NONFICTION - Oct. 31, 1993

WHAT JANE AUSTEN ATE AND CHARLES DICKENS KNEW: From Fox Hunting to Whist--the Facts of Daily Life in 19th-Century England by Daniel Pool (Simon & Schuster: $25; 416 pp.) It was the best of times (for the rich and titled), it was the worst of times (for the poor and humble). It was a time when ladies were preoccupied with learning to ride sidesaddle both left and right “so as not to develop an overly enhanced buttock on one side�; while in the poorhouse (a Kent inspector actually reported), children were killed to make meat pies and the elderly were ground up for fertilizer. It was a time when the poor lit their hovels with rushes dipped in animal grease, while the Duke of Rutland employed three men full-time to do nothing but cut candle wicks. It was 19th-Century England, a time gravid with great literature, a time of Thackeray, the Brontes, Dickens, Trollope, Hardy, Austen, Eliot. . . .

The novels remain vivid, eminently readable to this day, but sometimes a puzzlement. What exactly was a “resurrection man�? A quartern loaf? A saveloy? A ha-ha? When was Michaelmas, Hilary Term, Plough Monday? How much was a butt of wine, how far a “furrow long�? How smoggy was it in London, Johnny? (Smoggy enough so that choking Cockneys walked straight into the Thames and drowned at high noon!) How was it that a poor man could be hanged from a crossroads gibbet for “doing damage to Westminster Bridge,� while wasting someone in a duel was socially acceptable?

In this unexpected charmer of a bedside book, Daniel Pool tells all, from social hierarchies to food coloring (iron, lead, copper; and arsenic made a nice green, too), even adding a 137-page index that’s better reading than a good half of the classics he cites.