“Then don’t you ever go and say,” retorted Miss Sally, “that you hadn’t meat here. There, eat it up.”
This was soon done. “Now, do you want any more?” said Miss Sally.
The hungry creature answered with a faint “No.” They were evidently going through an established form.
“You’ve been helped once to meat,” said Miss Brass, summing up the facts; “you have had as much as you can eat, you’re asked if you want any more, and you answer ‘No!’ Then don’t you ever go and say you were allowanced, mind that.”
Dickens showed the evil effects of eating too rapidly in his description of the dinner in Mrs. Pawkins’s boarding house in New York, where Martin Chuzzlewit boarded for a short time after reaching America.
It was a numerous company, eighteen or twenty perhaps. Of these, some five or six were ladies, who sat wedged together in a little phalanx by themselves. All the knives and forks were working away at a rate that was quite alarming; very few words were spoken; and everybody seemed to eat his utmost in self-defence, as if a famine were expected to set in before breakfast time to-morrow morning, and it had become high time to assert the first law of Nature. The poultry, which may perhaps be considered to have formed the staple of the entertainment—for there was a turkey at the top, a pair of ducks at the bottom, and two fowls in the middle—disappeared as rapidly as if every bird had had the use of its wings, and had flown in desperation down a human throat. The oysters, stewed and pickled, leaped from their capacious reservoirs, and slid by scores into the mouths of the assembly. The sharpest pickles vanished, whole cucumbers at once, like sugarplums, and no man winked his eye. Great heaps of indigestible matter melted away as ice before the sun. It was a solemn and an awful thing to see. Dyspeptic individuals bolted their food in wedges; feeding not themselves, but broods of nightmares, who were continually standing at livery within them. Spare men, with lank and rigid cheeks, came out unsatisfied from the destruction of heavy dishes, and glared with watchful eyes upon the pastry. What Mrs. Pawkins felt each day at dinner time is hidden from all human knowledge. But she had one comfort. It was very soon over.
Dickens repeats this criticism of rapid eating in his American Notes, when specifying the causes of disease among American people. He says: “The custom of hastily swallowing large quantities of animal food three times a day and rushing back to sedentary pursuits after each meal must be changed.”
Poor Paul Dombey was sacrificed to his father’s pride. Mrs. Toodle was dismissed by Mr. Dombey because she dared to take his infant son with her when she went to see her own children. Paul was thus robbed of the natural food, which his sensitive nature needed so much. This was largely responsible for the fact that Paul was delicate. By first depriving him of proper food, and then sending him to Doctor Blimber’s school “to learn everything,” Mr. Dombey led directly to Paul’s death. His pride and vanity overreached themselves.
In Mrs. Pipchin’s meals Dickens tried to show two things: First, the selfishness of adulthood in regard to children’s diet as compared with its own; second, the absolute insufficiency of the kind of food commonly supplied to children for building up strong, energetic, and well-developed men and women.
She regaled the children with a repast of “farinaceous and vegetable foods—chiefly rice,” but she herself had a good hot dinner with mutton chops.