'THE VICTORIAN HOUSE'

Synopsis:

The Victorian age is both recent and unimaginably distant. In the most prosperous and technologically advanced nation in the world, people carried slops carried 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 now 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: most were luxuries available only to the prosperous.

Judith Flanders has written an incisive and irresistible portrait of Victorian domestic life. The book itself 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.

Through a collage of diaries, letters, advice books, magazines and paintings, Flanders shows how social history is built up out of tiny domestic details. Under Judith Flanders’ expert guidance the Victorian house opens up in from of the reader to become an exploration of Victorian life. Through these details we can understand the desires, motivations and thoughts of the age. The houses are familiar, but the lives are not. The Victorian House will change all that.

This book can be bought online at Barnes & Noble and Amazon

Reviews:

'The Way We Lived Then'

Caroline Moore reviews The Victorian House by Judith Flanders
Daily Telegraph 2003

Some books are "unputdownable"; it would be more accurate, however, to describe The Victorian House as infinitely pickupable. One reads a thriller straight through, from cover to cover; but I found it singularly hard to do that with this book. I kept on haring off after irresistible footnotes (" . . . for more on the unpleasant Dr Bakewell, see pp. 306-8"). And whenever I re-opened the book, I would chance upon a detail so riveting (" . . . by the end of the century, a fashionable woman was carrying 37 pounds of clothing") that I would read on, rather than finding my place ...... read more

'Dishing the dirt' by Julie Myerson in The Daily Telegraph 2003 .... read more

'Upstairs, Downstairs' by Alida Becker, The New York Times June 6th 2004 ....read more

'Wipe the floor', 19th-century domesticity in The Economist August 21st 2003 ....read more

'Upstairs, downstairs' by Margaret Drabble in The New Statesman, August 25th 2003 ....read more

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