Hunger: A Modern History

Betjeman’s verse does not fit the circumstances of this review but associating George R. Sims with a book on hunger is highly appropriate, for Sims’s most famous line: ‘It is Christmas Day in the Workhouse’, showed him to be a man deeply concerned about social justice but not one who required such concepts as the ‘cultural turn’ or the ‘imperial turn’ for the understanding of hunger (pp. viii–ix). Since James Vernon is a modern cultural historian, he does and, although he offers no definition of hunger, he begins by revealing that he will ‘track three great transformations in the modern understanding of hunger ... the divine, the moral, and the social’ (p. 2) which he sees occurring between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries. Limiting the scope of the topic may puzzle readers then faced with the author’s claim that ‘I take the nutritional history of modernity as a given’ (p. 4). It is a perplexing statement: is the reader to assume that the author has nothing to add to previously published histories of hunger, or that hunger is anything more than a label to be applied to various aspects of the unfortunate state of poverty in which many people found themselves, or used as a term when claiming relief from destitution? In fact this does not resolve the shifting values of Professor Vernon’s approach to a variety of sources – ‘I follow discussions of hunger’ (p. 9) – or the lack of methodological rigour which is evident in his verbose but superficial style.