How to Be a Victorian by Ruth Goodman

I use the tag The Past is a Foreign Country mostly to indicate books that are old themselves, but it's broader than that - it's for books that, in one way or another, are full of the thoughts and ideas of past eras - whether that's one generation ago or several hundred.

How To Be a Victorian is an example - it's a decade-old book, I think a companion piece or line-extension to a TV show the author, Ruth Goodman, presented about life on a farm in the 19th century. I don't know if Goodman is still doing that, or if her career has moved into a different phase, but it looks like she spent a decade or so making TV shows about farming using the tools of various ages in UK history - and, as I type this, I'm pretty sure my wife watched those shows and told me about them. If you want a capsule explanation of how different the two of us are, "and I read a book by the same person many years later for unrelated reasons," comes close.

The subtitle is "A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Victorian Life," which explains the book pretty succinctly. Goodman organizes her material into fifteen chapters, starting with getting out of bed in the morning and ending with getting back into bed (this time to cover sex) at the end. In between, she covers clothing, grooming, work, play, school, leisure, and a lot of detail about food - obtaining and cooking and eating, how meals were presented and who ate what, when and how.

Goodman, I think, is a trained historian, and she repeatedly makes the point that the Victorian era is a long period - sixty-plus years from 1837 to 1901 - and the world was not static during that time. She also is clear about the differences between classes, urban vs. rural, and especially men vs. women - all of those groups had very different experiences of life. She also tries to cover geographical differences as much as possible: occasionally mentioning America, mostly in the context of media or advertisements, but mostly falling into the general UK dichotomies like North vs. South or London vs. everywhere else, with occasional color about specifics in places like Wales or Ireland.

I still read things with my editor brain, which often is specifically a SFF editor brain, so I kept thinking this would be a good research book for anyone writing historical fiction or alternate worlds going through their own Industrial Revolutions. There's a lot of small detail of how lives are lived - some of it seems general to the level of technology, while more is contingent of specifics of religion (most fantasy worlds, he said archly, should not have a cod-Christian church in charge) and history (the US Civil War had a surprisingly large effect on what people wore in the UK) and other real-world things. All of that could be useful to anyone writing in a similar world: specifics and details are always important, vagaries and genericism are lazy and make for dull stories.

But most of the people reading How To Be a Victorian are probably more like me: vaguely interested, with some knowledge (as much as I specialized in anything for my English degree, it was 19th century novels) and a desire to understand more about how people actually lived during those times. This is a fine book for that, full of nuanced details and excellent comparisons, good to tell you not just what "a Victorian" ate and wore, but how a poor woman differed from a rich one, or a housemaid in the 1890s from her grandmother fifty years earlier. I doubt most of us will ever need to know those details, but knowing pointless, interesting details is one of the great small pleasures of life, isn't it?