What did Queen Victoria have for dinner? And how did this compare with the meals of the poor in the nineteenth century? This classic account of English food habits since the industrial revolution answers these questions and more.

In this companion volume to Useful Toil, John Burnett has drawn extensively on over eight hundred previously unpublished manuscripts. The result is a unique record of childhood that reveals in intimate detail the trials and hard-won triumphs of nineteenth-century working-class life. Besides affording rare insights into the developing child's world of dreams, hopes and fears, they reflect a crucial period in the evolution of a family tradition; a time when, to counteract the brutalizing pressures of urbanization and industrialization, ordinary people turned to each other for...