In this remarkable study, Gail Turley Houston examines the rich interplay of consumption as alimental process, medical entity, psychological construct, and economic practice in order to explore Charles Dickens s fictional representations of Victorian culture as he presents it in his novels. Drawing from medical, historical, economic, psychoanalytic, and biographical materials from the Victorian period, Houston anchors her work in the belief that if class and gender are fictional constructions, real people s lives are affected in complex and coercive ways by such constructions.

Proceeding...