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.
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The basic feature of English life during the first half of the nineteenth century was that of change — change from a small, mainly agricultural society to a large, industrial population which lived and worked in towns rather than villages. Population had first begun to grow noticeably in the middle of the eighteenth century, although at the first official census, taken in 1801, England and Wales could still only muster 8,900,000 inhabitants, scarcely more than one-third those of France, with whom we were now in mortal conflict. Within the next decade, however, nearly another million and a half were added to the English population, and by 1851 it had doubled to reach eighteen million. Various theories were advanced, and are still being advanced, in explanation of this phenomenal growth. The view that the main factor was a fall in the death rate, and particularly in child mortality, has recently come under attack, and opinion now generally favours a rise in births due to a higher rate and earlier age of marriage. The important point here is that a population which doubled in the remarkably short space of fifty years had somehow to be fed.
The problem was complicated by the fact that the increase in total numbers was accompanied by a marked shift in the balance between town and country. In 1815, England was already in the process of transition into an industrial society: factories, coal mines, and iron works were beginning to exert a magnetic effect, attracting men and women into the industrial midlands and north, and from rural areas into towns and suburbs. Urbanization was the most important and most easily recognizable social consequence of the Industrial Revolution. In 1801 only one-fifth of the population were town-dwellers, four-fifths rural; by 1851 the proportions were evenly balanced, while by 1911 they were completely reversed. During the first fifty years of the nineteenth century, Manchester grew from a town of 75,000 to a bustling city of 303,000 at the centre of the Lancashire cotton industry. The mechanization of cloth weaving raised Leeds from 53,000 to 172,000 and Bradford from 13,000 to 104,000.1 Hardware trebled the size of Birmingham, steel nearly quadrupled that of Sheffield. Throughout the industrial areas of the country people were, in the dramatic words of Ruskin, ‘thrown back in continually closer crowds upon the city gates’. Thus, not only had an ever-growing population to be fed, but it was one which, as the century progressed, became more and more divorced from the land which had formerly supplied it. Even if the England of 1850 had still been able to feed itself, there would have been half the nation — the new nation of town-dwellers — necessarily dependent on others for the supply of its daily bread. Factory workers and coal-miners, nail-makers and framework-knitters, had neither land nor leisure to grow food for themselves.
These demographic changes had highly important food consequences. The growth of urban life encouraged competition and social imitation among all classes, leading ultimately to far more sophisticated tastes and eating habits. The outstanding examples of this are white bread and tea, both of which were, in the eighteenth century, the luxuries of the well-to-do. The labourer had eaten brown household bread made, in the south, of wheat, but over wide areas of the north and west more frequently of barley, rye, and oats, and had drunk home-brewed beer when he could afford it. Already by 1815, however, wheat had become the almost universal bread corn of England. Sir William Ashley’s estimate that in 1795 wheat constituted 95 per cent of the nation’s bread2 is almost certainly premature, for mixtures of grains continued to be used regularly in country districts for many years to come, especially in years of scarcity and high prices. But townspeople, however poor, ate wheat bread in the nineteenth century, and, it seems, no other. Moreover, they ate white bread — the product of ‘high milling’ and total removal of the bran. This change in public taste had originated in fashionable London society early in the previous century, reaching provincial towns like Norwich by about 1745:3 by the time of Waterloo the object of every baker was to produce the whitest possible loaf, and household bread had all but disappeared. The history of tea-drinking shows a similar progress, from the occasional luxury of the urban rich in the early eighteenth century to the national beverage of all classes by 1850. Sir Frederic Eden noted in 1797 that small quantities had already found their way into the poorest labourer’s diet in the south and east of England,4 and by the 1840s tea had taken its place alongside white bread in the poverty-line dietaries described by Engels and other contemporary writers. The apparent contradiction is easily explained. What had been mere adjuncts at the tables of the wealthy now often constituted virtually the total diet of those who could afford no more. White bread was more palatable and easily digestible than the coarser household bread, and, when necessary, could be eaten without meat, cheese, or even butter: in this case, tea became even more important, because it converted a cold meal into the semblance of a hot one.
In the new urban environment, traditional rural skills, of which domestic baking and brewing were economically the most important, gradually decayed and ultimately disappeared over wide areas of the country; where they did survive — often in the households of those who could afford to employ domestic servants — it was for reasons of preference, not cost. This was, no doubt, an inevitable consequence of industrialization and the division of labour. Baking and brewing were long, tedious operations, the materials sometimes hard to come by in small quantities, and the results often uncertain. In the towns there was the permanent temptation of the nearby baker’s shop or public house selling, often at little greater cost and on credit terms, an apparently more attractive article than could be produced at home. Where the housewife was also engaged in paid work and had little time to spare in the kitchen, these arguments against domestic baking and brewing became compelling.
Oddly enough, the midlands and north of England clung longer to home baking than the south. Almost certainly, the main reason for this was the easier availability of fuel for the oven, still prohibitively dear in the south, even after the railways had begun to bring down costs in the 1840s. Whereas in Berkshire in 1831 there was one baker to every 295 inhabitants, in Cumberland the ratio was only one to every 2,200.5 In Manchester, in 1804, there had not been a single public baker,6 although professional baking subsequently made rapid progress, for eleven years later only ‘half the population was said to prepare its own bread’. The use of public ovens in some northern industrial towns was a compromise which persisted for some time, but as the century progressed the majority of the urban working classes came to rely entirely on the baker for their daily bread. In rural areas, too, home baking was declining, though less rapidly. Bakers had first appeared in the villages of southern England in the middle of the eighteenth century, and enclosures and the Speenhamland system of poor relief soon contributed to their growth. Traditionalists and domestic economists thereafter complained in vain at the advance of a system which was essentially linked with loss of independence and increasing rural poverty: ‘How wasteful,’ thundered Cobbett, ‘and, indeed, how shameful, for a labourer’s wife to go to the baker’s shop: and how negligent, how criminally careless of the welfare of his family must the labourer be who permits so scandalous an use of the proceeds of his labour.’7 By mid-century, it would appear, the art of home baking was almost forgotten in Kent, Surrey, Middlesex, and Sussex, and of the southern counties only Suffolk and Devonshire still retained a reputation for their cottage bread.8 Among northern counties, Yorkshire housewives in particular resisted the temptations of bought bread and continued their laborious twice-weekly bakings.
The fate of domestic baking was shared by that of home brewing. In earlier times the housewife brewed as naturally as she baked, and prided herself on her skill in producing different varieties, strengths, and flavours of beer. The demise of domestic brewing is part of the wider story of the collapse of the economic position of the rural labourer which occurred during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Brewing, even more than baking, presupposed a standard of living above mere subsistence. To provide the necessary equipment of vats, mash-tuns, pails, and barrels was an initial expense which even the partial Cobbett put in the region of £10, and thereafter to buy regular supplies of costly malt and hops throughout the year placed a strain on resources which very few labourers in the pauperized parishes of the south and east could hope to meet. Even if these difficulties could be overcome, there remained one which could well be insuperable — scarcity of fuel. By the end of the eighteenth century many labourers went fireless on occasion, unable to afford the fuel for ordinary heating or cooking, let alone the large quantities necessary for brewing. As acre after acre of common land was enclosed the fuel of the poor grew ever scarcer: whereas in the past the labourer had been able to gather sticks, logs, and brushwood merely for the trouble of it, he now had to buy, or risk pilfering from the hedgerows. The disappearance of free fuel, and the high cost of coal in many areas, had profound effects on the labourer’s diet and standard of living generally, and it was useless for philanthropists, however well-meaning, to criticize the poor for not baking their own bread or brewing their own beer. Actual observers, like the Rev. David Davies, who carried out a survey of poverty in his Berkshire parish, saw the difficulty clearly enough: ‘Where fuel is scarce and dear, poor people find it cheaper to buy their bread of the baker than to bake f...
