Inside the Victorian Home by Judith Flanders

Many a lady was sickly and subject to 'nerves,' surely not least because she wore up to 37 pounds of constricting clothing the Rational Dress Society campaigned to limit the amount to a mere seven pounds. The Victorian mistress had her own trials. The dirty, brutal labor of the 12-hour days increasingly drew women away from domestic service to jobs in factories and shops. The scullery, where pots were scrubbed, was, well, Dickensian-and left largely to servants, including workhouse children, like the Orfling in David Copperfield, and an unfortunate third of the population of young London women. The average Victorian kitchen was 'a dark, miserable basement space, running with damp,' writes Flanders. Considering the rigors of merely adequate housekeeping, Flanders concludes that, like most readers of Martha Stewart Living today, most Victorians regarded the daunting standards of the hugely popular Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management (1859-61) as 'aspirational in nature.' Simply protecting the bed from omnivorous vermin and omnipresent soot required constant, backbreaking vigilance: In addition to the ordeal of soaking, boiling, washing, bluing, and drying linens, Victorian homemakers were burdened with the task of turning and airing heavy horsehair mattresses. For a middle-class woman, who often worked alongside her one or two servants, maintaining this ideal was a Sisyphean task.īy the end of the first chapter, which focuses on the bedroom, readers will have a new appreciation for their vacuum cleaners and washer-dryers. In contrast to the industrial workplace, the Victorian house, presided over by Charles Dickens's 'ministering angel to domestic bliss,' was meant to be a clean, orderly sanctuary. Readers whose vision of Victorian domestic life derives from the aristocratic mansion of Upstairs, Downstairs will be taken aback by Judith Flanders's picture of the bourgeois home. Inside the Victorian Home examines this buttoned-up but tumultuous period through the keyhole of each room in the middle-class British house. We use 'Victorian' as a synonym for 'old-fashioned,' but the strait-laced era between 18 was also a time of extraordinary progress. INSIDE THE VICTORIAN HOME: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England. APA style: Inside the Victorian Home: a Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England.

Inside the Victorian Home: a Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England.' Retrieved from 2004 Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars 26 May. MLA style: 'Inside the Victorian Home: a Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England.' The Free Library.

Inside the Victorian Home by Judith Flanders