What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories. Laura Shapiro
puddings are not bad in their way, but they are not among the things we would make to set before our friends,” ruled Georgiana Hill in The Breakfast Book, published in 1865.
Why, then, did it show up that January day? Dorothy wouldn’t have enjoyed such a meal under any circumstances, for she suffered from what was probably colitis or irritable bowel syndrome and had been reporting painful attacks for years. Black pudding, heavy and notoriously indigestible, would have looked to her like intestinal agony on a plate. And she was the de facto mistress of the house; Mary Dawson would have consulted her on the dinner menu. Dorothy could have raised an objection. She didn’t.
Dorothy didn’t object to anything at Whitwick. She accepted all of it and simply translated her experience into the language she preferred, the language of happiness and satisfaction. She approved of frugal cooking and had done it herself, joyfully, at Dove Cottage, where her simple meals had been woven into the fabric of each day’s blessedness. When she made broth, it was for William’s breakfast; when she broiled a mutton chop, she served it to Coleridge in bed. “Wm & John set off into Yorkshire after dinner at 1/2 past 2 o’clock—cold pork in their pockets,” she wrote on the first page of the Grasmere Journal. It was she who had roasted the pork and wrapped the cold scraps for travel; that’s why she put it in the Journal. The very words bound her together with William. Now she was gazing at her dinner in John’s lonely house and seeing all she had lost. The food was foreign, it belonged nowhere, and neither did she. So she translated it. Like the gloomy weather, black pudding went into the diary undisguised; the words were plain and truthful. But the meal as she chose to taste it was sweet.
Dorothy had been in Whitwick for only a few weeks when John received news that the prospects for his future had brightened. Another opening for a curacy had turned up, this one in Moresby—a more prosperous and appealing town, located on the west coast of England not too far from Grasmere. He accepted the offer gratefully and made plans to move by summer. In this congenial new post, he would have no further need of his aunt’s companionship. Dorothy would stay with him for the rest of the winter, but the fantasy of extending her term of service indefinitely—winter after winter, central to John’s life and first in his heart—was abruptly shut down. As always, she expressed only happiness; but paradise was about to disintegrate once again. Dorothy had arrived in Whitwick in perfect health. As she assured a friend, “I can walk 15 miles as briskly as ever I did in my life.” When she left, she was an invalid.
It’s hard to know what precipitated her collapse that April, but one day, after she had nursed her nephew through a bad week of influenza, Dorothy was seized with intestinal pain and spent two long days in what William described later as “excruciating torture.” This may have been an attack of gallstones or possibly a dramatic worsening of her usual colitis. The family was terrified that she might die. An “obstruction” was removed, and afterward she was so feeble she couldn’t move or speak. Mary sped to Whitwick to take care of her, and slowly she became stronger, but that summer she had a relapse. When she finally returned to Rydal Mount in September, she found that even a two-mile walk was too much for her. Increasingly she felt exhausted and confused. Her symptoms—violent pain in her bowels, nausea and vomiting, and debilitating weakness—were not unfamiliar to her. She had recorded similar attacks from time to time in the Grasmere Journal (much to the displeasure of William Knight, the Journal’s first editor, who didn’t like the bowel references any better than he liked the food references). But after Whitwick, a pattern set in: she would collapse in agony, recuperate and gain a bit of strength, then fall back once more.
The standard treatment for pain was laudanum, a tincture made from opium mixed with wine or brandy. Dorothy had taken it regularly in the past for toothaches. Now she was relying on it for her frequent intestinal attacks, and the worse they became, the more heavily she was dosed. The drug, of course, was addictive; it also affected the brain, and by 1835 Dorothy was showing signs of mental disintegration. Gradually illness stripped her of nearly everything that made her recognizable. Once she had been sharp-minded, vigorous, and perpetually curious, always ready for a trek or a project, always eager for conversation. As her body and mind deteriorated she became trapped ever deeper in what Mary called a “child-like feebleness,” given to outbursts of rage, hilarity, babbling, and profanity. Helpless and homebound, she became the focus of constant worry and round-the-clock nursing. Yet in one way or another, using language when she had it and other means when she didn’t, she continued to tell her food story. In fact, it was all she wanted to talk about.
The third act of Dorothy’s food story takes place during the twenty-six long years of her illness, which among other gifts and heartbreaks left Dorothy with a new body. She had always been thin, even gaunt, but after the onset of her dementia she started complaining of “faintness and hollowness,” as William described it. He said she constantly craved “something to support her.” More and more, that something was food. She wanted to eat, she demanded to eat; her pleas became incessant. For the first time in her life she grew fat, then very fat: it took two people to hold her up if she decided to “walk” by pushing her feet along the floor. She told William she was happy only when she was eating.
But much as she craved food, it was a metaphor for something she craved even more desperately. No, not love—she knew she was loved; William never left her in the slightest doubt about that. One day at Dove Cottage she broke a tooth and realized she was well on the way to losing all of them. “Let that pass,” she wrote calmly in the Grasmere Journal. “I shall be beloved—I want no more.” But in the wake of her first breakdown at Whitwick, she had experienced a novel sensation. As she recuperated, she became aware that her illness had prompted an outpouring of tenderness, sympathy, and worry from numerous friends and family members. She was deeply moved to hear from so many people. For the first time in her life, she was able to bask in the warmth of simultaneous attention from just about everyone she knew. “It drew tears from my eyes to read of your affectionate anxiety concerning me,” she wrote to an old friend. “In fact it is the first time in my life … in which I have had a serious illness, therefore I have never before had an opportunity of knowing how much some distant Friends care about me—Friends abroad—Friends at home—all have been anxious.”
Selfless devotion to others had long been Dorothy’s vocation. She had taken care of William, she had tended to Coleridge, she had helped raise children, she had poured attention on the lonely and the needy, and whenever it seemed that she might run out of work, she managed to find more—until illness opened up another way to live, and she slipped right in. By 1835 she had discovered self-pity. That year William and Mary made a trip to London, leaving Dorothy and their daughter Dora, who was also chronically sick, in the care of the Rydal Mount servants. Dorothy was still able to write in her diary at that point, so we have an account of her reaction; apparently she had begged them not to go. “Wm & Mary left us to go to London. Both in good spirits till the last parting came—when I was overcome. My spirits much depressed … More than I have done I cannot do therefore shall only state my sorrow that our Friendship is so little prized & that they can so easily part from the helpless invalids.” Never in her life had she expressed herself in those terms—“poor me, poor me” was simply not the way she responded to trouble or deprivation. But she was whining now, feeling sorry for herself as assiduously as if she had decided to make up for lost time.
“It will please Aunty if one of you will write to her,—for she often tells us nobody takes notice of her,” Mary reported to a niece, adding, “She has been very cross lately.” Dorothy complained often that she was neglected by her family; she said she was “ill-used” and needed protection, and she begged for signs of affection. The arrival of a birthday gift sent her into cries of delight: “You see, I have good friends who care for me, tho’ you