On learning that John Thornton, the industrialist hero of Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1854−5), has recently opened a communal dining-room for his employees, Thornton's landlord Mr Bell signals his approval for the scheme by blithely declaring that there is ‘nothing like the act of eating for equalizing men’; whereas men die differently according to their stations, Bell suggests, ‘all eat after the same fashion’ (Gaskell 1995: 354). This naive faith in the democratising power of consumption would not, in all likelihood, have been shared by Gaskell's early Victorian readers, for within the print culture of the period the ‘act of eating’ was consistently understood as a means by which to categorise and differentiate forms of masculinity. As the old weaver Job Legh astutely notes in Gaskell's earlier industrial fiction, Mary Barton (1848), ‘I never see the masters getting thin and haggard for want of food’ (Gaskell 1996: 384).

Dietary differences were a key theme in the raft of social investigations into the moral and physical condition of the manufacturing classes published during the 1830s and 1840s. Within these reports the white, working-class, male body was recurrently distinguished from its middle-class counterpart in terms of appetite: how, what and how much it consumed. Counter-intuitively though, within this discourse, those bodies with access to the least were typically constructed as the most gluttonous. Despite having to subsist on a meagre or, in many cases, inadequate diet during the periods of economic depression that haunted the ‘30s and ‘40s, industrial male labourers were invariably represented in terms of alimentary voracity by social commentators. Figured as the possessors of an excessive, animalistic – and sometimes quasi-cannibalistic – hunger, working-class men were positioned in overt ideological opposition to the bourgeois manly ideal, which was celebrated in early Victorian culture for its exemplary qualities of selfdiscipline and control.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, assumptions about the unruly character of working-class male appetites frequently slipped over from social discourse into contemporary fiction, such as Gaskell's own.