Saw this book review in the NY Times. Thought it might be of interest to some who love to learn about Victorian Times. Lorraine Iervolino Inside the Victorian Home By Judith Flanders "Are we really that far from the underlying assumptions of domestic life in the Victorian age?" asks Alida Becker, an editor at the Book Review. "This is just one of the questions raised by Judith Flanders's" book, "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. ... [M]arshaling an array of suggestive details and juicy quotations, she turns us into voyeurs and eavesdroppers, then gives us plenty of room to read between the lines." Through letters and diaries, "we come to understand in a much more immediate way the daily impact of Victorian codes of etiquette, theories of disease, standards of hygiene, fashions in cookery and methods of child-rearing," says Becker. During this era, the "the idea of home" evolved, becoming "a refuge from the outside world. ... The house, in other words, was to become 'an expression of the morality that resided within.' That morality may have been expressed in different terms, but it's hard not to see its shadow stretching into the 21st century."