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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 909
EAN num: 9780393327632
ISBN number: 0393327639
Label: W. W. Norton
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton
Page Count: 416
Printing Date: November 21, 2005
Publishing house: W. W. Norton
Sale Popularity Level: 41261
Studio: W. W. Norton
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
'[Flanders] knows what we want to know and is thoroughly engaging, undidactic company.'—Katherine A. Powers, Boston Sunday Globe
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 room, and parlor, all the way to the sickroom—Judith Flanders draws on diaries, advice books, and other sources to resurrect an age so close in time yet so alien to our own. 100 illustrations, 32 pages of color.
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Rated by buyers 
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A well written comprehensive study of the domestic life during the Victorian period. Amazing reading!
Rated by buyers -
I am always on the lookout for information to help in restoring my Victorian Home. This book was helpful.
Rated by buyers -
This book is very factual while being entertaining; a thoroughly researched trip through each room of a middle class victorian household with some gentle asides and forays into wealthy and laborer homes. I had a number of "aha" moments, especially because the author goes into detail on some of the rooms, such as the morning room and the scullery, that many authors simply skip over or say a few words about. I have read many books on victorian history and I imagined the scullery to be a sort of storage area for dirty dishes and knives; I had no idea it was a "dirty jobs" room.
If you want a complete study of each room, to get a clear idea of the layout and function of a victorian home, you will enjoy this book.
Some of the folks here who have given this book indifferent reviews apparently have not read it.
Rated by buyers 
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This book is an excellent collection of truthiness - gathered from advice books, novels and diaries. The author acknowledges here and there that these may hardly reflect reality of the actual life during the Victorian era, but most of the time she just assumes it does. It's quite entertaining, but sometimes the author's feminist interpretation of the facts goes overboard. It's also tiring how she always looks down her nose on anything the "Victorians" did, thought or stood for, on any of their achievements and even any progress they made. She makes them all look stupid and backward.
Rated by buyers 
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This takes all the usual primary sources--the records of Beatrix Potter and Jane Carlyle, the diary of Munby's lover, Mayhew, Beeton, etc.--as well as some less well known sources and packages it in a largely accurate and very attractive whole. The book is very well written and doesn't often engage in the broad stereotypes and sensationalism that tends to predominate mass market-oriented books on the Victorian age.
Occasionally, Flanders' own inexperience in MODERN parenting and housekeeping come through. For example, she thinks that infant febrile seizures described in Beeton are sheer fantasy rather than a common side effect to high fever, and several of her other comments about children leave me wondering how much contact she's had with those under the age of 10. She also has a weirdly 1950s throwback attitude toward breastfeeding, seeming to see it as something dirty and horrible that women were forced to go through and characterizing their babies as "vampires." (As opposed to the patriarchally imposed formula that doctors invented because a male doctor can do so much better for a baby than a mere female can who has no benefit of scientific and hygienic MEDICINE. Erm. Okay, my prejudices are showing here, but sheesh, breastfeeding has been a right that women have had to fight for ever since the male medical establishment shoved a bottle of condensed cow milk into our collective hands.)
She's also no experienced hand in the kitchen--she's astonished over how MANY things are needed for a complete kitchen while any modern cook would be astonished that a kitchen was considered to be fully outfitted with so FEW. This means that her section on the kitchen and food preparation isn't nearly as insightful as some of her other chapters--she just has no frame of reference for discussing much of it. This section would have been much more helpful coming from someone who could really recognize differences.
Other times, she sensationalizes slightly, taking nontypical examples of the treatment of women (particularly those of girls) and of Victorian prudery and painting them as more mainstream than they were. I really wish that the section on children were stronger, but I feel, again, that her experience is failing her here.
Overall, however, she does an excellent job in making a broad topic digestible, fascinating, and comprehensible to any reader.
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