In Charles Dickens' The Pickwick Papers, the irrepressible Sam Weller offers an observation that would have struck his readers as plain common sense: "Poverty and oysters always seem to go together." To a modern diner, for whom half a dozen oysters on ice is one of the more expensive things on a restaurant menu, the line sounds like a misprint. But Weller was right about his own time. In the nineteenth century the oyster was the food of the poor — cheap, abundant, sold by the barrelful from street stalls, and swallowed in staggering quantities by London's working class. The transformation of the oyster from pauper's staple to luxury delicacy is one of the great inversions in the history of food, and it was driven by simple greed and simpler biology.
A city built on shells
The waters around Britain had for centuries teemed with the native oyster, Ostrea edulis, a species prized even by the Romans, who exported British oysters back to Italy. By the Victorian era, vast natural beds along the English coast and in the Thames estuary were being harvested on an industrial scale to feed the exploding population of London. The numbers involved were colossal. Oysters arrived in the capital by the cartload and the boatload, and were consumed in the hundreds of millions each year. They were sold cheaply enough that a labourer could buy a few for coppers, and they turned up everywhere in the diet of the poor — eaten raw from stalls, added to stews and pies to eke out scarce meat, and stuffed into that most Victorian of dishes, beefsteak and oyster pudding, where they served as a cheap bulking agent rather than a treat.
The oyster's cheapness was a function of sheer abundance. As long as the beds could be dredged faster than the demand grew, prices stayed low and the mollusc remained the protein of the tenements. But abundance of that kind is a trap, because it invites the harvesting that destroys it.
The collapse
Over the course of the nineteenth century the great oyster beds were dredged relentlessly and, in the end, ruinously. Overharvesting stripped the beds faster than the slow-breeding oysters could replenish themselves. Populations that had seemed inexhaustible thinned and then crashed. The problem was compounded by the filthy state of Victorian waterways: as London poured its sewage into the Thames and coastal rivers, the estuaries that had nurtured the oyster beds became polluted, and the shellfish, which feed by filtering water, concentrated whatever contamination surrounded them.
That last fact proved commercially fatal. Oysters are efficient filter feeders, and an oyster grown in sewage-tainted water can harbour the bacteria of disease. In the early twentieth century a series of typhoid outbreaks was traced to contaminated oysters, and public confidence collapsed almost overnight. A food that had been the cheap, everyday sustenance of the masses suddenly carried the stigma of deadly infection. Demand fell, beds were condemned, and the trade that had fed London for generations shrank drastically.
The great inversion
The combined effect of overharvesting, pollution and disease scares was to make the oyster scarce, and scarcity did to the oyster what it does to any commodity: it drove up the price. As the native beds gave out and supply dwindled, oysters ceased to be a food anyone could afford in quantity. They passed out of the diet of the poor entirely and, within a couple of generations, became a delicacy associated with wealth, seaside indulgence and fine dining. The very same creature that Sam Weller had linked with poverty became a symbol of luxury — served on crushed ice with a wedge of lemon, priced by the individual shell rather than the barrel.
Places that had built their prosperity on oysters, such as Whitstable in Kent and Colchester in Essex — famous for its native oysters since Roman times — reinvented themselves around the mollusc's new prestige, celebrating with festivals what had once been mere bulk food. The native oyster never fully recovered its former numbers; much of the oyster eaten today is the faster-growing introduced Pacific species, farmed rather than dredged from wild beds.
The oyster's story is a parable about the economics of nature. A wild resource that seems limitless is priced as if it is worthless, and so it is consumed without restraint until it is gone; and only in its scarcity does it acquire the value that might, too late, have justified protecting it. The Victorian poor ate their oysters by the million because they were cheap, and they were cheap because they were abundant, and the eating destroyed the abundance. The luxury on the modern ice platter is, in a sense, a monument to the beds that were dredged to nothing.
Quiz nuggets
- In Dickens' The Pickwick Papers, Sam Weller says "poverty and oysters always seem to go together," reflecting the oyster's status as cheap Victorian food.
- The native British oyster is Ostrea edulis, prized and exported to Italy even in Roman times.
- Victorian London consumed oysters by the hundreds of millions per year, often as a cheap bulking ingredient in pies and puddings.
- Overharvesting plus Thames sewage pollution collapsed the beds, and early-twentieth-century typhoid outbreaks were traced to contaminated oysters.
- Colchester in Essex and Whitstable in Kent remain famous oyster towns; much oyster now eaten is the introduced Pacific species.