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Families with the highest of skilled workers in London ate formal meals, complete with napkins and rings and even disciplined children at tableside.[1]  Distinctions in types of meals among upper- and lower-class citizens blurred after about 1870 as food was imported and food processing technology advanced.  Foods making their way onto the Victorian table included margarine, jam, chocolate, tomato “catsup”, and biscuits.[2]  As for the dining room itself in an upper-middle class home, it would be one of at least ten rooms in the house and contain an oval or circular table with a central support that would enable the whole family to gather around it.  The chairs surrounding it would preferably be leather since chairs of velvet tended to attach on to the materials of ladies’ dresses.  The room would also normally contain a sideboard with attractive dishes on display, and there might even be a dumbwaiter nearby to allow for easy transfer of items to the kitchen, located on a lower level.[3]  Upper-class Victorian home design focused on segregating areas for specialized purposes, but it could also serve functional purposes.  The dining room at Stoke Rochford Hall (1841-1845), for example, was connected to the kitchen by a corridor measuring almost 45-yards in order to keep the smells of food preparation away from the eating experience.[4]

[1]K. Theodore Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation, 1846-1886 [book on-line] (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998, accessed 24 December 2007), 345; available from Questia, http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=35631984; Internet.
[2]Ibid., 346.
[3]Sally Mitchell, Daily Life in Victorian England [book on-line] (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, accessed 24 December 2007), 111-112; available from Questia, http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=57191660; Internet.
[4]Hoppen, 334.