Gail Turley Houston, Professor of British & Irish Literature, was asked by Routledge to edit four volumes of primary documents on the topic of hunger and famine in the long nineteenth century. These volumes came out as a set in May 2022. Descriptions of each volume are found below:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Vol. 1\u00a0Capturing Dorothy Hartley\u2019s point that there was “a\u00a0dislocation of the food supply<\/em>” during the Industrial Revolution, which occurred through the enclosure movement, the poor laws, the game and corn laws (qtd. in\u00a0Consuming Fictions<\/em>\u00a08), this section would begin with the date of Thomas Malthus\u2019s “Principle of Population” (1798) to capture voices invoked during the lead up to the Reform Bill of 1832.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Vol. 2 The Hungry Forties and the Great Famine,\u00a0with their horrifying monikers, deserve a section just for the many voices engaged in political, humanitarian, and social venues in juxtaposition to the voices of the starving. This\u00a0volume shows how rhetoric itself experiences a crisis of representation in the face of such dramatic, tragic events: how does a culture deal with its own chosen guilty and irrational psychological motives for casting a blind eye to famine within its own borders?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Vol. 3\u00a0 This volume examines the sub-topics on the use of the metaphor of hunger to describe the condition of women as well as to a sub-topic on invisible poverty and hunger after Chartism failed. As Disraeli noted, there were still two Englands “fed by a different food.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Vol. 4 This volume examines the rhetorics used around race and famine in the colonies vis-\u00e0-vis the persistence of hunger and poverty in the island nation\/empire. As William Booth reminded the British in his aptly titled\u00a0In Darkest England\u00a0<\/em>(1890), one need not look further than London\u2019s underbelly to find intractable hunger. <\/p>\n\n\n\n