The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed by Judith Flanders

Author:Judith Flanders [Flanders, Judith]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780007404988
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2013-12-12T00:00:00+00:00

Friday:

Breakfast Potted meat [made with remnants from various meals during the week], broiled kidneys, poached eggs

Dinner: Fried soles, mutton from Wednesday’s dinner stewed with pickles, veal cutlets, brussels sprouts, mashed potatoes; cheese

Kitchen: Cold pie from Thursday, leftover meat, potatoes, rice pudding

Saturday:

Breakfast: Kippered salmon, mutton chops from Tuesday’s dinner, cold sole from Friday’s dinner, preserves

Dinner: ‘Palestine’ [Jerusalem artichoke] soup, calf’s head (half), bacon, broccoli, mashed potatoes; raisin pudding, cheese

Kitchen: Mutton ‘etc.’, or general meat leftovers, potatoes, currant dumplings39

The two major changes that took place over the century were the times at which meals were served (and what they were called) and the manner of serving them. The timing of meals was considered of essential importance, in terms of both timekeeping itself and the social implications of when one ate each meal. Dinner had, earlier, been a meal eaten at midday; supper was served early in the evening, and tea came after, before bed. By mid-century, when most middle-class men were no longer working at home, dinner was moved to the later hour of five or six, after the office workers returned. From this hour, those who did not have to get up for work the next morning pushed dinner ever later, as a sign of leisure. The upper middle classes copied them, in order to indicate their own gentility, and the middle classes, in turn, followed their lead, in order to separate themselves from those beneath them. Improved gas and oil lighting also meant that eating after dark was no longer the expense it had been earlier, and gradually, as the century progressed, only the elderly, the stubbornly old-fashioned or those so low on the social scale as to be unconcerned ate their dinner during the day.

Ruskin, after his marriage in 1848, entertained frequently, having guests to dinner at six o’clock: his parents disapproved of this as ‘unhealthy’ – unhealthily late, that is. Mrs Gaskell would most likely have won their approval: her family ate dinner between four and five (unless, like Dora Spenlow’s aunts in David Copperfield, the elder Ruskins thought the even older fashion for dinner at three was more suitable).40 Both the Ruskins and the Gaskells expected to have tea three or four hours after their dinner. Henry and Augustus Mayhew mocked the fashionable world in their novel Living for Appearances, the story of an ultra-smart couple who dare do nothing that is not approved of by the beau monde:

It was only three o’clock, p.m., and yet Mr. Wellesley Nicholls and his wife were about to dine. Such a flagrant transgression of the rules of fashionable or civilized society was the more remarkable because Mr. Wellesley Nicholls had often been heard … to express himself in very forcible terms on the disgusting and tradesman-like custom of early dining … he had been known to exclaim, ‘Better is a dry crust and gentility at seven, than baked mutton and vulgarity at two.’ His usual hour for eating was seven.

As, however, he was forced by circumstances that day to dine at three, ‘The parlour blinds were carefully drawn down.

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