Most Helpful Customer Reviews
52 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
What It Means When We Say "Victorian", May 22, 2004
This review is from: Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England (Hardcover)
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!
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
39 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Hug Your Hoover, August 20, 2004
This review is from: Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England (Hardcover)
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.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A wonderful peek into the Victorian lifestyle, April 23, 2004
This review is from: Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England (Hardcover)
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.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
|
