Charles Dickens May Have Invented The Christmas Feast, But Many Of His Literary Food Sources Are ‘Unclean’ And Meant To Inspire Social Action

The morality of food is a battlefield now, and it was 150 years ago, when Dickens published A Christmas Carol, as well: “Dickens’s most abiding influence is his conviction that everybody has the right to sit down together and enjoy the same food. Crucially, the Cratchits’ Christmas was not part of any ecclesiastical or charitable space but enjoyed by a poor family in their own home. Dickens was challenging a culture that regarded food as necessarily exclusive. These are conflicts in a war for status and control, in which food is deployed to show that ‘you are what you eat.'”