S TUDIES concerned with the standard of living of the working classes during the Industrial Revolution continue to appear in abundance, though there has recently been a move away from national aggregates towards investigations of particular groups of workers in individual areas,' or particular aspects of the problem like working-class diet and housing conditions.2 One of the most recent is a stimulating study in the Review which examines the standard of living of working people in the Black Country in the nineteenth century (particularly in the years i 840 to 1900).3 The article is a highly compressed form of a much larger discussion and it is, perhaps, for this reason that it contains a number of significant omissions or oversimplifications particularly in relation to coal miners. Dr Barnsby is clearly right in stressing the importance of trying to construct a realistic index of unemployment and short-time working in order to calculate actual earnings, and he has made an impressive attempt for the period i 839-99.4 It is, nevertheless, surprising to find the author claiming that in i842 the miners worked only one day a week on average throughout the year. This year was certainly one of the worst trading years in the century and there was a prolonged coal strike in the autumn. Even so, apart from the strike, Dudley miners appear to have been working about two-thirds of the working week, although irregularity of work differed enormously, from one week to another, as the following table illustrates.5 Another colliery, at Wolverhampton, worked 46 out of the 6o working days before 3I July, when the miners came out on strike.6 Moreover, when the strike terminated (it lasted from six to ten weeks depending on the type and geographical position of the colliery) work was apparently plentiful, as might be expected, given the coal famine which had resulted from the stoppage. A miner at a Bilston colliery, for instance, worked 68 out of the 78 working days between 4 October and 2i December,7 though this was somewhat higher than the average apparently. It would seem that miners were working considerably more than one day a