Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England »

Judith Flanders is the author of A Circle of Sisters, which was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award. She lives in London.

"Almost criminal in its housebreaking, burglarizing, second-story genius."—James Kincaid, University of Southern California

The New York Times - Alida Becker

… if we now live in a time when tennis elbow is more common than housemaid's knee, are we really that far from the underlying assumptions of domestic life in the Victorian age? This is just one of the questions raised by Judith Flanders's Inside the Victorian Home, a nimble compilation of the sort of social history to be found not just in public archives but also in popular novels and advice manuals, private correspondence and newspaper advertisements, arranged in chapters devoted to particular rooms in the typical mid-to-late-19th-century middle-class English household.