Dr Rachel Rich

Scholars of timekeeping have assumed that time was linear and mechanical in the nineteenth century, but have failed to account for women’s temporal experiences. The absence of women’s timekeeping practices has led to a definition of modernity and modern temporality which is limited, failing to take into account continuities with ‘traditional’ modes of timekeeping, and ignoring women’s presence in modern, public timescapes. This paper seeks to redress this imbalance by looking at clock and watch ownership, women’s diaries, and cookery books in order to create a nuanced understanding of the complex ways in which women told time, marked time, and experienced the passage of time. Middle-class women and men cohabited in a culture that placed great value on time as a commodity, which had to be spent wisely in order to denote respectability. Yet paradoxically, women had to adhered to this highly structured timekeeping regime, while also ostentatiously displaying ease and leisure. They filled their homes with clocks and watches, yet used these as decorative rather than functional items. By examining various ways in which women marked time, this paper will argue for the need for a new understanding of what time was in nineteenth-century France.

Adivce books were widely published and purchased in London and Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century. They were available on nearly all aspects of life, including what how, when and where to eat Adivce literature provided a set of guidelinesfor how to decorate the dinning room. The way that space was crucial to middle-class perceptions of the role of dinning both in everyday life and for special occassions. The dinning room was one of the most important rooms in every middle-class home,in London and even more so in Paris. Though fashions changed, certain basic ideas about the space and design of this room, whose role was simultaneously public and private, decorative and functional, remained constant throughout the period. Table settings differed between private family meals and more formal dinnier parties and, at every occasion, important messages were conveyed by the physical apperance of the room inwhich meals were consumed. The imposition of a set of standards of spartical and decorative ideals was a key feature of how the bourgeoisie placed of their stamp of the environments they inhabitated. Looking at the dinning room from three analytic perpectives, of architecture, furniture and table decoration, it is possible to examine the way a fairly unified ideal of middle-class dinning room design was disseminated through the popular genre oof advice literature.

This article examines female-authored cookbooks in the 1860s, focusing in particular on the little-known work of Georgiana Hill, and the famous life of Isabella Beeton and her Book of Household Management. Looking at the state of cookbook publishing in the 1860s, and considering both the tone and content of these publications, the author argues that taking Hill’s authorial voice into account can enhance our understanding of how women operated in the highly competitive cookbook market. Hill’s and Beeton’s work, alongside that of Eliza Acton and numerous lesser-known cookery writers, suggests ways in which authors were conscious of addressing multiple audiences, including mistresses and servants, and both confident and incompetent cooks. At the same time, the frequent appearance of both European and Indian recipes suggests that the middle-class cookbook market made assumptions about the sophistication and cosmopolitanism of the domestic dinner table. The article goes on to investigate Hill’s biography, and her navigation of the publishing industry, analysing in particular the archives of George Routledge and Co., in order to argue that even while it offered female cookery writers the opportunity to capitalize on their expertise, this was still an industry in which it was difficult for a woman to be fairly rewarded for her work.

In the second half of the nineteenth century domestic advice manuals applied the language of modern, public time management to the private sphere. This article uses domestic advice and cookery books, including Isabella Beeton's Book of Household Management, to argue that women in the home operated within multiple, overlapping temporalities that incorporated daily, annual, linear and cyclical scales. I examine how seasonal and annual timescales coexisted with the ticking clock of daily time as a framework within which women were instructed to organize their lives in order to conclude that the increasing concern of advice writers with matters of timekeeping and punctuality towards the end of the nineteenth century indicates not the triumph of 'clock time' but rather its failure to overturn other ways of thinking about and using time.

This dataset makes accessible the uniquely comprehensive dining records of King George III, Queen Charlotte, the Prince Regent, and their households during the declining years of the King (1788-1813). It includes a transcription and structuring of two volumes that outline day-by-day what members of the royal households were fed at each meal. It includes details of more than 40,000 plates of food from over 3,000 distinct recipes, recorded by the kitchen staff as part of their financial accountability, but offering historians a rich glimpse into the culture and consumption of two royal palaces, as well as the rich multicultural influences on eighteenth century cooking. The dataset includes a spreadsheet of all dishes, and an accompanying appendix that outlines our methodology and some suggestions for using the material effectively. Additional context and information about the records is available in: Adam Crymble; Sarah Fox; Rachel Rich; Lisa Smith, ‘Three Thousand Dishes on a Georgian Table: The Data of Royal Eating in England, 1788-1813’, Food & History, vol 21, no 2 (2023).

This data paper introduces and contextualises a new digital resource in food history that includes a digitisation and interpretation of two substantial kitchen ledgers from the palaces of King George III and his son (future) George IV of Britain, between 1788-1813. These bills of fare contain the daily food allocations of every table in the two palaces. They include more than 3,000 unique dish constructions and more than 40,000 served dishes. Each dish has been classified by a number of categories related to cooking, from details of key ingredients, to cooking method, resulting in over 1.3 million points of scholarly data about daily eating in Georgian Britain. Importantly the volumes digitised include two periods in which George III was suffering acutely from his mental health crises, raising important questions about dietetics in the period. The dataset is released openly with this article.

Bourgeois Consumption looks at how the middle classes in late nineteenth-century London and Paris used food and dining as forms of social expression and identity. This engaging treatise about how class and gender informed people’s eating habits focuses on the complex interactions between bodies, ritual and identity. Forgoing the traditional food history territory of recipes and ingredients in favor of how people ate in different circles, Bourgeois Consumption explores the role of real and imagined meals in shaping Victorian lives. The perception of the middle classes as rigid and upright, found in the extensive pages of their etiquette books, is contrasted with a more flexible and spontaneous bourgeoisie, gleaned from the pages of their own colorful memoirs, diaries and letters, leading us on a lively journey into eating spaces, mealtimes, manners, and social interactions between diners. Further, contrasting Paris with London reveals some of the ways each city shaped its inhabitants but, more surprisingly, throws up a range of similarities that suggest the middle classes were, in fact, a transnational class. Rachel Rich’s work will be of interest to anyone intrigued by the history of food, consumption and leisure, as well as to a broader audience curious about how the Victorian middle classes distinguished themselves through daily life and manners.

George III was a family man, a modest eater, and a thoughtful ruler who wrote about the big questions of the day, from royal sovereignty to the best methods of agriculture to feed a modern nation. His writings provide a glimpse of his version of monarchy, which placed him at the head of a national family, where he embodied the habits of self-regulation and temperance in keeping with the sensibilities of late eighteenth-century manhood. This article brings together George’s meals and his essays, considering the histories of food, masculinity, and self-fashioning, to argue that George was a monarch who embodied a new form of masculinity, as marked by his agricultural interests and insistence on a modest diet. His eating habits, along with his intellectual interests and public persona, bring us to the intersection between the private man and the public monarch. Drawing on newly digitised data, alongside contemporary caricatures and descriptions, and George’s own writing, we argue that moderation was central to George’s creation of an image that appealed to the emerging British nation of the late eighteenth century; food was central to this image, highlighting both his masculine self-control and his ability to be useful to the nation.