Toast and the Familiar in Children’s Literature

Abstract

When Lewis Carroll’s Alice ventures to taste the little bottle labeled “drink me,” she fi nds that “(it had, in fact, a sort of mixed fl avour of cherrytart, custard, pineapple, roast turkey, toff y, and hot buttered toast),” and, as a consequence, “she very soon fi nished it off .” 1 Robert Hemmings, drawing attention to the “taste of nostalgia” in socalled golden age children’s literature , points to the highly specifi c tastes and smells in this passage, which “are rich with associations of a privileged middleclass Victorian childhood, both Alice Liddell’s and Charles Dodgson’s: exotic fruit, dessert s, a roast dripping with holiday associations, comforting toast, candy, nary a vegetable to wrinkle a child’s nose.” 2 Th e hot buttered toast Alice mentions, and Hemmings emphasizes as “comforting,” would seem to be a prime example of nostalgiainvoking, nonvegetable, unobjectionable food. While it is “rich with associations of a privileged middleclass Victorian childhood,” it also seems more accessible to a broader range of readers than, say, cherry tart or custard. It is less costly than any of the other foods Alice mentions. Barely needing to be cooked, it doesn’t seem to require money, skill, time, or expertise. Surely almost anyone would have access to toast. It also promises to be a better time traveler than the other foods. Toast seems a food that readers now will recognize (as they do not, for example, the pickle d limes in Little Women ). Is it necessary, for instance, for an edition to provide a note for toast, to describe or defi ne it? In its very familiarity, buttered toast might seem to be the perfect comestible to sum up the golden age of children’s literature: it calls to mind the Victorian nursery, or at least a vision of that nursery that has been created precisely through