Inside the Victorian home : a portrait of domestic life in Victorian England / Judith Flanders.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Flanders, Judith.

Standardized Title:

Victorian house

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Families--England--History--19th century.

Families.

History.

England--Social conditions--19th century.

England.

Social conditions.

Physical Description:

xxviii, 499 pages, 24 pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 24 cm

Edition:

First American edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : W.W. Norton, 2004.

Summary:

Our image of how Victorians lived is based on novels and movies, mostly costume dramas of upper-class life, a life of privilege, servants, leisure, country living, and money. That is fantasy. The facts are much more interesting. Most middle-class, professional Victorians lived in small houses in murky industrial cities, and the women performed the most grueling, back-breaking tasks with little or no help. This is the subject of Judith Flanders's Inside the Victorian Home, a masterly account of how ordinary people went about their ordinary lives in "the workshop of the world." Nineteenth-century Britain was the most prosperous and technologically advanced nation on earth, yet many middle-class people still carried chamber-pots up and down stairs, buried meat in fresh earth to prevent mold from forming, wrung sheets out in boiling water with their bare hands. Such drudgery was routinely performed by the parents and grandparents of people now living in London, but the knowledge of it has passed as if it had never been.

An average family burned a ton of coal every five weeks, and all of it had to be carried up and down the narrow stairs of the typical Victorian house, with a full coal-bucket weighing nearly thirty pounds. Until the 1850s, prams for babies did not exist. A mother or nursemaid taking her charge out for a "walk" had to carry the baby -- and a well-nourished eighteenth-month-old in the 1880s weighed on average twenty-six pounds. Laundry took two full days a week. The equivalent of one modern "load" needed fifty gallons of water -- all of which had to be laboriously boiled up in a special laundry copper or on the kitchen stove. If the water boiled over, then the coal fire underneath flared up, spewing out steam and soot, which fell back into the clean clothes, and the whole ordeal had to begin again. The battle against dirt and dust was never-ending.

Flanders uncovers material present in familiar sources but which has for too long been considered unimportant. Some are well known: Jane Carlyle, wife of Thomas Carlyle, cataloged her life in her renowned and witty letters; Alice James took grim satisfaction in the minutiae of her illness and impending death. Others, like the diary of the maid-of-all-work Hannah Cullwick, have only recently been accorded the importance of these middle-class documents.

The people who lived in the Victorian house inhabited a different mental world from ours. The assumptions they made about privacy, comfort, childhood, family, and gender make them seem almost impossibly remote from us. Flanders gets inside this world of middle-class Victorian social assumptions by starting at the beginning: How did these people, whose world is both so near to us and so unimaginably distant, live their daily lives? What were their expectations?

To answer these questions, Inside the Victorian Home 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. Using a collage of diaries, letters, advice books, magazines, and paintings, Flanders shows how social history is built up out of tiny domestic details. She also draws domestic details from the writings of the familiar personalities of the age: John Ruskin, Mrs. Beeton, Beatrix Potter, Florence Nightingale, Charles Dickens, and Charles Darwin, who, when contemplating marriage, set out the pros and cons of married and single life in facing columns. She does not neglect those on the fringes of history -- E. M. Forster's aunt, forgotten women novelists, and a wide range of women who were simply going about their daily lives: the daughters of stockbrokers, schoolteachers, and doctors; the wives of journalists, academics, and illustrators. Under Flanders's expert guidance the Victorian house opens up in front of the reader to become an exploration of Victorian life. The houses she describes are still familiar to many, but the lives are not. Inside the Victorian Home will change that.

Contents:

Currency xxvii

Introduction: House and Home 3

1. The Bedroom 37

2. The Nursery 64

3. The Kitchen 100

4. The Scullery 130

5. The Drawing Room 168

6. The Parlor 214

7. The Dining Room 253

8. The Morning Room 292

9. The Bathroom and the Lavatory 324

10. The Sickroom 340

11. The Street 390.

Notes:

Originally published: The Victorian house : domestic life from childbirth to deathbed. London : HarperCollins, 2003.

Includes bibliographical references (page 417 -473) and index.

Local Notes:

Athenaeum copy: Gift of the Princeton University class of 1974 on the occasion of its 30th reunion.

ISBN:

0393052095