Feast or Famine? Food and Children’s Literature : Food and Children’s Literature [1 ed.] 9781443863544, 9781443861427

Citation preview

Feast or Famine? Food and Children’s Literature

Feast or Famine? Food and Children’s Literature

Edited by

Bridget Carrington and Jennifer Harding

Feast or Famine? Food and Children’s Literature Edited by Bridget Carrington and Jennifer Harding This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2014 Bridget Carrington, Jennifer Harding and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN-(10): 1-4438-6142-1, ISBN-(13): 978-1-4438-6142-7

TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures

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List of Plates (in centrefold)

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Acknowledgements

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Introduction Bridget Carrington

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Constructions of Childhood through Food in Children’s Literature Jean Webb

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Eating My Words Anne Harvey

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Girls and Body Image Fiona Dunbar

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Guo Yue: Music, Food and Love Judith Philo and Jennifer Harding

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Liniment Cake, Beavers, Buttered Eggs: Children Cooking; Cooking [for] Children Nicki Humble Drawing, Stories, Ambiguity, Magic David Lucas Food and the Capitalist Marketplace in Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Stories Aoife Byrne Unpunished Gluttony in Astrid Lindgren’s Children’s Books Anne Malewski Women, Work and Chocolate: Food, Power and ‘Sites of Struggle’ in the Post-War Novels of Noel Streatfeild Kay Waddilove

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80 99

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Feast or Famine? Food and Children’s Literature

Food and Starvation in Heroic-Era Antarctic Literature for Children Sinéad Moriarty

138

Food Supply and Sustenance in Victorian Robinsonades for Children Simone Herrmann

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‘Edible’ Children in Early Nineteenth-Century Children’s Literature Karen Williams

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Poachers and Scavengers: Reconceptualising Food in Children’s Literature Sarah Layzell Hardstaff

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‘Crunchy Apples to you, Comrades’: Alex Shearer’s Bootleg Rebecca R. Butler

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Whiz Cinnamon Rolls to Sloppy Joes: 50 Years in Children’s Cookbooks Zahra Amlani

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Bridging the Gastronomical Divide in Translating Children’s Literature Gili Bar-Hillel

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Wishing Tables and Magic Puddings: Never-Ending Edibles Franziska Burstyn

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A Varied Menu: Children’s Poetry about Food Pat Pinsent

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Food, Love and Childhood: Surviving and Thriving in the Deepwoods Rebecca Ann Long

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Biographies of Contributors

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Index

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LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Sketch of Kitty Slade for the Kitty Slade series. Fiona Dunbar.

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Figure 2. The molasses-on-snow candy of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods. 2009: 36. 54 Figure 3. From C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. 1959: 73. The hungry children enjoying a meal in the Beavers’ cave. Illustration by Pauline Baynes. 62 Figure 4. Statue of a young girl, Faith, who is stuck in a room with a tiger-skin rug. David Lucas.

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Figure 5. The Lying Carpet being beaten. David Lucas.

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Figure 6. Faith jumping off her plinth. David Lucas.

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Figure 7. Walter Crane’s ‘The Capitalist Vampire’ – Justice Journal (1885).

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Figure 8. Walter Crane’s title illustration of the Happy Prince from The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888)..

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Figure 9. Illustration from ‘The Happy Prince’. Walter Crane’s illustration of the starving people of the Prince’s city.

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Figure 10. Title illustration from ‘The Devoted Friend’. Big Hugh the Miller takes the fruits of little Hans’ labour. 88 Figure 11. The final illustration of ‘The Devoted Friend’ depicts little Hans’ abandoned broken wheelbarrow, overshadowed by the domineering mill. 90 Figure 12. The Selfish Giant. Nature becomes fruitful and productive once more.

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Figure 13. Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon’s original cover illustration of A House of Pomegranates (1888). 93 Figure 14. 1941 advertisement.

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Figure 15. 2011 advertisement.

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Figure 16. Woodcut from Thomas Hood’s The Comic Annual (1832), p.97.

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Figure 17. Twig and the Gabtroll, p.211.

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List of Figures

Figure 18. Twig and Spelda, p.14.

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Figure 19. Twig in the Deepwoods, p.40.

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Figure 20. Battle with the Hoverworm, p.51.

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Figure 21. The bloodoak attack, p.93.

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Figure 22. The gyle goblin colony, p.104.

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Figure 23. The Grossmother, p.106.

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Figure 24. The banderbear, p.138.

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LIST OF PLATES (IN CENTREFOLD) Plate 1. Sophie. From Fiona Dunbar’s Under the Stairs. Plate 2. Cover designed by the publisher for Fiona Dunbar’s Kitty Slade trilogy. Plate 3. Look at the crane-fly legs! Cover of Helena the Horseriding Fairy by ‘Daisy Meadows’. Plate 4. A normal-shaped girl. Cover of Pia the Penguin Fairy by ‘Daisy Meadows’. Plate 5. Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Samuel Whiskers or The PolyPoly Pudding. Plate 6. Detail from Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Land of Cockaigne, 1567. Plate 7. The ‘monster’ boy Grendel. From David Lucas’s Grendel: A Cautionary Tale about Chocolate. Plate 8. Fighting for his life. From David Lucas’s The Skeleton Pirate. Plate 9. Adolf Wölfli’s Irren-Anstalt Band-Hain, 1910. Plate 10. The death of the robot. From David Lucas’s The Robot and the Bluebird. Plate 11. The Robot and the birds. From David Lucas’s The Robot and the Bluebirds. Plate 12. Food advertisement of 2011. Plate 13. Christmas Day. From Tom's Rabbit by Meredith Hooper, Illustrated by Bert Kitchen. Plate 14. The Heroic Arrival. From Michael McCurdy’s Trapped by the Ice. Plate 15. Mrs Chippy. From Tom's Rabbit by Meredith Hooper, Illustrated by Bert Kitchen.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Cover illustration copyright © Helen Cann. Reproduced from Little Leap Forward by Guo Yue, by kind permission of Barefoot Books Ltd. www.barefootbooks.com. Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

INTRODUCTION BRIDGET CARRINGTON I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy Child well Nursed is at a year Old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome Food, whether Stewed, Roasted, Baked, or Boyled, and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a Fricasie, or Ragoust. (Jonathan Swift, 1729)

This volume in the series which records the topics addressed in the annual IBBY UK/NCRCL MA conference hosted by Roehampton University marks a significant milestone in academic study, being the product of the 20th such conference at one of the UK’s pioneering centres for the study of children’s literature. That it concentrated on that constant subject of childish attention – food – seems particularly appropriate, as did the appearance on the day of the conference of a celebratory cake for the Tiger who Judith Kerr first invited to tea for our delectation 40 years ago.

Children, Food and Literature Food and sex perpetuate our species. In adult literature (especially ‘Adult’ literature), food and sex are both served in order to whet the reader’s appetite. In literature for children, as several of the writers observe in this volume, because direct reference to sex is deemed inadmissible, food is often used as a signifier of both. The variety of feast- and famine-related writing by the contributors spectacularly reflects the pervasiveness of food, cooking and eating in prose and poetry for children, as befits a staple of life. Both food and famine can engender extreme behaviour, and the

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following pages are laden with an abundance of examples of this, both textual and pictorial. Inspired by my own admiration of Jonathan Swift’s social conscience and caustic wit, and by the title of Nicki Humble’s chapter, with its interpolated ‘[for]’ between ‘cooking’ and ‘children’, I chose to preface my Introduction with a food/child image that shocks the twenty-first-century reader as surely as it did those of the early eighteenth. Indeed, in one of the many appearances of A Modest Proposal on the internet, there is a cautionary note added to indicate that the writing is satirical, and that its recommendations are not actually meant to be followed. I suspect that the note was added in all seriousness. David Lucas recalls that a similar health warning was issued by a critic when one of his books referred to a chocolate mother who melts, which children might find distressing! Karen Williams shows us that a century after Swift, ‘edible children’ had well and truly entered children’s literature. I would argue that some twentieth-century adults’ view that the work of Roald Dahl was new, shocking, subversive and undesirable for tender young minds seems to have been formed in ignorance of much tougher earlier fare. Sinéad Moriarty’s study of Heroic-Era Antarctic literature examines genuine, historic acts of eating that took place because of impending starvation, and which, like Swift’s suggestion, transgress accepted Western norms. Simone Herrmann looks at Victorian Robinsonades for children, in the course of which we discover that this genre of adventure fiction perpetuated the opinion widely held within the British Empire that indigenous peoples – ‘savages’, ‘natives’ – were incapable of civilisation, and that stories of their cannibalism demonstrated this. Several contributors look at food in works of fantasy, and the diet therein also proves at times unusual, even bizarre – often disgusting and transgressive.

Introduction

A Cookery Book for Children While digesting the rich and hugely varied diet offered by all the contributors to the conference, I noted with some surprise there was no reference to an abiding memory from my childhood, The Chalet Girls’ Cook Book. I was, and remain, a great fan of Eleanor Brent-Dyer’s Chalet School, a fictional boarding school for girls, which from its inception in 1925 until 1938 was situated in the Austrian Tyrol. Having removed it to British soil for the duration of the Second World War, Brent-Dyer returned it in the 1950s to Switzerland. This Teutonic boarding-school setting resulted in many references to food in the 60-odd titles, particularly to ‘Kaffee und Kuchen’ which, in my immediately post-war child’s world of rationing, seemed representative of an exotic, exhilarating and enticing world of which I could only dream in the extremely unexotic corner of south-east London where I lived. I devoured every Chalet School title I could lay my hands on in the local library, and when in 1953 The Chalet Girls’ Cook Book appeared, my sixpence-a-week pocket money was saved until the required sum to purchase it was achieved, and by attempting one or two recipes, I could feel that I had become an honorary Chalet Schoolgirl. Rationing finally ended the year after the book’s publication, so many of the recipes seemed incredibly unusual in a world in which almost the only foreign food eaten in traditional British homes was curry, a legacy of a fast dwindling Empire. Brent-Dyer chose to set her Cook Book within a Chalet School narrative, in which four of the girls who are about to leave the school, Jo Bettany, Simone Lecoutier, Frieda Mensch and Marie von Eschenau, are confined to quarters by an outbreak of mumps, and compile the book as a way of passing the time, and as a present for Marie, who is about to be married. The recipes chosen reflect the nationalities of the girls recording them, and those additional ones that they have learnt from friends at the school, so English, French, German, Italian, Austro-Hungarian and Russian favourites are added. ‘We’ve got all sorts of continental recipes, and people might like them’

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(2009: 25), says Jo, and they begin to assemble their book, from soups to ‘odds and ends’ by way of fish, meat, vegetables, creams and puddings, cakes, biscuits and sweets, cheese dishes, egg dishes and drinks, a slightly odd arrangement to modern eyes. There is even a Chinese recipe (the Chalet School over the years welcomed girls from almost every country), and this, chop suey, is garnished with beansprouts and a soy sauce that Frieda insists is ‘just like Bechamel sauce, only made with soya bean flour instead of with ordinary flour’ with the addition of ‘a tablespoonful of peanut butter’ (p.66). Understandably, the editorial team from the 2009 republication by Girls Gone By, Ruth Jolley and Adrianne Fitzpatrick, think it unlikely that Brent-Dyer had ever tried some of these recipes. The section of the book on odd and ends contains useful advice for girls who have never kept a house before, with advice on pots and pans, a list of weights and measures, and on laying the table. In the early 1950s women had returned from the men’s jobs that they had highly competently filled during the Second World War, and they were once more expected to confine themselves to marriage, childbearing and housekeeping. Brent-Dyers’ advice was therefore helpful for the teenagers reading her Cook Book, although by doing so she reinforced the stereotypical image of women which had existed prior to the war. To show just how catastrophic it would be to lay the table incorrectly, Brent-Dyer shows Marie, the daughter of a Graf (duke) starting to giggle, and on being asked what the joke is, she replies, ‘I was just thinking about a story I’ve often heard Mamma tell’ (p.175), and she relates the appalling sight of knives and forks, napkins and glasses in the ‘wrong’ place on the table. This error of etiquette has arisen from the efforts of a rich girl who has recently married a poor man ‘who couldn’t give the poor girl dozens of well-trained servants’. In the mid-twentieth century, let alone a generation earlier, such a girl would probably not have laid a table herself before, and a man would never have been expected to help with domestic chores, so would have relied on his mother or wife to undertake the task, and

Introduction

never gained this social skill. ‘But the funniest thing of all,’ Marie continues, ‘in peals of laughter’ (p.175) is that when the husband began to carve the meat (this, of course, being a skill only a man could master …), ‘the most awful smell arose’ because ‘She had cooked that chicken with all its insides in!’ (p.175). Marie tells the girls that because of this debacle her mother ‘vowed to herself that, if she had any daughters, she would see to it that they knew how to do everything about the house … all sorts of housework, even to cleaning the stoves, and blacking the boots’ (p.175). Moreover, showing a far more enlightened attitude, ‘Papa decided that his boys should also learn handiwork in the house, for the man was as helpless as the girl’. Luckily, as Marie relates finally, the newly wedded man is soon left a large fortune, and ‘they went to New Orleans to live, and were able to have servants to do everything’ (p.176). This presents the reader with a different vision of enslavement, far removed in the 1950s from the experience of most young British readers, but probably familiar from their viewing of films in the cinema, and their reading of tales set in the Americas and the British Empire. The Chalet Girls’ Cook Book was by no means the earliest cookery book specifically for children. Eleanor Brent-Dyer herself had contributed recipes to annual volumes of additional short stories in The Chalet School Book for Girls published in the late 1940s. She seems to have followed in a tradition of cookery books for children set within a story, with Lucy Crump’s Three Little Cooks (1906), published by Edward Arnold, one of the twentieth century’s earliest. In answer to a query to The Guardian in November 2012 about the earliest cookery book for children, Julia Eccleshare cited Crump’s book, together with two others, but noted that ‘I'm sure recipes for children to follow were written ‘down before that, but they wouldn't have been widely published and therefore are hard to find today’. The others mentioned by Eccleshare are an American story by an author with a suitably culinary name, Jayne Eayre Fryer, Adventures among the Kitchen People (1912), and Moira Meighn’s Adventure Book of Cookery, an

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Oxford publication from 1937. Fryer’s book, whose intention is to help ‘a little girl whose great ambition was to help her mother’ (1912: n.p.), includes some 40 recipes in its pages of 175-page fantasy narrative, the recipes helpfully listed after the contents page. Republished under a variety of titles over the years, this was obviously a popular book for young cooks. Meighn’s book was altogether more serious, and earned itself an excellent review in the article recommending Christmas books for children in an issue of The Tablet of December 1937: A most unusual present for a girl who likes keeping house in a holiday cottage or caravan, is Moira Meighn's Adventure Book of Cookery [sic]. It begins at the beginning, and explains everything from the tools you should have for the job and the heat of different kinds of stove, to the most entrancing recipes collected from here, there and everywhere. It only costs 3s. 6d. from the Oxford University Press. I shall keep this book for myself.

Despite encouraging young readers/cooks to use a variety of cooking methods such as paraffin stoves, which health and safety would not approve in the twenty-first century, Meighn had clearly found a recipe for success. Similar success was replicated in the delicious fare on offer at the 20th IBBY UK/NCRCL MA conference!

Works Cited Brent-Dyer, Eleanor ([1953] 2009) The Chalet Girls’ Cook Book. Bath: Girls Gone By. Eccleshare, Julia (2012) Children’s Book Doctor: When was the first cookery book for children published? The Guardian 19 November 2012. www.theguardian.com/childrens-bookssite/2012/nov/19/childrens-cookery-books. Fryer, Jayne Eayre (1912) The Mary Frances Cook Book; or, Adventures among the kitchen people. Philadelphia: The John C. Winston Co. Hallack, Cynthia (1937) The Books they would chose for themselves. The Tablet 4 December 1937 (p.24).

Introduction

http://archive.thetablet.co.uk/article/4th-december1937/24/the-books-they-would-choose-for-themselves. Meighn, Moira (1937) Adventure Book of Cookery for Boys and Girls between Nine and Fourteen or for Any One Interested in Cooking. Oxford: University Press. Swift, Jonathan (1729) A Modest Proposal: For Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burthen to their Parents or Country, and for Making them Beneficial to the Publick. www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1080.

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CHAPTER ONE CONSTRUCTIONS OF CHILDHOOD THROUGH FOOD IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE JEAN WEBB A keynote speaker carves us three ways in which food is used to give the reader insights in children’s literature. Jean Webb examines how writers through the ages have constructed and portrayed childhood by using food as a mode of representing philosophical perspectives, and notions of class and gender.

Contemporary British media and culture demonstrate a great deal of interest in food with a notable number of television programmes associated with cooking and food. Such programmes are not confined to adult audiences nor to adult participants since there are a number designed for children. The following demonstrates how there are close associations between how the chef chooses, uses and prepares food, and the ways in which authors construct and portray childhood, employing food as a mode of representing philosophical perspectives, and notions of class and gender. The discussion is divided into three sections: ‘Hearty Meals to Build a Nation’, ‘Of Bygone Dishes’ and ‘Quirky Recipes: Deconstructed Banoffee Pie’. A current approach taken by chefs on contemporary British television cookery competitions, such as MasterChef and The Great British Menu, is to produce a dish by cooking the central ingredient three ways, such as rabbit three ways, or, as my vegetarian ex-husband said the other week, ‘Cheese sandwich

Constructions of Childhood through Food in Children’s Literature

three ways!’ Such an approach to preparing a dish calls for creativity and interpretation of the focal ingredient, resulting in a dish that reflects the interests of the chef and demonstrates his/her skills. The dish will also be related to and influenced by particular cultural and philosophical influences and also, I would suggest, matters of class and economy. An Irish chef might well take pork and cook it three ways using locally and responsibly sourced ingredients, since pork has been widely produced in Ireland for centuries and is a central component of Irish cuisine. The Irish chef might well serve the three-ways pork dish with champ, a distinctively Northern Irish dish of creamy mashed potatoes and spring onions. However, if the chef was from Eire it would be a similar side dish to champ but called colcannon and include regional variations such as kale or ham. Ingredients and the dishes created by chefs and cooks can therefore be seen to be related to national identity. Although very likely delicious, the pork dish would be unacceptable to Jewish diners or those who follow the Islamic faith for matters of religious law, as the pig is regarded as unclean. Moreover, a vegetarian would obviously neither cook nor eat the dish, whilst an omnivorous diner may be concerned as to whether the ingredients were ecologically produced and from local organic sustainable sources and that the pig had been well treated. Furthermore, whether the breed of pig was a traditional breed and had been reared outdoors in more natural conditions might well be factors of consideration associated with particular philosophical views. Food can therefore be readily associated with cultural and philosophical perspectives that lie behind the seemingly uncomplicated matter of a dish for consumption. Social class also comes into the kitchen and the dining experience. Tom Kerridge, an English chef of renown who now has his own television series, owns and runs the only pub that has two Michelin stars attributed to the quality of the food. The accolade of the Michelin star is normally associated with the higher ranks of fine dining in restaurants as opposed to the public house.

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Kerridge’s determination is to produce dishes associated with the genre of pub food that is affordable and notionally attractive to certain class sectors of society, as opposed to expensive and exclusive fine dining experiences. One of the determining differences between the pub and the fine dining experience is that of the presentation of the food, the nuances of construction. Kerridge is also intent upon saying that no food is restricted by class boundaries. Furthermore, he often adds a gendered slant to his dishes by describing them as ‘man food’, i.e. substantial and satisfying, suggesting that the dish is suitable to sustain the active male engaging in physically demanding activities. In fact the phrase ‘man food’ has been added to the publicity material for his latest cookbook. Masculinity was a focus of the boy’s adventure story in the nineteenth century and was a central component of the construction of national identity and nationhood through English children’s literature. However, as will be demonstrated, the construction of the nation was not constrained to men only and for women food was an important contributory element in building the nation and the British Empire.

Hearty Meals to Build a Nation Michelle J. Smith’s fascinating study Empire in British Girls’ Literature and Culture: Imperial Girls, 1880–1915 discusses how ‘girls were shaped by, and were imagined as shaping, the British Empire’ (2011: 1) and ‘also situates these girls’ texts in the contexts of discourses of the period about femininity, education, and race’ (p.1). Smith draws particular attention to the work of Bessie Marchant (1862–1941) who wrote adventure stories featuring girls, earning herself the title of ‘The Girl’s Henty’. Marchant wrote over 130 novels that featured girl heroines. The stories were set across the British Empire in isolated locations, although Marchant herself never left England. They are therefore creations of the imagination that embed British values of colonialism and the creation of and sustenance of the Empire.

Constructions of Childhood through Food in Children’s Literature

Marchant’s heroines are intrepid, practical and, whilst being adventurers, are also homemakers. They represent the essential support to the adventuring colonial male who would, it was hoped, secure land and riches, thus contributing to the power of the Empire as in Marchant’s Waifs of Woollamoo (1938). By implication, it is set in Australia around the time of the 1851 Gold Rush, for no dates are given in the novel. The household is that of the bachelor Captain Brandreth who has taken in three children for different reasons. Meg, the eldest girl, is his niece, her mother having been housekeeper for the Captain and then later died. Lionel is the orphaned son of one of the Captain’s ex-crew, whilst Dot, the youngest, was taken in by the Captain on being orphaned, rather than being sent to an orphanage. The three children make up a family and call themselves ‘the waifs and strays’. The Captain is charitable and kind, yet does not always make the most sensible decisions. Although he creates a family for these children on his small farm, he loses his money through speculation and throws them into the jeopardy of destitution. Meg takes over the responsibility of looking after the household when the Captain decides to leave to speculate for gold to alleviate their dire financial situation. Central to the novel, Meg is the source of stability, responsibility and sound decision making. In contrast, the adults are unreliable, make poor decisions and leave their children to fend for themselves. Paradoxically, the actions of the adults are those that epitomise the adventuring spirit and attitudes that drove the development of colonialism and the Empire through financial speculation and seeking to make wealth from the land that they were colonising. The text can thus be read in some ways as a feminist critique of imperialism, placing the female and the family community as the focus of the action, as opposed to the potential high adventure that could have been told of the goldfields. The community of the family grows with children from neighbouring families who also go to the goldfields. Prior to his leaving, the Captain regales the children with tales of the great

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fortunes to be made on the goldfields where gold can be found by chance, waiting to be plucked from the streams and undergrowth. He communicates the sense of adventure when he says that one of the reasons for going is to prevent himself from ‘being caught in a rut’ (p.19). The reaction of the children a little later when the Captain has ridden off without a backward glance is to take his sudden decision making as part of the behaviour of adults to be smiled at rather than condemned. They have a wisdom beyond that of the adults, saying that he was ‘bitten by the speculationbug’ and that ‘People of his age are often taken like that’ (p.21). The values of the domestic community centred on the Captain’s farm and particularly in the children represent the positive attributes of colonial settlers who will make a successful life in the new land, and such values and attributes are focused and magnified in Meg. She represents the essentials of domestic stability and reliability symbolised in the emphasis given to food in terms of preparation and adaptability, particularly when she takes over from the Captain as full-time housekeeper and cook, which duties she had previously carried out only during the school holidays. Meg assumes her responsibilities with a clear sense of responsibility and is described as ‘taking command’ (p.25). All the children contribute. Dot, the youngest of the original three, feeds the poultry and livestock, whilst Meg milks the cows. There is the sense of the involvement in food at each stage, from husbandry and hunting to cooking and enjoying the feast. The importance of the kitchen and food, often described as ‘abundant and appetising’ (p.17), and as being at the centre of the household, is marked by the mention of the stove providing both comfort, heat and the means of cooking. Whilst proficient at bread making, Meg also learns how to cook a wild pig that has been causing mayhem on the farm of the neighbours who have brought their young children to the Captain’s place and left their eldest son Jack in charge of the homestead. Interestingly, there is a fulsome description of the damage done by the wild pig, which would be informative for the child reader in the safety of the English countryside where pigs

Constructions of Childhood through Food in Children’s Literature

would be confined to sties. The wild pig has tunnelled under the wire fencing, slain six sheep and killed a sheep dog. Jack’s decision is to hunt down the wild pig. On his way he meets Meg and the others by chance, who are about the business of the farm. Throughout, there are inclusions of the work of producing food such as milking, taking the milk to the creamery, carting fodder for the animals, etc., all the requirements that go into the production of the provisions from which they produce their meals in an environment where there are no shops. This is engagement with food through all the processes from beast and field to the table. Emphasis is also given to the fact that they work up good appetites and satisfy them with simply cooked foods, such as bread and fried eggs, as in the case of Jack on the way to his pig hunt. Whereas the adventure for the adults is in hunting gold, adventure for the children is in the danger and success of hunting the pig for protection of their livestock and the ensuing roast-pig feast they enjoy. However, having managed the tricky business of killing the pig, achieved by Cicely, they then discuss what should be done with the carcass. Again processes are gone through in the conversation that follows. Jack thinks it will be too tough and too strong, a statement counteracted by Cicely, who reminds him of their school history books that told them that boar’s ham was considered a ‘luxury in medieval times’ (p.81). She then thinks through what they will have to do, knowing that they will have to ‘get that beast cut up and the hams smoked properly’ (p.81). Raised in an essential self-sufficient manner, these children are aware of the procedures required to produce meat, whereas most child readers of the period and now would not be. She knows that the creamery owners will do it for them as ‘they always smoke our bacon when we kill a pig’ (p.81). Dot joins the conversation, emphasising the history and pageantry associated with roasting a boar, declaring that they have got to have the boar’s head. … For truth to tell ‘tis a lordly dish, and in its jaws we’ll put the biggest lemon. Oh, we’ll take the head

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to Woollamoo, and we’ll have a great feast to celebrate our victory. (p.81)

Jack responds to Dot’s eulogy in a somewhat dampening way, stating that ‘Boar hunting is no place for girls’ (p.82), which is countered by Lionel reminding him of Cicely’s part in achieving the kill. Marchant is thus placing girls at the centre of the action and demonstrating that they are equally able to provide, even in dangerous circumstances. The following feast is one enjoyed by all, after they have taken account of the size of the animal and how they can provide for the future by salting and preserving the meat. Again they are knowledgeable about where they can obtain the saltpetre for pickling, how to do so and how to prepare the pickling vats. Food therefore is used by Marchant to emphasise equality and capability against the prejudice ingrained in the older boy. The scene also demonstrates the responsibility of the children and their awareness in having to plan for the future, which again is in direct contrast to the behaviour of the adults. When the Captain and the other parents do return from the goldfields they are sick, half starved, have been robbed of all they gleaned and are in a worse situation than before. It is the children who save the situation, for Meg has been astute in her management of the farm and the livestock, having developed the cow herd and raised horses, resulting in a lucrative sale. Marchant’s waifs are of the stuff of Empire builders and colonialists, for they can survive without adult support and provide for their otherwise unfortunate elders. At the centre of such achievements are young girls proving that heroism does not have to be on the battlefield but can be on the domestic front. Dot’s fulsome description of the boar presented as at a medieval feast, albeit in her imagination, draws attention to the place of food in history and in historical fiction.

Constructions of Childhood through Food in Children’s Literature

Of Bygone Dishes Food can be an integral means of constructing childhood in bygone times as by Kevin Crossley-Holland’s The Seeing Stone (2001), which is the first of his Arthurian trilogy. Crossley-Holland is a medieval scholar as well as an award-winning children’s author. His story of Arthur is deeply informed by his scholarship and gives a vivid depiction of medieval life, including the part food played in the medieval community. The novel is a combination of social history and the fantasy of the legends of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. The boy Arthur, the focal character in the text, is the son of the Lord of the Manor, a manor frequented by Merlin who gives him a piece of obsidian, a jet-black volcanic glass. In the obsidian, Arthur sees the playing out of the life and legend of King Arthur and, through this insight into another world, contemplates his own life, his future and the part he will play. For much of the novel Arthur is wondering whether he is the King Arthur and whether this is his future. In the obsidian, Arthur holds present, past and potential future; what the reader holds in the text is a vivid insight into medieval life with birth, death, sickness, joy, sorrow and feasting. Crossley-Holland brings together sickness and imminent death with joy derived from food in the presence of a pigeon pie. Baby Luke is very ill. He is the youngest member of the Lord of the Manor’s household and his sickness carries with it the memory of the loss of another baby a year earlier when no medicines would work and the child wasted away. Almost painfully, CrossleyHolland includes a scene of joy through food, set against this dark scenario, emphasising as Merlin says to Arthur ‘that everything contains its opposite’ (p.23). After the long night of suffering and sadness, to cheer them up, the cook serves ‘a surprising pie’ for dinner: The pastry was shaped like a dovecot, and there was a feather sticking out of the top of it. … Well, when my father cut open the crust, there was a great commotion inside the pie. My mother and Sian squealed and stood up. Then a pink-eyed pigeon poked out its

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head and flapped its wings. We were all showered with bits of crust, and the pigeon flew up into the gallery. Everyone clapped,’ and then the real pie was carried in. (p.23)

This moment of playfulness is some relief from the misery. Live birds and animals encased in pastry were a feature of medieval cuisine in wealthier families. As Melitta Weiss Adamson in Food in Medieval Times (2004) notes: English cooks in particular liked to make towers and castles out of dough. … But more than buildings it was animals that inspired imitation dishes in the Middle Ages. (p.74)

These dishes, such as the one described by Crossley-Holland, variously included live birds, giving rise to the ‘four and twenty blackbirds’ of nursery rhyme fame. As well as the live bird pie, The Seeing Stone also includes information about medieval foods that are known today, but in a somewhat different form. For example, when Arthur tells of Slim, one of the characters, who brings over a large covered dish from the side table, and planted it in front of my father. ‘Herbolace!’ he announces. Then my father lifted the dish lid, and helped himself to a large dollop of scrambled eggs and cheese and herbs, while Slim brought over another dish, … which I shall tell you about in just a moment. (p.65)

Herbolace was the precursor of the omelette, being a mixture of eggs and shredded herbs, baked in a buttered dish. Over the centuries it became more elaborate, being finished with grated cheese and sometimes flavoured with ginger – imitating a French dish of the same name. The other dish was that of collops, which was a dish of slices of meat. Although the derivation is obscure, the Oxford English Dictionary indicates that it may be related to the old Swedish word kollops, but also suggests a German origin (klops), both of which would reflect the cultural influences on medieval England. Originally the meat would have been venison, but then the term was more widely applied to any meat. CrossleyHolland is opening up the opportunity for the reader to learn of

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the diverse origins of dishes and how they are linked linguistically with the component influences that shaped the British nation. Matters of national identity are embedded here, and also the interchange possible through cooking and foodstuffs travelling across nations. With transportation, foods that were exotic in the medieval period are now taken as unremarkable and staple ingredients in Britain. At the meal of herbolace Arthur’s father is speaking of the relationship between King Richard and Saladin who, when his enemy was ill: sent King Richard pomegranates and grapes, lemons, cucumbers: rare fruits almost as costly as jewels. (p.67)

All the foods nominated here are common and unexceptional today. Once an exotic fruit, the pomegranate, originally a native of Persia, is now recognised as a fruit with valuable health-bearing properties as it contains compounds that benefit the reduction of blood pressure and can help to reduce cancerous conditions. It is also favoured by contemporary chefs – especially Nigella Lawson – to add to salads and other dishes. More than a delicious addition to a meal, these foods are used by Crossley-Holland to subtly incorporate deeper political and moral considerations. Through a conversation about exotic foods Arthur’s father is able teach Arthur that those on opposite sides in a bitter religious war could still respect each other. What Arthur learns through these incidents associated with food is that there is respect and generosity beyond the differences that lead to bloody war and division; that food is a way of coming together in some understanding. This is also the position for the reader, and has resonance and pertinence today with the divisions between East and West; between Islamic extremists and Western culture; and between right-wing activists and intolerance for immigrants. Through the inclusion and subject of food, CrossleyHolland thus introduces complex ideas for contemplation, ways of thinking that will shape future attitudes and approaches to life. In The Seeing Stone there are a number of other associations to be

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made through the subject of food, such as recipes and the need for the cook to balance flavours; the contamination of foods in medieval times owing to the lack of refrigeration, and how foodstuffs can be used both medicinally and for enchantment; the methods employed to catch and prepare meats; and how traditional games such as apple dipping can be a simple source of fun and enjoyment. However, the final way I wish to discuss how Crossley-Holland uses food concerns morality and the law. Whilst the better off sectors of medieval society enjoyed a diet that fulfilled their needs beyond the basic requirements, others at the bottom of the social scale were not so fortunate and could be living on the edge of starvation when harvests were poor and their access to hunting, foraging and forestry rights were limited by the law. Hum, one such serf, is accused of stealing a leg of mutton from the manor kitchen. Arthur attends the manor court where Hum is tried. Crossley-Holland thus gives insights into how important food was and the regulations surrounding access. Under usual circumstances Hum’s offence would be punished by hanging, however Arthur’s father is well respected by the official of the court and so leniency is given and Hum’s punishment is to have his right hand cut off. Leniency seems an inappropriate term in one way, for the lack of hygiene and medical knowledge will result and does so in the wound becoming gangrenous and Hum suffering a painful and prolonged death. In medieval times, life was precariously balanced against the workings of nature in ways that are, for some of the world’s population, not a matter of either concern or awareness. The organisation and actions of society in relation to the essentials of life could either give or take, could decide between either life or death. Arthur, the child in The Seeing Stone is placed as an observer. As the novel progresses and he matures, he is more directly placed in the events of society, those kinds of happening that he has watched in his piece of obsidian, his ‘seeing stone’. The seeing stone itself is a piece formed by ice and fire in the formation of the very world we inhabit. It has a mirrored surface like glass. In it

Constructions of Childhood through Food in Children’s Literature

Arthur is reflected as he watches. Through The Seeing Stone, Crossley-Holland invites and enables the reader as an observer, as a thinker, to connect past, present and future. He uses food as a means of making connections through the known to the unknown and thus encompasses subjects that are deeply rooted in the substance of the construction of society. Crossley-Holland’s construction of childhood is that of the child as a thinker, a learner, and a potential activist to make a better and more tolerant future. However, childhood is also about play and playfulness.

Quirky Recipes: Deconstructed Banoffee Pie My third and final construction of childhood is ‘Quirky Recipes: Deconstructed Banoffee Pie’, which is a rather more playful consideration of the role of the chef and cooking in two texts for younger readers: Peter Bently and Chris Harrison’s Monster Chef (2012) in the Vampire School series and Chef Shocker (2006) by Sue Mongredien and Teresa Murfin in the Frightful Families series. Both play on the current popularity of cheffie cookery series and competitions on television such as Masterchef in three versions, The Great British Bake-Off and Nigel Slater’s A Taste of My Life. Monster Chef is about a school cookery competition. The plot is unoriginal in that it is about the good hero child and the cheating villain who compete in the competition, the villain being defeated. What is original is that the school is one for young vampires. The playfulness in the text is linguistic, circulating around the names of dishes and associations with the world of television chefdom. The free meal offered as the prize for the winner is a meal in ‘The Fat Bat’, which is an allusion to Heston Blumenthal’s world-class restaurant ‘The Fat Duck’ that has been awarded three Michelin stars and the accolades of the Best Restaurant in the World and the Best Restaurant in the UK. The other quirky element of this text is the punning on the names of dishes, such as ‘Coq au Fang’, making them desirable for vampires.

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Chef Shocker tells the story of young Amy, whose parents own a somewhat unusual restaurant, not in terms of the clientele, but in the bizarre food served. Ingredients are oddly combined and turned into grotesque dishes. Amy’s school has been invited to join in a television programme called Life Swap, again playing on a contemporary UK reality programme. Amy’s parents take over the school kitchen and the school cook runs their restaurant. The cook produces traditional dishes in the restaurant and the parents continue with their bizarre concoctions, including serving snail stew. Matters are happily resolved when the parents rein in their eccentricities and produce a more normal and edible menu. These two texts raise an awareness of food for the child reader and they are amusing. The fun comes from playfulness with language and also knowing the parodying of the foodie world portrayed on television and beyond in which the authors engage. Here are texts that call for an awareness outside the texts themselves in order to understand and enjoy the humour. The child reader also has to either have an understanding of food and UK food culture, or be introduced to that by someone who does. The school cook in Chef Shocker also cooks healthy food for the most part, with only one inclusion of chips. So there are links to be made with nutritious healthy eating as opposed to junk foods, whilst also placing the school cook as the heroine. There is an implied association here with the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s 2009 campaign for healthy school food, food education and appetising school dinners, which has had a considerable impact in raising public awareness to the problems of poor nutrition and diet previously provided by school meals, which would not, however, include deconstructed Banoffee Pie. By this point you may be wondering about the relevance of deconstructed Banoffee Pie. For those of you who are yet to be initiated into the wonders of Banoffee Pie, it is a dessert comprised of a pastry or biscuit-crumb shell filled with caramel made from condensed milk and topped with sliced bananas and whipped cream: an indulgent and sweet delight. I had a deconstructed

Constructions of Childhood through Food in Children’s Literature

Banoffee Pie at a fine-dining restaurant and found it a somewhat confusing scattering on the plate. I did not realise then that the idea of deconstructed dishes is for the diner to be reintroduced to the delights of foods with which they may have become overly familiar and habituated by separating components to be viewed and tasted afresh and then to reassemble the dish in the mouth. One could view this as culinary as opposed to literary ‘ostranemie’ or ‘defamiliarisation’. In similar ways, this is what literary criticism is intent on doing: to re-view the familiar, to re-understand and to become exposed and immersed in new experiences and understandings. It is, as it were, the old making the new, which is what literature for children also does. Authors, i.e. ‘the old’, construct childhoods and children employing philosophical, nationalist, culture, class and gendered parameters; and the literary critic and academic read, taste and digest in order to reproduce an intellectual and stimulating feast to nourish the mind.

Works Cited Primary Texts Bently, Peter (illus. Chris Harrison) (2012) Vampire School: Monster Chef. London: Boxer Books. Crossley-Holland, Kevin (2000) The Seeing Stone (Arthur). London: Orion Children’s Books. Marchant, Bessie (1938) Waifs of Woollamoo: A Story for Girls. London: F. Warne. Mongredien, Sue (illus. Teresa Murfin) (2006) Frightful Families: Chef Shocker. London: Orchard Books. Secondary Texts Adamson, Melitta Weiss (2004) Food in Medieval Times. Westport, CA: Greenwood Press. Smith, Michelle J. (2011) Empire in British Girls’ Literature and Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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CHAPTER TWO EATING MY WORDS ANNE HARVEY Anne Harvey provides the menu and eating notes for the selection of delicious poetry she offered the delegates at the conference!

I felt very privileged to be invited to the IBBY UK/NCRCL academic study day at Roehampton University and to provide some poetry on the subject of food in between the talks. I decided that the link between writing and poetry needed a title, so I chose the overall title ‘Eating My Words’. The idea sprang from a poem by one of my favourite writers, Vernon Scannell. I read his ‘Poem on Bread’ as an introduction. Poem on Bread The poet is about to write a poem; He does not use a pencil or a pen. He dips his long thin finger into jam Or something savoury preferred by men. This poet does not choose to write on paper; He takes a single slice of well-baked bread And with his jam or marmite nibbed forefinger He writes his verses down on that instead. His poem is fairly short as all the best are. When he has finished it he hopes that you Or someone else – your brother, friend or sister – Will read and find it marvellous and true. If you can’t read, then eat; it tastes quite good.

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If you do neither, all that I can say he who needs no poetry or bread Is really in a devilish bad way.

I followed this with poems about breakfast time: poems on toast and porridge by Peggy Dunstan, and Russell Hoban’s ‘Egg Thoughts’. Butterfingers When father finished up his toast he raised his plate for more so mother buttered some and said ‘Don’t drop it on the floor.’ ‘I’m not a little child!’ he cried, ‘I never drop my toast,’ then tipped it over on the mat … and mother laughed the most. Porridge Dorothea, Dolly, Dot, wouldn’t eat her porridge hot Left it sitting on the table, said, ‘I’ll eat it when I’m able.’ ‘Eat it now,’ her mother said. ‘Or you’ll go straight to bed.’ Egg Thoughts Soft-Boiled I do not like the way you slide, I do not like your soft inside, I do not like you many ways, And I could do for many days Without a soft-boiled egg. …

‘NO.’ Said one. ‘YES.’ Said the other. ‘Dorothea, I’m your mother simply do as you are told’ – ‘No,’ said Dolly, Dot. ‘It’s cold.’

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Last in this group was the famous and unforgettable ‘The King’s Breakfast’ by A.A. Milne. I still know it by heart. The King’s Breakfast The King asked The Queen, and The Queen asked The Dairymaid: ‘Could we have some butter for The Royal slice of bread?’ The Queen asked the Dairymaid, The Dairymaid Said, ‘Certainly, I’ll go and tell the cow Now Before she goes to bed.’ The Dairymaid She curtsied, And went and told The Alderney: ‘Don’t forget the butter for The Royal slice of bread.’ The Alderney Said sleepily: ‘You’d better tell His Majesty That many people nowadays Like marmalade Instead.’ The Dairymaid Said, ‘Fancy!’ And went to Her Majesty. She curtsied to the Queen, and She turned a little red: ‘Excuse me,

Your Majesty, For taking of The liberty, But marmalade is tasty, if It’s very Thickly Spread.’ The Queen said ‘Oh!’ And went to His Majesty: ‘Talking of the butter for The royal slice of bread, Many people Think that Marmalade Is nicer. Would you like to try a little Marmalade Instead?’ The King said, ‘Bother!’ And then he said, ‘Oh, deary me!’ The King sobbed, ‘Oh, deary me!’ And went back to bed. ‘Nobody,’ He whimpered, ‘Could call me A fussy man; I only want A little bit Of butter for My bread!’

Eating My Words

The Queen said, ‘There, there!’ And went to The Dairymaid. The Dairymaid Said, ‘There, there!’ And went to the shed. The cow said, ‘There, there! I didn’t really Mean it; Here’s milk for his porringer, And butter for his bread.’ The Queen took The butter And brought it to His Majesty;

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The King said, ‘Butter, eh?’ And bounced out of bed. ‘Nobody,’ he said, As he kissed her Tenderly, ‘Nobody,’ he said, As he slid down the banisters, ‘Nobody, My darling, Could call me A fussy man BUT ‘I do like a little bit of butter to my bread!’

Preparing for the conference made me turn back to the anthology on food that I edited for the publisher Blackie almost 25 years ago. It was called A Picnic of Poetry (1988), and I took poems from that book and also from another anthology published by Random House The Naughtiest Children I Know (2000). One of those children was from Heinrich Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter, the story of Augustus who would not eat his soup. In case you have forgotten: he got thinner and thinner and ‘On the fifth day he was dead’! The Story of Augustus Who Would Not Have Any Soup Augustus was a chubby lad; Fat ruddy cheeks Augustus had; And everybody saw with joy The plump and hearty healthy boy. He ate and drank as he was told, And never let his soup get cold. But one day, one cold winter’s day, He scream’d out – “Take the soup away! I won’t have any soup to-day.”

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Next day, now look, the picture shows How lank and lean Augustus grows! Yet, though he feels so weak and ill, The naughty fellow cries out still – “Not any soup for me, I say: O take the nasty soup away; I won’t have any soup today.” The third day comes; Oh what a sin! To make himself so pale and thin. Yet, when the soup is put on table, He screams, as loud as he is able, – “Not any soup for me, I say: O take the nasty soup away! I won’t have any soup to-day.” Look at him, now the fourth day’s come! He scarcely weighs a sugar-plum; He’s like a little bit of thread, And on the fifth day, he was – dead.

This was followed by another Milne poem, ‘Rice Pudding’, the sad tale of Mary Jane who wouldn’t eat her rice pudding, though the grown-ups thought it was delicious! Milne doesn’t explain what happened to her. Rice Pudding What is the matter with Mary Jane? She’s crying with all her might and main, And she won’t eat her dinner - rice pudding again What is the matter with Mary Jane? What is the matter with Mary Jane? I’ve promised her dolls and a daisy-chain, And a book about animals - all in vain What is the matter with Mary Jane? What is the matter with Mary Jane? She’s perfectly well, and she hasn’t a pain; But, look at her, now she’s beginning again! What is the matter with Mary Jane?

Eating My Words

What is the matter with Mary Jane? I’ve promised her sweets and a ride in the train, And I’ve begged her to stop for a bit and explain What is the matter with Mary Jane? What is the matter with Mary Jane? She’s perfectly well and she hasn’t a pain, And it’s lovely rice pudding for dinner again! What is the matter with Mary Jane?

Among many other poems on likes and dislikes was one by my late friend, the actor David King (famous as Badger in productions of Toad of Toad Hall). For my anthology he drew on his own pet childhood dislike, and wrote ‘I Hate Greens’. Delegates at the conference joined in the chorus of ‘I Hate Greens’ as lustily as any junior school class! I Hate Greens I hate greens! ‘They’ good for you,’ my mother said, ‘They’ll make the hair curl on your head, They’ll make you grow up big and strong, That’s what your father says.’ He’s wrong! I hate greens. Peas like bullets, beans like string, Spinach – not like anything, Sprouts as hard as bricks and mortar, Slimy cabbage, slopped in water, I hate greens. Swamp them in tomato sauce, Hide them in your second course, Though they make you nearly sick, Close your eyes and gulp them quick, I hate greens. Limp lettuce on a lukewarm plate,

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Grit in watercress I hate, Can’t bear leeks with dirt inside, Cauliflower with slugs that died, I hate greens. When we go on shopping trips, Couldn’t we have egg and chips? Couldn’t we have chips and beans? Don’ you know what hunger means? I HATE GREENS!!!

Not all the choices I made were amusing or light-hearted. I included Laurie Lee’s beautiful, lyrical ‘Apples’. He once told me that if he had a penny for every time that poem was spoken or anthologised, he would be a very rich man. Apples Behold the apples’ rounded worlds: juice-green of July rain, the black polestar of flowers, the rind mapped with its crimson stain. The russet, crab and cottage red burn to the sun’s hot brass, then drop like sweat from every branch and bubble in the grass. They lie as wanton as they fall, and where they fall and break, the stallion clamps his crunching jaws, the starling stabs his beak. In each plump gourd the cidery bite of boys’ teeth tears the skin; the waltzing wasp consumes his share, the bent worm enters in. I, with as easy hunger, take entire my season’s dole; welcome the ripe, the sweet, the sour, the hollow and the whole.

Eating My Words

And I included an anonymous poem, translated by Chris Searle, on the delights of the mango – heart of Africa. Mango, Little Mango The mango stands for Africa in its taste in its smell in its colour in its shape The mango has the shape of a heart – Africa too! It has a taste that’s hot, strong and sweet – Africa too! It has a reddy-brown shade like the tanned plains of my beloved earth Because of this I love you and your taste Mango! Heart of fruit, sweet and mild. You are the love of Africa because beating in your breast Is Africa’s heart, O, mango, little mango, love of Africa

As a trustee of Eleanor Farjeon’s Estate, and having just taken part in this year’s Eleanor Farjeon award (which went to David Almond, a good food surname), I had to read one of her poems. Her poem about a greedy girl called Griselda was probably really about herself. It is known that she loved her food. Finally, after warnings about weight and spots, Griselda suffered from a very bad tummy ache, but, as the poem, concluded: ‘people are greedy. Leave it at that’! Griselda Griselda is greedy, I’m sorry to say. She isn’t contented with four meals a day, Like breakfast and dinner and supper and tea

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(I’ve had to put tea after supper – you see Why, don’t you?) Griselda is greedy as greedy can be. She snoops about the larder For sundry small supplies, She breaks the little crusty bits Off rims of apple pies, She pokes the roast-potato-dish When Sunday dinner’s done, And if there are two left in it Griselda snitches one; Cold chicken and cold cauliflower She pulls in little chunks – And when Cook calls: ‘What are you doing there?’ Griselda bunks. Griselda is greedy. Well, that’s how she feels, She simply can’t help eating in-between meals, And always forgets what it’s leading to, though The Doctor has frequently told her: ‘You know Why, don’t you?’ When the stomach-ache starts and Griselda says: ‘Oh!’ She slips down to the dining-room When everyone’s in bed, For cheese-rind on the supper-tray, And buttered crusts of bread, A biscuit from the biscuit-box, Lump sugar from the bowl, A gherkin from the pickle-jar, Are all Griselda’s toll; She tastes the salted almonds, And she tries the candied fruits— And when Dad shouts: ‘Who is it down below?’ Griselda scoots. Griselda is greedy. Her relatives scold, And tell her how sorry she’ll be when she’s old,

Eating My Words

She will lose her complexion, she’s sure to grow fat, She will spoil her inside—does she know what she’s at?— (Why do they?) Some people are greedy. Leave it at that.

And then we all dispersed to greedily sample Judith Kerr’s delicious birthday cake, a poem in itself!

List of Poems Vernon Scannell (ed. Anne Harvey) (2001) ‘Poem on Bread’. The Very Best of Vernon Scannell. Basingstoke: Macmillan Children’s Books (p.5). www.scribd.com/doc/24076404/SixNights-of-Poetry. Peggy Dunstan (1980) ‘Butterfingers’, ‘Porridge’. In and Out of the Windows: Poems for Children (illus. Mark Dunstan). London: Hodder & Stoughton. A Picnic of Poetry, pp.80, 88. Russell Hoban ([1964] 1994) ‘Egg Thoughts’. Egg Thoughts and Other Frances Songs. New York: HarperCollins. A Picnic of Poetry, p.89. www.eggfarmersofontario.ca/everythingeggs/2010/05/takingpoetic-license-with-ones-preference-for-eating-eggs/. A.A. Milne ([1924] 1939) ‘The King’s Breakfast’, ‘Rice Pudding’. When We Were Very Young (illus. Ernest H. Shepard). London: Methuen (pp.55,48). www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-king-sbreakfast/; www.poemhunter.com/poem/rice-pudding/. Heinrich Hoffmann ([1840] 1995) ‘Augustus Who Would Not Have Any Soup’. Struwwelpeter. London: Dover Children’s Classics (p.19). The Naughtiest Children, p.12. www.strangelove.net/~kieser/Poetry/augustus.html. Dave King ‘I Hate Greens’, A Picnic of Poetry, p.101. Laurie Lee ‘Apples’. A Picnic of Poetry, p.29. www.poemhunter.com/poem/apples/. Anon. trans. Chris Searle ‘Heart of Africa’. A Picnic of Poetry, p.38.

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Eleanor Farjeon (ed Anne Harvey) (2013) ‘Griselda’. Like Sorrow or a Tune: A New Selection of Poems by Eleanor Farjeon. Holt: Laurel Books. www.nataliemerchant.com/r/leave-yoursleep/lyrics/griselda.

Acknowledgements The following copyrights and permissions to reproduce the poems in this paper are acknowledged below. Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity. Heinrich Hoffmann, ‘Augustus’. Reproduced under terms of Dover Children’s Classics licence. Vernon Scannell, ‘A Poem on Bread’. Permission the late author. Eleanor Farjeon, ‘Griselda’. Permission Eleanor Farjeon Estate. David King, ‘I Hate Greens’. Permission the late author. A.A. Milne, ‘The King’s Breakfast’, ‘Rice Pudding’. From When We Were Very Young by A.A. Milne. Text copyright © The Trustees of the Pooh Properties 1924. Published by Egmont UK Ltd London and used with permission. Peggy Dunstan, ‘Butterfingers’, ‘Porridge’. Hodder Headline/Hodder Childrens. Laurie Lee, ‘Apples’. Curtis Brown. Reproduced with permission. Russell Hoban, ‘Egg Thoughts’. David Higham Associates. Excerpt reproduced under copyright guidelines for academic works.

Works Cited Harvey, Anne (illus. Helen Read) (1988) A Picnic of Poetry: Poems about Food and Drink. London: Blackie and Son. –– (illus. Harry Horse) (2000) The Naughtiest Children I Know. London: Red Fox.

CHAPTER THREE GIRLS AND BODY IMAGE FIONA DUNBAR Reflections by Fiona Dunbar on girls’ obsessions with body image, and the influence of media and literature.

I’m going to quote a news story here: ‘The age of anorexia sufferers … is dropping alarmingly … with doctors saying they are treating nine year olds for the condition and even, in one case, a child of four.’ Anyone like to guess when that news story appeared? 12 August 2003. Over ten years ago (by a journalist called David Fickling – not the children’s publisher). And remember the line ‘nothing tastes as good as thin feels’? Well, again, this is a decade old, from a teenage pro-anorexia website. It achieved greater fame and notoriety in 2009 when Kate Moss quoted it, but it actually goes back as far as 2003. Cosmetic surgery was on the increase, and those undergoing it were getting younger and younger: 16 year olds were getting breast implants for their birthdays, and Botox injections were a new phenomenon, growing in popularity – and not just for those with wrinkles. Around the same time I remember reading about the opening of a beauty salon for young girls, and I just thought no, stop this madness! My first children’s novel, The Truth Cookie, was published in 2004, so it’s now approaching its tenth anniversary in print. It’s a modern fantasy about a girl called Lulu Baker, whose magic recipe book is her one source of power; her nemesis is her stepmother, fading fashion model Varaminta le Bone. The Truth Cookie ended

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up being the first of a trilogy; it was adapted as a TV series in 2009, and all three books are about to be re-released with newly designed covers. Obviously I am delighted about this. However, it depresses me that the problem in contemporary culture that I was attempting to confront has actually become deeper and more widespread since then. And yes, I’ve looked: it has. Anorexia. A HuffPost blog (Duca, 2013) recently reported that ‘thinspiration is still very much alive. It continues to exist on not just Instagram, but Tumblr and Pinterest, and on privately run blogs.’ And research has shown that pro-anorexia sites do influence people’s behaviour (Jett, LaPorte and Wanchisn, 2010). It isn’t enough to say that anorexia is just about control: yes, girls starve themselves because of academic pressure or because their parents are divorcing, but they also do it out of self-loathing, and where does that self-loathing come from? It doesn’t happen in a vacuum. And obesity is the flipside of the same coin. Beauty salons. By 2008 it was already common for very young girls to have manicures and pedicures in salons. In an article in The Observer, a child psychologist said ‘What are you going to be doing when you’ve got your nails painted at three? Are you going to be out in the garden digging for worms or in the sandpit?’ (Gordon, 2008). I remember experimenting with makeup as a child, but a professional manicure at three? That’s the sort of thing that robs a girl of her childhood. What these three year olds are already learning is that girls and women aren’t good enough the way they come, that they need fixing. And at this point I have to mention online porn as well, because eleven-year-old boys are being conditioned to think that ‘sexy’ equals fake boobs and no pubes. This, in turn, has an impact on how girls perceive their own level of attractiveness. The trend is that natural equals unappealing, even repulsive (Daubney, 2013). All this translates into low self-esteem among girls over their appearance, and consequently their relationship with food. Before I go any further, I need to clarify one thing: I don’t write ‘issue books’. I write because I love stories, not because I want to

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put the world to rights – by itself, a terrible reason to write fiction of any sort. But as writers we respond to the world in which we find ourselves. We’re artists: that is what artists do. Layered onto that is the matter of moral responsibility, which I don’t think can be ignored when your readers are children. A while ago, in anticipation of this talk, I posted a Facebook status, asking my writer friends (most of my Facebook friends are other writers, and most of those write for children and young adults) whether they thought we had a ‘responsibility’ to address the issue. Most agreed that, collectively, we did – though not all were certain as to how that could be achieved. Many felt the problem had more to do with book covers than what’s between them – of which more later. Meg Rosoff was a dissenting voice: she said ‘I don't think it’s our responsibility to address anything. We’re not moral crusaders or politicians.’ She was, of course, being facetious: this is the same Meg Rosoff who, on 16 November 2012, posted a piece entitled ‘Be the weird kid’ on her blog, which included lines like: Be the geek who doesn’t get invited to parties. Be the freak whose clothes are different. Be the girl who dances by herself. … Be the weird kid Those normal children will never change the world. (www.megrosoff.co.uk/blog/)

If that isn’t a clarion call, I don’t know what is. Of course no teenager would deliberately make herself unpopular, but for a reader of her blog who already was ‘the weird kid’, it must have been heartening. As for myself, I’m not saying writers are, or should be, moral crusaders. What I am saying is that we live in a world where children are being robbed of their childhoods, and increasingly it is making them ill. Is that something we should just ignore? Do we really just shrug and say ‘not our problem’? Do writers say that about any other problem in society? War? Social inequality? Racism? I don’t think so. Do we say, ‘I’m a storyteller; it’s my job to take the reader away from their misery, not rub their faces in it’?

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Well, yes, actually, of course we do! But that’s what I mean about the difference between ‘issue books’ and ones that take on these matters in creative and original ways. What sort of creative and original ways? Well, I can talk a bit about how I’ve approached it. I started out as an illustrator, and way back in 1993 my picture book Under the Stairs was published. My protagonist is Sophie. She’s the same sort of age as the readership for the book – about five. I found myself drawing her with shortish messy hair and virtually gender-neutral clothes (aside from the mary-janes). It wasn’t really a conscious decision; it’s just that when I imagined Sophie that was the form she took (Plate 1). Facially she’s based on myself from that age, but I was no tomboy: I loved dresses! So she isn’t me. A more classically male scenario you couldn’t imagine. I suppose I was being gently subversive, but to be honest I didn’t really think about it much. Is this a girl you’d find in a beauty salon having her nails done? Er, nope. Thankfully I think this is probably true of most characters in picture books, but things change when we get to early readers – of which more later. I gradually moved away from illustration and into writing longer fiction for 8–12 year olds. Which brings us back to Lulu and The Truth Cookie. Again, I envisaged someone who didn’t really bother with her appearance, and there was a very good reason for that. Lulu is just more interested in other things, in contrast to Varaminta le Bone, who is the archetypal wicked stepmother. Yes, as the name suggests, she is skinny; she is super-skinny, obsessed with her appearance, and with dieting. When I first conceived of the idea of a girl with a magic recipe book, it seemed obvious to me that her greatest enemy should be someone who fitted that profile. And through Varaminta, I got to express my distaste for her values: that appearance is everything; that, as Wallis Simpson said, ‘you can never be too rich or too thin’. Varaminta and Sophie are inextricably linked: Varaminta is as obsessed with money and status as she is with her appearance because looking ‘good’ – or Varaminta’s idea of good (thin, flawless, tanned, designer clad) –

Girls and Body Image

costs a lot. Those 16 year olds getting breast implants are not the same children who are on free school meals. But, incidentally, look at the trend for year-round spray tans, false eyelashes and hair extensions: your typical demographic there would be a 15-year-old schoolgirl from Barnsley. Or a tea lady in a call centre in Swansea. How can they afford it? I don’t know, but they do. Anyway, there’s one scene from The Truth Cookie I used to love reading out in school visits. It’s immediately before Lulu runs off, eventually taking refuge in a very strange bookshop, where books find people, instead of the other way round, and where the magic recipe book literally falls into her hands. She runs off because it’s her thirteenth birthday, and Varaminta has persuaded Lulu’s wellmeaning but hopelessly infatuated dad to let her take Lulu out for a ‘birthday treat,’ ostensibly in an effort to improve relations between the two of them. In fact, Varaminta has an agenda: she’s desperate to land herself a happy-families spread in Chow! magazine (Hello! to you and me) and she’s determined to impose her own superficial values on her stepdaughter. A slightly pudgy, wild-haired stepdaughter really won’t do. The extra pounds – and I should point out that Lulu is not overweight, but has the normal puppy fat of a girl her age – won’t shift overnight (though Varaminta’s onto the case there as well). But she’ll certainly do whatever else she can to ‘educate’ Lulu on how to be a girl. So, the birthday outing is a surprise outing to a West End beauty salon, along with Varaminta’s best friend Waxia Legge-Suntan. In this scene, they have just arrived at the salon. ‘Surprise!’ beamed Varaminta. It was a white, bright room, with white, tinkly music. A poster for ‘Slim-Me’ showed a woman with lots of wires attached to her. A beauty salon. Lulu felt as if a rug had been pulled out from beneath her. Since last night, she had actually started to believe that Varaminta was going to make a real effort to be nice to her. She was clearly brimming over with enthusiasm, and Lulu had taken her excitement to mean that she genuinely wanted to make Lulu happy. And Lulu loved surprises. But now she felt like an utter fool.

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‘Is this Louisa?’ asked a woman in a white coat. Her teeth were so white they glowed. Lulu scowled. Varaminta shot Lulu a furious look, then replied, ‘Yes, I’m afraid so. Not easy, I know, but see what you can do. The usual for us, darling.’ She pulled the dog from its carrier. ‘And Poochie-Wooch wants pink highlights, don’t you, Baby Poochkins!’ The woman with the glowing teeth steered Lulu towards a sink. Some birthday, thought Lulu. She wouldn’t forget this one in a hurry. Devilish thoughts ran through her head as she was robed like an angelic choirgirl; the seed that had been planted that day she had overheard Varaminta and Waxia’s conversation was beginning to sprout forth with ideas … Now she was staring at the ceiling while a miniature shower needled her head. Varaminta and Waxia’s voices rose above the slooshing noises. ‘Any normal girl would simply love all this,’ Varaminta went on. ‘No appreciation,’ agreed Waxia. ‘I mean, look at her, she makes no effort at all. Is it any wonder she’s called ‘Poodle’?’ ‘Yes, we’ll have to do some serious work on her in time for your big day,’ said Waxia. Not if I can help it, thought Lulu. Luminous Teeth guided Lulu to a chair in front of a huge mirror. Looking into it, she could see Varaminta and Waxia reclining halfnaked on couches, shower caps on their heads and blue stuff on their faces. There were those little wires again, hooking them up like two Frankenstein Monsters to thrumming machines. ‘What are those?’ asked Lulu. ‘They send tiny electrical impulses to your muscles, making them contract,’ replied Luminous Teeth. ‘Tones up the muscles, making you look slimmer.’ It occurred to Lulu that if Varaminta got any slimmer that she already was, she might disappear altogether, like in a fairground mirror. How fantastic that would be! While the Brides of Frankenstein got their lightning bolts, Poochie was having its hair painted. In a room in the corner, a red-haired woman was stirring a great pot of brownish stuff, like sludgy fudge. ‘What’s that?’ asked Lulu.

Girls and Body Image

‘Leg wax,’ explained Luminous Teeth, as she drenched Lulu’s head in foul-smelling goop. ‘For removing hairs. Is this the first time you’re having it done?’ ‘I didn’t know I was! How, exactly, are the hairs removed?’ ‘Oh, you’ll be just fine. It only hurts a teeny tiny bit!’ She said ‘teeny tiny’ in a little-girl-talking-to-her-dolly voice. ‘We just heat the wax, then spread it onto those wild old hairy legs and then rip – er, gently ease it off and boom! Beautiful smooth, silky legs.’ You’re out of your mind if think you’re getting that stuff anywhere near me, thought Lulu. ‘And … kids have this done?’ she asked out loud in amazement. ‘Girls want to be beautiful too. There’s nothing wrong with looking your best, Louisa.’ Lulu felt as if she was going to be sick. Who were these people? Then she had an idea: wait till that wax is nice and hot. Lulu’s now de-frizzed hair hung in tendrils at the sides of her face. Luminous Teeth positioned a great silver octopus-lamp over her head. ‘This is to dry you off,’ she said. The lamps glowed hot and red, and she went away. Lulu noticed a large glass container in front of her. It was filled with a blue liquid and some combs, and marked ‘Barbicide’. Now! Lulu slid off her seat, grabbed the jar of Barbicide and headed for the leg-waxing room. A white coat hoved into view. ‘What are you …’ ‘Sorry,’ said Lulu, and she emptied the Barbicide down the woman’s front. ‘Aaaargh!’ All hell broke loose. Lulu lunged for the pot of hot wax, unplugged it and bolted towards the door. Poochie yapped insanely while the two blue-faced monsters desperately tugged at their wires. Luminous Teeth and Red Hair descended upon Lulu. She turned on them: time for weapon number two. ‘Nobody move!’ she yelled. ‘I’ve got hot wax, and I’m not afraid to use it!’ ‘Call the police!’ screamed Varaminta. ‘Do something!’ Red Hair flapped over to the reception desk. Luminous Teeth, shaking, reached gingerly for the wax pot. ‘Now, Louisa …’ she said nervously. Lulu grinned, backed out of the door, then dashed the

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pot to the floor in the doorway and flung herself into the crowded street, leaving Varaminta trapped inside the salon by an everspreading ooze of sticky, hot-fudgy goop.

Now, when I agreed to do this paper, I thought it be brilliant if I could talk to a whole bunch of schoolgirls about this, get their take on it! So I did. Well, I did an online survey, and 419 girls took part. They are mostly tweens, which is what I wanted: the vast majority were aged 11–13, with a handful of 14–19 year olds; two or three teachers and librarians also took part. When I asked ‘How do you feel about your body?’ 42% thought they were too fat; I seriously doubt that many of them are actually overweight. But I was quite pleased to see how many thought they were just right. Half said they never dieted, but 43% said they did so occasionally. Almost exactly the same number that think they’re too fat. Quite a few dieting 12 year olds by the sound of it, which makes me weep. They’re still growing! I did ask what age they thought it was appropriate for a healthy person to start dieting, I thought the results were relatively sane, but … did they answer truthfully? Hmm. I asked if they agreed with the following statement: ‘Movie stars and models make me feel bad about my appearance.’ 71% agreed: no surprises there – although I was quite surprised that almost 16% strongly disagreed. Now we get to the heart of the matter: when asked ‘Would you like to see a change in the way girls and women are represented in the media?’ 63% said yes, they would. I invited them to comment further in writing: an overwhelming majority complained about Photoshopping of women in magazines. Here are some further comments, which I quote verbatim: ‘Some magazines say that shes put on weight or lost to much that can hurt someone.’ ‘Don’t talk in the press about, models, pop singers etc have put on a smidge of weight it makes you feel even worse because it makes you think you are really fat.’

Girls and Body Image

‘Be recognized for their achievements and not the image.’ ‘Don't zoom in on spots on pop-stars faces.’ ‘Because its mainly men on tv i mean like only mens football is shown.’ ‘There should be more women working for the media.’ ‘In films no one is ever fat even if they are in the book.’

I was interested to know what sort of protagonist girls related to more: strong and independent, or submissive. Alas I think I failed, because the question I put was ‘Bella or Buffy?’ (as in Bella Swan from the Twilight books/films versus Buffy the Vampire Slayer from the BBC TV series of 1997–2003). There were three possible answers: Bella, Buffy, or Who? 33% said Who? because Buffy is ancient history. Perhaps I should have chosen Katniss Everdene from the Hunger Games series, but I’m a writer who can’t resist a bit of alliteration. Over 50% chose Bella, but I’d have to conduct the survey again if I wanted to find out if they prefer her to Katniss. Incidentally, I want to read you one of the comments from a 31year-old respondent, who defended her Bella choice, saying: We need to be careful to embrace girls who want to save the day (Buffy), and girls who want to create families (Bella). Girls can do one or both, and girls are not weak for wanting to fall in love, get married, and have children. It's a very thin line we need to watch as adults.

My response to that would be ‘yes, but …!’ However we’re straying off-topic here, so back to body image. I asked respondents to rate a variety of public figures. Again, I may not have picked the best ones, given how young my respondents turned out to be, and to be honest the results were not particularly revealing. Of course 76% said they didn’t care for Katie Price. That doesn’t exactly square with her ratings in the bestseller lists – though it’s true that her popularity rating has plummeted. In retrospect I probably should have put Adele in there, as an example of a famous person who is less than sylphlike.

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I think we can guess, though, that she would have rated highly. That is good, but a picture of her in Vogue a couple of years ago was obviously heavily Photoshopped to give her an unbelievably cinched-in waist. So instead I chose a less mainstream artist who has definitely never caved into pressure to lose weight: Beth Ditto. Alas, hardly any respondents had heard of her. The same was true of Lena Dunham, creator and star of the TV show Girls. I am not surprised; that show is not mainstream, nor is it suitable for 11 year olds. But I think it says something that I couldn’t come up with a more mainstream version of Lena that they would have heard of.

Figure 1. Sketch of Kitty Slade for the Kitty Slade series. Copyright © 2003 Fiona Dunbar.

Girls and Body Image

Just a fun aside here because at this point I feel a bit like a schoolchild presenting her homework: all these percentages and stuff! I’ve never done this before. And this is relevant because it relates to images of girls on book covers. I don’t get to design my book covers, but as a former illustrator, unusual for an author, I do get consulted, up to a point. Here’s how I saw my character Kitty Slade for the Kitty Slade trilogy (Figure 1 above). Of no fixed abode, and with a tendency to get into all sorts of scrapes due to her determination to solve mysteries involving the ghosts she sees, I saw her as a girl with ‘Attitude’, with a capital ‘A’. She’s a younger, gentler, non-pornographic version of Jamie Hewlett’s creation Tank Girl. Tank Girl is an outlaw with a multimillion-dollar bounty on her head, prone to random acts of sex and violence, hair dyeing, flatulence, nose picking, vomiting, spitting and more than occasionally drunk. Her boyfriend Booga is a mutant kangaroo. I did have to tone my original image down a bit. But my version got watered-down further still – made more feminine, I feel (Plate 2). No wonder that boys won’t read these books, which is a shame, because I think they’d enjoy them. Back to the survey. I wanted to know what the girls were reading. Mostly novels? Non-fiction? Magazines? Or did they do most of their reading online? Over half said ‘novels’ (24% said nonfiction, 29% magazines and 17.5% said online). Only 38% said they preferred TV and film, yet when asked who their greatest female idol was, the celebrities win by a mile: 63%. Only two specifically mentioned writers: one said ‘an authoress’ (cringe) and another said J.K. Rowling. The other two categories I gave for idols were ‘An important public figure, past or present’ (21.6%), or ‘a character from a favourite book’ (26%). I also gave them the opportunity to name some other kind of idol: the overwhelming majority of those were mums or other family members. There were a few sports stars; one 12 year old said ‘artists such as Frida Kahlo’!; another said Rosa Parks. Good for them. Importantly, what this part of the survey demonstrates is that 62% of my respondents are readers.

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Back to book covers. In that Facebook discussion I mentioned earlier, Sophia Bennett, author of The Look and You Don’t Know Me, said: I think we could do more, but at the moment there’s such a disconnect between what we write and what appears on the cover, that I’m not sure how much of a difference it will make. We’re actually addressing LGBT issues, and issues of colour, race, body image and anything you can think of, all the time, but they almost never make it to the cover. That’s where I'd start.

Susie Day, author of Pea’s Book of Big Dreams and My Invisible Boyfriend deplores: ‘the whirlwind of lipstick, nail polish, shoes etc. that tends to appear around girls in illustrated contemporary covers.’

Chris Priestley, author of Mister Creecher and Uncle Montague’s Tales of Terror said: I get very tired of all those models staring out of YA fiction for girls. I don't think boys get bombarded with such images of (supposed) perfection – skinny, beautiful and in the most part, white.

I don’t seem to have many examples of these books on my shelves, and frankly I didn’t have the will to trawl through page after page on Amazon to find them, but I will ask: can we put a stop to this sort of thing? I share my publisher with ‘Daisy Meadows’ so this is a bit awkward, and I must admit that having great big lolloping fairies would look ridiculous. But, look at those legs! I realise they’re fairies and not real girls, but must they have legs like a crane fly’s! (Plate 3). And ask yourself this: can you think of a single book aimed at boys that contains this sort of physical distortion? This was the only one I could find that bore some resemblance to a normalshaped girl – and, notably, it’s by a different illustrator (Plate 4). Some titles were mentioned in the Facebook discussion as having interesting, positive characters who are definitely not slim. In Bennett’s You Don’t Know Me, the reader’s perception of the Adele-like character Rose is cleverly manipulated. Cathy Cassidy’s

Girls and Body Image

Ginger Snaps deals skilfully with themes that any young teen girl would relate to, not least the dreaded ‘makeover’. Chris Higgins’ A Perfect 10 is compellingly told from the point of view of your archetypal ‘Mean Girl’. And Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor and Park has an oddball heroine who is a lot of other things besides being large. It’s a book that demands to be read as widely as possible. These are teen/young adult titles, though. Where are the books for 8–12s that confront these issues? That’s when the rot sets in. I want to finish by returning to Lulu Baker from The Truth Cookie. When I was first approached about the TV series I was very excited of course. It turned out to be something radically different from the books, though, because it was a sitcom and there are very specific rules for sitcoms. You can’t have any real villains for starters. So Varaminta became softened into Minty, who is merely a bit annoying. At a private screening of the first three episodes, a young fan of the books expressed her disappointment that Varaminta/Minty wasn’t nasty enough. I think the producers achieved what they set out to do very effectively: the show was an entertaining romp. But an actual adaptation of the original books would have told a very different, darker story, and might have reached a wider audience with its ‘message’, for want of a better term. Down with Barbies! Giving people food is giving them love! At the beginning of The Truth Cookie, there’s a flashback to a scene with Lulu’s late mother, just before Lulu’s fifth birthday: They’d made the cake together. Well, Mum had made it really, but she had managed to make Lulu feel as essential to the process as flour and eggs. After putting it in the oven, Mum had crouched beside the cooker. ‘Come and have a look.’ Lulu had stepped forward and peered through the glass oven door to watch as the cake puffed itself up. ‘It’s biggering!’ Lulu had said. Mum had laughed and put her arm around her. ‘That’s it!’ she’d replied. ‘That’s exactly what it’s doing; it’s biggering!’ Lulu had stood and breathed in the delicious buttery aroma as the cake swelled some more. And Lulu remembered how the light from the

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oven had made Mum’s face look as if it glowed from within as she had turned and whispered excitedly, ‘It’s like magic, isn’t it?’

Let’s not lose the magic of childhood. Let’s go on celebrating the literary picnics and midnight feasts we grew up with; let’s have big characters that are other things besides bullies and losers, and let’s see them on the covers once in a while.

Works Cited Primary Texts Dunbar, Fiona (1993) Under the Stairs. London: Hutchinson Children’s Books. –– (2011) Divine Freaks. Kitty Slade series Book 1. London: Orchard. –– (2004) The Truth Cookie. London: Orchard. Secondary Children’s Texts ‘Meadows, Daisy’ (2010) Pia the Penguin Fairy. Rainbow Magic: Ocean Fairies 87. London: Orchard. –– (2008) Helena the Horseriding Fairy. Rainbow Magic: Sporty Fairies 57. London: Orchard. Secondary Reference Texts Daubney, Martin (2013) Experiment that convinced me online porn is the most pernicious threat facing children today. Mail Online, 25 September 2013, updated 30 September 2013. www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2432591/Porn-perniciousthreat-facing-children-today-By-ex-lads-mag-editor-MartinDaubney.html. Duca, Lauren (2013) Can thinspiration really be #banned from Instagram?. The Huffington Post, 28 August 2013. www.huffingtonpost.com/lauren-duca/thinspiration-bannedfrom-instagram_b_3829155.html.

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Gordon, Olivia (2008) Salons boom as girls yearn to grow up fast. The Observer, 15 June 2008. www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2008/jun/15/healthandwe llbeing.uk. Jett, S., D.J. LaPorte, and J. Wanchisn (2010) Impact of exposure to pro-eating disorder websites on eating behaviour in college women. European Eating Disorders Review, vol. 18, no. 5 (pp.410–16).

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CHAPTER FOUR GUO YUE: MUSIC, FOOD AND LOVE JUDITH PHILO AND JENNIFER HARDING Guo Yue’s presentation was a performance not a paper and so is not included in this book as such. He titled his performance as ‘Music, Food and Love. A Little Leap Forward’. The title arises from his books, Music, Love and Food being his autobiography (coauthored with Clare Farrow) and his 2006 CD for Real World, and A Little Leap Forward being a fictionalised account of his childhood for children (co-authored with Clare Farrow and illustrated by Helen Cann). On Stage Guo Yue leapt lightly onto the platform, informally dressed but wearing a red waistcoat to catch the eye. He began by demonstrating how every social encounter should be conducted. Bowing slightly and with hands pressed together he spoke the words ‘ni low?’, which translated is ‘have you eaten?’ This gracious preliminary is the customary way visitors are welcomed and offered hospitality in his country. He then proceeded to beguile the audience with descriptions of his life in his native China, intermittently illustrating his themes by playing from a selection of wooden flutes. He also showed a brief autobiographical film from his childhood. He grew up poor. In Mao’s time there were many restrictions to life, and there was hardship. Workers and their families were divided into courtyard quarters by occupation. His family lived in

Guo Yue: Music, Food and Love

the countryside and worked hard manually. He was taught how to fill buckets from the well and carry them on a yoke, how to harvest crops without cutting himself and how to choose the best produce. His father was a musician, and music was a central part of family life. Guo Yue learned to play a tiny flute; his family arranged for him to have lessons and paid with half a bottle of rationed cooking oil. He was expected to practice four hours a day. Over time he graduated to the full range of flute sizes. The family lost their mother, who was taken away by the authorities, and later they learned she had died. Despite the hardship, a spirit of survival and imaginative resourcefulness sustained the family. Guo Yue likened the sound of the flute to speech. He illustrated this idea with a piece called ‘Dragonfly’, which he felt evoked the flow of the river and the darting flight of the dragonfly. Using a selection of flutes in turn he called another piece ‘Beyond the Clouds’. The freedom of musical expression was a means of surmounting Mao’s restrictions and drive to uniformity. In a similar way, he said, food can provide transformative experience. Fruit and vegetables do not grow in regular shapes or sizes. We may enjoy their colour, texture and flavour, or, in Guo Yue’s words, ‘savour them with gusto’. Nowadays he has a restaurant in London where his philosophy of life, food and music are all ingredients of the occasion. Echoing the theme of the conference in reverse, Guo Yue’s life has moved from the relative threat of famine to feast. His Book for Children A Little Leap Forward: A Boy in Beijing describes the summer of 1966 from the viewpoint of Little Leap Forward and his friends in Beijing. Little Leap Forward lives with his mother, his father (a musician from the countryside who is often away working), his younger brother and his elder sisters in a house in a small courtyard. Whenever they can, the friends go down to the river to fly paper kites. His best friend is Little-Little. One day, the boys capture a yellow bird and Little Leap Forward takes it home. He builds a bamboo cage for it, hoping to teach it to sing, but it

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remains silent. He names the bird Little Cloud. After weeks of silence, his mother buys him a bamboo flute and arranges for him to have lessons in exchange for peanut oil, thinking that the bird might then sing in response to the flute. Little Leap Forward tries not to think about food as he is always hungry. His sisters guarded the rice sack like treasure as it had to last the entire month. There was never enough to fill them up. Little Leap Forward would queue at the grocery shop with the ration tickets to fetch vegetables in a straw basket. The story describes life under Chairman Mao. Old tunes had been given revolutionary words and these were the only songs allowed to be sung. His school was in the old temple where people in the past had prayed, but Mao had banned religion in China. Then the Red Guards arrive, bringing in the Cultural Revolution. The students are throwing sheets of paper and shouting ‘Get rid of old China. Make a new China’. Windows are smashed and Little Leap Forward and Little-Little can see people being marched out of their courtyards with their hand forced behind their backs. Little Leap Forwards sister burns all her mother’s letters, photographs and books, saying ‘Ti’s very dangerous to love the old things of China now’. His friend Blue’s plaits had been cut off: ‘The Red Guards are cutting women’s hair and the heels off their shoes’. One day Little-Little says to Little Leap Forward ‘Wouldn’t you rather be free, just for a day, than spend a lifetime in a cage?. The next day Little Leap Forward goes down to the river bank and opening the Little Cloud’s cage: ‘You’re free now. You can fly!’ Lying on the bank a few weeks later, practising his flute, Little Cloud flutters down. Its singing is beautiful and it lifts his spirit as he plays, absorbed in his own music. Food descriptions are plentiful in this book of childhood hunger and the eking out the rationed allowances. The book ends with an eight-page afterword with photographs describing the facts of life for Guo Yue’s family and the wider setting of China after Mao Zedung became leader of the Communist Party.

Guo Yue: Music, Food and Love

Acknowledgements To Judith Philo for her report on the presentation.

Works Cited Geo Yue and Clare Farrow (illus. Helen Cann) (2008) Little Leap Forward: A Boy in Beijing. Bath: Barefoot Books. Geo Yue and Clare Farrow (illus. Qu Lei Lei) (2005) Music, Food and Love: A Memoir with Recipes. London: Portrait (an imprint of Piatkus Books

Website Geo Yue’s Story from Barefoot Storytelling with a preview of A Little Leap Forward. www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0Qps7v_BBc.

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CHAPTER FIVE LINIMENT CAKE, BEAVERS, BUTTERED EGGS: CHILDREN COOKING; COOKING [FOR] CHILDREN NICKI HUMBLE Examining the importance of food in children’s literature over the centuries and in our own childhood memories, Nicki Humble observes the paradoxes revealed. She finds that for children food is both an object in itself and an excuse to indulge in the physical delights of recipe creation and cooking.

Food, as we all know, is obdurately, disproportionately present in children’s literature. As Carolyn Daniel in Voracious Children (2006) has persuasively suggested, food seems to function in children’s texts in much the same way that sex does in those for adults: producing bodily desires that operate on a level beyond a purely imaginary engagement with the world of the text. What is perhaps less immediately evident is how often descriptions of cooking occur in children’s fiction. From Jo’s failed dinner party in Little Women, with its unripe strawberries, curdled blancmange and rock-hard lobster (Alcott, 1953: 159–60), to Pippi Longstocking’s ginger-snap dough rolled out on the kitchen floor (Lindgren, Pippi Longstocking, 2012: 13), scenes of food preparation are richly significatory moments in many texts. This paper considers a few such moments, and looks also at the ways in which cookbooks and food memoirs engage with the notion of children and cooking. One of my early reading memories is of a seemingly innocuous passage in Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons (1930) where

Liniment Cake, Beavers, Buttered Eggs: Children Cooking; Cooking [for] Children

Susan, the boring domestic sister, discusses methods of cooking eggs with one of those handy farmers’ wives who pop up so conveniently in middle-class children’s adventure stories of the first half of the twentieth century. Susan professes that her ‘best’ eggs are buttered eggs. The farmer’s wife expresses surprise: ‘most people are best at boiled.’ ‘Oh, I don’t count boiled’, says Susan (p.21). That exchange stayed with me for years. I’m sure I couldn’t quote much of the rest of Swallows and Amazons, so why was this so memorable? At first I think it was the mysterious buttered eggs (scrambled, it turns out), also the competence of Susan talking to the farmers’ wife as an equal – and competence of course is one the pleasures of Ransome’s books (‘better drowned than duffers’ …). I was also intrigued by what it meant to not count boiled: in the idea of a sort of cooking too elementary to count as cooking. What interests me now is also the question of memorableness. What snags me in this food passage is that it should be remembered whole, while the various scenes of pemmican eating have blurred into one. What are the particular effects and pleasures of accounts of cooking? And what might these textual moments have to tell us about the oddly over determined presence of food in children’s literature? In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries scenes of children – girls – cooking are a particularly iconic feature of North American children’s literature. There are fewer to be found in British children’s texts – a result of the much stronger social constraints against middle-class females being seen to perform domestic tasks. But in a culture that strongly valorised notions of self-sufficiency, culinary skills were seen as a crucial element of a child’s education. Cooking understood as an essential skill and familial duty is seen most clearly in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series, her thinly disguised autobiographical account of her late nineteenthcentury pioneer childhood. In every book the reader is given extended descriptions of the cooking, baking and preserving undertaken by Ma and the girls who make cheese and pickles,

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bread and pies, with the children helping with the simpler tasks and learning by watching. The most memorable passages, though, certainly for a child reader, are those where the children get to cook alone – particularly when they make treats: the molasses on snow candy of Little House in the Big Woods (1932) (Figure 2) and the popcorn in These Happy Golden Years (1943).

Figure 2. The molasses-on-snow candy of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods. 2009: 36. Copyright © 1953 Garth Williams. HarperCollins USA.

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books are driven by remembered hunger, demonstrated most clearly by the extraordinary quantities of food described in the third book in the series, Farmer Boy (1933), which depicts not her own childhood but that of her husband growing up on a prosperous farm, where the child Almanzo is invariably depicted stuffing himself from a board groaning with meat and dairy products. The pleasure in these passages stems not so much from his memories of culinary plenitude as from her memories of hunger. It is hunger that animates the descriptions of the rare treats her parents manage to provide – the little white heartshaped cakes, one each in their Christmas stockings, shine with more than simply powdered sugar: they speak of the indulgence

Liniment Cake, Beavers, Buttered Eggs: Children Cooking; Cooking [for] Children

and specialness of baked goods made with refined sugar and flour, of the parental love that affords these rare luxuries in the midst of penury. The food that is cooked in the American children’s texts of this period falls almost invariably into the treat or luxury category. In Louisa M. Alcott’s An Old Fashioned Girl (1870), simple rural Polly is counterpointed to the sharp sophisticated girls who are the usual social companions of the wealthy Shaw family. Polly wins the heart of the Shaw son, Tom, when he trespasses on the kitchen and finds her giving lessons in cake baking. Allowed into the hallowed, all-female space and invited to beat the cake mixture, he compares himself in his imagination to ‘Hercules with the distaff’, and finds his employment ‘pleasant, if not classical’. Polly’s skills as a baker, and the warm welcoming environment she creates in the kitchen mark her out as precisely the wife Tom needs, but it is notable that it is the pleasures of baking, rather than eating cake that is the means to his heart (Chapter XVII). In L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series (1908– 1920) the baking of cake plays a repeated and significant part in establishing the life of the rural community of Avonlea and the travails of passionate, imaginative orphan Anne as she tries to fit in. In the opening chapter of Anne of Green Gables (1908), a neighbour surveys the prepared tea table in Marilla Cuthbert’s house, assessing that company must be expected, but because of the everyday china, crab-apple preserves and only one sort of cake ‘it could not be any particular company’. Cakes in the novels are an essential part of social relations, carefully graded in number, complexity and luxuriousness so that everyone knows their place. Later in the first novel Anne begs to be allowed to bake a cake in honour of the new minister and his wife. She feels the pressure of the occasion deeply, as she confesses to her bosom friend Diana: It’s such a responsibility having a minister’s family to tea. I never went through such an experience before. … We’re to have two kinds of jelly, red and yellow, and three kinds of cookies, and fruit cake, and Marilla’s famous yellow-plum preserves that she keeps

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especially for ministers, and pound cake and layer cake, and biscuits as aforesaid. … I just grow cold when I think of my layer cake. Oh, Diana, what if it shouldn’t be good! I dreamed last night that I was chased all round by a fearful goblin with a big layer cake for a head. (Montgomery, 2013: 217–18)

Anne’s cake rises beautifully, ‘it came out of the oven as light and feathery as golden foam’, but her triumph is short lived: Mrs Allan took a mouthful of hers and a most peculiar expression crossed her face; not a word did she say, however, but steadily ate away at it. (p.221)

Anne has flavoured the cake with anodyne liniment instead of vanilla, unable to smell the difference because of a cold. The mixup and Anne’s succeeding shame are played as comic, but the abiding assumption is that a girl should, by the age of 11, be already a skilled cake maker, and that much social cachet rests on her abilities. (In another iconic ‘orphan’ narrative, Eleanor H. Porter’s Pollyanna is taught to cook by the members of the Ladies’ Aid. Since they cannot agree about the correct way to bake bread, they begin her culinary education with cakes – she has only got as far as chocolate and fig before she is removed to live with her straight-laced aunt, who disapproves of this lack of knowledge (Pollyanna, 1913: ch.V)). In the case of Anne, I would suggest that the appeal of the extended episode of the liniment cake is finely balanced between vicarious enjoyment of her domestic prowess and a deep pleasure in her failure. Scenes of calamitous cooking are among the most enjoyable and memorable in children’s texts – and they are many. The failed smart dinner in Little Women, which I mentioned earlier, comes in the chapter ‘Experiments’, where Marmee decides to allow the girls to make their own mistakes. Knowing even less about cooking than her elder sister Meg, who has already managed to burn the breakfast, Jo nonetheless invites guests to dinner: Language cannot describe the anxieties, experiences and exertions which Jo underwent that morning; and the dinner she served up became a standing joke. Fearing to ask any more advice, she did

Liniment Cake, Beavers, Buttered Eggs: Children Cooking; Cooking [for] Children

her best alone, and discovered that something more than energy and goodwill is necessary to make a cook. She boiled the asparagus for half an hour, and was grieved to find the heads cooked off and the stalks harder than ever. The bread burnt black, for the salad-dressing so aggravated her that she could not make it fit to eat. The lobster was a scarlet mystery to her, but she hammered and poked it till it was shelled, and its meagre proportions concealed in a grove of lettuce leaves. The potatoes had to be hurried, not to keep the asparagus waiting, and were not done at last, the blancmange was lumpy, and the strawberries not as ripe as they looked, having been skillfully ‘deaconed’. (Alcott, 1953: 159)

The scene is lingered on in the Puffin edition I read as a child, with Shirley Hughes’s illustration of Jo’s harassed stirring. In this notoriously double text, the ‘message’ is that one should not be puffed up, should not hanker after elegance or ape empty upperclass forms; and you should not run before you can walk. But the pleasure is in the lingered-over failure. Why should culinary failure be more appealing than success? I don’t think we’d remember the scene had it been a triumph. It is reminiscent of those scenes of other young people failing at entertaining in David Copperfield (1850): David’s attempt at a dinner for the Micawbers in his lodgings, where the joint prepared by the drunken landlady is covered in ash and nearly raw, and the ‘young gal’ hired for the occasion spills the gravy down the stairs (pp.471–74); and Dora and David’s failed dinner for Traddles in their new married home, where the oysters are unopened and the dog walks around the tablecloth and stands in the butter (pp.708–10). Is our enjoyment here simply schadenfreude? Perhaps, but I think there is something else going on as well. The terms in which Meg had warned Jo against the whole culinary enterprise are interesting: ‘Don’t try too many messes, Jo, for you can’t make anything but gingerbread and molasses candy fit to eat’ (Alcott, 153: 156). ‘Messes’ in the primary sense Meg means it refers to what the English of the same date would call a ‘made dish’ – a mixture of ingredients cooked or eaten together, but its secondary meaning

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takes over almost immediately, and it is here I think much of the pleasure of such scenes lie: in the idea of making a mess, of cooking as play. In the first of the David Copperfield episodes the dinner with the Micawbers is redeemed when they have the idea of slicing the underdone joint and grilling the slices over a gridiron in David’s room: What with the novelty of this cookery, the excellence of it, the bustle of it, the frequent starting up to look after it, the frequent sitting down to dispose of it as the crisp slices came off the gridiron hot and hot, the being so busy, so flushed with the fire, so amused, and in the midst of such a tempting noise and savour, we reduced the leg of mutton to the bone. My own appetite came back miraculously. I am ashamed to record it, but I really believe I forgot Dora for a little while. I am satisfied that Mr. and Mrs. Micawber could not have enjoyed the feast more, if they had sold a bed to provide it. Traddles laughed as heartily, almost the whole time, as he ate and worked. Indeed we all did, all at once; and I dare say there never was a greater success. (Dickens, 1985: 474–75)

The sense that their pleasure here is rooted in cooking as play is confirmed in the next paragraph when Littimer, the superior servant of David’s school friend, enters, and in insisting on taking over the grilling and serving sucks all the pleasure from the room (pp.475–77). In the early years of the twentieth century, and particularly after the First World War the British middle class experienced what the press referred to as ‘the Servant Problem’. With workingclass women increasingly reluctant to enter domestic service, the problem of getting, training and keeping servants becomes an overwhelming preoccupation, continually harped on in women’s magazines and fiction until the Second World War, at which point there is no longer any hope held out of being able to obtain or afford live-in servants. In the British children’s literature of this period we find the situation of unstable domestic labour transmuted into

Liniment Cake, Beavers, Buttered Eggs: Children Cooking; Cooking [for] Children

representations of children at war with cooks, and in the new licence for children to be seen entering the kitchen and even cooking themselves. In E. Nesbit’s The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904) the chapter entitled ‘The Queen Cook’ sees the children acting out their latent hostility towards the cook, who has already threatened to resign because of their behaviour, with bad deeds and mishaps including breaking a kitchen slice, burying a dead mouse, breaking the kitchen window and spreading mud on both sides of the carpet. Their most exuberantly described crimes involve acts of trespass not just on the cook’s territory but on her role: Monday. – Liquorice put on to boil with aniseed balls in a saucepan. Anthea did this, because she thought it would be good for the Lamb’s cough. The whole thing forgotten, and bottom of saucepan burned out. It was the little saucepan lined with white that was kept for the baby’s milk. Wednesday. – Chopped suet left on kitchen table. Robert added chopped soap, but he says he thought the suet was soap too. (Nesbit, 1995: 55–56)

They later come to feel for the reality of the cook’s life when they inadvertently transport her to a desert island on their magic carpet and she is adopted as a queen by the savage inhabitants. They ask if she wants to come home but she is very happy to remain because it gives her a rest. So they take her a friendly burglar as a husband. In Richmal Crompton’s William stories there are many similar scenes of skirmishes with hostile cooks and of renegade cooking. In the first-ever William story, ‘Rice-Mould’ (first published in 1919 and reprinted as the second chapter of More William in 1922), William engages in debate with a sarcastic family cook about whether she will provide cream blancmange for his elder siblings’ party. He plans to steal the blancmange to give to the little girl next door to compensate for the hated rice mould that constitutes her own pudding (Crompton, 2010b: 24–25). (Although

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he carries out his dastardly plan, transferring the blancmange to his soap dish – soap still present – and carrying it next door under his jacket, no good is to come of it – he took the rice mould by mistake). Many subsequent William stories revolve around his stealing of food, and crashing parties, with the most memorable perhaps being the glorious episode in which he gets to run a sweet shop for a day (pp.186–204). He also often indulges in culinary exploration of his own: mixing noxious drinks with his fellow outlaws, and cooking bizarre concoctions. Perhaps the strangest of these come in William the Outlaw (1927) in which William and his fellow outlaws, having failed in the opening story to live up to their name and survive in the woods on a diet of ‘blackberries an’ mushrooms’ an’ roots an’ things’, in the story called ‘The Terrible Magician’, turn their hands to actual cooking: They had made a fire in Ginger’s backyard and cooked over it a mixture of water from the stream and blackberries and Worcester Sauce and Turkish delight and sardines (these being all the edibles they could jointly produce), had produced the resulting concoction to be excellent and had spent the next day in bed. (Crompton, 2011, Ch.2)

Reminiscent of the random (though delicious) flavours in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s bottle labelled ‘Drink Me’ (Alice in Wonderland, 1865: 13) and the exuberant food lists of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), this concoction balances the reader half-way between disgust and delight. This is a position food memorialists often find themselves in when remembering childhood eating and cooking experiences, like Collette recalling her childhood habit of eating rubber, pencil leads and chalk bits, and of roasting chocolate on a pin over a candle,1 and M.F.K. Fisher, the great American stylist of food writing, announcing with some pride in ‘The Gastonomical Me’ (1943) that ‘The first thing I cooked was pure poison’: a pudding ‘a little round white shuddering milky thing’ made for her convalescing mother. The purity of the pudding offending her in its naked state –

Liniment Cake, Beavers, Buttered Eggs: Children Cooking; Cooking [for] Children

‘obscenely pure; obscenely colourless’, she picked blackberries from the garden and placed them carefully, still unwashed, in a circle on the summit, with the result that her mother broke out in hives and was unable to feed her newborn brother (pp.364–67). Food for Fisher is almost always as Freudian as this, pleasure and denial and intense drives all bound up together. (I was originally going to go on to write here about disgust in food writing – Elizabeth David’s lyrical description of the horrors of childhood boiled cod, Nigel Slater’s vile fried eggs, and the competing models of disgust as abject and carnivalesque developed by Kristeva and Bakhtin. But it was taking me off track.) Instead, I’ll turn to the beavers of my title. Two of them in fact. The first is the scene in the Beavers’ cave in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), where the children help Mrs Beaver to cook the meal: Just as the frying pan was nicely hissing Peter and Mr Beaver came in with the fish which Mr Beaver had already opened with his knife and cleaned out in the open air. You can think how good the newcaught fish smelled when they were frying and how the hungry children longed for them to be done and how very much hungrier still they had become before Mr Beaver said, ‘Now we’re nearly ready.’ Susan drained the potatoes and then put them all back in the empty pot to dry on the side of the range while Lucy was helping Mrs Beaver to dish up the trout, so that in a very few minutes everyone was drawing up their stools … and preparing to enjoy themselves. (Lewis, 1950: 72)

This meal forms a pair with the earlier meal Lucy alone had been served in Mr Tumnus’s rather more elegant house – a meal that she did not help prepare, and during which he hypnotised her with his flute, intending to hand her over to the White Witch. The message is clear, even without the notorious Turkish Delight, food is safer, and better, when you prepare it yourself, or at least see it prepared. And it is notable how competence is again valorised – the little grace note of how to dry the potatoes, for instance.

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Figure 3. From C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. 1959: 73. The hungry children enjoying a meal in the Beavers’ cave. Illustration by Pauline Baynes copyright © C.S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. 1959. Reprinted with permission.

The other beaver I had in mind is the description in Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes (1936) of the snack meals served up to them each day in the break of their lessons with Doctor Jakes and

Liniment Cake, Beavers, Buttered Eggs: Children Cooking; Cooking [for] Children

Doctor Smith, lodgers in their house who are helping to educate them: Both doctors had lovely ideas about the sort of things to have in the middle of lessons – a meal they called a beaver. They took turns to get it ready. Sometimes it was chocolate with cream on it, and sometimes Doctor Jakes’ ginger drink, and once it was icecream soda; and the things to eat were never the same: queer biscuits, little ones from Japan with delicate flowers painted on them in sugar, cakes from Vienna, and specialities of different kinds from all over England. (p.52)

The children do not themselves cook these foods and neither do the doctors, but these curious, creatively educative snacks are part of a genre of food that children’s texts present as the most interesting and attractive: meals that are not quite meals – picnics, midnight feasts, illicit snatched handfuls, sweets doled out from grubby paper bags. This is food that has been rescued from the control of manners and the rigid procession of meal times. It is food that is free. But food is never only one thing. If it has the potential for freedom and creativity, it is also horrific. ‘Before any story of cooking is possible, crime is inevitable, says Alice B. Toklas, in a chapter called ‘Murder in the Kitchen’ in her 1954 Alice B Toklas Cookbook, recalling her first experiences killing a carp and pigeons for the table (pp.51–57). Children’s picture books are one of the first places where the realities of the connections between death and eating are broached, but these books also lay bare a profound cultural confusion around these issues. These books are part of a culture that, along with nursery rhymes, songs, soft toys, nursery decoration, and so on, requires very young children to perform their first acts of imaginative identification with animals: not just any animals but specifically those animals – ducks, hens, lambs, calves, pigs – that we farm and kill for food. The fact of the death of those animals is an open secret – something children are supposed to know and not know simultaneously, and children’s picture books play with these processes of secrecy and knowledge,

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identification and betrayal, pleasure and horror with an intensity that is perverse, if not outright sadistic. For Beatrix Potter, immersed in the pragmatic logic of a farming community, there was no need to draw a veil over the life-anddeath realities of animal husbandry – the very first thing Peter Rabbit is told in her first book (The Tale of Peter Rabbit, 1903) is not to go into Mr McGregor’s garden because ‘your father had an accident there: he was put in a pie by Mrs McGregor’ (p.10). This curious – and comic – transfer of agency – the father’s having an accident rather than Mrs McGregor’s act of cooking (and the elision of – we assume – Mr McGregor’s act of killing) thematises this central paradox – Mr Rabbit Senior is both person and food, someone who can have an accident and someone who can be put in a pie. The central aim of the animal protagonists of Potter’s work is not to become food. This need is handled in a somewhat orderly psychological manner in those texts in which it is humans who wish to turn the protagonists into food, but it becomes far more radically disruptive in those texts – most notably Potter’s The Tale of Samuel Whiskers (1908), when there is competition over the role of eater and eaten. Naughty, adventurous Tom Kitten, hiding from his mother, is captured by Anna Maria and Samuel Whiskers – rats – and put into a roly-poly pudding (Plate 5). Tom is rendered simultaneously as protagonist – pictured squalling in pain and fear as the rats truss him up – and as food stuff, as the rats discuss him only as ‘the pudding’, worrying that it will not be good as he is covered in chimney smuts, and arguing about the recipe (p.46). But it is not just the rats who eat children – near the beginning of the story Tom’s mother notes in passing that she had even caught a dozen young rats and served them for Saturday dinner (p.25). The twist of the knife in this ‘dog-eat-dog’ world is not so much that these creatures eat each other’s young, but that they do so in the context of ‘civilised’ constructs such as recipes and Sunday dinner. As Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal (1729) with its suggestion of fricassee or ragout makes clear, the worst barbarism

Liniment Cake, Beavers, Buttered Eggs: Children Cooking; Cooking [for] Children

would not be eating the babies of the poor, but exchanging recipes for the best way to serve them. The recipe transforms necessity to pleasure – Potter’s animals are at their most disturbingly barbaric when they act like people. More recent children’s picture books tease children with the fear of being food in ever more ingenious ways, from Maurice Sendack’s creepy midnight bakers of In the Night Kitchen (1970), baking little naked Mickey into a cake (n.p.), to the extraordinary food narratives of Mini Grey. In Biscuit Bear (2004), the biscuit of the title, having survived his first night of existence uneaten, goes to the kitchen and bakes himself a whole circus of friends – performing the role of cook as if to refuse the role of food. All is good until the arrival of the household dog, Bongo, who ‘liked biscuits. (But not in a way that is necessarily good for the biscuits.)’. Only Biscuit Bear survives the resulting massacre. Seeking a place where ‘a biscuit could be safe’, he finds a refuge in the window display of a pastry cook where he can survive forever uneaten. The protagonist of Grey’s much darker Egg Drop (2002) is not so lucky. It is an egg who wants to fly. Its mother tells it to wait, but it is too eager. It is shown with all sorts of fantastic designs for flying machines. But in the end it climbs all the way to the top of a tall tower and jumps off. But he was not flying, the text tells us he was falling. The final picture offers a bleak reassurance to go with its final image of a fried egg on a plate, eyes closed: ‘Luckily he was not wasted’. The transition from identification to agency to food is particularly abrupt and painful. It is clear that as well as now being food the egg is also dead. But he is smiling. We have been with him in his bizarre, overweening, human aspirations. And the knife and fork are waiting for us. It is in scenes of cooking and food preparation that some of the key paradoxes of our cultural understanding of food can be played out. Food as gift, as friendship, as love; food as death. The recipe as social order, civilisation; but also as disguise and palliative for what Roland Barthes calls ‘the brutality of meat, the abruptness of seafood’ (1972: 78). Food is always paradoxical – both absolutely

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ordinary yet also strange and fugitive. In most of our cultural representations we treat food as a thing – a fixed, solid, immutable object to be represented in still lives, in the illustrations in cookbooks, in the descriptions in fiction. But food is not really (or not only) an object, it is a process. We grow or purchase, prepare and cook it, consume it, chew it, swallow and digest it; it becomes part of our bodies or the energy that moves them, and we excrete the waste. This is one of the most fundamental aspects of our existence: we do this or else we die. And yet in our constant hankering after the object status of food we wilfully sideline these processes. The problem of having our cake and eating it is a genuine one, at the heart of what we understand and what we ignore about food. The scenes of cooking in children’s texts play around the margins of these paradoxes: they extend the object status of food a bit longer – holding off the moment of consumption, destruction, incorporation. But they also acknowledge – and often glory in – the process, the creation, the mess.

Notes 1 Collette. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colette.

Works Cited Primary Texts Alcott, Louisa (illus. Shirley Hughes) ([1868] 1953) Little Women. London: Puffin Books. Reprinted 1982. –– ([1870] 1950) An Old-Fashioned Girl. Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Company. Carroll, Lewis (1865) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Crompton, Richmal ([1922] 2010a) Just William. Basingstoke: Macmillan Children’s Books.

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–– ([1922] 2010b) More William. Basingstoke: Macmillan Children’s Books. –– ([1927] 2011) William the Outlaw. Basingstoke: Macmillan Children’s Books. Dahl, Roald (1964) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. London: Puffin. Dickens, Charles ([1850] 1985) David Copperfield. London: Penguin Classics. Grey, Mini (2004) Biscuit Bear. London: Cape Children’s Books. –– (2002) Egg Drop. London: Jonathan Cape. Lewis, C.S. (illus. Pauline Baynes) (1950) The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. London: Geoffrey Bles. Reprinted 1966. Lindgren, Astrid (illus. Tony Ross) ([1945] 2012) Pippi Longstocking. Oxford University Press. Montgomery, Lucy Maud ([1908] 2013) Anne of Green Gables. London: Vintage Children’s Classics. Nesbit, E. ([1904] 1995) The Phoenix and the Carpet. Ware: Wordsworth Editions. Potter, Beatrix (1903) Peter Rabbit. London: Frederick Warne. –– ([1908] 1987) The Tale of Samuel Whiskers or The Poly-Poly Pudding. London: Frederick Warne. Ransome, Arthur ([1930] 2001) Swallows and Amazons. London: Red Fox. Sendack, Maurice (1970) In the Night Kitchen. New York: Harper & Row. Streatfeild, Noel (illus. Ruth Gervis) ([1936] 1949) Ballet Shoes: A Story of Three Children on the Stage. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Wilder, Laura Ingalls (illus. Garth Williams) ([1932] 2009) Little House in the Big Woods. Little House series 1. London: Egmont. –– Farmer Boy (illus. Garth Williams) ([1933] 1953). Little House series 3. New York: Harper & Bros. –– (Illus. Garth Williams) ([1943] 2004) These Happy Golden Years. Little House series 7. New York: Harper Trophy.

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Secondary Texts Barthes, Roland (trans. Annette Lavers) (1972) Ornamental Cookery. New York: Hill and Wang. First published in French 1972. Daniel, Carolyn (2006) Voracious Children: Who Eats Whom in Children’s Literature. London: Routledge. Fisher, M.F.K. (1943) The gastronomical me. In The Art of Eating (1991). London: Macmillan (pp.364–67). Swift, Jonathan (1729) A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick. www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1080. Toklas, Alice B. ([1954] 1961) Alice B. Toklas Cookbook. London: Penguin.

Websites Louisa Alcott Little Women. www.literaturepage.com/read/littlewomen-1.html. Louisa Alcott An Old-Fashioned Girl. http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044004432209;vie w=1up;seq=11. Charles Dickens David Copperfield. www.fullbooks.com/DavidCopperfield.html. Lucy Maud Montgomery Anne of Green Gables. www.planetebook.com/ebooks/Anne-of-Green-Gables.pdf. E. Nesbit The Phoenix and the Carpet. www.gutenberg.org/files/836/836-h/836-h.htm. Eleanor H. Porter Pollyanna. www.yeoldelibrary.com/text/PorterE/pollyanna1/index.htm. Beatrix Potter The Tale of Samuel Whiskers or The Poly-Poly Pudding. www.gutenberg.org/files/15575/15575-h/15575h.htm Jonathan Swift A Modest Proposal. www.artbin.com/art/omodest.html.

CHAPTER SIX DRAWING, STORIES, AMBIGUITY, MAGIC DAVID LUCAS In his transcript of the final talk of the conference, the artist David Lucas speaks about his work, including Grendel: A Cautionary Tale of Chocolate. He discusses the ambiguity that pervades symbolism, the use of characters as absurd visual metaphors of emotional states and the use of art to unite opposites.

Plate 6 shows a detail of Brueghel’s painting of Cockaigne – a mythical edible land – reached by an intrepid traveller, who has eaten his way there, through pudding mountains, with a spoon. Mountains of pudding. A lake of milk. A world of perfect irresponsibility. A dream of eternal childhood – of babyhood – where the world and mother are one. I want to talk about symbolism. How symbols can say opposite things at once. But I’ll begin by reading from my book Grendel (2013) – see Plate 7. Grendel loved his mum. Grendel loved his dog. But most of all Grendel LOVED chocolate. [He was truly a monster.] ‘I’ve bought you a chocolate egg,’ said Grendel’s mum. ‘CHOCOLATE!’ said Grendel. ‘Give it me! Give it me! I was only going to give it to you if you were good,’ said Mum. ‘I’ll be good. I’ll be good …’ Grendel snatched the chocolate egg and ran. He sat in his secret hiding place. Hmm … delicious. Inside the egg was a note. A note? You have three wishes, it said. ‘Three wishes?’ said Grendel. ‘I just wish I had MORE chocolate!’ he said.

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[…] ‘I wish … everything I touch turns to chocolate!’ […] It was so much fun [turning things to chocolate] … until the dog came to meet him. ‘NO!’ said Grendel [trying not to touch him but to no avail]. ‘Grendel! What have you done?’ said Mum [as she puts out her hand to touch him]. ‘NOOOO!!’ said Grendel. [Mum turns to chocolate as she touches him.] ‘Mum! Mum! Speak to me, Mum!’ But she didn’t say a word. I hate chocolate!’ he roared. ‘I hate it! I hate it! I HATE it!’ The sun was hot, Mum … was … starting … to … melt! ‘What have I done?’ said Grendel. He was just about to say that he wished he hadn’t been so stupid – when he stopped … ‘I’ve got one more wish! ‘I wish … it was YESTERDAY!’ […] ‘Mum!’ he cried. ‘You’re not chocolate!’ […] He hugged her for a long, long time. And then he hugged the dog. ‘What’s happened to you?’ she said. ‘You’re so different!’ then she smiled. ‘You are a good little monster really.’ […] And of course the moral of this story is to be careful what you wish for.

The story is based on the Midas legend. Grendel is the monster in Beowulf.1 And Grendel’s mother is the most famous single-parent monster in literature. She lives in a cave, in water – symbols of birth, sex and death – and she would have originally been a goddess figure. Grendel is a story of life and death. Greed is an impulse for more – more life, power, energy – but it is self-destructive: a death wish. In Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Scrooge changes only when he sees his own death, his grave. In my story, Grendel is reborn after a vision of his Mum as a melting chocolate Death Goddess – representing all that is desirable – and horrifying. In general in children’s books food represents the object of desire – taking the place of romantic love in adult fiction.

Drawing, Stories, Ambiguity, Magic

This is a pudding. Well, it might be a pudding. It could be a mother figure. And it could be the Heavenly City – where we go when we die. Symbols are not just ambiguous – many things at once – they can represent precise opposites at the same time – opposites mysteriously unified. Water is the perfect example. It is life and death. Fertility and dissolution. Another example: a ship is both cradle and grave. Raoul Dufy drew endless black ships at the end of his life. Death as a voyage – an awfully big adventure – and as rebirth. In classical logic the Law of Identity is that ‘each thing is the same with itself and different from another’. A thing is only ever what it is, and must remain so. Symbols offend the laws of classical logic. In poetic logic identities merge, swap and multiply. It is the logic of play, and make-believe and metaphor.

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Joseph Campbell begins his book Primitive Mythology with a chapter called ‘The Lesson of the Mask’. A performer in a tribal ritual wearing a mask does not merely represent the god; he is the god … even though everyone knows that a man made the mask and that a man is wearing it … the whole point is the fun of play …. In all the wild imaginings of mythology a fanciful spirit is playing on the border between jest and earnest. ([1959] 1991: 21, 23)

The performer is both himself and not himself – man and god at once. Opposites united in the deadly serious business of play.

Figure 4. Statue of a young girl, Faith, who is stuck in a room with a tigerskin rug. Copyright © 2008 David Lucas.

Drawing, Stories, Ambiguity, Magic

The Lying Carpet (Figure 4) is the story of a statue of a little girl: Faith, who is stuck in a room with a tiger-skin rug which seems to talk nonsense. The story hinges on the ‘liar’s paradox’ when the Carpet says that ‘Everything I have said is a lie’. Faith is forced to decide for herself what is true, and what she wants to be. This is probably my favourite ever review: Reading The Lying Carpet is a dreamy experience — the language is lovely; the free verse has an offbeat rhythm; the illustrations are breath taking … older readers may think of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and The Present Age — the poetry, the paradoxes, the musings on leaps of faith, the need for passion and the awareness of self. I can see high school and college philosophy students finding endless discussion fodder in The Lying Carpet; it would be a great graduation gift for black-clad poetesses. (The New York Times, 17 June 2011)

Characters in all my stories are absurd visual metaphors of common emotional states. The Carpet is the King of the Jungle and a doormat, at once (Figure 5). An image of pride and humility at once: like a king in rags, a wizard. Because, of course, he also flies, and a flying carpet is an ambiguous thing: a hearth rug that can take you on a journey to the stars. So he is freedom and stability, comfort and adventure, carpet and carnivore, all at once. His identity is multiple, and paradoxical. The Carpet explains: I may be a fake. I may have been a tiger. I may be just the ghost of a tiger here to haunt the house of the man who shot me. I prefer to think they are all true at once. (p.38)

And later, when the Carpet has claimed he can fly, he says that he is, in fact, flying all the time, and that he can travel through time, moving up and down the floors of history like an elevator … he is able to be in several places at once: that he was telling a different story to someone else in another room, at that very moment. (p.62)

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Figure 5. The Lying Carpet being beaten. Copyright © 2008 David Lucas.

Faith is both a lump of rock and a little girl – two very different things, at once. Young yet impossibly old. Vulnerable yet impervious. She is like a traumatised child – an elective mute – turned to stone – a statue. But of course she wants to live, to be free (Figure 6).

Drawing, Stories, Ambiguity, Magic

Figure 6. Faith jumping off her plinth. Copyright © 2008 David Lucas.

Each character in the story is alive with inner conflict – in an ambiguous double state. A union of opposites in conflict. Any metaphor exists in that same double-state.

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If you say ‘my heart is on fire’, you join two very different things, but the tension, the mismatch, captures something otherwise indescribable: a feeling. So I want to finish by talking about how art unites opposites. If I draw a star:

it is both a mark on a page, and a star in the night: a vast ball of boiling plasma – a billion hydrogen bombs going off all at once, seen at an infinite distance. It is endlessly ambiguous, irreducibly two things at once, hovering in perpetual tension. That is the magic of life – not just the magic of art. William Faulkner said that all good stories were about ‘the heart in conflict with itself’ (1950: n.p.).

Drawing, Stories, Ambiguity, Magic

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus said that everything that is alive is in a state of tension, of inner conflict – opposites fighting and working together at once. He used the example of a string on a harp or bow. The string is in tension, pulled by opposing forces and a pure musical note is born – or an arrow flies. Any work of art is a sort of map of conflict. Good art finds union in conflict: not peace, but beauty. Just like a pure note on a plucked string, or an arrow that hits the bullseye. Art is always a battle between these opposing forces: pattern versus representation, ideal versus real. Plate 8 is a picture from my book The Skeleton Pirate: to me it is a war between pattern and representation – I’m fighting for my life – fighting for both sides at once! (And the Skeleton Pirate himself is ambiguous of course: alive and dead at once.) In art, pattern represents the spiritual, ideal realm: religious art and folk art (in every culture) is highly patterned (for example, Plate 9). Roger Fry describes what he calls: the stigmata of the religious artist – the love of pure decoration, the patient elaboration of surface, the predilection for flat tones

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and precision of contour, the want of the sense of mass and relief, and the extravagant richness of invention. ([1920] 1957: 236)

This actually describes most children’s book illustrators. Pictures in children’s books are symbolic, idealised – unreal. But few illustrators are religious – it’s not exactly fashionable. But religion is all about crazy ambiguities: god becoming man, finding heaven on earth, the Infinite somehow having a human face (Plate 10). Christianity was founded on a series of crazy riddles and paradoxes. The Christian idea of the Trinity was invented (by Cappadocian monks) precisely to upset classical logic. Materialism wants to bring everything down to earth with a bump – like musical chairs when the music stops – invoking an iron Law of Identity. You are there. I am here. We are just machines and our brains are computers. Materialism tries to banish ambiguity from the world – and with it fun. In many areas of modern life literal mindedness has triumphed. Children’s books are a refuge for romantics. A review of Grendel says: Adults should be aware that the scene where Mum is turned to chocolate and starts to melt might be upsetting for some children.

I have read this story to hundreds of children – and of course none has ever been upset. Children understand symbolism. It’s literalminded adults who get confused. An editor friend of mine used to say: ‘Never underestimate children’s understanding. Never overestimate their knowledge.’ Children understand symbolism better than adults – perhaps because they’re not burdened with a lot of facts (Plate 11).

Notes 1 See www.gutenberg.org/files/16328/16328-h/16328-h.htm Beowulf: An Anglo-Saxon Epic Poem, translated from the Heyne-Socin text by Lesslie Hall, D.C. Heath & Co., Boston, New York, Chicago, 1892.

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Works Cited Primary Texts by David Lucas Grendel. London: Walker Books, 2013. The Skeleton Pirate. London: Walker Books, 2012. The Lying Carpet. London: Andersen, 2008. The Robot and the Bluebird. London: Andersen, 2007. Secondary Texts Ingall, Marjorie (2011) Paradoxical Storytelling for Children. New York Times Reprints, 17 June 2011. www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/books/review/paradoxicalstorytelling-for-children.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print. Campbell, Joseph ([1959] 1991) Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God: Vol. 1. New York: Arkana (Penguin Group). Faulkner, William (1950) Speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, 10 December, 1950. Acceptance of the Nobel Prize in Literature 1949. www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1949/f aulkner-speech.html. Fry, Roger ([1920] 1957) Vision and Design. York: Meridian Books. www.archive.org/stream/visionanddesign002535mbp/visiona nddesign002535mbp_djvu.txt.

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CHAPTER SEVEN FOOD AND THE CAPITALIST MARKETPLACE IN OSCAR WILDE’S FAIRY STORIES AOIFE BYRNE Identifying food as the major tool for critique, Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales are examined by Aoife Byrne, alongside Wilde’s more overtly political writing, as anti-capitalist warnings against the accumulation practised by the rich and the exploitation of the poor.

Along with other authors of Victorian children’s literature, such as Christina Rossetti, Catherine Sinclair and Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde is preoccupied with the materiality of food in demonstrating the inequality of the capitalist system. Wilde’s fairy stories utilise images of food in order to provide a salient critique of the fraudulence of the capitalist marketplace. Food as a motif runs throughout both his fairy tale collections, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891), in which he juxtaposes images of the opulent foods of the inactive ruling classes with the ‘faces … pinched with famine’ of the common man (Wilde, 2003: 87). This paper analyses Wilde’s representations of overindulgence, starvation and the authoritarian withholding of food in order to demonstrate how he translates his critique of inter-class struggles to a children’s literary market. The paper explores how the original illustrations interact with the text in the visual depictions of food, plenty and wanting. As well as this, I shall interpret tales from both Wilde’s collections as a warning against

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the abject poverty and starvation engendered by the injustices of the dominant capitalist system of accumulation. Wilde’s fairy stories are culturally embedded in contemporary discourses surrounding socialism and individualism. Moreover, they are deeply engaged with, and to a certain extent critical of, the emergence of the charity culture in the Victorian era. Jack Zipes in Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion reads the tales alongside ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ (1891), arguing that Wilde’s tales are imbued with a Christian socialist notion of humanism and contradict the civilizing process as it was practiced in England. To achieve the effect he desired, Wilde broke with the apologetics of classical fairy tales and the puerile Victorian stories in order to mirror social problems in Victorian England with a glimmer of hope – with a utopian impulse for change. (Zipes, 1983: 114)

As Zipes has shown, ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ explicitly attacks the ways in which the ruling classes of Wilde’s contemporary cultural context thrive financially at the expense of the subaltern lower classes. In his essay, Wilde’s use of food as a motif through which he critiques this inequality is perhaps most explicit where he asserts that the capitalist despot profits by ensuring that the common man subsists only on ‘scanty unwholesome food’ (Wilde, 2003: 25). In ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’, Wilde attacks the ways in which private property has destroyed individualism through its emphasis on accumulation of property as inextricably linked to the value of the person. Wilde offers a rationale for socialism, where private property, and thus crime, would be abolished, degrading authorities and despotisms would be unnecessary and individualism would finally be allowed to flourish. The fairy stories attempt to highlight Wilde’s concerns about the unjust nature of the society that was meted out to him. ‘The Devoted Friend’ and ‘The Happy Prince’ admonish societies that are structured around accumulation for the rich and exploitation of the poor, while ‘The Selfish Giant’ offers a more optimistic worldview in its

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deconstruction of capitalism and its vices in favour of a socialist commune.

Figure 7. Walter Crane’s ‘The Capitalist Vampire’ – Justice Journal (1885). Capitalism, embodied by a vampire, violently feeds on the ‘Common Man’, who has collapsed from hunger and overwork. Meanwhile, socialism, embodied by a woman, rallies the people to protest.

The interaction of text and image in the tales emphasises the visceral acts of feeding, while also envisaging wanting and starvation. The illustrations of Wilde’s fairy stories, and in particular Walter Crane’s original illustrations of The Happy Prince and Other Tales, serve to deepen the socialist conscience of the tales. Crane’s socialist principles are arguably most apparent in his career in his 1885 political cartoon ‘The Capitalist Vampire’, published in The Justice Journal (Figure 7). Crane’s socialist conscience quite understandably attracted him to Wilde’s own increasingly socialist writings, which, however codified, are certainly expressed in his fairy stories. As Isobel Spencer has pointed out about Crane’s ‘Capitalist Vampire’, ‘Socialism attempts to waken a slumbering workman whose lifeblood is being sucked by the monster of exploitation’ (1975: 148–49). Indeed, as Crane’s political cartoon so violently depicts, capitalism is frequently characterised as a metaphorical vampire, feeding off the lower

Food and the Capitalist Marketplace in Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Stories

classes through its exploitative procedures. What both Crane and Wilde have in common is their use of food and the visceral acts of feeding as a means through which they can express their shared socialist interest.

‘The Happy Prince’ Wilde’s ‘The Happy Prince’ tells the tale of the late Prince whose persona has been reanimated in the statue raised to his memory. The statue of the Prince is erected above the impoverished and starving city over which he once blithely and obliviously ruled. During his short lifetime, the Prince lived in the palace ‘Sans-Souci’, meaning ‘without cares’, and he was so content in his walled-up Eden that he never worried himself with what was behind the palace walls. The Happy Prince, along with his right-hand man the Swallow, is so distraught at the poverty and ugliness of the city that he does all in his power to try to help his suffering people. However, Wilde’s embedded message is that while the Prince’s attempts to help the starving poor are genuine, the Prince tries to alleviate their suffering in a method that serves only to prolong the inequities of the system. Wilde juxtaposes starvation and opulence in order to cast a disparaging eye on the inequality of the capitalist marketplace, as well as the laissez-faire governments of the Victorian era that are at once unintentionally and wilfully ignorant to the needs of the common man. The Prince acknowledges the starvation and suffering of the poor, but has been so conditioned by monetary systems in his lifetime that he cannot conceive of another way to end their suffering than through the unsustainable charitable giving of money. Wilde implies that this is an act which only prolongs and sustains capitalism. For instance, the scene where the Prince entreats the Swallow to pluck out his eyes and give the sapphire to the starving young playwright demonstrates the philosophically empty nature of accumulation when faced with the irrationality of starvation (Figure 8).

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Figure 8. Walter Crane’s title illustration of the Happy Prince from The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888). The illustration depicts some distant swallows migrating for the winter, blithely turning their backs on the ‘hideous’ hunger and poverty of the city. ‘Swallow, Swallow, little Swallow,’ said the Prince, ‘far away across the city I see a young man in a garret. … He is trying to finish a play for the Director of the Theatre, but he is too cold to write any more. There is no fire in the grate, and hunger has made him faint’. (Wilde, 1888: 14)

The Prince thinks that the playwright will acknowledge the value of his eyes, ‘made of rare sapphires, which were brought out of India a thousand years ago’ (p.15). He expects that the Playwright will sell it to the jeweller, and buy food and firewood, and finish his play. However, the delirium caused by starvation, along with the ethical insignificance of the money, causes the Playwright to

Food and the Capitalist Marketplace in Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Stories

completely misinterpret the gesture as recognition for his servitude to the capitalist system: ‘“I am beginning to be appreciated,” he cried; “this is from some great admirer. Now I can finish my play,” and he looked quite happy’ (p.16). The Playwright continues to slave away for the authoritarian Director despite his illness from starvation, and does not sell the sapphire for food as the Prince expects. Similarly, the scene where the Prince implores the Swallow to pluck the gold leaf from his body and give it to the orphans demonstrates the unsustainability of charitable giving from the rich to the poor. Rather, a system should be established wherein such poverty and starvation will no longer be possible: Leaf after leaf of the fine gold he brought to the poor, and the children’s faces grew rosier, and they laughed and played games in the street. ‘We have bread now!’ they cried. (p.20)

The children’s elation over finding the gold leaf, when juxtaposed with their assertion that they have bread ‘now’ demonstrates the unsustainability of charitable giving under capitalism. There will come a time that the gold leaf will run out, the children will no longer have bread and they will once more be starving under the same unequal system (Figure 9).

Figure 9. Illustration from ‘The Happy Prince’. Walter Crane’s illustration of the starving people of the Prince’s city.

To return to ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’, Wilde explicitly echoes this sentiment in his essay where he says, Under Socialism all this will, of course, be altered. There will be no people living in fetid dens and fetid rags, and bringing up unhealthy, hunger-pinched children in the midst of impossible and absolutely repulsive surroundings. (1912: 4–5)

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In his essay, Wilde continues to argue that under the constraints of private property, the rich, although well-intentioned, only temporarily alleviate the suffering of the poor through charitable giving. They quite understandably attempt to lessen the suffering brought by the lack of private property, however they erroneously do so through awarding more private property. Wilde’s stance then, is that it ‘is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property’ (p.4). While well meaning, the isolated, untenable altruism of the Prince and the Swallow has done more harm than good. The Prince has a very limited supply of private property on his person to disperse to the poor. Most importantly however, the noble, though misguided, deeds of the Prince and the Swallow have distracted the poor from their starvation and poverty, and guided them to the false conclusion that they are beginning to be recognised by the capitalist market and should continue their servitude to the monetary system. As such, the Prince and the Swallow’s giving of money is unsustainable; it is the system that needs to change in order to prevent such poverty and starvation in the first place. Moreover, that the reader never learns of the fate of those who received money from the Swallow and the Prince sheds an even more critical light on the one-sided nature of altruism when defined in monetary terms. On the other hand, if, as social commentators like Wilde’s illustrator Walter Crane might argue, capitalism can be interpreted as a vampire that feeds on its victims, then the figure of the Happy Prince, so utterly convinced of the success of capitalism as a system, both literally and figuratively feeds himself to the lower classes in an attempt to lessen their suffering. As Zipes puts it: As we have seen, most of Wilde’s tales end provocatively with Christ-like figures dying, and the reader is compelled to question why such remarkable protagonists could not fulfil themselves within society. (1983: 120)

As Zipes demonstrates, the Happy Prince can be lauded for his altruism and genuine attempts to help the starving people through

Food and the Capitalist Marketplace in Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Stories

his Christ-like self-sacrificial acts. However, heaven has been completely divided from the earth due to the inequality of the system which governs the earth, and as such the Prince cannot possibly fulfil himself owing to the extent of the social inequality. Although the ending of the story is bittersweet insofar as the Happy Prince’s self-sacrifice brings him to heaven, this does not mitigate the fact that his self-sacrifice also brings about his demise under this system.

‘The Devoted Friend’ In ‘The Devoted Friend’, Wilde tells of an exploitative relationship between little Hans and his supposedly devoted friend, Big Hugh the Miller. As Anne Markey points out, Wilde ironically reflects on the manipulative relationship between rich Hugh the Miller and poor little Hans, and so, by extension, on the inequities on a hierarchical social system which perpetuates itself by means of exploitation masquerading as mutual interest. (2011: 125)

Wilde’s depiction of food to illustrate this exploitative relationship encapsulates the laissez-faire policies of the Victorian era. Indeed, Jarlath Killeen has persuasively argued for the Irish connection to ‘The Devoted Friend’, contending that little Hans can be read as an allegory for the common man during the Great Famine, while the Miller can be read as the laissez-faire government that simultaneously exploits and ignores the plight of the starving people. The tale commences with the Linnet, the herald of truth, satirically describing the exploitative relationship of Big Hugh and little Hans: Little Hans had a great many friends, but the most devoted friend of all was big Hugh the Miller. Indeed, so devoted was the rich Miller to little Hans, that he would never go by his garden without leaning over the wall and plucking a large nosegay, or a handful of sweet herbs, or filling his pockets with plums and cherries if it was the fruit season. (Wilde, 1888: 63)

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Already, Wilde uses the motif of food to illustrate injustices embedded in the economic policies of his contemporaries. The Miller both literally and symbolically takes the fruits of little Hans’ labour without giving anything in return and thus allows the latter to come to a very real privation (Figure 10).

Figure 10. Title illustration from ‘The Devoted Friend’. Big Hugh the Miller takes the fruits of little Hans’ labour.

During the winter, when the harvest is over, little Hans comes to the brink of starvation and is forced to sell his possessions in order to buy food. Nonetheless, the Miller chooses to ignore little Hans’ plight, demonstrating the worst immoderations of laissez-faire policy. The Miller’s youngest son’s conceptualising of a socialist idyll in which Hans can be included during the winter is brutally rebuffed by the Miller: ‘But could we not ask little Hans up here?’ said the Miller’s youngest son. ‘If poor Hans is in trouble I will give him half my porridge, and show him my white rabbits”. (p.65)

The Miller’s response to his son’s suggestion expresses the dominant culture’s thinly veiled justification for the propagation of the class system: ‘Why, if little Hans came up here, and saw our warm fire, and our good supper, and our great cask of red wine, he might get envious, and envy is a most terrible thing, and would spoil anybody’s nature’. (p.68)

That the Miller’s consciousness of his economic advantage over little Hans is expressed through his knowledge that he has luxurious food, where little Hans has none at all, puts a stark emphasis on the bare parlour of little Hans’ own freezing home. Thus, Wilde emphasises the inequality of the system of

Food and the Capitalist Marketplace in Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Stories

accumulation. This inequality is emphasised by Big Hugh’s commoditising of little Hans, where Big Hugh sends little Hans on the journey that causes his untimely death. The Miller as good as tells little Hans that his life is not even worth as much as a handheld lantern (Killeen, 2007): the Miller asserts that ‘it would be a great loss to me if anything happened to it’ (Wilde, 1888: 81). Despite little Hans’ supposed popularity, the Miller is completely unchallenged for his hand in his death and is allowed to retain his position as a hypocritical despot. Wilde again uses food to articulate the monstrosity of this injustice: ‘Little Hans is certainly a great loss to everyone,’ said the Blacksmith, when the funeral was over, and they were all seated comfortably in the inn, drinking spiced wine and eating sweet cakes. (p.83)

The lavish spiced wine and sweet cakes of the ruling classes, when contrasted with little Hans’ wanting for even the most basic food is Wilde’s representation of capitalist vices at their most immoral. As Killeen argues, ‘People like Hans are dying while egoists like the Miller are being praised for their altruism’ (2007: 81). What is more, Wilde’s critique of individuals who blindly follow convention or are easily seduced by such ideology extends to those who manage to see through the distortion but fail to act, those who do not challenge authority, or who buckle under authoritarian pressure. The people who wondered about the Miller’s intentions but never intervened, and then allowed him to be chief mourner at little Hans’ funeral are equally critiqued, as well as perhaps Big Hugh’s youngest son who, on being scolded by his father, silently wavers on his proposal of a fairer way of treating little Hans. The final decorative illustration of ‘The Devoted Friend’ by Jacomb Hood depicts little Hans’ abandoned broken wheelbarrow, which is overshadowed by Big Hugh’s domineering mill. That both the subjects of these juxtaposed images are used in the production of food evokes the tragedy of the starvation of the ‘little man’ under the overarching system (Figure 11).

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Figure 11. The final illustration of ‘The Devoted Friend’ depicts little Hans’ abandoned broken wheelbarrow, overshadowed by the domineering mill.

‘The Selfish Giant’ ‘The Selfish Giant’, unlike the culminations of the bittersweet ‘The Happy Prince’ and the completely tragic ‘The Devoted Friend’, provides an optimistic ending of resolved social tensions wherein the system of accumulation has been exposed as immoral and is dismantled. At the tale’s commencement, a group of children has established a socialist Eden in a giant’s vacant garden. The garden is initially described in terms of productivity insofar as nature’s reaction to the socialist idyll is to provide rich fruit and flowers for the children. It was a large lovely garden, with soft green grass. Here and there over the grass stood beautiful flowers like stars, and there were twelve peach-trees that in the spring-time broke out into delicate blossoms of pink and pearl, and in the autumn bore rich fruit. (Wilde, 1888: 45)

However, the Giant, on his return, is outraged to discover intruders in his garden, which he meets with a predictably capitalist justification for new self-preserving legislation in economic dialogue: ‘My own garden is my own garden’. He secures his private property by walling it off and takes aggressive measures to ensure that the children will not intrude again: ‘TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED’ (p.46). The Giant’s initial social outlook is characterised as redundant and unjust; he takes far more than he needs at the expense of the children’s commune that has been in existence for seven years.

Food and the Capitalist Marketplace in Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Stories

Nature is so utterly disgusted with the Giant’s capitalist corruption of the children’s socialist utopia that it refuses to produce the fruit and flowers, condemning the garden to a constant state of winter. As Killeen points out, nature brings retribution to ‘wreck a horrific vengeance on the capitalist landlord’ (2007: 73). Only in the garden of the Selfish Giant it was still Winter. The birds did not care to sing in it as there were no children, and the trees forgot to blossom. (Wilde, 1888: 47)

Natural forces have banded together to displace the tyranny of the Giant in a method not dissimilar to the way in which Wilde’s ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ suggests that common men should band together to displace degrading and dictatorial authority: When [authority] is violently, grossly, and cruelly used, it produces a good effect, by creating, or at any rate bringing out, the spirit of revolt and individualism that is to kill it. (1912: 34)

The birds, trees and flowers, as representatives of productivity in a healthy ecotopia, are so utterly disgusted and enraged by the cruelty of the disenfranchisement of the common man that they refuse to work within a system where the Giant cruelly and degradingly tries to enforce his capricious laws of ownership. In the end, however the Giant realises the error of his ways and uses an axe, the Marxist symbol of the workers, to demolish the wall that once sectored off his capitalist interests. The Giant’s act epitomises the defeat of private property. Not only does the Giant allow the children to play in the garden on the demolition of the wall, he gives up all ownership to the people, and nature becomes fruitful and productive once more (Figure 12).

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Figure 12. The Selfish Giant. Nature becomes fruitful and productive once more. .

Pomegranates and the Foods of the Ruling Classes As we have seen, Wilde’s use of food to critique social inequality runs throughout his fairy stories. However, Wilde places a particular emphasis on the pomegranate, which tends to signify opulence, social standing, access to exotic markets and membership of the exclusive ruling classes. In ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’, for instance, Wilde contrasts love and money as opposing concepts in terms of philosophical meaning, implying that since love cannot be quantified under the system of accumulation, it is philosophically sound, while the capitalist system is void of deeper meaning: Pearls and pomegranates cannot buy it, nor is it set forth in the marketplace. It may not be purchased of the merchants, nor can it be weighed out in the balance for gold. (2003: 13)

Food and the Capitalist Marketplace in Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Stories

Wilde’s juxtaposition of pomegranates with gold and precious stones designates to the exotic fruits a rich and ethereal quality that aligns them with the exclusive and authoritarian ruling classes, and also the vapidity and totalitarianism he implies that they embody. Wilde continually uses the pomegranate as a warning against excess at the expense of the starving proletariat. This is perhaps most apparent in Wilde’s second collection of fairy stories A House of Pomegranates.

Figure 13. Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon’s original cover illustration of A House of Pomegranates (1888).

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The original edition of Wilde’s A House of Pomegranates features extravagantly ornamented illustrations by Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, which fit within the range of the mid-to-late nineteenth-century Aesthetic, Symbolist, Pre-Raphaelite, and Arts and Crafts, and Art Nouveau movements. Wilde’s use of the pomegranate as a symbol for the ruling classes is reflected on the cover of the collection (Figure 13 above). Ricketts and Shannon’s cover image depicts tamed sequestered gardens with richly dressed women picking pomegranates from plentiful trees. These artistic movements represent stages in the nineteenth-century artistic dialogue with the mass production typified by the Industrial Revolution. They variously embrace the new possibilities of technological advances in art, while simultaneously endorsing a nostalgic backward gaze, which in the case of the Arts and Crafts movement is particularly evident in the use in book illustration of the much older technique of woodcuts. The connections of British Art Nouveau to socialism were pronounced from its inception through the closely related Arts and Crafts movement, whose major proponent, with John Ruskin, was the Pre-Raphaelite William Morris, who also co-founded the Socialist League in Britain (Lahor, 2007). Because Wilde submitted work to The Yellow Book (an illustrated quarterly compiled by Aubrey Beardsley, published by John Lane) that frequently published illustrations in the Art Nouveau style, as well as the fact that he was a friend of the Symbolist/Art Nouveau illustrator and artist Aubrey Beardsley, it is reasonable to think that he was aware of the sociopolitical stance of these styles. Killeen similarly points out Wilde’s awareness of the backward gaze during this time: ‘As an anarchist, Wilde was aware of the nostalgia for a simpler society that characterised such political movements’ (2007: 169). This use of the pomegranate as a motif for the ruling classes is perhaps most explicit in ‘The Star-Child’, one of the longer stories in A House of Pomegranates. In this story, Wilde’s use of decadent food as a means through which he can voice class inequality is arguably more pronounced than before. When the Star-Child goes

Food and the Capitalist Marketplace in Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Stories

on a journey to discover himself and recover his parents, he is captured by a group of soldiers who sell him to a slave owner for a bowl of sweet wine. Killeen’s reading of ‘The Star-Child’, which is informed by the works of Max Weber, demonstrates that The city soldiers take for granted that, since they represent the state, they effectively own the Star-Child and can do with him what they will. (2007: 169)

Not only is power centralised in the representatives of the state, however, but in the economy-driven motivations of the merchant who purchases the Star-Child. That the slave owner lives in a house covered with a fruitful pomegranate tree symbolises the selfserving decadence of his authoritarian class. The scene where the slave owner leads the Star-Child to the dungeon is demonstrative of a class that takes more than it needs, while simultaneously perpetuating the suppression of the deprived lower classes. As the narrator tells us: And after that they had gone through many streets they came to a little door that was set in a wall that was covered with a pomegranate tree. … And when the scarf was taken off his eyes, the Star-Child found himself in a dungeon, that was lit by a lantern of horn. And the old man set before him some mouldy bread on a trencher and said, ‘Eat,’ and some brackish water in a cup and said, ‘Drink,’ and when he had eaten and drunk, the old man went out, locking the door behind him and fastening it with an iron chain. (Wilde, 1994: 158–59)

The stark comparisons of the decadent pomegranates and sweet wine with the mouldy bread and brackish water add a further cruel dimension to the slave driver’s authoritarianism. As the narrative unfolds, the slave owner manipulates the Star-Child into indentured slavery through granting and withholding food. The slave owner sends the Star-Child on quests to find rare and precious gold; and the latter could easily escape, but for the fact that he is so consumed with worry over his starvation, as well as the starvation of the other poor people around him, that thoughts of escape do not occur to him. However, the Star-Child’s anxiety

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does not distract him from the suffering and starvation of the poor, and when he finds the coloured pieces of gold he gives them to the starving people in an attempt to lessen their hardship. The Star-Child’s self-sacrificial suffering under authoritarianism ultimately leads to his redemption, where he is reconciled with his parents and given what the narrator implies to be his rightful role as lord of the city. The narrator tells us he rules fairly and with mercy: ‘and to the poor he gave bread’ (p.164). Nonetheless, Wilde ends the tale with ominous abruptness where he informs us that Yet ruled he not long, so great had been his suffering, and so bitter the fire of his testing, for after the space of three years he died. And he who came after him ruled evilly. (p.164)

The abrupt method in which Wilde concludes ‘The Star-Child’ is unexpected; with this sudden ending, the fact that the authoritarian ruling classes have regained their right to rule resonates all the more.

Conclusion In conclusion, the ways in which Wilde’s fairy stories from both The Happy Prince and Other Tales and A House of Pomegranates utilise the tropes of overindulgence, starvation and the authoritarian withholding of food demonstrate how Wilde translates his critique of class inequality to a children’s literary market. The original illustrations further support the text in the visual depictions of food, plenty and wanting. The illustrations interact with the text to emphasise this socialist ethic, which had been informed by Wilde’s own essay on socialism and individualism, ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’.

Food and the Capitalist Marketplace in Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Stories

Works Cited Primary Texts Wilde, Oscar (illus. Walter Crane and Jacomb Hood) (1888) The Happy Prince and Other Tales. London: David Nutt. https://archive.org/stream/happyprinceando00hoodgoog#pag e/n16/mode/2up. Wilde, Oscar (1912) The Soul of Man under Socialism. London: Author J. Humphries. https://ia600208.us.archive.org/22/items/soulofmanunderso0 0wildiala/soulofmanunderso00wildiala.pdf. –– (1915) A House of Pomegranates. London: Methuen. http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/wilde/oscar/house/. Wilde, Oscar (ed. Ian Small) (1994) Complete Short Fiction. London: Penguin. The Happy Prince and Other Tales ([1888] 1–66); A House of Pomegranates ([1891] 81–184). –– (2003) The Soul of Man under Socialism. In Ian Small (ed) The Decay of Lying and Other Essays. London: Penguin (pp.233– 74). The Happy Prince and Other Tales includes ‘The Happy Prince’, ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’, ‘The Selfish Giant’ and ‘The Devoted Friend’. A House of Pomegranates includes ‘The Young King’, ‘The Fisherman and his Soul’ and ‘The Star-Child’. Secondary Texts Killeen, Jarlath (2005) The Faiths of Oscar Wilde: Catholicism, Folklore and Ireland. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. –– (2007) The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde. Aldershot: Ashgate. Lahor, Jean (trans. Rebecca Brimacombe) (2007) Art Nouveau: Art of a Century. New York: Parkstone Press. Markey, Anne (2011) Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales: Origins and Contexts. Dublin and Portland, OR: Irish Academic Press. Spencer, Isobel (1975) Walter Crane. London: Studio Vista.

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Zipes, Jack (1983) Inverting and subverting the world with hope: The fairy tales of George MacDonald, Oscar Wilde and L. Frank Baum. In Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization. New York: Routledge (pp.97–133).

CHAPTER EIGHT UNPUNISHED GLUTTONY IN ASTRID LINDGREN’S CHILDREN’S BOOKS ANNE MALEWSKI Children’s literature teems with descriptions of gluttony. In contrast to many other children’s classics, Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking and Karlson trilogies let gluttony go unpunished. Lindgren’s approach is unique and empowering still today.

The Potential of Food ‘I don’t trust a novel in which the characters never eat.’ (Linda Sue Park, 2009: 233)

Little Red Riding Hood’s basket, Margaret Atwood’s edible woman, Robert Cormier’s chocolate wars and the apples in Coraline’s dressing-gown pocket: food permeates literature. Recognising its semiotic value, Roland Barthes defined food as ‘a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations, and behaviour’ ([1975] 2008: 29). In fact, food is one of the most relatable tropes in human history and, as such, both personal and political. It holds considerable literary potential, especially in children’s literature. In an essay on significant food moments in children’s literature, Linda Sue Park states that food fulfils several literary functions: ‘time- and place-specific’ food effortlessly establishes settings, a character’s relationship to food conveys

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character traits by showing instead of by telling and readers can identify with a story via food because, as she puts it, ‘everybody eats, especially kids [emphasis in original]’ (2009: 233–34). Furthermore, food provides a safe space for creative experiments. As food is a familiar trope, a staple in the everyday life of readers of all ages, unexpected food idioms such as ‘lemon-pie smile’ in Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia (1977: 22), ‘we must bite our time’ in David Almond’s The Boy who Swam with Piranhas (2012: 208) and ‘crazy as a crumpet’ in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (1972: 105) are effective signifiers. In line with the anthropologists James L. Watson and Melissa L. Caldwell’s view of food practices as ‘a complex field of relationships, expectations, and choices that are contested, negotiated, and often unequal’ (2005: 1), food can further be used to convey highly political subtexts and communicate power relationships. Foodrelated power relationships are pivotal for children. In life, the food intake of most children is regulated by adults who decide on when food is available, which kind of food is served and how much of it the child has to eat. In fiction, one of the most delightful ƐƵďǀĞƌƐŝŽŶƐŽĨƚŚĞƐĞ ƌĞƐƚƌŝĐƚŝŽŶƐ ŝƐ ŐůƵƚƚŽŶLJо͚ƚŚĞŚĂďŝƚŽĨĞĂƚŝŶŐ and drinking too much’ (Oxford Advanced Learners’ Dictionary, 2003: 547). As gluttony has been considered to be one of the seven deadly sins since the sixth century (Rotor, 2006: ix), it is no surprise that its representation in children’s literature is rarely permanently positive and often has negative repercussions. In comparison with other children’s classics, Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking and Karlson trilogies present a unique approach to gluttony.1

Gluttony in Children’s Literature The representation of gluttony in children’s literature became increasingly popular during the Victorian era. According to Carolyn Daniel, a ‘bland and restricted nursery diet’ led to ‘fictional feasting’ (2006: 11). Susan Honeyman agrees that ‘gastronomic

Unpunished Gluttony in Astrid Lindgren’s Children’s Books

utopias project the urges of the hungry’ (2010: 45). Nevertheless, the Victorian moral codes ultimately demanded punishment even in literature (Daniel, 2006: 12). At best, gluttony was ambivalent. This approach might not be surprising in Christina Rossetti’s poem ‘Goblin Market’ or Mary Martha Sherwood’s cautionary tales of ƚŚĞ &ĂŝƌĐŚŝůĚ ĨĂŵŝůLJ͕ ǁŚĞƌĞ ͚ĞĂƚŝŶŐ ƚŽŽ ŵƵĐŚ о Žƌ ƐŽŵĞƚŝŵĞƐ ǁĂŶƚŝŶŐƚŽĞĂƚĂƚĂůůоƐƚĂŶĚƐĂƐĂŵĂƌŬĞƌŽĨƚŚĞĐŚŝůĚ͛ƐǀŝĐŝŽƵƐŶĞƐƐ͛ (Labbe, 2008: 93). However, even in nonsensical classics throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by, for instance, Lewis Carroll, A.A. Milne and Roald Dahl, eating comes with a moral and gluttony with punishment. In Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, food is magical but unreliable. A bottle of fluid and a piece of cake can shrink or grow people and, more importantly, these objects order Alice to drink and eat them ([1865] 1982: 21–24). Although Alice’s food intake is not determined by adults, she is not much better off: via these food imperatives, the food itself has more power than the child. The German fairy tale ‘Das Märchen vom dicken, fetten Pfannkuchen’ about a pancake who refuses to be eaten and runs away, is a similar example of nonsensical food autonomy (Kniepert, n.d.). In A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh books, food is less powerful but more prominent. According to his son Christopher Milne, A.A. Milne was a nostalgic eater who ‘ate not just for present pleasure but also to re-evoke past pleasures. In the way that smells are nostalgic to most of us, so to him were tastes’ (1976: 115–16). Despite this nostalgic attitude, excessive eating is problematic in Winnie-the-Pooh as well: after eating every last pawful of his friend Rabbit’s honey, Pooh gets stuck in the front door ([1926] 2000: ch.2). To escape his predicament, Pooh has to lose weight and skip meals. On top of this hard punishment for an exceptionally hungry bear, his hind legs are being used as clothes hangers. Naturally, Pooh learns no lesson and continues to indulge his greed. While his behaviour is being tolerated by the other characters, the general sentiment is that he is an exception to the rule. Another

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gluttonous instance comprises Tigger trying various kinds of food in one continuous procession of meals ([1928] 2004: ch.2). Tigger needs to find out which food he likes because he has to eat to survive. Thus, the purpose of his gluttony is nutrition, much like in Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar, where a caterpillar bingeeats to become a butterfly. Roald Dahl’s sweet tooth is apparent not only in his autobiography ([1984] 2008: ch.2) but also in much of his other work. The descriptions of food in his children’s books even inspired recipe collections. Nevertheless, gluttony, as many other ‘abuses’ of food, is punished, even in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory ([1964] 2007: ch.17); it is a paradise with a strict set of rules. In Matilda, gluttony itself becomes a punishment: a ‘large and round’ boy who had stolen a piece of cake is forced to eat an entire chocolate cake and does not enjoy the experience at all ([1988] 2003: 162–82): the joy of munching chocolate cake is rewritten. While Matilda includes positive food references such as the kind teacher Miss Honey’s surname, gluttony as an act in the narrative is presented negatively. At a closer look, this is true of many iconic moments of gluttony in children’s classics.

Gluttony in Astrid Lindgren’s Work The Swedish author Astrid Lindgren breaks the pattern. While not avoiding serious manifestations of hunger, her children’s books teem with picnics, Christmas feasts and other expressions of gastronomic enthusiasm. In Mardie to the Rescue, a family has a spontaneous birthday picnic in a treetop (1981: 214–38). In Emil’s Pranks, Emil invites the downtrodden inhabitants of the local almshouse home for a Christmas feast; there are hardly any leftovers for his own family’s Christmas meal (1973: 76–119). In Emil in the Soup Tureen, Emil finishes his family’s entire sausage supply all by himself (1970: 37–67) and, in Lotta’s Bike, the adventure culminates in a birthday dinner (1973: n.p.). Hence, as the scholar and critic of children’s literature Ulla Lundqvist

Unpunished Gluttony in Astrid Lindgren’s Children’s Books

observes, ‘enjoyment of food [matglädje] permeates Lindgren’s work’ (1979: 150). The most significant depictions of gluttony are found in Lindgren’s trilogies on Pippi Longstocking and Karlson.2 Two of her most iconic and food-driven characters, they authoritatively invent their own food customs, gastronomically defy adults and gorge themselves silly on more than their fair share. Pippi Longstocking Pippi Longstocking is an extraordinarily strong and creative nine year old who lives on her own, has a vast supply of gold coins and frequently challenges the expectations of adults. Already, in the introductory sentences, food marks her difference: She had neither mother nor father, which was really rather nice, for in this way there was no one to tell her to go to bed just when she was having most fun, and no one to make her take cod-liver3 oil when she felt like eating peppermints. (PL: 9)

Even Pippi herself is characterised by food: her hair is ‘the same colour as a carrot’ and her nose ‘the shape of a very small potato’ (p.13). Apart from the wholesome vegetable features, she also has ‘healthy white teeth’ (p.13) and, thus, her body contradicts potential reader expectations connected to her unusual, unsupervised lifestyle: although the child is in charge of her own food intake and has unlimited access to sweets, Pippi is taking excellent care of herself. Pippi frequently enforces her own idiosyncratic food rules and food lore. She likes to beat batter with a bath brush (p.18), stir saucepans with an umbrella (PLGA: 276) and recite nonsense rhymes while cooking (PL: 17). In one memorable scene, Pippi enthusiastically makes cookies on the kitchen floor: She had made a huge pile of dough, and was rolling it out on the kitchen floor. ‘Cause can you imagine,’ said Pippi to her little monkey, ‘what earthly good a pastry board would be when you’re going to make at least five hundred ginger-snaps?’ There she lay

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on the floor and cut out heart-shaped ginger-snaps as if her life depended on it. (p.21)

Pippi worries about neither flour on the floor nor manners at the table. Her friends Tommy and Annika are to eat their pancakes before they get cold instead of waiting for her to join them (p.18) and may speak with their mouths full (p.70). After meals, Pippi does the dishes by wrapping them in the tablecloth and discarding the bundle (p.129). Occasionally adopting Pippi’s carefree attitude does not harm her well-mannered friends: when Annika falls asleep with unbrushed, chocolate-covered teeth, she does not develop caries (PGA: 333). Furthermore, Pippi imparts her own food lore. She tells many a tall tale about food customs in other countries (PL: 51–52, 54–58), a hollow oak in her garden provides chocolate on Thursdays and ginger beer on the other days (PLGA: 321–22) and, at the end of the trilogy, she produces three pea-like ‘squigglypills’ with the power to prolong childhood (PLSS: 244–48). While Tommy and Annika discuss the possibility of Pippi inventing instead of knowing her food lore (PL: 32; PLSS: 244–48), they continue to suspend disbelief and, thus, food becomes magical. Moreover, food is a weapon. A much-debated example of Pippi defying adults via food is the chapter ‘Pippi Goes to a Tea Party’ (PL: ch.9). Whether or not the title is a reference to American history, Pippi’s behaviour is revolutionary, especially with regard to the sociocultural context of the book. Having baked ample cakes for her tea party, Tommy and Annika’s mother Mrs Settergren allows her children to invite Pippi as well. She assumes that they will eat in the nursery upstairs (p.102) and, thus, hopes not to ‘have any bother with her own children’ (p.99).4 Nervous about her ability to behave, Pippi arrives on the scene like a warrior: her hair a ‘lion’s mane’, her mouth painted ‘a violent red’ and her eyebrows ‘blackened’, she looks ‘quite dangerous’ (p.101). Compared to the hitherto peaceful surroundings of ‘three distinguished ladies’ talking quietly and Tommy and Annika silently looking at an album (p.101), she is flamboyance incarnate. Her behaviour is as unexpected as her appearance: Pippi yells her

Unpunished Gluttony in Astrid Lindgren’s Children’s Books

greetings and, instead of retreating upstairs, she occupies the best chair and demands to be fed (pp.101–2). Soon she begins to help herself. She scrambled together as many cakes as she could manage on one plate, slung five lumps of sugar into a teacup, emptied half the cream-pitcher into it as well, and returned to the chair with her plunder before the ladies had even come forward to the table. Pippi stretched her legs out in front of her and put the plate of cakes between the tips of her toes. Then she plunged each cake with gusto into the teacup and pushed so much into her mouth that she couldn’t get a word out, much as she tried. In a trice she had finished all the cakes on the plate. She stood up, hit on the plate like on a tambourine, and went up to the table to see if there were any left. (pp.102–3)

Unaware of the ladies’ disapproving looks, Pippi follows this first round of gluttony with a glorious second and devours an entire cream cake by herself. Turning to the stern ladies, she uses a surprisingly adult tone: ‘Now, you mustn’t be upset about such a little accident, … [t]he main thing is that we have our health.’ This topsy-turvy sense of authority is complemented by Pippi demonstrating the joys of walking barefoot on caster sugar in an attempt to cheer them up (p.104). In a newspaper article, one of the sternest critics of the series, John Landquist, vehemently disapproves of this scene: ‘No normal child eats an entire cake at a tea party or walks barefoot on caster sugar. … This smacks of a mad imagination or of sick obsessions’ (1946, cited in Lundqvist, 1979: 240). His anger about gluttony and food on the floor is symptomatic of the book’s sociocultural context: it was first published in 1945, a time when extravagance and waste were virtually outlawed. The propaganda of rationing was omnipresent throughout the 1940s: ‘the children were often told how necessary it was to eat crispbread instead of cakes and how important it was not to waste food’ (Lundqvist, 1979: 54). Even gluttony’s appearance in fiction was strictly policed and Landquist’s comments triggered a ‘Pippi controversy’ in the media (Lundqvist,

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1979: 232). However, Lindgren herself barely punishes Pippi. Mrs Settergren forces Pippi to sit with the children and, when Pippi keeps interrupting the (mean-spirited) adult conversation with her own (good-natured) tales, Mrs Settergren bans Pippi from her house. Pippi apologises: ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t behave myself’ (p.110). However, while this development might be read as a punishment, Pippi keeps shouting interruptions as she is leaving and apologises not for not behaving herself but for not being able to, which means that she has nothing to apologise for. Most remarkably, her main offence, the daring act of eating an entire cake by herself, does go unpunished. Mrs Settergreen fails to witness that particular act of gluttony and, returning to the room afterwards, punishes Pippi only for the caster sugar incident. In fact, Mrs Settergren is pleased with the swift disappearance of the cake and assumes that her guests simply enjoyed it a lot (p.104). Pippi frequently escapes punishment when she is eating without adult permission (PLGA: ch.4). However, Pippi’s gluttony is inclusive; she also provides access for other children. When Pippi realises that a rich lady holds examinations for children to decide whether or not they deserve sweets, Pippi holds her own, decidedly nonsensical, examinations as a result of which every child is rewarded with large bags of sweets (PLSS: ch.4). A heightened version of sweet charity ensues when Pippi goes shopping. Tapping into a tradition of longing, present in, for instance, Richmal Crompton’s Just William (1922: ch.10) and Roald Dahl and Stephen Fry’s autobiographies (1984: ch.2; 2010: 5–23), Lindgren captures the lure of the sweet shop. A group of children was outside, gazing at all the wonderful things displayed in the window: large jars full of red and blue and green sweets, long rows of chocolate bars, piles and piles of chewing gum, and the most tempting toffee lollipops. No wonder the little children gazed and now and then heaved a heavy sigh, because they had no money, not even one little penny. (PLGA: 267)

Carelessly rich, Pippi enters and asks for 36 pounds of sweets, which she generously shares with the crowd outside.

Unpunished Gluttony in Astrid Lindgren’s Children’s Books

A sweet-eating began, the like of which had never been seen in the little town. All the children filled their mouths with sweets, the red ones with the luscious juice inside, and the green acid ones, and the liquorice allsorts, and the jelly babies – all higgledypiggledy. You could also have a chocolate cigarette in the corner of your mouth, because the taste of chocolate and jelly mixed was very nice. More children came running from every direction, and Pippi shared out handfuls all round. (p.268)

The mouth-watering descriptions of textures, tastes and colours as well as the sheer abundance of sweets that enables children to eat multiple kinds at the same time makes for an enchanting depiction of gluttony. While this occurrence already seems fantastic to child readers who suffer from chronic shortness of money and depend on begging their various adults to fund their longing, Pippi gracefully buys another 36 pounds to prolong the delight. Especially for her friends Tommy and Annika, Pippi provides plenty of meals, snacks and spontaneous feasts that invariably end with pure and unpunished happiness, as in: ‘At last the children were so full they could hardly move, and they sat quietly in the sunshine and simply felt good’ (PL: 70). In short, Pippi Longstocking is in charge of her own food intake and generously provides access for other children as well. In response to critics who consider food scenes to be the sex scenes of children’s literature, Kara K. Keeling and Scott Pollard refer to Paul Rozin’s argument that Freud should have used food instead of sex to explore the relationship between biology and society, for ‘everyone must eat, but not everyone has to reproduce’ (2012: 3). Similarly, Lisa Rowe Fraustino observes that in stories such as Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, mothers provide food as an expression of their love (2008: 64). In the light of these arguments, Pippi can be read as a motherly rebel, providing for other children but also playing with food and relaxing rules. Contrary to the war propaganda, food is plentiful, magical, delicious and extravagant. Eating is encouraged instead of punished. Pippi, with her healthy teeth and loving attitude, proves that gluttony can be inclusive and wholesome.

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Karlson Where Pippi’s charms are obvious, Karlson is more of an acquired taste. He, too, lives by his own rules in his own house. However, his house is clinging to the roof of a building in Stockholm instead of standing on its own in a village. Similarly, Karlson, a chubby, selfish, incredibly self-confident and, most of all, incredibly hungry boy with a propeller on his back, takes advantage of others instead of providing for himself. Introducing himself as ‘a handsome, intelligent and reasonably stout man in [his] prime’ (KR: 8),6 Karlson befriends Midge, the youngest of three children, who is desperate for company. Their relationship is presented as a symbiosis: for Midge, ‘it was a very good thing …, because when Karlson flew in everything became exciting’ and Karlson benefits from their friendship ‘because it can’t be all that much fun living quite alone in a house which nobody dreams is there at all’ (p.3). However, their power balance is unusual: Karlson resorts to his universal catchphrase ‘That’s a mere trifle’ instead of to an apology when he breaks Midge’s toys (p.10) and constantly demands food, or smugly cheats Midge out of his fair share of treats. The trilogy’s essential food moments show Karlson creatively acquiring food, challenging adults and generally being insatiable. Karlson’s greedy schemes are impressively inventive. A prime example is his make-believe illness (pp.39–55). Karlson insists that he has a temperature and needs Midge ‘to be a mother’ (p.41). Thus, Midge has to spend his pocket-money savings on Karlson’s medicine: Karlson on the Roof’s gluggety-glug medicine. It has to be half sweets and half chocolate and you stir it all together with some bits of biscuit. … It helps bring down your temperature. (p.47)

When Midge doubts the effectiveness of the mixture, Karlson uses the opportunity to increase his share of sweets: he bets a chocolate biscuit that the medicine will work. Having taken the medicine, he concedes that it did not but, nevertheless, claims the biscuit:

Unpunished Gluttony in Astrid Lindgren’s Children’s Books

If you won, it’s surely not too much for me to get the chocolate biscuit? … There has to be a bit of justice in the world. In any case, you are a greedy little boy, sitting there thinking about chocolate when I’m having a temperature. (p.50)

Never satisfied, Karlson acquires another chocolate biscuit and two toffees in a similarly shady manner (pp.51–54). This behaviour is typical of Karlson. Even when he eats a peach that Midge had meant to share with him and leaves only the peach stone, he manages to turn the tide: If you plant this stone you will have a whole peach tree bursting with peaches. Admit that I’m the kindest person in the world not to make a fuss although I only got one miserable little peach! (WBK: 12)

Despite Karlson’s egotism, Midge does not bear grudges. His reaction to Karlson’s peculiar cinnamon-bun arithmetic is exemplary. Karlson proposes sharing their buns fairly, seven each, although they have only ten buns altogether (KFA: 47). Measuring his own appetite, Midge happily settles for three. However, Karlson also claims Midge’s third bun by declaring that Midge has ‘bun fever’: any more buns would be fatal (p.52). Instead of arguing, both are content, Karlson merrily talking to his food and Midge enjoying the sight: ‘But what luck for this poor little bun that I am here. Otherwise it would have had to lie on the step all alone,’ said Karlson, eating the bun quickly. ‘But now it’s not so lonely,’ said Midge. Karlson patted himself contentedly on the tummy. ‘No, now it’s with its seven friends and it’s happy there!’ Midge was happy too. He continued to lie on the verandah feeling good, in spite of the bunfever. He was quite full, and happy for Karlson to have his bun. (pp.52–53)

Karlson enjoys gluttony with every fibre of his being; he eats blissfully and takes pride in his tummy. For him, gluttony has no side effects either: he had bun fever when he was three and has since been immune (p.52). Valuing Karlson’s company more than his own fair share of food and recognising the entertainment value

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of gluttony, Midge accepts Karlson with all his quirks and gluttonous schemes. Adults are less tolerant. Midge’s parents doubt his existence for almost the entire first volume of the trilogy, but, finally laying eyes on him, they, not very flatteringly, see ‘[a] fat little man with cream cake spreading right up to his ears’ (KR: 118). Hence, food, and his carefree consumption of it, defines Karlson’s encounters with adults as well. He does not wait for permission to eat, steals food from adults and, instead of apologising, talks back. Typical are Karlson’s encounters with Miss Black, the home help who minds Midge when his mother is away. Miss Black advocates discipline, especially in matters of food: she refuses to let Midge try her freshly baked buns: ‘Snacks between meals ruin your appetite’ (KFA: 39). Karlson helps Midge by ‘tirritating’ Miss Black, tirritating being the deadlier form of irritating (p.40). As Midge enters the kitchen to distract Miss Black, he catches her eating buns herself: ‘It was obviously only children who shouldn’t eat between meals’ (p.42). While they talk, Karlson steals all the buns. Eventually, Miss Black slaps Midge for being cheeky and locks him into his bedroom to teach him a lesson (pp.44–45). Midge has never been slapped before and, in the midst of his anger and sadness, Karlson arrives: ‘What about a little snack between meals? … Chocolate and buns on my verandah … My treat!’ (p.46). Although Karlson does not share the buns fairly, this untypically caring gesture saves Midge from despondency and defies Miss Black’s ideas of an authoritarian upbringing and her double standards. At their subsequent encounters, Karlson challenges Miss Black more openly. They exchange insults over meatball theft: she calls him a ‘scoundrel’ for stealing meatballs, he catches her about to eat one and calls her ‘a greedy little girl’ before eating it himself (pp.106-7). A wild chase ensues, but, instead of catching Karlson, Miss Black falls, hurts her head and invites him to a peaceful meal (pp.109–11). Hence, his cheek is not punished but rewarded. When Karlson invites himself to another meal and orders Miss Black to bring the food (p.117), he escapes punishment as well:

Unpunished Gluttony in Astrid Lindgren’s Children’s Books

Then he [Karlson] twitched his nostrils. ‘What are we having?’ ‘A good hiding,” said Miss Black, stirring the stew more violently. ‘That’s what you ought to have, but I’m so sore all over today, I’m afraid I can’t even run.’ (p.117)

Apart from insults and orders, Karlson even has a comeback for a common adult argument to convince children to eat. When Miss Black tells the boys to ‘be ashamed of [them]selves’ and that ‘there are thousands of children in this world who would give anything for a little stew like that’, Karlson brandishes a notebook and asks: ‘Would you give me the names and addresses of two of them?’ (p.118). Taking her claim this literally renders it preposterous. Furthermore, Karlson frequently defies another rule: do not play with your food. Once he decorates a tower with a meatball, to Midge’s mother’s dismay: His mother didn’t like people using her meatballs for decoration and of course she thought it was Midge who had decorated the tower so elegantly. (KR: 23)

Considering her misconception, Karlson goes unpunished on that occasion as well, and even the narrative itself clearly identifies with Karlson’s playfulness by choosing the somewhat unsuitable adjective ‘elegantly’, which, by labelling his architectural touch not silly but graceful, emphasises Karlson’s charm. Even emptying a bin full of cherry stones and nutshells onto ‘the head of a dignified gentleman’ does not result in punishment (KFA: 27). Down on the pavement, the man calls for the police; up on the roof, Midge is terrified. Karlson keeps calm: He ought to be grateful. Now, if the cherry stones take root in his hair, he might find a lovely little cherry tree growing up there, and he could go round picking cherries and spitting the stones out all day long. (p.27)

Either way, no policeman comes to the rescue: ‘There were no policemen in the street, so the gentleman with the cigar had to go home with his nutshells and cherry stones’ (p.27). Encouraged by this development, Karlson and Midge happily spit cherry stones.

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Thus, in every possible way, Karlson defies adults and their rules via food, without ever apologising or stopping. Karlson not only never stops inventing new schemes for acquiring food or challenging adults via food, he also never stops eating. He eats quickly, he eats enormous amounts and he always wants some more. Karlson is insatiable and the examples are numerous. His many titles include ‘[t]he world’s best cake eater’ (KR: 118) and ‘the world’s best pancake eater’ (WBK: 77). He eats porridge ‘at lightning speed’. (WBK: 8) and drinks aquarium water ‘in great gulps’ (KR: 39). As cake is about the only thing that is not ‘a mere trifle’ (WBK: 29), Karlson suggests that Midge asks for eight cakes and one candle instead of one cake and eight candles for his birthday (KR: 105). Furthermore, Karlson decides that two chocolate puddings are better than one, even if that means that adults will have to go without dessert, for they should watch their weight, he tells them; while other children go without dessert for misbehaving, he gets away with eating twice his share (WBK: 113– 14). Amongst children, Karlson masks his greed as charity by demanding that sweets ‘shall go to charitable objects’ aka himself (KR: 97, 116). However, with children, he usually trades food for entertainment such as conjuring tricks and stories (KR: 97). In short, the Karlson trilogy is a story about mutual dependencies in which everyone benefits, even if they lose out. Karlson wants to be fussed over and Midge needs someone to fuss over. Karlson is selfish but adorable, Midge provides food and endorses Karlson’s gluttony. The acceptance of Karlson’s greediness is omnipresent: from the benevolent narrator who refrains from punishing Karlson, to Midge’s tolerance despite the fact that his share of food shrinks as a result of it. However, Karlson’s gluttony can be subversive as well. Perhaps Karlson’s immense popularity in Eastern Europe since his arrival in the restrictive society of the USSR in the 1950s,7 can be explained by the fact that, while he mostly focuses on his own personal gain, he also challenges double standards and rules imposed by a higher authority.

Unpunished Gluttony in Astrid Lindgren’s Children’s Books

The Potential of Gluttony ‘There should always be a meal with my name on it.’ (The Wave Pictures, ‘Canary Wharf’ [song], 2008)

Whereas many children’s classics punish their characters for gluttony as a more or less serious manifestation of a deadly sin, Lindgren’s trilogies on Pippi Longstocking and Karlson celebrate gluttony. Pippi shares her culinary wealth with other children, Karlson’s priority is his own ‘reasonably stout’ self; neither is punished for their behaviour. In fact, they are protected by a benevolent narrator and rewarded with the friendship of other children whom they encourage by defying adults via food. Food is not bland but delicious, not restricted but plentiful, and if it is magical, it is the child who is in control. Gluttony is not represented as a disgusting and immoral deed, but as a glorious and potentially heartening feat. Particularly remarkable within the trilogies’ sociocultural context of a disciplined wartime and post-war Sweden, Lindgren’s celebration of gluttony symbolises her attitudes towards children. According to Ulla Lundqvist, telling children about abundance in times of insecurity and scarcity is a natural behaviour pattern (1979: 153). However, by refusing to deprive children of food as a lesson at the end of her stories, Lindgren is the exception to the rule that temptations to indulge ‘often emphasis[e] powerlessness’ in child lore (Honeyman, 2010: 45). If food, like knowledge, is power, then, by giving it to children in her trilogies (and not taking it away again), Lindgren permanently empowers both them and her readers. Moreover, Carolyn Daniel states that Children must … learn all sorts of rules about food and eating. Most important, they must know who eats whom. Food events in children’s literature are clearly intended to teach children how to be human. (2006, cited in Keeling and Pollard, 2008: 13)

In contrast, Lindgren’s trilogies propose unlearning some conventional food rules and shaking the power balance. If food

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events in children’s literature teach children how to be human, Lindgren teaches them to be independent, idiosyncratic, generous and tolerant. In line with Leon Rappoport’s assertion that refusing food expresses a child’s self-determination (cited in Keeling and Pollard, 2012: 3), claiming food can be read as a sign of child autonomy in the Pippi Longstocking and Karlson trilogies. Therein, children rely not on adults but on themselves or on other children to secure food. Besides, they choose when, how much and what they eat. The essay ‘The Art of Being a Child’, which Lindgren wrote from the point of view of her son, proves her deep sympathy and understanding of the underdog: It is not easy to be a child, no! It is difficult, very difficult and I speak from long and bitter experience. … It means that you have to go to bed, get up, get dressed, eat, brush your teeth and blow your nose when it suits the big ones not when it suits yourself. It means that you have to eat hard bread when you would rather have soft bread. … And if any of my children stubbornly refuse to eat fish, I shall pat him on the head and say: ‘You don’t have to! Your father couldn’t bear fish either when he was small.’ (1939, 8 cited in Lundqvist, 1979: 253–54)

In giving children food, Lindgren also expresses her acceptance of how children are – even indulging their gluttony. Symbolising power struggles where adults are involved, food symbolises friendship when it is consumed amongst children; ultimately, the child wins, even when he/she loses some of his/her share to another child. Irrespective of their age or gender, Lindgren’s child characters are loved, even, or especially, the most gluttonous amongst them, for gluttony can be wholesome, inclusive, entertaining and subversive. The treatment of gluttony in Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking and Karlson books is a rare phenomenon in children’s literature. There are not many examples in classic children’s stories where food is as essential and freely available and gluttony as unrepentantly joyful. Even in the twenty-first century, Oliver Jeffers’s book-eating boy

Unpunished Gluttony in Astrid Lindgren’s Children’s Books

eventually has to learn not to eat books (2006: n.p.). The fact that one of the foremost icons of gluttony, the cookie monster, while not being renamed the veggie monster as rumour had it, has developed a liking for vegetables and now only considers cookies ‘a sometime food’ (MashalGrover, 2005; Charter, 2005; Roy, 2013), is further proof that adult concerns about the food intake of children still affect fiction. In Lindgren’s works, children are trusted to draw their own conclusions. Whether Lindgren’s representation of gluttony is read as a safety valve or as an unhealthy temptation, it, ultimately, conveys a sincere and unique respect for children’s needs and rights.

Notes 1 All Swedish texts that were not available in an official English translation are quoted in an unofficial translation by the author. 2 In the following, the abbreviations PL, PLGA and PLSS denote the volumes Pippi Longstocking, Pippi Longstocking Goes Aboard and Pippi Longstocking in the South Seas, whereas KR, KFA and WBK refer to Karlson on the Roof, Karlson Flies Again and The World’s Best Karlson, respectively. The Pippi Longstocking volumes are quoted from the omnibus The Best of Pippi Longstocking in the Oxford edition of 2003. However, in the Oxford edition, the first publication dates of the originals and the order of the books are confused: the ultimate volume Pippi Longstocking in the South Seas is erroneously positioned prior to the penultimate volume Pippi Longstocking Goes Aboard. 3 Interestingly, the sweetness of the object of desire changes with the age and the translator. Where Edna Hurup selects ‘peppermints’ (2003: 9), the translation into German by Cäcilie Heinig uses the French word ‘bonbons’ (1967: 8) and Tiina Nunnally’s English translation chooses ‘sweets’ (2010: 7). Lindgren’s first version of Pippi Longstocking, later published as Ur-Pippi [The original Pippi], has Pippi escaping a dose of cod liver oil, and no other food item is mentioned ([1944] 2007: first endpaper). 4 Like many of her contemporaries, Mrs Settergren is of the opinion that ‘children should be seen and not heard’. Pippi’s reply is extraordinarily encouraging for silenced children:

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People have both eyes and ears, I should hope; and though I’m certainly a pleasure to look at, it won’t do their ears any harm to have a little exercise as well. But some people seem to think that ears are only meant for waggling [emphasis in original] (PLSS: 154). In the film adaptation, Pippi justifies her gluttony to Tommy and Annika by explaining that, at these kinds of party, you have to be first: ‘På sådana här kalas måste man hålla sig framme’ (‘Pippi är’, 2004). In the German dub, she goes one step further and explains that when there are good things you need to make the most of them, otherwise you go without: ‘Wenn es was Gutes gibt, muss man sich ranhalten, sonst kommt man zu kurz’ (‘Pippi auf’, 2009). The German translation has become a catchphrase in the everyday life of a generation. Throughout the trilogy, the perception of Karlson’s age varies; for instance, the home help Miss Black likes to call him ‘that horrible, fat little boy’ (WBK: 41). Boris Pankin, the former Russian ambassador to Sweden, even claims that the books most likely to be found in a Russian household are the Bible and Karlson on the Roof. Quoted at ‘Karlson on the Roof: Trivia’. www.imdb.com/title/tt0073227/trivia. (See also Plus Licens, 2013). However, in another article, Lindgren states that Pippi Longstocking was intended not so much as a role model for children, but as a distorting mirror for inconsiderate adults (Lundqvist, 2007: 108).

Works Cited Astrid Lindgren Texts Dates in square brackets are the original publications in Swedish. The language of the cited publication is denoted by the place of publication in each reference. Lindgren, Astrid(2003) (illus. Quentin Blake) The Best of Pippi Longstocking. Oxford University Press. –– ([1944] 2007) Ur-Pippi [The Original Pippi]. Hamburg: Oetinger. –– ([1945] 2003) (trans. Edna Harup) Pippi Longstocking. In The Best of Pippi Longstocking (pp.7–136). –– ([1945] 1967) (trans. Cäcilie Heinig) Pippi Langstrumpf. Hamburg: Oetinger.

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–– ([1945] 2010) (trans. Tiina Nunnally) Pippi Longstocking. Oxford University Press. –– ([1946] 2003) (trans. Marianne Turner) Pippi Longstocking Goes Aboard. In The Best of Pippi Longstocking (pp.251–378). –– ([1948] 2003) (trans. Marianne Turner) Pippi Longstocking in the South Seas. In The Best of Pippi Longstocking (pp.137–250). –– ([1955] 1975) (trans. Patricia Crampton) Karlson on the Roof. London: Methuen. –– ([1962] 1992) (trans. Patricia Crampton) Karlson Flies Again. London: Mammoth. –– ([1968] 1980) (trans. Patricia Crampton) The World’s Best Karlson. London: Methuen. –– ([1971] 1973) Lotta’s Bike. London: Methuen. –– (1976] 1981) (trans. Patricia Crampton) Mardie to the Rescue. London: Methuen. –– ([1963] 1970) (trans. Lilian Seaton) Emil in the Soup Tureen. London: Beaver Books. –– ([1966] 2001) (trans. Ed Holmes) Emil’s Pranks. London: Hodder Children’s Books. Primary Texts Almond, David (2012) The Boy who Swam with Piranhas. London: Walker. Atwood, Margaret ([1976] 2009) The Edible Woman. London: Virago. Carle, Eric ([1969] 1986) The Very Hungry Caterpillar. New York: Philomel. Carroll, Lewis ([1865] 1982) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In The Complete Illustrated Works of Lewis Carroll. London: Chancellor Press (pp.11–14). Cormier, Robert (2008) The Chocolate War and Beyond the Chocolate War. London: Puffin. Crompton, Richmal ([1922] 1924) Just William. London: George Newnes. Dahl, Roald ([1964] 2007) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. London: Puffin.

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–– ([1972] 2010) Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. London: Puffin. –– ([1984] 2008) Boy: Tales of childhood. In Boy and Going Solo. London: Puffin. –– ([1988] 2003) Matilda. London: Puffin. –– (1997) Charlie’s Secret Chocolate Book. London: Puffin. Kniepert, Andreas (ed.) (n.d.) ‘Das Märchen vom dicken, fetten Pfannkuchen’ [The fairy tale of the thick fat pancake]. www.internet-maerchen.de/maerchen/pfannkuchen.htm. Fry, Stephen (2010) The Fry Chronicles: An Autobiography. London: Penguin. Gaiman, Neil ([2002] 2003) Coraline. London: Bloomsbury. Jeffers, Oliver (2006) The Incredible Book Eating Boy. London: HarperCollins Children’s Books. Milne, A.A. ([1926] 2000) Winnie-the-Pooh. London: Egmont. –– ([1928] 2004) The House at Pooh Corner. London: Egmont. Milne, Christopher (1976) The Enchanted Places. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Paterson, Katherine ([1977] 1987) Bridge to Terabithia. London: HarperCollins. Rossetti, Christina (1865) Goblin Market. In Goblin Market and Other Poems by Christina Rossetti. London and Cambridge: Macmillan (pp.1–30). Sherwood, Mary Martha (1822) The History of the Fairchild Family or The Child’s Manual. 6th edn. London: J. Hatchard and Son. DVDs and CDs MarshalGrover (2005) Sesame Street – A Cookie Is a Sometime Food. Sesame Street. [video online] http://youtu.be/iH9IO6iMO78. Pippi är sakletare och går på kalas [Pippi is a turnupstuffer and goes to a party]. In Pippi: Pippi Långstrump efter Astrid Lindgrens Bok [Pippi: Pippi Longstocking based on Astrid Lindgren’s book]. Vol. 1 [in Swedish] (2004) [DVD] Nordisk Film.

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Pippi auf sachensuche [Pippi looking for things]. In Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking [in German] (2009) [DVD] Universum. The Wave Pictures (2009) ‘Canary Wharf’ [song]. In If You Leave It Alone. [CD] Cooperative Music. Secondary Texts Barthes, Roland (1975) Toward a psychosociology of contemporary food consumption. In Carole Counihan and Penny van Esterik (eds.) Food and Culture: A Reader (2008). New York: Routledge (pp.28–35). Charter, Chelsea J. (2005) Cookie Monster changes his tune. The Associated Press. In CBS News, 8 April 2005, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cookie-monster-changes-histune/. Daniel, Carolyn (2006) Voracious Children: Who Eats Whom in Children’s Literature. Abingdon: Routledge. Fraustino, Lisa Rowe (2008) The apple of her eye: The mothering ideology fed by best-selling trade picture books. In Kara K. Keeling and Scott T. Pollard (eds.) Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature. New York and Abingdon: Routledge (pp.57–74). Honeyman, Susan (2010) Gastronomic utopias and the legacy of political hunger in African American folktales. In Children’s Literature, vol. 38 (pp.44–63). Keeling, Kara K. and Scott T. Pollard (2008) Introduction: Food in children’s literature. In Kara K. Keeling and Scott T. Pollard (eds.) Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature. New York and Abingdon: Routledge (pp.3–18). –– (2012) The key is in the mouth: Food and orality in Coraline. In Children’s Literature, vol. 40. (pp.1–27). Labbe, Jacqueline M. (2008) To eat and be eaten in nineteenthcentury children’s literature. In Kara K. Keeling and Scott T. Pollard (eds.) Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature. New York and Abingdon: Routledge (pp.93–103).

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Lundqvist, Ulla (1979) Århundradets barn: fenomenet Pippi Långstrump och dess förutsättningar [The child of the century: The phenomenon of Pippi Longstocking and its premises]. Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren. –– (2007) Astrid Lindgren och barnuppfostran [Astrid Lindgren and parenting]. In Lena Törnqvist and Suzanne Öhman-Sundén (eds.) Ingen Liten Lort: Astrid Lindgren som opinionsbildare [No little piece of dirt: Astrid Lindgren as a moulder of public opinion]. Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren (pp.99–114). Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (ed. Sally Wehmeier) (2003) 6th edn. Oxford University Press. Park, Linda Sue. (2009) Still hot: Great food moments in children’s literature. The Horn Book Magazine, May/June (pp.231–40). Plus Licens (2013) ‘Russian’ Karlsson on the Roof. www.pluslicens.com/property-portfolio-page-5/karlsson-onthe-roof/. Rotor, Elda (2006) Editor’s note. In Elda Rotor (ed.) The Seven Deadly Sins: Gluttony. Oxford University Press (pp.ix–x). Roy, Ryan (2013) Here’s an article to show to people when they mention Veggie Monster. Tough Pigs: Muppet Fans Who Grew Up. 22 July. www.toughpigs.com/heres-an-article-to-show-topeople-when-they-mention-veggie-monster/. Watson, James L. and Melissa L. Caldwell (2005) Introduction. In James L. Watson and Melissa L. Caldwell (eds.) The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell (pp.1– 12).

CHAPTER NINE WOMEN, WORK AND CHOCOLATE: FOOD, POWER AND ‘SITES OF STRUGGLE’ IN THE POST-WAR NOVELS OF NOEL STREATFEILD KAY WADDILOVE In this discussion of three works published between 1944 and 1951, we see the importance of food in Noel Streatfeild’s children’s novels, in particular as a signifier for the changing role of women in the family and in society as a whole, and the tensions, which as a result, ensue.

Introduction Noel Streatfeild wrote some of her most noteworthy children’s books in the post-war austerity period of the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s. During this decade food became a catalyst for societal concerns about cultural and political change in the wake of the Second World War, and a factor in the ensuing socioeconomic developments that were to be both reactionary and revolutionary in their effect. As wartime acquiescence in civilian sacrifice was being replaced by post-war discontent, the position of women in society and, particularly, in the family, had become the subject of intense debate. Food rationing became even more stringent than it had been during wartime, and providing for, obtaining, preparing, consuming and celebrating the basic human need for food acquired a significance far beyond mere sustenance. Food has

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always held mythic as well as physiological meaning, and this paper will explore how food is interpreted as a marker of crucial events in the development of the protagonists in Streatfeild’s stories, examining the way in which it becomes a signifier for contemporary tensions in the family dynamic with regard to power, resistance and the role of women, both inside and outside the home. The paper discusses three novels that demonstrate the rapid social changes then in process – Curtain Up (1944), The Painted Garden (1949) and White Boots (1951) – in order to show how their representation of food reveals the complex interface between personal and public responsibilities for women (as well as men and children) in a decade of change that still has resonance for today. The mid-1940s to the mid-1950s was a decade of immense upheaval in society at large, and especially in the family, as a result of a cataclysmic world war followed by extreme economic and social changes in the post-war austerity years. Women in particular were affected by these changes, and, at a time when their nurturant roles were in question, food – obtaining, preparing, cooking, presenting and consuming it – offers a revealing prism of the wider social discourses affecting the lives of women, children – and even men – during this decade. Food in human society, and story, has always, of course, from Eve and the apple onwards, held mythic as well as physiological meaning; while food in children’s novels has famously, by Katz, Nikolajeva and many others, been interpreted as ‘the sex of children’s literature’.

Noel Streatfeild Noel Streatfeild, born in 1895 during Queen Victoria’s reign and dying in 1986 in the ‘reign’ of Margaret Thatcher, witnessed a century of immense social upheaval, particularly for women, and this was reflected in her writing. While some of her most noteworthy children’s books were written in the post-war austerity period between 1945 and 1955, it is inevitable, as Margaret Meek has observed, that children’s books are ‘produced

Food, Power and ‘Sites of Struggle’ in the Post-War Novels of Noel Streatfeild

within and determined by their social and historical context’, and all Streatfeild’s 38 children’s books foreground the social changes of the twentieth century. Streatfeild grew up in an Anglican family, but her ancestors were Quakers. Her great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth Fry, was the famous prison reformer (and ur-feminist), and two aspects of the Quaker tradition are particularly relevant to Streatfeild’s work. First, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Quakers were great believers in showing faith by works – doing some practical good in the world. So, as heir to a tradition of dedication, hard work and social responsibility, for women as well as men, the work ethic is particularly strong in Streatfeild’s writing. Secondly, as nonconformists, Quakers were excluded from professions; denied access to universities and public-service careers until the nineteenth century, the dissenting Quakers became prominent in manufacturing businesses and medicine. In 1748 Streatfeild’s ancestor Joseph Fry opened an apothecary shop in Bristol. He taught himself a number of recipes for chocolate which was recommended for its medicinal qualities during the eighteenth century, and was marketed by the Quakers as a healthy alternative drink to alcohol with its attendant social ills. In 1761 Joseph Fry obtained a royal patent for a machine used in making chocolate, and a century later his great-grandson (also called Joseph Fry) discovered a way to mix melted cocoa butter and cocoa powder with sugar to create a paste that could be pressed into a mould. The chocolate bar was born, and people began to think of eating chocolate as well as drinking it. The Frys were later followed by the Cadbury and the Rowntree families – the ‘trinity’ of Quaker chocolate. The Quaker work ethic, mixing economic success with a strong seam of social responsibility, was reinforced in Streatfeild’s upbringing; both grandfathers were clergymen and her father a devout Anglican vicar who later became Bishop of Lewes. The influence of a tradition of dedicated work informs her stories of productive working lives, and the novels reflect her hard-working,

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albeit conservative, background; even when afflicted by money problems, their families are identifiably middle class and there is usually a devoted servant (or two) to share their genteel poverty. Streatfeild’s most successful book, Ballet Shoes, was published in 1936 and has survived well into the multimedia age. But the semi-forgotten Curtain Up (1944), The Painted Garden (1949) and White Boots (1951) offer valuable insights into contemporary family life and women’s lives; they provide cogent examples of how food became a catalyst for societal concerns about intense cultural and political change in the wake of the Second World War. Food in Streatfeild is also a marker for significant events in the lives of the protagonists; it is semiotic because, whether being shopped for, cooked, or consumed, it reveals social codes and social relations, particularly the shifting relations of women, work and family at this time of cultural upheaval. Julia Kristeva talks about intertextuality as the insertion of history or society into a text and of the text itself into history. Food, while clearly an element of discourse in the wartime years and afterwards, is also, in both senses, on everybody’s lips. In Curtain Up, published in 1944, but set in 1942, by which time almost all foods in England were rationed, three children are sent to live with their maternal grandmother in London after their father is reported missing in action. On the crowded and miserable train journey, a surprise picnic is provided and the sight of real egg and chocolate biscuits, both at the same minute, excited the other passengers so much that in no time they were talking like old friends. Of course the conversation was mostly about food, but food was what grown-up people liked talking about, so that was all right. (Curtain Up, 1944: 11)

Food here is the social glue, bringing together the grumpy woman in the corner seat, the laconic American soldier who later produces ‘three enormous sweets’ for the children (who worry they are taking up his rations) (p.21), and the children’s loquacious nurse

Food, Power and ‘Sites of Struggle’ in the Post-War Novels of Noel Streatfeild

who draws the whole carriage into the conversation. It is a signifier of the wartime spirit of pulling together in the face of adversity. The Painted Garden is set mostly in California, where the Winter family has travelled to stay with an American aunt. Jane, the middle (and difficult) child in the family is devastated at leaving her dog (interestingly called Chewing Gum – food gets everywhere …) behind. In another chronotopic train journey at the beginning of this book: Just as it was beginning to be a bore, Peaseblossom ordered coffee for them all, and, as a surprise, out of her case, she brought chocolate biscuits. Now that they had really started and, with all their luggage, were safely on the train, they found the appetites they had lost at breakfast had come back. Even Jane, who had not spoken at all but glared out of the window, ate three chocolate biscuits and seemed to enjoy them. (The Painted Garden, 1949: 49)

Once settled in America, the abundance and quality of the food available is constantly remarked on, and contrasted with the scarcities at home. On the family’s arrival at their aunt’s house, breakfast is the rite of passage marking the dividing line between the past (England, austerity and family tragedy), and the future in America which is to prove transformative for each member of the family in different ways. The first thing they did on arrival was to have another breakfast. Just as if she had known what they would like, Bella had made popovers for them; as well there was the most amazing fruit. Blueberries, the size of gooseberries, served with thick cream. Purple figs. Little canteloupe melons cut in half and iced. Queer soft orange-coloured fruits called persimmons, and a whole bunch of bananas. There was a glass of chilled tomato juice, there was a cereal, there were eggs, bacon, and coffee and cream. Nobody was sure if in America it was the right thing to talk about food, but they simply had to. (The Painted Garden, 1949: 49)

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This is a distinct contrast to the family breakfast of bread and jam that marked their departure from England. And these are children who have travelled from a country where even apples were restricted – greengrocers during these years often limited customers to one apple per person. There is also an interesting international social insight into the contrasting attitudes of the adult women in the party to the feast. While the British Bee and Peaseblossom tuck in heartily, the American Aunt Cora: looks in a sad way at the table. ‘I always provide good food, but I scarcely touch it myself. I have to be so careful to keep my calories right. That’s how I keep my figure.’ (The Painted Garden, 1949: 95)

Aunt Cora is an unsympathetic character and her negative approach to food is echoed by Aunt Claudia, the villain of the piece in White Boots, who puts the 11-year-old skating star Lalla on a diet because ‘there are a few naughty curves I should like to see disappear’ (1951: 92), and then bemoans the fact that, ‘with meat rationed as it is, it’s going to mean a sacrifice all round to see you have sufficient’ (p.93). This approach to her eating and shape, which prefigures later twentieth- and twenty-first-century female preoccupations with body image that are not apparent in Streatfeild’s earlier books, leads to Lalla sneaking food from plates when handing round at parties. ‘She usually manoeuvred something into her mouth each time her back was to Aunt Claudia’ (p.97). In this case, the power struggle, previously always won by Aunt Claudia in her domination of Lalla, is ameliorated by Nana’s determination to maintain a wholesome approach to food, declaring that, ‘the moment I see Lalla looking peaky, it’s hot dripping toast for her tea and plenty of it’ (p.95). The friendship between Lalla and Harriet, whom she meets at the skating rink, is at the heart of White Boots, and, true to form, is heralded by a celebration tea at Lalla’s house, with ‘three sorts of sandwiches, chocolate biscuits, and a cake covered with pink icing’ (p.67). Here food is both a designator of a significant event and a signifier of the class differences which will become central to the

Food, Power and ‘Sites of Struggle’ in the Post-War Novels of Noel Streatfeild

narrative. Harriet’s family are poor, subsisting on the proceeds of a poorly stocked greengrocer’s shop and her mother struggles to cook nourishing meals for the family, whereas Lalla is rich. At home if there had been such a tea, everybody would have said how scrumptious it was, but Lalla seemed to take lovely food, like she took a lovely house and lovely clothes, for granted. She sat down at the table looking at the food with no more interest than if it had been bread and jam. (White Boots, 1951: 67)

The struggles of Olivia, Harriet’s mother, in relation to food, mirror those of many women during the post-war strict rationing period, and are indicative of one of the prevailing ‘sites of struggle’ for women whose family responsibilities clashed with their desire to work outside the home and provide economically for their families. Olivia’s situation is exacerbated as she has to create meals from the random food items sent to them by Uncle William, the supplier for the greengrocery shop, who, unfortunately for the Johnson family, ‘ate the best of everything that he grew caught or shot’ (p.8). William is known secretly to the children as Uncle Guzzle because of his greed and the shop suffers from the poor quality of the inferior goods he sends. Unsurprisingly however, it is Olivia who suffers most: What would not sell had to be eaten and this made a great deal of trouble because Uncle William had a large appetite and seldom sent more than any one kind of fish or game, and the result was that the family meals were made up of several different kinds of food, which meant a lot of cooking. (White Boots, 1951: 9)

When announcing dinner Olivia declares: There’s enough rabbit for two, there’s a very small pike, there is grouse but I don’t really know about that, it seems to be very, very old, as if it had been dead a long time, and there’s sauerkraut. I’m afraid everyone must eat cabbage of some sort today, we’ve had over seven hundred from Uncle William this week and it’s only Wednesday. (White Boots, 1951: 9)

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A humorous exaggeration yes, but also a situation that illuminates the difficulties for women during the post-war years, when choosing specific food was, for many, an unlikely luxury. You bought what you could get – and cooked it. The social background to Olivia’s situation began in 1940 when bacon, butter and sugar were rationed in order to maintain food supplies for the nation in the face of a German naval blockade on ships carrying food. Two thirds of British food was imported in 1939 and the effectiveness of the blockade halved food imports during the war years. The three originally rationed foods were rapidly joined by successive ration schemes for meat, tea, jam, cheese, eggs, milk and so on, until, by 1942, almost all foods except vegetables and bread were rationed. The difficulties of wartime rationing permeate Curtain Up, in which Hannah’s role as housekeeper and main carer of the family is almost entirely presented in terms of the food situation. A staunch traditionalist in the devoted family retainer model characteristic of many of Streatfeild’s early stories, Hannah is not troubled by any conflict between domestic and public responsibilities – her ‘site of struggle’ is located in the problems of managing ration books, ‘points’ systems and coping with the endless queuing necessitated by ever-increasing shortages. She even, when in a good mood, sings about it, combining this preoccupation with the words of her favourite hymns: ‘We plough the fields and scatter, the good seed …/ Drat the butcher, that’s a wretched piece of meat’ (1944: 9). The points system, introduced in 1941 to ensure that the staple foods available were distributed fairly, entered into Hannah’s singing after the move to London, ‘Do no sinful action, speak no angry word/ We ought to spend our points today’ (p.114). Some aspects of rationing became even stricter during the years after the war. In mid-1946, after continual rain had ruined Britain's wheat crop, bread rationing started, and potato rationing began in 1947 when frost had damaged much of the stored potato crop. In the face of further reductions in the meat ration, unusual foods such as ‘snoek’, a sort of barracuda, and whale meat, as well as

Food, Power and ‘Sites of Struggle’ in the Post-War Novels of Noel Streatfeild

horse, were offered for sale. The American actors Jane meets in The Painted Garden assume that even pets go hungry in England after Jane tries to earn a food parcel for her dog: ‘I suppose your dog goes pretty hungry.’ ‘Not hungry exactly. He has horse. You don’t eat horse much in America do you? It’s nice but you get tired of it. I think Chewing Gum does.’ (The Painted Garden, 1949: 140)

Despite the restrictions, food did become a catalyst for change at this time, as the rationing system, which inculcated principles of fairness and equal shares for all, came to inform the demand that such principles should prevail in British society once the war was won. The population as a whole, assuming they survived, were healthier after the war than before because of food rationing, and the overwhelming support for the Beveridge Report, Social Insurance and the Allied Services (1942), whose proposals would form the basis for the post-war establishment of the Welfare State, arose partly out of these changes in expectations. During the war years, women had had an essential role to play in the war effort, working in factories, serving in the armed services, or, equally valued, maintaining the home front. The propaganda of Lord Woolton, Minister of Food, emphasised the vital contribution of the ‘Kitchen Front’ to the continued survival of the nation at this time. Without women undertaking paid employment, replacing the men away fighting, the structure of society would have collapsed. However, demobilisation was accompanied by a sharp reduction in the female workforce and the reassertion of men’s economic interests. Wartime nurseries were closed, the marriage bar, which required professional women to resign on marriage, was widely enforced, and propaganda on the joys of domesticity reappeared once the wartime need for women’s contribution to the workforce was removed. Government policy, celebrating family life as an aspect of citizenship in which women’s domestic role is a part of their public duty, sheds an interesting light on female ‘sites of struggle’ in the post-war home:

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Homecraft forms an important part of education for the family life of a good citizen …. The important, and often neglected, part that can be played by the men and boys of the household is not forgotten. But the main weight of the shopping, the cooking, the making and mending, the furnishing, the minor household repairs, the fuelling and heating, and even the gardening and poultry keeping, above all, the budgeting and catering, is likely to fall on the housewife. [My emphasis] (Ministry of Education, 1949: 31)

It is difficult to divine here what ‘important part’ was actually left for the ‘men and boys’ to play in the household and Streatfeild’s works reflect this attitude. Despite the fact that the Winter family have transplanted to America in The Painted Garden, published in the same year as the Ministry of Education pamphlet, it is still taken for granted that Bea and Peaseblossom will take on household duties in Aunt Cora’s house. The site of struggle appears not in their own ready acceptance of this role, but in the objections of the female children, Rachel and Jane, who are expected to share in the tasks. Rachel ‘pushed an electric polisher up and down the hall … with a sulky face’ (1949: 106), while Jane, who is making beds with Peaseblossom ‘looked and felt shockingly black-doggish’ (p.107). Tim, the son of the house, is not expected to push vacuum cleaners around, but he is depicted cleaning the family shoes in one scene, ‘scowling and banging polish’ (p.108) on them; at least one ‘important part’ is being ‘played by the boy of the household’. Nevertheless, in some quarters, the domestic site of struggle was acknowledged. William Beveridge, who was seen at the time, both by himself and by the conservative elements of society, as something of a revolutionary, perceived domestic work, including food preparation and cooking, as a problem requiring intervention and advocated radical communal solutions: The housewife’s job with a large family is frankly impossible, and will remain so, unless some of what has now to be done separately in every home – washing all clothes, cooking every meal, being in

Food, Power and ‘Sites of Struggle’ in the Post-War Novels of Noel Streatfeild

charge of every child for every moment when it is not in school – can be done communally outside the home. (Beveridge, 1948: 108)

During the war, some of these solutions had been adopted. In Curtain Up, meals at Madame Fidolia’s Academy for Dancing and Stage Training were ‘brought in vast containers from the British Restaurant’ (1944: 96). The creation of the government-run British Restaurants relieved women of the need to cook an evening meal every night by providing ready-cooked nourishing food at affordable prices. There were criticisms of the quality of the food: It was always a bad day when you had to go to the British Restaurant, [it] was awfully like being fed by the Government – possibly by the Minister of Food himself. (Blishen, 1972: 147)

But despite such concerns, these establishments did smooth one particular site of struggle for many women trying to balance domestic and public responsibilities. In 1951, however, when White Boots was published, Labour lost the General Election and Winston Churchill returned to power. The political climate militated against such socialist solutions and the restaurants were closed down; ‘cooking every meal’ was once again a female domestic responsibility. Sending women ‘back to the kitchen’ served to merge domesticity with the other major site of struggle for women in this decade, that of work performed for pay and outside the home. In 1941 it had become compulsory for women between the ages of 18 and 60 to register for war work. Much propaganda was commissioned to encourage women to work, in factories and on the land particularly, and by 1944 a third of the population not enlisted were engaged in work, including over seven million women. After the war, however, the shift in the socioeconomic climate and the perceived need to provide ‘jobs for the boys’ as the soldiers returned home, meant that the belief system based on the centrality of a wife and mother in the home was reasserted. Women were important in replacing the population losses of the

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war; as Beveridge put it, ‘Mothers have vital work to do in ensuring the adequate continuance of the British race’ (quoted in Stevenson, 1984: 177). While the implementation of Beveridge’s report Social Insurance and the Allied Services to form the welfare state was, as he himself said, ‘a revolutionary moment in the world’s history’, Beveridge reinforced the traditional role of women once they became wives and mothers, declaring that ‘the attitude of the housewife to gainful employment outside the home is not and should not be the same as that of the single woman’ (p.177). Social measures such as family allowances, intended to encourage population growth, were another, very practical, incentive for women to choose domesticity. And, as the ideological assumptions of the three Streatfeild books indicate, domestic responsibilities were regarded, by both sexes, as the paramount task of women. Such discourse was informed by studies such as John Bowlby’s Child Care and the Growth of Love (1951), published in the same year as White Boots. Although based on studies of institutionalised children, this became popularly interpreted as an irrefutable argument for the constant presence of the mother in the home: ‘Deprived children … are the source of social infection as real and serious as are carriers of diphtheria and typhoid’ (Bowlby, 1951: 182). The tensions engendered in the family dynamic by this ideology are clearly reflected in Steatfeild’s work. Olivia, for example, in White Boots, is evidently a Bowlby mother, dedicating herself to feeding and caring for her family and reluctantly excluding herself from an economically productive role despite the financial constraints of the Johnson household. When Alec her son takes on a paper round in order to hire skates for Harriet:

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It seemed to [Olivia] a miserable thing that Harriet’s skates and boots had to be earned by her brother instead of by her father and mother. ‘I wonder if I could get something to do? I see advertisements for people wanted, but they always seem to be wanted at the same time I’m wanted here.’ (White Boots, 1951: 16)

Despite the fact that Alec reassures his mother, ‘you know as well as I do you couldn’t do any more than you do’ (p.16) – and considering her cooking challenges, one might agree with him – Olivia’s site of struggle remains unresolved. However daughter Harriet is manifestly destined to resist and challenge such a role. She intends to work, ‘have a great skating career’ and ‘surprise the boys by earning money much sooner than they could’ (p.195). Harriet, Rachel and Jane in The Painted Garden and Sorrel in Curtain Up, like all Streatfeild’s heroines, do manage to exert power and resist the expectations imposed within the domestic site of struggle. They achieve agency by their investment in hard work and determination, values intrinsic to Streatfeild’s oeuvre. While the strong work ethic and belief in striving for excellence that informs Streatfeild’s writing may be linked to her Quaker heritage, her portrayal of girls, particularly in relation to their working roles and domestic contribution, belies traditional expectations and remains both radical and universally applicable. The continuing relevance of food as a marker of ‘struggle’ is indicated in the two advertisements illustrated in Figure 14 and Figure 15. Separated by 70 years, their ideological message is identical. So the resonance of Streatfeild’s message on the primacy of work is clear. As one female author did not actually say (but may well have agreed), it is a truth universally acknowledged that ‘work and money are the keys to freedom, and women and children don’t have much access to either’ (Paul, 1987: 190).

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Streatfeild’s radical position is that with dedication and application her heroines (and her readers) can overcome their traditional sites of struggle and will have access to both. A message as relevant in 2014 as it was in 1944.

Figure 14. 1941 advertisement.

Food, Power and ‘Sites of Struggle’ in the Post-War Novels of Noel Streatfeild

Figure 15. 2011 advertisement – shown in colour in Plate 12.

Works Cited Primary Sources Streatfeild, Noel (1944) Curtain Up. London: Evans Brothers. –– (1949) The Painted Garden: A Story of a Holiday in Hollywood. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. –– (1951) White Boots. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Secondary Sources Beveridge, William (1948) Voluntary Action: A Report on Methods of Social Advance. London: Allen & Unwin. Blishen, Edward (1972) A Cack-Handed War. London: Thames & Hudson. Bowlby, John (1953) Child Care and the Growth of Love. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Bull, Angela (1984) Noel Streatfeild: A Biography. London: Collins. Cadogan, Mary and Patricia Craig (1978) Women and Children First: The Fiction of Two World Wars. London: Victor Gollancz.

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Cooper, Susan (1963) Snoek piquante. In Michael Sissons and Peter French (eds) Age of Austerity 1945–1951. London: Hodder & Stoughton (pp.33–54). Daily Mail (1941) Bevin threatens compulsory work for women. Daily Mail, 2 September 1941. Finch, Janet and Penny Summerfield (1991) Social reconstruction and the emergence of the companionate marriage. In David Clark (ed.) Marriage, Domestic Life and Social Change. London: Routledge (pp.7–32). Foucault, Michael (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Tavistock. Gorman, George H. (1978) Introducing Quakers. London: Friends Home Service Committee. H. M. Government (1942) Social Insurance and the Allied Services (the Beveridge Report) Cmd. 6404, London: HMSO. Hollindale, Peter (1988) Ideology and the children’s book. Signal, vol. 55 (pp.3–22). Huse, Nancy (1994) Noel Streatfeild. New York: Twayne Publishers. Katz, Wendy R. (1980) Some uses of food in children’s literature. Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 11, no. 4 (pp.192–99). Keeling, Kara K. and Scott T. Pollard (2009) Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature. Abingdon: Routledge. Kristeva, Julia (1986) Word, dialogue and novel. In Toril Moi (ed.) The Kristeva Reader. Oxford: Blackwell (pp.34–61). Lewis, Jane (1992) Women in Britain since 1945: Women, Family, Work and the State in the Post-War Years. Oxford: Blackwell. Ministry of Education (1949) Citizens growing up: At home. In School and After. London: HMSO (p.31). Myrdal, Alva and Viola Klein (1956) Women’s Two Roles: Home and Work. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Noel Streatfeild (2004) Homepage. www.whitegauntlet.com.au/noelstreatfeild/. Paul, Lissa (1987) Enigma variations: What feminist theory knows about children’s literature. Signal, vol. 54 (pp.186–202).

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Philips, Deborah and Ian Haywood (1998) Brave New Causes: Women in British Postwar Fictions. London: Leicester University Press. Stephens, John (1992) Language and Ideology in Children’s Fiction. London: Longman. –– (1984) British Society 1914–45. London: Allen Lane. Sutherland, R.D. (1985) Hidden persuaders: Political ideologies in literature for children. Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 16, no. 3 (pp.143–57). Wilson, E. (1980) Only Halfway to Paradise: Women in Postwar Britain 1945–1968. London: Tavistock Publications. Wilson, B.K. (1961) Noel Streatfeild. London: Bodley Head.

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CHAPTER TEN FOOD AND STARVATION IN HEROIC-ERA ANTARCTIC LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN SINÉAD MORIARTY The author examines the ways in which food and eating in children’s texts about the Antarctic subvert the image of the explorer as a hero. Using Michael Smith’s Tom Crean: Ice Man and Michael McCurdy’s Trapped in the Ice! Shackleton’s Amazing Antarctic Adventure, she considers the way each author has dealt with the tension between the characters as heroic figures and their actions in relation to foods that contravene the customary Western cultural diet. The paper looks first at starvation and the heroic body, and then at unusual food sources in the children’s literature about the Heroic-Era expeditions.

Drawing on the real stories of exploration at the turn of the twentieth century, the children’s texts about the ‘Heroic Era’ of Antarctic exploration are tied to stories of adventure, discovery and courage – but also to stories of suffering, starvation and, sometimes, death. As Ernest Shackleton raced to make it back to base camp on his 1907–1909 Nimrod expedition he summed up his party’s desperate situation: ‘Our food lies ahead, and death stalks us from behind’ ([1911] 2007: 234). Food, particularly the absence of food, is a constant theme in Antarctic literature. Hunger and starvation fill the early diaries of explorers in the Antarctic. As Jason Anthony notes in Hoosh: Roast Penguin, Scurvy Day and Other Stories of

Food and Starvation in Heroic-Era Antarctic Literature for Children

Antarctic Cuisine: ‘If the mother of Antarctic cuisine was necessity, its father was privation. Hunger was the one spice every expedition carried’ (2012: xii). When men like Shackleton and Robert F. Scott went to the Antarctic, very little was known about the continent. It was Terra Australis Incognita – the Unknown Southern Land. When they landed on Antarctica they found themselves in the coldest, windiest driest place on earth; a place which is 98% ice and 2% barren rock, a place where nothing grows.1 Food was always going to be a problem. The explorers brought as many provisions as they could on board their expedition ships, and then relied on finding seal and penguin meat for food. But seals and penguins do not live on the interior of the continent and so the explorers relied on those foods that Western cultures traditionally deemed unsuitable to eat: horse meat and dog meat. These animals played two roles on the expeditions, they were used as working animals, dragging the heavy sleds across the Antarctic ice, and when they were worn out by this task, they were used as food. Sometimes the meat was used as food for the remaining sled dogs, but it also provided vital food for the explorers themselves. The explorers did not sugar coat the barbarity of this act in their diaries. Scott’s bitter rival Roald Amundsen – the first to reach the South Pole – named his first camp on the Antarctic plateau the Butcher’s Shop because it was here that, as planned, they killed and butchered nearly half their dogs. He describes the ambivalence with which his colleagues approached the feast that followed. The entrails were for the most part devoured warm on the spot by the victims’ comrades, so voracious were they all. … The holiday humour that ought to have prevailed in the tent that evening – our first on the plateau – did not make its appearance; there was depression and sadness in the air – we had grown so fond of our dogs. The place was named the ‘Butcher’s Shop’. It had been arranged that we should stop here two days to rest and eat dog. There was more than one among us who at first would not hear of taking any part in this feast; but as time went by, and appetites

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became sharper, this view underwent a change, until, during the last few days before reaching the Butcher’s Shop, we all thought and talked of nothing but dog cutlets, dog steaks, and the like. (Amundsen, [1912] 2010: 269)

If hunger is the best sauce, then hunger is also an amnesiac, allowing the starving to forget their years of acculturation during which these animals were presented as companions and workers – but not food. Necessity overrules propriety. The historian Gordon Hayes coined the term ‘Heroic Era’ in relation to Antarctic exploration in 1936. He argued that: A large amount of valuable work was accomplished by these ventures, for the most part under difficult conditions. The footsteps of the British explorers were continually dogged by disaster and some of them purchased their discoveries with their lives. As a small tribute to these gallant men it is suggested that this period should be known as the Heroic Era of Antarctic exploration. (1932: 29–30)

The Heroic Era of Antarctic exploration is now generally understood as beginning in 1895 with a resolution from the International Geographical Congress in London which stated that ‘the exploration of the Antarctic regions is the greatest piece of geographical exploration still to be undertaken’ (Francioni and Scovazzi, 1996: 640), and ending with the death of Ernest Shackleton in 1922 aboard his ship Quest, bound, once again, for Antarctica. 58 These figures became heroes for adults and children. They were presented as exemplars of masculinity, courage and determination. In many ways they are still presented in this way to children through rewritings of the Heroic-Era narratives. Even since 2000 many books have been written for child readers based on the early Antarctic expeditions. Texts such as Jennifer Armstrong’s Spirit of Endurance (2001), Dowdeswell, Dowdeswell and Seddon’s Scott of the Antarctic (2012) and Nicholas Brasch’s Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic Expedition (2013) (from the Sensational True Stories series) all retell the stories of the first explorers in

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Antarctica. As the titles of these books indicate, the heroic nature of the expeditions is still a central theme in the narratives of Antarctic exploration written for children. Margery Hourihan in Deconstructing the Hero (1997) argues that the heroic tale has been dominant in Western culture, and particularly in tales written for children. She argues that In Western culture there is a story which has been told over and over again, in innumerable versions, from the earliest times. It is a story about superiority, dominance and success. It tells how white European men are the natural masters of the world because they are strong, brave, skilful, rational and dedicated. … It is our favourite story and it has been told so many times that we have come to believe that what it says about the world is true. (p.1)

Based on the imperial exploits of a group of white men, these tales echo the traditional structure of a heroic tale as outlined by Hourihan. The first four of Hourihan’s eight-point narrative structure are particularly apt. 1 The Hero is white, male, British, American or European, and usually young. He may be accompanied by a single male companion or he may be the leader of a group of adventurers. 2 He leaves the civilized order of home to venture into the wilderness in pursuit of his goal. 3 The wilderness may be a forest, a fantasy land, another planet, Africa or some other non-European part of the world. … It lacks the order and safety of home. Dangerous and magical things happen there. 4 The hero encounters a series of difficulties and is threatened by dangerous opponents. (pp.9–10)

However, a significant element that does not fit with the heroic image is that of eating and starving in these tales. Food in the narratives of the Heroic Era is greatly problematic because the lack of food literally wore away at the bodies of the Heroic explorers,

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diminished them in stature and, in some cases, killed them. The lack of food also necessitated the butchering and eating of the unusual food sources: penguins, seals, horses and dogs all became dinner. This is a compelling element of the narrative because it demonstrates the desperation of the explorers and it highlights Antarctica’s position as totally other to our home spaces. These actions also create a tension between the image of the hero and the image of a desperate man. Drawing on this tension, I examine the ways in which food and eating in children’s texts about the Antarctic subvert the image of the explorer as a hero. I consider the way in which two authors of children’s fiction about Antarctica, Michael McCurdy and Michael Smith, have dealt with the tension between the characters as heroic figures and their actions in relation to food that contravene Western cultural food avoidance. The two key texts I shall examine are Michael Smith’s Tom Crean: Ice Man (2003), illustrated by Annie Brady, and Michael McCurdy’s Trapped in the Ice! Shackleton’s Amazing Antarctic Adventure (1997). I shall look first at starvation and the heroic body, and then at unusual food sources in the children’s literature about the Heroic-Era expeditions.

Starvation and the Heroic Body Hourihan describes the hero as a man of action. He is good at fighting, and he uses his club, or his sword or gun to telling effect. … Thus the story glorifies violence and defines manhood within this context. (1997: 3)

Both McCurdy and Smith begin their texts by establishing their heroes as men of action. McCurdy introduces Shackleton saying: Sir Ernest Shackleton was a national hero in England when he began his third Antarctic trip in 1914’, and describes the story to follow as: ‘one of the most remarkable true-life survival stories on record. (1997: 4–5)

Food and Starvation in Heroic-Era Antarctic Literature for Children

Similarly Smith highlights Tom Crean’s courage and achievements in the opening paragraph. Tom Crean was among the small band of outstanding men who conquered the unexpected Antarctic wilderness about 100 years ago. His astonishing adventures helped lift the veil from Antarctica and no history of the frozen land can be written without saluting the massive role he played. (Smith, 2003: 6)

The hero in both texts is certainly a man of action. In her article ‘Voracious Appetites: The Construction of Fatness in the Boy Hero’, Jean Webb notes the rise of muscular Christianity as a movement within boys’ adventure fiction in the 1850s, pointing to works by Charles Kingsley, Thomas Hughes and G.A. Henty. Webb contends that in his writing Kingsley is representing an essence of English manliness which he would want his young readers to espouse; that is, being manful, godly, practical, enthusiastic, prudent, self-sacrificing … and dedicated to the furtherance of English interests through war. Furthermore this hero is athletic and sporty, and one would deduce not overweight. (Webb, 2009: 107)

Webb’s description of the muscular Christian hero links closely with the early narratives about Scott and the Heroic-Era explorers, and this image – the image of the athletic, sporty, manly hero – has remained consistent in children’s Heroic-Era narratives to this day. It is interesting to contrast the rewritings of Heroic-Era narratives with another form of children’s fiction in which starvation is a common theme: Irish famine literature. These narratives focus on describing the suffering of the people. Karen Hill McNamara notes that the famine stories, ‘reveal the horrors of the Great Famine, the relentless hunger and the quest for food … [and] the depiction of lips green from eating grass and other weeds is a powerful image in Famine folklore and children’s literature’ (Hill McNamara, 2009: 149). In these tales of the Irish famine the physical decline of the protagonists and those around them is central to the narrative. Many of the child characters have

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seen parents or siblings starve to death, and the sight of emaciated corpses is commonly used to highlight the widespread nature of the disaster. These are tales in which the characters are the individuals who are meant to be representative of the group, their suffering is the suffering of a whole people. In contrast, the Heroic-Era tales are stories about the individuals who are separated from and implicitly positioned as superior to the many. Any physical decline in the explorers could therefore endanger the traditional heroic image. Some texts resolve this conflict through refusing to show a physical decline in the body of the hero. An example is Meredith Hooper’s Tom’s Rabbit (1998), which is based on the Scott’s Terra Nova expedition, an expedition where five people died starving and crippled by frostbite. Hooper’s story focuses on the time the men spent on the ship before landing on Antarctica, and chooses a moment of celebration – the Christmas meal aboard the ship (Plate 13). The animals in this tale are treated with kindness and shown lounging safely, there is no hint of their later fate. The men are surrounded by food, and their later sufferings are only summarised and in a postscript. Both McCurdy and Smith highlight the lack of food as a potential threat. Smith says: ‘A new danger was looming. Food supplies were starting to run low’ (2003: 77). Similarly McCurdy says: ‘Over the next few months, food was always a concern’ (1997: 14). In McCurdy’s text, while we do hear about the risk of starvation and the hunger of the men, the images of the explorers that accompany the text do not show a physical deterioration. The last image of the three explorers depicts the three men, Shackleton, Crean and Worsley after their arrival at the South Georgia Whaling Station. The image depicts the climax of what McCurdy called ‘one of the most remarkable true-life survival stories on record’ (1997: 5). The three men have climbed over the mountains of South Georgia, surviving on measly rations, and yet the final image shows them strong, healthy and towering above the men in the

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whaling station. The hero has suffered and yet his heroic image has not changed (Plate 14). Smith’s text, however, does describe some of the physical side effects of starvation on the explorers. Early in the text Smith describes the consequences of the limited diet of the explorers: The daily diet of fresh seal or penguin meat which contains the necessary vitamin C, prevented them getting scurvy. But it had another side effect. All the men became horribly constipated and were constantly breaking wind. (2003: 69)

Smith also describes a change in the physical appearance of the explorers: The six men were a pitiful sight. Some could barely walk on their shaky legs after being so long at sea. Frostbite, hunger, exhaustion and thirst had taken a heavy toll. (2003: 98)

Smith’s text challenges the traditional invincible image of the hero; his choice of Crean is an initial indication that this story may not follow the conventional heroic structure as Crean was a seaman, not a leader of the expedition and not an officer like Scott and Shackleton. He also shows Crean’s emotional reactions to the suffering of his colleagues: Tom knew that Lt Evans was slowly dying. On one occasion Lt. Evans fainted. Tears filled Tom’s eyes as he knelt down to revive the man. Tom’s warm salty tears rolled down his face and dripped onto Lt Evan’s face, waking him. (Smith, 2003: 48)

Crean’s heroism in this book is located not only in his acts of strength and endurance, but also in his kindness towards his friends and his willingness to openly show his emotions. In this way the physical decline represented in the text is not at odds with the image of the hero because this is a picture of an imperfect hero, a very human hero. Similarly, texts like Geraldine McCaughrean’s The White Darkness (2007) seek to interrogate the popular image of the Heroic explorers. McCaughrean describes in detail the physical decline of Titus Oates, one of Scott’s tragic polar party. As Oates accompanies Sym, the protagonist, on her own

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Antarctic misadventure, we (and she) see the reality of his suffering: And he leans over me, his face close to mine, his cheek rubbing mine. Sharp with beard, it scratches my cheek like frostburn. When he takes his face away it is ice-poked, the blue lips split and bleeding, the cornea of his eyes scraped red by the iron-filing flecks of ice in the wind. (McCaughrean, 2007: 231–32)

The realistic depiction of Oates physical decline is just one way in which McCaughrean challenges the established images of the explorers as heroes. Both Smith and McCaughrean locate their characters’ heroism in their humanity so that the reader sees both their frailty and their courage.

Dog Meat: The Cannibal Explorer However it is not the risk of starvation from lack of food that presents the greatest challenge to the heroic image of the explorers – it is the food that they do eat. Many of the Heroic-Era narratives for children show the unusual animals that became food for Antarctic explorers. Seals, penguins, sea lions and albatrosses, even dogs and horses, all formed part of the Antarctic diet, and the eating of these animals, traditionally eschewed by Western European cultures remains troubling in the children’s texts about the expeditions. Many critics have highlighted the importance of food choices in culture and literature. Roland Barthes argues that ‘to eat is a behaviour that develops beyond its own ends, replacing, summing up, and signalizing other behaviours’ (Barthes, [1961] 2013: 28). Ann Alston contends that food plays an important role in children’s literature, saying: The consumption of food is a biological necessity but it is also a cultural practice as the type of food, the method by which it is prepared, and the people with whom it is shared suggest an adherence to specific ideologies, families, and even nations. (Alston, 2008: 106)

Food and Starvation in Heroic-Era Antarctic Literature for Children

Carolyn Daniel claims that Children must also learn all sorts of rules about food and eating. Most important – they must know who eats whom. Food events in children’s literature are clearly intended to teach children how to be human. (Daniel, 2006: 12)

These distinctions are broken down in the tales of Heroic-Era exploration for children. The characters must forget their culturally specific lessons on who eats whom – in this landscape no potential food source can be wasted. The boundaries are further broken down between eater and eaten in the tales because at times the explorers are themselves at risk of being eaten. Both McCurdy and Smith retell a story from Shackleton’s Endurance expedition when Tom Orde-Lee was attacked by a sea lion. McCurdy writes: [A ]monstrous head burst from the ice. A giant sea leopard lunged at Tom, only to slip quickly back into the dark water, stalking Tom as sea leopards do when they hunt penguins … the huge animal lunged again, this time springing out of the water and right onto the ice. … Frankie Wild rushed over from camp carrying a rifle. The sea leopard now charged Frankie, who dropped calmly to one knee, took careful aim, and fired three shots. The sea leopard fell dead. There was plenty to eat for days afterwards. (McCurdy, 1997: 14)

Describing the same incident Smith says: On one occasion, a 3m (10ft) sea leopard climbed onto the ice and tried to attack one of the sailors. The massive beast was shot and made ready for dinner. When the creature was cut open the chef found seven whole but undigested fish inside its stomach. That night the men also had ‘fresh’ fish for dinner. (Smith, 2003: 69)

In both these accounts the men risk becoming food for the sea lion before finally making the creature their own dinner. The most transgressive food act in the tales of Heroic-Era exploration is the eating of horse or dog meat. Of all food types, meat in particular is subject to many food prohibitions. Alan

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Beardsworth and Teresa Keil in Sociology on the Menu explain that: The rejection of a particular flesh food can be a powerful cultural device to reinforce and emphasize a particular group’s collective identity, as can the acceptance of a given flesh food. … The rejection of such flesh is in itself a clear expression of the individual’s continuing commitment to the religion or system of belief in question. (Beardsworth and Keil, 1997: 205–6)

Horse and dog flesh are two forms of meat typically abjured in West European cultures. Dog meat is particularly uncomfortable for many audiences because of the dog’s role as a human companion. The dual role of the dogs as both companions and workers and as food in Heroic-Era narratives for child readers is a breaking down of the barriers between what is food and what is not. As Daniels argues: when a dog is kept as a family pet, with a given name, it assumes a certain level of subjectivity. As such, dog flesh, like human flesh, cannot be coded as a meat to be eaten. (Daniel, 2006: 16)

However, dog meat was eaten by the explorers, and is eaten in some literary rewritings of the Heroic-Era narratives. Michael Smith depicts the explorers’ affection for the dogs and the ship’s cat, Mrs Chippy (Plate 15), and also their later killing and eating of the animals. Early on we hear that: Tom loved handling the dogs [and] Mrs Chippy was a big favourite with all the men. The men on board Endurance became fond of their animals, often taking photographs of them or feeding them scraps of food from their own plates. (Smith, 2003: 76)

However, when circumstances become desperate the men are forced to kill and eat the animals they have named and cared for: The run-down of food stocks was bad news for the remaining dogs. Without food the animals would starve to death or suffer brutal attacks from each other. The dogs themselves were also a valuable source of meat for the men. So it was decided to put the animals out of their misery and shoot them. Even Tom’s last puppy

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could not be saved. Tough men like Tom were in tears. But there was simply no choice. Only the strongest can survive a Polar expedition. (Smith, 2003: 77)

In all the passages where Smith describes killing the animals there is an insistence that the killings are also an act of mercy. When describing the killing of the ponies on Scott’s Terra Nova expedition, Smith says: ‘It was an act of mercy to shoot them. The alternative was to watch the ponies freeze or slowly starve to death’ (2003: 31–32). Later, when Mrs Chippy the ship’s cat is killed, we are told he was shot ‘because the other dogs, who were likely to grow hungry on the march, might attack him’ (2003: 75). The food that the animals provide is depicted as a final gift from the loyal creatures: ‘Bones and the other loyal ponies gave the explorers one important last service – fresh meat’ (2003: 32). Smith distances Crean, his hero, from the act of killing the dogs or ponies. The killings are always abstract, with no one person made accountable. Smith uses phrases like ‘it was decided to put the animals out of their misery’ and the ship’s pet cat ‘was shot’. However, these distancing mechanisms cannot remove the brutality of the acts to the reader, particularly the child reader who is used to seeing animals as protagonists in stories, or as faithful companions to central characters. The naming of the animals before their deaths is particularly disturbing. As Daniel argued, to name a creature is to give it subjectivity, and so the act of killing these named animals, who have been attributed with individual characteristics, is almost akin to cannibalism. This act further breaks down the boundaries between the eater and the eaten, between human and animal. Paul Rozin argues that: It is only by maintaining an emphatically clear distinction between ourselves as eating subjects in contrast to certain animals as objects to be eaten, that we retain our position at the top of the food chain and avoid becoming part of it. (Rozin in Daniel, 2006: 15)

The act of eating of these animals risks making monsters of the very characters the stories celebrate as heroes.

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And yet in stories like Hooper’s and McCurdy’s, which completely ignore the eating of dogs or horses, the true fate of the animals lurks behind the stories like a shadow. These stories do not exist in isolation – they form part of a web of information about the Heroic Era, some more explicit than others. The image in Hooper’s text of Mrs Chippy cosily asleep in a hammock made by the men seems far less serene when we know that he was taken and shot (Plate 15), while the dogs are a ghostly absence in McCurdy’s narrative, conveniently absent throughout. In Rabelais and his World, Mikhail Bhaktin declares that ‘the body … swallows, devours, rends the world apart, is enriched and grows at the world’s expense’ (Bahktin, 1984: 281). Food in HeroicEra tales is destruction, destruction of the explorer’s body through the lack of food, or destruction of the environment and companion relationships through the eating of unusual food sources – either way, eating and starvation in these tales quietly subverts the traditional image of the heroic explorer.

Notes 1 Geographical information on Antarctica from the CIA’s (2010) The World Factbook 2010. Washington, DC: Potomac Books.

Works Cited Primary Texts Hooper, Meredith (illus. Bert Kitchen) (1999) Tom’s Rabbit. London: Frances Lincoln. McCurdy, Michael (1997) Trapped in the Ice! Shackleton’s Amazing Antarctic Adventure. New York: Walker & Company. Smith, Michael (illus. Annie Brady) (2003) Tom Crean: Ice Man. Cork, Ireland: The Collins Press. Secondary Texts Amundsen, Roald ([1912] 2010) The South Pole. Bremen: Salzwasser Verlag.

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Alston, Ann (2008) The Family in English Children’s Literature. New York: Routledge. Anthony, Jason (2012) Hoosh: Roast Penguin, Scurvy Day, and Other Stories of Antarctic Cuisine. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail ([1965] 1993) Rabelais and his World. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Barthes, Roland [1961] (2013) Towards a psychosociology of contemporary food consumption. In Carole Counihan and Penny van Sterik (eds) Food and Culture: A Reader, 3rd edn. New York: Routledge. Beardsworth, Alan and Teresa Keil (1997) Sociology on the Menu: An Invitation to the Study of Food and Society. London: Routledge. Daniel, Carolyn (2006) Voracious Children: Who Eats Whom in Children’s Literature. New York: Routledge. Franciono, Francesco and Tullio Scovazzi (eds) (1996) International Law for Antarctica. The Hague, The Netherlands: Kluwer Law International. Hayes, Gordon (1932) The Conquest of the South Pole: Antarctic Expeditions, 1906–1931. London: T. Butterworth. Hill McNamara, Karen (2009) The potato eaters: Food collection in Irish famine literature for children. In Kara K. Keeling and Scott Pollard (eds) (pp.149–166). Hourihan, Margery (1997) Deconstructing the Hero: Literary Theory and Children’s Literature. London: Routledge.. Keeling, Kara K. and Scott Pollard (eds) (2009) Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature. New York: Routledge. McCaughrean, Geraldine (2007) The White Darkness. Oxford University Press. Shackleton, Ernest ([1911] 2007) Heart of the Antarctic and South. London: Wordsworth Editions. Webb, Jean (2009) ‘Voracious appetites’: The construction of ‘fatness’ in the boy hero in children’s literature. In Kara K. Keeling and Scott Pollard (eds) (pp.105–23).

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CHAPTER ELEVEN FOOD SUPPLY AND SUSTENANCE IN VICTORIAN ROBINSONADES FOR CHILDREN SIMONE HERRMANN The writer examines the importance of food in nineteenth-century Robinsonades, focusing on Masterman Ready and The Coral Island. She argues that through this their authors justify and reinforce the ideology of Empire.

Robinsonades, as the name indicates, are stories that imitate the structure of its eponym, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). This genre usually implies a shipwreck, rescue on an uninhabited island, creating and maintaining a life worth living, encountering setbacks, for example, cannibals or serious illness, and the eventual escape from the island on your own or with help from outside. Deviations from and variations of this scheme are, however, common, sometimes turning a single castaway into a group or the island into a moon. Adaptations or chapbook editions of the original are excluded from this definition.1 What is particularly obvious is that other fields of research examining these island narratives have been dealt with more prominently to date than the aspect of food provision. Most notably, the main field of research for Robinsonades are pedagogy, the construction of the family, colonialism and religious education. Yet the dilemma of shipwreck and the ensuing survival inevitably raise the issue of food as the basic means to life. Two concepts of the isolated habitat emerge within the genre: the ‘insula amoena’,

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the friendly and preserving island; and the ‘insula inimica’, the hostile island, as used by Peter Zupancic in his dissertation Die Robinsonade in der Jugendliteratur (1976) on popular German, English and French Robinsonades for young adults. Nineteenth-century Britain forms the framework for a multitude of these narratives, promoting imperial ideology and the Empire’s grandeur. In fact, the majority of British Robinson stories find their origin in the Victorian period. Hence, this paper is concerned with two examples of Victorian Robinsonades in which I shall examine the following. 1 Their tendencies of presenting the island setting as highly life friendly; 2 The power relations that arise through the giving and denying of food; 3 The motif of cannibalism; 4 The narratological function of food. The examples I have chosen are Captain Frederick Marryat’s Masterman Ready ([1841] 1970) and R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island ([1858) 1966). The first deals with a pious family who are shipwrecked on an isolated island and are delivered by the even more pious old seaman Ready. The latter is the story of the three boys Jack Martin, Ralph Rover and Peterkin Gay who are shipwrecked, but find, to their delight, that this lonely island is the mythical ‘land of plenty’.2 Since nineteenth-century Puritanism and religiosity caused a strict regulation of children’s diet (Labbe, 2009: 93), food posed a constant lure for young people. As Christiane Bimberg argues, these regulations did not only include what to eat, but also where (i.e. the separation of food-preparing and food-consuming rooms), when (concerning the regularity of mealtimes), how (meaning eating education and manners) and with whom (parents/masters versus children/servants) (1999: 12–13). As Susan Honeyman explains:

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Victorians were ‘sadistic’ in child feeding, following … spiritual pedagogy … and nutritional advice … to develop a ‘pleasure-free’ cuisine that some claim helped create the stoic Victorian personality that led to Great Britain’s domination of the world. (2007: 208)

Idyllic Settings Masterman Ready The constant lure of what is and is not allowed found its way into adventure stories, as the distance and isolation of the South Seas left an open space for pretending and dreaming. Hence, the characters of Victorian Robinsonades usually lack nothing. At first, similar to Robinson Crusoe, the castaways profit from the wreck of the ship in which they arrived. Here, it functions as the starting point of their civilisation. However, the island’s provisions are so favourable that the wreck is later used only as a toolbox. In this manner, the Seagrave family and Ready are able to gather and preserve a respectable amount of provisions: eggs from the chicken they brought with them (p.201), bananas and pepper, plants for fences, parrots to make parrot pies, yams for potatoes (pp.217–20), plants for rope, grape vines so that they seriously consider producing wine, and even growing mustard (p.223). Furthermore, the coconut trees are the all-rounders among the island’s plants, since they provide material not only for food, but also for the building of huts, planks, rope and fans (p.58). Mervyn Nicholson refers to this ‘miraculous provision of food [as] the signifying prerogative of divinity’ (1994: 288). Typical of a religious narrative, only the good aspects are God sent, not the negative occurrences. Ready is thus labelled to be sent from heaven to save them, not only in the end from the natives, but also through his knowledge, experience and morality. ‘There’s nothing like having a ready supply of provisions at all times’ (p.176) might be referred to as his mantra. He teaches them how to find fresh water, to catch, keep and handle certain food (turtle is accordingly

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eaten as soup and steak), to produce more salt (p.128), to build storehouses and animal shelters (p.175), to grow a vegetable garden (p.193) and, most importantly, to recognise certain plants as food; for example, peas, beans and cucumbers (p.225). Apparently, as they lack nothing in particular, neither do their animals: ‘What beautiful food there is for the sheep and goats’ observes Mr Seagrave (p.253). Characteristically, nearly all their meals are ‘excellent’, ‘splendid’ or ‘admirable’, like an ‘excellent breakfast of fried fish’ (p.139). Still, Marryat’s castaways do not seem to realise the wealth of resources they have and the luxury in which they are living. Mr Seagrave claims that ‘We cannot expect to get things here, as though we were a hundred yards from a grocer’s shop’ (pp.261–62). This is, however, exactly the picture Marryat displays in his narrative, since they have everything they need at their disposal. This mixture of already available food and the ability to work to maintain it is already a motif in Robinson Crusoe. I had no want of food, and of that which was very good too, especially these three sorts, … goats, pigeons, and turtle, or tortoise, which added to my grapes. Leadenhall market could not have furnished a table better than I …; and though my case was deplorable enough, yet I had great cause for thankfulness that I was not driven to any extremities for food, but had rather plenty, even to dainties. (Defoe, 1994: 110)

The Coral Island In Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, the free availability of food is inseparable from the romantic nature of the island setting. After Peterkin learns of the various uses of the coconut, he exclaims: ‘Meat and drink on the same tree! … washing in the sea, lodging on the ground and all for nothing! My dear boys, we’re set up for life; it must be the ancient Paradise, hurrah!’ (p.44)

This Edenic nature is further emphasised when he describes the juice of the coconut to be ‘Nectar! Perfect nectar!’ (p.44), thus referring to the mythical drink of the ancient gods. On their island,

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the climate is beautiful, summer lasts forever and the trees bear fruit all year long so that they ‘never wanted for a plentiful supply of food’ (p.168). From a closer look at a list of provisions, it becomes evident that the boys are well provided for. At one point they have: 10 Bread-fruits (two baked, eight unbaked). 20 Yams (six roasted, the rest raw). 6 Taro roots. 50 Fine large plums. 6 Cocoa nuts, ripe. 6 Ditto green (for drinking). 4 Large ducks and two small ones, raw. 3 Cold roast pigs, with stuffing. (p.156)

In addition, they weekly catch several eels, turtles, shrimps and prawns, so they even have the luxury of a varied diet: ‘indeed, we never passed a week without making some new and interesting discovery of some sort or other, either on the land or in the sea’ (p.148). Still, this multitude of food and provision offered to them makes them arrogant. As Ralph explains: we did not consider it necessary to carry any food with us, as we knew that wherever we went we should be certain to fall in with cocoa-nut trees’, the source of ‘meat and drink and pockethandkerchiefs’ (p.84)

So far, it appears that nineteenth-century Robinson stories propagate a utopian idyll in which the life removed from home is guaranteed to be paradise on earth with all its possibilities and abundances.

Food Regulation Yet it should be mentioned that the Victorians regulated children’s overindulgence and greed for food, and this becomes apparent in these Robinsonades. Among metaphors of food in children’s literature such as hospitality, celebration, tradition, cosiness and

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cheer (Katz, 1980: 192–94), gluttony is also of major importance. For Jacqueline Labbe, the greedy and hungry child – the voracious child – is equal to the sinful child with regard to original sin (2009: 94).3 Food is thus used as a means to inculcate social practices and expectations into children (Katz, 1980: 193). Ballantyne and Marryat, in fact, restate Defoe’s opinion on the waste and over-consumption of food. Crusoe is highly aware that he must not produce more than he can consume – the basic market strategy of supply and demand. But all I could make use of was all that was valuable: I had enough to eat and supply my wants, and what was all the rest to me? If I killed more flesh than I could eat, the dog must eat it, or vermin; if I sowed more corn than I could eat, it must be spoiled. (Defoe, 1994: 129)

In The Coral Island, this issue is dealt with less obviously. Their provisions are ‘more than sufficient’ (Ballantyne, 1966: 153) and the boys are many times overwhelmed by having to make a decision about ‘which of the dainties to begin with’ (p.136). They continue eating, the result being that they happily sleep late, and Peterkin suspects that they will become gluttons or epicures if they continue their life on the island (pp.99, 100). Masterman Ready employs a more drastic example of the ‘little greedy boy’ (Marryat, 1970: 147) in the form of young Tommy. He likes everything, but is never satisfied. Marryat equates this insatiable greed with naughtiness and misbehaviour: ‘You said I was a good boy when I learnt my lesson this morning,’ replied Tommy. ‘Yes, but you should always be good,’ replied his mother. ‘I can’t always be good,’ said Tommy: ‘I’m very hungry, I want my dinner.’ (p.110)

As a result of his constant misbehaviour, phrases such as ‘Well, then, he shall have no dinner till …’ (p.146) or ‘You’ll have no dinner this day, you may be sure’ (p.204) acquire a formulaic character. None of his siblings is as unsatisfiable as Tommy. By contrast his only sister is regarded as an example of feminine

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purity (Honeyman, 2007: 211) because she is content with what she is given. The message of modesty, not only concerning food and hunger, is evident in all fields of life: The fried fish was excellent, and Master Tommy was nearly choked by a bone, which stuck in his throat, in consequence for his being so greedy, and eating so fast. (Marryat, 1970: 213)

Tommy is only able to avoid punishment and build a closer relationship with his parents when he can control his appetite. Wendy Katz asserts that this is evident with regard to obese and anorexic children in literature: to control one’s appetite means to regain control over life (1980: 196). By strictly regulating Tommy’s diet in this way, his parents and, ultimately, Ready (also an adult) control him. Only if he acts as they wish, does he receive his meal. Thus the Seagraves turn from parents into masters. This is in accord with Christiane Bimberg’s view that in eating habits, especially where and with whom food is consumed, parents behave to children as masters behave to servants (1999: 12). However, Marryat himself states that this power relationship is maintained only for a certain amount of time: [W]hat a parallel there is between a colony and the mother country and a child and its parent. In infancy, the mother country … supports the colony as an infant; as it advances and becomes vigorous, the colony returns the obligation. … As soon as the colony has grown strong and powerful enough to take care of itself, it throws off the yoke of subjection, and declares itself independent; just as a son, who has grown to manhood, leaves his father’s house, and takes up a business to gain his livelihood. (pp.115–16)

In the same manner does Crusoe give Friday food before he puts him to bed, just like a parent would a child (Defoe, 1994: 201). The choice of the word feed instead of eat (p.209) indicates a difference between the active and the passive part in their relationship and the ensuing power relationship.

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This structure is repeated in Ballantyne’s narrative, though not as constantly, and is recognisable in the dependencies among the boys. Jack is more than once referred to as their leader, as well as being the noblest and oldest of the three. In their imperial play, acting on their delight at being marooned in paradise, Peterkin exclaims ‘You shall be king, Jack’ (Ballantyne, 1966: 36). This hierarchy of dependency and power play is emphasised, even if in a joking manner, when the boys find oysters, much to Peterkin’s delight. ‘I’ll be able to keep you in good order now, Master Peterkin,’ says Jack. ‘You know you can’t dive any better than a cat. So, sir, whenever you behave ill, you shall have no oysters for breakfast’ (p.52).

Here again we can find proof of the luxuriousness of their life on the island, constantly having oysters at their disposal. Nicholson claims in his essay ‘Food and power: Homer, Carroll, Atwood and Others’ that: [P]ower over food = power over the people. At the same time and for the same reasons, control over food signifies independence. … Thus, food = (1) power over life = (2) power over others = (3) control of one’s own destiny. (1987: 48)

Cannibalism Nicholson’s claim not only underlines the food-related aspect of power relationships in Robinsonades, but also raises questions about the motif of cannibalism. In Robinson Crusoe, Crusoe’s fear of falling victim to cannibalism is evident. Neil Heims identifies in this fear the same concerns as Nicholson expresses, namely the metaphor that power over food signifies domination. The relationship of eater and eaten can thus be compared to that of the powerful and the powerless (Nicholson, 1987: 39). Accordingly, eating = possessing = domination (Heims, 1983: 190–91). Heims furthermore argues that this paranoia of being dominated reflects

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the actual task Crusoe set out on, which was to take part in the imperial mission and enslave natives, hence to dominate others (p.191). Cannibalism here simply justifies imperialism in the eighteenth century through turning the actual victims into victimisers (p.193), and this has become a repeated motif in Robinson stories. Cannibalism as a motif is not overt in Marryat’s Masterman Ready. At first glance, the Seagraves are merely afraid of being eaten by sharks, and indeed some animals fall victim in this way (1970: 84, 291). However, if we consider that Ready in his accounts of ‘savages’ describes them as being more like animals than humans (p.193), a subversive fear of being devoured by them becomes evident. Ballantyne’s novel, however, focuses strongly on cannibalism and the cruelty involved. In The Coral Island the boys find that ‘all they had ever heard or read of wild beasts and savages, torturings at the stake, roastings alive, and such like horrible things’ (Ballantyne, 1966: 55) was true, and, through this, Ballantyne considers that what was being taught in nineteenth-century Britain about native peoples was justified. The natives’ humanity is frequently undermined, for example, by referring to them as monsters (pp.174, 237), and they act with a ferocity incomprehensible to the civilised British boys. Descriptions like these inhuman monsters were actually launching their canoe over the living bodies of their victims. … [O]ne after another, the ponderous canoe passed over them, burst the eyeballs from their sockets, and sent the life’s blood gushing from their mouths. (p.37)

further justify Britain’s merciless dealings with native peoples in the imperial project. Besides the obvious fact of cannibalism, that of eating human flesh, Ballantyne manages to distance the natives from the British on another level. Hearing that the natives brained [their victims] as they lay; and putting some of their brains on leaves went off with them, we were afterwards informed, to

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their temples, to present them to their gods as an earnest of the human victims. (p.284)

the white man is able to condemn the natives’ religion and manner of worship. By reading that ‘the savages [are] dancin’ round them [i.e. the crew of a pirate schooner] like demons’ an atmosphere of satanic ritual is created (p.248). The connection between cannibalism and hell is easily established in Victorian literature, referencing pictures of hell in which lost souls are shoved into a monster’s, or Satan’s, mouth (Nichsolson, 1994: 293). Norman Kiell summarises the use of cannibalism in Victorian adventure tales thus: There is a relation between nature and culture through the opposition of raw food, a product of nature, to cooked food, a product of culture. (1995: 126)

Culture here implies civilisation, of which the British thought native peoples were incapable.

Narratological Function As a last point I should like to mention that food and its production, as well as consumption, work narratologically as well as dramaturgically on a structuring level in Robinsonades (Bimberg, 1999: 32). Crusoe’s only tasks on the island are concerned and structured around tending his garden and flock. He thus constructs a routine for his day, while simultaneously adding purpose to his solitary life on the island (Defoe, 1994: 119). In both Marryat’s and Ballantyne’s novels the actions of the protagonists are constructed around the regular consumption of food. One reason for this might be, as mentioned before, the development of consistent mealtimes during the period. In Masterman Ready, chapters usually start with breakfast and end with supper, just like the day of the castaways (Marryat, 1970: 168). Since the Seagrave family even includes a servant, a black girl named Juno, they succeed in establishing kitchens in their various houses on the

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island, which considerably adds to the domestic atmosphere of the novel (p.298). This awareness of habitual mealtimes is maintained in The Coral Island. As the story is told in the first person, the narrative is profoundly connected to the act of eating. ‘That afternoon, as I was down below at dinner, I heard the men talking about this curious ship’ (Ballantyne, 1966: 209). Furthermore, mealtimes here function dramaturgically as time markers for the reader, such as when Ralph, the narrator, explains that ‘during the dinner hour I wandered into the woods alone’ (p.225).

Conclusion Robinsonades created more than a century after their namesake deal with food on different levels. The expression of gustatory utopia, social education, narratological structuring and the processes of othering as part of justifying Britain’s imperialism are four very striking functions of food in nineteenth-century Robinson stories. However, for a detailed study of its functions in Victorian Robinsonades, novels such as The Castaways (1857) by Anne Bowman, W.H.G. Kingston’s The Rival Crusoes (1836) and Ann Fraser Tytler’s Leila or The Island (1849), to name but a few, need to be taken into consideration. Yet although food aspects are not part of the research traditionally done in this genre, Robinsonades nevertheless mirror, even condense, the didactics and imperial ideologies conveyed in many Victorian adventure narratives.

Notes 1 On chapbook editions, see Andrew O’Malley (2012) Children’s Literature, Popular Culture and Robinson Crusoe. Basingstoke: Palgrave. 2 Many readers will here correctly recognise the names from William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. This reuse is deliberate, since it creates a direct object of reference for his dystopian novel.

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3 For a further study of the greedy child as a motif in children’s literature, see Carolyn Daniel (2006) Voracious Children: Who Eats Whom in Children's Literature. New York: Routledge.

Works Cited Primary Texts Ballantyne, R.M. ([1857] 1966) The Coral Island. London: Collins. Defoe, Daniel ([1719] 1994) Robinson Crusoe. London: Penguin. Marryat, Captain Frederick ([1841] 1970) Masterman Ready. London: Dent. Secondary Texts Bimberg, Christiane (1999) The importance of eating and drinking in children’s classics. In Dieter Petzold (ed.) Inklings – Jahrbuch für Literatur und Ästhetik. Vol. 17. Moers: Bredow (pp.10–34). Bowman, Anne (1857) The Castaways. London: G. Routledge & Co. Heims, Neil (1983) Robinson Crusoe and the fear of being eaten. Colby Quarterly, vol. 19, no. 4 (pp.190–93). Honeyman, Susan (2007) Gingerbread wishes and candy(land) dreams: The lure of food in cautionary tales of consumption. Marvels & Tales, vol. 21, no. 2 (pp.195–215). Katz, Wendy (1980) Some uses of food in children’s literature. Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 11, no. 4 (pp.192–99). Kiell, Norman (ed.) (1995) Food and Drink in Literature: A Selective Annotated Bibliography. London: Scarecrow. Kingston, W.H.G. ([1878] 1879 ) The Rival Crusoes. London: Griffith and Farran. Labbe, Jacqueline M. (2009) To eat and be eaten in nineteenthcentury children’s literature. In Kara K. Keeling and Scott T. Pollard (eds) Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature. New York: Routledge (pp.93–104). Nicholson, Mervyn (1991) Eat or be eaten: An interdisciplinary metaphor. Mosaic, vol. 24, no. 3/4 (pp.191–210). –– (1987) Food and power: Homer, Carroll, Atwood and others. Mosaic, vol. 20, no. 3 (pp.37–55).

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–– (1994) The scene of eating and the semiotics of the invisible. Recherches sémiotiques, vol. 14, no. 1/2 (pp.285–302). Tytler, Ann Fraser (1849) Leila or The Island. 5th edn. London: J. Hatchard & Son. Zupancic, Peter (1976) Die Robinsonade in der Jugendliteratur. Dissertation. University of Bochum (n.p.).

CHAPTER TWELVE ‘EDIBLE’ CHILDREN IN EARLY NINETEENTHCENTURY CHILDREN’S LITERATURE KAREN WILLIAMS The author argues that the image of the edible child, one that is common in early nineteenth-century children’s literature, has particularly resonance in this period of political, social and industrial upheaval.

From the witch in the Grimms’ ‘Hansel and Gretel’ and the figure of the wicked stepmother in their ‘Snow White’, through the carnivalesque work of Roald Dahl and the more disturbing ideas of consumption contained within Tim Burton’s ‘Oyster Boy’,1 the ‘child-who-is-consumed’ (or at least the threat of consumption) seems a timeless concept in children’s literature. However, the ability of this trope to generate ambivalent reactions of horror and pleasure, entertainment and fear has also seen this image inscribed on specific historical periods in an attempt to reflect contemporary debate and preoccupations. This paper focuses on the figure of the edible child in early nineteenth-century literature in order to illustrate how, in this period of great social, scientific and industrial change, the often troubling image of the consumption of a child can be read as an intrinsic reflection of both the positive and negative aspects of a society in flux. As scholars such as Richard Cronin have hypothesised, in literary terms, this early nineteenth-century period lies between the traditional scope of Romantic and Victorian literature. Indeed,

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in Romantic Victorians: English Literature 1824–1840 (2002) Cronin constitutes the era through this very lack of literary definition as not ‘a literary period at all but something more in the way of a lacuna, a dash, or some other kind of punctuation mark’ (p.2). As Cronin’s book demonstrates however, the literature produced in the first half of the 1800s draws heavily on the legacy of the Romantic period, particularly on the Romantic poets, but it also adapts and redraws this legacy to forge a new and self-sufficient literary identity. The implications of this for writing for and about children in this era is a retention of the foregrounded figure of the child characteristic of the major Romantic poets, but also a merging of the Romantic tendency for the reification of the infant figure with the increased importance assigned to the child as pivotal to the ‘perfectibilty’ of society and to consumer culture and associated production systems. Such seemingly contradictory visions have particular implications for the relevance of the trope of the edible child to this period. In Charles Lamb’s poem ‘The Dessert’, for example, which was published in 1809 as part of a collection of poems by Lamb and his sister Mary, the child is identified as a luxurious and exotic item, becoming both an object of adoration and fetishisation, but also of consumption. The poem opens with the simultaneous entry of the dessert and the child, ‘little Carolina’, to an adult’s dinner party. Carolina becomes effectively ‘served’ to the assembled guests along with the dessert: ‘with the apples and plums/Little Carolina comes’. The child curtsies, and then the narrator asks rhetorically, ‘what shall we compare her to?’ His answer; ‘The dessert itself will do’. The strong rhyme of the couplet emphasises the fusing of the child with the food, and thrusts them both under the gaze of the watching adults. The description of Carolina then, in effect, constitutes the child as part of the dessert itself: Like preserves she’s kept with care, Like blanch’d almonds she is fair, Soft as down on peach her hair, And so soft, so smooth is each

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Pretty cheek as that same peach, Yet more like in hue to cherries;

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(Charles Lamb, 1834: 151)

The child is there to be consumed by the onlookers, revered and eroticised. She becomes an object to be acted upon (note the image of her being ‘kept with care’ like a jar of ‘preserves’). As Judith Plotz suggests in her book Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood (2001), the description of Carolina makes her ‘explicitly good enough to eat’ (p.127). Disturbingly she becomes for the adults a disposable and enjoyable commodity, like the food at a dinner table. Plotz, however, reads this edible child not as fetishisation, but as a symbol of a deeper desire by the poet Lamb to preserve the innocence of childhood from the ‘experience of the adult’ by ‘wholly consum[ing] that untainted child itself’ (p.127). Imagined consumption here becomes a deep psychological desire to retain a part of ‘childness’ within oneself, and harks back to a yearning for the oneness between child and mother/adult that forms the basis of the imaginary stage in Lacanian theory. And yet, even as Lamb, the adult poet, desires to retain a part of the lost ‘innocence’ of childhood by ‘consuming’ the child, the unfortunate consequence for the literary child, Carolina, is a dismissal of her agency and subjectivity. In order to be consumed the child is presented as food, and this is affected, along with the sustained similes of fruit, through an absence of speech from the child that denies her entry into the Lacanian symbolic order and, as a result, her human subjectivity. The edible Carolina, then, represents both the Romantic legacy of child reification and the increasing commodification of early nineteenth-century society. The rising consumer culture into which Carolina is interpolated in Lamb’s verse was a complex phenomenon in this era. On the one hand, middle-class children became as much a part of this culture of consumerism as did adults. As book and toy emporiums specifically targeting a juvenile market sprang up in London and other large cities, children became valuable and important

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consumers (Denisoff, 2008: 11). But, conversely, at the lower end of the social scale, children were also implicated into the market economy as producers of consumer goods. It is here that the image of the edible child professes a darker side that speaks not to fancy goods and playthings, but instead to exploitation and desperation. In her book Conceptualising Cruelty to Children in NineteenthCentury England (1998), Monica Flegel outlines how cannibalism was often evoked in the vocabulary that vocalised the exploitation of the child. Using Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna’s 1841 novel Helen Fleetwood as an example, she cites the unsympathetic presentation of Mrs Wright and her home and family as indicative of a working-class family sucked into the production system to provide commercial products for the consumer market, but also as consumers themselves. Mrs Wright’s daughter Sarah with her body disfigured by unsuitable and onerous work in the factories becomes ‘a visible sign of the consumption of children’ who, when finally unable to work, ‘becomes merely an “object” … of no worth’ (Flegel, 1998: 118). It is left to the character of Tom South, a friend of the family, to explicitly link this kind of exploitation to cannibalism. He states: ‘it’s a cannibal sort of life to be eating, one might say, the flesh off our children’s bones, and sucking the young blood out of their veins’ (quoted in Flegel, 1998: 118). As Flegel describes it, the vocabulary used by Tonna captures not only the fact that these children are consumed by their labor so that others might be fed, but also that such an arrangement breaks a taboo – that it goes against a natural, proper order and as such, threatens society itself. (p.118)

Such images of disturbing unnaturalness also arise frequently in regard to children and food in the work of the poet and illustrator Thomas Hood. Hood’s prolific output in poetry collections, periodicals and annuals during the 1820s to 1840s culminated in his series of humorous Christmas annuals in the 1830s. These annuals were written for a family market which included children and contain many examples of Hood’s particular brand of social

‘Edible’ Children in Early Nineteenth-Century Children’s Literature

comment presented with a humorous tone. In ‘Ode to Mr Malthus’, for example, which appeared in The Comic Annual of 1832, Hood, like Tonna, questions the unnatural treatment of children in a search for the overall amelioration of society. Hood’s poem satirises Thomas Malthus’ popular work ‘Essay on the Principal of Population’, which was published and republished six times between 1798 and 1826. This tract argued against Rousseauian ideas of the perfectibility of society, with Malthus maintaining that current population growth would have to be curtailed before population outstripped food supply and society was plunged into catastrophe. In this poem the narrator, presented as a fervent supporter of Malthusian ideas, views lowerclass children as mere disposable objects in a quest to save society from itself. Through this bigoted mouthpiece, Hood hyperbolically (and comically) demonstrates the extreme possibilities of Malthusian doctrine. The narrator proposes, for example, in a speech laden with class hypocrisy that ‘all the little Blue-coats’ (Hood, 1832: 95) (children of charity schools like Christ’s Hospital) should be poisoned, or that during the traditional charity service for orphans on Maundy Thursday in St Paul’s, the dome should be shaken down to kill them all (p.97). Indeed, one of the accompanying illustrations (Figure 16) shows the narrator/Malthus figure in his comfortable study surrounded by images of infanticide drawn cross-culture and from different periods. There are numerous puns on the threat of killing children: ‘skirmish with the infantry’, ‘siege of Babylon’, as well as famous examples of child killers such as King Herod. Malthus is himself reading a book entitled ‘Tales from Ogres’ thus identifying the narrator with the figure of the child-guzzling ogre to which I shall return shortly. The fact that a shortage of food was central to Malthusian doctrine further draws the figure of the child into the perverse kind of cannibalism seen in Tonna’s narrative. In Hood’s poem children become mere objects able to be obliterated en mass in order that the existing population can survive with enough to eat.

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Figure 16. Woodcut from Thomas Hood’s The Comic Annual (1832), p.97.

As Flegel states when describing Thomas Carlyle’s portrayal of a poor Stockport family in Past and Present (1843) who have killed their children for insurance money, this kind of action ‘translates into a kind of cannibalism, in which the child who cries for food becomes the child murdered so that others can be fed’ (Flegel, 1998: 109). The objectification of little Carolina in Lamb’s poem, then, has been replaced in 1832 with something equally

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disturbing: the treatment of lower-class children as disposable commodities in a harsh market economy. Thus the figure of the edible child figures strongly in the often dichotomous and complex attitudes towards children in this period. As C.J. Sommerville states, it remains a harsh irony that in this period ‘the greatest exploitation of children coincided with the greatest glorification of childhood’ (quoted in Plotz, 2001: 160). Thus, for all the legacy of the reification of childhood left by the Romantic poets, the disturbing cannibalistic vocabulary relating to children in many different senses constitutes the infant as the locus of some of the more negative aspects of social and industrial advancement. And yet, alongside such visions, there are also many other instances when the trope of the edible child is used in a much more positive sense in order to explore agency in the child reader. By drawing on age-old concepts of threatened child consumption in popular myths and fairy stories, some writers in the following examples allow the child to explore other issues pertinent to their own time and circumstances in a way that requires both enquiry and imagination from the readership. As my introduction makes clear, the image of the child-eating ogre is the stuff of fairy tales, myths and legends that considerably predate this period. However, a further legacy of the Romantic period was a resurgence in interest in fairy tales and folklore, and as such an outpouring of titles relating to these subjects. Benjamin Tabart’s Popular Fairy Tales, for example, was published in 1818 and the Grimms’ seminal Kinder und Hausmarchen in 1812. Thomas Crofton Croker published his Fairy Legends and Traditions from the South of Ireland in 1825. This latter collection features mischievous fairies and menacing ogres as well as instances of (threatened) child consumption. For example in the story ‘The Brewery of Egg-Shells’ where Mrs Sullivan, suspicious that her son has been substituted for a sickly child by the fairies, relates reassuringly that because the boy ‘still [had] a strong resemblance to her own boy: she therefore could not find it in her heart to roast

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it alive on the griddle’ (Crofton Croker, 1834: 28). And in another story, ‘The Wonderful Tune’, a mother laments the desire of her son to marry a mermaid and the cannibalistic possibility of the resulting grandchildren being more fish like than human: And who knows but ‘tis grandmother I may be to a hake or a cod – Lord help and pity me, but ‘tis a mighty unnatural thing! – and may be ‘tis boiling and eating my own grandchild I’ll be, with a bit of salt butter, and I not knowing it! (p.203)

For Crofton Croker, Thomas Hood and others, such images were part of a folk culture that was endangered by rationalism and empirical science. Many of the Romantic poets lamented the decline in access for children to such stories and legends, as influential figures such as Sarah Trimmer rejected such subjects in favour of moral and evangelical stories. However, scholars such as Matthew Grenby have critiqued the notion that such folk culture did indeed die out in the early nineteenth century, and have likewise problematised the relationship of moral and evangelical writers as well as the reading public to popular myths and legends (2006: 12). Indeed, Crofton Croker, alongside his work on the mythology of Ireland, also edited the first Christmas annual for children in 1828, entitled The Christmas Box, a work that engaged very strongly in this debate. This collection of poems and prose pieces was highly original in its imaginative and entertaining nature. In one particular piece entitled ‘The French Nurse’, Crofton Croker uses the figure of the edible child to highlight the complexity of the reason–imagination binary. In this poem Crofton Croker presents within a framing narrative, a verse that appears to have its root in the oral folk tradition. The frame story states that whilst passing a cottage door in France with the sounds of a crying baby coming from within, the narrator peers inside and sees an old lady with a baby on her knee and hears the singing of the lullaby: Baby, baby naughty baby, Hush, you squalling thing, I say: Peace this instant; peace, or, may be,

‘Edible’ Children in Early Nineteenth-Century Children’s Literature

WELLINGTON will pass this way. Baby, baby he’s a giant, Tall and black as Rouen steeple; Breakfasts, dines, and sups (rely on’t) Everyday on naughty people. Baby, baby, if he hears you, As he gallops by the house, Limb from limb at once he’ll tear you Just as pussy tears a mouse. And he’ll beat you, beat you, beat you, And he’ll beat you all to pap; And he’ll eat you, eat you, eat you, Gobble you, gobble you – snap, snap, snap. (1828: 83)

By way of explanation, the narrator states that the people of France hate Wellington because he beat their fine army; and they fear him, because they think, if ever a new war should come, he would beat them again just as he did at Waterloo. (p.83)

But that this extreme ‘instance of their hatred and fear … made me laugh’, going on to suggest, in a direct address to the child audience, that ‘perhaps you may laugh too when you hear it’ (p.83). This verse, or at least a version of it, seems to have been used frequently throughout history to suit the specific era. In volume 5 of Eliza Gutch and Mabel Peacock’s County Folklore (1908), the authors report an almost identical version of this rhyme with the generic German ‘Menschikoff’ (human head) playing the part of the bogeyman, but also reporting anecdotal evidence that Cromwell’s name alongside that of Napoleon Bonaparte was figured, in apposite periods, as the ‘bogey’ (pp.383–84). In this instance, however, it is Wellington who appears as the grotesque giant. Physically the English leader takes on gigantic, ogresque and evil proportions: ‘as tall and black as Rouen’s steeple’ and in actions too he is associated with the animal: attacking the baby ‘just as pussy tears a mouse’. This demonisation

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of Wellington in this poem has the effect of aggrandising the power of the English for the juvenile, ostensibly British, audience of The Christmas Box. He has the ability to terrify the enemy, thus his status as what Marina Warner calls the ‘enemy other’ (1998: 161) stands in metonymically for English military might against the French. In 1828, with the Napoleonic wars over, a restatement of the continuing fear of the English in France is pivotal to the use of the figure of the edible child in this verse. The threat of being eaten lies here not for the child reader of the story, but for the actualised baby in the narrative. Instructed or permitted to laugh at this contextualised scene, ‘perhaps you may laugh too when you hear it’, thus any fear the child reader of The Christmas Box might have of being gobbled up him/herself is dissipated by the framing context. What is interesting is that in placing such an age-old image of child consumption within such a frame, Crofton Croker also interpolates his child audience into contemporary debate concerning fairy tales, as well as topical tensions between the French and English. The instruction to laugh is ambiguous; the child is not told at what specifically he/she should be amused. Perhaps laughter could be evoked from the ludicrous and unbelievable nature that the English represented by Wellington could behave in such a monstrous way, or that it is ludicrous in any case that giants can come and consume a child. Crofton Croker’s interest in all things antiquarian, including folklore and superstitions, set him squarely against evangelical and moral rationalists in this period, who often insisted on the unsuitability of bloodthirsty fairy tales and stories with magical happenings for children. And yet perhaps the instruction to laugh also encompasses an element of Hobbesian laughter at the old nurse, who thinks it appropriate to threaten her tiny charge with such grotesque violence and consumption. Many contemporary commentators, drawing on the educational theories of John Locke, blamed servants and nursemaids for filling the heads of young children with horrible

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stories such as these, and warned of the dangers to young minds of such fantasies. Whatever the possibility for laughter here, what is beyond doubt is the invitation to the child to partake in the story within the story. The instruction or permission to laugh assigns agency to the child to interpret the narrative in whatever way he/she sees fit. This is very different from the objectification of the consumed child in Charles Lamb’s poem or the child disposed of so that others may be fed in Hood’s poem. Here the image of consumption, with all its many possibilities and ambiguities, inscribes the child with the power of interpretation. The same could also be said for another image of child consumption in one of the stories in a collection of fairy tales written by Thomas Hood and published posthumously in 1860 by Hood’s son and daughter. One of the tales, ‘The Three Great Giants’, contains a fascinating reworking of the child-eating giant presented as Wellington in The Christmas Box, or the figure of the ogre/Malthus in The Comic Annual of 1832. In ‘The Three Great Giants’, Hood describes the three giants Fee, Faw and Fum: Every morning of their lives Mulligatawny, their cook, brought up a dish of babies on toast. So they must have been wicked; for we know that everyone who eats a baby on toast is very wicked, and never succeeds in life. (1860: 63)

Here the menace of the child-guzzling giant is dissipated through Hood’s humour. The incongruous reasonableness-in-absurdity that people who eat ‘a baby on toast … never succeed in life’ illustrates the way that Hood throughout his work takes the folkloric figures of the past and uses them to resonate in his particular era. In this case the whole story can be read, as can Crofton Croker’s work, to contain a gentle satire on the Enlightenment approach to education, where reason must triumph over the more sensational aspects of the imagination. By taking reasonableness to an absurd level, Hood pokes fun at this turn-of-the-century preoccupation with rationalising even the unknowable, but equally he also makes the figure of the giant, much lamented as lost to a world of reason by the Romantic poets in particular, a butt of his humour.

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It is notable also in this story that the narrative is very much concerned with notions of food and starvation. The inhabitants of the town at the centre of the work are living under famine conditions owing to the mismanagement of the mayor and his aides. As a result, the people are left with no option but to consume non-food items such as ‘boots, shavings … [and] horse hair’ (Hood, 1860: 81). This transformation of the inedible into the edible is a hallmark of Hood’s work. His remarkably diverse poetic canon is littered with humans who turn into food and food that becomes human. In the poem ‘A Plain Direction’ (1839) for example, Hood evokes ‘roasted pigs [that] run crying out, “Come eat me, if you please”’ (p.237). And ‘The Supper Superstition’ recounts the grotesque tale of a sailor son who, having been lost at sea, reappears at his family’s dinner table and appeals to them not to eat the food. He maintains that the same oysters and shrimps served up for dinner have recently been feeding on his own body and thus he has become such foodstuff and his family are about to commit an, albeit accidental, act of cannibalism (1831: 91–95). Notwithstanding the grotesque nature of such images, Hood also explores the power of transformation in a playful sense, strongly pre-empting the later nonsense landscapes of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, who likewise often use the image of the edible child in their work. Hood embraces the concepts of medieval carnival with its emphasis on the visceral and the concept of the world-turned-up-side-down. He connects these elements to an early nineteenth-century world where the harlequinade was a prominent theme in the theatre, and the positive as well as the negative possibilities of social and industrial change produced a landscape of ambiguity and uncertainty. In such a world, Hood’s constant transformations of commodities into other items reveal comic and imaginative possibilities in consumption that is lacking in all my previous examples of edible children. These playful transformations are also highly prevalent in Hood’s letters, and it is in this private world that I wish to end my

‘Edible’ Children in Early Nineteenth-Century Children’s Literature

discussion of the trope of the edible child. Throughout this correspondence, food is a frequent location for play and punning. He often draws into his personal space the grotesque comic possibilities of foodstuff, and he particularly relates this to letters he writes to his own children and those of friends. In one such letter to the young May Elliott he writes that he hopes she will have a merry Christmas with ‘such good things to eat’, but asks her to ensure her mother doesn’t ‘boil the baby by mistake for a plump pudding instead of a plum one’ (Hood, Letters, 1843: 576).3 Equally, after giving a present of a toy rabbit to his newborn niece, Hood remarks sardonically that ‘perhaps by rubbing it over with a little parsley & butter at the beginning she might be tempted to like it’ (Letters, 1823: 51). In a similar way, in a letter to his daughter Fanny, written from the seaside town of Margate where Hood and his wife had gone to take in the beneficial sea air, Hood describes the scene of children playing in the water, with many playful references to the children morphing into other animals: The little children here of a morning go in a covered cart into the sea & the old woman takes off their clothes & gives the boys & girls such souses into the water – & dips them under like ducks in our pond. Some of them like the fun of paddle daddleing – but some of them are afraid & squall & squeak like the pigs when Moot is killing them & while they are squalling the sea goes dab into their gaping wide mouths, & the water is so salt it makes them spit & splutter like frogs in a gutter. (Letters, May 1833: 149– 51)

The similes of the children as like ‘ducks’, ‘pigs’ and ‘frogs’ not only permit Fanny to imagine the scene by relating his descriptions to familiar animals, but they also present a transitional place where the possibilities for multiple identities are endless. The children Hood describes are so transformed by the fun of being in the sea that they ‘become’ fish with their ‘gaping wide mouths’ and the punning reference to ‘dab’. The theme of total and positive selfabsorption in therapeutic play is represented by the children

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laughing so much that they literally consume themselves. Hood describes their mouths open so wide as to ‘swallow their ears’. This transformation of children into the stuff of food is much less the objectification of Carolina in Lamb’s poem and more a demonstration of the transformative power of play where the vision of consumption becomes a metaphor for being completely abandoned to the ludic. In another letter to Jeannie Elliott, Hood talks of ‘childhood [being] such a joyous merry time’ that he himself wishes he ‘was two or three children’ which would have the effect of making him ‘pull off my three pairs of shoes & socks & go paddling in the sea up to my six knees’ and then ‘climb up the down & then roll down the ups on my three backs and stomachs’ (Letters, July 1844: 627). This nonsensical metamorphic description made up of merged body parts allows Hood to consume the child and become part man, part multiple child. Just like the children having so much fun at the seaside that they turn into fishes, so Hood presents a symbolic embodiment of the importance of the child to the adult and, importantly, vice-versa. The child, who needs the adult to help him/her to grow, equally can aid the adult to retain a sense of the importance of play. It is a kind of mutual consumption that speaks not so much to cannibalism than to the abandon of carnival. This is not the adult menacing the child with the threats of consumption of the Wellington poem, or the exploited child of Tonna, or the fetished edible Carolina in Lamb’s poem. Rather here the consumption is playful, fantastical and life enhancing rather than deadly. In complete opposition to the perverse implications of cannibalism of infants, here the edible child becomes the sustenance of the man in a positive and lifeenhancing manner. It is a view that merges Romantic objectification of the child with the playful qualities of later Victorian nonsense verse, and illustrates just how diverse and contextualised are the images of the edible child in this early nineteenth-century period.

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Notes 1 Tim Burton’s book of poems The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories. Harper Entertainment, 1997. 2 Very few of the poems are attributed conclusively to Charles or Mary. There are arguments that could be made for or against each poet in terms of authorship. But, as Plotz points out in her discussion, the theme of food is central to many of Charles’ works and the theme of ‘The Dessert’ also fits with his general treatment of children in his oeuvre, particularly in terms of the way in which he often distances himself from the actual child and his frequent objectivisation of juvenile figures. 3 Dates given for the letters of Thomas Hood are for the specific letter being referenced within the collected Letters.

Works Cited Primary Texts Crofton Croker, Thomas (ed.) (1828) The Christmas Box. London: William Harrison Ainsworth. –– ([1825] 1834) Fairy Legends and Traditions from the South of Ireland. London: John Murray. Hood, Thomas (1831) The Comic Annual. London: Charles Tilt. –– (1832) The Comic Annual. London: Charles Tilt. –– (1839) The Comic Annual. London: A.H. Baily and Co. –– (ed. Peter F. Morgan) (1973) The Letters of Thomas Hood. University of Toronto Press. Hood, Thomas and Jane Hood (ed. F.F. Broderip and Tom Hood) (1861) Fairy Land; or, Recreation for the Rising Generation. London: Griffith and Farran. Lamb, Charles and Mary Lamb ([1809] 1903) Poetry for Children. In William Macdonald (ed.) The Works of Charles Lamb in Twelve Volumes. Volume VIII. London: J.M. Dent & Co. Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth [alias. Charlotte Elizabeth] (1841) Helen Fleetwood. New York: John S. Taylor & Co.

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Secondary Texts Cronin, Richard (2002) Romantic Victorians: English Literature, 1824-1840. Hampshire, UK and New York: Palgrave. Denisoff, Dennis (2008) The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture. Aldershot: Ashgate. Grenby, Matthew (2006) Tame fairies make good teachers: The popularity of early British fairy tales. The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 30, no. 1 (pp.1–24). Gutch, Eliza and Mabel Peacock (eds) (1908) Country Folklore, vol. 5: Examples of Printed Folk-Lore Concerning Lincolnshire. London: Published for the Folk-Lore Society by David Nutt. Flegel, Monica. (1998) Conceptualizing Cruelty to Children in Nineteenth-Century England. Farnham: Ashgate. Plotz, Judith (2001) Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood. New York: Palgrave. Warner, Marina (1998) No Go the Bogeyman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Websites Charlotte Elizabeth [Tonna] Helen Fleetwood. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=pI9PAAAAYAAJ&printsec=f rontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q& f=false. Thomas Hood (1830–1839, 1842) Serial archive listing of The Comic Annual. http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=comica nnual. Charles and Mary Lamb Poetry for Children. Text of 1809. www.studymore.org.uk/xlambpc.htm. Thomas Carlyle Past and Present (1843). www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/13534/pg13534.html.

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Benjamin Tabart Popular Fairy Tales; or a Lilliputian Library (1818). London: Sir Richard Phillips and Co. https://ia700208.us.archive.org/4/items/popularfairytale00tab aiala/popularfairytale00tabaiala.pdf. Grimms’ Children’s and Household Tales. www.seiyaku.com/lit/grimm/index-en-num.html. Thomas Crofton Croker Fairy Legends and Traditions from the South of Ireland (n.d.). Swan Sonnenschein & Co. www.askaboutireland.ie/aai-files/assets/ebooks/146_FairyLegends-and-Traditions-of-the-South-of-Ireland/146_FairyLegends-and-Traditions-of-the-South-of-Ireland.pdf.

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN POACHERS AND SCAVENGERS: RECONCEPTUALISING FOOD IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE SARAH LAYZELL HARDSTAFF Using texts from Morpurgo to Burgess, via Dahl and Rowlings, the writer proposes that rather than interrogating food in children’s literature to tell us about emotional life and morality, we should examine what emotional life and morality can tell us about access to food and, by extension, the socioeconomic positioning of fictional characters.

This paper draws on the research I undertook for my MPhil thesis, focusing on food acquisition as a means of highlighting the socioeconomic positioning of characters in children’s literature. I became interested in the theme of feast and famine in a slightly back-to-front way, initially looking at child characters portrayed as having been financially affected by the absence of a parent – absent parents being fairly commonplace in children’s literature. My initial corpus included works such as Slake’s Limbo (Felice Homan, 1974), Danny the Champion of the World (Roald Dahl, 1975), Homecoming (Cynthia Voigt, 1981), The Baby and Fly Pie (Melvin Burgess, 1993), The Scavenger’s Tale (Rachel Anderson, 1997), Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (J.K. Rowling, 1997), Private Peaceful (Michael Morpurgo, 2003) and The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins, 2008). Significant in all these books are the commonalities around, and shared relationship with, food. The

Poachers and Scavengers: Reconceptualising Food in Children’s Literature

protagonist in every one of these books steals food. They experience hunger. They dream of and witness others accessing the most magnificent feasts, and are sometimes invited to the table themselves. Current children’s literature criticism often focuses on food as symbolic of sexuality and relationships. Food and hunger are usually interpreted within a Freudian framework. Within this model, arguably, sexuality is considered as the primary driver for human behaviour. Fiona McCulloch summarises the current critical attitude to food in children’s literature: ‘In children’s literature, the act of eating and drinking is often associated with Freud’s theories of childhood sexuality and the oral phase’ (2011: 90). Ann Alston points out that ‘McGillis, Daniel, Nikolajeva and Katz have all emphasised the link between sex and the oral gratification that comes from food in children’s literature’ (2008: 111): Maria Nikolajeva, for example, writes that ‘Food and sexuality are interchangeable in myth’ (2000: 131), working from the premise that children’s literature is mythic in nature. In Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature, Holly Blackford states that ‘food is symbolically linked with our conceptions of female sexuality, desire, and development’ (2009: 41). Food is often seen as a ‘stand-in’ for sexuality, a way to explore issues of desire, power, repression and gratification in literature for children without tackling the taboo subject of sex. As an expansion on this theme, many critics also consider the motif of food in children’s literature to function as symbolic of family relationships. For Alston, the way in which food is consumed functions as a marker of a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ family, regardless of social class. For Alston, the power associated with food is described in sexual rather than economic terms: ‘to feed someone is to exercise power, to penetrate metaphorically the body of another and to gratify desire’ (2008: 105). Food is thus seen as symbolic of sexuality, morality, emotional development and family relationships. Susan Honeyman considers this idea from a different perspective, arguing that as ‘food is one

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of the primary vehicles of struggles and control in child culture’ (2010: 47), it can be interpreted in terms of its relation to socioeconomic and political struggle. By focusing on the sexuality and emotional development signified by food, we sidestep the wider structural social issues that these books seem to be bringing to the table. In his major philosophical work, The Principle of Hope ([1959] 1956), Ernst Bloch offers a counter-argument to Freudian theory which is particularly pertinent to a study of food in children’s literature. Bloch suggests that psychoanalytical models, with their focus on sex and power as the primary drivers behind all human activity, are severely limited by their failure to account for what he sees as the most basic, primary drive of all: hunger. Bloch argues that:1 all too little has been said so far about hunger… a man dies without nourishment, whereas we can live a little while longer without the pleasures of love-making. It is all the more possible to live without satisfying our power-drive, all the more possible without returning into the unconscious of our five-hundredthousand-year-old forefathers. But the unemployed person on the verge of collapse, who has not eaten for days, has really been led to the oldest needy place of our existence and makes it visible … the cry of hunger is probably the strongest single cry that can be directly presented. … The stomach is the first lamp into which oil must be poured. Its longing is precise, its drive is so unavoidable that it cannot even be repressed for long. (p.65)

Bloch saw not only hunger, but also what he termed ‘expectant emotions’, including hope, fear, anxiety and despair, as motivated by socioeconomic conditions. Seen from this perspective, food ceases to be a stand-in for sexuality: the child eats, sometimes to excess, because food is the key to human survival. A child steals to survive. A child shares food in order to help others survive, or perhaps to control others, though economically rather than sexually. Issues of power are still of primary importance – the question of who can access food, and who controls access to food are of particular interest. A lack of food is of huge significance in

Poachers and Scavengers: Reconceptualising Food in Children’s Literature

itself, and, while it may not reflect the experience of a book’s readership, it nonetheless reflects the experience of the majority of human beings for the entirety of human history. So, the question I would ask is not what food tells us about emotional life and morality, but what emotional life and morality can tell us about access to food and, by extension, the socioeconomic positioning of fictional characters. Food as a theme can still be considered in terms of its timeless mythic or symbolic properties (see, for instance, Nikolajeva, 2000), but within a Blochian framework that proposes that the survival of these forms is due to their failure to be resolved in the political sphere, they are the cultural expression of a collective desire to resolve the problem of hunger. In Mythic and Linear: Time in Children’s Literature (2000), Nikolajeva touches on this as a possible basis for continued symbolism: ‘Existential problems that torment modern protagonists do not leave any room for positive answers – after thousands of years of human civilization, we still do not know why we are here’ (2000: 230), and it begs the question: why do we still tell the story of, for instance, Hansel and Gretel? Is it perhaps because hunger still characterises the lives of much of the world’s population? In this context, hunger becomes politicised. The feast becomes emblematic of the kind of utopian ‘land-of-plenty’ imagery often seen in folklore, the eternal dream of the hungry and dispossessed. Many characters in children’s literature steal food. Poaching, scavenging and foraging for food are all common themes; yet, selfpreservation has been largely overlooked by critics. We can see these activities as forming part of a ‘hidden economy’ that runs through fiction for children and young people.2 The child character’s relationships with others and with his/her society are often determined by access to food, and self-preservation is often ensured for the child character through presenting a moral fluidity around the act of stealing. These themes are prevalent in a number of texts, and as I have written extensively on Cynthia Voigt’s Homecoming and Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games

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elsewhere (Hardstaff, 2013), in this paper I examine a number of other novels, giving a brief overview of each. More detailed readings of these texts may form the basis of future research in this area.

Private Peaceful and Danny the Champion of the World Early on in Michael Morpugo’s novel Private Peaceful (2003), Tommo Peaceful is tempted to steal eggs from a nest. He feels his dead father’s influence ‘willing me to think again ... not to take what was not mine’ (p.10). The crow who eventually takes the eggs is identified with a crow whom Tommo sees dead and concludes that ‘he got what he deserved’ (p.10). The child here seems to advocate harsh treatment of thieves. However, it is later revealed that Tommo’s father had been a poacher and the children follow his example as a response to their growing hunger (p.40). The children are poaching from the local landowner, the Colonel. Tommo and his older brother Charlie initially see food on the Colonel’s land as fair game, until their attitude is ‘corrected’ by the adults. The Colonel insists on his property rights even when what is stolen is useless to him, such as Bertha the dog (p.63); the exchange between himself and Mrs Peaceful exposes his stance as derisory. The crow who takes the eggs is perhaps not the hungry poacher after all, but the landlord taking and hoarding more than his fair share. Roald Dahl’s Danny the Champion of the World (1975) is somewhat different. Danny and his father do have enough to eat, but are by no means well off. However, their theft is never presented as anything but a diversion, almost a re-enactment of the fantasy of showing up the cruel landlord and undermining his social position. Danny’s father’s hatred of Victor Hazell is seen as justification for stealing his pheasants. William, Danny’s father, also frequently refers to the delicious taste of roast pheasant, and while, as Danny says, they are not starving, most of their meals seem to involve little more than a sandwich.

Poachers and Scavengers: Reconceptualising Food in Children’s Literature

This is a curiously radical book, in which theft is not used to nourish or survive, yet nevertheless goes completely unpunished. Indeed, it may even be said to be rewarded inasmuch as Danny and his father end the novel by buying an oven. The means of paying for the oven are never specified, even though the family’s material circumstances appear to be exactly the same as at the novel’s opening. Danny learning to poach is considered beneficial skills training for his future life: ‘He’ll be a great inventor one day!’ (p.165). Poaching is also seen to give dignity to other members of the community, including Sergeant Samways: there was a certain majesty in the way he held himself, with the head high and the back very straight, as though he were riding a fine thoroughbred mare instead of an old black bike. (p.169)

As in Private Peaceful, the acts of theft are centred on wild animals roaming the landowner’s estate. Here, the pheasants are kept on Hazell’s land for sport, which only serves to underline the discrepancy between Hazell’s position and that of Danny. Hunting the birds for sport is condemned as a waste: Do you know, Danny, that the cost of rearing and keeping one single pheasant up to the time when it’s ready to be shot is equal to the price of one hundred loaves of bread! (p.81)

The birds are as well fed as Danny himself. Similarly, Doc Spencer uses the example of the pheasants that ate multiple raisins (filled with sleeping powder) to deliver the book’s moral message: ‘“Those were the greedy ones,” the doctor said. “It never pays to eat more than your fair share.”’ (p.168). These rural tales are reminiscent of Hansel and Gretel, as the hungry children alone in the woods gradually become aware that others have unlimited access to food. This is certainly the position Jack Zipes takes in his interpretation of the folk story, arguing for a reduced emphasis on the cruelty of the mother or stepmother, and focusing instead on the witch and her endless supplies of food: ‘The killing of the witch is symbolically the realization of the hatred which the peasantry felt for hoarders and oppressors’ (2002: 38).

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But we can also see, taken out of its traditional setting, the themes of ‘Hansel and Gretel’ translated to urban environments and futuristic visions.

The Baby and Fly Pie and The Scavenger’s Tale In Melvin Burgess’ The Baby and Fly Pie (1993), a novel set in a futuristic dystopian London, the child characters are well aware of the discrepancy between their own situation as orphaned scavengers and the circumstances of the wealthy when it comes to food: you know, the people who go in those restaurants are the richest in the world. They go in just to pass the time, like a kid might play noughts and crosses or sit in a box when there’s not much going on. They sit down and the order steaks or a piece of chicken or half a duck, and potatoes and salad and mushrooms and everything, even though they’re not even a bit hungry. And they sit there talking and they eat nothing at all sometimes – maybe just a mouthful of lettuce or a few peas. (p.7)

The main purpose of theft in this text is to provide: To Scousie, thieving was a respectable occupation. He complained that all the young men were joining the gangs and dealing drugs when they ought to be out stealing things for their families. (p.96)

A similar story of a future dystopian London is The Scavenger’s Tale by Rachel Anderson (1998). Protagonist Bedford describes the rewards of scavenging as follows. Mostly useless bits but occasionally there’s treasure. That’s how I found our bench, a curtain, and a mattress for Netta. One time I saw someone pick up a whole crateful of some foreign product. PINEAPPLES SIERRA LEONE was branded on the side. (p.14)

Bedford does not know what pineapples are, highlighting his deprivation. Scavenging is seen as fun, a way to pass the time, but also a way of supplementing the family’s meagre provisions, in living conditions where ‘Nothing goes to waste’ (p.23). When

Poachers and Scavengers: Reconceptualising Food in Children’s Literature

Bedford comes across a man’s body, his first thoughts go to the prospect of more food: ‘With any luck, no one had scavenged it yet. Even a vagrant had a ration book. Or there might be an ID. Spares are always handy’ (p.17). This episode may seem shocking from a strict moral perspective, but is put into context when we see Bedford savouring his watered-down turnip and pitta-bread soup (the same ingredients as in the children’s sandwiches for school) (p.23).

Slake’s Limbo Felice Hoffman’s 1974 novel Slake’s Limbo centres on Slake, a 13year-old boy who runs away from his life in the care system and takes up residence in the New York subway. The story of Hansel and Gretel is referenced directly: Slake had known the stories could not be true ... The only one of the stories at school that had really frightened Slake was about children lost in the woods and starving, because there was one thing Slake knew – he knew truth. He knew fact from fiction. (p.55)

Slake’s scavenging starts with finishing a cup of coffee left behind in the subway café (p.28). He is worried about not fitting in at the café, but not about taking the drink. Slake, despite his inability to name his own feelings (see p.61 and p.94, in contrast with that famous product of neglect, Harry Potter, who somehow emerges from the cupboard under the stairs as a deeply sensitive and moral being), is aware that stealing poses a moral dilemma, and suffers terrible anxiety at the thought that reselling the discarded newspapers he finds might be considered stealing or dishonest (p.39). However, this anxiety is inseparable from the anxiety he feels in all his daily activity (p.31). This anxiety and Slake’s feelings of low self-worth reflect his food insecurity, rather than criminality.

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Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone Generally if children are left to fend for themselves, the reader is encouraged to adopt their moral position. There is, for example, no moral commentary on Harry Potter contemplating ‘sneaking to the kitchen for some food’ while the Dursleys sleep, as his surrogate family are so recognisably in the wrong in their maltreatment of him (1997: 27). Unlike the child characters discussed so far, Harry is given access to unlimited food security when he starts attending school. It is of course possible to read the abundance of food at Hogwarts as representative of the emotional fulfilment the school offers. It might also be evidence of a certain ‘middle-classness’ of the stories. This would suggest a similar interpretation to Peter Hunt’s thinking on Winnie-the-Pooh, where [t]he absence of any mundane considerations such as where the jars of honey come from may be a function of the middle-classness of the text – but it also a function of fantasy where such matters are generally unimportant. (Hunt, 1992: 114)

(Sometimes of course, we do know where the honey comes from, as it is stolen from the bees!) Perhaps in fantasy it does not always matter where food comes from; it does however matter enormously that food is there. The feasts of fantasy hint at the utopian function of fiction suggested by Ernst Bloch (see Note 1), and omnipresent in folk dreams of an end to hunger, dreams that have yet to be realised for many. Although Susan Honeyman notes that often ‘Gastronomic utopias are not just the products of hungry dreams; they can be fantasies created to fool and control their audience, as well as cautionary tales warning against such traps’ (p.47), we can see the Hogwarts feast as a more benevolent cornucopia, the utopian fantasy of the hungry and neglected child.

Poachers and Scavengers: Reconceptualising Food in Children’s Literature

Summary Overall, it is my view that a theory of the representation of food and hunger in children’s fiction should have as its basis the recognition that access to food is not a certainty, for either the child inside or outside the book. Furthermore, the perceived morality of the poaching, scavenging child cannot be separated from his/her position in terms of food security. The existence of hunger is, as it has ever been, an indictment of existing political, social and economic structures. The continued presence of the hungry child in literature acts as a constant reminder that we can do better.

Notes 1 For a brief introduction to Bloch’s work, see ‘The utopian function of fairy tales and fantasy: Ernst Bloch the Marxist and J.R.R. Tolkein the Catholic’. In Jack Zipes (2002) pp.146–78. 2 The ‘hidden economy’ is a descriptive term used in economics, which ‘refers to everything the national accounting system fails to register either for conceptual reasons or because the relevant data are concealed’ (Bagnasco, 1990: 164). This category covers those transactions that cannot be formally quantified, including blackmarket transactions, illegal labour (such as child labour), and informal care arrangements – all themes that feature in fiction for children and young adults. The stealing of food also forms part of this underground economy.

Works Cited Primary Texts Anderson, Rachel (1998) The Scavenger’s Tale. Oxford University Press. Burgess, Melvin (1993) The Baby and Fly Pie. London: Andersen Press. Dahl, Roald (1975) Danny the Champion of the World. London: Puffin Books.

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Holman, Felice (1974) Slake’s Limbo. New York: Aladdin Paperbacks. Morpugo, Michael (2003) Private Peaceful. London: HarperCollins. Rowling, J.K. (1997) Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. London: Bloomsbury. Secondary Texts Alston, Ann (2008) The Family in English Children’s Literature. London: Routledge. Bagnasco, Arnaldo (1990) The Informal Economy. In Alberto Martinelli and Neil J. Smelser (eds) Economy and Society: Overviews in Economic Sociology. London: Sage (pp.157–74). Blackford, Holly (2009) Recipe for reciprocity and repression: The politics of cooking and consumption in girls’ coming-of-age literature. In Kara K. Keeling and Scott T. Pollard (eds) Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature. New York: Routledge (pp.41–56). Bloch, Ernst (trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight) ([1959] 1986) The Principle of Hope. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Collins, Suzanne (2008) The Hunger Games. London: Scholastic. Hardstaff, Sarah (2013) Poachers and scavengers: The hidden economy in modern children’s fiction. MPhil thesis, Cambridge University (unpublished). Honeyman, Susan (2010) Gastronomic utopias: The legacy of political hunger in African American lore. Children’s Literature, vol. 38, pp.44–63. Hunt, Peter (1992) Winnie the Pooh and domestic fantasy. In Dennis Butts (ed.) Stories and Society: Children’s Literature in its Social Context. Basingstoke: Macmillan (pp.112–24). McCulloch, Fiona (2011) Children’s Literature in Context. London: Continuum. Nikolajeva, Maria (2000) From Mythic to Linear: Time in Children’s Literature. Lanham: Scarecrow Press. Voigt, Cynthia (1981) Homecoming. New York: Atheneum Books.

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Zipes, Jack (2002) Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky.

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN ‘CRUNCHY APPLES TO YOU, COMRADES’: ALEX SHEARER’S BOOTLEG REBECCA R. BUTLER Rebecca Butler considers the wider implications of a novel based on the criminalisation and punishment of those whose eating habits contravene laws based on diet

Can you imagine a government in the UK passing legislation to ban the production or consumption of chocolate and sweets? On the face of it, the idea might not be totally absurd. There is at present a serious problem of obesity among children and adults. The cost to the health service of treating people for problems related to excess weight is considerable. The government intervenes to ban people from doing some things that are bad for them, such as using drugs, smoking in public and driving without a seatbelt. But, all the same, the idea that buying a bar of chocolate might be a criminal offence does seem to infringe some basic idea of freedom. Such a law would certainly seem likely to arouse opposition, or even outright defiance. But in Alex Shearer’s novel Bootleg (2003) that is exactly what has happened. A general election has been won by the Good for You Party.1 Not only are the production and consumption of sweets and chocolate banned by law, but the everyday discourse of the people has been regulated. The obligatory greeting to be offered to a fellow citizen is ‘Crunchy apples to you, comrade’.

‘Crunchy Apples to you, Comrades’: Alex Shearer’s Bootleg

Demonstrations of support for the new regime are organised for the Young Pioneers, schoolchildren who march while singing their message: ‘I don’t want no chocolate bar! Or keep my false teeth in a jar. Sugar and sweets are bad for me! Rather have some celery!’ (p.7)

As you can see, there is a significant message embedded here. What Shearer has achieved – and it is a very considerable achievement – is to create a novel that is an entertaining and compelling read for children aged ten or over, but at the same time a powerful political allegory. The iron discipline and doctrinal orthodoxy of the Young Pioneers are, deliberately I think, reminiscent of the Hitler Youth under the Third Reich and Komsomol under the Leninist/Stalinist Soviet Union. Shearer amusingly satirises the way the indoctrination of the Young Pioneers leads them to certain programmed activities, irrespective of the circumstances. They can act according to the instruction book, but not think for themselves. The Young Pioneers were notorious for their good deeds. They regularly helped old ladies across the road, whether they wanted to go or not. Things had got to the point where many old ladies would hide in shop doorways when they heard the Pioneers coming, afraid they would be helped across the road against their will and not be able to get back through the traffic. (p.6)

The regime of the Good for You Party extends not only to the Young Pioneers but also to every child in the land. The Politeness Pledge was another of the Good For You Party’s ideas. All children over the age of five were expected (in reality, obliged) to take the Good for You Politeness Promise and to guarantee to do a minimum of one good deed per day. They vowed that they would give their seats up to expectant mothers and not use their mobile phones to send text messages while in class. (p.11)

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The rules of the new regime are enforced ruthlessly, employing advanced technology. Some citizens observe a large, heavy vehicle approaching them that they mistake for a television licence detector van. On top of the vehicle was a large, curved dish in the shape of a satellite receiver. It was mounted on a turret, which enabled it to revolve in continuous circles. As the vehicle came down the street, the dish went slowly round like a huge prying eye on a stalk, on the lookout for something. It seemed to peer right into your very thoughts. (p.13)

Soon, however, the observers learn the true objective of the detector vans. Written on the side of the vehicle, spelled out in reflective yellow letters, were the words: CHOCOLATE DETECTOR VAN NUMBER 19. Under the dish on the roof was a small dot-matrix display flashing the words ‘CHOCOLATE DETECTED …’ over and over again. (p.16)

Interesting literary references are apparent here. The detector vans hunting for chocolate remind the reader of the ubiquitous observation cameras maintaining Big Brother’s constant vigil on the citizens of Airstrip One in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Shearer’s book (published in 2003) is also very prescient, since we now know that we live in a world where everyone’s phone conversations and emails can be intercepted by the security forces or by newspapers. Another sinister note is struck when Shearer explains what happens to anyone caught violating the ban on chocolates or sweets. They are sent away for re-education. A boy named Dave Cheng is described as ‘so full of life, fun, mischief’. But when he returns to the classroom from re-education he is barely recognisable. Dave looked around, seeming to recognise no one. Every child in the class stared at him. It was Dave on the outside all right, but inside, there seemed to be nobody there. It was as if someone had completely removed his old personality and had forgotten to replace it. (p.197)

‘Crunchy Apples to you, Comrades’: Alex Shearer’s Bootleg

Oppressive laws run the risk of provoking resistance. The chocolate rebellion is led by two teenage boys named Smudger and Huntly. Initially they are motivated not by a just determination to assert their rights but by a more basic desire: they are desperate for chocolate. Smudger draws inspiration from an encyclopaedia article about bootlegging during the prohibition era in the USA, where speakeasy joints were set up to allow people illegal drinks. The two boys manage to find a recipe for making chocolate. An antiquarian bookseller named Mr Blades has a copy of a book (fictitious of course) entitled The Art of the Chocolate Maker by Tobias Mallow. He can’t let them take the book away but allows them to copy out the recipe. They also find another indispensable ally, Mrs Bubby, who runs the local news agency. Mrs Bubby can get her hands on supplies of illegal ingredients such as sugar and cocoa. They make their first batch of chocolate and open their ‘eateasy’. Of course the eateasy is raided by the Troopers, the Good for You government heavies. But Smudger and Huntly manage to get most of the customers out of the club, while those left behind mount a convincing imitation of an after-school study group. The chocolate insurrectionists know that to make their mark they must spread their message more widely. They smuggle themselves into a television studio by posing as the window cleaners on a routine visit. Mr Blades, wearing a dinner jacket under his window cleaner’s dungarees, broadcasts on prime time an inflammatory message ending with that forbidden word ‘chocolate’. The people take to the streets and the Good For You government is toppled, leaving chocolate freely available for those who want it. Apart from its other themes, Bootleg is a celebration of the individual citizen or group of citizens who decide to oppose what they regard as unfair measures, if necessary by breaking the law. Such characters occur both in history and in literature. In history perhaps the examples that spring to mind are women who consistently broke the law in pursuit of universal suffrage. These

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women were the targets for almost total condemnation while they were waging their campaigns. How could anyone justify the destruction of property in pursuit of a controversial political aim? But in the light of subsequent history they are now regarded as heroic figures, law breakers but architects of a new world order. In more recent times the imposition of the poll tax, a perfectly legal government impost, yet almost universally detested, caused large numbers of protesters to take to the streets. What caused the government to abandon the poll tax? It was the spectacle on television night after night of a large mob of people fighting against the police. They couldn’t all be misfits or anarchists. Whatever triggered such a response in the British public had to be mistaken. Rule breakers are also popular species in children’s literature. A splendid example was provided by Richmal Crompton in the bedraggled form of William Brown. Roald Dahl’s Matilda Wormwood put glue in her father’s hat and dyed his hair. Susan Coolidge’s Katy Carr paid a serious price for her rebelliousness, yet in the end the reader may hope that her defiant streak has not been wholly suppressed. And the inclination of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter to disregard rules is cited with admiration not only by his godfather Sirius Black but even by the evil Dumbledore himself. Smudger and Huntly are heirs to a glorious literary tradition of insubordination. There are one or two questions that interest me greatly. Shearer’s book can be read purely for entertainment. It has a memorable cast of characters and a lively plot. But the book also has a massive subtext. It raises a number of issues. Governments have a duty to protect the best interests of the people they govern. But how far is any government entitled to go when what it proposes is in direct conflict with the wishes of the people? When in the 1960s it was legislated that all new cars had to be fitted with seatbelts, there was huge opposition from people who didn’t want to pay the extra cost, and who regarded themselves as safe drivers anyway. With hindsight we can see they were wrong: seatbelts

‘Crunchy Apples to you, Comrades’: Alex Shearer’s Bootleg

save lives. But sometimes those like the suffragists who challenge the right of the government to impose laws turn out to be heroic figures. There are two possible ways in which children might be encouraged to read this book. They might read it just for entertainment. Its plot and its characters certainly allow such a reading. Alternatively children might be encouraged to consider the social and political messages inherent in the novel. Educators and family members might assume the responsibility of helping young readers to address these questions, while avoiding steering the discussion with too intrusive a hand. At the conference the consensus view was in favour of the latter view. Adults should help young readers understand these issues and consider the relevant arguments. The children may learn to identify situations where people are being treated unjustly, and to consider what steps may be available to combat injustice.

Notes 1 I must report, to my great regret, that Shearer’s book is now out of print, though used copies are still available at Amazon and elsewhere.

Work Cited Primary Texts Shearer, Alex (2003) Bootleg. London: Macmillan Children’s Books. Secondary Texts Coolidge, Susan ([1872] 1944) What Katy Did. Ware: Wordsworth Editions. Crompton, Richmal ([1922] 2010) Just William. London: Macmillan Children’s Books. Dahl, Roald ([1988] (2013) Matilda. London: Puffin. Orwell, George ([1949] 2013) Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Penguin.

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Rowling, J.K. ([1997–2007] 2010] Harry Potter series. London: Bloomsbury.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN WHIZ CINNAMON ROLLS TO SLOPPY JOES: 50 YEARS IN CHILDREN’S COOKBOOKS ZAHRA AMLANI Zahra Amlani considers that the design and content of cookbooks created for children over the last 50 years subtly reflect the wider cultural changes that have taken place over those decades.

The memories of childhood are filled with kitchen experiences. From the sensation of rubbing butter into flour to the anticipation as little gingerbread people emerge with missing limbs from the oven, ready for their iced tailoring. Cooking is hot, sweet and decidedly yummy. But what is the enduring appeal for children to cook? Does the answer lie in the kitchen? Unlike the child’s bedroom which is a domain exclusively belonging to the child,1 or the margins of the house (stair landings, corners and nooks) which, through the littering of toys and shoes can be understood as having being colonised by the child, the kitchen is a unique space. Filled with dangerous implements and opportunities to be burned, scalded and lacerated, it is a space from which the parent seeks to protect the child (through admonishments for unruly behaviour and strict guidelines on permissible activities). Yet the child is drawn to the tantalisingly out-of-reach cupboards that hide glutinous caramelised treasures, and assorted kitchen wizardry of mandolins and smoothie machines. The kitchen is therefore a potential loci of tension between adult and child, and any artefact that brings them into close contact in this space is inherently intriguing. Children’s

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cookery books play a key role in mediating entry into this adult domain. Through their transactions with cookery books written especially for them, the growing child is able to exert his/her autonomy over this traditionally adult kitchen space, transforming it into a playful environment. This paper analyses three cookery books spanning the past 50 years: Betty Crocker’s Cookbook for Boys and Girls (1957), The Usborne First Cookbook (1983) and The Silver Spoon for Children: Favourite Italian Recipes (2009), in order to understand the shifting adult–child power dynamic as revealed through the interplay of text and image. Using Jan Longone’s (2003) work in which she considers the ‘transmission of culinary heritage’ through children’s cookbooks (p.104),2 I identify how Betty Crocker’s Cookbook for Boys and Girls accentuates family values. Although the eponymous ‘Betty Crocker’ was invented as part of a marketing campaign for Gold Medal flour by General Mills Inc., she quickly became synonymous with the perfect 1950s housewife. Presentation reigns supreme in this cookbook and even peaches needed thoughtful adorning. The Raggedy Ann salad consists of a canned peach body, a lettuce leaf skirt and a hard-boiled-egg head, and the hamburgers have smiley faces. Betty Crocker’s mothering presence is felt throughout, with instructions like ‘choose a time to suit your mother, so you won’t be in her way’ (p.186) and ‘make pancakes for Dad with his initials on them’ (p.81). Thirty years later, the recipes included in The Usborne First Cookbook have lost these childish names; however, the recipes continue to be mostly simplistic and familiar (fancy sandwiches and apple crumble for anyone?). Playful elements have, however, crept in, with the addition of humorous-looking miniature cartoon chefs adorned in toques, helping to bring the recipes together. Anne L. Bower (2004) likens the experience of an adult female reading a cookbook to indulging in a romance novel. It is improbable that children would be satisfied by such wistful longing. However, by ushering the child into exotic new territories to

Whiz Cinnamon Rolls to Sloppy Joes: 50 Years in Children’s Cookbooks

explore and conquer,3 is it possible that reading a cookbook is like reading an adventure novel?4 The most recent cookbook that I discuss (The Silver Spoon for Children) certainly has a more adventurous feel (even including an illustrated map of Italy in the introduction, much like a treasure map in an adventure story). The cover art for The Silver Spoon for Children depicts a bowl of pasta with a tendril twirling itself around a silver spoon. It rouses in the child pleasurable recollections of eating sauce-smothered spaghetti (further emphasised by the cleverly chosen tomato-red background). It is a significant visual shift from the classic adult version,5 which shows a lone silver spoon on a stark white background. The children’s version is suggestively playful through its utilisation of a cursive font as opposed to the uppercase text of the adult cookbook. The pages within use a muted pastel colour palette with subtle nods to the world of a child. Some openings use wide-margin ruled exercise book paper or square graph paper as their background, which a child will be familiar with from school. The sky-blue endpapers are filled with illustrations of ingredients laid out in a haphazard but delightful manner. The recipes do not rely on explicit textual instructions but utilise detailed pictogram representations to help the child visualise the cooking process. This enables instant accessibility to children who may not yet read, or who face difficulties in doing so. Unlike Betty Crocker’s Cookbook for Boys and Girls, that includes aspirational etiquette tips, for example, ‘Good manners are not something to put on for company, but should be a part of us’ (p.141), the recipes themselves are aspirational. The blossoming chef will master potato gnocchi and rigatoni with meatballs, rather than the childish dishes that were prevalent in earlier cookbooks. Interestingly, unlike Betty Crocker’s Cookbook for Boys and Girls which is spiral bound, thus allowing the A5-size book to be laid flat, or the Usborne First Cookbook which is slim and easy to manipulate, the design of The Silver Spoon for Children is difficult for a child to use alone. Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott (2001) have written that the format of picture books is ‘not accidental but

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part of the book’s aesthetic whole’ (p.241). The cumbersome nature of the both the book’s size and its weight thereby suggests the need of an adult to help turn the pages. The sticky fingerprints on the cookery book belong to both the adult and child sharing the experience. Perhaps this most recent cookery book of my corpus reflects the increasingly transitional nature of the kitchen. With a growing preference for open-plan living and the absence of fireside vigils, the kitchen is arguably the new hearth of the modern home. Once again, it is children’s cookery books that provide a meeting place between adult and child. A place to collaborate, a place to create and a place to cook.

Notes 1 Which is why picture books such as Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are which draws attention to the adult nature of Max’s bedroom, grab our attention as being unnatural. 2 Longone looks at American cookery books, but I believe the principles apply to all. 3 This is achieved through the mastering of a previously unknown recipe. 4 Further research is required to substantiate these claims. 5 The adult version was first published over 150 years ago in 1950 as the original Italian kitchen tome Il Cucchiaio d’argento (The Silver Spoon).

Works Cited Primary Texts ‘Crocker, Betty’ (illus. Gloria Kamen) (1957) Betty Crocker’s Cookbook for Boys and Girls. New York: John Wiley. Grant, Amanda (ed.) (photo. Angela Moore (2009) The Silver Spoon Children: Favourite Italian Recipes. London: Phaidon Press. Wilkes, Angela (illus. Stephen Cartwright) (1983) The Usborne First Cookbook. London: Usborne Publishing.

Whiz Cinnamon Rolls to Sloppy Joes: 50 Years in Children’s Cookbooks

Secondary Texts Bower, Anne L. (2004) Romanced by cookbooks. Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies, vol. 4, no. 2 (pp.35–42). Longone, Jan (2003) As worthless as savorless salt? Teaching children to cook, clean, and (often) conform. Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies, vol. 3, no. 2 (pp.104–10). Nikolajeva, Maria and Carole Scott (2001) How Picturebooks Work. New York and London: Garland. Sendak, Maurice (1963) Where the Wild Things Are. New York: Harper & Row.

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN BRIDGING THE GASTRONOMICAL DIVIDE IN TRANSLATING CHILDREN’S LITERATURE GILI BAR-HILLEL The writer likens the different interpretations that cooks bring to recipes and food preparation to the alternative descriptions of specific food types offered in translated literature for children. There are many gaps – culinary, cultural and linguistic – down which our favourite foods may fall!

Food is one of the great cultural dividers. A dish that is taken for granted as a staple in one culture may hardly be considered edible in another. For literary translators, the translation of passages relating to food is often quite challenging, as the translation becomes a feat not merely of finding the right words, but of attempting to render equivalent associations, allusions and imagery, despite the very different roles that a certain food may play in different cultures. Children’s literature is full of food: hence the translation of children’s literature is full of food-translation pitfalls. Instances in which translations fall short are opportunities for serious insight into the symbols and values of different cultures. In this paper I draw from my extensive experience of working on translations from English to Hebrew for examples of the revelations that can come out of the struggle to adequately translate food texts. The challenges of translating food terms are not merely linguistic, but cultural. The first stumbling block may be the simple

Bridging the Gastronomical Divide in Translating Children’s Literature

need to identify the food referenced when the same word in the same language can represent quite different foods. For example, words such as ‘biscuit’, ‘lemonade’ and ‘pudding’ refer to quite different articles of food in modern British culture versus modern American culture. Within the same geographic bounds, a food may have changed over time: a typical ‘cake’ of the nineteenth century is likely to be nothing like ‘cake’ today. For a translator it is important to know the historical, geographical and cultural context before determining just what food is being referenced. Once the food itself has been identified, it may happen that there is a lack of terms in the target language to signify this food – a lexical gap. Such was the case, for example, in early translations of L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Avonlea (1990) into modern Hebrew. Foods such as maple syrup (p.255) and blueberries (p.111) were not common enough to have conventionally recognised names in Israel of the early 1950s when Y. Fishman was translating the books. Hence the translator chose coinages that were soon outmoded. Readers revisiting newer translations of the book were sometimes startled to discover that what had seemed by its unfamiliar name to be strange and exotic, was today a commonplace food: ‘The greatest shock was to discover that the wondrous asis galmooshim was nothing more than plain old maple syrup’ (Lev, 2000; my translation). Even when the food has been properly identified and a common conventional term exists in the target language, the different value assigned to the food in different cultures may cause a wrinkle in the translation. In different cultures the same food may be considered ordinary or festive, exotic or mundane, palatable or unappetising, nutritious or indulgent. Even if the name of the food is familiar, a young reader encountering the food framed in an unfamiliar setting may be perplexed. For example, Brussels sprout in one culture may be the marker of a traditional Christmas meal (as in the British J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2005: 305)), while in another culture they are

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classic examples of vegetables that children hate to eat (as in the American Judi Barrett’s Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (1978)). Take for example this passage from Christianna Brand’s The Collected Tales of Nurse Matilda ([1964] 2007): On Wednesday there was steak-and-kidney pudding, the crust dry and light on top and all sloshy and gooey underneath as it ought to be, wallowing in its hot, rich gravy; and mashed potatoes with a little cheese in them to make them all goldeny, and swedes, not boiled in water at all, but sliced up thin and cooked in nothing but butter (specialty of Cook). … I know this was a dreadfully indigestible meal, but Mrs Brown always gave her children whatever they liked best, every single day of the week. (2007: 50)

The way these foods are described in the text makes it clear that they are supposed to sound rich, delicious and desirable; but to a child of another culture not raised on these dishes, foods like steak-and-kidney pie or fried swedes may be incongruous with this description, if not downright disgusting. Translators employ different strategies for dealing with cultural gaps. In the example above from Nurse Matilda, when I translated the book into Hebrew I chose a relatively straightforward translation, despite the cultural gaps of which I was aware, in the belief that the context gave readers enough cues to understand that this was supposed to be a description of a delicious, indulgent meal. By context, I mean both the immediate descriptive language of the passage; for example, in the passage quoted above: ‘as it ought to be’, ‘whatever they liked best’; and the wider context of the setting of the book that is set in a place and time quite different from that of the assumed readers of the translation. If young readers can accept that the protagonists lived in a large house with servants and rode in horse-drawn carriages, they should be able to accept that different foods were found by them to be delicious. Another strategy often employed by translators is that of substitution of a more familiar local equivalent. This is the kind of reasoning that lead some Scandinavian translators to turn the Mad

Bridging the Gastronomical Divide in Translating Children’s Literature

Hatter’s tea party in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) into a coffee party. To an Anglophile reader, the tea party in Alice is so iconic that this change may seem shocking or absurd. From a Scandinavian perspective, coffee is a more run-of-the-mill hot drink: children drink coffee, and are likely to accept the drinking of coffee as more natural than the drinking of tea (see Epstein, 2012). Substitutions are often employed when adapting a British text for American readers or vice versa. For example, in the UK edition of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003) a witch is mentioned having a satsuma stuck in her nostril, but in the US edition the satsuma is replaced by a walnut – the only similarity being that satsumas and walnuts are of a roughly similar size. In my translations I have occasionally employed substitutions when I felt it appropriate. One such example ended up being one of the most controversial choices of my translation career. In the first chapter of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997), the wizard Dumbledore offers Professor McGonagall a sherbet lemon from his pocket (‘sherbet lemon’, being a specifically British sweet, was changed to ‘lemon drop’ in the US edition of the book). It took me some research to discover what sherbet lemons actually were, and I had a friend mail some to me in the post from England. En route to Israel, the lemon syrup had leaked through the cellophane wrappers, and I ended up receiving an extremely sticky, sugary mess, the kind in which children delight and mothers despair. It seemed to me that the choice of sherbet lemons was one that shed light on the childish aspects of Dumbledore’s character, as opposed to the prim and proper McGonagall. I therefore decided to replace ‘sherbet lemon’ with krembo, a chocolate-covered marshmallow sweet, much like a chocolate teacake, which is popular in Israel. Little did I know that the book I was translating was about to become a global phenomenon, breeding fanatical readers who atypically expected almost religious adherence to the original text. My choice to substitute an Israeli sweet for a British sweet was regarded by some with derision. At the same time others, familiar

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with both Israeli and British cultures, have applauded this same choice, agreeing with me that sherbet lemons and krembos have similar cultural significance: sweets holding a particularly strong association to childishness. Had I known how pedantic the young Harry Potter readers would be, I might have chosen more conservatively; and yet I still believe that simply translating into the closest Hebrew equivalent to ‘sherbet lemon’ – something on the lines of ‘lemon-flavored sweet’ – though strictly speaking correct, would have been missing the mark as far as the early characterisation of Dumbledore. Finally, a very common tactic for overcoming both lexical gaps and cultural gaps in translation is circumlocution: replacing an idiom from the source language with a description in the target language. For example, ‘Yorkshire pudding’ may not be familiar to all readers, but ‘a traditional Sunday pastry’ can sometimes be an acceptable substitution. The description can also be annexed in a number of ways: as a parenthetical remark, a footnote or within the sentence (e.g. ‘Yorkshire pudding, a traditional Sunday pastry’). When C.S. Lewis’s book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) was first translated into Hebrew in 1971, translator Shoshana Vidal chose to translate ‘Turkish delight’ as ma’adan Toorkee – ‘Turkish delicacy’. This is an example of circumlocution because ‘Turkish delicacy’ is not an idiom in Hebrew, and was not conventionally applied to any particular food before its appearance in this book. In 1990 Vidal’s translation was edited by Professor Gideon Toury and reissued: Toury had changed ma’adan Toorkee to rahat lokum, the name by which Turkish delight is presently known in Israel. A commenter on my blog expressed a reaction that I’ve heard echoed by many: Why did they have to go change the old translation? The fact that I didn’t know what Turkish delicacy was only added to the mystique of this treat. Years later I discovered it was rahat lokum, and I couldn’t understand why Edmund would sell his soul for a gelatinous sweet that is sold at every corner store. (http://gilibarhillel.wordpress.com, 4/12/2005; my translation)

Bridging the Gastronomical Divide in Translating Children’s Literature

Now the translation becomes an example of a cultural gap: the same sweet coveted as a delicacy by Edmund, a British boy during the Second World War, is considered cheap and common by a contemporary Israeli reader. So what is the ‘correct’ solution? Is it better to give the local name for a food, even if it is valued differently in the local culture (rahat lokum, fried swedes) or to invent a phrase that is essentially meaningless out of context, but can take on the values implied by the text (Turkish delicacy, asis galmooshim)? Or is it best to choose yet a third way, replacing the food of choice with something that is both idiomatic in the target language, and in keeping with the values of the scenario – such as coffee for the Mad Hatter, and perhaps fine chocolate truffles for Edmund? The standards and conventions of translation are not fixed, and what was considered an acceptable translation a few decades ago may today be considered too loose or off the mark. Translation is very much an art, requiring the translator to be attuned both to the source culture and to the subtle shifts in conventions and fashions of the target culture. Thus, translations of the same text to the same language made at different points in time can be quite different from each other, as can translations by different translators who are contemporaries but possess different sensibilities and world views. There is no single correct solution: a translator must play by ear, shifting tactics and picking solutions to match the particulars of each dilemma. Ultimately, the success or failure of a translation is measured by the ability of the reader not only to comprehend the text, but to be caught up with it emotionally and artistically. Like chefs following a recipe, translators can cook up the same dish with very different results – and readers, like diners, bring their own preferences to the table when evaluating what they are served.

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Works Cited Primary Texts Barrett, Judi (1978) Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. New York: Simon and Schuster. Brand, Christianna ([1964] 2007) The Collected Tales of Nurse Matilda. London: Bloomsbury. Carroll, Lewis (1865) Alice in Wonderland. London: Macmillan. Lewis, C.S. (1950) The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. London: Geoffrey Bles. Hebrew translation by Shoshana Vidal (1971). Tel Aviv: Zmora Bitan. Reissued translation by Shoshana Vidal, edited by Gideon Toury (1990), Tel Aviv: Zmora Bitan. Montgomery, Lucy Maud (1909) Anne of Avonlea. Boston, IL: L.C. Page & Co. Hebrew translation by Y. Fishman (1956) Tel Aviv: M. Newman Press. www.archive.org/stream/anneavonlea00montgoog/anneavonl ea00montgoog_djvu.txt. Rowling, J.K. (1997) Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. London: Bloomsbury. –– (2003) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. London: Bloomsbury; New York: Scholastic. –– (2005) Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. London: Bloomsbury. Secondary Texts Epstein, BJ (2012) Translating Expressive Language in Children’s Literature: Problems and Solutions. Bern: Peter Lang Publishing. Lev, Eleonora (2000) Canada: In the Footsteps of Anne of Green Gables. [Translated from the Hebrew] Masa Aher, Issue 108.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN WISHING TABLES AND MAGIC PUDDINGS: NEVER-ENDING EDIBLES FRANZISKA BURSTYN The writer examines the motif of magically appearing never-ending food as a mythical element in fairy tales within their socio-historical background, and looks at the relics of this motif in children’s literature. ‘[W]ithout food, everything is rather less than nothing.’ (Lindsay, [1918] 2004: 16)

This is the shocking truth Bunyip Bluegum discovers in Norman Lindsay’s The Magic Pudding once he sets out into the world. His conclusion is not only deeply profound with regard to human necessities, but is also programmatic for a majority of fairy tales. The cornucopia he encounters just when in direst need of it leads to the mythic relic of the land of plenty, formerly known as ‘The Land of Cokaygne’,1,2 a medieval fantasy adopted into an anticlerical satire in the Middle English Kildare manuscript. This motif is also present in a number of metamorphoses in folklore culture and fairy tales, and seems to capture the human consciousness to such an extent that it has found a way into twentieth-century children’s literature. Accordingly, this paper traces the land of plenty from the medieval utopia to more contemporary expressions in children’s literature, while pursuing the motif in fairy tales as a mythic relic in its various disguises. Furthermore, it places the myth of Cokaygne within the context of the

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carnivalesque and examines how far the narration conforms to the characteristic constituents of the carnival. The comparative approach of this paper presupposes a universality of the motif as such, which often finds expression in fairy tales as part of folklore tradition. It is not by chance that many studies on the fairy tale tend to regard the genre as prone to psychoanalysis. Fairy tales have been already drawn on as analogy by Sigmund Freud in his Interpretation of Dreams (1913), while Carl Gustav Jung attributes a universal truth to the tales in his theories concerning archetypes and the collective unconscious (1921: 85). These approaches also support the argument of a widespread prevalence and an inherent mythic quality assigned to The Land of Cokaygne in its many disguises. Hence, by exemplifying the myth as a relic in the German fairy-tale tradition by the Brothers Grimm, owing to its wide circulation, and then tracing it in the Australian children’s book The Magic Pudding (Lindsay, [1918] 2004), this paper highlights the universality of this motif.

The Land of Cokaygne The land of plenty, formerly known as The Land of Cokaygne or Lubberland, did not survive in Anglophone common knowledge while being a very well-known folklore utopia in a number of European countries. The Land of Cokaygne can be located from the Middle Ages onwards, with manuscripts spread across Europe, known under many names. The Italians refer to it as ‘Paese di Cuccagna’, the Dutch as ‘Luilekkerland’, the Germans as ‘Schlaraffenland’ and the French as ‘Pays de Cocagne’ (Del Giudice and Porter, 2003: 12). The land of plenty as described in those early manuscripts comprises a place that is pervaded by rivers filled with milk, honey, or, alternatively, wine, beer or even rum in later versions (p.12). Nevertheless, the aspect of physical wellbeing provides the centrepiece of this paradisiac fantasy, where ‘food falls like manna from heaven, work is banished, and no one

Wishing Tables and Magic Puddings: Never-Ending Edibles

ever grows old’ (p.12). Hence, the myth encompasses the desire for earthly pleasures, which is contrasted to the prevalent image of the Christian paradise. Likewise, the Anglo-Irish manuscript ‘The Land of Cokaygne’ also refers to the myth as a celestial place that is elevated above the Christian imagination of paradise, which, according to the poem, lacks the bare necessities that are already forfeited during life on earth (Kuczynski, 1984: 29; Lucas, 1995: 46– 47). The core of the myth, then, ‘represents one of the most persistent desires for a return to a terrestrial Paradise Lost’ (Del Giudice and Porter, 2003: 12) and, with the luxurious descriptions of edibles, also responds to the utopian vision of the starving population (p.12). Being both a utopia and an underworld, the land of plenty has a complex history and is connected to the carnivalesque as coined and elaborated on by Mikhail Bakhtin in his work Rabelais and his World (1965). Overall, narrations about the land of plenty encompass two aspects: the rules of the world as we know it are turned topsy-turvy and the landscape is formed by endless supplies of consumer goods, with a clear focus on rich and alluring food. The celebrations of the carnival allude to the myth Cokaygne by including feasts of bountiful measures for a community with equal rights, and thus, symbolically, give a glimpse of the land of plenty, the place of abundance and shared ownership. Moreover, the carnivalesque as defined by Bakhtin describes essentially a performative aspect, and thus covers ‘masquerade, inverted social and sexual roles, … mock-hierarchies and topsy-turvy codes of license and revelry’ (Rammel, 1990: 74), which still does not give the overall picture of the vast dimensions to which the term is applicable (Burstyn, 2011: 12). Within its historical context, the carnivalesque refers to folkloristic cultural expressions outside the monotony of everyday life, a ‘boundless world of humorous forms and manifestations [that] opposed the official and serious tone of medieval ecclesiastical and feudal culture’ (Bakhtin, 1968: 4). The manifestation of these cultural practices took place within the sphere of a ‘second life of the people, who for a time entered the

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utopian realm of community, freedom, equality, and abundance’ (p.9). This idea of a utopia once again links The Land of Cokaygne to the carnivalesque tradition, which is identified also by Peter Kuczynski. He recognises a mythical relic of this fantasy in the English folk-play tradition, which is sometimes briefly alluded to in the monologues of some of the characters: Now my lads we’ve come to the land of plenty, rost [sic] stones, plum puddings, houses thatched with pancakes, and little pigs running about with knives and forks stuck in their backs crying ‘Who’ll eat me, who’ll eat me?’. (Tiddy, 2003: 168)

Needless to say, the image of a landscape made of food is especially alluring to the child, whose first experiences in the world are basically a microcosm of the land of plenty in terms of the primal relationship with the mother, providing a seemingly endless source of food without any effort (Daniel, 2006: 10, 89–90). In fact, the relationship between the land of plenty and the primal relationship has been recognised by a number of scholars, which may also explain the reason for the general fascination with such a utopian fantasy, although often dismissed as belonging merely to children’s culture (p.10; Pleij, 2003: 5). The fairy tale then, as an expression of folklore culture, links the folklore utopia within the carnivalesque tradition with stories surrounding the marvellous land of plenty in which you can effortlessly indulge in the food that has been earlier denied to the famished protagonists.

Fairy Tales of the Empty Stomach In her monograph Voracious Children, Carolyn Daniel asserts that ‘the ultimate food fantasy is [probably] the mythic cornucopia, the symbol of plenty in its various manifestation’ (2006: 9). In general, a deprivation of the protagonist is a common ingredient of fairy tales, which then demands that they leave their home in order to seek their fortune. With regard to the myth relics of the gastronomic utopia of Cokaygne, it seems to be only the folktale ‘The Sweet Porridge’ that resembles Norman Lindsay’s The Magic

Wishing Tables and Magic Puddings: Never-Ending Edibles

Pudding at first glance, a connection that has also been recognised by Daniel. On closer observation, however, the myth of Cokaygne is spread throughout the fairy-tale tradition and revealed twofold. It either appears as a symbolic relic in a parallel world or underworld, often guarded by a cannibalistic ogre or witch, or it appears as a self-reproducible magical object. A well-known example of the former is the witch’s gingerbread house in the forest in Grimm’s ‘Hansel and Gretel’ (2007: 71–78), or the magical objects encountered by Jack in the Ogre’s house up in the sky in the English fairy tale of Jack and the Beanstalk. The magic object as exemplified on the basis of ‘The Sweet Porridge’ is evocative of Lindsay’s The Magic Pudding, although the approach in Lindsay’s novel is certainly more playful and ambivalent than the fairy tale. The novel centres on a selfreproducible pudding that is able to walk around freely on his long spindly legs when not being devoured, wearing his serving bowl on his head. Owing to this anthropomorphic depiction, Lindsay also poses additional questions concerning the boundaries between edible and inedible (Daniel, 2006: 5). Accordingly, the Pudding, notably with a capital ‘P’, is called Albert and has to live more or less voluntarily in the custody of his owners, while his greatest wish is to be eaten. Daniel links this anthropomorphic depiction to the general observance of food rules, which are arbitrary with regard to what is considered as edible (p.5). The food-related magic objects in fairy tales, in contrast, takes shape in something that is closer to the myth of Cokaygne as a gastronomic folklore utopia with regard to their inanimate state. Those tales of pots providing an endless source of food and tables magically covering themselves with dishes seem to be scattered throughout the fairy-tale tradition. The Brothers Grimm relate tales like these, and likewise Del Giudice and Porter observe such elements in the Italian tradition (2003: 48). Two fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm stand out with regard to their reminiscence of the land of plenty, namely ‘The Sweet Porridge’ (2007: 461–61) and ‘The Magic Table, the Golden Donkey and the Club in the Sack’

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(2007: 163–73). Both fairy tales are centred on inanimate magic objects that provide an endless source of food and operate only with the help of incantations as an integral part of their magic. ‘The Sweet Porridge’ reveals the basic idea of a cornucopia that can be linked to the land of plenty. It actually relates to a common theme within fairy tales, in which the protagonist sets out into the world to seek their fortune, for the most part lacking necessary commodities (Del Giudice and Porter, 2003: 47–48). These fairy tales, spread throughout the European fairy-tale tradition, essentially hint at the utopia of The Land of Cokaygne, an Edenic place that caters for basic human needs. The guises and metamorphoses in which the myth of Cokaygne emerges might vary, but the essential core of those narrations remains the same: they allude to times of famine in which the kind of food is not relevant as long as there is enough to assuage the starving population. Since the fairy-tale genre derives from an oral tradition, this again emphasises the communal character of this gastronomic utopia, which is essentially a ‘collective dream of the hungry masses’ (Camporesi, 1999: 31). ‘The Sweet Porridge’ narrates the story of an impoverished mother and daughter, who are given a magical little pot in a time of famine which cooks enough porridge to nourish them with the simple words ‘Little pot, cook’ (Grimm, 2007: 461). The fairy tale does not provide the fantastic and alluring cornucopia of the myth of Cokaygne. It is rather plain in its wares, although the sweetening of the porridge may already hint at luxurious goods, not easily accessible by the common populace (Bloch, 1986: 357). The narration ends with an image of the whole town being filled with porridge, alluding to the entrance of Cokaygne and often described as a huge mountain made of gruel through which you need to eat your way in order to reach the land of plenty (Pleij, 2003: 165). ‘The Sweet Porridge’ has a sole purpose, namely to satiate the characters’ hunger and, to a certain extent, also to feed into the fantasies of the audience. Thus, this fairy tale functions both as a pipe dream and compensation in times of hardship.

Wishing Tables and Magic Puddings: Never-Ending Edibles

Another fairy tale alluding to Cokayne is ‘The Magic Table, the Golden Donkey and the Club in the Sack’, which has a more fantastical approach than ‘The Sweet Porridge’, although the former seems to be closer to Lindsay’s The Magic Pudding at first sight. It also has a more elaborate storyline and, as a type, concentrates on ‘three important fairy-tale motifs: the banishment of the sons or son from home, their or his apprenticeship, and the demonstration of magic skills and gifts’ (Gonzenbach, 2004: 352). In this particular fairy tale, we encounter three magic objects, given to three brothers whose father turns them out of their home. One of these objects is a table that will cover itself with the most delicious dishes by means of the magic formula ‘Table, be covered’ (Grimm, 2007: 167). The incantation produces a clean tablecloth, and on it would be a plate with a fork and a knife, and dishes with roasted and stewed meat, as much as there was room for one on the table, and a large glass of sparkling red wine to tickle one’s throat. (p.167)

The detailed description of the abundant food and the protagonist’s relief to have ‘everything his heart desired’ is thwarted by an innkeeper who steals the table (p.167). The same holds true for the second brother, who has his magic donkey that can spit out gold pieces on the word ‘Bricklebrit’ replaced by the same landlord with an ordinary donkey (p.169). However, the third brother, coming into possession of a magical club that is ready to put his owner’s enemies to flight at a command, catches the landlord trying to steal the club and then retrieves the table and donkey stolen from his siblings (pp.172–73). The defence of magic objects and the element of punishment are also an integral part of The Magic Pudding. The two ingredients that seemed vital to Lindsay in his narration in order to attract a child audience are exactly those of food in abundance and fight (Pullman, 2004: x). Thus the struggle of guarding the magical object as a symbol of bliss and prosperity is essentially the same in both narrations. The fairy-tale tradition, however, corresponds more closely to the myth, while Lindsay’s story emphasises the

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need for a more fantastical approach, and inserts a great deal of slapstick humour. Nevertheless, many elements taken up in Lindsay’s food fantasy of the magic pudding can be related to the whole carnivalesque tradition in which the myth of the land of plenty is embedded.

Norman Lindsay’s The Magic Pudding The beginning of The Magic Pudding is structured in a similar manner to the commencement of a traditional fairy tale. The protagonist koala Bunyip Bluegum is turned out of his house by his uncle, or, more specifically, by his annoyance concerning his uncle’s whiskers as an unpleasant presence at mealtimes. The outset consequently also relates to the negotiation of food rules with regard to its observance and boundaries (Daniel, 2006: 3). Thus turned out of his home, Bunyip sets out into the world and suddenly has to realise a rather unpleasant truth: I had no idea that one’s stomach was so important. I have everything I require, except food; but without food everything is rather less than nothing. (Lindsay, 2004: 16)

As if by magic, he encounters the sailor Bill Barnacle and the penguin Sam Sawnoff, who reveal themselves to be the owners of a magic pudding. They refer to the pudding as ‘a respectable steakand-kidney, apple-dumplin’, grand digestive Puddin’ ’ (p.132), and disclose that ‘if you wanted a change of food from the Puddin’, all you had to do was to whistle twice and turn the basin round’ (p.34). Bunyip is invited to dine with them and, what is more, to join in and become a member of the Noble Society of Puddin’Owners (p.42). This instantly founded company sets the basic struggle of the novel into motion: namely, the fight for the pudding between professional pudding owners and professional pudding thieves. With regard to the fairy-tale structure, this pattern closely relates to ‘The Magic Table, the Golden Donkey and the Club in the Sack’ in which the magic items are stolen and have to be retrieved as a consequence. While the punishment in the

Wishing Tables and Magic Puddings: Never-Ending Edibles

fairy tale is quite severe, The Magic Pudding humorously narrates the bending of the pudding thieves’ snouts in order to put them to flight (p.32). The continuous conflict between the professional pudding owners and professional pudding thieves also alludes to ‘discourses about Australia as a land of plenty in need of protection from plundering colonialists’ (Daniel, 2006: 10). The inherent nature of Australianness in Lindsay’s narration with its indigenous animals and a bush setting, however, is infused by British allusions with regard to the working-class accents, and a continuous reference to the King of England (Gerber, 2011: 19). Accordingly, the novel, which is often referred to as ‘Australia’s only children’s classic’, portrays an intrinsically Australian image as well as ideas of Britishness (Saxby, 1992: 21). The exploitation of the pudding by the pudding owners and pudding thieves alike thus conveys a sense of ambivalence owing to the contradictory image of Albert as personified cornucopia, who is both expressing his desire to be an object of indulgence while at the same time struggling to escape his owners (Kelen, 2007: 7). Despite his repeated attempts to get away from anyone who does not make sufficient use of him as something edible, Sam Sawnoff assures their bond of friendship in the mock trial at the end of the novel: ‘That puddin’, sir, an’ me has registered vows of eternal friendship and esteem’ (Lindsay, 2004: 158). The reference to the bond between the pudding and his owners appears comprehensible with regard to their first encounter, in which the protagonists all suffer pangs of hunger. In the case of Bunyip, the pudding even insists on inviting him to dinner, and Bill respectively asserts that ‘[t]here’s nothing this Puddin’ enjoys more than offering slices of himself to strangers’ (p.18). This affirmation explicitly coming from the pudding certainly points to his charitableness, since the relief provided due to the protagonist suffering pangs of hunger turns the utilisation of a ‘cut-an’-come-again Puddin’ ’ into a positive image (p.19).

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In the wider contextualisation of the land of plenty, The Magic Pudding also makes use of various elements of the carnival as examined by Bakhtin. Apart from the allusion to Cokaygne as an everlasting food source, the narrative is also embedded into the wider context of the carnivalesque. This includes the aspect of performance, the constant humour as a vital element, as well as the nonsensical and topsy-turvy elements as a generic marker, which finally leads to a Kafkaesque mock trial between pudding owners and pudding thieves. Such mock trials, generally commenting of the absurdities of society, are also featured in other children’s literature, most prominently in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1864). The mock trial as an element of social inversion and utter chaos is also a typical marker for the ending of the carnival (Rammel, 1990: 63). While the carnival usually ends in the symbolic execution of the elected carnival king, in its wider sense a sacrifice to allow for a revival of nature and a regenerated life in general, the dissipation of the carnivalesque state in The Magic Pudding is solved by a metafictional momentum. As a result, the protagonists decide to ‘settle down to a life of gaiety, dance and song’ since they are perfectly aware of their position within the narration: ‘here we are pretty close up to the end of the book, and something will have to be done in a Tremendous Hurry, or else we’ll be cut off short by the cover’ (Lindsay, 2004: 166). This closure still retains the carnivalesque spirit of The Magic Pudding, but also dissolves into ‘dance and song’ as a traditional ending of folk plays and tales. With regard to the protagonist’s entrance into the fantastic realm of the narration, the encounter of the pudding owners and their consequential inclusion into the circle provides a link to the carnival as a playful time out and second life that is distinguished from everyday routines. This is also defined by Sam Sawnoff: One of the great advantages of being a professional Puddin’owner … is that songs at breakfast are always encouraged. None of the ordinary breakfast rules, such as scowling while eating, and saying the porridge is as stiff as glue and the eggs are as tough as

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leather, are observed. Instead, songs, roars of laughter, and boisterous jests are the order of the day. For example, this sort of thing,’ added Sam, doing a rapid back-flap and landing with a thump on Bill’s head. (p.46)

This designated way of life clearly hints at the different aspects of the carnivalesque with its folkloristic expressions of laughter, jests and the inversion of ordinary rules concerning everyday life. Moreover, it clearly links the carnivalesque to expressions of children’s culture as opposed to the adult world with its strict rules. This boisterous attitude proclaimed and lived out by the protagonists thus not only places them into the sphere of the carnival as opposed to blunt reality, but also opposes the strict regulations of adulthood with a playful childlike disposition. Another important aspect of the Noble Society of Puddin’Owners is the almost religiously practiced humorous spirit with the above-quoted ‘roars of laughter’. The element of ‘festive’ laughter as an integral part of Bakhtin’s definition of the carnivalesque is described as follows: It is, first of all, a festive laughter. Therefore it is not an individual reaction to some isolated ‘comic’ event. Carnival laughter is the laughter of all the people. Second, it is universal in scope; it is directed at all and everyone, including the carnival’s participants. The entire world is seen in its droll aspect, in its gay relativity. Third, this laughter is ambivalent: it is gay, triumphant, at the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies, it buries and revives. (Bakhtin, 1965: 11–12)

The ambivalence of carnival laughter is also inherent in The Magic Pudding, which makes use of humour and jest in order to negotiate traumatic experiences that relate to the protagonists’ basic needs. In the case of the characters Sam Sawnoff and Bill Barnacle, it is the time of hardship they had to endure before they acquired the magic pudding. In their narration about the discovery of the pudding, they playfully turn a blind eye on their struggle with the pudding’s inventor Curry and Rice, while telling Bunyip about it. While the pudding refers to Curry and Rice having been

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pushed into the sea by both Sam and Bill, they dissolve the account about this rather grim episode of deliberate foul play into bafflement and nonsense. Bakhtin attributes ‘the recognition of its positive, regenerating, creative meaning’ as a significant characteristic of carnival laughter, a spirit that pervades each individual episode in the narration (p.71). Owing to the pudding owners’ conflict with the pudding thieves entailing the continuous abduction of their beloved magic object, they have to overcome difficulties with boisterous tricks and inventive counter-moves, which are generally met with life-affirming feasts and derisive songs. Hence, Lindsay embeds the carnivalesque spirit very closely into his narration, which also equates to the childlike vivacity that accounts for the topicality with which the novel can still be read.

Conclusion In conclusion, The Magic Pudding follows a tradition of the carnivalesque with the myth of Cokaygne at its very centre. The myth of never-ending edibles as an expression of folklore tradition is perpetuated in fairy tales as part of our cultural assets. This myth is also echoed in the various motifs in children’s literature. The emphasis on food and its fantastical embellishment as a continuation of the fairy-tale motif underlies the same principle of the fairy-tale structure, with the protagonists fulfilling the need they experienced beforehand. The link between The Magic Pudding and ‘The Sweet Porridge’ obviously leads to the magically reproducible objects. While ‘The Sweet Porridge’ merely offers the fantasy of a single and rather plain dish, The Magic Pudding turns this fantasy into something more luxurious and playful. Although the anthropomorphised pudding, Albert, with a constantly grim facial expression appears to be a problematic image at first, since it blurs the lines between the edible and inedible, he still relates directly to the land of plenty. It is not only a gastronomic utopia with rivers of milk and honey as well as an edible architecture; Cokayne is also inhabited by animals readymade and roasted,

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constantly offering themselves to the inhabitants. Whereas a variety of other children’s books often entail moralistic implications opposing an inappropriate consumption of freely available food in abundance, The Magic Pudding does not impart any judgements about the protagonists’ cheerful excess. Quite the contrary, the novel encourages a healthy appetite, promoting a society of pudding owners where ‘[h]earty eaters are always welcome (p.19). This unconstrained spirit towards food and eating as a frequent feature of food narratives in children’s literature also mirrors the carnivalesque and a childlike playfulness that differs markedly from adult food etiquette (Daniel, 2006: 12).3 The benevolence of the pudding owners towards agreeable strangers also equates with the structure in the novel, which is divided into four slices rather than four chapters. Such a division also alludes to the readiness with which they willingly share their prized possession with the reader. The allusion of sharing the magic pudding as a collective experience thus also promotes a sense of community beyond the boundaries of the novel, a gesture that was certainly important at the carnival, and consequently also offers a little piece of the heavenly land of Cokaygne to the reader.

Notes 1 Common alternative spellings are Cockaynge and Cockaigne. 2 ‘The Land of Cockaygne’. In Angela M. Lucas (ed.) Anglo-Irish Poems of the Middle Ages. Dublin: The Columba Press, 1995. 3 The playfulness with which the motif of food is frequently dealt with in a number of children’s books from the twentieth century onwards is opposed to the use of food in order to educate the child about improper and immoderate excesses. This attitude is strongly mediated in Victorian children’s literature, which sees excesses with regard to eating as immoral behaviour corrupting the child’s character (Daniel, 2006: 11).

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Works Cited Primary Text Lindsay, Norman. The Magic Pudding. New York: The New York Review Children’s Collection, 2004. First published 1918. Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (ed. and trans Jack Zipes). The Complete Fairy Tales. London: Vintage Books, 2007. Secondary Texts Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and his World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1965. Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. Burstyn, Franziska. The Myth of Cokaygne in Children’s Literature: The Consuming and the Consumed Child. Arbeiten zur Literarischen Phantastik. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2011. Campesoresi, Piero. Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. First published in Italian, 1980. Del Giudice, Luisa and Gerald Porter. Imagined States. Nationalism, Utopia, and Longing in Oral Cultures. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2003. Daniel, Carolyn. Voracious Children: Who Eats Whom in Children’s Literature. London: Routledge, 2006. Gerber, Leah. ‘The Proof Is in the Puddin’: The German Translation of Norman Lindsay’s The Magic Pudding’. Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature. Vol. 49.1 (2011): 17–30. Gonzenbach, Laura (trans. Jack Zipes). Beautiful Angiola: The Great Treasury of Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales. New York: Routledge, 2004. Honeyman, Susan. Consuming Agency in Fairy Tales, Childlore, and Folk Literature. New York: Routledge, 2010. Johnston, Rosemary. ‘Carnivals, the carnivalesque, The Magic Puddin’, and David Almond’s Wild Girl, Wild Boy: Toward a theorizing of children’s plays’. Children’s Literature in Education. 34.2 (2003): 131–46.

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Jung, C.G. Psyche and Symbol. A Selection from the Writings of C.G. Jung. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. Kelen, Christopher. ‘The Magic Pudding: A mirror of our fondest wishes’. Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature. Vol. 6 (2007): 65–78. Kuczynski, Peter. Bekämpfung einer Volksutopie: das volkstümlich gehaltene Schlaraffenland im 16. Jahrhundert [Dealing with the people’s utopia: The paradise of Cokaygne envisaged in the 16th century]. Berlin: Habilitation dissertation, 1984. Lucas, Angela M. (ed.) Anglo-Irish Poems of the Middle Ages. Dublin: The Columba Press, 1995. Pleij, Herman. Dreaming of Cockaigne: Medieval Fantasies of the Perfect Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Pullman, Philip. Introduction. The Magic Pudding. New York: The New York Review Children’s Collection, 2004. vii–xi. Rammel, Hal. Nowhere in America: The Big Rock Candy Mountain and Other Comic Utopias. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois, 1990. Saxby, Maurice. Proof of the Puddin’. Sydney: Ashton Scholastic. Tiddy, R.J.E. The Mummers’ Play. London: Clarendon, 1923.

Websites Anglo-Irish poems of the Middle Ages: The Kildare Poems. Author: unknown. Poem 1: ‘The Land of Cokaygne’. www.ucc.ie/celt/published/E300000-001/. The Land of Cockaygne. Wessex Parallel WebTexts Project. www.southampton.ac.uk/~wpwt/trans/cockaygn/cockaygn.htm. British Museum Collection Harley 913. The Kildare Lyrics, including The Land of Cokaygne. www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/record.asp?MSID =18695&CollID=8&NStart=913.

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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN A VARIED MENU: CHILDREN’S POETRY ABOUT FOOD PAT PINSENT Pat Pinsent considers the history of poetry for children that involves food, and finds that both quantity and attitudes have changed over the centuries, from famine to feast.

‘Food has not always been deemed a subject worthy of literary study, despite its appearance in literature,’ suggest Kara K. Keeling and Scott T. Pollard, the editors of a recent collection of essays, Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature (2009: 6). Comparable to the critical neglect of the subject, the relative sparsity of poetry about food, whether for children or, indeed, for adults, suggests that poets too have not deemed the everyday function of eating to be worth much attention from them. Certainly scenes of feasting appear in epic poetry, but generally these are settings for speakers, such as Aeneas in Vergil’s Aeneid, Hrothgar and the eponymous hero in Beowulf and the Green Knight in Gawain and the Green Knight, to address a captive audience. A slightly different and distinctly positive reference that comes to mind is Rubert Brookes’ famous couplet: ‘Stands the church clock at ten to three/ And is there honey still for tea’ (‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, 1912) – the apparent near banality of which is thrown into relief by the context of seeking to hang on to the familiar things as Europe fell to pieces in the ‘Great War’.

A Varied Menu: Children’s Poetry about Food

There are of course many nursery rhymes which deal with this constantly recurring aspect of children’s lives: ‘Pease Pudding Hot’, ‘Little Miss Muffett’ with her ‘bowl of whey’, Jack Horner and Jack Sprat, to name but a few. Verses occurring in fairy tales sometimes involve an element of food, even if this is scarcely standard fare: a typical example is ‘Fee fie fo fum … I’ll grind his bones to make my bread’ in ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’. The complexity of underlying meanings that the nursery rhyme and the fairy tale involve, however, motivates me to focus here only on verse that was written by a specific person (even if we do not always know who that person was) and which had a child audience in mind. The relative sparsity of poems featuring food is notable in, for instance, The Faber Book of Children’s Verse (1953), compiled by Janet Adam Smith, only seven of whose 384 pages are given to this topic; this may of course signify the compiler’s lack of interest in the subject. Interestingly, a later anthology, The New Oxford Book of Children’s Verse (1996), edited by Neil Philip, has a wider range of poems related to food, but the majority of these are from the second half of the twentieth century. The few relevant poems in The Rattle Bag (1982) and The School Bag (1997), both edited by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, tend to have been written with an adult audience in mind. This paper is in no way intended to be a comprehensive survey of the subject of food in poetry for children, nor an analysis from a critical standpoint of what poetry there is. Rather it is intended to give a taste of the diverse flavours of the fare on offer in different periods, with the intention of generating an appetite for more.1 My fairly cursory scrutiny of verse on this topic written for children suggests that relatively little verse written before the late nineteenth century acknowledges that food can provide pleasure, while admonitions about manners at table and reproofs against gluttony imply that adults saw food rather as an area in which children needed particular guidance, as well as one which provided ample scope for the drawing of morals.

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Another facet is the notion of eating as predation. My initial surmise is that it is only in fairly recent times that children’s enjoyment of food is allowed to be celebrated.

Advice about Food: Manners and Behaviour The Oxford Book of Children’s Verse, edited by Iona and Peter Opie, includes some stern admonitions about good manners from a fifteenth-century manuscript (1973: 7–8). The youth, presumably living as a page in a noble household – a kind of apprenticeship before he takes up his own place in society – is told how he must behave at table: ‘Eat not thy meat too hastily … Pick not thy teeth with thy knife Nor spit thou not over the table …’. The editors’ note, a type of note particularly frequent in such manuscripts, is the advice not to dip the meat into the salt, and to wash hands after eating (pp.390–91). The rhyming tetrameter format was probably chosen in order to facilitate memorisation of these rules. If such advice is obeyed, onlookers will judge that ‘A gentleman was here’ (p.8). Probably the most common of the food-related verses in the Opies’ collection are poems inveighing against gluttony. For readers familiar with ‘The Lobster’ in Carroll’s Alice, or the earlier children’s poem by Isaac Watts, ‘The Sluggard’ (1715), which served as a template for Carroll’s, John Oakman’s ‘The Glutton’, written in the late eighteenth century, has a familiar ring: The Glutton The voice of the glutton I heard with disdain: ‘I’ve not eaten this hour, I must eat again; O give me a pudding, a pie, or a tart, A duck, or a fowl, which I love from my heart!’ (1973: 83)

The second stanza of this lively, largely anapaestic, injunction begins, ‘O let me not be like the glutton inclined/ In feasting my body and starving my mind!’, reinforcing the impression that moderation in relation to food is likely to be associated with scholarly habits. More logical, perhaps, is the link made in ‘Greedy

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Richard’ by Jane Taylor between the glutton’s overeating and his subsequent sickness, together with his inability to bestow alms on a needy man. The consequences of overindulgence for both the Duck in Ann Taylor’s ‘The notorious glutton’ (p.118) and the title character in ‘The Mouse and the Cake’ (p.209) by Eliza Cook are more serious – both perish despite having received medical advice to mend their ways and not be selfish. All these poems are from the first half of the nineteenth century. It is perhaps a sign of the times that ‘Greedy Jane’ (p.328) who, in an anonymous verse of c.1907, demands to have both pudding and pie, seems to meet no evil fate. The moral advice in all the material looked at so far is very specific in its focus on how and how much to eat. But not all writers limited their focus to the practicalities. John Bunyan, better known for his influential prose work The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), which includes a number of hymns, some still familiar today, also wrote a collection of verse emblems, A Book for Boys and Girls (1686). These poems derive morals from the word pictures which Bunyan draws of everyday objects, such as bees, an egg, and in this verse, bread: Upon a Penny Loaf The Price one Penny is, in time of Plenty; In Famine doubled ’tis, from one to twenty. Yea, no man knows what Price on thee to set, When there is but one Penny Loaf to get. This Loaf’s an Emblem of the Word of God, A thing of low Esteem, before the Rod Of Famine smites the Soul with Fear of Death: But then it is our All, our Life, our Breath. (1890: 53)

The technique of drawing an explicit moral after the initial description is one he uses throughout this book. The implied child reader or listener is encouraged to imagine the object described, and thus to be inveigled into deriving, and presumably committing to memory, the moral. Bunyan’s simple vocabulary and iambic

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metre, features that are characteristic of most of the verses in the collection, allow attention to be concentrated on the relative complexity of the argument. While such verses might today be thought to have relatively little appeal to the young reader, the innovatory aspect of a book actually entitled as directed to a young audience and the fact that, unlike so many Puritan publications of the period, it does not focus on the death of young children, caused this collection to become very popular and several later illustrated editions are also to be found.

Decline of Moralising: Nineteenth-Century Poems As a wide range of differing attitudes towards childhood developed during the latter part of the nineteenth century, it is scarcely surprising that verse written for children followed a similar trajectory and, like children’s fiction, catered more extensively than previously for their enjoyment. Verse written about food not unnaturally followed suit. There is less stress on morality and manners, more on enjoyment of food, either by humans or by animals. It has often been observed that Lewis Carroll’s Alice books (1865, 1871) have a constant theme of predation, usually in the prose narrative (recall Alice’s frequent tactless allusions to the mouse-catching propensities of her cat, Dinah, together with the range of edibles that she herself consumes). Of the verse in the books that addresses the same subject, probably the best known is ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ in Through the Looking-Glass. This concludes: ‘A Loaf of bread,’ the Walrus said, ‘Is what we chiefly need: Pepper and vinegar besides Are very good indeed – Now if you’re ready, Oysters dear, We can begin to feed.’ … ‘Oh Oysters,’ said the Carpenter,

A Varied Menu: Children’s Poetry about Food

‘You’ve had a pleasant run! Shall we be trotting home again?’ But answer came there none – And this was scarcely odd, because They’d eaten every one. (1970: 235–56)

Part of the ‘catchiness’ of this verse results from Carroll’s exploitation of alternating lines of eight and six syllables, a pattern found in one of the most popular hymn measures, common metre, and thus perhaps subconsciously setting up a potential clash between form and meaning. The human (and walrus) predation celebrated in this poem is reversed in ‘Jim’ by Hilaire Belloc (1907, Iona and Peter Opie, 1973: 312). The boy, who at the beginning of the poem vies with the gluttons mentioned above in the amount he consumes, meets his dreadful fate when he visits the zoo and falls prey to the incongruously named lion, Ponto. After inviting his readers to imagine how it feels to be consumed from the toes upwards, Belloc interposes a note of detachment from the humanity of the victim to the lion’s perspective: at the keeper’s commands to ‘Put it down’ … ‘The lion made a sudden stop/ He let the dainty morsel drop’ (pp.312–14). A rather different stance on food is to be found in ‘Goblin Market’ (1862) by Christina Rossetti. Although it is not included in the Opies’ collection, it demands mention because, despite its savagery and, most critics would claim, its implicit and probably subconsciously sexual subtext, it is often to be found in anthologies directed towards children (as, for example, The Children’s Omnibus, 1932). The description of the goblins’ wares is intended, presumably, not only to entice the hapless Laura and her more resistant sister, Lizzie, but also the reader, young or old: ‘Apples and quinces, Lemons and oranges, Plump unpecked cherries … All ripe together …

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Sweet to tongue and sound to eye; Come buy, come buy.’ (pp.347–78)

The association of fruit with temptation is of course scarcely original, dating back to Genesis, but the lavishness with which Rossetti has described the sensuous qualities of the forbidden fruits suggests that, despite her ‘intense shyness’ (Carpenter and Prichard, 1984: 462), her strong appreciation of some varieties of natural produce fed her imagination of other delights of the flesh. A less complex attitude towards food occurs in Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses ([1885] 1952). Food seems to be regarded as an incidental but welcome part of the normal routine of the day: ‘It is very nice to think/ The world is full of meat and drink’ (‘ A Thought’, p.18). It is natural for the persona and his playmate Tom to take with them into the imaginary ship made from the furniture, a real ‘apple and a slice of cake’ to sustain them until tea (‘A good play’, p.31), while ‘The Cow’ which provides cream ‘To eat with apple-tart’ (p.41) is surely a forerunner of A.A. Milne’s bovine donor in his ‘The King’s Breakfast’.

Enjoying Food in Modern Verse Without doing any statistics, I have formed the impression that poems for children about food are not only more numerous in the twentieth century, but are also more positive in allowing the child a reasonable degree of enjoyment of the process of eating, without being reproved for gluttony or expected to draw some moral lessons from the verses. Of poems expressing a positive attitude, some of the most familiar are by A.A. Milne – as indeed might be expected from the creator of a bear whose appetite for honey is at the same time greedy and endearing. Rather than voicing any moral censure, Milne at one point lets Pooh suffer for his overindulgence (Winniethe-Pooh, 1926: ch.2, ‘Pooh goes visiting’), but there is no hint of the moral strictures expressed in the poems quoted above by

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Bunyan, Oakman, the Taylor sisters and Eliza Cook. Both ‘The King’s Breakfast’, probably Milne’s best-known food poem (When We Were Very Young, 1924: 55–59) and ‘The Little Black Hen’ (Now We Are Six, 1927: 60–64) provide an attractive focus on the creature producing the food, but ‘Binker’, about an invisible playmate, may be less familiar. Near the end we read: Binker isn’t greedy but he does like things to eat So I have to say to people when they’re giving me a sweet, ‘Oh, Binker wants a chocolate, so could you give me two?’ And then I eat it for him, ’cos his teeth are rather new. (1965: 17)

The largely anapaestic rhythm gives a jauntiness to the verse and perhaps enhances the impression we are left with that the child persona believes in the truth of his own strategy for manipulating adults into giving him more chocolate. Among the twentieth-century poets whose work supports my contention that there exists a rather different attitude from that of their predecessors is Eleanor Farjeon (1881–1965), whose ‘Honey for Tea’, rather than reproving the ‘babes in the nursery’ for eating their fill, presents them positively as ‘With sweet sticky lips/ [they] Are sucking their thumbs/ And finger-tips’ (Berg, 1960: 100). The poet seems to have little worry about either the physical or the moral consequences of the infants indulging in what earlier would have been seen as bad habits to be beaten out of them! This positive attitude towards food seems to increase throughout the century. In fact the only negative attitude displayed by the several poems about food in The New Oxford Book of Children’s Verse (Philip, 1996) is in a short verse by Douglas Florian which voices an antipathy not uncommon among young children: ‘Send my spinach/ Off to Spain …’ (p.318). Verses about food in Michael Rosen’s A to Z: The Best in Children’s Poetry from Agard to Zephaniah (2009) are also largely celebratory. Berlie Doherty is represented by a particular interest in vegetables. She employs an unusual image of togetherness in a poem of which the first verse is:

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If you were a carrot and I was a sprout I’d boil along with you I’d sit on your plate … (2009: 52)

The following poem, ‘Mushrooms’ involves the senses as she describes how, as the mushrooms are cooked … in hot-butter fry they grow plump as the slugs that slithered round their stems … (2009: 54)

Yet any potentially less attractive aspects of this comparison are balanced by thoughts of how the juices that the mushrooms spill when bitten recall the grass and ‘the rich moist brown deep earth’ (p.54). Doherty’s close observation of the taste of food is unusual, and the very abundance of adjectives describing the earth engenders an impression of fertility and plenty. Interestingly, both these anthologies include verse about food originating from outside these islands, though by now well naturalised. ‘Good Hot Dogs’ by Sandra Cisneros seems to be American in its inspiration – it speaks of paying with ‘quarters’ – but all the rest of the description of the ‘delicacy’ would be familiar to British children: … We’d eat Fast till there was nothing left But salt and poppy seeds even The little burnt tips Of french fries … (1996: 330–31)

This focus on food not originally indigenous to the UK is also found in Adisa’s ‘Chick Pea Pie’, which uses several expressions in patois to evoke a lavish range of very animated Caribbean delicacies (such as plantain, yam, aubergine and, contra the Florian verse quoted above, spinach): … Spinach and cousin callaloo A try fe to tease black eye peas Spinach flutter her eyelashes

A Varied Menu: Children’s Poetry about Food

Black eye peas body start to swell Callaloo blow peas a kiss I think I am in Love Peas start fe YELL … (2009: 6–7)

‘Dino’s Café’ by Matthew Fitt, in a Glaswegian dialect, celebrates the Scottish–Italian connection. Dino is equally happy offering foods from both cultures: ‘mince and tatties/ Macaroni and ciabatties’, and indeed combining them in ‘Tartan Pizza’ and ‘Tutti Frutti Clooties ‘ This celebratory attitude towards foods originating outside these islands reveals how immigration has led to a vast expansion in the normal British diet. It is interesting in this context to recall an 1834 poem by Sara Coleridge quoted by Lissa Paul: Tea is brought from China Rice from Carolina India and Italy Countries far beyond the sea

(2010: 40)

Paul claims: [t]hat world was a gigantic colonial cookie-jar filled with sugar and spice and everything nice, from which the colonisers, like greedy children grabbed and gobbled everything in sight. (p.40)

It would appear that the tide indeed has turned.

Conclusion Food can serve as an image for so many things – comfort, stability and even, though less commonly in poetry for children, sexual appetite. I certainly haven’t done enough research to support my feeling that, apart perhaps from a few isolated verses, it is only in the twentieth century that children’s verse is allowed to celebrate the enjoyment that most children, and adults, derive from food, instead of feeling the imperative to convey a moral message about it to young readers. Much of the material reflects social developments, ironically encapsulated in the popular song ‘Food,

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glorious food’ from Lionel Bart’s Oliver (1968), which, based on Dickens Oliver Twist (1838), is sung by poor workhouse boys faced with a sparse allowance of gruel. Keeling and Pollard, in the recent collection of essays about food in children’s literature that I quoted at the beginning, do not seem to pay any attention to poetry, but there is plenty on the plate, both appetising and otherwise, to chew over and digest!

Notes 1 I must apologise for the puns in both the title of this paper and in this sentence. But language about food is so often used in a figurative sense (something that needs further investigation, presumably based on psychological studies of ‘orality’) that it is difficult to resist making use of double meanings.

Works Cited Berg, Leila (1960) Four Feet and Two. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Bunyan, John ([1686] 1890) A Book for Boys and Girls, or Country Rhymes for Children. London: Elliot Stock. Carpenter, Humphrey and Mari Prichard (eds) (1984) The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature. Oxford University Press. Carroll, Lewis (1970) The Annotated Alice. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Heaney, Seamus and Ted Hughes (eds) (1982) The Rattle Bag. London: Faber. –– (1997) The School Bag. London: Faber. Keeling, Kara K. and Scott T. Pollard (eds) (2009) Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature. New York and London: Routledge. Lynd, Sylvia (ed.) (1932) The Children’s Omnibus. London: Gollancz. Milne, A.A. ([1927] 1965) Now We Are Six. London: Methuen. Opie, Iona and Peter Opie (eds) (1973) The Oxford Book of Children’s Verse. Oxford University Press.

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Philip, Neil (ed.) (1996) The New Oxford Book of Children’s Verse. Oxford University Press. Rosen, Michael (ed.) (2009) A to Z: The Best in Children’s Poetry from Agard to Zephaniah. London: Penguin. Smith, Janet Adam (ed.) (1953) The Faber Book of Children’s Verse. London: Faber. Stevenson, Robert Louis ([1885] 1952) A Child’s Garden of Verses. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Paul, Lissa (2010) Ted Hughes and the ‘Old age of childhood’. In Morag Styles, Louise Joy and David Whitley (eds) Poetry and Childhood. Stoke on Trent: Trentham (pp.33–44).

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CHAPTER NINETEEN FOOD, LOVE AND CHILDHOOD: SURVIVING AND THRIVING IN THE DEEPWOODS REBECCA ANN LONG Rebecca Ann Long examines the use of food and eating as metaphors for the emotional and social development of characters in the Deepwoods trilogy of the Edge Chronicles. Here food means identity, survival, power and domination. It is linked to culture, to family, to belonging, and therefore to home. She examines the power of Stewart’s text and Riddell’s illustrations to convey the complex and threatening food chains present in the books.

There is an essential, primal connection between the food we eat, the homes we inhabit and the bodies we must sustain. Children’s literature is fundamentally informed by that connection, by the link between satisfying hunger and experiencing the safety, security and emplacement of a home environment. But sometimes that link is problematised; when a food supply is disrupted or contaminated or when the sanctity of the home is violated. In From Mythic to Linear: Time in Children’s Literature, Maria Nikolajeva talks – in the context of myths, fairy tales and literary archetypes – of the subconscious fear that child figures experience that one day their supply of food will disappear. In Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell’s Deepwoods trilogy, Twig, the series’ central protagonist, does not experience this fear, rather he yearns or is homesick for a lifestyle and a domestic space that he has never known, for food that nourishes and excites him. In many fairy

Food, Love and Childhood: Surviving and Thriving in the Deepwoods

tales, food becomes a token or a symbol of belonging; in certain myths, food from home accompanies the protagonist through the forest (2006: 185). When Twig leaves the woodtroll village, he does not take any food with him and when he steps off the path and into the unknown, he loses the ability to source food for himself. One of the primary functions of food in children’s literature is to serve as a link back to home when child heroes embark on adventures. But because Twig’s home with the woodtrolls has been problematised by his stepmother Spelda’s revelations about the circumstances of his adoption, he has been cut adrift in the vast wilderness of the Deepwoods; a place where the food is strange, monstrous and even poisonous and where Twig himself is also a stranger. In the vastness of the forest he must not only fend for himself and find food, he must also find a new home. So the need for food and the quest for home are inextricably linked, given that each domestic space Twig encounters in the Deepwoods is defined by the food its inhabitants consume. Twig is very often alone in the Deepwoods, alone with himself and with his thoughts. Even in the company of others – with the obvious exception of the banderbear – Twig feels lonely and excluded. Riddell’s illustrations highlight this isolation, often placing Twig in the centre of the Deepwoods wildness. When he meets the gabtroll, Twig is discomfited by her gaze, and in Riddell’s image he stares back at her, his chin pressed down towards his chest as though he is being pushed into himself by the power of that gaze (Figure 17). She recognises the desire to belong that burns at the centre of Twig’s existence, the yearning in him as to who he is, the appetite for emotional fulfilment that he cannot control. She sees in him a hunger that is a kind of emptiness because he has no way of satisfying it. Riddell’s illustrations for the Twig trilogy explore the problematic dynamic between food and home by placing Twig, the child figure at the heart of the narrative, at the centre of images that depict an experience of childhood that is defined by the violence associated with the production and

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consumption of food in the Deepwoods. In the forest, food is the fundamental and basic foundation of community. As Twig moves through the Deepwoods, he engages with and relates to each community he encounters through the foods associated with those communities. His experience of home and home spaces is mediated through food. In fact, the production and consumption of food is intimately linked to relationships, to the domestic space, to belonging.

Figure 17. Twig and the Gabtroll, p.211.

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Twig survives in the Deepwoods – but does he thrive? The image Chris Riddell’s illustrations present us with is one of a painfully thin young boy whose body is, to all intents and purposes, as slender as a twig. Often, we perceive the forest through and in relation to Twig’s body. While he is often surrounded by food in the Deepwoods, we never see him eat. Riddell does not give us a visual image of Twig eating. If food is one of the defining aspects of individual communities in the Deepwoods, then we can say that the Woodtrolls, his adoptive family and community, are defined by the foods they eat. Twig finds many of these foods repulsive. So instead of food and home forming positive associations for him, food becomes connected with the gaps and breaks in his identity. Food does not mean security for Twig; rather, it is another external manifestation of the difference he feels internally. The only image of the Snatchwood cabin in the text highlights this.

Food, Love and Childhood: Surviving and Thriving in the Deepwoods

Twig and Spelda are alone together, yet Twig has his back to his adoptive mother, there is already a distance between them. There is no food visible in the scene and we are painfully aware of Twig’s slender form as it is dwarfed by Spelda’s solid bulk. Twig is, it seems, pining or wasting away in the heart of his own home. Twig’s childhood then, is defined, in a perverse way by the food he eats – or rather, the food he is given (Figure 18).

Figure 18. Twig and Spelda, p.14.

When he leaves the Snatchwood cabin and finds himself alone in the forest, he is suddenly responsible for his own survival, for nourishing his own body and for sustaining his own mind and soul. He begins to grow out of his childhood, even as he forages for food to maintain that growth. As Twig’s various encounters prove, food is a dangerous business on the Edge. But it is also a profitable one. Existence in this strange world is harsh and often brief; the Deepwoods alone

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contain ‘monstrous creatures, flesh-eating trees [and] marauding hordes of ferocious beasts’ (p.8) (Figure 19).

Figure 19. Twig in the Deepwoods, p.40.

Survival, which naturally involves the consumption of food, is dangerous – especially when one runs the constant risk of actually being the food. But surviving in the Deepwoods can also turn into a

Food, Love and Childhood: Surviving and Thriving in the Deepwoods

profit because ‘the succulent fruits and buoyant woods that grow there’ are highly valued (p.8). Food is a commodity. And oftentimes that means the inhabitants themselves can be bought, sold and eaten. Working within that theme, Riddell’s illustrations depict, in visceral and often shocking detail, the effects of consumption and starvation on the inhabitants of the Edge. Those who eke out an existence in the Mire are ‘pink-eyed and bleached as white as their surroundings’ (p.9). They rummage, they scavenge; they do not thrive. They are not sustained by the food they consume and Riddell’s images of the Mire as a barren, polluted space, ‘rank with the slurry from the factories and foundries of Undertown’ serve to illuminate the deep and complex relationship between food, environment and survival to which the inhabitants of the Deepwoods are subjected (p.9). Food and slavery are intimately connected on the Edge. It is said that nobody goes hungry in the fair city of Undertown – and that no Undertowner can be made a slave. But slaves exist in the slums and alleys of the city. Enslaved by hunger and poverty, the inhabitants of Undertown eke out miserable existences in the anonymity of the urban sprawl. Death in the Deepwoods is meaningful, it is part of the circle of survival within the system itself. In Undertown and the Mire, death becomes meaningless. The Deepwoods is a hostile but fertile environment. By contrast, Undertown and the Mire are barren and hazardous, they are irredeemable spaces that consume the characters who try to eke out an existence in them. The Deepwoods promotes survival, Undertown promotes exploitation. Throughout the series, we are presented with images of characters who have been denied access to food: characters who have been starved, deprived and manipulated by figures more powerful than them. The illustrations are full of weakened, emaciated figures who become the symbolic manifestation of the slavery theme that runs through the text. Food, power and overindulgence become inextricably linked as do the twin evils of

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starvation and slavery. In this context, Riddell’s illustrations provide us with a visual narrative representation of Twig’s ongoing survival. Monsters abound in Riddell’s work. And monsters have monstrous appetites. Even the fearsome gloamglozer desires something, and is driven by the need to expose the mental weakness and desires of the creatures he pursues; he is driven to consume the emptiness he finds in those who venture near the edge. Twig himself is haunted – and at times, very nearly consumed – by his own personal monsters; by the memories of the home in which he did not belong and the mother he has left behind. The cathartic moment at the very edge of the Deepwoods when the gloamglozer offers him what he really desires is one of deep psychological intensity for Twig; the monster offers to sate his yearning for a home, to fill the emptiness inside him. Riddell illustrates each of the Deepwoods creatures Twig encounters within the context of their often monstrous appetites. The halitoad, the hoverworm, the skullpelt, the bloodoak, the rotsucker, the wig-wigs – they all attack Twig because they see him as a potential source of food, because they must satisfy the appetites by which their bodies are regulated. The link between violence and food is therefore a primal and a fundamental one in the Deepwoods and is played out constantly in the dialectic between predator and prey; a dialectic in which Twig often finds himself in the position of powerless victim. The relationship between prey and predator, hunted and hunter is a fundamental aspect of food culture and survival in the Deepwoods, and at times it seems that Twig himself will be sacrificed to the monstrous appetite of the Deepwoods. As such, Twig’s experiences with food in the Deepwoods are often traumatic – not least because he is often targeted as the food in question. He is the victim and object of monstrous appetites in the forest.

Food, Love and Childhood: Surviving and Thriving in the Deepwoods

Figure 20. Battle with the Hoverworm, p.51.

During one such skirmish, the battle with the hoverworm, the creature is fighting to kill Twig and to eat him – Twig on the other hand, is fighting (in a larger, symbolic sense) for his right to be himself, for his right to the time he needs to discover who he is, to nurture his identity (Figure 20). He fights to survive – but he does not kill to eat. Twig never eats the animals of the Deepwoods, only the fruits of various trees. When he steps off the path, Twig interposes himself into the natural cycle of the Deepwoods – into the food chain. He is frequently attacked by the animals of the forest because he represents food, nourishment and survival to them. When Twig is attacked by the bloodoak – a huge, flesh-eating tree that, with its accomplice the tarry-vine attacks and consumes the Deepwoods creatures that are unfortunate enough to cross its path – he is more than just a victim; he is the prey, he is the hunted figure in the dialectic between hunted and hunter in which he suddenly finds himself (Figure 21). His sentience, his identity, do not provide him with protection from the monstrous tree; he is the food it desires, it demands of its environment.

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Figure 21. The bloodoak attack, p.93.

The tree is alerted to his presence by the ‘thin, sickly wind’ that carries the scent of his blood into the shadows where it waits (p.89). It is a stationary hunter. The bones the tree is surrounded by constitute a kind of graveyard, a memorial to the creatures who have been sacrificed to the tree’s monstrous – yet ironically natural – appetite. Twig gags on ‘the metallic stench of death’; the tree is more than a predator, it is a living abattoir, perfectly evolved to capture, slaughter and ultimately process its food (p.89). Riddell’s fabulously graphic illustration of the moment when Twig is being ingested depicts in visceral detail the carnivorous nature of the tree which is attacking him. In this moment Twig becomes a part of the larger narrative of the Deepwoods: of the ecosystem itself that governs the life of the woods’ inhabitants. His body is in danger of being consumed by the bloodoak – of becoming part of the forest itself.

Food, Love and Childhood: Surviving and Thriving in the Deepwoods

Later, wandering alone in the forest, Twig is overcome by hunger, a need for food that is impossible to ignore. He comes to a tree ‘heavy with a deep, dark purple harvest’, its fruit so ripe that some have ‘split their skins and [are] dripping golden juice’ (p.134). Stewart’s narrative takes on a distinctly visual element when it comes to describing the foods of the Deepwoods. The relationship between narrative and illustrations is a highly interactive one. Twig is sorely tempted to eat the fruit he finds but he knows he cannot; for ‘although many of the fruits and berries in the Deepwoods [are] sweet and nourishing, many more [are] deadly’ (p.133). And Twig has no way of knowing which is which. This tension between nourishment and survival is one that the forest inhabitants experience every day. Knowledge of their surroundings is fundamental to their survival. Food itself becomes monstrous, poisonous; fruits that can blind, fruits that can explode, fruits that can induce paralysis. Death is far from the only danger when it comes to food. Without the food he so desperately needs, his body begins to feel heavy but his mind becomes ‘oddly light’ (p.134). Twig stands with a large fruit in his hands, looking back over his shoulder at a cluster of the same fruits hanging just behind him. The cluster dominates the scene and we begin to realise just how hungry Twig is, how desperately he needs nourishment. He stares intensely – and yet somewhat suspiciously – at the fruit, but, crucially, in this picture and while he is by himself, he makes no attempt to consume it. He does not dare, he does not know whether the fruit is poisonous. The fruits themselves are luscious and juicy looking – yet appearances in the Deepwoods can be deceptive or even deadly. Later, with the banderbear, Twig passes a spiky blue-green bush and absentmindedly pops one of the plant’s pearly white berries into his mouth as though it is a snack. However, once the banderbear realises what Twig has done it roars and smacks the other berry out of his hand. Screaming in fright, Twig accidentally swallows the berry and begins to choke. To save him, the banderbear grabs the boy by the ankles and shakes him until the offending berry is

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dislodged from his throat. It quickly becomes clear that the berries are poisonous and that the bear has just saved Twig from an horrific death. Twig must learn how to screen his food, how to regulate his own appetite and to recognise that food in the Deepwoods means both life and death in equal measure – food can be nourishing and monstrous. As a child in the Deepwoods, Twig is especially vulnerable to acts of violence and to poisonous substances. But, as a child, Twig is subject – and slave – to his own monstrous appetites. Alone and hungry in the Deepwoods, he meets a band of gyle goblins, heading back to their colony for a mass feeding session. He tells them that he was almost eaten by a bloodoak – but that he survived. Twig has not eaten since the meal he shared with the Slaughterers, a community of farmers based in the Deepwoods. He recognises that he desperately needs to be fed and he expects the goblins to share what food they have with him. But they don’t. And this is when Twig gets angry for the first time. His anger and his need for food – which in this context is something beyond the desire for food – transforms him. He becomes like the gyle goblins, like the bloodoak he has so narrowly escaped from. In a way, he becomes monstrous in his pursuit of the food he needs to sustain himself. Twig has encountered a community that is, if not hostile, then markedly indifferent to his situation. The goblins have food – but they won’t let him have any. Confronted with this indifference, Twig’s anger explodes. He begins to channel some of the violence that is nearly always linked to the procurement and consumption of food in the Deepwoods. The gyle goblins’ reaction to Twig’s hunger raises another issue regarding food in the forest environment – that of food ownership. Twig is told, in no uncertain terms, that the berries and fruit the goblins carry are not for him. The gyle goblin colony is another society structured around food and, specifically, its communal consumption. Twig enters the colony as an outsider, as the only non-goblin creature in the vicinity and witnesses the mass feeding frenzy that pre-empts the distribution of the honey that sustains

Food, Love and Childhood: Surviving and Thriving in the Deepwoods

them. Riddell’s illustration of a group of satiated goblins in the aftermath of the feeding session is both compelling and disturbing – Twig himself is absent from this image and this is significant as we are told that he turns away in disgust from the sight of the goblins gorging themselves uncontrollably (Figure 22).

Figure 22. The gyle goblin colony, p.104.

They eat almost to the point of intoxication and the feeding process itself is almost entirely automated. The goblins are fed by a wide tube that distributes the honey that is so fundamentally important to the colony. Looks of mindless contentment spread over the goblins’ features and we realise that sharing food in this manner compromises the individuality of each member of the colony, in contrast to the Slaughterers’ feast that was a celebration of the community and of the food the community has produced, this feeding process is based on principles of control. The goblins are powerless in the face of their own appetites and so they are controlled by them. Having been fed, they begin to file away

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‘calmly, peacefully’. As soon as their hunger is satisfied, the ‘frantic atmosphere’ is dissipated and neutralised (p.104).

Figure 23. The Grossmother, p.106.

An image of the goblins’ Grossmother dominates in Riddell’s illustration; she fills the space with her mass and is described as ‘the biggest, the fattest, the most monstrously obese creature’ Twig has ever seen (p.105). Her size makes her monstrous in his eyes; there is something abnormal about her corpulence (Figure 23). As the instrument through which the goblins receive their food, she wields a certain amount of power over them. Yet it is ultimately that power which proves to be her downfall – the goblins hold her responsible for the souring of the honey, for its contamination, and in their angry attack, they storm the kitchen, the very site of her power, a space that was previously taboo.

Food, Love and Childhood: Surviving and Thriving in the Deepwoods

Twig does manage to satisfy his hunger in the gyle goblin colony – down in the compost heaps, he discovers a woodsap fruit that he eagerly consumes. He bites into the fruit hungrily and its red juice trickles down his chin. Almost every inhabitant in the Deepwoods is ultimately shown to be a slave to their natural, physical appetites. Here, Twig puts his hunger above his need to escape from the colony. The image of the red juice as it trickles down Twig’s chin is a viscerally visual one and recalls many images in which food and the colour red are associated. The red light the bloodoak emits, the red skin of the slaughters, the red dream Twig falls into in the hammock and the red sap that the termagent trogs drink in order to commune with the bloodoak. In the Trog Cavern, Twig is removed from the natural cycles of the Deepwoods in which food – and the pursuit of food – plays such a fundamental role. In this underground world, there are ‘no dangerous plants and no wild beasts’; all the monstrous elements of the Deepwoods are suddenly absent. Now food is not associated with risk and danger but rather with monotony and lassitude. Twig is not fulfilled in the Trog Cavern, either mentally or physically, because he has no agency in the procurement of the food he is given. Mag is a child in the Deepwoods, just like Twig. But unlike Twig, Mag’s destiny has been mapped out for her. As a trog child she will turn termagent once she ingests the sap of the bloodoak. Food facilitates Mag’s transformation; it is an essential part of the act of communion with the bloodoak in Mag’s initiation and baptism. Responding to her words, the bloodoak root system engages in an extremely physical response to her voice: the roots change colour, ‘glowing a deep and bloody crimson’, an image that resonates with the translucency of Mag’s pale skin (p.197). It is as though she is about to be infused with life and vitality. She kneels before the tap her mother hammers into the root in a ritualistic gesture of supplication, which reverberates with meaning within the sacred, circular space. Mag not only drinks the crimson juice, she is bathed in it as it ‘splash[s] over her head and stream[s] down her back, her

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arms, her legs’ (p.197). Even as she consumes the juice and it courses through her system, her external body is drenched in it. The ritual is one of baptism, of initiation into a new way of life, a new form of existence within the landscape. Once she has drunk her fill, her physical body must expand in order to accommodate this new existence: ‘upwards, outwards, her whole body … grow[s] larger’ (p.197). The transformation is complete only when she sheds the last vestige of her childhood bodily appearance: her red hair. She is utterly changed through her physical and emotional engagement with the landscape. This engagement is focused through the figure of the bloodoak, which is simultaneously part of the subterranean environment of the cavern and the landscape of the Deepwoods above. Here, the act of consumption brings Mag’s childhood to an end and – literally – fuels her movement into adulthood. In the aftermath of the ceremony during which she gorges herself on the bloodoak juice, she is utterly transformed. So what does food mean in the Deepwoods? It means identity, it means survival, it means power and domination. It is linked to culture, to family, to belonging – to home. In a place where everything that moves is food for something else, movement through the forest is linked – often literally – to the pursuit of food in either a foraging or a predatory context. Much of the food the forest has to offer is animate and sentient; food literally has a life of its own. When everything and everyone is food, survival becomes a network of complicated relationships based on selfcontrol, on power, on community, in a place where the danger of being consumed, by a hunter, by emotions or even by circumstances, is constant. In a place like the Deepwoods where everything and everyone is food, nothing is sacred, not even the banderbear who becomes a meal for a band of marauding wigwigs in order to save Twig from a similar fate (Figure 24).

Food, Love and Childhood: Surviving and Thriving in the Deepwoods

Figure 24. The banderbear, p.138.

Riddell’s illustrations often depict monstrous figures – human or otherwise. As an illustrator he is interested in the relationships between children and animals, between children and the monsters that haunt their dreams and even their waking moments. Twig, the central protagonist of the first of the Edge Chronicles trilogy, is surrounded by monsters in the Deepwoods and, in many instances, he becomes their prey. Twig is no longer just himself once he steps off the path he has been raised to follow; his body becomes a potential source of food for the creatures that inhabit the forest. The Deepwoods illustrations address a theme that Riddell pursues throughout much of his work: the act of consumption and the dangers of being consumed. Images of corpulent, obese and monstrously overweight figures abound in his illustrations – as do images of the painfully thin, the woefully undernourished, the skeletally slender. Food, in the context of his work – and especially in the Deepwoods – is a dialectic between two extremes; overindulgence and deprivation. His illustrations highlight the relationship between food and community in the

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Deepwoods and, through the figure of Twig, visually represent a childhood that is defined by both; food sustains the idea and the space of home in the forest. Twig engages with and relates to each community he encounters through food; his experience of home is mediated through the foods associated with those homes. Focusing on how Chris Riddell illustrates Twig in his environment and represents his growing body allows us to analyse how Twig survives and thrives, both in the Deepwoods and out of it, and to explore the connection between food, the child body and the experience of home in children’s literature.

Notes and Acknowledgements 1 All figures are from Beyond the Deepwoods. Copyright © 1998, 2006 Chris Riddell. Reproduced with permission Chris Riddell.

Works Cited Primary Texts Stewart, Paul and Chris Riddell ([1998] 2006) Beyond the Deepwoods (First Book of Twig) Edge Chronicles 4. London: Corgi Children’s Books. –– ([1999] 2006) Stormchaser: Midnight over Sanctaphrax (Second Book of Twig) Edge Chronicles 5. London: Corgi Children’s Books. Secondary Text Nikolajeva, Maria (2002) From Mythic to Linear: Time in Children’s Literature. Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield.

BIOGRAPHIES OF CONTRIBUTORS

Plenary Speakers Fiona Dunbar Fiona Dunbar is the author of 14 books for children, ranging from picture books, which she also illustrated, to novels for 8–12 year olds, including the Lulu Baker trilogy (The Truth Cookie, Cupid Cakes and Chocolate Wishes) about a girl with a magic recipe book. The trilogy was adapted for TV as Jinx. She is currently working on a young adult book. Guo Yue The International soloist and composer Guo Yue is well known for the soaring beauty and descriptive poetry of his extraordinary collection of Chinese bamboo ‘di-zi’ flutes. Guo Yue is also a master on the bamboo ‘xiao’ and ‘ba-wu’ flutes, and a remarkable white jade flute, recorded in 2011 for the first time on his album White Jade (Real World Records). He was born in an overcrowded hutongs courtyard in Beijing, housing the families of five traditional musicians. When Mao’s Cultural Revolution started in 1966, a year after his father’s death, his mother bought him a little bamboo flute. When she and his sisters were sent to the countryside by the Red Guards, Yue learned to play his flute by taking lessons from an old musician in the courtyard, paying for his classes with tiny measures of precious cooking oil. Aged 17, he became a flute soloist in the army of the People’s Republic of China, travelling on horseback with his flutes and a wok. He left China in 1982 and was discovered by Peter Gabriel in London. Since then he has recorded many albums with Real World Records, as well as performing in Womad festivals worldwide. Music, Food and Love: A Memoir with Recipes (Little, Brown),

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accompanied by a CD of the same name (Real World Records), tells the story of Yue’s childhood and the freedom he found through his love of music and cooking. Little Leap Forward: A Boy in Beijing (also written with Clare Farrow and published by Barefoot Books) is an illustrated novel – a poetic interpretation of Yue’s childhood set in the weeks leading up to the Cultural Revolution. A story about love, friendship and freedom, it has won gold medals in the Moonbeam Children’s Book Awards and Nautilus Book Awards in the USA, and has been turned into a theatre production in the UK. Yue teaches his musical approach to the art of Chinese cooking in regular workshops in London, at the Divertimenti Cookery Schools and Books for Cooks, and in food festivals worldwide. He often combines music performances with cookery events. Anne Harvey Anne Harvey has been a drama teacher, examiner and adjudicator, and now works freelance as a broadcaster, as well as presenting literary programmes at arts and literature festivals and galleries. She has edited over 40 anthologies of poetry and drama for adults and children and was made a Fellow of the Society of Speech and Drama for her contribution to literature and drama. She is the executor of the Farjeon Estate and her latest anthology is Like Sorrow or a Tune: A New Selection of Poems by Eleanor Farjeon (Laurel Books, 2013). Nicki Humble Professor Nicki Humble is a co-director of the Research Centre in Modern Literature and Culture at Roehampton University. She specialises in the literature and cultural history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her particular interests include middlebrow fiction, the literature, culture and history of food, historiography, women’s writing and children’s literature. David Lucas As a romantic, David Lucas believes the world is alive with gods, spirits and magic. His drawing is picture-writing – he never draws from life – he makes patterns, as if he is knitting with ink. He loves

Biographies of Contributors

medieval art and folk art – art that is decorative not just to be beautiful, but because pattern making is a magical ritual. Writing, for him, is pattern making too – putting words together as if they were simple shapes, making story patterns that are a mixture of autobiography, myth and fairy tale. David Lucas studied illustration at St Martin’s School of Art and the Royal College of Art and tried his best to be fashionable, but it wasn’t until he was in his thirties that he rediscovered his old love of fairy tales and began writing stories again. Jean Webb Professor Jean Webb is Director of the International Forum for Research in Children’s Literature, University of Worcester, UK. Her research interests include children’s literature and culture from international perspectives. Her publications on food in children’s literature include ‘Food: Changing approaches to food in the construction of childhood in Western culture’ in Yan Wu, Kerry Mallan and Roderick McGillis (eds) (Re)imagining the World: Children’s Literature’s Response to Changing Times, Springer 2013 and ‘Voracious appetites: The construction of ‘fatness’ in children’s literature’ in Kara K. Keeling .and Scott T. Pollard (eds) Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature, Routledge 2009.

Workshop Presenters Zahra Amlani Zahra Amlani has recently completing an MEd (Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature) at the University of Cambridge. She is now working on her PhD. Her thesis is a rally cry against the marginalisation of children’s informational texts. She is working on how children transact with them, looking at strategies of the text and considering how text and illustrations work together. Her corpus will include digital texts and apps.

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Gili Bar-Hillel Gili Bar-Hillel is an MA candidate at the Child and Youth Culture programme, Tel Aviv University, Israel. She expects to complete her study in 2014. Franziska Burstyn Franziska Burstyn is a first year PhD candidate in the research project Canon Formation and Social Imaginaries in British Fiction for Children and Young Adults at the University of Siegen, Germany. Her academic interests are centred on children’s and young adult literature, folklore culture and food in literature. Rebecca R. Butler Rebecca R. Butler holds a BA in English Literature and an MA in Children’s Literature, both from the University of Roehampton. She is currently reading for an education doctorate, focusing on how schoolchildren respond to disabled characters in fiction. Aoife Byrne Aoife Byrne is a PhD candidate, Department of English, University of Cambridge. Sarah Layzell Hardstaff Sarah Hardstaff is an MPhil student in Children’s Literature at the University of Cambridge. Her MPhil thesis explores the themes of poaching and scavenging in young adult hunger fiction, with a focus on Cynthia Voigt’s Homecoming (Tillerman cycle, Book 1, 1981) and the first novel in Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy, The Hunger Games (2008). Simone Herrmann Simone Herrmann is a first year PhD candidate in the research project Canon Formation and Social Imaginaries in British Fiction for Children and Young Adults at the University of Siegen, Germany. She has an MA from the University of Siegen. Her MA thesis was titled ‘Individual, Society and Civilisation in Three Contemporary British Robinsonades’. She has also studied theatre

Biographies of Contributors

and performance studies as well as women in Islam at the University of Leeds. Rebecca Ann Long Rebecca Ann Long is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin where she read English as an undergraduate. In April 2013 she graduated from the college’s inaugural MPhil in Children’s Literature. In September 2013 she began her study for a PhD in Irish Children’s Literature and hopes to be officially on the course in September 2014. Sinéad Moriarty Sinéad Moriarty is studying towards a PhD in Children’s Literature at the University of Roehampton. Her current research seeks to examine the representation of wilderness and wild spaces in British and Irish children’s literature, focusing on two case-study landscapes: Antarctica and Ireland. She recently completed an MA in Children’s Literature at the University of Roehampton. Pat Pinsent Pat Pinsent is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Roehampton, specialising in children’s literature, the subject matter of most of her 15 books. She researches the current development of children’s literature, and the relationship between it and spirituality/religion. She also edits a journal on feminism and religion, Network. Kay Waddilove Kay Waddilove has been Head of Learning Resources at a large London comprehensive school since 2002, following a career in public libraries and education. Having completed a BA in English Literature and History at Cardiff University, she obtained an MA in Children’s Literature from the University of Roehampton in 2008. She is currently researching for a PhD in Children’s Literature. Karen Williams Karen Williams studied English Literature at Somerville College, Oxford, before embarking on a career in industry. On returning to

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academia in 2010 she undertook a MA in Children’s Literature at the University of Roehampton. She is currently in her second year of doctoral study at Roehampton, where the title of her research is ‘Humour in Children’s Literature 1800–1840’.

INDEX ‘healthy’ eating, 17, 20 absent parents, 14, 103–7, 182, 189–90 abundance of food, 189–90 adaption to TV, 45–46 Adisa, 236 adult–child relationship, 102– 15, 202 Adventure Book of Cookery, 5–6 adventure stories, 10–14, 53, 138–50, 152–62, 203 Adventures among the Kitchen People, 5–6 advertisements, 133 Alcott, Louisa, 52, 55, 56–57 Alice B Toklas Cookbook, 63 Alice books, 232 Alice in Wonderland, 60, 101, 208–9 American children’s literature, 53–58 Amundsen, Roald, 139 Anderson, Rachel, 188 Anne of Avonlea, 207 anorexia, 33–34 Antarctic exploration, 138–50 ‘Apples’, 28 Art Nouveau, 94 Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, 15–19 Arts and Crafts movement, 94 Australia, 10–14 Australian literature, 212–27 autonomy, 101, 114 The Baby and Fly Pie, 188

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 215 Ballantyne, R.M., 152–62 Ballet Shoes, 62–63, 124 Barrett, Judi, 208 beauty salons, 34, 36–40 behaviour at the table, 229–32 Beijing, 48–49 Bently, Peter, 19–21 Betty Crocker’s Cookbook for Boys and Girls, 202 Beveridge Report, 129, 130–31, 132 ‘Binker’, 235 Biscuit Bear, 65 bizarre foods, 20, 60 Bloch, Ernst, 184–85, 190 body perceptions, 33–46 book covers, 44–45 Bootleg, 194–99 Brady, Annie, 142 Brand, Christianna, 208 breakfast, 23 Brent-Dyer, Eleanor, 3–5 ‘The Brewery of Egg-Shells’, 171 British Empire, 10–14 Britishness, 221 Bunyan, John, 231 Burgess, Melvin, 188 ‘Butterfingers’, 23 Cann, Helen, 49–50 cannibalism, 159–61, 168, 169– 72, 176, 178 capitalism, 80–96 Carle, Eric, 102 carnival, 176, 178, 212–27

264

Index

Carroll, Lewis, 60, 101, 208–9, 232 The Chalet Girls’ Cook Book, 3–5 The Chalet School Book for Girls, 5 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, 60, 102 Charlotte Elizabeth, 168 Chef Shocker, 19–21 ‘Chick Pea Pie’, 236 child–adult relationship, 102– 15, 202 childhood, 8–21, 232, 241 children as food, 65 A Child’s Garden of Verses, 234 China, 48–49 chocolate, 69–70, 123, 194–99 Christianity, 78, 143, 215 The Christmas Box, 172–74 A Christmas Carol, 70 Cisneros, Sandra, 236 citizen uprisings, 197 class stuggles, 81 class, social. See social class clothes, 36 Cokaygne/Cockaigne, 69, 213, 214–16 Coleridge, Sarah, 237 colonialism, 10–14, 152–62 Comic Annual, 175 communism, 49–50 Conceptualising Cruelty to Children in NineteenthCentury England, 168 consumerism, 167 contaminated food, 18 continental foods, 3 cookbooks, 3–6, 52–66, 201–4 cooking, 8–21, 52–66, 201–4

competitions, 19–21 regional, 9–10 taboos, 9 The Coral Island, 152–62 corruption, 91 cosmetic surgery, 33 courage, 140 Crane, Walter, 82–83 Crofton Croker, Thomas, 172– 74, 175 Crompton, Richmal, 59–60 Crossley-Holland, Kevin, 15–19 Crump, Lucy, 5–6 cultural contexts, 103–7, 206– 11 Cultural Revolution, 50 Curtain Up, 124–25, 128–29 Dahl, Roald, 60, 102, 186–87 Danny the Champion of the World, 186–87 David Copperfield, 58 death, 148–49 deconstructed dishes, 20–21 Deepwoods trilogy, 240–56 deprivation, 188 despotism, 89 ‘The Dessert’, 166 ‘The Devoted Friend’, 81, 87 Dickens, Charles, 58, 70 diet, inadequate, 145 dieting, 40–42 disgusting foods, 207–8 dogs, eating, 146–50 Doherty, Berlie, 235 Dunbar, Fiona, 33–46 Dunstan, Peggy, 23 dystopias, 188–89 eating and being eaten, 240–56 eating dog, 146–50

Index

eating human flesh, 160, 165– 78 eating, ‘rules’, 146–50 Eccleshare, Julia, 5–6 Egg Drop, 65 ‘Egg Thoughts’, 23 emotional fulfilment, 189–90 empire building, 10–14, 153 endless food, 216–20 enjoyment of food, 234–37 Enlightenment approach, 175 epic poetry, 228 etiquette, 4, 203 evacuees, 124, 125–26 excess food, 225 exotic foods, 17 The Faber Book of Children’s Verse, 229 failed dishes, 55–58 Fairy Legends and Traditions from the South of Ireland, 171 fairy tales, 80–96, 101, 171–74, 212–27, 241 family life, 165–78 famine, 80–96, 176, 216 fantasy, 15–19, 240–56 fantasy novels, 33–34 Farjeon, Eleanor, 29 farming, 10–14 Farrow, Clare, 49–50 fashion models, 36–40 fear of being food, 65 feasting, 12–17, 102–15, 189– 90, 228 financial hardship, 10–14 Fisher, M.F.K., 60–61 Flegel, Monica, 168 folklore, 171–74, 212–27

265

folktales. See fairy tales food continental, 3 definitions of, 99–100 power relationship, 152–62 rationing, 3, 48–50, 121, 128– 29 Freud, Sigmund, 214 friendships, 102–15 Fryer, Jayne Eayre, 5–6 games, 18 ‘The Gastronomical Me’, 60–61 gastronomy, 8–21, 102–15 gender, 8–21, 55 gender issues, 3–5, 33–46 geographical contexts, 207 ‘The Glutton’, 230 gluttony, 99–115, 157, 230 ‘Goblin Market’, 233 Gold Rush, 10–14 ‘Good Hot Dogs’, 236 Grant, Amanda, 202 greed, 70, 108–12, 156–59 Grendel: A Cautionary Tale about Chocolate, 69–70, 78 Grey, Mini, 65 Grimm Brothers, 214, 217–19, 217 ‘Griselda’, 29 ‘Hansel and Gretel’, 188, 189 ‘The Happy Prince’, 81, 83–87 The Happy Prince and Other Tales, 80 hardship, 48 Harrison, Chris, 19 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, 207 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, 209

266

Index

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, 189–90, 209–10 Harvey, Anne, 25 Heaney, Seamus, 229 Helen Fleetwood, 168 Heroic Era, 138–50 Heroic-Era narratives, 142–43 heroines, 10–14 heroism, 140–42 historical contexts, 207 historical foods, 13–19 history, social, 15–19 Hoban, Russell, 23 Hoffman, Felice, 189 Hoffmann, Heinrich, 25 Hood, Jacomb, 89 Hood, Thomas, 168–72, 175–78 Hooper, Meredith, 144, 150 horse meat, 146–50 A House of Pomegranates, 80, 92–96 housekeeping, 3–5 Hughes. Ted, 229 humour, 19–21, 220, 222, 223 hunger, 53–55, 61–62, 138–50, 182–86 ‘I Hate Greens’, 27 identity, 242 idiosyncratic children, 102–15 ‘If you Were a Carrot’, 236 illustrating, 69–78, 80–96, 80– 96, 138–50 immigration, 237 In the Night Kitchen, 65 inadequate diet, 145 indoctrination, 195 indulgence, 221 initiation to adulthood, 252–54

injustice, 199 innocence of childhood, 167 intoxication, 250–52 Irish Famine, 87, 143 isolation, 241 issue books, 34–36 Jung, Carl Gustav, 214 Karlson trilogy, 108 Kildare manuscript, 213 killing for food, 63–65, 65 killing, mercy, 149 King, David, 27 ‘The King’s Breakfast’, 24–25 lamb, Charles, 166–67 Lamb, Mary, 166–67 The Land of Cokaygne, 213, 214–16 law breakers, 197 legislation on consumption, 194 Letters, 176–78 Lewis, C.S., 61–62, 210–11 liars, 73, 103–7 Lindgren, Astrid, 52, 102–15 linguistics, 17 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, 61–62, 210–11 Little House series, 53–55 A Little Leap Forward: A Boy in Beijing, 49–50 Little Women, 52, 56–57 logic, 71, 78 loneliness, 108–12 Lucas, David, 69–78 The Lying Carpet, 73–75 The Magic Pudding, 212–27 ‘The Magic Table, the Golden Donkey and the Club in the Sack’, 217, 219 magical objects, 101, 217–21

Index

Malthus, Thomas, 169 ‘Mango, Little Mango’, 29 Mao Zedung, 50 Marchant, Bessie, 10–14 Marryat, Frederick, 152–62 Marxism, 91 masculinity, 10–14, 140 Masterman Ready, 152–62 Matilda, 102 McCaughrean, Geraldine, 145 McCurdy, Michael, 142–45, 150 media representations, 40–42 medieval dishes, 13–19 Meighn, Moira, 5–6 memorableness, 53 mercy killing, 149 Middle Ages, 214 Middle English, 213 Milne, A.A., 24–25, 25–27, 101– 2, 234–35 misbehaviour, 157 A Modest Proposal, 1–2 Mongredien, Sue, 19–21 Monster Chef, 19–21 monsters, 70, 246 Montgomery, L.M., 207 moral dilemmas, 189 moral guidance, 229–32 Murfin, Teresa, 19–21 ‘Mushrooms’, 236 music, 48–50 narratological functions, 161–62 nationhood, 10–14 The Naughtiest Children I Know, 25 Nesbit, Edith, 58–60 The New Oxford Book of Children’s Verse, 229, 235

267

nineteenth-century literature, 53–55, 165–78 Nurse Matilda, 208 nursery rhymes, 16, 229 Oakman, John, 230 Oates, Titus, 145 obesity, 194, 252 An Old Fashioned Girl, 55 Opie, Iona, 230 Opie, Peter, 230 opinion polls, 40–42, 43 opposites, 69, 71–72, 76–77 orphans, 55–56, 103–7, 188, 189, 241 overindulgence, 80–96, 156–59 ownership of food, 250–52 The Oxford Book of Children’s Verse, 230 The Painted Garden, 124, 125– 26, 129, 130, 133 paradise, 214–16 paradoxes, 65–66 pattern versus representation, 77 perceptions of food, 207–8 Philip, Neil, 229, 235 The Phoenix and the Carpet, 58– 60 A Picnic of Poetry, 25 pioneer childhoods, 53–55 Pippi Longstocking, 52 Pippi Longstocking trilogy, 103– 7 ‘A Plain Direction’, 176 ‘Poem on Bread’, 22 poetry, 22–31, 228–38 poisons, 249–50 Pollyanna, 56 ‘Porridge’, 23

268

Index

Porter, Eleanor, 56 Potter, Beatrix, 63–65 power, 252 power–food relationship, 152– 62 prejudices, food, 14 prey, 246–47 The Principle of Hope, 184–85 Private Peaceful, 186–87 protests, 197 public houses, 10 punishment, 100–102, 187, 220 Quakers, 123–24 questionable food sources, 142, 146–50 Ransome, Arthur, 52–53 rationing of food, 3, 48–50, 105, 121, 128–29 The Rattle Bag, 229 recipies, 3–5 Red Guards, 50 regulation of food, 153–54, 156–59 religious education, 152–62 representation versus pattern, 77 restaurants, 10, 19–20, 49 revenge, 36–40 ‘Rice Pudding’, 25–27 Riddell, Chris, 240–56 Robinsonades, 152–62 The Robot and the Bluebird, 78 Romantic period, 166–67, 171– 72, 178 Rosen, Michael, 235 Rossetti, Christina, 233 Rowling, J.K., 207, 209 satiation, 250–52 satire, 195

Scannell, Vernon, 22 The Scavenger’s Tale, 188 scavenging, 188–89 The School Bag, 229 Scott, Robert F., 139, 144 Searle, Chris, 29 Second World War, 3–5, 165–78 The Seeing Stone, 15 ‘The Selfish Giant’, 81, 90 self-sufficiency, 10–14 Sendack, Maurice, 65 servants, 58–60 sex connotations, 52 sex conotations, 34 sexuality and food, 183–84 Shackleton, Ernest, 138–39, 140, 147 Shearer, Alex, 194–99 shipwrecks, 152–62 The Silver Spoon for Children, 202 'sites of struggle', 165–78 The Skeleton Pirate, 77 Slake’s Limbo, 189 slaughter, 63–65, 65–66 slavery, 94–96, 245–46, 250 Smith, Janet Adam, 229 Smith, Michael, 142–45 social change, 165–78 social class, 8–21, 55–56, 58–60, 126–28, 189–90 socialism, 80–96 sociocultural contexts, 103–7, 206–11 socioeconomic contexts, 182– 85 ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’, 81 ‘The Star-Child’, 94–96

Index

starvation, 80–96, 138–50, 176, 245–46 stealing, 60, 186–88, 188–89 stepmothers, 36–40, 241 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 234 Stewart, Paul, 240–56 ‘The Story of Augustus Who Would Not Have Any Soup’, 25 Streatfeild, Noel, 62–63, 165–78 surveys, 40–42, 43 survival, 245–46 Swallows and Amazons, 52–53 Swedish literature, 102–15 ‘The Sweet Porridge’, 217, 219 sweets, 103, 106–7, 108, 112, 194–99 Swift, Jonathan, 1–2 symbolism, 69–71, 78, 183–84 table manners, 104–6, 229–32 The Tale of Peter Rabbit, 64 The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, 64 teatime, 55–56 television programmes, 8–9, 19–21, 45–46 Three Little Cooks, 5–6 Tom Crean: Ice Man, 142–45 Tom’s Rabbit, 144 Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth, 168 traditional games, 18 translation of texts, 115–16, 206–11 Trapped in the Ice! Shackleton’s Amazing Antarctic Adventure, 142–45 The Truth Cookie, 33–34, 36–40, 45–46

269

tweens, 36–40, 43 twentieth-century literature, 53–55, 58–60 Under the Stairs, 36 uninhabited islands, 152–62 unusual food sources, 142, 146– 50 ‘Upon a Penny Loaf’, 231 uprisings, 197 The Usborne First Cookbook, 202 utopia, 156, 162, 214–16 vengeance, 91 The Very Hungry Caterpillar, 102 victims, 246–47 Victorian literature, 80, 100, 152–62, 165–78 violence, 241 Waifs of Woollamoo, 10–14 ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’, 232 wartime advertisement, 133 weight loosing, 101 Welfare State, 129 White Boots, 124, 126–28, 132– 33 The White Darkness, 145 Wilde, Oscar, 80–96 Wilder, Laura Ingalls, 53–55 Wilkes, Angela, 202 William series, 59–60 Winnie-the-Pooh, 101–2 women in society and family, 165–78 ‘The Wonderful Tune’, 172 Yue, Guo, 49–50