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the figures which are ever around us now, and the bulges and circumferences of the days of hoops and bustles. It was an occasion which it is almost criminal to have missed. This is a book which will give plenty to talk about; and we must admit that to be no mean achievement when we consider that it is down the 19th century that Mrs Peel has gone mining for 80 per cent. of her ore and nuggets.

For, truth to say, it is a mine which has been so industriously delved that one might think all that could glitter must have been extracted long ago. But yet we shall talk much over Mrs Peel's book, if I mistake not, for the details which she has brought us out of that wonderful century. It is her sumptuary chapters, her discussions on what things of domestic use cost and have cost, her family budgets now and at different times in the century, that will capture us. For most of us, not being Squires of Blankney, the saying that 'we all think a great deal too much about our money' is true, doubtless; even though it carry with it a savour of heroic counsel. That most of us do think a great deal about money is true without the moral tang.

It is not exactly the century that Mrs Peel discusses. From 1820 to 1920 her hundred years run. Neither is it all her budgets that we shall study with personal zest. She begins to treat of her great theme in Chapter III-'Life in Palaces'—the inebriety of King George IV and of King William; the sobriety introduced at Court by Queen Victoria, and so on-sketches that are familiar. She continues her studies through the classes, to the cottage and the slum. To most of us, poor and passing mediocrities, neither Alpha nor Omega of the social scale, our knowledge of palaces or of cottages comes mainly by glimpses through windows or doors. We do not expect to be kings: we hope not to be slumdwellers. So we read the budgets of palaces and slums with the admiration or distress befitting the subject; yet with no rise of temperature. But when Mrs Peel conducts us from palaces to the mansions of the rich, and so on through the dwellings of the middle-class and the lower-middle; well, there, somewhere, we are at home; because to most of us has been vouchsafed the privilege now and then of entry into rich houses, while

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lawful occasions may even have summoned us into those of the lower-middle.' Somewhere, moreover, in this long gamut we shall have actually touched our own place, our own income, and then it is no longer, 'I wonder how Dives gets along in that great house,' or 'how Lazarus makes those two ends meet'; it is 'that's ourselves-now, how can she say we ought to be able to live on that?' Inevitably there is the servant problem, which was so much a factor in the difficulties, financial and otherwise, of domestic life then, almost as now. So, if your guests or your cooks are late for dinner you may serve up all the materials for a good dish of talk, if no more, in that cold quarter of an hour, if this book is at hand upon the table and ready to be opened at the right page. Anywhere about the middle of the book will do-say Chapters VII to XIII for preference.

She tells us of a country house, only named as C Hall, but evidently of a large size, where in 1860 or so, 'Household accounts show that in winter time, on an average one ton of coal per day was consumed.' With our green experience of the longest coal strike on record, this seems much. Let us come down to more modest and common measures. From The Cook's Oracle,' date 1821-22, Mrs Peel extracts a table of expenses for a family of three in the parlour, two maids and a man, allowance being made for a dinner-party once a month.' The yearly expenditure in such a household is given at 3201. Of course, no rent or rates or house repairs are in this total, nor is any allowance made for wine, without which we hardly know whether any guests would have been found to come to the monthly dinner-party. Table ale,' however—rather a washy and watery sound about this beverage, is there not?-is put down at 251. a year. From the above total, if we deduct, as Mrs Peel notes:

'coals, washing and table ale-757.—that leaves 245l., which is practically 47. 158. a week or roughly 168. per head for food and cleaning materials in a household "where there is plenty of good provisions, but no affectation of profusion." Such living, in 1913, might have cost 12s. a head; while, in 1920, 17. a head per week might cover the cost. One must remember, however, that dinner-parties in 1822 were costly affairs, for

each of the two or three courses consisted of a vast number of dishes.'

Probably most readers will be surprised to see that the cost of living in 1820 was a third as much again as in 1913. The rise since the war will not be a surprise at all. The last item of the list in 'The Cook's Oracle' is pleasant: Sundries and Forgets.' 50l. out of the 3201. total is allowed for these. Forgets' is good.

Mrs Peel might have been a little more exactly enlightening about her dates, now and again; but apparently it is of about the middle of the 19th century that she writes:

'For the younger army officers in the less expensive regiments an income of 4007. a year all told was considered sufficient for a young couple to begin upon, while many curates and their families subsisted upon 150l. or 2007. a year. Incomes of between 400l. and 800l. a year were considered comfortable means for country clergy and Civil Servants. . . . In 1875, Mrs Humphry Ward, then a young married woman with two babies, was living at Oxford. It was possible, she says, "to keep as many little nursery maids as one required on 8007. or 900l. a year, which was about the income that she and her husband jointly earned."

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From a collection of household budgets, it seems that in 1890 a Colonel, commanding his regiment, with wife and three children under seven, found it none too easy to manage on an income varying between 1400l. and 1500l. a year, this being "because we are always moving about, which adds to our expenses. If we could settle down in the country on 13007. I could manage most comfortably."

'A mother of two daughters living in good society in London considered that in 1913 "young people could begin on 8007. with hope of some increase of income: now (1920) I hope neither of my children will marry on less than 10007., and it will be hard enough to do on that, even though nowadays no one hampers themselves with large families."

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There is much more in this kind, more budgets, various estimates; but enough has been cited to show that much is given us to discuss, to disagree with, to get excited about, and over which to break up domestic peace. And what more should we ask of a book than that?

Other chapters tell of changes that we well knowVol. 248.-No. 491.

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as from a slow-going to a quickly moving time, from a time when people had no book-learning at all to our present state of educational imperfection, from a time when no man was permitted to smoke tobacco in the house to the smoking by both sexes and all sizes anywhere and everywhere. An excellent change is noted in greater humanity shown to the lower animals, although Mrs Peel is constrained to tell us of an aunt— not her own but a correspondent's, and again the date is left a little sketchy, but may be nearly conjectured from the surroundings-who, when of a morning, she gave out to the cook the groceries from the store:

'wore an apron, goloshes, and a silk handkerchief tied over her cap. She was then a small fragile woman of about fiftyseven, with white hair, brilliant blue eyes, and single eye-glass, and the spirit of a Napoleon. The little dear was devoted to animals, but owned with shame that she had a naughty love for a cock-fight. She wore white lace caps, generally adorned by a blue ribbon bow, and in the morning a little black silk, lace-frilled apron; all middle-aged women wore caps then.'

A fascinating little figure; but at a cock-fight! Mrs Peel casts an illuminating and an entertaining searchlight now and then on the life below stairs-not so freeand-easy as you might ignorantly imagine; but, on the contrary, fast bound by etiquette. There was 'a servant problem' then-even at Mrs Peel's earliest then-as now. The servants have much changed. But human nature is unchanged, so our forefathers groaned and grumbled much as we groan and grumble. From the point of view which we, highly educated by the modern servant, have so painfully attained, we may think that they had mighty little to grumble about. Some of the old family servants were of a devotion which we do not now find. The type is as extinct as the Dodo, or the English squire. We may permit ourselves a doubt, however, whether the Squire of Blankney could ever have had anything but loving service, even as we can have no possible doubt that all of his household found themselves treated with a kindness and liberality beyond their merits. Mr Chaplin was, however, as much an exception as were widows in the opinion of Mr Weller, senior.

It is almost comforting that Mrs Jane Carlyle found the British workman much that we have fondly believed

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only a prolonged course of Trade Unionism has brought him to. I have often said,' she writes, that I couldn't be at the trouble to hate any one; but now decidedly I hate our Mr The Mr, thus left blank, was apparently by profession, though not by performance, a paperer and painter. His conduct has been perfectly shameful; not a promise kept, and not even an apology for breaking them. I have ceased to write to him, to send any messages to him. I merely pray God to "very particularly damn him." Whether any special providence did visit the victim of the invocation and the split infinitive we are not told; but the whole sentiment of the passage breathes the spirit which we had ignorantly thought was only to be provoked by the modern plumber. Perhaps, however, it took less than the modern plumber to provoke Mrs Jane Carlyle.

Mrs Peel quotes Thackeray's advice to the gentleman in Hobson's Choice,' who is thinking of engaging a manservant. The advice, to put it in a word, is 'Don't.' Parlour-maids are better. I like them, I own,' says Mr Hobson. 'I like to be waited on by a neat-handed Phyllis of a parlour-maid, in a nice-fitting gown and a pink ribbon on to her cap.' Phyllises, neat-handed and otherwise, had come much into vogue before the Great War, and were ubiquitous during its course; but until towards the end of the last century it is not to be denied that gentlefolk hardly thought it was 'gentlemanly '—the word had not quite gone out then-to have the front door opened by a woman servant. Probably the strict belowstairs etiquette had its uses, as well as the ceremony above stairs from which it was reflected. Questions of procedure have to be answered by rule; otherwise they will only be answered by unruliness.

'Visiting servants,' Mrs Peel tells us, 'were given the precedence of their employers, in some cases being addressed by their employer's names.' Yes, we know that; but consider the nicety of the following case under that dispensation. 'One of two gentlemen who shared the services of a valet-but can it have been a fully self-respecting gentleman's gentleman who allowed himself to be thus divided?—

"relates that "Henry came to me yesterday and said, 'If you

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