A Pair of Horse-Pictures
In her 2010 book The Discourses of Food in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, Annette Cozzi asserts that food is a significant cultural item that works to establish insider/outsider dynamics within and across communities (5). In her chapter devoted to Charles Dickens, she writes that Dickens’s novels often use the motif of food to distinguish between and critique the “two nations” of England (15). This is evident not only in Dickens’s own works, but in the works he compiled in All the Year Round.
The serial part that directly follows The Moonstone—“A Pair of Horse-Pictures”1— is a satire on upper-class English privilege that explores the classist connotations of taste/preference. In this story, the homodiegetic narrator describes the reactions of a group of rich men upon tasting horse meat at “the great Langham horse-dinner” (“Horse-Pictures” 270). Upon learning that the meal was comprised of horse meat, one guest exclaims “God bless my soul! what are we coming to?” (270). Later, the narrator notes that in the end, physical hunger outweighed any moral objection to the food on the table (271).
If one reads this issue of All the Year Round intratextually as Molly Knox Leverenz suggests (25), it is clear that this story fragment responds to and reshapes interpretations of The Moonstone within All the Year Round. “A Pair of Horse-Pictures” exposes the absurdity of grouping people into arbitrary classes and creating artificial hierarchies within cultures. The positioning of this story within the periodical instigates a rereading of The Moonstone. It asks readers to adopt a more critical view of Sergeant Cuff’s perceived sense of superiority over Betteredge (Collins 120), and of the characters’ general condescension towards lower-class characters like the Yollands and Rosanna Spearman.
Notes
1. This text can be read in full at Dickens Journals Online, http://www.djo.org.uk/indexes/articles/a-pair-of-horse-pictures.html.
Works Cited
Collins, Wilkie. “Chapter XV.” The Moonstone. Ed. John Sutherland. New York: OUP, 2008. 199-132. Print.
Cozzi, Annette. The Discourses of Food in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. New York: Palgrave, 2010. Print.
"A Pair of Horse-Pictures [ii]." Dickens Journals Online. U Buckingham. n.d. Web. 6 Oct. 2015.
Parkinson, Joseph Charles. "A Pair of Horse-Pictures." All the Year Round: A Weekly Journal 29 Feb. 1868. 270-274. Print.