Sydney Whiting, Memoirs of a Stomach (London: Chapman and Hall, 1855), engraving.

Infamous Pumpkin:
Memoirs of a Stomach

Many people thought there was no truer or funnier way to express a man’s stupidity or excesses than to use a pumpkin. In Memoirs of a Stomach, the pumpkin serves as crowning symbol of this portrait of gluttony. Likewise, in Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Ichabod Crane appeared the fool when it turned out that the headlike object tossed at Ichabod Crane by the Headless Horseman was nothing but a pumpkin.