Dream's Library

I recently browsed through What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist - The Facts of Daily Life in Nineteenth-Century England. It is readable, it is exactly intended to serve as a guide to the background of novels set in that time period, and it covers areas of life such as food, city and country life, pastimes, the servant system, and so on. I felt the author was biased toward men when discussing marriage and courtship, and he didn't always get things quite right in the food section, but overall it would be a good start.