Want, Famine, and Faith

Informed by recent critical work on hunger, fasting, and starvation in nineteenth-century culture, this chapter considers how understandings of individual and communal relationships to food inform Gaskell's representation of individual agency and practices of faith, including food restraint, in an age of increasing empiricism and scientific enquiry. Focusing especially on Gaskell's shorter works of historical fiction, such as Lois the Witch (1859) and ‘The Poor Clare’ (1856), this chapter examines their treatment of the vexed relationship between a devotional life marked by self-restraint and enforced hunger due to the poverty endemic to the industrialised state and a climate of pervasive of famine and want.