‘A knowledge of proletarian conditions,’ wrote Engels in 1845, ‘is absolutely necessary to be able to provide solid ground for socialist theories, on the one hand, and for judgements about their right to exist, on the other; and to put an end to all sentimental dreams and fancies pro and con.’ The burgeoning of social and labour history in Britain in the past twenty years has been directed primarily towards increasing our knowledge of these conditions. There have been studies of paupers and poverty, housing, leisure, conditions of work and apprenticeship, diet, drink, welfare, crime and punishment, education, and so on, not to mention the countless publications on specific industries and industrial areas, on the rise of labour and on the political organization of labouring men.

These histories have been written from a wide variety of ideological standpoints, but they are all, more or less, materialist; they accept that the material conditions of life are key determinants of personal and social behaviour. The strength of this underlying consensus makes the apparent neglect of the foundations of these material conditions – personal income and expenditure – a surprising one. There are, of course, a number of indices of prices and wages, and these have been very thoroughly reworked and analysed at a national level by Charles Feinstein, but little attention has been paid to the way in which individual families eked out a living by balancing their income with their expenditure.