ABSTRACT
The general impression which emerges from T. Fisher Unwin's compilation is of a labouring class, particularly in the countryside, constantly hungry for bread and meat from the opening years of the nineteenth century until well into the 1860s. Tradesmen's bills and private house-keeping accounts of the 'Hungry Forties' would also be of interest and useful for comparative study. The phrase 'Hungry Forties' is not to be found in the original Oxford English Dictionary, but was added in the Supplement and Bibliography with a note dating its first appearance as being in 1904. The 'hunger-propaganda' of the Anti-Corn Law League has doubtless been responsible in part for the growth of the general impression that the 1840s constituted a decade of especial suffering for the working class. The Anti-Com Law agitation gained its first successes, like Chartism, in the crucial period of 1838-1842.
