Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England

by Judith Flanders

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393327639
• ISBN13: 9780393327632
• Release Date: November 2005
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 554 Pages
• Weight: 1.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.9" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Like a Trip in a Time Machine

I love, love, love this book. I usually can't get into non-fiction books, but this one was a pure joy to read. I was actually sad when I finished. What a fascinating journey back in time. Just a note: the footnotes are the best part. They are full of the most interesting factoids about what really went on in the typical middle-class Victorian's life. Judith Flanders has a wonderful wry sense of sarcastic humor that shines through in her writing, and I found myself laughing many times throughout this book. Makes you glad you live in modern times, but glad you can have an armchair journey back to get a glimpse of what life must have been like back then. It's made me appreciate what I have now so much more, and also to realize why we do things today the way that we do, and where those customs and traditions came from originally. My only criticism would be that this isn't a totally objective look at Victorian life - it is all tinged with Ms Flanders' personality and judgments, and her feminist leanings quickly become obvious throughout the beginning of the book. Now, I'm all for women's rights and all that, being a woman myself, but it got a bit tiring after a while to be reminded, YET again, of how hard life was for women in that era. One other little criticism is that the introductory chapter is a bit slow - don't give up! The rest of the book picks up the pace quite considerably. It's definitely worth it! It's changed my view of my own life in today's world, and been a wonderful, and fascinating journey back over a hundred years ago, from the safety and comfort of my rather cushy 21st century existence. I didn't want it to end, even though it removed my rose-tinted glasses of "charming" Victoriana entirely!

Mrs. Beeton Would Be Proud of Judith Flanders

Like a well-run Victorian home, Judith Flanders has carefully placed each aspect of Victorian life in it's "proper place" with this thoroughly engaging book. Dedicating an entire chapter to each room of the 19th century Victorian English home(Nursery, Scullery, Kitchen,Bathroom, Parlour, Sickroom and so on), Flanders uses each room as a case-study of Victorian English life, from birth to death (and everything in-between). Flander's book draws you in to the era completely with an unromanticized glimpse into the life of average Victorians-not just the wealthy-and through a copious use of contemporary material(e.g. letters, newspapers, advertisements, diaries andliterature). All of this lends an authenticity that at times proves disarming...The details of laundry-day and the immense work involved in basic housekeeping and meal preparation are utterly amazing! After finishing "The Victorian House", I stood in awe of my household appliances and remembered the adage, "The Good Old Days...Are Now".

I'm surprised at the negative attacks

This book is a fasicinating account of HOUSE and HOME in the Victorian Age, an era when house and home was synonymous with women. It is not about Victorian life in general, or its politics, or its literature. Because it focuses on how middle class Victorian households operated, it naturally focuses on the women who made sure the households maintained a careful face of correctness to the public world. How this makes it a feminist diatribe is unclear. One of the commentators remarks that the author regards nursing babies as "vampires." This is false, the comment is one from the historical record, not the author's. It should surprise no one that, throughout history, there have been women who did not relish child rearing. Why the author is held responsible for this fact is anybody's guess. I thought the book was a well-documented work that managed to be hugely entertaining as well as academic.

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 masterpiece

Whatever one might have thought about the Victorian era...through books of that time, plays, photographs and other images of a golden age... have been thoroughly reconsidered in "Inside the Victorian Home", a stunning new book by Judith Flanders. It is hard to know where to begin to describe this important work.The author's unusual setting is centered around different rooms of the house and finally street scenes surrounding that life. It is a brilliant way of conceptualizing because Flanders gives the reader a "guided tour" from top to bottom and from birth to death. She quotes prices throughout the book and so reasonably begins with a short page devoted to currency followed by an even more helpful section about men and women she quotes later. These references, skillfully put at the beginning of the book and not at the end, are the brochures which help the tour proceed."Inside the Victorian Home", though ostensibly inclusive of all types and classes of people, really focuses on two things: women and rules. The two are linked as tight as tightly-drawn corset strings (about which we learn in some detail!) and the author is terrific at conveying how Victorian women felt and how seldom they were able to express their true feelings.Each reader, I'm sure, will have a favorite chapter or two. I particularly enjoyed the chapters on "The Scullery" and "The Sickroom", possibly because these two sections really get down and dirty, literally. One of the high points of the book is a description of why (because so many women felt that they never had any time for themselves) women often resorted to illness as a way to gain that precious personal time. The rules of the Victorian era were striking and fiercely followed. The visits to friends, whether or not personally desired, followed a strict code. The author saves the best for near the end, however. In a four-page addendum to "The Sickroom", Flanders lists the regulations of "Mourning Clothes for Women". As I read them I honestly didn't know whether to laugh or cry.The boundaries that Flanders uses for herself...(there are several points in the book where she feels she might like to digress but keeps her focus sharp and clear)... are almost in keeping with the Victorian tradition. It is, without doubt, a small but nice addition to her book.I couldn't close this review without commenting on how beautiful the book looks, as well. There are three sections of illustrations comprised mostly of paintings with a few photographs. These enhance the book's beauty to a great degree."Inside the Victorian Home" is a monumental work of toil and love by Judith Flanders. She has researched things so well and presented them in such a way as to give immense care to everything she explains. I would suggest this book be read with due deliberation so as not to miss anything. (but maybe I'm sounding a bit Victorian, myself) As an author, Judith Flanders is wonderful. As a tour guide, she's the best.