Victorian House

Product Description

The bestselling social history of Victorian domestic life told through the letters diaries journals & novels of 19th-century men & women. The Victorian age is both recent & unimaginably distant. In the most prosperous & technologically advanced nation in the world people carried slops up & down stairs; buried meat in fresh earth to prevent mould forming; wrung sheets out in boiling water with their bare hands. This drudgery was routinely performed by the parents of people still living but the knowledge of it has passed as if it had never been. Running water stoves flush lavatories -- even lavatory paper -- arrived slowly throughout the century & most were luxuries available only to the prosperous. Judith Flanders author of the widely acclaimed A Circle of Sisters has written an incisive & irresistible portrait of Victorian domestic life. The book itself is laid out like a house following the story of daily life from room to room: from childbirth in the master bedroom through the scullery kitchen & dining room -- cleaning dining entertaining -- on upwards ending in the sickroom & death. Through a collage of diaries letters advice books magazines & paintings Flanders shows how social history is built up out of tiny domestic details. Through these we can understand the desires motivations & thoughts of the age. Many people today live in Victorian terraces & so the houses themselves are familiar but the lives are not. The Victorian House will change all that.