Rich Victorians ate French cuisine consisting of rich meats, fish and desserts. The rich people of this era used meals as a time to show off their wealth through fine cutlery, china and up to 20 or more dishes of food, often cooked by a French chef.

Here are 30 foods and drinks people were discovering and enjoying in the first decade of the 1900s.

• Popcorn. C Creators & Co./Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain.
• Campbell’s Soup.
• Orange Omelette.
• Milk Chocolate Hershey Bars.
• Lady Baltimore Cake.
• Peanut Butter And Jelly Sandwich.
• Oysters Rockefeller.
• Pigs In Blankets.

For many poor people across Britain, white bread made from bolted wheat flour was the staple component of the diet. When they could afford it, people would supplement this with vegetables, fruit and animal-derived foods such as meat, fish, milk, cheese and eggs – a Mediterranean-style diet.

The meals for rich families were prepared and cooked by the servants in the kitchen. Food was cooked on a range and was served to the family in the dining room. Breakfast tended to be a large meal and would have included ham, eggs, bacon, bread and fish. This was followed by a light lunch and afternoon tea.

That is the sort of poverty that 25% of Britons suffered in Victorian times. We can check this with Angus Maddison’s numbers (which are also inflation and PPP adjusted) and we can see that per capita GDP in 1890 was $4,000 a year.

Poor people could work in mines, in mills and factories, or in workhouses. Whole families would sometimes have to work so they’d all have enough money to buy food. Children in poor families would have jobs that were best done by people who weren’t very tall.

The pay was pitifully low. A woman might make one shirt in a long day, sewing by hand in poor light – she had to buy her own candles – and she would be lucky to earn six shillings for a dozen.

Rich Victorians always had servants. Cooks, butlers, gardeners, housemaids, nannies and governesses were employed by this social class. The middle class families did not usually have as many servants as the upper class families.

Poor Victorian women wore thin dirty dresses which were dark colours and made from cotton or wool because silk and linen would be far too expensive and wouldn’t last as long as they needed them to last for ages.

Mourning black In Britain, black is the colour traditionally associated with mourning for the dead. The mourning dress on the right was worn by Queen Victoria, “it shows the traditional touches of mourning attire, which she wore from the death of her husband, Prince Albert (1819–1861), until her own death.”

Rich women wore corsets under their dresses. At the beginning of Victoria’s reign it was fashionable to wear a crinoline under a skirt. These hoops and petticoats made skirts very wide.