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Eating Englishness and Causing Chaos: Food and the Body of the Fat Man in R. S. Surtees' Jorrocks's Jaunts and Jollities, Handley Cross, and Hillingdon Hall

In recent years the recognition of the importance of food history and scholarship have grown, but food, and in particular feasting, is also an integral part of the theory of Rabelais’s carnivalesque, as discussed by Mikhail Bakhtin, who acknowledged as early as the mid-twentieth century that ‘eating and drinking are one of the most significant manifestations of the grotesque body’ (281). In turn, R. S. Surtees’s work, with its hunting-focused narratives, has received limited scholarly attention. The three books in the Jorrocks series – Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities (1838), Handley Cross (1843), and Hillingdon Hall (1845) – engage with issues beyond the scope of the previously discussed avenues of hunting (Mukherjee 2005), money (Congdon 2002), and the law (Gutteridge 1943), and can be seen in light of the new area of fat and food studies and the more established field of body scholarship. The focal point of the narratives is the foxhunter Jorrocks, whose largesse and consumption permeates the text throughout. Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities is made up of a series of sketches that centre on the comical figure of Jorrocks, a foxhunter who persists in getting into scrapes. It appeared irregularly as separate articles in The New Sporting Magazine from July 1831 to September 1834 and was then published in book form in 1838 (Welcome 60). Handley Cross also appeared monthly in the same journal from March 1838 to June 1838 as Gin-and-Water, its title was then changed and it was then published irregularly until August 1839 and published in book form in 1843. This was then followed by Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 2014 Vol. 36, No. 4, 335–346, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2014.954423