Appearances
How to Keep Them Up on a Limited Income

This interesting piece of social history from 1899 describes how a newly married woman on a restricted income keeps house.

Teresa Praga (Author)

9781108071925, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 8 May 2014

188 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.1 cm, 0.25 kg

This interesting piece of social history, published in 1899, appears to have been the first non-fiction work by Teresa Praga (d.1920), the wife of a portrait painter and miniaturist, who also published novels. Her later output included books on cookery, housekeeping and dress, many with the emphasis on 'easy' (Easy French Sweets for English Cooks, for example). Like Jane Panton (several of whose books on lifestyle are also reissued in this series), Praga is writing for middle-class wives with not much money, and aspirations to gracious living. Appearances (subtitled How to Keep Them Up on a Limited Income) is presented as autobiography: how a newly married woman, on a very restricted income but used to - and liking - being 'waited on', manages a house. With detailed descriptions of finances, menus, the duties of servants, and other minutiae, this is a light-hearted account of late Victorian housekeeping.

Introduction
1. Ways and means on £300 a year
2. In search of servants
3. Training the servants
4. Domestic details - how it worked
5. The shops - how to select them
6. How to spend the house-keeping money
7. How I shopped
8. The cook - how to train her
9. The cook - how to train her (cont.)
10. Entrees, breakfasts and luncheons
11. The commissariat
12. Entertaining
13. Dress
14. Amusements
15. The annual holiday
16. The family medicine chest
17. Keeping up appearances
18. Success
Appendix
Index.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural history [HBTB]