Feasting and Fasting: Nourishment in the Novels of Samuel Richardson
Peter Sabor, Université Laval
Volume 14, no. 2, January 2002
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
In A Natural Passion — one of a handful of books that revitalized Richardson studies in the early 1970s — Margaret Anne Doody devotes several pages to the uses of nourishment in Pamela (1740). Contending that “both hero and heroine are fond of eating,” she discusses the novel’s many food-related scenes, which, she believes, “reinforce the lovers’ physical and instinctual relationship.” Doody adds that “there is nothing approaching this emphasis on food in the two later novels, Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison, where relationships are more sophisticated.” Although fasting in Clarissa has been the subject of a recent work by Donnalee Frega, very little has been added to Doody’s remarks, published over twenty-five years ago, on nourishment in Pamela or Sir Charles Grandison. My purpose here is first to reconsider the depiction of eating and drinking in Pamela in the light of Richardson’s own dietetic concerns in the 1730s and early 1740s — before and shortly after the publication of Pamela — and then to re-examine the relationship between the treatment of food in Pamela and that in Richardson’s two later, more ambitious, and more complex novels.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Food” include:
“Wholesome Nutriment” for the Rising Generation: Food, Nationalism, and Didactic Fiction at the End of the Eighteenth Century
by LISA WOOD (ECF 21.4, Summer 2009)
“The Muses O’lio”: Satire, Food, and Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
by NICHOLAS D. SMITH (ECF 16.3, April 2004)
Cooking Up a Story: Jane West, Prudentia Homespun, and the Consumption of Fiction
by DAVID THAME (ECF 16.2, January 2004)
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