Food in the Novels of Thomas Hardy: Production and Consumption by Kim Salmons (review)

Kim Salmons’s Food in the Novels of Thomas Hardy: Production and Consumption takes Hardy’s rendering of foodstuffs—which were acutely in flux during the nineteenth century—as occasions to open up the social, historical, economic, and political realities surrounding who makes food in Victorian Britain (where, how, and for what pay) and who eats that food. Salmons’s guiding claim is that “food references facilitate a discussion about the historical, sociological, and political changes of the nineteenth century in England” (ix). These changes include the increasing urbanization of the population, changing legislation around gathering and poaching food from land formerly held in common, legislation subsidizing crops such as corn and wheat, the changing moralizing discourses around women laborers, and Britain’s increasing reliance on foods imported from the colonies. Salmons mines the archives documenting changes in laws, farming practices, and distribution pathways of corn, sugar, furmity, dairy, and pork for clues to help interpret the symbolic participation of food in articulating characters’ actions and fates.

Salmons’s goal is to trace through Thomas Hardy’s novels a progression toward modernized, urban, colony-dependent food production. The early chapters show the ways in which The Trumpet-Major (1880) and Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) dramatize the effects of the Enclosure Acts of the 1830s, which replaced a moral economy with a commercial economy and contributed to criminalizing the rural poor. The Corn Laws and the statistics around corn production receive exquisite attention as background informing the rise and fall of Michael Henchard in The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886). Salmons reads Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) alongside discussions of women’s purity as industrialization transformed the roles of women workers in rural dairies, and Jude the Obscure (1894–95) in light of arguments about animal slaughter and the urbanization of food production.

Salmons sets out to show Hardy’s work as “an artistic—but realistic—record of the nineteenth century” and the Victorian foodways (3). For Salmons, then, literature is a prism onto the historical period, rather than the historical period serving as a prism onto Hardy’s literature. A rewarding aspect of this study is its thorough anthropological attention to the social life of food, and the unquestionable currency with these changes on the part of Hardy. The reader will learn much about, for example, the way enclosure laws prohibit tenant laborers from cutting the grass and killing wild animals for food, and thus help motivate (as Salmons argues) the transformation of the Mellstock Choir in Under the Greenwood Tree into an institution aiming at the laborers’ moral preservation.

The more specifically literary stakes are Hardy’s realism, and the changing valences of pastoral and idyll. Hardy, Salmons argues, resists an idealized vision of the country to treat unflinchingly the changing realities of agriculture, land and game management, and the relationships Britain’s rural workers have with food. And yet, the working descriptions of these terms (realism and pastoral) remain slight, as does engagement with existing scholarship on Hardy’s revisions of the idealized vision of the country. Salmons briefly takes to task Terry Eagleton’s 1976 argument, in Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory, about Hardy’s “flat patronage of the ‘bucolic,’” but her engagements with more recent discussion of Hardy’s realism, or of the pastoral, remain underdeveloped (Eagleton qtd. in Salmons 8).

This reader, overall, is left feeling that the identity of Hardy as a literary artist has contributed little to informing Salmons’s method, which takes Hardy’s mentions of food as occasions to examine the historical laws regulating food production, demographic changes, and relative prices of food items. The medium- and genre-specificity of Salmons’s literary objects of study—those objects’ formal features—seem to demand little attention. Food historians, thus, will benefit from this book’s thorough detailing of Hardy’s attention to food, but literary scholars have less to...