Starving by numbers: William Farr, medical statistics and the social aesthetics of hunger

Mangham, A. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3585-7162 (2015) Starving by numbers: William Farr, medical statistics and the social aesthetics of hunger. English Literature, 2 (2). pp. 203-217. ISSN 2420-823X doi: 10.14277/2420-823X/EL-2-2-15-2

Abstract/Summary

This essay considers how literary and medical representations of hunger developed into an impure aesthetic in the nineteenth century. With specific reference to the Social Problem Novel, it questions how the tension between traditional, folkloric understandings of hunger and more positivist approaches by medical statisticians raised important questions about how we understand poverty and suffering.