In a period of less than seventy-five years, over six million houses were built, and the majority stand and function as homes still." "One-third of the houses in Britain today were built before the First World War, and most of these are Victorian. "To house the numbers of newly urbanized people was a challenge without precedent," Flanders writes. The 19th century, as she says, "was the century of urbanization." Whereas in 1801 "only 20 percent of the population of Great Britain lived in cities," a century later "that figure had risen to nearly 80 percent." With a population of about a million in 1800, London was the largest city in the world, and at century's end that figure had multiplied five times. Her attention is focused on city life, London in particular what she shows us is a world in which dirt, vermin and disease were nearly inescapable, and in which the labor of maintaining even the best-managed households was endless, exhausting and often dangerous. But in many respects the picture she draws - and she draws it with obsessive attention to detail - is a useful corrective to over-romanticizing. Judith Flanders acknowledges as much at the end of her exhaustive study of domestic life in Victorian England.
It is easy, and tempting, to take a romantic view of the Victorian Age, to wax sentimental about its high moral standards, its extraordinary literature, its great strides in industrial production and domestic conveniences and, of course, the good queen from whom it takes its name. Judith Flanders is the author of A Circle of Sisters, which was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award.
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