Home Comfort - Hardcover

Hardyment

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0897333756 ISBN 13: 9780897333757

Publisher: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1992

Synopsis

'I must frankly own that, if I had known beforehand the labour which this book has entailed, I should never have been courageous enough to commence it.' So begins Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management, and so perhaps should run the first line of this book. The subject of the book is probably best described as domestic archaeology, a quest for establishing exactly how our ancestors kept themselves clean, warm and well-fed.
Christina Hardyment has visited over a hundred houses, most belonging to The National Trust: stately mansions and humble farmhouses, medieval manors and terraced town houses. She has squirmed through medieval drains, poked into cellars and dilapidated sculleries, clambered down ice houses and up chimneys in the interests of establishing where domestic tasks took place and how they were done. Besides offering detailed chapters on the history of the kitchen, bathroom and laundry, she investigates bakehouses and breweries, kitchen gardens and orangeries, the lamp room and the larder, the poultry yard and the still-room.
Her descriptions are illuminated by much lore about the operation of mangles, the management of dovecotes and the workings of water closets that has been gleaned from housecraft manuals through the centuries, National Trust archives, diaries and novels, advice given by architects and tradesmen and the reminiscences of those who were once part of the upstairs/downstairs world that we have lost.
She concludes by asserting that even these days, when machines and supermarkets seem to provide all we need in the home, we would do well to take more seriously the traditional assumption that skilled household organization is a vital element of domestic happiness.

About this title

From Library Journal

Primarily based on an examination of the great rural mansions owned by the National Trust in Britain, this book explains how the inhabitants of the vast edifices the English call "country houses" met their physical needs in past centuries. The text reveals little about the domestic arrangements of ordinary people other than those who happened to be servants in very wealthy rural households. What the butler did, what the linen closet contained, why a dovecote was needed and how it was designed, how baths were taken and sewage removed, how houses were lighted in different periods, how clotted cream was made--all these details will fascinate a large number of Masterpiece Theatre fans. Hardyment ( Mangle to Microwave , Blackwell, 1988) offers some fairly interesting sociological observations as well. Many public libraries will find the book useful, but most academic libraries can safely skip it.
- Robert W. Frizzell, Hendrix Coll. Lib., Conway, Ark.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Academy Chicago Publishers
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0897333756
• ISBN 13: 9780897333757
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288