Product Description

A middle class home, circa 1850, of the sort that many people live in today, is the focus of Judith Flanders' book. The Victorian age is both recent and unimaginably distant. In the most prosperous and technologically advanced nation in the world, people carried slops up and down stairs; buried meat in fresh earth to prevent mould forming; wrung sheets out in boiling water with their bare hands. This drudgery was routinely performed by the parents of people still living, but the knowledge of it has passed as if it had never been. Running water, stoves, flush lavatories - even lavatory paper - arrived slowly throughout the century; and most were luxuries available only to the prosperous. Judith Flanders' new book is itself laid out like a house, following the story of daily life from room to room: from childbirth in the master bedroom, through the scullery and kitchen - cleaning, dining, entertaining - on upwards, ending in the sickroom and death. Under Judith Flanders' guidance the Victorian house opens up in front of the reader to become a full exploration of Victorian life. Through a collage of diaries, letters, advice books, magazines and paintings, she shows how social history is built up out of tiny domestic details. Through these we can understand the desires, motivations and thoughts of the age. Many people today live in Victorian terraces, and so the houses themselves are familiar. But the lives are not.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #33552 in Books
• Published on: 2004-08-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Judith Flanders takes a novel approach to rediscovering the lives of our 19th century forebears in her The Victorian House. She pays them a visit. Perhaps mindful of the success of the Channel 4 series, The 1900 House and The 1940s House, Flanders steps back a few decades earlier to embark on a room-by-room guide to a typical mid-Victorian family home. We start in the bedroom and work our way downstairs through the principal parts of a middle-class home. Particular attention is paid to the operations side of the household--the bathroom, the kitchen and the scullery--where the Victorian preoccupation with cleanliness and food is well-described. Flanders is also good at drawing out the decorative functions of the Victorian home, bringing out the separate male and female domains of the drawing room and the parlour.

A wealth of detail--from advice books such as Mrs Beeton's cookbooks, novels, contemporary magazines and autobiographies--is crammed into each room. This is more than an inventory of interior design. Flanders uses the house as a base from which Victorian attitudes towards servants, marriage, illness, death and religion can be explored. There remains a small quibble: this book should really be titled "The Middle-class House of Victorian London". We are not taken to any provincial homes. And a question mark remains over how representative Flanders' rather grand Victorian house is, heaving as it does with servants, hot water and ornate furnishings. As she herself notes, few Victorian families could afford more than one servant at the very most, many married couples still lived with their older relatives and hardly anyone owned their own home. --Miles Taylor

Sunday Times
'Flander's pleasing anecdotal, with discerning use of contemporary source material, enables us to empathise with the exhaustion and the ennui.'

Charlotte Moore, The Evening Standard
'I found myself absorbed in the minutiae...and in the rules governing the fascinating relationship between employer and servant'

Customer Reviews

excellent
Excellent account of what life was like for upper-middle-class people in the Victorian era. Very entertaining and thoroughly researched. It does not certainly deserve any 1 or 3 star ratings. I've just finished reading it and have already ordered "Consuming Passions" by the same author.

Exciting, eye-opening!
I love reading about domestic life and this book hit the spot perfectly! I keep re-reading it and always find something new I've missed before because there is so much information.

The book divided into sections corresponding to each room of a Victorian house but it goes beyond that, to explain the way Victorians lived in and related to that particular room in the house. In this way, the book presents an intriguing insight into the Victorian worldview and how it compares to ours. It is often amazing to see how different they are and explains a lot of the Victorians' preferences and actions.

Oh, and if you thought that middle-class life in the 19th century English towns was somehow romantic, this book will set you straight. You will have no illusions regarding the work women had to do, either. It's one of these books that changes your perceptions completely.

unputdownable!
What a great book! I love the way the chapters are divided into the different rooms in a Victorian house. Each one deals with not only the items you would expect to find within the room, but the kinds of lives lived there and the effect of such domestication on the external world. She roams as far afield as the development of department stores, the boom in food colourings, the effects of furnishings on disease etc. It also talks about the way that current markets have been shaped by the growth of marketing in Victorian times. Here are the origins of mass consumerism and a competitive business culture that we live with today. It is full of human interest and those snippets of history that make the Victorians such eccentric, memorable and fascinating people.