Round About a Pound a Week (Persephone Books) (Volume 79)

This is a study of working-class life in Lambeth, London, in the early years of the 20th century that is witty, readable, poignant and fascinating.

In 1909 a group of women, all of them members 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 and in 1912 these were written up as a twenty-page Fabian Tract which Maud Pember Reeves (1865-1953) and her co-author Charlotte Wilson decided to turn into the more snappily titled Round about a Pound a Week. The sixteen chapters, covering such topics as Housing, Thrift, Food and Mothers’ Days, resulted in a book of stunning interest and originality which has never really been rivalled in the nearly 100 years since first publication in 1913.