Do you remember an egg? A boiled egg with soldiers when you were ill, the oozing of a poached egg on toast, the sense of achievement at creating a first omelet? Many of the subjects of Emma Griffin's Bread Winner held evocative memories of eggs all their lives. For successive generations raised in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, an egg was an everyday staple only for those few families who kept hens. For most, it was a rare treat. Some had eggs once a year, at Easter. Some were allowed the top cut off from their father's eggs. Some watched with envy as their father tucked in to a daily egg—invariably prepared, but not eaten, by their mother—perhaps with bread dipped in, perhaps whipped into a glass of milk; a ritual that symbolized paternal status within the family. Eggs, then, were not only connected with memories of mealtimes but were a profound illustration of the power and politics of family resources and their distribution (209–17).

Bread Winner, drawing on 662 autobiographies of individuals born between 1830 and 1903, is full of such illustrations of the daily life of working class families in this period. Griffin focuses on the autobiographers’ memories of their earliest years, and though she does not put it in these terms, this surely also represents an important contribution to the history of childhood. The stories recounted are often deeply poignant. The fact that a Mrs. Dickinson mentions her hot water boiler four times in only two pages (88) speaks volumes about the transformative effect such an appliance had on her life. But Griffin never strays into sentimentality or pathos, nor loses sight of the broader patterns narrated by these vivid voices. One of the great strengths of this volume is the way that Griffin navigates this difficult balance, weaving so many disparate stories into a coherent and compelling overall account.

Bread Winner uses a new approach to answer an old question: if real wages were rising, why were more people not better off? Griffin uses these autobiographies to break down the economic unit of the household and enquire into the distribution of wages—and the resources, power, and status that accompanied them—within the family. She argues that the distorting impact of gender ideology both hindered women's participation in the labor market and held down their wages. While real wages rose, male workers retained more of these wages for themselves, so their families did not share evenly in the benefits. A model of the nuclear family that had once been grounded in interdependence became one of dependence as “the balance between a man's waged work and his wife's unpaid work was disrupted” (127). As Griffin later argues, “the breadwinning model was founded upon an unequal power between marriage partners, and when male wages increased, that power imbalance intensified as well” (260).

The first section of the book focuses on the gendered experience of work. Girls worked as soon as they were able but were rarely paid for it, their labor required to maintain their siblings and their household. Though work for boys was often casual, unstable, and dangerous, it might also offer a sense of satisfaction and the opportunity for advancement, as well as the wages, which facilitated independence. For both boys and girls, wages signified a change in status and self-understanding. However, this was far more marked for boys, who could eventually command sufficient wages to become self-supporting—something that was all but out of reach for girls.

The significance of money is explored further in the second section. Here, Griffin analyzes how far and with what impact families conformed to the breadwinner model. For these autobiographers, a good father meant a good provider. This did not necessarily mean a high earner. It was more closely correlated to the child's sense of whether their fathers worked steadily and shared fairly. Such men were honored with gratitude by their children. Yet Griffin shows there were all too many men who did not fulfil these expectations. In some cases, this was the result of poor health or unemployment, but many families were blighted by drunkenness, irresponsibility, and desertion. In most cases, however, any breadwinner was better than no breadwinner at all and Griffin highlights the extreme difficulties faced by women as single mothers. Many women, regardless of their effectiveness of their provider, undertook paid work, combined with the intense burden of domestic labor that rightly is always foregrounded in this account.

The final section focuses on “life,” exploring themes of food, emotions and politics. This last chapter is particularly interesting, because many of the autobiographers later became involved in activism in some way, reflecting the rise of the labor movement and the renegotiation of political participation, citizenship, and democracy. Again, experiences were clearly gendered here. Men often found that work and the money, leisure and self-esteem it afforded them provided a route into politics. For women, these resources were difficult to obtain. A female political life was more likely to be associated with an absence of marriage and children.

Some themes, of course, recur throughout the chapters. This is an account saturated with alcohol. Drink was never associated with pleasure or celebration but recurs again and again as a cause of irresponsibility, selfishness, abuse, and violence. Griffin is careful not to judge or blame, and though she understands it as a structural issue rather than an individual failing, but the ruinous effects of alcohol on family life are all too evident.

Griffin offers insightful commentary on her methodology, interrogating the creation and form of the texts that inform her narrative. She pays particular attention to changing cultural norms that allow or inhibit the expression of certain experiences and emotions. She also considers the way that oral historians and community groups might have elicited and shaped the narratives. She is particularly effective at elaborating the specificity and nuance of particular ways of life—comparing and contrasting urban and rural life, for example—and elucidating the diverse range of experiences encapsulated in the term working-class.

However, the close attention paid to the nuclear family means there is less space for wider kinship, friendship, and community networks. We know from historians such as Ellen Ross that these were also such an important feature of life for working-class women and girls and might have been critical in helping them hold fragile families together. Similarly, the focus on the household means that we do not see the social and cultural structures and institutions—the church, the press, even the middle classes—through which breadwinner norms were created and replicated. Griffin is surely right to argue that low wages and limited opportunities not only reflected but reinforced women's low status (294), but she does not explore the role that employers or trade unions played here. Yet this, of course, may well be a consequence of the source material and the autobiographers’ priorities and preoccupations.

Griffin adds a vibrant and compelling account of the subjective meaning and experience of working-class family life to the account offered by historians who have examined more conventional statistical material on mortality, bodies, and nutrition. The book has already deservedly attracted a significant audience beyond the academy. With its authoritative, accessible style, it will surely introduce many new students to the rich resources to be found in nineteenth-century life writing and even to the human possibilities of economic history. The image of Agnes Cooper's father taking his meal to eat alone so that his hungry children would not stare at him (216) is not easily forgotten.