Food in Nineteenth-Century British History: Volume Three: Meals in Nineteenth-Century Britain

A curious phenomenon occurred in British food writing from around the 1860s. Publishers began printing books dedicated to specific meals. Breakfast. Luncheons. Afternoon Tea. Dinners. Until this time, most cookbooks had been hefty tomes containing hundreds of pages of recipes, but the new recipe books were slimmer and more accessible, catering for a broader readership. The appearance of focused cookbooks reveals the growing influence of advanced printing technologies and rising literacy levels combined with changes in social life and class relations that coalesced around food, granting mealtimes great importance. The sources reprinted in this volume were produced in response to the changing social dynamics that accompanied industrialisation, urbanisation and socio-economic modernisation.

Dr. Ian Miller is Senior Lecturer in Medical History at Ulster University. He has authored seven books on the history of medicine and food. Of particular relevance are Ian’s book-length studies on the force-feeding of hunger strikers (2016), Irish dietary change following the devastating Famine (2013) and the surprisingly interesting history of the Victorian stomach (2011).