30/12/2025
Hunger Was Not a Metaphor in Victorian Britain. Nor Is It Today.
“Here was a motley crowd of woebegone wretches who had spent the night in the rain. Such prodigious misery! and so much of it!
Old men, young men, all manner of men, and boys to boot, and all manner of boys. Some were drowsing standing up; half a score of them were stretched out on the stone steps in most painful postures, all of them sound asleep, the skin of their bodies showing red through the holes and rents in their rags.
And up and down the street and across the street for a block either way, each doorstep had from two to three occupants, all asleep, their heads bent forward on their knees.
And it must be remembered, these are not hard times in England. Things are going on very much as they ordinarily do, and times are neither hard nor easy.”
- Jack London, The People of the Abyss (1903)
Hunger in Victorian Britain was not poetic, symbolic, or fleeting. It was physical, relentless, and etched into the body.
For millions, hunger did not mean missing a meal. It meant living year after year without enough food to sustain health or strength.
The body adapted at first. Then it failed.
Ruth Goodman describes how long-term hunger reshaped people from the inside out. Children grew shorter than earlier generations. Many developed rickets from diets devoid of animal fat and vitamin D. Their bones bent as they grew. Bowed legs and fragile spines were common sights in working-class streets.
Adults lived with constant pain. Hollow stomachs, dizziness, exhaustion. Muscles wasted away. Sleep came lightly and never restored. Hunger filled the mind not as appetite, but as absence. A permanent condition.
Hunger rarely killed quickly. It weakened people until ordinary life finished them off.
Minor infections became fatal. Small cuts refused to heal. Many died of what records blandly called “fever,” when the truth was simpler: bodies too depleted to recover.
Children carried the damage into adulthood. Stunted growth. Rotten teeth. Weakened immune systems. A lifetime reduced before it began.
Food became something to ration, fear, and control, not something safe or nourishing.
This was not ignorance. It was poverty.
Victorian diets were heavy on bread, potatoes, and tea. Calories without nutrition. Fuel without strength. Britain’s wealth expanded, its empire flourished, its factories roared. And the poor paid for it with their bodies.
And when people speak of empire and colonialism, they should not point the finger at the working class. The men, women, and children bent over looms and furnaces were not the architects of conquest. They did not draft imperial policy, finance expeditions, or profit from overseas plunder.
Empire was built and directed by those who ruled. The political class. The financiers. The industrial and landed elite.
The establishment has always been the oppressor. At home as well as abroad.
The same system that stripped wealth from colonised peoples also stripped strength, health, and dignity from Britain’s own poor. Empire did not lift the working class. It consumed them.
Their history is not preserved in statues or stately homes.
It is written in bones...
Then and Now: Different Bodies, Same Failure
It would be a mistake to imagine this problem ended with the gas lamps.
Today, hunger and poverty wears a different shape.
Not hollow cheeks, but swollen waistlines.
Not rickets, but diabetes.
Not bowed legs, but failing hearts and exhausted immune systems.
This is not abundance. It is imbalance.
It is fat, it is large it is unhealthy, it is measured in your blood and BMI.
Ultra-processed food is cheap, filling, and nutritionally empty. Calories are plentiful. Nourishment is not. Once again, the poorest eat what the system makes affordable, not what sustains health.
Obesity is not the opposite of hunger. It is hunger distorted.
It is measured in the profits of supermarkets...
A body fed without nutrition responds as bodies always have: storing, inflaming, breaking down. The damage is slower, quieter, and just as class-bound.
Victorian Britain failed to feed its people properly. Modern Britain has still not learned how.
A nation that cannot provide affordable, nourishing food is not free, prosperous, or advanced. It is merely efficient at hiding the consequences.
Then, as now, the question is not individual choice. It is political will.
As Charles Dickens saw clearly in his own time:
“And then I looked at the stars, and considered how awful it would be for a man to turn his face up to them as he froze to death, and see no help or pity in all the glittering multitude.”
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1860)
Labour Heartlands
