Product Description

"[Flanders] knows what we want to know and is thoroughly engaging, undidactic company."--Katherine A. Powers, Boston Sunday Globe Nineteenth-century Britain was then the world's most prosperous nation, yet Victorians would bury meat in earth and wring sheets out in boiling water with their bare hands. Such drudgery was routine for the parents of people still living, but the knowledge of it has passed as if it had never been. Following the daily life of a middle-class Victorian house from room to room; from childbirth in the master bedroom through the kitchen, scullery, dining room, and parlor, all the way to the sickroom; Judith Flanders draws on diaries, advice books, and other sources to resurrect an age so close in time yet so alien to our own. 100 illustrations, 32 pages of color..

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #45562 in Books
• Published on: 2005-11-21
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780393327632
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
This room-by-room guide brims with delightful description and discussion of the Victorians and their domestic environments. Flanders (A Circle of Sisters, which was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award) evokes the period's intimate preoccupations by drawing on a variety of sources: extracts from Dickens, Gissing, Jane Carlyle, Gaskell, Trollope and Beatrix Potter, among many other authors; line drawings, period paintings and advertisements; and snippets by the numerous magazine advice writers of the era, including the influential household experts Mrs. Panton and Mrs. Beeton. Flanders makes particularly clever use of commentaries by alienated overseas visitors to Britain, highlighting national customs of the period. She weaves these materials into an absorbing cradle-to-grave story of life in the urban upper-middle-class household. Although working-class life is overlooked, the work of the servants who tended the bourgeois home is rendered in vivid, often harrowing detail and with great attention to class boundaries and tensions. Particularly informative are the journal entries of domestic servant Hannah Cullwick, encouraged to record her days' work by naughty gentleman Arthur Munby (who later became her clandestine husband). Flanders is unflinching on the realities of dirt, childbirth, women's bodies and serious illness. Her intelligent, and unromanticized scrutiny of Victorian domestic custom, etiquette and style will greatly enhance readers' understanding of the period's social history, its literature, and visual and decorative arts. Aware of the power of family life to determine attitudes toward gender, childhood, education and health, Flanders is sensitive to the otherness of the period, translating its strangeness without resorting to anachronism. 24 pages of color illus. and b&w illus. throughout.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

It is easy, and tempting, to take a romantic view of the Victorian Age, to wax sentimental about its high moral standards, its extraordinary literature, its great strides in industrial production and domestic conveniences and, of course, the good queen from whom it takes its name. Judith Flanders acknowledges as much at the end of her exhaustive study of domestic life in Victorian England. But in many respects the picture she draws -- and she draws it with obsessive attention to detail -- is a useful corrective to over-romanticizing. Her attention is focused on city life, London in particular; what she shows us is a world in which dirt, vermin and disease were nearly inescapable, and in which the labor of maintaining even the best-managed households was endless, exhausting and often dangerous.

The 19th century, as she says, "was the century of urbanization." Whereas in 1801 "only 20 percent of the population of Great Britain lived in cities," a century later "that figure had risen to nearly 80 percent." With a population of about a million in 1800, London was the largest city in the world, and at century's end that figure had multiplied five times. "To house the numbers of newly urbanized people was a challenge without precedent," Flanders writes. "One-third of the houses in Britain today were built before the First World War, and most of these are Victorian. In a period of less than seventy-five years, over six million houses were built, and the majority stand and function as homes still."

In London, as in New York and in certain sections of Washington, most of these houses are what the British call "terraced," which is approximately the same as what Americans call "row houses"; indeed Flanders betrays an ignorance of American society and history when she says that "unlike the American row house, the English terraced house is highly flexible socially and economically." Built in rows, sharing common walls, these houses solved the problem of urban living with impressive ingenuity, managing to combine economical use of urban space with the privacy that city dwellers longed for amid the growing depersonalization of society that was an inadvertent byproduct of the industrial age. Flanders writes:

"What the house contained, how it was laid out, what the occupations of its inhabitants were, what its housekeeper did all day: these were the details from which society built up its picture of the family and the home, and it is precisely these details that I am concerned with in this book. I have shaped the book not along a floor plan but along a life span. I begin in the bedroom, with childbirth, and move on to the nursery, and children's lives. Gradually I progress to the public rooms of the house and with these rooms the adult public world, marriage and social life, before moving on, via the sickroom, to illness and death. Thus a single house contains a multiplicity of lives."

As that suggests, there is much more to this book than architectural design, floor plans, household furniture and kitchenware. The chapter entitled "The Scullery" is only incidentally about the "dirty, and damp, and dark" place where scrubbing of tableware and cookware was done, where "all the jobs that could be passed over to the servants as soon as possible were performed"; it is really, as that suggests, about the lives and labors of servants, an immense class of more than a million people in mid-Victorian London. We see them now on "Upstairs, Downstairs" or in Merchant-Ivory films, and aren't given even a clue: "Most servants' work was backbreaking, and they were rarely healthy, suffering from long-term illnesses caused by poor nutrition, confined quarters, and lack of sun and fresh air." One of these, Hannah Cullwick, kept a diary. Here is her entry for July 16, 1860:

"Lighted the fire. Brush'd the grates. Clean'd the hall & steps & flags on my knees. Swept & dusted the rooms. Got breakfast up. Made the beds & emptied the slops. Clean'd & wash'd up & clean'd the [silver] plate. Clean'd the stairs & the pantry on my knees. Clean'd the knives & got dinner. Clean'd 3 pairs of boots. Clean'd away after dinner & began the preserving about ½ past 3 & kept on till 11, leaving off only to get the supper & have my tea. Left the kitchen dirty & went to bed very tired & dirty."

That more than a million people daily performed such hard and demeaning labor is testimony to the central role of servants in polite Victorian society. The middle and upper-middle classes expanded dramatically as the fruits of industrialization and population growth spread far beyond the old nobility and gentility. The handsome houses in which they lived (in Victorian England people usually rented, rather than owned, their residences) were immensely labor-intensive, drawing housewives as well as servants into the work force: "The majority of women worked regularly and hard in their houses: they made the beds, cleaned the lamps, washed windows, skinned and prepared meat for cooking, and made preserves and wine, as well as cooking daily meals, dusting, sweeping, scrubbing, sewing and upholstering, doing the laundry, making curtains and clothes, and cutting and laying carpeting; many even repaired shoes and boots. All the things that it is now thought that 'genteel' women of the time did not do, they did."

Much of this labor was made necessary by the lack of anything approximating modern conveniences, even in the most privileged households, but much of it had to be done for the simple reason that London, like all cities of the age, was filthy. Dirt was everywhere: household dust, chimney soot and coal residue, night soil. Interior walls were covered with at least three coats of lead, and "some wallpapers had concentrations of [arsenic] that ran as high as 59 percent." Vermin were everywhere: "For us, mice and rats are the first thought at the word 'vermin'; for the Victorians it was bugs: blackbeetles, fleas, even crickets." If not fought incessantly, according to one contemporary account, they would "multiply till the kitchen floor at night palpitates with a living carpet, and in time the family cockroach will make raids on the upper rooms, . . . the beetles would collect in corners of the kitchen ceiling, and hanging to one another by their claws, would form huge bunches or swarms like bees towards evening and as night closed in, swarthy individuals would drop singly on to floor, or head, or food."

Yet somehow, though perched eternally at the edge of squalor, the Victorians managed to make decent lives for themselves, with comfortable parlors and dining rooms (the latter often served "as both a dining room and a family sitting room"), and drawing rooms for receiving and entertaining friends. That they did so was almost entirely due to women. The "hierarchy of authority was undisputed: God gave his authority to man, man ruled woman, and woman ruled her household -- both children and servants -- through the delegated authority she received from man." Women inhabited, as we can see from the vantage point of the 21st century, a "bizarre disjunction" in which they were both treasured and patronized: "As nurses, as mothers, as educators of future generations, women were able, capable, adept and proficient managers; as wives, as daughters, as sisters, women were unstable, fragile, uncertain creatures needing masculine guidance."

By the end of the 19th century that was beginning to change, albeit slowly and against masculine resistance, but it was daily reality for all except the most atypical Victorian women. To her credit Flanders does not bang the feminist drum -- simple statement of the facts is all that is required to underscore the self-evident points -- but it would be difficult indeed for any reader to come away from Inside the Victorian Home with anything except admiration for these doughty women and exasperation at the smug, self-righteous men who saw it as their God-given right to dominate and use them.

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* London journalist-author (A Circle of Sisters, 2001, among others) Flanders provides a book so fascinating that it yields at least one surprise--and often many more than that--on each page. Ignore the title; it is no more a static treatise on different Victorian rooms than Sir Terence Conran's books comprise an ordinary approach to home decor. Instead, we find a real sense of Victoriana, its "occupants'" lives, struggles, habits, and styles, portrayed through the eyes of contemporary novelists (Dickens, Trollope, and other less-recognized names) and nonfiction writings. Consider, for example, the evolution of the woman as "the ministering angel to domestic bliss." In the parlor, she was transformed into a bride, ready for all the exigencies of marriage, beginning with a trousseau that might have cost 20 pounds. The morning room, exclusively female, was dedicated to the business of organizing and running a household. And the nursery symbolized a child-centered universe, with mothers responsible for teaching and nurturing their young offspring, and fathers for supporting the family. More than a window into the past. Barbara Jacobs
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

What It Means When We Say "Victorian"
Judith Flanders has written a book that is not only well conceived, well written, enlightening and informative, it is also a window to focusing the definition of the much maligned adjective 'Victorian'. Flanders writes with a fluid, novelesque style that cements her references and investigations into a fascinatingly powerful indictment of what many of us have believed to be a Golden Age. Using the unique format of going room by room through a middle class (and please note, this is not a book about the wealthy or the poverty stricken homes) English Victorian house, describing (and well illustrating!) the emphasis on appearances in the 'public sections' of the homes ( reception halls, parlors, dining rooms, libraries, living rooms) and the disparate Spartan appearances of the 'private rooms' such as the kitchens, bedrooms, bathrooms, maids' quarters, Flanders is indeed describing the social mores of that era. Everything is caught up in appearances: a woman's place is in the home preparing for the return from work of the husband, keeping the children at bay, overseeing the 'help' and paying lip service and public display to the superficialities of charity work. Men's live are public; women's lives are private. One of the many interesting aspects Flanders investigates is the crudity of coping with the filth of the homes - from the gaslight lamps, the soot from Industrialization, the lack of knowledge about bacterial contamination in food handling, the disgust of the mud and manure encrusted streets and shoes, etc. If ever there were explanations for the dichotomies that inhabit the literature, art, music, politics, gender problems of the late 19th century, they are here well documented by a first-rate writer. No matter your reasons for wanting to investigate the Victorian Era, this wise and very entertainingly informative book is an excellent resource. An excellent book on many levels and well worth your reading time!

Hug Your Hoover
History lovers are a hardy lot. They repeatedly accept the challenge of reading 500-page, often dry, and frequently dreary, accounts of people and events so obscure that most "normal" folks wouldn't venture a guess at the reason for the exercise. But even we tome-travelers have to admit that once in a while it sure is refreshing to come across a bit of "social" history that, conceding nothing in either scholarship or excellence of presentation, examines that most fascinating-at least to me-of all subjects: the daily lives of people in another time.

Having read Daniel Pool's "What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew", a facially similar account of daily life in Victorian England, I doubt that I would have purchased this prosaically titled work had it not been for its glowing reader reviews. And if anything, the reviews understate this book's delights.

Adopting the clever device of moving from room to room in a "typical" Victorian home, Ms. Flanders uses each setting as a topical springboard to examine every conceivable facet of daily life in more telling detail than Pool's treatment and with a plain but wryly humorous writing style that should be the envy of any author on any subject! Seguing effortlessly from room to room and subject to subject, she paints a portrait of a period so close to ours in time but so far removed in struggle that one can't refrain from pausing every chapter or so to ponder how easy we have it compared with our forebears. Her description of servants' Sisyphean efforts to maintain a home's cleanliness in the age of coal and unpaved streets is alone reason to have you running to hug your Hoover and worship your Whirlpool. Her recounting of the "treatment" of a breast cancer victim reminds that death was as frequent a visitor to the Victorian household as the most ardent social climber, often shepherded by quack doctors and degrees of pain and despair thankfully foreign to us.

I have been unable to gather much information on Ms. Flanders except that she has previously published "A Circle of Sisters" (which I am ordering forthwith) and that 2005 will see the release of her new book, "The Discovery of Neverland", which I will purchase in due course. One can only hope that she is beavering away on her next project because if this work is typical of her talent, she will quickly become a "must read" and an abiding reminder that the reading of history can be something more than a labor of love.

A wonderful peek into the Victorian lifestyle
While there are many accounts of life for the upper classes in Victorian England, and on the working classes too, Judith Flanders has chosen to focus on daily life for the Victorian middle class, which exploded in England during the 19th century. With greater buying power and social influence than ever before, they created a lifestyle that still echos in ours today. And they were responsible for that English institution: the Victorian terrace house.

"Inside the Victorian Home" takes us through every room in such a house, and describes not only what happened there, but why. For example, the chapter entitled "The Scullery" outlines the multiple steps involved in doing one load of washing. We also learn how hard it was to keep a house clean in a time when coal dust coated everything, the difference between what boys and girls were expected to learn in the school room, and how the Victorians treated illnesses at home. Many of these are taken from diaries and letters, real life accounts.

But behind all of this domestic detail, the book tells us WHY all of this was so important to the Victorians. It underlines the moral climate of the time: "A man's home is his castle", and "Cleanliness is next to godliness" - sayings which became the virtues every family strove to display by the way they lived their domestic life. We are told how most of this responsibility fell to women. As mistress of the house, a Victorian wife proved the moral standing of her family not only by the way she behaved, but also by how clean her house was, how she regulated the servants and children, and how she handled the household accounts. All these were just as much expressions of respectability as marital fidelity or going to church.

Social changes are also explained to give context to Victorian daily life. For example, dinner was served in courses (entree, main, dessert) for the first time in the Victorian era. This is because servants became affordable for the middle classes, and this was a good way to show them off. Before this, all courses were set on the table at once, and guests served themselves. The social proprieties for engagement, marriage and mourning are also discussed in fascinating detail.

Inside the Victorian Home dispels the romantic view many of us have of the era, and instead gives us something real and alive, which we can relate to. Domestic details and social and moral conditions are blended to give an eye-opening account of the time. The book is well written and easy to read. I highly recommend it.