Even Victorians felt sympathy for hungry children. Why doesn't this government? | Angelique Richardson

Novelists from Gaskell to Hardy helped change thinking about childhood poverty. It’s time some MPs took a lesson from them

Hunger courses through Mary Barton, Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1848 novel documenting what would become known as the hungry 40s. Like Dickens with Oliver Twist, 10 years earlier, she sought to move the heart of middle England. Hunger could no longer be accepted as natural or inevitable.

In Gaskell’s novel, “hunger-stamped” men from Nottingham, Sheffield, Glasgow, Manchester and other industrial cities implore parliament in vain to act on the “unparalleled destitution of the manufacturing districts”. John Barton, a chartist and trade unionist who is one of the delegates, knows hunger. As a young child, he and his mother (who dies “from absolute want of the necessaries of life”) had hidden their hunger so his younger siblings could eat. His “little son, the apple of his eye” dies of starvation.

Angelique Richardson is professor of English at Exeter University. Her books include Love and Eugenics in the Late 19th Century and After Darwin: Animals, Emotions and the Mind

Continue reading...

from Children | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2HGxfbB