeness between habits of alimentary, auditory, and
cultural consumption in articulating competing visions for the future of the human race.
The second half of the dissertation turns from foods to foodways, and from philosophical
questions about the malleability and vulnerability of the human body to socio-political questions
about how these bodies could be ordered and placed to optimize the good of the British nation.
Chapter 3 (“Weariness and Watercress: Temporalities of Gender, Temporalities of Class”)
follows the withered figure of the watercress girl to consider how the preservation of food, the
salvation of souls, and the reification of national identity converged in the disproportionate
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visibility of labor across the watercress industry within sociological and philanthropic accounts.
Chapter 4 (“Between World’s Fairs and Warfare: Ordering Food at the British Empire
Exhibition”) pays a visit to the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, arguing that food’s
recalcitrance to coherent narrativization was causally linked to the exhibition’s failed aims to
circumscribe the visitor’s movements simultaneously within the contained space of the
exhibition and in the wider Empire, depicted as ripe for harvest.
Together, the case studies in these four chapters articulate the centrality of food in the
period’s engagements with the limitations and possibilities of self, society, and species.
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