Castles fit for Everyman

Judith Flanders believes that "How we live at home, where we live, what we do all day when we're not doing whatever it is that history is recording - these are some of the most telling things about any age, any people." Her book is an enthralling, entertaining and thought-provoking revelation of the realities of life in the tall, thin, Victorian town house.

Millions of these were built to cope with an urban population explosion that changed the proportion of people living in cities from 20 per cent in 1801 to 80 per cent in 1901. They snaked out from city limits to create suburbs that were oases of rest and repose for male breadwinners, but a daunting management challenge for their wives.

What gives enormous added interest to finding out both the joys and the horrors of life in such houses is that six million of them survive, soughtafter homes for 21st century families. That we continue to build houses in their likeness, content to strap ourselves in the same domestic straitjacket as the Victorians, proves how successful in design they were. Yet, Flanders points out, foreign visitors found them (and still find them) a distinctly eccentric form of mass housing.

Large or small, they share a family likeness. Whether they rise merely to two storeys or up through six, each has its own front door and staircase, two main rooms on each storey, kitchen and sculleries in the basement or built out at the back.

This vertical division of personal space was uniquely English. "The English divide their edifices perpendicularly, into houses - every man is master of his hall and stairs - whereas we Germans divide them horizontally into floors," wrote a fascinated German visitor. "It is this that gives the Englishman [his] proud feeling of personal independence."

French philosopher Hippolyte Taine also put the Victorians' domestic architecture down to national character. The Englishman "could not endure the promiscuous existence of our huge Parisian cages". Even in London, he "plans his house as a small castle, independent and enclosed".

To convey the reality of this castle, Flanders methodically takes us around a typical "establishment", using memoirs, letters, housekeeping manuals and novels to describe not just how each room was equipped and furnished, but what happened there.

Her sources are many and varied. There are novelists such as Arnold Bennett, Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens, social commentators such as John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle, and a brigade of bossy, exhortative matrons who wrote such books as How I Managed My House on £200 a Year, Wives of England and From Kitchen to Garret.

She starts with childbirth in the bedroom (not sex - Flanders is unashamedly "more interested in S-bends") and ends with death in the sick-room, an opportunity for a formidable digression into degrees of mourning (Regent Street had a General Mourning Warehouse, with a special "Mitigated Affliction Department", which could supply bridal veils edged with black; Genoa velvet was "the very Luxury of Woe... fit for the handsomest type of domestic calamity)".

In between, we explore children's lives in the nursery, strictly disciplined and fed plainly, but also indulged with toys; servants' duties in the kitchen, "the engine room of the comfortable ship of the home"; horrendous battles with bugs in the scullery; social pretensions in drawing room, sabbatical observance in the parlour, marriage arrangements in the morning room, multi-tasking in the dining room (sewing, letterwriting and "fancy-work"), and the arrival of wash-down lavatories and plumbed-in baths.

Each room triggers off a wider picture. Flanders is not just offering a catalogue of everyday life. A 21st century woman herself, she looks critically at Victorian values - obsessions with hygiene and piety, status and "good taste", time-wasting " fancywork", the inadequacy of girls' education. Men might find home a heart-easing refuge from the outside world, but women's lives were unrewarding.

In truth, as her own evidence of typhus-tainted drains and financial ruin through ill-advised marriages suggests, survival in Victorian middle-class homes was an uncertain business. Before the advent of electric and gas appliances, social security and a national health service, efficient housekeeping spelt the difference between comfort and destitution, life and death.

Women really were "angels in the house" - and right to be proud of, and satisfied with, their role.