Starving by Numbers

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DC Field	Value
dc.identifier	ECF_article_158
dc.title	Starving by Numbers. William Farr, Medical Statistics and the Social Aesthetics of Hunger
dc.contributor.author	Mangham Andrew S.
dc.publisher	Edizioni Ca’ Foscari - Digital Publishing
dc.type	Research Article
dc.language.iso	en
dc.identifier.uri	http://edizionicafoscari.it/en/edizioni4/riviste/english-literature/2015/2/starving-by-numbers/
dc.description.abstract	This essay argues that Alton Locke (1850) by Charles Kingsley might be read as a response to a tension that emerged, in the nineteenth century, between the imperatives of political economy and medicine. The baggy, reference-laden nature of the novel offers a unique insight into the complex negotiations of what constitutes a narrative of hunger. These negotiations then form part of a discussion of the 'aesthetics' of hunger narratives, which became a central note in the statistical work of men like Edwin Chadwyck and William Farr. What Alton Locke suggests is that there is only an impure aesthetics of hunger; attempts to sanitise the issue by turning it into a series of facts and figures served only to make the matter worse.
dc.relation.ispartof	English Literature
dc.relation.ispartof	Vol. 2 \| December 2015
dc.issued	2015-12-01
dc.identifier.issn
dc.identifier.eissn	2420-823X
dc.rights	Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License
dc.rights.uri	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
dc.identifier.doi	10.14277/2420-823X/EL-2-2-15-2
dc.peer-review	yes
dc.subject	Literature
dc.subject	Literature
dc.subject	Medicine
dc.subject	Medicine
dc.subject	Starvation
dc.subject	Starvation
dc.subject	Statistics
dc.subject	Statistics

Research Article
open access peer reviewed

Starving by Numbers

William Farr, Medical Statistics and the Social Aesthetics of Hunger

Andrew S. Mangham University of Reading, UK

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abstract

This essay argues that Alton Locke (1850) by Charles Kingsley might be read as a response to a tension that emerged, in the nineteenth century, between the imperatives of political economy and medicine. The baggy, reference-laden nature of the novel offers a unique insight into the complex negotiations of what constitutes a narrative of hunger. These negotiations then form part of a discussion of the 'aesthetics' of hunger narratives, which became a central note in the statistical work of men like Edwin Chadwyck and William Farr. What Alton Locke suggests is that there is only an impure aesthetics of hunger; attempts to sanitise the issue by turning it into a series of facts and figures served only to make the matter worse.

Published

Dec. 1, 2015

Language

Keywords: Starvation • Medicine • Literature • Statistics

permalink http://doi.org/10.14277/2420-823X/EL-2-2-15-2

Copyright: © 2015 Andrew S. Mangham. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

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