When dinner was the meal in the middle of the day

Walk through any working district a hundred and fifty years ago at a little past noon and you would have met the same tide every day. Doors opening, boots on cobbles, the smell of something kept warm since morning. The middle of the day emptied the workshops the way a bell empties a school, and for an hour the street belonged to people eating.

Call it what they called it. For most of them the meal in the middle of the day was dinner, the big one, and the thing eaten in the evening was tea or supper and a good deal smaller. The grander your income, the later your dinner drifted, until the word slid all the way to the end of the day and left the midday meal with the thinner name of luncheon, then lunch. You can almost date a household by where its dinner sat on the clock.

What was actually on the plate

Not much, and the same most days. Bread was the floor of it, which is why the price of a loaf could empty a street faster than any speech. Around the bread went whatever was cheap that week: a bit of cheese, dripping, an onion, cold potato, a herring if the catch had been good. A pie from a stall was a small luxury and a hot one a slightly larger. The tin a man carried his dinner in told you more about his wages than his coat did.

The women who fed all this rarely sat down to it. Someone carried the men's dinners to the gate, often a child sent from home with a basket and strict instructions, and the meal was eaten standing, or on a step, or on a wall warmed by the morning.

The hour that had to be fought for

Here is the part worth remembering. The break in the middle of the day was not a gift. It was argued over, shift by shift and trade by trade, and in plenty of places it was lost before it was won. A dinner hour shrank in bad years and stretched in good ones, and the length of it was one of the plainest measures of how much a day's labour was respected.

The length of the dinner hour was one of the plainest measures of how much a day's labour was respected.

What finished the old midday dinner was not a decree but a distance. As people came to work further from where they slept, going home at noon stopped being possible, and the meal shrank to whatever could be carried and eaten fast. The sandwich won not because it was better but because it fitted in a pocket and did not need a plate.

I think of all this now when someone eats at a desk without looking up, counting the minutes. The hour in the middle of the day was once the one hour that belonged to the worker and not the work. We gave it back without quite deciding to. Of all the things a century misplaces, the quiet ones go first, and this was a quiet one.

The ordinary rhythm of a day is what Scratched on the Walls recovers from Pompeii's walls, where people left price lists, jokes and love notes for us to find.