A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain

by Michael Paterson

The Victorian era has dominated the popular imagination like no other period, but the familiarity with later 19th-century stories and history tends to give us a distorted view. Using character portraits and key events, Paterson brings the world of Victorian Britain alive, from the lifestyles of the aristocrats to the depths of the London slums.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Audiobook, Victorian, 19th Century, British Literature, Historical

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Karen· · Rating 2 out of 5]

So obviously there is social history and social history.

There's the academic pursuit, based on rigorous research and evaluation of archival source unavailable to past historians:such exciting material as laundry lists or piano invoices. Its aim is to provide a narrative, an interpretation of continuity and change in people's lives and ways of living them, based on a thorough and detailed scrutiny of social institutions, of demographic change, of customs and habits, of relationships between genders, classes and generations. It uses quantitative methods to draw objective conclusions. It sees social history more as a method of enquiry than a field of research. It takes as its basic vision a holistic view, one that combines the influences of economics, ideology and culture - one I ascribe to as it refuses to see human beings as puppets, strings tweaked by economic forces or class conflict alone.

Or it's just 'the history of the people with the politics left out' as G.M.Trevelyan famously, nay infamously, put it in the preface to his English Social History. The residue, what's left over when you've done the military, the statecraft, the constitutional, the economic history. A bit of a hodge-podge, a bit of a pot-pourri. It's social history: I can pop in anything that takes my fancy, and it will sell, because people love reading about what funny things people ate or strange clothes they wore in that other country that is the past.

This, I'm afraid, is firmly in the latter camp.

Those two chapters 'What They Ate' and 'Etiquette and Fashion' were entertaining and informative, it has to be admitted, but read Victorian People and Ideas for religion, read Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain for transport, sport, leisure and shopping, read The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public for the publishing industry and literacy rates and read The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830-1900 for just about everything else (except what people wore and ate).

I was going to grudgingly concede that of its type, this isn't a bad book. Its type would be: popular, accessible, readable social history for the general reader. But I'm not even sure it's not a bad book:

During the second half of the nineteenth century two important elements came together to create a revolution in communications. The first was a massive increase in the amount of material published. The second was a massive increase in the number of people able to read. Rapid advances in printing techniques made possible for the first time publishing for a mass market, (no quibbles so far, wait for it) while the Education Act of 1870 provided, almost overnight a colossal reading public. (my emphasis)

That is frankly bizarre.

The 1870 Education Act merely provided the framework, and the obligation on local authorities to plug the gaps that were left by denominational schools. It did not cause a revolution in the provision of schools: there was already a hotchpotch of Sunday Schools, Ragged Schools, Nonconformist Schools, you name it. It took years for the School Boards to get themselves organised. And it was at least another ten years before the question of compulsory attendance for the under 12s was tackled. Overnight revolution? Hardly.

And on top of that, real rates of literacy are incredibly hard to measure. The common test is whether a person can sign the marriage register. The trouble there is that reading and writing were not a package deal in the 19th century, but discrete skills. Reading was seen as a useful skill, not least for religious purposes, but writing was only needed by those intending to take up clerical work. On the other hand, people may have learnt at least to write their own name. So the test of providing a signature is a coarse measure at best. But let's take it, since it's all we have. According to the graph on page 124 of The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750-1950, Volume 3: Social Agencies and Institutions, by 1870 slightly less than 20% of men and around 30% of women were unable to sign the register when they married. Ten years later these rates had dropped by around ten percentage points.

So if Mr Paterson is making such sweeping statements in an area where I can spot the deliberate mistake, I begin to wonder how many more errors there are that I didn't see. Certainly a lot of the coverage is patchy. And a real bugbear:in his introduction, Paterson divides Victoria's long reign into the hungry forties, the mid-Victorian calm and the decadent eighties and nineties. But this neat structure turns into an entirely undifferentiated Victorian sludge when he's actually dealing with the various topics.

I suppose there is one hugely gratifying compensation to this experience: at least some of my reading in the past year or so seems to have lodged itself in the grey matter. I was able to skip great swathes of this book, smugly saying to myself, 'Ach, but I know all that already.'

Bought in Waterstones, Argyle Street, Glasgow.

[Xanthi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Whilst I found some of this book informative and interesting, there were parts of it that made me cringe. Workhouses? They weren't so bad! Colonialism and imperialism? Quite good, actually - even for the natives! Yes, yes, the British set up concentration camps in South Africa in the time of the Boer Wars, and tens of thousands of people died in them, but they weren't the first to use of them! It was the Spanish in Cuba years before that did that. Etc etc... There was a lot of playing down of negatives of this era in British history, and a lot of showing it to be a lot rosier than what it was, and that's why this book gets just two stars.

[Frances · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting account of Victorian society as a whole but nothing so special.
It may be a good reading and a nice place to start if you have little knowledge of that period, but as far as I'm concerned, it wasn't very satisfying.

[Amy H. Sturgis · Rating 4 out of 5]

As brief histories go, this one is extremely well done. Paterson's social history of Queen Victoria's reign is short on generalizations and dense with well-organized and meaty information about everything from architecture and furnishings to food and fashion. He stresses in particular the social revolutions that took place thanks to innovations in transportation and literacy during the Victorian era. Throughout his study, Paterson draws attention to how thoroughly life transformed from the beginning of Victoria's reign to its close, and how this age of intense change (both physical and intellectual) not only set the stage for much of the world we've inherited globally in the twenty-first century, but also marks the experience of that time as one that resembles our own more closely than we might realize. Reading it cover to cover was a delight, and I'm sure I'll refer back to sections of it in the future for personal research.

[Georgia Gladitz · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a terrible book. Where did the author do his research? Wikipedia? I can't even finish it. And I'm only on the second chapter. There are so many discrepancies, particularly when he dealt with child labour and workhouses. Firstly he claims that children started work around the age of 5 sometimes, and made it seem like their work was menial, which is untrue; children as young as 3 or 4 would be employed in many professions, such as chimney sweeping. Children worked up to 16 hours a day (though labour laws existed, mostly the applied to textile work and went ignored) until the second half of the 19th century when a bill was passed that regulated work to 10 hours a day for both children and adults. And the work wasn't just sewing in the shared tenement room for your parents or running small errands, it could be factory work and other incredibly dangerous jobs.

The author also almost made it seem like the only problem with workhouses were that people were ashamed of needing to get help. I'm sure that may have been a TINY aspect of people's hesitance, but I rather think the separation of families (no, children mostly did not live with their mothers, or even have visitation with them, thanks Mr Patersson, they mostly lived in separate children's quarters), brutal punishments, inhumane living conditions, backbreaking labour, and having to pay your way out of a workhouse (you couldn't just leave whenever you wanted to as the author implies) or get yourself employed outside the workhouse were all reasons why people would rather die in the streets or kill themselves before going to a workhouse. Obviously not all workhouses were completely horrible, but many were, which created a public fear of them that far surpassed the fear of having to rely on handouts. Meat 3 times a week?? For working adults?? Really?? I'd love to see the primary source where he found that tidbit of information. Especially since http://www.workhouses.org.uk/life/foo... shows that young children get meat in their meal once a week and infirm women who cannot work get it only twice. And other groups get none. Mostly people ate bread and gruel or porridge. What makes him think Oliver Twist was an embellishment of any kind?

The author can't even bring himself to say prostitution or sex work for f---ks sake. He says, "an older profession". This is clearly a book more suitable for a middling, slightly puritanical reader than an academic or intellectual who really wants to understand what life was like in the Victorian period. Moving on to better, actually researched texts. That's a day of my life I can't get back.

[Alex · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is an incredibly rosy look at life in Victorian Britain, largely the lives of the upper and middle classes (pretty much in the London area only). He says the workhouses weren't really grim at all, guys, they were great! Phew!

While presenting interesting information, as one would expect, the author sometimes inserts opinions about modern life that don't really have a place in the book and grated on me (there was a line about how we're "obsessed with political correctness today," which, sorry, we're more aware of how language hurts and the histories of certain words and less willing to cause further hurt by some ridiculous refusal to change vocabulary, it's not about correctness or politics but being a basically decent human being).

Then, especially in the last quarter or so of the book, he repeatedly talks about how colonization was actually good and imperialism shouldn't be a bad word. Yeeaah... I stopped the audiobook with forty seconds to go because it was frankly a little disgusting.

Not recommended.

[Marilyn · Rating 1 out of 5]

There is error in the book, such as the made up nonsense stated as truth of the removal of ribs by corset wearing women or that women fainted from too tightly drawn corset strings, this despite the fact that corset wears and other persons on today know it was a lack of oxygen caused by gas lamps in non aired room which gave a women the vapors.
The author completely ignores Judaism in Victorian England and how things changed for Jews which new laws and the repealing of old ones. In all this is a poorly created piece of bum fodder

[Willa Guadalupe Grant · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book, there is a lot of information in a very small book & gives one a working knowledge of Victorian Britain. I especially like the "fashion" & "what they ate" chapters. The author really covered pretty much all aspects of life from how they got around to the military & what they read, religion & etiquette, office life & leisure. A very good overview of this time period

[Alex Crozier]

Better to steer clear of this one. Lots of sweeping generalisations, misrepresentations and straight up errors (colonialism, Fanny Adams, waistlines and crinolines were particularly badly handled) leads to a conservative and outdated picture of the era without any of the nuance and complexity that makes Victorian England such a joy to study.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good overview of how much things changed during the reign, as well as a good comparison of how much technology changed society in a lifetime, similar to modern history.

Good narration - recommended

[Eleanor]

Losing my mind at this book describing the British Empire as "one of the finest and fairest administrative bodies" when specifically referencing and discussing colonisation. The academic equivalent of making a fancam for Queen Victoria

[Lauren Albert · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good general introduction to life during the period. Obviously ("brief history), it is not for people with a strong background in Victorian Britain.

[Nightbird World · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a good book, quite enlightening. Although, I wanted to know more about other aspects of Victorian life than some of the ones that were thoroughly explored in this book.

[Allie | livingskieslibrary · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good read for those interested in Victorian history or enjoy learning about the Victorian era. It covered a little bit of everything so it's a great place to start for general information of the Victorian era.

The flow was pretty good overall, although I wish that there was a concluding chapter or something to bring everything together instead of just ending it with whatever chapter we happened to be on (which was war - interesting, but I still would have liked to have had a proper conclusion).

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book was well written with lots of background for those who want to delve into such history.
Having said that, I found the contents to be disappointing. To explain why, I would suggest that it is re-titled to be a Brief History of the Life of the rich and privileged in Victorian Britain.
There was hardly a mention about the lives of the vast majority of the population who had much harder lives.

[Philip Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really good. Gives you a nice summary of various aspects of life in the 1800s in Britain (ie. clothing, war, etiquette, entertainment, sport, food, religion) without overwhelming you with too much. Now I'm curious about a bunch of stuff that I think I'll definitely go do some more reading on, starting with the Crimean War. A really interesting period to read on, as it gives so much context for the 20th century, which in turn shapes us today.

[Michal · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting read for two reasons: there's quality historical information here, and it allows for an insight into the mind of an Imperial Britain apologist. I was surprised to find out the conditions for the poor weren't that bad or that the police were quite effective and professional - I think that's demonstrably not true. It does allow us to see though how people perceive the era and its relevance today.

[Ian Kittle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was one of my most enjoyable and fascinating historical reads.

The Reign of Queen Victoria was lengthy and a time of great changes to the country and its people.

I found it hard to comprehend the living conditions in the larger cities for common people in the early 1800s. What a brutally hard life.

The military research for this book is amazing.

If you want to know what life was like then, this is a must read book.

[Daniel Kukwa · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a one-stop shop for information about the Victorian era, it's informative and useful. I only wish it was less in awe of its own material, and certainly less apologetic for some of the era's fundamental flaws; its attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of the workhouses is frankly ridiculous, and borders on the insulting.

[Bébhinn Ní Riain · Rating 2 out of 5]

A slog to read, which given the subject matter, is a huge disappointment. At times the author also handwaves away the negative impacts of Colonialism, the Workhouses and the abject poverty that the majority of the citizens lived through. Also reinforces the myth that women got ribs removed for corsets (didn't happen).

[Emma · Rating 2 out of 5]

DID NOT FINISH.
A very in-depth look at the Victorian era, the first 30ish percent I enjoyed, and this certainly isn’t a bad book, the research done was exceptional, but it just wasn’t for me. I really don’t have a desire to spend 40 minutes reading about how things like the omnibus came to be. I think it’s time to go back to a novel or two.

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some chapters I found less interesting than others but the book overall was well worth the read especially if interested in Victoria-era history. I also enjoyed the way the author writes and will be look for other books by him.

[Alex · Rating 2 out of 5]

Praise of colonialism, inability of the author to call sex work sex work by alluding to "an older profession" only, the chapter on religion talks exclusively about Anglicanism and Catholicism... Just a few issues with this book.

[Akkilag · Rating 2 out of 5]

ما ادري ايش الي يخليني ارجع كل فتره واقراء عن تاريخ برطانيه من وليام الفاتح الى عصر فكترويا الى تشرشيل حتى اليوم.. على العموم هم شعب كل ما قراءة له كثر اشمئزازي صراحه.

[Stephen Tubbs · Rating 4 out of 5]

If not in-depth, this is an impressive social history, in breadth. As the history informs us more than once our way of life today owes a lot to the Victorians.

[Joanna · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is exactly what it says it is: a brief history of life in Victorian Britain. Well done but basic.

[Cee · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF

[Dana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Picked this up when I was in York earlier this summer. I find English culture fascinating and thought this book would be fun to read as a number of my favorite authors are British and wrote around this time. The book opens up with a lengthy chapter on Queen Victoria whom I knew nothing about- what a woman!! I very much enjoyed learning about her. The remainder of the book was good as well and really brought so much of Victorian England to life. The author is a good writer and the work seems well researched. I wish there had been more pictures. My favorite chapter besides the opening chapter on Victoria was the chapter on food.

[Susan Abernethy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Link to my review of this book:

https://flhwnotesandreviews.com/2017/...

[Luisa Mayer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had a lot of fun reading this book. For me the most interesting part of history is seeing how people in earlier times lived their day to day lives: what they ate, what their relationships were like, what they read and talked about. Mr. Paterson writes an overview of Victorian England by looking at different aspects of their culture: fashion, architecture, religion, food, entertainment, technology.

The book is just an overview of the period, so the author skates over a lot of information without having time to provide detail. As a result, I have 10-20 notations in my book of people or movements to Google or read about in the future. This book would be a great springboard for digging in and reading more deeply about many other subjects – John Ruskin, William Wilberforce, the stories of Queen Victoria and her family.

It would have been more convenient if the book contained pictures of things like the architecture and the “pork-pie” hat. However, the author’s descriptions were done so carefully that much of what he talked about I could picture in my mind. Also, when I had a minute, it was easy enough to look up information about Gothic Revival architecture and the wall paper designs of William Morris in Wikipedia. I guess that if I had been interested, I could have listened to Gilbert and Sullivan on the internet as well! We are so like the Victorians, relying on and highly valuing technology!

For the past week I have been frequently poking my husband in the ribs saying things like, "That is so Victorian of you!" when he can't put down his cellphone, or "You can thank the Victorians for that!" when Chinatown references pop up in a favorite mystery show. I am amazed at how much of what we do today was built on Victorian society and how much like the Victorians we are.