‘An Antidote to Modern Errors’: Annabella Plumptre and the health of the nation                                                                                              
Annabella Plumptre ’s writing career spanned the years 1794 to 1818 , a period of political unrest which encompassed both the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and during which food was a highly politicised issue. Britain was at war with France continuously from 1793 to 1802, and her last known published work, Tales of Wonder was published in 1818, only three years after the Napoleonic Wars ended ostensibly with the Battle of Waterloo in July 1815. The Napoleonic wars were a barrier to the import of foreign grain, but after 1791, protective legislation, combined with trade prohibitions imposed by war, forced grain prices to rise sharply; a bad harvest in 1795 led to food riots; there was a prolonged crisis during 1799–1801; the period from 1805 to 1813 saw a sequence of bad harvests and high prices (Corn Laws: n.p.). Plumptre refers to ‘those who withhold grain when it is wanted, or who corrupt it in any way when it is brought into use, are pre- eminently the secret and worst enemies of mankind’(Plumptre 1812: 16-17) She continues:
‘To create an artificial scarcity of corn, is to reduce the poor and middling ranks of society to a thousand miserable and injurious devices to supply their deficiency of what they must fall short of in this important article, and thus to generate diseases among them. And to corrupt this prime source of subsistence is to undermine the health of society at large, and dwindle it down to a race of invalid dwarfs. Are not such men the enemies of their country and of their species?’         ( Plumptre 1812: 16-17)
‘Food’, writes Plumptre ‘is not more necessary than the abuse of it is injurious to mankind’. (Plumptre 1810: xv):
‘But accustomed to it by necessity from the first moments of our existence, it is so familiar to us, that we use it without any reflection on the nature of it, or the excessive influence it is capable of, nay, certain to have upon us, from its constant use, both physically and morally. So insensible indeed are we upon this subject, that food is chiefly thought of as a sensual indulgence, however unperceived or unacknowledged, this sentiment operates upon us.’ (Plumptre 1810: xv [my italics])
Plumptre argues for a ‘moral order and rational happiness.’ (Plumptre 1810: v) To treat food as mere sensual gratification is to treat it ‘without any reflection’, that is not rationally; people need to reflect, to come to see, in the light of reason, what they have been blinded to, by familiarity, from birth. To treat food as only sensual indulgence is, though perhaps unperceived, a morally culpable activity; ‘[i]t is an indiscriminate gratification of our tastes, regardless of consequences’ writes Plumptre, ‘that is [...] blameable.’ (Plumptre 1810: xvi) Such habits, acquired from birth, are habits acquired from care-givers: ‘Even diseases said to be hereditary may [...] be assigned to errors in domestic life, of which children partake, and fall into the same disorders as their parents.’(Plumptre 1810: xvi) What troubles Plumptre is such excess should be perceived as genteel, and be fashionable:
                   ‘It is at the same time both a serious and ludicrous reflection that it should be thought to do honour to our friends and ourselves to set out a table where indigestion and all its train of evils, such as fever, rheumatism, gout and the whole catalogue of human diseases lie lurking in almost every dish. Yet this is both done, and taken as a compliment. We have here indeed the ‘unbought grace of a polished society, where gluttony loses half its vice by being stripped of its grossness.’’ (Plumptre 1810: xi)
In the title of Domestic Management, Plumptre states she has ‘Added, the Method of Treating Such Trifling Medical Cases That Properly Come Within the Sphere of Domestic Management’, but implicit throughout her treatise on diet is the notion that under the proper scheme of domestic management, medical cases which are anything other than trifling may be avoided completely. Guenter Risse notes that there was was an attempt, within what he refers to as the ‘medicalization’ of the eighteenth century, to popularise medicine in the production of health manuals aimed at, and written in the speech of, common man (Risse: 186), but written for  the affluent of society who would charitably share this knowledge with the lower classes (Risse: 187). Issues such as personal hygeine, diet and lifestyle were commonly addressed as means of the prevention of illness (Risse:187). When Plumptre writes about the importance of diet as a means of disease prevention in 1810 she is perpetuating a trend already well established. The prohibitive cost of consulting a professional doctor at the time (Loudon: 231) would also make this an especially attractive prospect. Loundon also contends that from the public’s point of view there was little change in the efficacy or methods of medical treatment between 1780 and 1840 (Loudon: 229). There was certainly not much regulation of the medical profession until the Medical Act of 1858 (Loudon: 228), though the Apothecaries Act of1815 did help to control dipensing druggists who usually had no medical training at all. (Loudon : 228)  Plumptre believes in self-knowledge gained through judicious observation; ‘ ‘[a] fool or a physician at forty’ is an adage containing more truth than is commonly believed’ she writes, but ‘he who has noted the things that cause disorder in himself [...] must, by the course of his own experience, possess much knowledge that a physician at a pop visit ought not to pretend to’ (Plumptre 1810: xxiv). She maintains that   ‘[C]ooks, as well as doctors, will differ; not that cooks are always intent on selecting the better from the worse practice, but that they have been accustomed to do the thing their own way, and will not be put out of it.’ (Plumptre 1810: 85) This juxtaposition of cook and doctor seems to insinuate that in practical terms the two may be interchangeable. The issue for the poor, however, was more likely to be the need of something to actually cook.
In Plumptre’s terms, the physical and moral dangers poised by food to the health of individuals at opposing ends of the class system were very different. When Plumptre writes that ‘[t]he health of mankind depends in great measure on the good or bad preparation of food, and on the purity of provisions of every kind used as foods,’ the purity of the food of the poor was endangered by adulteration., but the purity of the food of the rich, and those who wished to appear rich, was at risk from a surfeit of ingredients, of over-refinement. Plumptre objects to the over-preparation of food; butter should not be melted becauses it has already been churned. This is over-refinement which vitiates the nutritious value of the food. She resents the making food pretty rather that nutritious for the sake of vanity, for overloading the table showing off status, or putting up a facade of wealth, and seeing more company than the family can afford. While she contends diet to have a more immediate effect than enviroment on health, vanity over possessions appears to her to be part of the same lack of reason and morality. ‘In great cities in particular,’ she comments ‘how common is it that for the vanity of having a showy drawing-room to receive company, the family are confined to a close back room [...] but[...] to shut up the only room perhaps in the house which is really wholesome’This she views as ‘a kind of lingering murder [...] What a reflection, when nursing a sick child, that it may be the victim of a bright grate, and a fine carpet!’ (Plumptre 1810: vii).
  The chemist Frederick Accum published his Treatise on Adulteration of Food and Culinary Poisons in 1820 (Broomfield: xv), but it was not until 1872 that the Adulteration of Food, Drink and Drugs Act was passed (Broomfield: xvi) According to Wilson, food additives in the early nineteenth century were often harmful and there use in processed foods, beer, tea, bread and pickles increased steadily until the Adulteration of Food Act came into force. (Wilson: 420) Annabella Plumptre was certainly aware of this; she writes:
‘Where bread is fixed to a standard weight and price, fraudulent bakers add a mixture of alum and pearl-ash to it, for the purposes of hastening its rising, of making it retain its moisture, and hence its weight. [...] It is said that a compound salt is clandestinely sold in London, under the name of baker's salt, and is composed of the above ingredients.’ (Plumptre 1810: 19)
In this light, her interest in providing ‘an Antidote to modern Errors’ and interest in making people aware of what when into the food they ate carries more scientific weight than her objection to certain other foods which may seem puzzling in the twenty-first century, and sometimes also did at the beginning of the nineteenth century, such as the ‘insuperable objection to the whites of eggs’ (Critical Review: 333) for which she was mocked by one reviewer of Domestic Management. Plumptre even provides methods by which to test bread for the presence of both pearl-ash and alum, though her test of alum requires an infusion to be made from a pound of bread, which the poorer classes, who existed primarily on bread, could probably little afford. However, neither would they be likely to be able to afford to buy a copy of Domestic Management, the first edition of which retailed, according to its title-page, at five shillings, which, as Broomfield points out, for some was nearly half their weekly wage in the early nineteenth century, if they were lucky enough to have work, especially in the south of England, given the effects of agricultural reform. (Broomfield: 14)
 In Plumptre’s ideal of the domestic, the wife and mother is central to correcting the errors she sees as endemic to the nation. Her main point of contention in this is that ‘[t]he subject of cookery is, in general, either despised by women as below their attention, or when practically engaged in, it is with no other consideration about it than, in the good housewife’s phrase, to make the most of everything, whether good, bad, or indifferent’ (Plumptre 1810: ix) Here it is necessary for women to cultivate their rational faculties; ‘It should be the serious reflection of every mistress of a family’ writes Plumptre, ‘that the health of it, in all its branches, depends in great measure upon her judgement in diet and cookery’ but, ‘pre-eminently that of her children’ (Plumptre 1810:  viii). Women, then, collectively have power over the health of the nation and the power to heal by example and by the saucepan, cultivate moral tastes and prevent diseases of habit learnt by example within the family. Without strong, moral female influence, Plumptre’s vision cannot suceed. Where the wife is  ‘deficient in knowledge, or wanting in inclination, to fulfil her domestic duties’ there is ‘[n]othing [that] can truly compensate the defect: it may be assisted, as the loss of a leg may; but no substitute will ever fully supply the place of a limb.’ (Plumptre 1810: xi) In this view, the wife and mother is one part – a limb – of the family whole. She remains in the domestic sphere and solicits change from within; Plumptre positions the family home as woman’s place of business, but she must ‘make it her business to inform herself’ so ‘that she may fulfil this charge so peculiarly belonging to the female sex’ because ‘her husband, children, and domestics[...] have a right to expect [it] from her.’ (Plumptre 1810:  viii)
  The good house-wife, however, does retain autonomy and fiscal responsibility with this role, ‘keeping her keys herself’, as well as ‘keeping regular accounts, and being punctual in her payments’  as these are ‘important points in housekeeping, and will all of course enter into the system of a sensible woman.’ (Plumptre 1810: xi) Somewhat amusingly, this observation is foot-noted by an advertisement for Crosby’s Family Account Book (Plumptre’s publisher for Domestic Management.) This does, however, highlight the fact that Domestic Management was a financial venture for Plumptre, and she herself never married and also worked as a teacher for a period of her life. Domestic Management was written for middle class women for whom working would not have been, for the main part, socially acceptable. Plumptre does register approval for women of lower class taking part in work, but she associates it with the rural prior to agricultural reform: ‘The good housewife of a small farm attended to her own business. Her poultry, brought up at the barn door, and killed from it was sweet and wholesome, and the produce of her dairy did her credit, and her customers justice.’ (Plumptre 1812: xxii) This perhaps, is an idealised, sanitised version of women’s work, still located in the home but paid, where long hours worked in a dirty urban factory might been a stroke too far for her target audience.
 The seed drill and steam driven thresher had come into use on farms by the end of the eighteenth century, along with other  agricultural innovations designed to increase yield, thus diminishing the need for manual labour and manual labourers (Broomfield: 15). This, combined with gradual enclosure of common land and an expanding population meaning peope were forced to move to the cities to provide for themselves and their families (Broomfield: 15). The early nineteenth century also saw a number of technological advances relating to the cooking and storage of food, though this had little effect on the lower classes. In 1802 George Bodley patented a closed iron range (Broomfield 2007: xv), and in 1810 Peter Durand took out a patent for the  use of tin canisters as a means of preserving food. (Broomfield 2007: xv) Count Rumford had invented the ‘Rumford Roaster’, which allowed for the cooking of food in a separate compartment in a ‘closed’ stove and Appert had published a volume claiming to be able preserve foodstuffs for years by means of an early type of vacuum-packing (Symons: 82).  While Plumptre mentions the ‘Rumford Roaster’ briefly as an unhealthy invention which preventing the free circulation of air and release of fumes, in the second edition of Domestic Management she adds an entirely new chapter devoted in the first instance to Appert’s work. Essentially, Plumptre viewed Appert’s method of preservation could not preserve any food wholly, retaining its purity, and was only appropriate to sustain life in dire circumstances, such as war, not in a domestic setting (Plumptre 1812: xviii). The technological advances made in agriculture, Plumptre seems to have viewed  as intrinsically unnatural, and immoral, viewing ‘[t]he regular seasons, and the peculiar properties, of the various productions of nature are our safest guides in the use of her bountiful supplies’ (Plumptre 1812: xix): ‘[t]o anticipate her seasons, or to prolong them, are a mis-application of labour, and a perversion of the bounties of providence into secret poisons, to indulge the wanton cravings of depraved appetites.’ (Plumptre 1812: xix) For Plumptre, the countryside has become a site of excess perpetuated by the upper classes and rich industrialists. ‘If mankind consulted their wel-fare [sic] as much as their dissipations’, she contends,  ‘the higher classes of society would not slight their daries [sic] for studs of horses kept more for ostentation than for use.’ (Plumptre 1812: xxii) Urbanisation meant people were losing their self-sufficiency; whereas prior to the industrial revolution most would have had access to some common land and therefore a varied, seasonal diet (Broomfield: 4). Broomfield notes that most urban labourers’ diets in the early nineteenth century were notoriously inadequate, consisting of poor quality bakery bread, weak tea and boiled potatoes (Broomfield: 16). ‘It is impossible to contemplate the subject of healthful human sustenance and not regret the breaking up of small farms’ insists Plumptre:
‘Whether anything may have been gained to the public in the articles of corn and cattle, by the multiplying of large farms and present high prices of both may make a question. But [...] the public are clearly losers. It was an object to a small farmer to supply the markets, or the neighbourhood with the produce of his dairy and poultry yard. To a great farmer this is a matter of indifference. The consequence is, therefore, that there is neither so plentiful a supply of these, nor so good of the kind as formerly.’ (Plumptre 1812: xxii)
While Plumptre mixes the political with the practical business of women’s daily lives she does not suggest any practical resolutions to the political issues she raises, except perhaps the making of bread in the home, including the production of leaven, which precludes the need to further stretch the family purse with the purchase of yeast. Though Plumptre raises the topic of the loss of small farms, she cuts short further discussion stating that the subject ‘is not within the province of this work to canvass.’ (Plumptre 1812: xxiii). She positions herself as only a compiler, her purpose to collate scattered information into one volume for the purpose of instructing women in their traditional gender role (albeit a role she considers important) as ‘wife, mother, and mistress of a family’ (Plumptre 1810: viii). Domestic Management is book written by and for middle class women. It laments the needs of the working classes and dissipations of the rich but does not engage in social reform only private reform.
If we consider Hannah More’s ‘The Cottage Cook, or, Mrs. Jones’ Cheap Dishes; Shewing the Way to do much good with little Money’ from her Cheap Repository Tracts, published in 1795, we can see how More engages with the practicalities of social reform, illustrating how one person can effect real change within her community. Mrs. Jones, a middle class woman, left with a minimal income after the death of her husband, though with the help of the church, manages the engage in a dialogue with both the working class women of her neighbourhood and the aristocratic men who control much of the locality. More has her protagonist respond to very specific, practical social problems in the community. Mrs Jones discovers that the local baker is cheating people with small loaves, and brings him to the justice of the magistrate. She gets the local public houses closed. She helps bring about the building of a community oven having found that local cottages are being built without them, and with the money they have saved the local woman are able to bake bread and brew beer for their husbands thereby promoting domestic happiness. Mrs Jones also helps a woman set up a successful business selling fresh milk in small amounts people can afford. By utilizing her ‘feminine’ character traits of what we might term ‘people-skills’ she negotiates specific change.  Of course, ‘The Cottage Cook’, being a fictional work and can go beyond the remit of a manual, to suggest alternate realities.
‘Any thing in an admonitory strain is generally unwelcome, and slightly passed over by an affirmation, that “things are very well as they are.” If it be well to have all kinds of diseases amongst us, and to see the human race degenerate both in body and mind, as it invariably does, where luxury prevails in the higher classes and penury in the lower, there is nothing further to be done but to await the event in silence. But if health, vigour, activity, and manly spirit, are either of physical or moral value, we shall do well to cultivate the means of restoring them to the country, in the hope of seeing it once more elevated from the degeneracy, of which in various ways, it now exhibits but too many symptoms.’(Plumptre 1812 xxiii)
Within Domestic Manangement, or the Healthful cookery book, what Plumptre sees as the errors of modern diet find their cause not just in the hands of the cook, wife or mother, but in the hands of society at large, or more particularly the upper, middle and merchant classes. The refinements and excesses of the rich are gained at the expense of small farms, and the profits of merchants in corn and dairy products are gained at the expense of quality, honesty, and the health of the poor. Food is in this way politicised by Plumptre. ‘Diseases’, she writes ‘arise from our own mismanagement of ourselves.’ (Plumptre 1810: xvi) and primarily through ‘diet, as the principal, if not the sole cause.’ (Plumptre 1810: xvi) Plumptre is concerned with national, not just individual mismanagement. The ‘antidote’ which Plumptre wishes to administer is not just intended to neutralise culinary poisons, but also the moral poisons of vanity and greed, refinement and excess. 

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Plumptre, Annabella. Montgomery; or, scenes in Wales. In two volumes. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.
[http://galenet.galegroup.com.lcproxy.shu.ac.uk/servlet/ECCO. Accessed 1 May 2009]
Pollard, A. F. ‘Plumptre, James (1770–1832)’, rev. Elinor Shaffer, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/22404, accessed 8 April 2009]
Risse, Guenter B. “Medicine in the Age of Enlightenment.” Medicine In Society: Historical Essays. Andrew Wear (Ed.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1992. 149-195.
Russell, Corinna.‘Merry, Robert (1755–1798)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/18611, accessed 1 May 2009]
Shaffer, Elinor. ‘Plumptre, Anne (1760–1818)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/22399, accessed 8 April 2009]
                    Biographical entry for Anne which includes a sub-entry for Annabella Plumptre.
Stauffer, Andrew. “Burke, Coleridge, and the rage for indignation.” Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism. Cambridge  and New York: Cambridge University Press; 2005. 38-64.
Symons, Michael. “An Empire of Smoke.” A History of Cooks and Cooking. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press; 2000 (1998). 56-87.
                   Symons discusses the changes that occurred in private kitchens, notably the invention of closed stoves and the “Rumford Roaster”, over the course of the industrial revolution.
Watt, Robert. Bibliotheca Brittanica: A General Index of British and Foreign Literature. Vol. II – Authours. Edinburgh: Printed for Archibald Constable and Company Edinburgh; and Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green, London; 1824. 764. [http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=swMJAAAAQAAJ. Accessed: 4 Feb 2009]
                  Contemporary index listing all works published by Annabella Plumptre.
Wilson, C. Anne. “The Nineteenth Century and After.”Food and Drink in Britain: From the Stone Age to Recent Times. London: Constable and Company Ltd.;1973.418-421.
                  A brief overview of technological developments in the food industry and its effect on national health from 1800 to the present day.
Winterbotham, William. A selection of poems sacred and moral, by W. Winterbotham. ... Vol. 2. London, 1796[1797]. 2 vols. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.
[http://galenet.galegroup.com.lcproxy.shu.ac.uk/servlet/ECCO. Accessed 30 April 2009]
                 The poem “ode to moderation” appears this selection as authored by Robert Merry.

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