A Certain Slant of Light

Ruth Goodman’s The Domestic Revolution: How the Introduction of Coal into Victorian Homes Changed Everything is saddled with one of those maddening subtitles that is directly contrary to the actual point of the book. Goodman’s whole point is that coal became the dominant fuel in London homes at the end of the Elizabethan Era, and this domestic coal usage spurred the use of coal for industrial purposes which, in turn, helped spark the Industrial Revolution, all of which occurred long before the Victorian era!

The subtitle issue is especially exasperating because it obscures the truly revolutionary nature of this book: in placing the home squarely at the center of the adoption of coal, it upends the traditional history of the industrial revolution.

Goodman’s day job is as a hardcore historical reenactor, using old advice books to recreate daily life in the past, so like all her books, this book is full of fascinating tidbits about daily life. Often Goodman discovers that advice that seems bizarre today makes good sense in context: one bit that sticks with me from a previous book is that brushing your hair one hundred strokes each night actually does keep your hair clean and shining if you do it with a natural bristle brush.

In The Domestic Revolution, Goodman answers a lot of questions that I had only vaguely formulated before. For instance:

Coal is responsible for the fact that British food is so different from food across Europe: coal fires are perfect for things like puddings that boil for hours and hours, while wood is better suited for things that need a long slow simmer, like stews. (This also explains why things like roly-poly pudding never caught on in America: American homes continued to be wood-based long after most of England had switched to coal, and it’s very hard to keep a wood fire at the pitch of heat necessary to boil a pudding for hours.)

The rise of coal-burning homes coincides with the fall of tapestries, because sticky coal smuts are almost impossible to clean off an expensive, difficult-to-launder tapestry. It’s much easier to wash them off a painted wall or that fashionable new wallpaper.

Wood-burning houses are generally easier to keep clean than coal-burning ones, and require very little soap, because wood ash is itself a natural cleaner. As you may recall, wood ash is one of the ingredients in soap: you pour water through ash to get lye. In a wood-burning house with plenty of ash, you can simply use that lye directly in the laundry, for instance. In a coal-burning house, however, only soap can clean away the oily coal smuts. In time, soap came to be seen as the only way to clean, a link that has only strengthened over time, so that when people today see ye olde cleaning advice that doesn’t feature soap, they assume it can’t possibly work and that people in the past and/or faraway places where this advice is still used must be filthy.

(Goodman notes that soap advertisements basically manufactured the “dirty native” trope: it became much more common after it was employed in massive ad campaigns that linked soap and civilization.)

Because of the sticky nature of coal smuts, it takes much longer to clean a coal-burning home than a wood-burning one. Thus, the adoption of coal forced women to spend much more time cleaning their homes (and concomitantly less time working in the garden, the dairy, the poultry yard…), and Goodman suggests that this contributed to the rise of separate spheres ideology that so powerfully identified women with the domestic sphere. Coal technology forced women to spend ever more time in the home, and people moralized from the accomplished fact, as people are wont to do. Whatever is, is not merely right, but the best of all possible worlds.

What I’ve Finished Reading

Ruth Goodman’s How to Be a Tudor, which I ended up purchasing - in hardcover, no less! - because I enjoyed her book How to Be a Victorian so much. Again, full of fascinating (and potentially useful for writing) tidbits about everyday life in history; Goodman is particularly good at teasing out the way that practices that seem bizarre now actually worked: brushing your hair a hundred times a night with a natural bristle brush will keep your hair clean and shiny even if you never wash it, for instance.

She’s also good at taking apart the givens of modern thought, if you will, and showing how societies can be organized differently. She notes, for instance, that most modern people assume that reading and writing will be taught concurrently, but in Tudor times they were viewed as separate skills, so there were quite a lot of people who could read but nonetheless signed with a mark because writing classes were quite a bit more expensive than reading.

I also read Maud Hart Lovelace’s Emily of Deep Valley, which I enjoyed very much! It’s loosely connected to the Betsy-Tacy stories, but I think that was a marketing decision as much as anything, because that could easily be cut out; Emily is a few years younger than Betsy and Tacy and thus her social world is quite separate from theirs.

At the beginning of the book, Emily is graduating from high school; she would like very much to go to college, but she’s an orphan living with her kindly but increasingly frail grandfather, who needs her care, and can’t leave, and the book is about her finding a way to move forward and pursue her goals even though she is in a sense stuck.

I’ve been thinking about taking a trip to Minnesota this summer, partly to see my aunt and also partly to visit Maud Hart Lovelace’s house in Mankato, and this might be the book to buy while I’m there. And also perhaps a box set of the first four Betsy-Tacy books? Or maybe I should splurge for the whole set of ten...

I also finished Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ Gypsy’s Cousin Joy. Following Joy’s mother’s death, Joy comes to live with Gypsy’s family; the two girls are initially at loggerheads, but slowly learn how to get along with each other and see each other’s good points. Lots of fun if you like mid-nineteenth century children’s books (I recognize this is perhaps an obscure taste) - somewhat moralistic but of course that comes with the territory. There are two more in the series, but Amazon doesn’t have them. :(

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve started Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Anne, from the list of Eight Classic Female Bildungromane You Should Know about If You Don’t Already. I’m enjoying Anne, I’m enjoying the immensely atmospheric island which used to be a fur-trading post, and has dwindled from its former glory (I am all about dwindling from former glory), and I already have grim forbodings (and not the good kind) about where the subplot with Anne’s little one-eight Chippewa, three-eighths French half-sister Tita.

Aside from Anne, whose loyalty to her half-sister is presented as a part of her charming naivete, pretty much everyone in the narrative muses grimly about Tita’s flaws: she’s small and dark and sly and self-dramatizing and (no one spells this out, but I’m conjecting) is undoubtedly going to either kill someone sneaky-like or possibly run off with a deeply unsuitable man before long. They all ascribe her manipulative secretiveness to her mixed-race heritage; I think it’s because ever since she was a wee babe literally every adult in her life has been murmuring that she’s doomed to go wrong. Why should she be open with them if they interpret everything she does in the worst way possible?

But we’ll see. Maybe the story will surprise me.

I’ve also been reading Peter Carlson’s Roughneck: The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood, mostly because Carlson wrote K Blows Top, a hilarious yet poignant book about Nikita Khrushchev’s 1959 visit to the United States. Roughneck isn’t quite in the same league (then again, what is?), but it’s an interesting exploration about the history of unionization in the United States, which previously I hadn’t known much about.

What I Plan to Read Next

In the Labyrinth of Drakes, the fourth of Marie Brennan’s Lady Trent books, is coming out! Or did come out yesterday, or something. Actually I probably won’t be reading it for a while, because I’ll be waiting till the library gets it, but I’m so excited about its existence that I had to mention it here!