We all have childhood memories that are strongly associated with food. It is a fundamental part of identity: everyone eats, but how we eat is dependent in many ways on our families and communities. Yet we are also highly individual in our own likes and dislikes (Forrest and de St Maurice, 2022). Food plays a significant role in three autobiographies that describe Victorian childhoods: George Sturt’s A Small Boy in the Sixties; Molly Hughes’ A London Child of the 1870s and Eleanor Farjeon’s A Nursery in the Nineties. All these children came from ordinary but reasonably comfortable families living in the south of England. Sturt lived in a rural area whereas the two girls lived in London but all of them had opportunities to travel and experience both city and country life. Their food memories all cluster around themes of play, learning, family times and special occasions.
George Sturt
Playing
All three children played games that reflected the everyday business of preparing and eating and serving food. Molly made dolls' cups and saucers with putty. George played with the pastry whilst his mother cooked, using a thimble to cut out shapes and to stamp them with decorative patterns. His mother baked the result, and despite the fact that his products were ‘cold, dry, flinty and usually grey from their frequent visits to the hearth-rug’, he ate them (Sturt, 1977: 8). Eleanor played grocer’s shops with her brother, using tins and jars from the kitchen. She also had a favourite dolls' tea set that was big enough for her to use for drinking from herself.
Eleanor Farjeon
Cooking
Molly had very strong memories of preparing food with her family. Her father seems to have taken the lead on many of these occasions. She described the family making toffee together – her father knew all about it, apparently, because he had learnt to do it at school. Making Welsh 'rabbit' (sometimes known as rarebit) and creating a family feast with some sprats which her father had impulsively bought at the market were other exciting occasions. George took a keen interest in cooking: he gleefully watched his Aunt Sarah making cakes and pies and he described the process in enough detail that it seems he could have replicated it himself.
Molly Hughes
Learning where food comes from
Molly wrote that ‘As a London child my ignorance about trees, poultry and animals was complete’ (Hughes, 1954, p.103). However, the family took extended holidays to stay with relatives in rural Cornwall where she experienced life in her grandfather’s house which she described as ‘self-supporting’ (ibid., p.95). She was given the opportunity to help her aunt with butter churning, despite the worries of some family members that this would result in waste. Eleanor, also a London child, took family holidays in Norfolk and remembered walking through turnip fields. She pulled up a ‘young, round, tender’ vegetable and her brother insisted on leaving a coin in the ground for the farmer by way of payment (Farjeon, 1935, p. 253). George, growing up in Farnham in Surrey, had many more opportunities to see and experience how food was produced. He had particularly strong memories of ‘hopping’, working alongside poorer families from other areas, to pick hops during the summer. For him, at least, this was enormous fun, ‘a season of blowsy, careless open-air life’ (Sturt, 1977, p. 72).
Family Rules and Quirks
Families develop their own routines around eating and often have their own idiosyncratic rules associated with this. Molly described how the usual rule when eating tea was that bread and butter should come first – but this could be broken on Christmas Eve. The family had a ‘common law’ that everything on the plate should be eaten: she wrote ‘I can still recall the swelling in my throat as I bolted the last piece of blancmange (Hughes, 1954, p. 28). George described his family routines – whereas most local families had 'lunch' at eleven ‘o’ clock, the Sturts ate their ‘dinner’ at one, fitting themselves around father’s work in his wheelwright business. On Sundays, they had a special breakfast in the front room, eating dough cake with currants. On winter days, George was allowed two brandy-soaked cherries before church to ward off the cold. Eleanor’s mother had firm rules for the Farjeon house which others might break. Papa took Eleanor for lunches in the city, where she was excited to drink at the city water fountains, something that Mama would not allow. Mama also had strict ideas about tea and refused to let Eleanor drink it until she was ten. When she was finally allowed to swap her cocoa for the more adult beverage, she felt this was real ‘stride towards grown-upness’ (Farjeon, 1935, p.401).
High Days and Holidays
Of course, special days are often strongly associated with special food: Molly described a traditional Christmas dinner with turkey, plum pudding and roasted chestnuts in the afternoon; Geroge recalled his mother making fritters with beer for Shrove Tuesday. More striking, though, are the accounts of food on occasions that were important for the particular family or local community. Molly’s family always stopped in the refreshment room in Swindon station on their way to Cornwall: ‘the hot soup all round is still a joyful memory’ (Hughes, 1954, p.88.). George’s memory of the local fair was tied up with the food. There was gingerbread, cut into hunks or pressed into disks: ‘it was none of it really nice…Yet the occasion make it palatable’. Similarly, he also disliked the Garibaldi biscuits ‘yet they were a sign of Fair day, and I ate them’ (Sturt, 1977, p.105).
Taken together, these autobiographies provide us with a valuable insight into relatively privileged childhood in the second half of the nineteenth century, although of course we are seeing things ultimately through the lens of adult memory. It is not surprising that there were many commonalities in these three young lives. However, these detailed recollections of eating, cooking and playing with food bring these writers into sharp focus. Their food memories provide a wonderful opportunitiy of really getting to know them as individuals.
References
Forrest, B. and de St. Maurice, G. (2022), ‘Introduction’ in Food in Memory and Imagination: Space, Place and Taste’, ed Forrest, B. and de St. Maurice, G, London: Bloomsbury, pp.1-9.
Farjeon, E. (1935) A Nursery in the Nineties London: Victor Gollancz
Hughes, M. V. (1954, first published 1934) A London Child of the 1870s Oxford: Oxford University Press (Original Title: A London Child of the Seventies).
Sturt, G. (1977, first published 1927) A Small Boy in the Sixties, Hassocks: The Harvester Press
Picture Credits
Chalk Drawing of George Sturt, W.H.Allen, 1909, Hampshire Cultural Trust
Eleanor Farjeon, 1899, Wikimedia commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eleanor_Farjeon
Molly Hughes, courtesy of Persephone Books, https://persephonebooks.co.uk/pages/molly-hughes
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