Product Description

This is an important study of working-class life in Lambeth in the early years of the twentieth century which even has tables of figures (weekly expenditure etc). But it is extremely readable, fascinating, poignant and compassionate - as well as being relevant today. In 1909 a group of women, all of them member's of the feminist, left-wing Fabian Women's Group, would regularly leave their comfortable homes in Kensington and Hampstead and call on forty-two families in Lambeth in order to interview them about their everyday life. They wrote down their findings in tiny lined notebooks and in 1912 these were written up as a twenty-page Fabian Tract, 'Family Life on a Pound a Week'.Once the tract had appeared Maud Pember Reeves turned it into "Round about a Pound a Week" with sixteen chapter's covering such topics as housing, thrift, food and mothers' days, producing a book of stunning interest and originality which has never really been rivalled in the hundred years since the first publication in 1913. 'A book addressed to a middle class world of power and condescension' - (Polly Toynbee), its mixture of factual rigour, wit and polemic remains unique.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #168241 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-23
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Review
'This book might have been joyless but isn't ... a classic study' Penelope Fitzgerald 'Classic, graphic account of the needy before the first world war' DAILY EXPRESS 'Fascinating ... I shall think of this book next time I'm stuck in a tesco checkout queue' DAILY MAIL 'As engrossing and necessary a read now as it was then.' SCOTSMAN 'Unique and highly readable.' SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY 'An intensely readable chunk of social history that should make us all profoundly appreciative of the here and now.' THE LADY 'Utterly fascinating.' THE TABLET

DAILY EXPRESS
'Classic, graphic account of the needy before the First World War'

VAL HENNESSEY, DAILY MAIL
'Fascinating ... I shall think of this book next time I'm stuck in a Tesco checkout queue'

Customer Reviews

Even Jamie Oliver couldn't have made it stretch
This is a fascinating - and very readable - study of how the vast majority of the population had to struggle, and not even all that long ago. Because Round About £1 A Week was all they had to manage on.
In 1909 a group of Fabian Society lady interviewers (middle-class Guardian-reading types!) began a study of 42 families living near Lambeth Walk, visiting them every week to interview them in depth about their everyday lives.
The shocking thing is that these families weren't slum dwellers. They deliberately left out the very poorest because they wanted to show that this was how the vast majority actually lived. £1 a week was the standard wage and these were the families of van-drivers, dustmen, plumbers' mates, bus-conductors, even policemen.
In fact, the investigators remark that all their preconceptions are overturned. Far from drinking away their wages, most of the married men can rarely afford a pint.
Some of the women are very good housekeepers; some were professional cooks before they married.
But there is simply no way that the money can stretch. We see their menus and their shopping lists ... the men get the best food, not out of chauvinism/selfishness but because you can't risk the breadwinner getting sick. The wife and kids have bread and scrape for breakfast and tea, plus their meagre dinner, maybe a stew from scraps of meat. They are fully aware that milk would be good for their children; but children never even taste fresh milk once they stop breastfeeding, it's too expensive; just one tin of condensed must stretch through a week in weak cups of tea. In fact, none of the advice commonly handed out by do-gooders is any use ... the women can't cook any better, because they can't afford fuel and they only possess one burned saucepan.
And every family is the same, it's not that some are more or less feckless. After the rent, the biggest expenditure is burial insurance because they can nearly all count on losing at least one child - and a paupers' burial is a great disgrace. Even so, children are still buried in common graves.
When children needed boots, it threw the budget completely out; the mother would have to pawn hers and do her shopping after dark so as not to be disgraced going out in her slippers.
Most of the families live in one or two rooms. In fact, it's such a struggle to keep things clean - and they can't afford soap, they even wash the kids' hair in washing soda! - that the interviewers conclude that families of slapdash mothers are the happiest; the women who try hardest have such an impossible task, it only makes them cranky.
What rather surprised me, is that the middle-class interviewers are wholeheartedly on the side of the workingclass mothers. There is no condescension, or hectoring them on how to manage to better. In fact, they agree that however hard you try, however you shop or cook, it is absolutely impossible to live decently/healthily on £1 a week.
A fascinating slice of social history, based on the interviewers' notebooks. My only quibble is that it does get a bit repetitive as Maud Pember Reeves makes the same points over again.

This book makes you appreciate how much you have.
We've all heard about poverty. Many of us have experienced it. But if you are reading this review from a computer screen and sitting on a chair as you do so, then chances are you are not experiencing the kind of appalling poverty this book depicts.

An under-lying theme in this book is one which any student of Marxism would recognize. Man is estranged from a natural and rewarding existence and enslaved to work as a cog in a capitalist mahcine which just about provides enough for the worker and his family (in the days before political correctness and feminism) to eat.

If you have enough to eat and a roof over your head this book will make you feel rich.