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Daily Life in Victorian England, by Sally Mitchell; pp. xi + 311. London and Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, 35.95, $45.00.
The first thing to say about Daily Life in Victorian England is "it's about time." There have been several books in the last several years about nineteenth-century daily life, from Richard Altick's The Presence of the Present (1991) to Asa Brigg's Victorian Things (1988) to Daniel Pool's popularized What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew (1993). But Sally Mitchell, drawing upon the massive accumulation of information that she supervised for Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia (1988), has provided an easy to read summary of information about the ordinary experience of most people during the nineteenth century in Great Britain. The chief thing to say about this book is that it is sensible. It is written in a clear, uncomplicated manner and is addressed chiefly to undergraduate students and other amateurs of the Victorian period. As a result, there is a good deal of quite basic information that would already be a part of any scholar's encyclopedia of knowledge. But even some of the most accomplished scholars would be surprised to discover a fact here or there of which he or she was not previously aware. I, for example, was unaware that a wedding would not be postponed for mourning unless the death was in the immediate family; nor did I know that attendants in mourning for other relatives wore grey or lavender (159). Also, I should have known but didn't, that Angela Burdett-Coutts was the first woman made a baroness in recognition of her service to the nation (22). This last item indicates...