Plain living and high thinking: The ethics and economies of Gissing’s vegetarians

In this article I explore one strand of the rich matrix of food and eating in George Gissing's works: vegetarianism, its food and its followers, drawing on examples from The Odd Women (1893), two short stories, “Simple Simon” (1896), “A Poor Gentleman” (1899), The Crown of Life (1901) and Will Warburton (1905). Do these characters and their diets function as part of the texts’ surface realism? Does vegetarianism serve, as various readers assert, as a euphemism for “poverty, a marker of genteel deprivation and barely concealed desperation”? This article explores the motivations, realities, and consequences of meat avoidance in Gissing’s works.