Product Description

The best-selling social history of Victorian domestic life, told through the letters, diaries, journals and novels of 19th century men and women. 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, author of the widely acclaimed A Circle of Sisters, has written an incisive and irresistible portrait of Victorian domestic life. The book itself is laid out like a house, following the story of daily life from room to room: from childbirth in the master bedroom, through the scullery, kitchen and dining room -- cleaning, dining, entertaining -- on upwards, ending in the sickroom and death. Through a collage of diaries, letters, advice books, magazines and paintings, Flanders 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. The Victorian House will change all that.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #122217 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

Review
'An enthralling, entertaining and thought-provoking revelation of the realities of life in the tall, thin, Victorian town house.' Evening Standard 'This book is a splendidly entertaining read, and it also breaks new ground. No one has ever written so interestingly or wittily about housework.' The Spectator 'Rich and well ordered, this study casts brilliant light... Curious facts tumble from the pages.' The Economist 'The delight of this book... is the intelligence and freshness of its inferences.' The Sunday Times 'Judith Flanders' artful arrangement of fascinating facts brings new life to people (mostly female) and places (all domestic) that traditional history ignored.' Literary Review

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

Good background reading for Victorian novels
This is a wonderful work of popular social history about the lives of Victorians. But, rather than the upper classes or the ruling elite, or the working classes, we are taken into the homes of the middle classes. Yes, this is costume drama territory. Flanders introduces us to the archetypal middle class house -- perhaps a prosperous five-storey villa in the city, or a humble terrace -- and she takes the reader on a guided tour of all the rooms in turn. We are told how the room was used by the household: what occurred there and when, how and why. How it was furnished, how often it was used etc. Then, far more interestingly Flanders digresses into wider related social aspects in each chapter. For example the chapter on the 'sickroom' -- usually a bedroom emptied of all furnishings to nurse a sick family member back to health -- becomes a discussion about Victorian healthcare, medicine, funerals, and mourning etiquette. (The Victorians had an unhealthy preoccupation with illness and a tendency towards hypochondria.)

Flanders makes wonderful use of primary sources such as memoirs, diaries, letters and journals to illustrate the points she is making and to give specific examples to bring situations and ideas to life (very evocative, quaint language). She also regularly cites contemporary novelists such as Dickens and Bronte (to name but two) that allows us an insight into the mind of a Victorian reader through their characters, whose situations, circumstances and opinions reveal an awful lot about prevailing thought of the period. Various 'pamphleteers' and authors of household management books (especially Mrs Beeton) also feature heavily, though usually to be derided by the author and the reader for their hopeless pomposity and self-righteous bluster.

Having read this, it's very difficult to admire or to respect Victorians very much as far as their private lives were concerned, and Flanders seems to concur with this and makes no attempt to disguise her contempt: generally (there are exceptions) they were pompous, self-righteous, patronising, snobbish and arrogant beyond belief, not to mention cruel to their servants. It is difficult or impossible to sympathise with any of the Victorians whose writings feature in this book. However this does allow for Flanders' pithy and acerbic notes at the bottom on the pages to add a little humour too. This is somewhat unusual for a history book and the author's style certainly ain't Adam Hart-Davis' gushing What The Victorians Did For Us. I'm just aching to read a Dickens now, or to watch a period drama. This really is a fascinating and entertaining read and written in an accessible prose and with some nice illustrations.

Just a few quibbles now. One thing I would add is that it seems to concentrate more on the lives of women and rather brushes over men a little. But this is to be expected in an exploration of the household. And Flanders does seem to repeat herself too often for my liking; there's repeating things for emphasis and then there's just repeating things. Lastly, it's also rather 'Londoncentric'. Now I don't mind this, thinking as I do that London is magnificent, but I'm aware that certain people object to this. But these are just trifling criticisms that don't detract from a real achievement. A splendid book.

I couldn't put this book down
I loved this book. I wouldn't normally read a non-fiction book from cover to cover, but I found this one addictive. It is quite specific in the ground it covers, centering very much on the domestic life of middle class women. The reference material is mainly contemporary fiction and advice books, which do perhaps give more of an indication of what people aspired to, rather than how they actually lived. However, the author does not pretend otherwise. We may not all follow the advice of TV programmes such as "How Clean is your house", but the fact that they are so popular does tell us something about our society. This book doesn't view the Victorians through rose tinted glasses, but why should it? If you want to know why your house has a front room, or how long you should wear black to mourn the death of your second cousin twice removed or are just feeling sorry for yourself because you have a big pile of ironing, then this is the book for you.

Astonishing Depth
Although the fifty page intro was a bit sluggish, it fortunately did not represent the rest of the book. Flanders devotes a chapter to each room in the stereotypical Victorian house, plus one for The Street. Her research gives new meaning to the word "depth". She has mined non fiction, letters, fiction, and just about anything that could possibly add insight to life in that very rigid time. The result is a wealth of analysis, as well as wonderful trivia (People did not want newfangled toilets in their bathrooms because bathrooms were clean rooms!). From the weight of women's clothing (37 pounds) and the number of times they had to change clothes daily (6), to the ways households detected adulteration in their food (and there was good reason to), and the number of mail deliveries per day (10-12, and the postman always rapped twice), The Victorian House is a treasure trove of fascinating information. Unsurprisingly, since they spent so very much of their time at home, the book's real impact is in the trials and tribulations of women - children, mothers, servants - and how the Victorian house shaped and ruled them. It is sad, frightening, and crazy, all at once.

The three sections of colour plates add visual evidence to Flanders' text, and the whole thing is a remarkably focused trip through this world.

I have no reservations about recommending this book.