How to be victorian

How to be a Victorian by Ruth Goodman – review

A pale reflection of the past? Paul Signac’s Woman at her Toilette wearing a Purple Corset, 1893 Photograph: Getty Images/The Bridgeman Art Library

A pale reflection of the past? Paul Signac’s Woman at her Toilette wearing a Purple Corset, 1893 Photograph: Getty Images/The Bridgeman Art Library

I n August 1839, when Queen Victoria was just out of her teens, the 13th Earl of Eglinton convened a medieval tournament on his estate in Ayrshire. Thousands turned up in fancy dress to witness the cream of Scots aristocracy, canned in brass armour, tilting at each other on horseback. The rain poured. The mud grew thick. Water sluiced through the banqueting facilities. The knights struggled to keep in the saddle. The event was, in the words of one tough critic whose descendants doubtless spent a lot of time in the cheap seats at the Glasgow Empire, «the most magnificent abortion that has been witnessed for two centuries».

Is historical re-enactment a research technique or a party game? A way of occupying the sensory world of our ancestors – or an excuse for frustrated moderns to conduct themselves in a way they would not dare attempt in normal trousers? Ruth Goodman is in the first camp and has a CV to prove it. She has separated curds and whey like Tess Durbeyfield, handled the chemical stimulants that roared through the brain of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, overturned an Edwardian tractor and dug for victory against the Nazis – all without troubling the fabric of the space-time continuum. BBC camera crews recorded her labours for Victorian Pharmacy, Victorian Farm, Edwardian Farm and Wartime Farm; TV tie-in hardbacks followed. Her new book, How to be a Victorian – sturdy, Beetonian, compendious – has bigger ambitions. It aims to be «history from the inside out» – to answer the question, «what was it really like to be alive in a different time and place?»

Goodman’s method is a form of object divination. She handles Victorian materials, uses Victorian tools, wears and repairs Victorian clothes, in the hope that a kind of sympathetic magic will collapse the distance between the 19th century and the 21st. She has brushed her teeth with soot and scoured her pans with brick dust. (Both triumphs.) She has styled her hair with rice starch and rectified spirit. («Very easy to make up and apply.») She once forswore washing with water for four months. (Nobody noticed, leading her to doubt the received idea that people in the past were more malodorous that their present-day counterparts.)

The best work in How to be a Victorian lies in Goodman’s quiet demilitarisation of the corset – one of the most vicious ideological battlegrounds in Victorian studies. In the 1970s, when academia was busily formalising the Hammer horror view of the 19th century as a police state of the sensibility, the corset was identified as an instrument of patriarchal control: the gimp-mask that reminded Victorian women who their masters were. The academic Hélène E Roberts, for instance, argued that it «helped mould female behaviour to the role of the ‘exquisite slave'» – but her ideas, and those of other writers in this field, were shaped by an overly literal interpretation of the evidence.

Exhibit A in this case was often a lengthy correspondence in the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, in which readers compared notes on whalebone and tight-lacing – with such feverish enthusiasm that it now seems safe to conclude that the letters pages of the EDM were hijacked by a gang of sniggering fetishists, not all of whom may have been the women they claimed to be. Goodman understands this history of overinterpretation, and having put in many corseted hours on her TV farm and pharmacy, comes to a simple and authoritative conclusion. «When I think now of a Victorian woman lacing up her corset, tying her garters and buttoning her dress, I think of a woman dressing sensibly for a hard day of work ahead.»

The history of historical re-enactment offers a forceful lesson: it is a better guide to the preoccupations of the present than the reality of yesterday. The pioneering TV example, Living in the Past, now looks less like an exploration of Iron Age life than another case of the survivalist strain in 1970s British culture. The most recent, Turn Back Time: The High Street, is less about discovering lost ways of life than working through our guilt at having been seduced away from our local tradespeople. The most such acts of mimicry can yield is, I suspect, a fragile and possibly illusory sense of contact with the experiential world of our ancestors. When you look above shopfronts and see, over the tide of fibreglass, a run of unaltered 19th-century windows, that sense of the proximity of the past is also a measure of its painful distance. But the instinct to do this at all might be a 19th-century innovation. Those wet spectators at the Eglinton Tournament knew it. How can you be a Victorian? Crave the experiences of the long dead. Be prepared to wear fancy dress.

How to be a Victorian

Рут Гудман

по защите русского языка

9 февраля 2022 г. 14:18

Пару лет назад книга Частная жизнь Тюдоров была проглочена мной залпом, поэтому за произведение о Викторианской эпохе взялась с не меньшим интересом и энтузиазмом. Однако пыл остыл довольно быстро. Основная причина – сухой академических язык, которым очень подробно и скрупулезно, с примерами из жизни конкретных людей той эпохи, нам повествуют о том:

Много исторических отсылок, иллюстрации, рекламные плакаты и цветные фотографии из музеев. Все это очень познавательно, но…

30 июня 2022 г. 18:50

5 Познавательно

Книга мне понравилась. Некоторые писали, что сухой язык по сравнению с Частной жизнью Тюдоров, но я не читала Тюдоров, поэтому сравнить мне не с чем. Книга информативна, без воды.

Магистр Книжной Магии

24 декабря 2021 г. 11:31

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How To Be a Victorian

Рут Гудман

по защите русского языка

9 февраля 2022 г. 14:18

Пару лет назад книга Частная жизнь Тюдоров была проглочена мной залпом, поэтому за произведение о Викторианской эпохе взялась с не меньшим интересом и энтузиазмом. Однако пыл остыл довольно быстро. Основная причина – сухой академических язык, которым очень подробно и скрупулезно, с примерами из жизни конкретных людей той эпохи, нам повествуют о том:

Много исторических отсылок, иллюстрации, рекламные плакаты и цветные фотографии из музеев. Все это очень познавательно, но…

30 июня 2022 г. 18:50

5 Познавательно

Книга мне понравилась. Некоторые писали, что сухой язык по сравнению с Частной жизнью Тюдоров, но я не читала Тюдоров, поэтому сравнить мне не с чем. Книга информативна, без воды.

Магистр Книжной Магии

24 декабря 2021 г. 11:31

Напишите рецензию!

Похожие книги

Вы можете посоветовать похожие книги по сюжету, жанру, стилю или настроению. Предложенные вами книги другие пользователи увидят здесь, в блоке «Похожие книги». Посоветовать книгу

THE mercury is pushing 30 degrees yet I’m kitted out in a heavy hessian dress pulled tight around my waist.

Lip Service: Presenter Ruth Goodman shows Joanna how to make red gloss

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The battered leather boots I’m wearing are laced tight around my ankles and I’m standing beneath an apple tree outside a 17th-century countryside cottage.

I wouldn’t look out of place in a costume drama although I’m definitely more downstairs than upstairs.

In fact the attire I’m wearing has been seen on screen. TV historian Ruth Goodman wore this dress, with its undergarments and whalebone corset, while she lived as a working-class Victorian for a year for the BBC series Victorian Farm. «The dress has never been washed,» she tells me as she fastens the waistband and ties my apron strings. «And considering I wore it almost every day it doesn’t smell that bad.»

We sort through the chest of musty clothes she wore for filming: cotton undergarments, aprons and dresses. Ruth may live in a medieval cottage but I’m slightly disappointed to find she doesn’t dress in historical costume in her everyday life. Nor does she indulge me when I encourage her to dress up for photographs. «Not without the corset,» she says. «When I dress up it’s all or nothing.»

During her year back in time Ruth brushed her teeth with soot, diligently separated curds and whey, experimented with opiates (at least handled them) and designed, sewed and wore historically accurate outfits.

Her latest project is a book, a step-by-step guide entitled How To Be A Victorian which promises to teach you to «cook with coal, clean with tea leaves, dress in whalebone, give opium to the little ones and avoid an untimely death on the threshing machine». It was a massive project not least because the Victorian era is so expansive, spanning more than 60 years. The book involved months of extensive research, practical and theoretical. «I really like that mixture of the doing and the reading,» says Ruth. «The practical side doesn’t necessarily give you answers but makes you read in a much more forensically dispassionate way. I think it makes you a much better historian. A lot of historians are missing a trick.»

Ruth never set out for a career in history. She didn’t study the subject but 20 years ago began attending historical re-enactment events and became fascinated by social history. As a result she has become something of an authority on the social and domestic life of Britain. She was first approached to do television 10 years ago and Tales Of The Green Valley about country life in Stuart times aired on BBC Two in 2005. Since then there have been other successful series.

«It’s not what I expected in life at all,» she says of her career. «But I do enjoy making TV programmes and communicating history. It’s such a good way of getting facts across just as writing is.»

Her cottage may be ancient but I can report that she doesn’t cook with coal and owns most mod cons including washing machine and dishwasher. But where my bathroom is full to the brim with an array of pharmaceutical and cosmetic products I notice there is just one small hard lump of soap in Ruth’s. «And I don’t use washing powder,» she admits.

«Sometimes if something’s really grubby I’ll use a tiny amount but all this research has shown me how few products we actually need. The market is saturated with pointless products and chemicals. It’s all a big marketing tool. Vinegar is still the best thing to clean floors and surfaces.

«I find that modern people smell, an acrid chemical smell, a synthetic combination of detergents and fabric softener and body wash and lotion and perfume. I can’t stand it,» she says. «I find that water pretty much does the job. And I don’t use body moisturiser or put any creams on my face or use make-up. I’ve found that chemicals don’t make you clean.»

While Ruth may not use make-up Victorian women did all they could to enhance their appearance. In her kitchen Ruth brings out a bag full of ingredients to show me how to make lip gloss and hairspray, or bandoline as it was then known, using a few household products and her cooker.

I scrape some paraffin wax from a candle into a saucepan along with beeswax, olive lard and alkenet root to give a red colour. I heat these until they are soupy. Ruth adds a few drops of rosewater then we pour it into a pot and wait for it to cool.

Looking the part: Joanna models the outfit Ruth wore daily during her year making the BBC’s Victoria

I find that modern people smell, an acrid chemical smell. I can’t stand it

What is left is a balmy lip gloss that leaves a red stain on the mouth, much like those you can buy today. I’m impressed at the resourcefulness of Victorian women and at the simplicity of making such a product although the waxy liquid that has hardened in the pan must have been a nightmare to clean.

Hairspray was similarly simple to concoct. Ruth shows me how to mix together alcohol, gum arabic and essence of bergamot to give a pleasant perfume. Then hey presto, we’ve created a hairspray to rival those sold on any high street. «I’m pretty sure this is all any hairspray is. I’ve used both sorts and this works just as well,» says Ruth, gesturing to the elixir.

However Victorian women did not have it easy. «Managing a household required more labour than at any other time in history,» says Ruth. «The change over from wood to coal fires meant suddenly women had to deal with black sticky muck all the time. Wood ash had also been the source of detergent used to dissolve grease in laundry so with the advent of coal they lost their detergent and had to buy in soap. Add to that the fact Victorian soap doesn’t activate in cold water so then they had to heat all their water. It’s ironic that the domestic burden on women rose with the rise of industrialisation.

«There was more housework to be done which trapped women into spending more time on domestic chores and less time on going out into the world.»

But, says Ruth, we can learn a lot from this era. «So much change took place from the rise of capitalism to the advancement of germ theory and medical cures. These were huge advances. You may not be able to change human nature but the Victorians showed us you can change the world around you. It’s an important message.»

How To Live Like A Victorian, Right Now 47:11

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Brush your teeth with soot, stay away from water, wear a steel corset. We’ll talk with the author of “How to Be A Victorian.” Strange ways from another age.

Frederick Daniel Hardy’s «Baby’s Birthday» (1867) shows a typical Victorian English family at home. (Wikimedia / Creative Commons)

Imagine a world of teeming forests and seas, all organic farming, no fossil fuels belching on the highway. Horses for all. And boom, you’re in the Victorian Age. We talk about Victorian mores and manners. Top hats, crinoline skirts, corsets and gaslight. What was it like to really live that life? In that age? British historian Ruth Goodman has done it. Recreated the smallest elements of Victorian life, from the washstand to the workplace to the bedroom. She lets you feel what it was to be there. Live there. With the smoke and the soot and the smells. This hour On Point: How to be a Victorian.
— Tom Ashbrook

Guest

Ruth Goodman, historian and author of the new book, «How To Be a Victorian: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Victorian Life.» Presenter on many BBC documentary programs, including «Victorian Farm,» «Victorian Pharmacy» and «Wartime Farm.»

From Tom’s Reading List

The Wall Street Journal: Book Review: ‘How to Be a Victorian” by Ruth Goodman — «Ms. Goodman’s fascination with the objects of the past doesn’t lead her to fetishize or romanticize them. She is admirably matter-of-fact in dealing with those areas of life that people often find disgusting (sanitary napkins) or salacious (condoms). Her examples remind us that old and new solutions to problems often coexist for a long time.»

Read An Excerpt Of «How To Be A Victorian» By Ruth Goodman

This program aired on January 26, 2015.