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BOOK REVIEW
HOW TO BE A VICTORIAN
A Dawn to Dusk Guide to Victorian Life
Written by Ruth Goodman
Reviewed by Fred H. Olin, M.D.
You are SO lucky to be living now rather than in the 19th century.
When we see expositions of life during the reign of Queen Victoria
(June 1837 to January 1901) on TV or in films, most of us seem to
think of the sort of things you might see on “Downton Abbey” or
the descriptions of life in the Sherlock Holmes books.
If we imagine living then, we mostly see ourselves in some man-
ifestations of what we are in our own world, or even someone rich
and/or famous. Crash Davis, a character in the movie “Bull
Durham” says “How come in former lifetimes everybody is someone
famous? How come nobody says they were Joe Schmo?”
Here’s a quotation from this book: “The Victorian era was a cat-
astrophic time to be poor. People’s skeletal remains provide the most
graphic and incontrovertible evidence of lifelong hardship…the
chances of long-term malnutrition and of body-deforming dietary
deficiencies in Victorian Britain were as bad as we have ever known.”
Most of the working poor, who were a majority of the population,
subsisted on diets consisting mostly of porridge and potatoes in the
north and bread in the south. A favorite baby food was bread soaked
in water. Protein and vitamin deficiencies were rife.
This book describes how things were in Great Britain during the
Victorian period. It’s likely that there were similar conditions in the are descriptions of things as mundane as table settings, chamber pots,
USA. Ms. Goodman did more than academic-style research: She
spent a year living the life of a Victorian farmwoman. She tried on
and wore actual clothes from the era and she cooked and ate foods
according to recipes of the time.
The book is organized as if the reader is going through a day in
the lives of folks in the mid- and late-19th century, starting with
Chapter One, “Getting Up,” and ending with the last two chapters,
“A Bath Before Bed” and “Behind the Bedroom Door.”
Think of your day, from the time you put your feet on the floor
until your eyes close at night. Think of every moment: up, to the
bathroom, eat breakfast, get to work, work, lunch (maybe,) home,
evening meal, and so on. To the best of her ability, the author carries
us through the days of people of not only the upper classes, but of
the growing middle class and the working class, rural and urban.
What does your 5 to 10 year-old child do? In the mid-1800s, he
or she would go to work, perhaps in a mine, in the fields, in spinning
or weaving mills or as a servant in a grand house. “By 1872, 10 was
26 San Antonio Medicine • November 2015
the minimum
age for boys
to work un-
derground…”
Prior to that
time, children
as young as 5
had jobs in
the mines.
Medically,
have any of
you doctors
prescribed opium, laudanum or heroin tonics for children? Have
you advised a man to visit a prostitute to keep his “vital fluids” flow-
ing? Have you experienced 15 members of the same family die
within weeks of each other from cholera? Those are just a few of the
medical bits described here.
Not all of the descriptions are of horrors. There is considerable space
devoted to how the people dressed, from how to fold nappies (diapers)
to the vagaries of female fashion through time. I didn’t know that a
“crinoline” wasn’t something made of fabric, but the framework that
held out what I always heard called “hoop skirts.” Additionally, there
sewing techniques, children’s clothing and men’s hats.
This is a pretty dense book (in the sense of lots of information
per chapter) and the San Antonio Public Library copy I borrowed
had other people’s requests for it, so when the three weeks were up,
I had only gotten half-way through. I waited a few days, put in an-
other request and was able to finish it a month or so later. Great
book!
If you have the urge, I suggest that you go online and read the
New York Times Sunday Book Review of this book, by Judith New-
man. I only wish I could have written one as good.
Fred H. Olin, MD, is a semi-retired orthopaedic sur-
geon and chair of the BCMS Communications/Publica-
tions Committee.