Customer Reviews

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

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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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

`The Victorian Home' will be a good purchase for anyone with an interest in British novels or Victorian history. I found the book to be well written and well documented. The author takes a walk through the Victorian house - from hovel to mansion - and watches while the normal family lives out its day. There is wash to be done, lots of cooking and eating, and a party to be planned. In all these things Flanders fleshes out the Victorian novels that so many people love. There are helpful illustrations and color plates and copious references from magazines and popular books of the period.

I understand that some think the book to be a feminist plot: if so they can delve much deeper between the lines than I can. I thought that the book was a well written, even handed, history that will enrich anyone's reading of the novels from the same period.

Although I am a prodigious reader, this is the first review that I have felt compelled to write. Flanders' interesting and well-written book relies upon the clever (and effective) structure in which each chapter addresses a different room that might be found in a Victorian-era house. Within these "rooms" the reader learns about the particular social habits and issues related to sleeping, eating, cooking, cleaning, illness, death, childbirth and the other multitudes of activities that occurred under the roof of a middle-class Victorian's house. In addition, Flanders synthesizes an interesting mix of primary, secondary and literary sources in her research. As a avid reader of Victorian era literature, I enjoyed her deft integration of both the literature and diaries of Charles Dickens, Henry James and Beatrix Potter into her work.

On the whole, this is an enjoyable and interesting look at Victorian era life as it pertained to daily middle-class Londoners. While I am happy to find that some things are no longer quite so common place (chamber pots, drawing mustards), I am surprised to note that many things remain the same. I will leave it to you, dear Reader, to discern what these may be.

I do hope that potential readers will read the publisher's comments, professional reviews, and positive reviews because they give a much more accurate account of the contents of the book than the rather nasty reviews by some readers. (Having read the book, it seems to me the reviewers have more of an ax to grind than does the author.) As an avid reader of Victorian novels over more than 50 years I found information on every page that threw light on the lost customs of the Victorians (the amazing system of visiting cards; the social complexities of meals and mealtimes; the astonishingly hard work involved in maintaining the home; the amazingly complex rituals involved in mourning; the problem of food adulteration). Every topic covered is illuminated. Plus, this book is a delight to read from first word to last. I recommend it without reservation to any reader of Dickens, Trollope, Eliot, and Arnold Bennett.

A couple years ago someone coined the term, "cocooning" to describe what they saw as the "trend that sees individuals socializing less and retreating into their home more."

But this is hardly a new phenomenon - in fact, it's actually a Victorian ideal, one admirably expounded on in "Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England" by Judith Flanders.

It was during the Victorian era that advances in technology and transportation made it possible (and even desirable) for people to work someplace other than the home. We take it for granted now, but 150 years ago you had to live where you worked. Think about it: the farmer (obviously) lived on his farm; the shopkeeper above his store. If you were in the lower classes, work often consisted of piecework, assembled in the home. With the rise of an increasingly affluent middle-class, it was now possible to remove your family from the dirt, crowds and crime of the city to the more bucolic environs of the country or suburbs. And we've been doing it ever since.

As I said, we take this for granted today - but in the Victorian era it was a new concept and became something of a mania for all but the poorest in the population. The separation of the public life from private living was described by Dickens:

"The office is one thing, and private life is another. When I go into the office, I leave the Castle [his house in the suburbs] behind me, and when I come into the Castle, I leave the office behind me... "

And on page 8:

"Oh, how dull and dreary is the best society I fall into compared with the circle of my own Fire Side with my Love sitting opposite irradiating all around her, and my most extraordinary boy!"

For how many of us is home and family a bulwark against all the pressures of work and the outside world? It's an incredible blessing and not everyone is lucky enough to have it.

I've noticed that a few other reviewers have commented on what they perceive to be a feminist bias in the author's work. I'm a pretty conservative guy (read my other reviews) and I never felt like Judith Flanders was doing anything except giving as honest a portrayal of Victorian life as was possible. The book is heavily footnoted and well documented. Many of the more troubling comments (the breastfeeding child as vampire, for example) are not the author's opinion, but the opinion of the Victorians themselves. I found it amusing in places to see how our twenty-first century prejudices color how we can look back at beliefs and practices that were no more remarkable in their time than referring to a woman as Ms is in ours. As I've counseled in other reviews, don't read any deeper than the text on the page, gentle reader. You'll enjoy the book a lot more if you don't waste your time trying to divine some political or social meaning beyond the written words.

"Inside the Victorian Home" is a fascinating look at the daily lives of middle-class Victorians and I highly recommend it.

That is the subtitle of this entertaining history of the middle-class Victorian family. There is a chapter on the bedroom, nursery, kitchen, scullery, drawing room, parlor, dining room, morning room, bathroom and lavatory, sickroom and the street in front of the home. The book takes you through each of these areas and details how they were used, decorated and any innovations during the era. In the chapter on the kitchen, attention is given to stoves, hot water heaters and food preparation. In the chapter on the bathroom, details on flush toilet innovations are covered.

As a history teacher who studies the Victorian period, I enjoyed this book and learned many new details. It is filled with quotes from period literature, articles, journals and diaries. The author does look at the family through modern eyes, an all too common error, and there are parts of the book that could be interrupted as feminist. But, these are minor and I am surprised at the venom of some of the reviewers.

If you want to understand the middle-class Victorian home I know of no better book to read.

Kyle Pratt