Through the keyhole

By 1851, one in three women between the ages of 15 and 24 was a household servant. They were the ones who kept the home fires burning - heaving coal up and down steep flights of stairs, cleaning grates and pumping the bellows to heat kitchen ranges.

Open fires, of course, made houses filthy, so the poor maid was forever dusting and sweeping. Tablecloths were laid just before a meal, otherwise the dust from the fire settled and they became smut-covered in minutes.

The fight against rats, mice, bugs, beetles and fleas was a constant war. As Flanders reminds us, the plagues that infested Victorian houses have been so effectively controlled for the past 100 years that we, with our chemical sprays, have largely forgotten them.

Pity the Victorian housewife when reading that bugs would 'multiply 'til the kitchen floor at night palpitated with a living carpet'. And shudder to read how, on a visit to her grandmother, Beatrix Potter's maids had to sit on the kitchen table because the floor was heaving with cockroaches.

A maid's daily routine, which began at 5.30am, consisted of hauling coals, ashes and water, scrubbing floors, beating carpets, turning mattresses, emptying chamber pots and so forth, until finally she collapsed exhausted on to a straw mattress in the basement scullery at around midnight.

I won't even mention the ghastly domestic arrangements detailed in a riveting chapter, The Bathroom And Lavatory, except to say that the introduction of the first public toilet, or 'halting station', at the Great Exhibition was a liberating breakthrough for women.

However, when Paddington Council proposed to open one, residents objected to such 'German abominations', warning that they would become congregation points for loose women.

As Flanders points out, the council's real concern was the prospect of women actually having the freedom - and literally the convenience - to be able to stay away from their homes for longer.

Inside the Victorian home, dining rituals and fashion dictates were strictly adhered to.

There was a trend for collecting household items - coal scuttles, foot stools, fire screens, candlesticks, ornaments, drapery and stuffed animals.

Furniture was segregated - men's armchairs had wide arms, and ladies' were more upright and uncomfortable with no arms in order to meet the requirements of vast skirts and rigid corsets. At mealtimes, women were expected to refuse savouries and cheese.

The following personal description of the hassle of walking about in heavy skirts seems to say so much more about the era than any number of battles and foreign explorers' adventures.

'Round the bottom of these skirts I had sewn two-and-a-half yards of brush braid to collect the worst of the mud (after a walk). The crusted mud had to be brushed off, which might take an hour or two.'

Truly, we women of the 21st century have never had it so good.

The self-sacrificial 'angel of the hearth' was also expected to be on non-stop nursing duties.

A pint of claret a day was recommended for someone feeling 'out of sorts' - a common occurrence, particularly as most houses' walls were primed with a double coat of lead, wallpaper contained arsenic, and tightly closed windows meant that noxious gas fumes pervaded the bedroom.

All these details have a stunning immediacy that brings the Victorian era vividly to life.

The thousands of us who live under the very same roofs as our Victorian sisters once did should be thankful for our vacuum cleaners, washer- dryers and microwaves; we should be glad we're not obliged to endure their mind-numbing, back-breaking daily round of hard labour.

The houses these people lived in may be very familiar - but their daily lives are another country.