On Corpulence

Found on The Shelves of The London Library #3

by William Banting

Fat seemed to be getting fatter under Queen Tweedledum and Tweedledee; Joe "the fat boy" in The Pickwick Papers ; even the first known report of childhood obesity in 1859. But for the short, corpulent (and extremely success- ful) undertaker William Banting, the overweight life was not a bundle of laughs. It was only at the age of sixty, when he was unable to even "attend to the little offices which humanity requires, without considerable pain and difficulty", that he finally stumbled upon a an early incarnation of the Atkins diet. Butter, potatoes, sugar, milk--all gone, in favour of fish, meat, dry toast (and seven glasses of claret a day).

And with the diet for the body came a diet for the for Lewis Carroll, an indiscriminate intake of "fatty" information was just as harmful as carbohydrates--and in today's society of ever-increasing "consumption" of food, news and even relationships, Banting and Carroll are remarkably ahead of their time.

The books in "Found on the Shelves" have been chosen to give a fascinating insight into the treasures that can be found while browsing in The London Library. Now celebrating its 175th anniversary, with over seventeen miles of shelving and more than a million books, The London Library has become an unrivalled archive of the modes, manners and thoughts of each generation which has helped to form it.

From essays on dieting in the 1860s to instructions for gentlewomen on trout-fishing, from advice on the ill health caused by the "modern" craze of bicycling to travelogues from Norway, they are as readable and relevant today as they were more than a century ago--even if contemporary dieticians might not recommend quite such a regular intake of brandy!

28 pages, Paperback

Published August 4, 2018

Reviews

[Jules · Rating 3 out of 5]

⭐:3

William Banting is a briliant writer and both him and Lewjs Carroll make a couple of good points but also a fair amount of points that you should take with a pinch of salt.

[Siobhan Brown · Rating 2 out of 5]

I finished this over my commutes to and from work. This is well written and William Banting is clearly very well versed, unfortunately his ego got in the way and decided to over annunciate quite a plain topic.

Ultimately this could have been a long paragraph, however one positive is I would recommend this book to school kids who need to learn to skim read in order to absorb content without wasting too much time.

[Amy Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Do you even lift, my good man?’

[nicothyun · Rating 3 out of 5]

I finished this book during a commute to work. It’s short, succinct and to the point, containing two essay pieces from William Banting & Lewis Carroll on corpulence of the body and mind. I rather enjoyed Lewis Carroll’s essay for I had always held a devious, desperate hunger for more information and knowledge. I recall my twenty-year-old bright-eyed esurience to travel beyond the confines of city-state Singapore: borne out of an intensity to escape the homogeneity, I had wanted to explore and to unravel the world in its splendidness and vastness. It took me awhile to realize that the self-education or the bildungsroman that I had wanted to craft and grow my Selfhood came purely and mostly from within. It didn’t matter where I was at - though beleaguered circumstances and difficult life’s scenario would more so stump and force me into uncomfortable situations of growth - growth was present everywhere. All it took was a willingness and criticality to see beyond the ordinary lens and an intrinsic desire to force myself into areas and spaces for growth.

Even then, I had loosely confounded my fervour chase for self-growth as a fervour chase to accumulate and to acquire knowledge and information. I seek ways to quantify my acquisition of knowledge through books, reading and travel. The number of books read, articles pocketed, 30 minutes of reading on the bus (…) yet this ravenousness for knowledge, if not pruned and trimmed, is mere overload and corpulence of the mind. There ought to be an active process of reading and analyzing when it comes to the books and articles I consume. Consumption for the sake of consumption is naught if it is not exercised. As such, this shall be my attempt to revive my reading or reflection log to force me to critically and reflexively muse over the contents that I am reading and consuming - be it through the medium of film, poetry, books and videos.

[sevdah]

Second volume in my quest to read all the books in Pushkin Press & London Library "Found on the shelves" series. This time, the year is 1864, and William Banting fights obesity with the advice of various doctors: he goes to Turkish baths, cleans his ears, and starts shampooing his hair, but, strangely enough, nothing helps until he changes his diet. He then writes a pamphlet about it, which goes on to become a massive bestseller, and this is the full text of all four editions - including some answers to questions he received after the initial publication (such joy to be informed that smoking is not off limits if you wanted to lose weight!). The second part of the book is a grumpy essay by Lewis Carroll, in which he writes how bad it is to read with vigorous appetite, especially silly novels. Boohoo.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two nineteenth-century essays which hold very true today. Obesity is caused by an excess of food and a lack of exercise - surprise, surprise - and it helps to actually think about what you've read if you don't want it to go in one ear and straight out of the other. Although these essays don't say anything world-changing, I do like a good bit of plainly-stated common sense, and these deliver.

[Achab_ · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting little book. The second part on feeding the mind was great.