THE HUNGRY FORTIES
THE AGE OF PARADOX, by John W. Dodds; Victor Gollancz, English price, 22/6. T’HE Greatest Wonder of the Age. Contelo’s Royal Incubator. Chickens always hatching. Exhibited by Command of Her Majesty, His Royal Highness Prince Albert, and Royal Family at Windsor Castle, and _ to thousands of ladies and gentlemen equally astonished and. delighted. ‘L HIS advertisement in the London Times of over a century ago is one of the many hundreds of details that | Mr. Dodds, a U.S. Professor of English (though one wouldn't guess it) has assembled to help make a "biography of England, 1841-1851." It is the story of the decade the economic and social historians, Cole, Engels, the Hammonds, Trevelyan and some others have called the hungry forties. We New Zealanders, the founding of whose country dates back to. those grim years, feel we know all about it .
| already. lo this UVodds will reply, "You may | know of the dreadful | conditions in the mines, | the near serfdom of the | people, the riots, the | Chartists, the stinking | cities, but you don’t | know the particular com- | bination of trivia, curi- | osa and the significant event which _ gives | shadow and highlight to |a portrait of a people." | You may not know that |in 1841 there were | 1,000,000 domestic ser- | vants in a population of ‘less than 16,000,000 in England and Wales. that 'in London in 1844 there were 450 societies. with names like London Philanthropic Society for Providing the Poor with Bread and Coal in Winter, and that in that same year the average age of death for the | working classes was 22 in London, 21 in Leeds, and 18 in Manchester. And much, much more -etiquette, art, photography, dress, drunken-
ness, railways, literature, manners, food, the Opium Wars, the Great, Exhibition. The illustrations are good, The last, No. 192, from Punch, is _ entitled, "Bloomerism-An American Custom."
W.B.
S.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 761, 19 February 1954, Page 14
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312THE HUNGRY FORTIES New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 761, 19 February 1954, Page 14
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