Round About a Pound a Week, By Maud Pember Reeves

"Had they been well housed, well fed, well clothed, and well tended, from birth, what kind of raw material would they have shown themselves to be," wondered the passionate campaigner Maud Pember Reeves as she gazed upon the impoverished children of London. Between 1909 and 1913, Reeves and other members of the Fabian Women's Group visited 42 families of manual workers in and around Lambeth Walk to record how they survived on low incomes. This reprinted 1913 book tirelessly and humanely examines the causes and effects of poverty, and chronicles the hardship of working-class life in the early 20th century in meticulous and moving detail.

Round About a Pound a Week combines the radical but practical approach of the Fabians with a new 20th-century feminism directed at the lives of working-class women. The researchers deliberately avoided special cases of penury in an attempt to show how the general standard of living among ordinary manual workers was below a level that could support good health and nutrition. The men worked in such occupations as bus conductor, packer of pottery, fry-fisher and butcher's assistant. Their incomes fluctuated wildly since they were on "zero-contracts", which meant they were paid for each day that they worked but could be laid off at any time.

The book chronicles what a family needs to survive materially (food and furniture) but also emotionally, listing "wisdom and loving-kindness... cleanliness and order" as qualities needed to raise a family on about £1 a week. What would Maud Pember Reeves make of society now, muses Polly Toynbee in her provocative introduction: she might despair at the near-death of the political spirit of Fabianism and the rise and rise of individualism.