Product Description

"The Edwardian Country House" gives an insight into the romance and reality of Edwardian society and evokes the "golden" years before World War I. In this illustrated book, Juliet Gardiner explores the key events in the social calendar of a wealthy Edwardian family - a fancy dress ball, a society dinner party, a village fete, a musical evening, a shooting party - from not only the points of view of the family, but also from that of the servants. Detailed descriptions of the day-to-day activities involved in running a country house are told through diary extracts, letters, advice manuals and recipes, while special craft features enable readers to create a range of authentic Edwardian delights for themselves. Providing a look at a period that was glorious for a few but certainly not all, this is a book on Edwardian life as seen through 21st-century eyes.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #439145 in Books
• Published on: 2002-04-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Review
The Edwardian Country House is another living experiment from the makers of the 1900 House and The 1940s House. The Edwardian Country House follows a team of volunteers and a modern family who turn back the clock to recreate life as it was for the upper classes and their servants in a country house in 1910. It will tell the story, over three summer months, of an old-fashioned way of life that is quintessentially English: a glorious country manor, tea and croquet on the lawn, a patrician butler and a stable full of horses. But this picturesque historical tableau is of a group of people utterly divided and ruled by class. Do their ostensibly old-fashioned issues of money, power, and above all, class, still plague Britain today? This will be a major series and a high-profile book.

About the Author
Juliet Gardiner was editor of History Today, and has worked as an academic and trade publisher. In 1992 she returned to academic life and now heads the Publishing Studies programme at Oxford Brookes University. She has written eight books, including The 1940s House, and has edited The Penguin Dictionary of British History and Who's Who in 2,000 Years of British History.

Excerpted from The Edwardian Country House by Juliet Gardiner. Copyright © 2002. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
John Betjeman wrote, 'The Edwardian was the last age in which a rich man could afford to build himself a new and enormous country-house with a formal landscape garden, a lily pond and clipped hedges.' Such country houses, which became the markers of society's 'Saturday to Monday' house parties (Monday being the significant day since anyone who could regularly be at leisure on a weekday must not need to earn a living), have come to epitomize the years between the Boer War and the Great War: the Edwardian era in which the priviledges of the rich were made possible by the labour of the servants, an age when the inequalities of wealth and poverty were starkly delineated and the conventions of class were still rigidly, if complexly, defined.
The period from 1905 to 1914 is the subject of this book, involving a unique social experiment in Edwardian living. Manderston, a large, beguiling, classical-style house on the Scottish borders near Berwick-upon-Tweed, rebuilt by an Edwardian plutocrat in 1905, was the container for the experiment. The house, which still functions today as the family home of the descendants of the Edwardian owner was taken over by the television production company Wall to Wall. They chose a family, the Olliff-Coopers, to live 'upstairs', and recruited a dozen or so individuals who were prepared to live 'below stairs' as servants for three months.
However, this was to be no 'upstairs, downstairs' costume drama, but as faithful a re-creation as possible of the way in which such a wealthy household would have functioned in the Edwardian era. Manderston is virtually unchanged in all the essentials from that time, and it was possible to reconstruct the material conditions with authentic Edwardian cooking faciities, food, clothes, toiletries and remedies, the lavish entertainments and the endless, menial workd, while the social 'rules of engagement' that framed Edwardian lives were replicated from household manuals, reference works and memoirs of the time.
The intention was to see how a set of twenty-first-century individuals, comprising a range of people from a variety of jobs and modern ways of life, would interrogate the Edwardian way of life, how they would cope with the various demands put upon them - whether cleaning grates or dealing with visiting cards - negotiating a very different set of social mores, and accepting or rejecting the rules and regulations that pertained both upstairs and down a century ago.