The Science of Starving in Victorian Literature, Medicine, and Political Economy by Andrew Mangham (review)

Abstract

family life,” in which the father filled the breadwinner role and the mother was a homemaker (188). The book’s study of breadwinning as ideology, however, implies potential contradictions between the social expectations generated by this template and writers’ experiences. Griffin describes the skepticism toward the political creed of individualism expressed by a woman autobiographer, Louie Stride, who had grown up homeless in the streets of Bath (296). This reference suggests that a more concentrated focus on such critical thinking might have revealed counternarratives centered on women as independent breadwinners. The book’s conclusion would have benefitted from a summary analysis of the range of autobiographers’ critical awareness of the social causes of their poverty and personal struggles. Did writers ever reject the family values enforced by the breadwinner model as hypocritical or oppressive? Did they ever allude to intimacies or partnerships outside the heterosexual norm that impacted household income? The book also lacks the perspectives of immigrant writers from the Caribbean, India, East Asia, or continental Europe, suggesting that a more intricate story about the working-class family’s economic life remains to be told. Sarah Winter University of Connecticut, Storrs