Chocolate from Dickens to Joyce: The changing iconography of cocoa in turn of the twentieth century Britain

This dissertation draws on literary and cultural sources to map the changing iconography of chocolate during a period that saw the commodity first emerge as an article of mass consumption in Britain (1880-1914). Its primary aim is to recover the complex set of historical meanings that then informed the commodity's circulation, and to investigate what about these meanings compelled Charles Dickens, Bernard Shaw, Queen Victoria, and James Joyce to deploy chocolate in their literary and social projects. The popular view of chocolate underwent a swift and irreversible refiguring late in the nineteenth century when producers bent on reaching the mass market took up advertising. Chocolate's continually evolving iconography presented challenges for modern writers who saw in its chemical and cultural duality opportunities to advance their literary and social agendas.;In the introduction I draw on Shaw's play Pygmalion (1912-13) to explore the complexity of the commodity's cultural meanings and to present the methodology governing this dissertation. In chapter one, I look to the sole two Dickens's novels in which chocolate appears at any length, Barnaby Rudge (1841) and A Tale of Two Cities (1859), to illustrate chocolate's meanings before the British mass production and marketing of the commodity. In chapter two, I examine the role of chocolate in Shaw's play Arms and the Man (1894) and argue that Shaw should have looked more critically at his play's use of chocolate to account for his play's failure. In chapter three, I investigate Queen Victoria's hastily prepared gift of chocolate tins to soldiers serving in South Africa to show that the project of re-branding chocolate as a British commodity was a decentralized effort set in motion by the broadening array of chocolate products becoming available and the commodity's irreversible incursions across class lines. In this study's final chapter I observe the increasing complexity of Joyce's literary treatment of chocolate and contend that he was drawn to deploy chocolate in all of his major fictional works in part because of its emerging role in Irish life but also because he lived abroad in countries with long historical ties to the commodity.