Under One Roof

Before the family woke, someone had already carried the coal, cleaned the grates and climbed the stairs with the morning's hot water.Behind the polished doors of a Victorian home lay a world of exhausting work, strict hierarchies and unexpected dangers. A bell could interrupt a servant's every task. A respectable dinner might contain adulterated food. The nursery's comforting remedies could be more dangerous than the illness they were meant to soothe.Under One Roof takes readers inside a reconstructed London household of the early 1860s, moving from the basement kitchen and tradesmen's entrance to the drawing room, bedrooms and nursery. Through its daily routines, Dylan Kyle Doyle explores how families ate, washed, entertained, raised children, guarded their privacy and mourned their dead.Along the way are the women who kept the household running, the tradespeople who supplied it and the reformers whose discoveries began to change it. Isabella Beeton's instructions, Hannah Cullwick's accounts of domestic service and John Snow's investigation of cholera reveal the connections between private rooms and the wider Victorian city.Here are coal dust and visiting cards, chamber pots and mourning veils, locked cupboards and servants' bells. Each has a history. Each reveals something about the people who lived together under one roof, with profoundly different measures of comfort, freedom and power.Drawing on period accounts, household manuals and historical studies, this intimate social history reveals what it took to make a Victorian home respectable, and whose labour paid for that appearance.