Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England, Judith Flanders

George Elgar Hicks, "Companion to Manhood," from Woman's Mission

(June 30) I loved this because of the time-travel effect of learning how people actually coped from day to day without electricity, running water and sound medical knowledge, and Judith Flanders did an impressively massive research job.

She presents the meticulous portrait partly as a way of explaining some of the unfamiliar practices of Victorian novels, like call-paying and card-leaving, partly to expose how strangely the Victorians applied morality to everything, and partly to protest the institutions and beliefs that oppressed women.

But even without these more scholarly excuses for the research, the details of domestic life are absorbing. I was fascinated by how dirty life was living with coal (your hairbrush would be black every day, even though you wore a hat outdoors) -- and how clean the Victorians actually strove to be (laundry was boiled at least three times during an eight-stage process) -- and how long and drudging all this husbandry was with the tools they had.

On the other hand, I was surprised that the time-travel effect was ultimately delusional. Flanders, I think, wanted to stress how different the Victorians were from us, but, in the end, it's apparent the differences between us are infinitesimal. We still have bizarre notions about cleanliness, food and health; we still oppress women; we still think we're in charge of the world.