376 pp; 170 x 245 mm; 
17 b&w illustrations; hardback

ISBN 1-903018-38-2 £25.00

Catherine, the wife of Charles Dickens, was herself an author, but of just one book: What Shall we Have for Dinner? Satisfactorily Answered by Numerous Bills of Fare for from Two to Eighteen Persons. As the title indicates, it was a cookery book, in fact a pamphlet containing many suggested menus for meals of varying complexity together with a few recipes. It went through several editions after 1851, under the authorial pseudonym of ‘Lady Maria Clutterbuck’ with a brief introduction that was, commentators aver, the work of Charles Dickens himself.
 In this book, Susan Rossi-Wilcox has investigated the life of Catherine Dickens, the domestic arrangements of the Dickens family, the composition of this menu-book and how the various changes in succeeding editions reflect both Catherine’s own development and the state of play in Victorian cookery, entertainment and food supply.
 At the same time, it contains a transcript of the menu-book itself and the appendix of recipes. It would not be sensible to claim the little book changed very much about Victorian cookery, but it serves as a potent marker of what was going on at the time, for example the modes of service, the sorts of dishes cooked, the domestic organisation necessary to maintain a reasonably well-off household.
 Catherine Dickens herself is a very interesting character and this book has much to offer people seeking to get behind the facade thrown up by Charles Dickens and his biographers (the couple separated in 1858 and Catherine suffered from much negative spin). Susan Rossi-Wilcox paints a sympathetic portrait of a capable and resourceful woman.
 Dinner for Dickens is fully referenced and illustrated with contemporary photographs, drawn largely from the collections of the Charles Dickens Museum in Doughty Street, London.

Susan M. Rossi-Wilcox is a Curatorial Associate of the Botanical Museum of Harvard University where she is Administrator for the Glass Flowers Collection. 

Catherine 1852: A daguerrotype of Catherine Dickens in 1852 showing a certain enbonpoint. Irrespective of Mclise’s vision of 1842, Catherine was already described by her American hosts of that year as quite plump.
 

Dickens Extract: I have offered here the first 30 pages of the beginning of the commentary by Susan Rossi-Wilcoxon Catherine Dickens’s menu books. I have excluded the tables in the text and all footnotes.
 

  Foreword by Lillian Nayder 

  Acknowledgements 

  Catherine Dickens: Chronology 

  What Shall We Have for Dinner: a transcription 

A History of Catherine Dickens’s Menu Books

  Their Publication and Authorships 

  Catherine Thomson Hogarth Dickens 

  Catherine and Charles in the Wider World 

  The Dickens Household 

  Dinner chez Dickens 

  Amateur Dramatics and Lady Clutterbuck

The Ingredients of What Shall We Have for Dinner?

  Soups and Seafood 

  Meats, Game, Dairy Goods and Condiments 

  Vegetables, Fungi and Fruit 

  Sweet and Savoury Conclusions 

  Epilogue 

Appendices:
  Dickens’ kitchen inventory, 1844 
  Food categories in the 1852 menus 

Notes and References 

Index

There are many ways of unpicking this damning narrative, but American scholar Susan M Rossi-Wilcox has chosen to do it by means of Catherine's capacities as a housekeeper. For while Dickens, in that sour, post-separation phase, was apt to imply that she was as bad at this as she was at everything else, Rossi-Wilcox has delved into Catherine's domestic records to show a woman passionately engaged with the whole business of keeping a good table (and, by implication, a good pantry, still-room and kitchen too). Instead of a domestic dowdy, reliant on a small repertoire of early to mid Victorian staples, Rossi-Wilcox finds a sprightly intelligence keen to graft dishes learned while living abroad in France and Italy on to a stock of sturdy "Scotch" staples that reflect a much-loved Edinburgh childhood. 

The reason that Rossi-Wilcox can even attempt to do this is that Catherine's manuscript menu books have survived (ironically because they belonged to the first wife of a great man) together with the odd fact that in 1852 she published a pseudonymous recipe book entitled What Shall We Have for Dinner? which was re-issued, in altered form, right through to 1860. Buttressed by the kitchen inventory from 1 Devonshire Terrace, where the family lived in the 1840s, as well as scraps of information about the arrangements at Doughty Street and Gad's Hill, Rossi-Wilcox is able to study Catherine's household in a way that has historically been impossible for all but a handful of courtly kitchens. 

Fish, for instance, was regarded by most mid-Victorians with a kind of horror. Catherine, by contrast, loved anything with fins and from her kitchen emerged a stream of dishes along the lines of stuffed haddock, codling with oyster sauce and stewed eels. Rossi-Wilcox puts this down to her Scottish childhood, combined with Charles's Kentish heritage that was full of Whitstable oysters and Dover soles. But she also neatly links this in with the Dickenses' ideas on social reform, not the least of which was that if the working class would only learn to eat from Britain's rich sea farms they could be weaned off the bad bits of fatty bacon that they insisted on seeing as the ultimate treat. 

Using domestic ephemera to prise open the Victorian middle-class household is an excellent idea. Rossi-Wilcox's work as a museum curator has given her the requisite gimlet eye to sort out her dutch ovens from her bottle jacks, or know the difference between a copper mould and a tin one, without which a book like this quickly degenerates into sloppy nostalgia. 

There are, however, problems with the fact that Rossi-Wilcox is working on the other side of the world from Catherine's kitchen. For instance, Rossi-Wilcox disconcertingly refers to Mrs Beeton having published her Book of Household Management in 1865, which is indeed the date that a version of the book first appeared in the US. The fact that the original actually appeared in 1861 and was being written from 1857 may seem piffling, but is crucially important when you are conducting a finger-tip search of the mid-Victorian dining room. Over a period of any eight years — but those eight years in particular — foods fell in and out of favour, cooking techniques changed and new ingredients became available, shifting the middle-class eating experience in small but crucial ways. 

The odd thing is that Rossi-Wilcox clearly knows this, since her careful readings of the various editions of What Shall We Have For Dinner? are all about tracking the way in which items such as mullet gradually took a central place on the Dickens' London dining table, thanks to the development of the Great Western Railway as a link to the fishing grounds of Cornwall. These inconsistencies, combined with a number of misnamings and repetitions, suggest that a tighter edit would have produced a text worthy of what is, despite everything, an imaginative attempt to refocus personal, literary and cultural history through the bottom of a custard cup.