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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Judith Flanders takes a novel approach to rediscovering the lives of our 19th century forebears in her The Victorian House. She pays them a visit. Perhaps mindful of the success of the Channel 4 series, The 1900 House and The 1940s House, Flanders steps back a few decades earlier to embark on a room-by-room guide to a typical mid-Victorian family home. We start in the bedroom and work our way downstairs through the principal parts of a middle-class home. Particular attention is paid to the operations side of the household--the bathroom, the kitchen and the scullery--where the Victorian preoccupation with cleanliness and food is well-described. Flanders is also good at drawing out the decorative functions of the Victorian home, bringing out the separate male and female domains of the drawing room and the parlour.
A wealth of detail--from advice books such as Mrs Beeton's cookbooks, novels, contemporary magazines and autobiographies--is crammed into each room. This is more than an inventory of interior design. Flanders uses the house as a base from which Victorian attitudes towards servants, marriage, illness, death and religion can be explored. There remains a small quibble: this book should really be titled "The Middle-class House of Victorian London". We are not taken to any provincial homes. And a question mark remains over how representative Flanders' rather grand Victorian house is, heaving as it does with servants, hot water and ornate furnishings. As she herself notes, few Victorian families could afford more than one servant at the very most, many married couples still lived with their older relatives and hardly anyone owned their own home. --Miles Taylor --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
‘Judith Flanders is the Mary Poppins of academic toil. “Spit spot”, she says, and suddenly you have…amusing information…the delight of this book is the intelligence and freshness of its inferences.’ Lynne Truss, Sunday Times
‘A God-among-loo-books…here, the past is not so much a foreign country as another planet…there is not a single piece of trivia here that I don’t feel better for knowing.’ Time Out
‘An enthralling, entertaining and thought-provoking revelation of the realities of life in the tall, thin, Victorian town house.’ Evening Standard
‘This book is a splendidly entertaining read, and it also breaks new ground. No one has ever written so interestingly or wittily about housework.’ Spectator
‘Rich and well ordered, this study casts brilliant light…Curious facts tumble from the pages.’ Economist
‘[Flanders] explores [Victorian’s] minds through the fascinating minutiae of their lives and through that detail we glimpse the bigger history. Turn off the TV and read this instead.’ The Sunday Business Post
‘This rich book is a shining example of how history might be made entertaining and engrossing, as well as informative. Flanders has crammed and incredible amount of detailed research into this book which will become an invaluable reference for other historians.’ The Glasgow Herald
'The delight of this book… is the intelligence and freshness of its inferences.' The Sunday Times
'Judith Flanders' artful arrangement of fascinating facts brings new life to people (mostly female) and places (all domestic) that traditional history ignored.' Literary Review
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
35 of 35 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I loved this book. I wouldn't normally read a non-fiction book from cover to cover, but I found this one addictive. It is quite specific in the ground it covers, centering very much on the domestic life of middle class women. The reference material is mainly contemporary fiction and advice books, which do perhaps give more of an indication of what people aspired to, rather than how they actually lived. However, the author does not pretend otherwise. We may not all follow the advice of TV programmes such as "How Clean is your house", but the fact that they are so popular does tell us something about our society. This book doesn't view the Victorians through rose tinted glasses, but why should it? If you want to know why your house has a front room, or how long you should wear black to mourn the death of your second cousin twice removed or are just feeling sorry for yourself because you have a big pile of ironing, then this is the book for you.
26 of 26 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I got my copy from the library, started to dip into it and five minutes later had ordered a copy from Amazon for my mother. It's absolutely fascinating. Not only brilliantly researched but wonderfully well-written. You may think you know the Victorians, but did you know for example that at a child's funeral everybody wore white? That the coffin was white, and the pallbearers children? What an amazing opening that would make for a film. Any idea how long Mrs Beeton would cook a large carrot for? Twenty minutes? Thirty? Not even close; two and a quarter hours is the answer.
A wonderful piece of social history, that can be dipped into at any time. Everyone I've shown a copy to, has wanted one for themselves.
A wonderful piece of social history, that can be dipped into at any time. Everyone I've shown a copy to, has wanted one for themselves.
54 of 55 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a wonderful work of popular social history about the lives of Victorians. But, rather than the upper classes or the ruling elite, or the working classes, we are taken into the homes of the middle classes. Yes, this is costume drama territory. Flanders introduces us to the archetypal middle class house -- perhaps a prosperous five-storey villa in the city, or a humble terrace -- and she takes the reader on a guided tour of all the rooms in turn. We are told how the room was used by the household: what occurred there and when, how and why. How it was furnished, how often it was used etc. Then, far more interestingly Flanders digresses into wider related social aspects in each chapter. For example the chapter on the 'sickroom' -- usually a bedroom emptied of all furnishings to nurse a sick family member back to health -- becomes a discussion about Victorian healthcare, medicine, funerals, and mourning etiquette. (The Victorians had an unhealthy preoccupation with illness and a tendency towards hypochondria.)
Flanders makes wonderful use of primary sources such as memoirs, diaries, letters and journals to illustrate the points she is making and to give specific examples to bring situations and ideas to life (very evocative, quaint language). She also regularly cites contemporary novelists such as Dickens and Bronte (to name but two) that allows us an insight into the mind of a Victorian reader through their characters, whose situations, circumstances and opinions reveal an awful lot about prevailing thought of the period. Various 'pamphleteers' and authors of household management books (especially Mrs Beeton) also feature heavily, though usually to be derided by the author and the reader for their hopeless pomposity and self-righteous bluster.
Having read this, it's very difficult to admire or to respect Victorians very much as far as their private lives were concerned, and Flanders seems to concur with this and makes no attempt to disguise her contempt: generally (there are exceptions) they were pompous, self-righteous, patronising, snobbish and arrogant beyond belief, not to mention cruel to their servants. It is difficult or impossible to sympathise with any of the Victorians whose writings feature in this book. However this does allow for Flanders' pithy and acerbic notes at the bottom on the pages to add a little humour too. This is somewhat unusual for a history book and the author's style certainly ain't Adam Hart-Davis' gushing What The Victorians Did For Us. I'm just aching to read a Dickens now, or to watch a period drama. This really is a fascinating and entertaining read and written in an accessible prose and with some nice illustrations.
Just a few quibbles now. One thing I would add is that it seems to concentrate more on the lives of women and rather brushes over men a little. But this is to be expected in an exploration of the household. And Flanders does seem to repeat herself too often for my liking; there's repeating things for emphasis and then there's just repeating things. Lastly, it's also rather 'Londoncentric'. Now I don't mind this, thinking as I do that London is magnificent, but I'm aware that certain people object to this. But these are just trifling criticisms that don't detract from a real achievement. A splendid book.
Flanders makes wonderful use of primary sources such as memoirs, diaries, letters and journals to illustrate the points she is making and to give specific examples to bring situations and ideas to life (very evocative, quaint language). She also regularly cites contemporary novelists such as Dickens and Bronte (to name but two) that allows us an insight into the mind of a Victorian reader through their characters, whose situations, circumstances and opinions reveal an awful lot about prevailing thought of the period. Various 'pamphleteers' and authors of household management books (especially Mrs Beeton) also feature heavily, though usually to be derided by the author and the reader for their hopeless pomposity and self-righteous bluster.
Having read this, it's very difficult to admire or to respect Victorians very much as far as their private lives were concerned, and Flanders seems to concur with this and makes no attempt to disguise her contempt: generally (there are exceptions) they were pompous, self-righteous, patronising, snobbish and arrogant beyond belief, not to mention cruel to their servants. It is difficult or impossible to sympathise with any of the Victorians whose writings feature in this book. However this does allow for Flanders' pithy and acerbic notes at the bottom on the pages to add a little humour too. This is somewhat unusual for a history book and the author's style certainly ain't Adam Hart-Davis' gushing What The Victorians Did For Us. I'm just aching to read a Dickens now, or to watch a period drama. This really is a fascinating and entertaining read and written in an accessible prose and with some nice illustrations.
Just a few quibbles now. One thing I would add is that it seems to concentrate more on the lives of women and rather brushes over men a little. But this is to be expected in an exploration of the household. And Flanders does seem to repeat herself too often for my liking; there's repeating things for emphasis and then there's just repeating things. Lastly, it's also rather 'Londoncentric'. Now I don't mind this, thinking as I do that London is magnificent, but I'm aware that certain people object to this. But these are just trifling criticisms that don't detract from a real achievement. A splendid book.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
A great read!
I bought this book to help me to prepare for a role in a new play in which I performed recently set in the Victorian era and entitled 'Death Takes A Lover. Read more
Published 5 months ago by Ms. Karen Elizabeth Lomas
Fascinating
This is a most interesting and engaging book. I grew up in a Victorian house and it gives me a new level of understanding of the rooms and their functions. Read more
Published 6 months ago by helenroberts169
A great read
I found The Victorian House to be an excellent read. Well written, Judith Flanders covers a wide variety of connected subjects as she moves from room to room. Read more
Published 14 months ago by S. Kay
a good read
This is a very good read. If a more detailed book is needed look elsewhere. I love reading about the period thus covered and the authors time spent in study is obvious. Read more
Published 17 months ago by Mr. I. V. Collett
Fascinating study.
This is a fantastic book, very easy to read despite it's slightly intimidating doorstep size. It explodes a lot of the myths of what we think we know about the Victorians and it is... Read more
Published 23 months ago by M. P. OKeefe
How social history should be written
I'm trying to read a book by a university academic on the evolution of the family, a subject which ought to be fascinating, but I find myself re-reading every phrase trying to... Read more
Published on 10 Oct 2009 by John Davison
Definitive description of middle class Victorians
Absolutely outstanding and gorgeously readable from first page to last. If you want to learn about everyday life, especially for the middle classes, in the Victorian period, this... Read more
Published on 21 Nov 2008 by David Williams
excellent
Excellent account of what life was like for upper-middle-class people in the Victorian era. Very entertaining and thoroughly researched. Read more
Published on 15 Aug 2008 by Rinconete
Exciting, eye-opening!
I love reading about domestic life and this book hit the spot perfectly! I keep re-reading it and always find something new I've missed before because there is so much... Read more
Published on 2 Jan 2008 by Marritza
unputdownable!
What a great book! I love the way the chapters are divided into the different rooms in a Victorian house. Read more
Published on 14 Nov 2007 by Mrs. K. A. Wheatley
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