Mind Your Language | 17 May 2003

Sir Ned Sherrin is beautifully vindicated by Mrs Beeton. He had wondered (Mind your language, 15 March) whether ‘morning performances’ of plays mightn’t, like other morning social activities of the mid-19th century, have been undertaken in the afternoon. His particular interest was the

matinée performances staged by Squire Bancroft at the Prince of Wales’s Theatre, which he took over in 1865. This theatre, later named the Scala, was in Tottenham Street, near Tottenham Court Road, London, and was in the later 1860s the sharp end of new, realistic drama by playwrights such as Tom Robertson.

The use of morning to mean ‘afternoon’ is nowhere more neatly illustrated than in the first edition of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861, just a few years before Bancroft’s matinées). A facsimile of this otherwise rare and subsequently much adulterated book is published at a moderate price by the enterprising Southover Press. ‘After luncheon,’ Mrs B. says, ‘morning calls and visits may be made.’

But when was luncheon, and who ate it? Answers to these and other tantalising puzzles are found in Movable Feasts by Arnold Palmer (Oxford, 1952). I know, because an intelligent and kind reader wrote to recommend it. Who it was we may never know because my husband has ‘tidied up’. When did he last tidy up, or ever tidy up? Well, he has now, he claims, and the letter may be in the same place as the cat’s flea-collar, wherever that has got to.

Palmer is excellent, and should be republished immediately. He starts at

1780, jumps to 1815, then to the 1830s and then to the 1860s, our territory. Drawing on diaries and novels, he tells us when people ate what and with whom, with eventual focus on the introduction of afternoon tea.