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| The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed | 
 enlarge | Author: Judith Flanders
Publisher: HarperPerennial
Category: Book
List Price: £9.99
Buy Used: £3.99
You Save: £6.00 (60%)
New (23) from £4.30
Avg. Customer Rating:  12 reviews
Sales Rank: 31883
Media: Paperback
Edition: New Ed
Pages: 528
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5 x 1.5
ISBN: 0007131895
Dewey Decimal Number: 900
EAN: 9780007131891
ASIN: 0007131895
Publication Date: August 2, 2004
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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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
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| Customer Reviews: Read 7 more reviews...
 excellent August 15, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Excellent account of what life was like for upper-middle-class people in the Victorian era. Very entertaining and thoroughly researched. It does not certainly deserve any 1 or 3 star ratings. I've just finished reading it and have already ordered "Consuming Passions" by the same author.
Exciting, eye-opening! January 2, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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 information.
The book divided into sections corresponding to each room of a Victorian house but it goes beyond that, to explain the way Victorians lived in and related to that particular room in the house. In this way, the book presents an intriguing insight into the Victorian worldview and how it compares to ours. It is often amazing to see how different they are and explains a lot of the Victorians' preferences and actions.
Oh, and if you thought that middle-class life in the 19th century English towns was somehow romantic, this book will set you straight. You will have no illusions regarding the work women had to do, either. It's one of these books that changes your perceptions completely.
unputdownable! November 14, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
What a great book! I love the way the chapters are divided into the different rooms in a Victorian house. Each one deals with not only the items you would expect to find within the room, but the kinds of lives lived there and the effect of such domestication on the external world. She roams as far afield as the development of department stores, the boom in food colourings, the effects of furnishings on disease etc. It also talks about the way that current markets have been shaped by the growth of marketing in Victorian times. Here are the origins of mass consumerism and a competitive business culture that we live with today. It is full of human interest and those snippets of history that make the Victorians such eccentric, memorable and fascinating people.
buy it for your friends April 1, 2006
12 out of 12 found this review helpful
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.
I couldn't put this book down September 19, 2005
17 out of 17 found this review helpful
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.
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