Round About a Pound Week

From 1909 to 1913, undaunted by the proposition that a 'bi-weekly visit to Lambeth is like a plunge into Hades', the Fabian Women's Group recorded the daily budgets of thirty families there. In 1913 they published this unique record in Round About a Pound a Week. We learn about family life, births, marriages and deaths; of grinding work carried out on a diet of little more than bread, jam and margarine. We learn how they coped with damp, vermin and bedbugs; how they slept - four to a bed, in banana crates; how they washed, cooked, cleaned, scrimped for furniture and clothes, saved for all too frequent burials...This classic text is one of the most important and vivid historical portraits of the daily life of working people in the early part of the twentieth century.