Everyone should read this telling document of social history. At the beginning of the last century vast swathes of the population worked in towns and cities earning ‘around about a pound a week’. The author details in blunt terms how it is impossible to raise a healthy family on this amount. And she is not shy with her criticism of all the do-gooders who think they could better and who brand these families as feckless spendthrifts. The birth of socialism and the recognition of the importance of women are important themes here too. Eye-opening. ( )

In 1909, Maud Pember Reeves and the Fabian Society conducted a social experiment in one of London’s poorer neighborhoods (in Lambeth Walk) to explore the daily lives and living conditions of those people. Round About a Pound a Week is a report of that venture, in which Pember Reeves outlines what she and her coworkers found. They focused on poor, working-class families, but she is quick to point out that the subjects of her study weren’t the poorest in London.

The book is divided into chapters that explore in (sometimes excruciating detail) housing, furniture, budgets, food, children, and attitudes to marriage. For example, Pember Reeves gives the exact breakdown of several families’ budgets. Interesting to note is how much these families spent on burial insurance. Pember Reeves does proselytize a little bit in her conclusions, but many of her observations are very astute and foresee the rise of child welfare and minimum wage laws.

In the introduction, Polly Toynbee compares the wages of the average manual laborer in Lambeth Walk in 1913 to their contemporaries today, and finds that not much has changed in 100 years—many people still live far below the official poverty line. Round About a Pound a Week is a fascinating social history; despite the minute breakdown that Pember Reeves gives on budgets and expenditures for her subjects, I really thought this book was really fascinating. ( )

25 Dec 2009 - from Matthew

I was thrilled when I saw this in the catalogue - I've heard about it but never seen a copy before. So it went straight on my wishlist and I bought it for myself from Matthew on my Autumn trip to the Shop.

I won't say I *enjoyed* this as it's not a book to enjoy as such, being a description of the pretty awful living conditions experienced by the honest, hardworking but underpaid and overburdened working classes just before the First World War. But I love sociology books, I love longitudinal studies, and I've read some of the books that followed this ("Four Years Old In The Urban Environment" and the more modern books about living on minimum wage by Polly Toynbee and Barbara Ehrenreich) so this was exciting to find both from a sociological and a historical point of view. Some of the comments about the women are a little naive but should be read as a product of their time, and this is such an important work, one of the first systematic examinations of the lot of people who should be able to afford to raise a family but struggle. The book ends with a call to arms to adopt a minimum wage and to stop assuming people can live in a "scientific" way on such a small wage. It's detailed, moving and I think still relevant today. ( )

This Persephone reprint of a 1912 Fabian Society tract was a Christmas present; like A Christmas Carol it served as a salutary contrast to the feasts and presents. Reeves reports on the outcome of an experiment in Edwardian Lambeth, in which the Fabian Women's Group recorded in meticulous detail the income and expenditure of poor families. Reeves emphasises firmly that these are the hardworking poor; the men do not drink, some hardly smoke, the women do not spend their few shillings at the pictures or on a new hat. Instead, the family's income is usually spent on rent for unhealthy, often vermin-ridden rooms, which work out dearer per cubic foot than a house in a middle-class area; burial insurance to avoid the shame of a pauper's funeral at the almost inevitable death of a child; and the bread, margarine and tea which forms the greater part of the family's diet - a diet less nutritious than that provided in contemporary workhouses. When rent, or the price of coal, or the breadwinner's travelling expenses, go up, the amount remaining for food goes down: the women and children will always eat less if that means paying the rent. Unhealthy accommodation and poor diet make for sickly and undersized children, although they are not without spirit: my favourite was Joey, who, when asked to explain the meaning of Christmas, replied "You get a bigger bit of meat on your plate than ever you seen before ... and when 'E dies, you get a bun". Reeves' tone is generally mild and neutral; the simple reporting of the Women's Group discoveries is shocking enough without emphasis, and the point is clearly made: you cannot raise a healthy family on round about a pound a week. In her final chapter Reeves calls for the introduction of a minimum wage, and for the State - which has already taken some responsibility for children by prohibiting child labour - needs to meet the other half of this bargain by ensuring they are properly housed and nourished, through grants to parents. The book gives great insight into women's lives at this time, of both the Lambeth mothers and the rather ghostly "visitors" who helped them track their budgets and expenditures, and who are often kind, sometimes patronising, but usually generous in their view of what makes a good parent and a good housekeeper. I wish it had not reminded me so forcibly of David Widgery's Some Lives, published in 1992 and showing families struggling with the same problems: little money, poor food and poor housing, and consequent illness and death. ( )