Why am I passionate about this?
I’m driven to understand the lives and mentalities of poor workers at the time of the Industrial Revolution. It’s a subject on which a great has been written but I’ve always been surprised that, in a British context, the subject of hunger has been largely ignored. The great joy of being a historical scholar is that freedom to follow your nose in the archive, to trust your instinct, and to uncover untold stories of the forgotten. Their experiences of hunger might relate to a now seemingly distant world, but such hunger histories are also amazingly prescient in our new age of food banks and famines.
Carl's book list on explaining the politics behind hunger
Why did Carl love this book?
"Hunger stared down from the smokeless chimneys, and started up from the filthy street that had no offal, among its refuse, of anything to eat." In these few short words Charles Dickens artfully summed up the experience – and landscapes – of abject urban poverty. Set in Paris and London during the period of the first French Revolution, it is perhaps more convoluted and less effective in terms of characterization than his best novels, but it pulls no punches. Although it’s a historical novel, and a romance at that, it’s as close as we can get to feeling what it must have been like to be hungry at that moment in which our modern world – and its social problems – was made.
8 authors picked A Tale of Two Cities as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Sydney Carton is a lawyer who has wasted his abilities and his life. Now he has to make a difficult choice about what is really important to him, which could be a matter of life or death. The French Revolution is running its violent course; lives are ruined as a new France is created. How did the gentle Doctor Manette and his daughter Lucie become caught up in France's struggles? What is the real identity of the handsome Charles Darnay, who wins Lucie's hand in marriage? And why does the shadow of La Bastille Prison hang over them all? The…