ABSTRACT
Throughout Victorian fiction, there is an overarching and often-used theme that emphasizes human fellowship, domestic harmony, and commodity culture. Three major Victorian texts – Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843), Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), and also Christina Rossetti’s poem “Goblin Market” (1862) – all emphasize that theme, but they do so not just in terms of the implied social and economic aspects, but also – quite uniquely and specifically – through food and the Gothic. Consistent with the Gothic’s penchant for pleasure often simultaneous with pain, the Gothicization of food in these three Victorian texts reflects the manner in which Victorians were both fearful of the food-Other, but also aware of the need to grow and diversify – in terms of culture, economy, and food. In order to contextualize Victorian fiction, it should be pointed out that the Victorian period typically refers to Great Britain during the reign of Queen Victoria, beginning in 1837 until her death in 1901. However, the influence of Victorianism was by no means limited to Great Britain, nor by those specific dates of Victoria’s reign, as scholarly approaches to Victorianism often fall within the larger context of the ‘long’ nineteenth century, which includes the late 1700s and early 1900s, and is also cognizant of the global influence of the Victorian British Empire. Regardless, the three texts that this chapter discusses were published well within those more typically Victorian geographical and chronological borders.
