Books by Judith Flanders

The 500-year story of how, and why, our homes have come to be what they are, from the bestselling author of The Victorian City and The Victorian House.

A celebration of the alphabet, from its beginnings to its pre-eminence as the organizing principle for the world's knowledge.

The acclaimed author of The Victorian House and The Victorian City tells the story of the celebration of Christmas, from mummers' plays to the invention of Sellotape, revealing much fascinating new information and shattering many myths.

'Full of detail and colour about everyday life in Dickens's London, and leaves you with a sense not only of how hard life was then, but how strange. Even if you've read Dickens and the contemporary historians of the poor, there is still more to marvel at here.' Sebastian Faulks, Mail on Sunday Books of the Year

The Macdonald sisters -- Alice, Georgiana, Agnes and Louisa -- started life among the ranks of the lower-middle classes, with little prospect of social advancement. But as wives and mothers they made a single family of the poet Rudyard Kipling, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, Edward Poynter, President of the Royal Academy, and the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin. In telling their remarkable story, Judith Flanders displays the fluidity of Victorian society, and explores the life of the family in the 19th century.

The bestselling social history of Victorian domestic life, told through the letters, diaries, journals and novels of 19th-century men and women.Some images were unavailable for this electronic edition.The Victorian age is both recent and unimaginably distant. In the most prosperous and technologically advanced nation in the world, people carried slops up and down stairs; buried meat in fresh earth to prevent mould forming; wrung sheets out in boiling water with their bare hands. This drudgery was routinely performed by the parents of people still living, but the knowledge of it has passed as if it had never been. Running water, stoves, flush lavatories - even lavatory paper - arrived slowly throughout the century, and most were luxuries available only to the prosperous.Judith Flanders, author of the widely acclaimed 'A Circle of Sisters', has written an incisive and irresistible portrait of Victorian domestic life. The book itself is laid out like a house, following the story of daily life from room to room: from childbirth in the master bedroom, through the scullery, kitchen and dining room - cleaning, dining, entertaining - on upwards, ending in the sickroom and death.Through a collage of diaries, letters, advice books, magazines and paintings, Flanders shows how social history is built up out of tiny domestic details. Through these we can understand the desires, motivations and thoughts of the age.Many people today live in Victorian terraces, and so the houses themselves are familiar, but the lives are not. 'The Victorian House' will change all that.