Round About a Pound a Week

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.