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'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.

The Victorian House is crammed with the vivid and intimate minutiae that bring the past alive. Its subtitle promises "Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed": this largely means the lives of women, together with their children and servants. And the servants in this book are almost invariably female too.
This is because the houses Judith Flanders is interested in are not grand country estates, where housekeepers, housemaids, nursemaids and scullerymaids were leavened by male butlers, footmen, coachmen and valets, but the urban and suburban Victorian terraces lived in, then and now, by the middle classes. And although servants were the Victorian equivalent of "consumer durables" yet for most these symbols of status were beyond their means. The lower-middle-class tradesmen had none, or at best a cheap workhouse child; and even the more prosperous professional classes, according to Flanders, usually had only one maid-of-all-work. (In genteel circles she was described as a "general servant"; but this did not alter her gruelling workload - labouring from five in the morning until 10 at night.) An occasional nursemaid or cook may stray into these pages; but that's all.

Flanders amusingly highlights the gap between aspiration and reality - particularly when she plunders the numerous Victorian books which were produced to give advice to the upwardly mobile and socially anxious on interior decor, etiquette and household management.

Even the redoubtable Mrs Beeton - with her magnificently scaled recipes ("take 12 dozen eggs . . . ") and confident advice upon everything from cooking pasta ("1.5 to 1.75 hour to boil the macaroni") to bringing up children and, of course, instructing in their duties the full range of butlers, footmen, ladiesmaids etc - turns out to have been a thoroughly middle-class 22-year-old journalist. Her book was bought by the wives of tradesmen, struggling doctors and merchants, for whom managing butlers would be strictly theoretical.

Still, some of the genuine dinner parties sound pretty Beeton-esque. The Sambournes, on the prosperous end of Flanders's range, with three servants, gave a "gentlemen-only" dinner for 12 in the 1890s. The men ate "caviar, clear soup, cold salmon, pigeons, tomato salad; roast lamb, peas; haricots verts; roast chicken, salad, Russian salad; jelly, macedoine of fruit; anchovy savoury, cream cheese; ices . . .; grapes, cherries, greengages."

Victorian kitchens specialised in the thrifty re-use of copious left-overs (working through various degrees of palatability on successive days). More impressive, therefore, is the amount the 12 men drank: "twelve bottles of Ayala '80, five of Geister '74, two of Sauternes, three of Burgundy and fifteen of Champagne". The next day Mr Sambourne noted a "Slight bilious headache."

Flanders makes brilliantly entertaining use of diaries, novels, letters, memoirs and magazines. She herself points out one or two areas that she does not cover. "It has been suggested", she observes in a footnote, "that I am more interested in S-bends than in sex. For the purposes of social history this is so, and I do not plan to discuss sex at all . . . For S-bends, however, see p.293" - and very interesting it is, too.

This gloriously compendious work is the book for you if you want to know when lavatory paper was first commercially available; why gloves were such an indicator of class; when soap was first sold in bars; the force exerted by the average corset (21 pounds of pressure on the organs, going up to 88 with fashionable tight lacing); when the tin-opener was invented (in 1858); how to make hot starch, or what to wear if in half-mourning for your cousin.

There is a joyous wealth of information and quotation. Flanders's enthusiasm drowns out the occasional note of feminist preachiness about Victorian attitudes to women. Perhaps, though, a degree of incredulous indignation is bound to creep in. Most lower-middle and lower-class Victorian women seem to have worked appallingly hard, endlessly cleaning the grime deposited by the polluted air, and endlessly stoking and raking out ashes from the stoves and fires that created it.

But a minority of the upper-middle classes lived lives of stultifying boredom, making the useless objects suggested in the ladies' magazines (such as "a penwiper shaped like a hand with the motto 'No Hands should be Idle' embroidered on it in beading, which rendered it incapable of wiping pens"). Beatrix Potter at 30 was driven to desperate measures, "beginning to read Gibbon's Decline and Fall from the beginning again, after having waded to the 4th vol. of seven, and forgotten the three first. It is a shade better than metaphysics, but not enlivening."

"Enlivening", however, is just the adjective to describe The Victorian House.

Caroline Moore was a Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge.

'Dishing the dirt' by Julie Myerson
Daily Telegraph 2003

History, as Judith Flanders rightly observes, is usually read "either from the top down - kings and queens, the leaders and their followers - or from the bottom up - the common people and their lives". This fat, fascinating and fact-filled exploration of Victorian domestic life, she emphasises, is going to be neither. More than anything, it's a tacit acknowledgment that - whether empire ruler or factory worker - we all have one burning thing in common: at the end of the day, we go home.

Actually, I'd go further than that. It's hugely in this book's favour that half the people who may wish to buy it will probably be taking it home to mid-Victorian terraces almost identical to the one on its cover.

But in a way that's Flanders's point. This book is about neither factory workers nor empire rulers, but the ubiquitous middle classes - and it's all the more beguiling and informative for that. Aren't comfortable middle-class homes almost always the best place to accurately take the pulse of a society? Add to that the fact that the very notion of home and domesticity came into its own during Victoria's reign, and Flanders's book is perfect proof that, by delving into the minutiae of mourning clothes or nursery food or the stomach-turning intricacies of Victorian lavatories, we can illuminate every single aspect of Victorian morality, society and emotions.

he concentrates almost exclusively on the period from 1850 to 1890 - and once you get to grips with the breadth and detail of this exhaustive tome you'll understand why. Beginning with the bedroom and ending with the street - and walking us though every other room in between - Flanders reveals what each would have looked like, where its furnishings would have come from, how they'd have been used, the smells and sounds that would have been familiar - and therefore what kind of lives would have been lived within the house.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, she writes like the historian she is, skilfully synthesising a plethora of facts culled from magazines, advertisements, first-hand accounts and fictions, and rarely allowing her own feelings, suppositions or excitements to colour the text. By and large, this approach is wholly successful, but now and then it leads to a parched, academic dryness that makes you cry out for something more tangible, more upfront and crunchy. Why in the bedroom chapter, for instance, does she undertake to describe pregnancy and childbirth in great detail but resolutely refuse to discuss sex - even when she rightly and happily covers food, clothes, illness and excrement in later chapters? She asserts that it's because she is more interested in S-bends. Fair enough, but if you're talking about beds and bedding and how exactly they were used, isn't it at your peril that you ignore blood and semen?

Maybe it says far more about my preoccupations than hers that my favourite bits are the gross ones. It made me shudder to discover that, for instance, Victorian women liked to change their hairbrushes three times in one day because "airborne dirt" from the street made them "look black after one using". But nowhere is there a more sobering insight into how people lived then than in the "Scullery" chapter where the never-ending duties of maids-of-all-work are revealed. The soot and dust of a typical London street made these houses so filthy that the mantelpiece in a normal drawing-room would have to be washed twice a day.

The diaries of one Hannah Cullwick make for especially delicious reading: "Clean'd the privy & passage & scullery on my knees. Wash'd the dog & clean'd the sinks down. Put the supper ready for Ann to take up for I was too dirty & tired to go upstairs. Wash'd in a bath and to bed without feeling any the worse of yesterday [when she had gone up a chimney to sweep it]." You can't help but take a small step back from these revelations when you learn that Cullwick only kept these detailed diaries at the request of her employer Arthur Munby, a civil servant who was "sexually aroused by the idea of working-class women".

I hope I'm not giving the impression that the book is all about dirt. But pollution is unquestionably a persistent theme. There's wonderful stuff about gas lighting (you forget how the typical Victorian home would have reeked like a mechanic's garage) and food (the Victorian larder, far from being pure, was tainted with enough poisons and preservatives to call in the WMD inspectors). And then there's lavatory paper: I love the account of little Diana Holman-Hunt being set to sit and tear up circulars, envelopes and paper bags and string them together, and how she slyly made "a mental note of the softer pieces and put them together in the middle, between the back of a calendar from Barkers and an advertisement for night lights".

Insights such as these - real, practical, endearingly human - are the best thing in the book. And indeed it's only when it registers that it wasn't until the time of the Great Exhibition of 1851 that women got their own public lavatories, that you realise how much about the discomforts of those times we simply forget or ignore.

'Upstairs, Downstairs' by Alida Becker
Published: June 6, 2004
New York Times
Inside the Victoian Home
A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England.

CONSIDERING the prospect of marriage, Charles Darwin jotted down a list of pros and cons. Balanced against items like ''cannot read in the Evenings'' and ''forced to visit relatives'' were the supposed benefits of connubial bliss: ''Charms of music & female chit-chat'' and ''Constant companion . . . who will feel interested in one, -- object to be beloved and played with. Better than a dog anyhow.'' ''Home, & someone to take care of house'' was, of course, was pretty much a given. ''Only picture to yourself,'' Darwin continued, his enthusiasm building, ''a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire. . . . Marry . . . Marry Q.E.D.''

It's easy enough for us to feel superior to Darwin and his fellow Victorians, with their unenlightened assumptions about women and the dangers of everything from ''bodily emanations'' to the ''promiscuous'' mixing of personal garments at commercial laundries. But if we now live in a time when tennis elbow is more common than housemaid's knee, are we really that far from the underlying assumptions of domestic life in the Victorian age? This is just one of the questions raised by Judith Flanders's ''Inside the Victorian Home,'' a nimble compilation of the sort of social history to be found not just in public archives but also in popular novels and advice manuals, private correspondence and newspaper advertisements, arranged in chapters devoted to particular rooms in the typical mid-to-late-19th-century middle-class English household.

This is a sequence that also takes us, as Flanders puts it, ''along a life span'' -- beginning in the bedroom and the nursery, moving through the more formal world of the parlor and the dining room to the drudgery of the kitchen and the scullery, then climbing back upstairs to the sickroom, where death came to most people of that era. Although her tour is bracketed by general chapters on ''House and Home'' and ''The Street,'' Flanders maintains, for the most part, a fittingly Victorian discretion when it comes to obvious theorizing about her subject: marshaling an array of suggestive details and juicy quotations, she turns us into voyeurs and eavesdroppers, then gives us plenty of room to read between the lines.

Flanders reminds us that with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, public and private spheres diverged and ''the idea of home'' evolved, becoming -- for the Victorians as it still is for us -- a refuge from the outside world. With the gradual disappearance of apprenticeships and piecework, jobs moved from the house to the office and the factory floor. But the job of running the house remained. And in the process, domesticity, the province of women, came to require an increasingly complicated choreography: not only was the home to provide a retreat, it was to bolster the soul -- and it was to do this by conforming to rules that would demonstrate (or convincingly fake) a family's private character in an acceptable public way.

The house, in other words, was to become ''an expression of the morality that resided within.'' That morality may have been expressed in different terms, but it's hard not to see its shadow stretching into the 21st century, with (among other things) the accusatory sparring of stay-at-home and working postfeminist mothers, the status-conscious hierarchy of shelter and lifestyle magazines, even our ability to use places like ''Upper West Side'' as a kind of social shorthand. Martha Stewart may be down, but she's not entirely out, and you can't help thinking of her when you read the advice of an author like Mrs. Jane Ellen Panton, a successor to Mrs. Beeton, that a housewife keep three hairbrushes in rotation: ''one to start the day clean, the second to be washed and set out to dry for the following day, and one spare to lend a friend should she need it.'' (Mrs. Beeton, herself no slouch in the minutiae department, is quoted elsewhere recommending grapes as a cure for ''the most obstinate cases of constipation,'' taking care to add that the pips and skin should be discarded.)

These two professional pundits are part of a cast of characters who reappear throughout the book, a cast so large and diverse that the text is prefaced by an annotated list of dramatis personae. Like the heroines and villains of a good novel (indeed, this book can be used to decode the domestic symbolism of the period's literature), some of them achieve almost iconic status: ''flinty'' Jane Carlyle, with her tartly dismissive character references for former servants and her habit of saving money by inviting guests to tea in the evening, after dinner had already been served; long-suffering Beatrix Potter, who married late and spent far too much of her adulthood under parental care, rereading Gibbon and dutifully visiting her grandmother (whose kitchen floor, on one summer evening, ''heaved with cockroaches''). There are also plenty of cameos: Dr. James Burnett, author of ''Delicate, Backward, Puny and Stunted Children'' (and father of the novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett); the Rev. H. R. Haweis, who thought a piano essential to a household because it ''makes a girl sit upright and pay attention to details''; Laura Marx, daughter of Karl, complaining about catching a cold because she wore a silk dress instead of a wool one.

Through the letters and diaries of such people (and the people in the novels they read), we come to understand in a much more immediate way the daily impact of Victorian codes of etiquette, theories of disease, standards of hygiene, fashions in cookery and methods of child-rearing. And their presence amplifies the impact of the statistics Flanders deploys to shock and amuse us -- everything from the life expectancy for men in mid-19th-century Liverpool (26) to the weight of a fashionable woman's clothing at the end of the century (37 pounds) to the amount of water a servant would carry from the public standpipe every day in order to maintain what one authority deemed a ''fairly clean household'' (the equivalent of five and half cases of the 1.5-liter bottles the modern consumer picks up so casually at the supermarket).

That sort of analogy is another of the ways Flanders jolts us out of our complacent view of a world that might seem impossibly distant. While she never stints on irresistible oddities (a laundress's perks included beer three times a day and gin and water at night; the underclothes in a wedding trousseau were all given the names of Queen Victoria's daughters, except for the underpants), she makes regular reference to our own experience, urging us, for example, to ''try reading by the light of one candle, with the curtains closed to block out ambient street lighting'' to get an idea of the squinty gloom of a pre-electric evening.

Every now and then, she also makes us wonder about the apparent superiority of some aspects of present-day life. Sure, we have e-mail and Fed Ex, but Victorian Londoners had postmen who made between 6 and 12 deliveries daily. In the suburbs, shops opened around 7:30 or 8 in the morning and remained open until 9 or 9:30 p.m. during the week. Repairmen came door to door, soliciting business. Such comparisons can also be extended into the realm of entertainment: when gas lamps were phased out in the 1880's and theaters were darkened for the first time, there was, Flanders notes, ''a radical change'' in the perception of the performance, with the audience shifting ''from participatory community to passive observer.''

For myself, I'm rather attracted to a different sort of passivity (well, maybe it's passive aggressive) -- the genteel coddling of the Victorian invalid. As Flanders points out, invalidism was an acceptable way for people to find ''time and space for themselves in a society that did not allow them to want either thing openly.'' My favorite is the Darwin aunt who, after a bout of diphtheria at the age of 13, was told by the family doctor to have breakfast in bed while she recovered. ''She never,'' her niece reported many years later, ''got up to breakfast again in all her life.''

19th-century domesticity
'Wipe the floor.'
The Economist
Aug 21st 2003

MRS BEETON, in the opening sentence of her influential “Book of Household Management”, declared: “As with the Commander of an Army, or the leader of any enterprise, so it is with the mistress of a house.” What sort of establishment was it that resided in the solid, brick Victorian houses that still characterise so many British neighbourhoods? Six million such houses were built over 75 years, reflecting both the prosperity and the separation of work from home that arose in the burgeoning industrial age. New businesses and better transport meant that a man was more likely to work some distance away from home, leaving his wife to hold the domestic front.

Judith Flanders's examination of the Victorian house, room by room, reveals very clearly the society within: stratified, status-conscious, with its own rigorous codes and practices. Each room—the bedroom, nursery, kitchen, scullery and so on—is accorded a chapter. Drawing on contemporary diaries, novels and books of practical advice, she describes the furniture, decoration and accoutrements appropriate to each room, all of which lead on to an analysis of the behaviour and customs of the time.

The dining room gives rise to a discussion of ways of serving food, meal times (which changed with better lighting) and cooking (large carrots should be boiled for up to two hours, Mrs Beeton recommended). The sickroom not only allows for a survey of common diseases and their treatment, but also for a description of that monstrosity, Victorian mourning. A widow was expected to wear black for two years; after that she could look for something a little less sombre in the Mitigated Affliction department of one of the new stores. Pages on laundry (exceptionally labour intensive) are fascinating. So is drainage. Ms Flanders admits that she is more interested in S-bends than in sex.
Victorian house-dwellers all aspired to servants. The census of 1871 showed that Britain had 1.9m servants, of whom 93,000 were cooks and 75,000 nursemaids. A workhouse child would be paid £5 a year. Conditions were hard—heavy manual labour, little or no time off—and the duties clearly delineated, whether for blacking the grate or whiting the doorstep.

Ms Flanders is as acute on the social niceties and solecisms—the etiquette of leaving visiting cards was full of pitfalls—as she is on the position of the woman of the house. The wife's mission, apart from monitoring the servants, making useless beaded objects and keeping up social standards, was to ensure that her husband was untroubled by domestic matters. A little bit of knowledge, in order to keep abreast of men's conversation, was desirable, but to impart it was not. The heroine of one popular novel is “gradually brought to understand that the pinnacle of womanhood is the renunciation of the use of her intelligence”. “I have spoken with becoming infrequency, and chiefly about the Zoo. I find the Zoo is a subject which is almost certain to be received with approval,” wrote one American lady.

Rich and well-ordered, this study casts brilliant light on the world of Pooter and his predecessors. Curious facts tumble from the pages—that the aspidistra owed its popularity, for example, to its ability to withstand the fumes from gas lighting. Or that the clothes of a woman of fashion might weigh as much as 37lb. Or that before the creation of the mackintosh she was unable to go out in wet weather because umbrellas didn't cover her voluminous garb. Coat hangers were not invented until 1900, but flush loos were seen at the Great Exhibition of 1851. There were 178 toll gates around London which charged vehicles to enter the city: a taste of things to come.

There is, however, one striking omission, and that is men. This book, like the house, is a woman's domain.

'Upstairs, downstairs' by Margaret Drabble
The New Statesman
Monday 25th August 2003

Judith Flanders's book about the Victorian house is a hodgepodge of miscellaneous information. Divided into 11 chapters that are intended to take us from the bedroom through the kitchen and the dining room to the sickroom and the street, it appears to have a proper architectural shape, but in practice anything can go anywhere. Diatribes on the shortcomings of female education pop up in the nursery, a tract on employment legislation appears in the scullery, and weddings occupy the parlour. All are full of interest, and maybe it is a mistake to read the book from cover to cover. Flanders is aware of her digressive tendencies, and her footnotes are packed with disarming asides and apologies.
Perhaps the eclecticism of this book is suited to its subject, as the Victorians liked clutter and pot-pourri and excrescences and sub-plots. The mass of extraordinary detail, assembled here from novels, diaries, magazines and housekeeping manuals, sheds light in odd corners. How strange that the bedside table made so late an appearance in history. How revolting the recipe for a pudding, or "second remove", called "Jaune Mange", an unpleasant cousin of the more familiar blancmange. How grotesque the "bridal, Christmas or birthday gift" described in The Young Ladies Treasure Book. This object was made of white velvet, orange blossom, ferns, fringes and balls of white carved wood, offset by a sleeping nymph in a shell, with a peeping cupid in attendance. No wonder a later generation turned against knick-knacks - all they did was collect dust.

Flanders is eloquent on the subject of dust, dirt and what was euphemistically known as soil. The chapter on the bathroom and the lavatory is the best, and her description of the influence of the D-bend and the S-bend is inspired. There is a magnificent illustration of the lavishly decorated "Iris" pedestal lavatory of 1895, and one could choose similar items from a poetic range of flowers and col-ours - orchid, carnation, morning glory, hydrangea, Pink Lucknow, Brown York, Olive Green Chicago . . .

But the domestic reality, even in the drawing room and the morning room, was less floral. The soot produced by the dependence on coal fires got everywhere, into carpets, hangings, clothes and furnishings, and a daily organised attack was needed to keep it under control. The cleaning of the house, in the era before what sociologists now call the deskilling of housework, was a serious undertaking with a fixed routine. Some well-to-do middle-class women had plenty of poorly paid domestic servants to deploy, but managing servants was a job in itself, and the cause of much advice and anguish. The less well-off pretended that they had more servants than they could afford, and were obliged to undertake a good deal of physical labour themselves. The optimistic advertisements - the new closed cooking stoves were said to use less fuel than the old open range, "if managed well", and you could bake a small pie on a new Dutch oven if you proceeded "with care" - hint at many a failure and disaster.
The differentiation of tasks celebrated in Upstairs, Downstairs was merely an aspirational dream to most of those who studied Cassell's Household Guide or Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management. Instead, there was an array of implements with which to attack the enemy of dirt, each of which served a particular purpose. My generation can still remember a puzzling forked object for dusting banisters.

The more useful clothes pulley, which was raised to the kitchen ceiling to dry the washing, enjoyed a long life. It survived well into the 20th century, thus outliving some of the exhausting and onerous aspects of the ritual washday. Schoolchildren used to be bewildered by a song with the chorus "Dashing away with the smoothing iron/She stole my heart away", in which the spectacularly inefficient charmer seems to take all week to get through her duties, but Flanders explains that this was not an unfair account of the average Victorian wash. The boiling of the water in the copper, the shaving and cutting and dissolving of the slabs of soap into soap jelly, the rubbing and the scrubbing, the rinsing and the wringing, the second-day starching, the ironing and the airing - all this was, as she says, a Herculean enterprise. Soap powder was a welcome innovation, and so was the wringer-mangle. But why the verb "to mangle" means simultaneously to chop up and to make smooth remains a mystery.

Difficulty may confer dignity, and the housewife/manager emerges as something of a heroine. Occasionally, in her desire to champion those below stairs, Flanders misreads: the objection to a kitchen Christmas crib as not being "safe" must surely have been based not on its subversive aspirations but on its "dozen coloured candles" in close proximity to its festoons of coloured paper. Flanders gives us little on domestic fire hazards, which were manifold, but she stimulates our curiosity to find out more. This is rich material, entertainingly if not very methodically handled.

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