There has rarely been a book so dripping with elbow grease as The Victorian House. And this is a compliment, by the way. Like Jerome K Jerome, who was fascinated by work and could sit and look at it for hours, the reader of The Victorian House can lie back (blaming the heaviness of the tome) and contentedly gawp at labours of all sorts. It is incredibly relaxing. Have cups of tea while the Victorian skivvy applies vinegar and tea leaves to those stubborn floor stains. And why not try a foot massage while admiring the gargantuan efforts of the author, as she amasses primary information from diaries, letters, tracts, novels, magazines and how-to books, plus (of course) back issues of The Builder? As readers of her excellent group biography, A Circle of Sisters, will know, Judith Flanders is the Mary Poppins of such academic toil. “Spit spot,” she says, and suddenly you have not only the amusing information that Victorian bread often contained plaster of Paris, but you know exactly how long to boil it to discover the truth about your own particular loaf.
The Victorian House is an inevitable development from A Circle of Sisters. In that book, Flanders argued that Victorians (however eminent) needed to be seen in a family light to be understood completely. “Can it really be true that our families have so little influence on our lives that they can be safely tucked away in Chapter One?” In the introduction to the new book she quotes from H G Wells’s Tono-Bungay (1909) on the sort of history Edward Ponderovo would like to read: “Don’t want your drum and trumpet history — no fear . . . What I want to know is, in the middle ages did they Do Anything for Housemaid’s Knee? What did they put in their hot baths after jousting?”
Since Flanders makes the case for the high Victorian period in Britain as characterised by the proud shutting of several million new front doors (from the inside), Ponderovo-approved domestic history is precisely what she has written. Readers of Victorian fiction will be comfortable enough with all this, of course. How much the Victorians wrote about their homes! How much store they set by domestic orderliness! Charles Dickens once wrote to his wife, begging her not to move anything in his absence: “Keep things in their places; I can’t bear to picture them otherwise.”
The book is organised according to rooms, starting with the bedroom. Here we learn about changing fashions in bed-curtains, the impulse towards privacy, and childbirth. Anyone who would like to find a discussion of sex, by the way, will be disappointed, but on the other hand there is more than enough filth of other sorts in this book to compensate. “It has been suggested that I am more interested in S-bends than I am in sex. For the purposes of social history this is so, and I do not plan to discuss sex at all,” Flanders writes in a footnote on page 1. “For S-bends, however, see page 293.”
But fair enough. The trouser- stirrings of the Victorian male are quite irrelevant to the fight against dust, soot, smoke, vermin and poisonous fumes, which is this book’s main subject. “Although there are several fine books on the role of man in the home,” she declares, “this will not be another of them.”
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From the bedroom, we proceed to the nursery, the kitchen, and so on. But The Victorian House is not just an inventory of hat stands and antimacassars: larger themes are intertwined — themes of domestic virtue, female infantilisation, middle-class etiquette and the place of illness in Victorian family life. In A Circle of Sisters, Flanders explained that while most female reproductive conditions were regarded as illnesses, so were all non-reproductive conditions. She expands on that theme in this book.
Girls had a “distorted pelvic life”. They were not allowed to attend funerals in case they were unbalanced by them. One woman’s short-sightedness was diagnosed as “a weakness of the womb” that should be treated by hysterectomy. Always stopping short of polemic, Flanders can’t disguise her feminist disgust with the way girls were fed “protein-poor” diets and given books such as I Will Be a Lady: A Book for Girls (while their brothers got Get Money: A Book for Boys). She notes that when Constance Maynard, later the founder of Westfield College, announced her girlish intention of going to Girton, her father offered her a pony, by way of persuading her to give it up.
The delight of this book, however, is the intelligence and freshness of its inferences. How can you tell that a craze for fish aquariums was shortlived? Look in the Exchange & Mart and find advertisements from people hoping to offload them in exchange for a “needle rifle”. How do you know that it was safe for a woman to walk alone in some parts of London? Note that Bella Wilfer, in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, walks from Holloway to the City, to see her father. How can you be sure middle-class women were wary of their servants? Read a passage from Mary Braddon’s lurid novel Aurora Floyd (1863): “Your servants listen at your doors, and repeat your spiteful speeches in the kitchen . . . Nothing that is done in the parlour is lost upon these quiet, well-behaved watchers from the kitchen.” Flanders is a sensitive reader of the Victorian novel from Dickens to Gissing, and quotes to good effect. In her chapter on mourning dress, she quotes the shocked Miss Mattie in Mrs Gaskell’s Cranford, when the widowed Mrs Fitz-Adam wears a silk dress: “Bombazine would have shown a deeper sense of her loss.”
Fiction writers will adore this book. I am sure it is intended for a wider readership, but gosh, has Flanders done the legwork for any future Sarah Waters. Anyone who has ever set a novel in Victorian England will know how quickly the questions arise. What time was dinner? How many servants would there be? How light was gaslight? Did everyone have it? What was the difference between dining à la Française and à la Russe? What’s all this about them having plaster of Paris in the bread? Flanders has done historical fiction a lot of favours by writing The Victorian House. Yes, the next time the plot of a thick historical novel describes a myopic woman recovering from a medically unnecessary hysterectomy and then tragically choking on a chunk of plaster of Paris in a sandwich, you will know where the writer got his ideas.
Available at the Sunday Times Books Direct price of £16 plus £1.95 p&p on 0870 165 8585 and www.timesonline.co.uk/booksdirect
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Read on... websites:
www.victorian-society.org.uk
Society devoted to study and preservation of Victorian and Edwardian art and architecture
Read on... books:
The Victorians by A N Wilson (Hutchinson £25)
Engaging, gossipy and lively study of all aspects of the Victorian era