Oliver Twist's bowl of gruel, Alice's "Drink Me" bottle, and Sam I Am's verdant sunny-side up eggs and ham represent some of the most transformative meals ever described in books. Oliver's plaintive "Please, sir, I want some more," was not a revolutionary request, but rather a good boy's bad luck at pulling straws. Yet asking for seconds had him ejected from the workhouse and into worse company than the looming Mr. Bumble. Cruikshank's steel-engraved illustration emphasizes the boy's underfed timorous fragility, his bobbing head as ungainly large as the bowl of his oversized spoon.
Meanwhile, in another childhood favorite, one actually written for a child, food remains central to the action. Alice literally shrank after obeying her magical draught's label; then the "Eat Me" cake made her too big to fit indoors. The 1910 Alice in Wonderland game of cards reproduce the John Tenniel drawings from the original 1865 publication, and among its 48 cards of "the most famous characters and scenes," the "Drink Me" bottle and the Mad Hatter's tea party figure prominently.
A more recent children's classic, Green Eggs and Ham, is another culinary cautionary tale. Nearly as visionary as Lewis Carroll, for Dr. Seuss, conservative taste threatens chaos. Instead, the book offers an incessant, positive incentive for children to be more adventurous at dinnertime: "You do not like them, so you say. Try them, try them, and you may, Try them and you may, I say!"
- George Cruikshank and Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, London; 1876. (Dorothy Braude Edinburg Art LLC)
- After Sir John Tenniel and Gertrude E. Thomson, The new and diverting game of "Alice in Wonderland." London: Thomas De La Rue & Co. Ltd., [1910]. (Prints & Drawings)
- Dr. Seuss, Green Eggs and Ham. Book Club Edition, 1960. (Private Collection)