Daniel PoolAnmeldelser

This book was a great disappointment to me. It was one that I've been wanting to read ever since I first heard of it, but it did not live up to expectations at all. The chatty and interesting title of the book led me to believe that the work itself would charm, which it did not. It was tedious and dry, and certainly more of a reference book than a study of social history. I will keep it on a shelf with my other reference books, but I don't see getting a lot of use out of it.½

I read this really slowly...over the course of this entire year, in fact. I really enjoyed all the information and plan to keep it handy since it offers a wonderful glossary in the back to aid me in my Victorian Reading Challenge this year. In fact, I plan to go back right away and read the chapter on the church again now that I've visited several and spent some time learning more about the Church of England.

Some fun take-aways:

It was interesting reading about apprenticeships and the laws regarding them.

The laws about dead bodies cracked me up: "Strangely enough, the law was not harsh on people having bodies, unexplained, in their possession, but if the bodies had graveclothes on them, the punishment was seven years' transportation."

I'll update more after rereading a few chapters...

Great book, but I can't read anymore of it: too many spoilers for books I want to read eventually.

This book was a little silly compared to some of the other, more immersive books that I've read on the subject of daily life and customs in 19th century England. It's more like a books of facts rather than a book that follows a narrative. I think it would definitely be handy to have around as a reference for when you are reading literature from this time period.

I picked it up on a whim at the library and, as soon as I picked it up to read, knew I had made a mistake. Apart from monetary matters (who can keep British coinage and slang about coinage straight anyway) I knew most of it from deduction and various histories. Thus, I was not the primary target for this book.

Bother.

And, to further complicate matters, new research has since been published that questions some of the facts presented herein.

Double bother.

But I skimmed it anyway. And found that there were some sections that deserved skimming because they skimmed themselves.

Also, I felt that the time (1780s to 1880s) was a little too broad. Picking one time period (either Victorian or pre-Victorian) would have allowed for more specificity.

Good overview, but not enough detail for anyone who picked it up in order to write historical fiction. Useful details when it comes to carriages and servants.

Good for Glossary and dryly amusing.

This is fun. If you are interested in life in Victorian England, you will enjoy this book.

This is a very interesting and useful book. Victorian Literature is full of details that may or may not be noted in the edition you are reading. Daniel Poole has drawn on the genre to detail the important ideas, events, and objects of the period. It is a good reference and fun book to read on its own.

It's okay, but most of it is pretty common sense really, and if you've read books or watched movies from that era, you already know all of these things. I think the only thing I learned is that surgeons were considered below physicians.

Reference book to look up stuff from Victorian era so I can understand what Doyle is talking about. Like it says on the cover. Very to the much which I appreciate.

Delightful; a sort of a time-traveling tourist’s guide to 19th-century England with specific focus on various terms that turn up in period literature. I used to consider myself fairly knowledgeable here, but I confess on reading this that a lot of my assumptions on the way things worked were just plain wrong.

The book has two sections; the first three-quarters or so are chapters on each aspect of 19th century life - etiquette and social graces, transportation (around the country, not to Australia - that comes under “Crime”), the Church, personal life (courtship, marriage, and “a taxonomy of maids”), and how to be an orphan, get sick, and die. The remaining quarter is a extensive glossary, with many words explained that I only thought I knew the meaning of (“paraphernalia”, for example).

Essential if you want to know:

* Who goes into dinner first, a duke or an archbishop?

* The difference between nurse maids, parlor maids, ladies maids, scullery maids, house maids, kitchen maids, maids of all work, dairy maids and charwomen.

* The difference between a Nonconformist and a Dissenter.

* How to tell a groom from a footman.

* The correct classification of rectors, vicars, deans, canons, prebendaries, vergers and other churchmen.

* How to get a handle on the immense variety and subtle differences in horse-drawn vehicles: curricles, berlins, barouches, landaus, stanhopes, gigs, victorias, phaetons, diligences, etc.


There are lots of curious little facts. I was impressed to find that 16% of the national work force, even in 1891 when various labor-saving devices were starting to come into use, was “in service”. I suppose various pundits of the time must have reflected on the decline of service positions and wondered where all the dispossessed butlers and footmen were going to find jobs. Similarly, it’s amusing to find that there was always a reason to resist any technological advance on religious or social grounds (although not quoted in this book, the Duke of Wellington reportedly was opposed to railroads because “they would encourage the lower orders to move about”). The fanatical delicacy about being “in trade” is also pretty funny; a barrister’s wife could be presented at court while a solicitor’s could not. This was because you paid a solicitor to engage a barrister; the barrister did not take your money directly, instead receiving a “gift” from the solicitor, and thus was not “in trade”. If you think the law is slow now, it’s worthwhile to consider the Jennings case (the basis for Jarndyce versus Jarndyce in Bleak House). The case was over the will of a man who died in 1798 - it was settled in 1915 (after soaking up £250K in court costs). Life was grim for orphans; only one third of the prostitutes in London had both parents living. And, for those who claim that global warming will inflict topical diseases on us, malaria and yellow fever were both endemic in England until widespread swamp drainage in the middle of the century (although yellow fever was normally confined to ports; presumable the mosquito carrier was unable to overwinter).

Recommended, even if you were forced to read Far From The Madding Crowd in high school and swore never to touch Thomas Hardy again.

This is fun. If you are interested in life in Victorian England, you will enjoy this book.

I read this book straight-through, but it'd be better if you just use it for reference if you have a specific question about the period. I felt like I got way too much information the way I read it.

This book had a lot of really neat information, I just wish the package in which said information was wrapped could have been a little less dry.

Over 400 pages of definitions, facts, and glosses for the most alien aspects of 1800s England. And there are a lot of them! The nineteenth century saw the birth of much of what we think of as unremarkable necessities of civilization: a police force, basic schooling for all children, a national mail system...This is truly a fascinating read, and one I highly recommend for anyone reading regency or Victorian-era literature.

A must for a Dickens fiend like me -- explains so many of the vagaries of Victorian England. Those people were freakin' nuts though when it came to titles and servants and all that crap. I would not have done well there.

A really interesting treatise on the rise of the novel in Victorian England -- Dickens, the Brontes, Thackery, etc. And interesting little tidbits about the principals involved.

Very readable. Probably a good reference for readers, but doesn't go into enough detail to be really useful for writers.

The author draws a lot of examples directly from novels (mainly Trollope, Dickens, and Hardy), and in the process he gives away some plot twists. So be careful if there are books you haven't read that you don't want to be spoiled for.

This is a quick slick book and is very breezy. I don't carry much away from reading this one, but it collects what a certain element in the reading public would find colourful.

Den som någon gång känt sig förvirrad av engelsk litteratur från 1800-talet skulle möjligen kunna hjälpas av denna bok – dess syfte är i alla fall att för en nutida (amerikansk) publik förklara allt det som författare som Trollope, Brontë, Hardy, Brontë, Eliot, Brontë eller de båda i titeln nämnda tog för givet att deras läsare redan kände till: hur det gick till på en dansafton, eller vid en middag, eller en rättgång, varför man måste hålla reda på vem som stod högst i rang av en baron, äldste sonen til en Earl och underhusets talman, om anglikanska kyrkan och brittiska flottan, rävjakt och exakt varför Mrs Eliot skryter med sin systers barouche-landau.

Boken är tudelad: första delen (den jag faktiskt läst) är en serie kortare texter om sådant som ovannämnda, illustrerade med exempel ur diverse mer kända romaner: essentiellt vad som borde förklaras i diverse förord och liknande. Andra delen är en uppslagsdel (som jag bara ströbläddrat i), och ger kortfattade ordförklaringar. Exempel:

nob—Someone with a good deal of status. Used often in conjunction with »snob«, in the sense snob initially had of someone of no status or pretensions.

Tämligen användbart, även om jag inte kan svara för hur komplett den är. Man skulle möjligen ha önskat sidhänvisningar till de tidigare utläggningarna när detta vore passande, men det är den enda brist jag hittills upptäckt. Annars verkar boken användbar och praktisk, och är rätt trevlig läsning på egen hand.

Not bad as a shallow overview of Victorian society, but the cute title sweeps Jane Austen into the wrong time period; this book blurs Regency and Victorian together, to the harm of the Regency. Poor organization, sweeping generalizations and the lack of citation keeps this from being a useful history text but likely of some use to the casual reader of both period and historical fiction.

For those who enjoy 19th Century fiction, this is a delightful reference, offering explanations of all those puzzling words and phrases that challenge the modern reader. In addition to detailed explanations of 19th Century daily life, the book offers a glossary of terms as a quick reference for those who need to know the precise function of a "teapoy" in a hurry. Delightful.

Does what it says on the tin. The first half of the book consists of short sections on topics of 19th-century English life that may arise in books of the period (such as "Fairs and Markets" or "The Church of England" or "Currency" or "Women's Clothing"). These sections are well-written and make frequent reference to passages which mention or hinge on the topic at hand in popular 19th-century novels. The second half of the book contains an extensive glossary, bibliography, and index. I read the book through from cover to cover, though it would work very well, I think, as a reference. The glossary treats most entries thoroughly enough to be getting on with if one were simply looking to understand quickly a reference in a 19th-century novel, and the table of contents and index would make finding a longer discussion of any topic quite easy. Recommended for any one looking to understand their 19th-century British reads more fully or anyone interested in the period generally.

Daniel Pool’s book consists partly of a glossary and partly of short articles on various aspects of life in the 19th century England. For example, various modes of transportation, aspects of law and both domestic and work life are discussed, and foods, tools, items of clothing, and currency explained in detail. The text abounds with quotes from and references to literature from the period.
The author’s background is in law and political science. This shows especially in the glossary. A number of entries would have benefitted from a wider knowledge of the arts, humanities and literature. Unfortunately, some glossary items also contain errors, or at the very least extremely cursory explanations. For this reason I wouldn’t recommend the source to be used alone; it would be better to verify important information elsewhere. Furthermore, Pool has a habit of serving the reader with value-laden adjectives that contribute little to the matter and end up annoying rather than edifying. (For instance, I don’t think that yew is a “dismal” evergreen, like Pool does.) Nevertheless, the book is an enlightening and interesting work.
EJ 01/2011