The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed

Love this book. So many details of everyday life of people that era.

I absolutely look forward to reading anything Judith Flanders writes. It's concise and the research she does is marvelous. Always interesting things to discover in her books and this one is no different. Want to know how long to boil macaroni? It's in there. Need to learn about "sick" Victorian ladies? They're in here too. Need to fumigate the bedroom? Ditto. Wonderful fun stuff.

I bought this book so that I could better understand the design, use, ornamentation and social significance of these special and amazing homes. It's super and I recommend it highly.

I am always curious about life in the past and this book is quite good at explaining all the things that they had in homes back in Victorian times. There are some diagrams and also pictures actually taken at that time. Tells some about family sizes, the people hired to work in the homes, problems with soot from fires, how often some parts of the kitchen were cleaned, etc. Quite interesting. I would have liked even more diagrams and pictures. Glad I got it.

but I love it so far (3/4 through)the book is greatly organized - the chapters are divided in different sections from birth to death followed by description of the rooms and their functions. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes history of the Victorian era, and Victorian houses in particular.

Excellent read on what life was really like in the Victorian times. Feel soo sorry for the servants, who literally are treated like crap, for people who are too lazy to do for themselves, just because they were wealthy.

Our just married daughter and her husband just bought a charming house in London that was built in the 1860's and looks exactly like the illustration on the cover. I gave it to them as a house-warming present and they are greatly enjoying using the footsteps of their house to imagine its former life.

I bought The Victorian House for a summer school book read requirement and was pleasantly surprised it arrived in a fabulous condition. The description had read gently used but it actually was better than that. The book was from the UK and arrival to US was quick. I cannot be more pleased.

This book was excellent.This is not a book for people who are already knowledgeable on the topic of domestic daily life during the Victorian age in England. Flanders does, however, manage to combine an informative overview with a considerable degree of entertainment value - especially if you read the footnotes, where most of the humour is.This is a particularly useful book for anyone hoping to write about the period, since Flanders does not get bogged down in detail, but she does manage to get the 'feel' of the period very well indeed. One thing that particularly struck me is the sheer filthiness of the cities (particularly London, as the largest city) - Flanders does not just say "it was filthy" but demonstrates by discussing little adjustments people had to make, like not putting out a white tablecloth until a short time before the meal, or it would go grey. This level of atmospheric pollution is something that we just don't have to deal with in the UK any more, so it's hard to imagine without the examples Flanders gives.Another interesting area is the illustration of how limited many middle-class women's lives were - again, something that we find it difficult to appreciate from our twenty-first century standpoint. We might intellectually know that the Victorian period was probably the one in English history where women's rights and status in society reached their lowest ebb, but Flanders provides illustrative facts, including that since women were supposed to spend their lives catering to their families (particularly the men), pretty much the only way for a woman to get some time to herself was to be ill - which provided a cast-iron excuse for retiring to one's bedroom and closing the door. It provides an interesting alternative viewpoint on the fragile Victorian lady - women's health was generally poorer than men's because of their poorer diet and lack of fresh air and exercise, but being a professional invalid definitely had its attractions for any woman who wanted to escape the endless round of service to others.This is a book I shall probably refer to again and again.

I bought this for background research - buying the cheapest used copy listed. It will serve that purpose, but I will dip in according to what catches my attention. It's quite thick and I am not an enormous reader - pages quite concentrated and I would have paid more for more line drawings.I have bought the other book with similar content - and reviewers review the style of one or the other - having bought cheaply, I was happy too try both, and once used take the to a charity shop. This was not my favourite.

The author has written an excellent social history about the domestic life of ordinary Victorians and based it around the rooms in the house. This is a very clever way in which to write this book and makes it very, very accessible for the reader of popular history. She links each room with one stage in life (the nursery for birth, the drawing room for the woman as household manager, the dining room for the hostess and the sickroom for death for example). This is a clever conceit and doesn't always quite gel as well as the author may have liked but it enhanced the book considerably by breaking down the aspects of life lived in a domestic sphere into manageable chunks.This book deals with the domestic side of Victorian life and thus it deals a lot with the role of the woman as the household manager and hostess whilst the man of the family earned the money and dealt with life outside the home. The author deals with the mass of middle class families more than the aristocracy or the very poor and breaks down some of the myths about Victorian living, especially with reference to the role of servants. She describes how life was lived together with the furnishings and equipment which would have been necessary. My mother-in-law also read this book which she very much enjoyed and recognised many of the techniques and equipment as still in use in her childhood in the 1930s in a small mining town.There are lots of fascinating nuggets here, revealed in an easy to read style broken up with plenty of illustrations (I had the paperback version of the book which has some colour plates in three sections and line drawings included in the text). Very enjoyable and informative

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.

i was exsited for this book arriving as it has images im many of the pages down side the book does show the images very well and the pages are very thin so im reading it care fully but still i got it