This Victorian Life: Modern Adventures in Nineteenth-Century Culture, Cooking, Fashion, and Technology Hardcover – November 3, 2015

I was looking for an escapist book and this one provided the needed escape. I liked knowing more about everyday life and tools and important objects of the 1890s. It was esp interesting to know more of the history around those objects. Eg the importance of watches once schedules, esp train schedules, became a part of life. All the details about watches, their cases etc was also interesting. And of course bicycles. There was a TV series on PBS (?) maybe 20 yrs ago showing a family who attempted to live in Victorian times. The thing I esp remember was how onerous laundry was. Eventually the family hired help. There is only so much room in a book but it would be interesting to know what the couple decided to leave to modern time. Sarah does hand laundry but there is no mention on what happened to the sheets on that bed she constructed.

It is always fascinating to read about people who live their lives differently than most. Living life as a Victorian 24/7 wouldn't be my cup of tea, but I was entertained and interested to learn about Sarah's daily life and the reasons she and Gabriel have chosen this path. It was striking that Sarah clearly sees Victoriana as a part of her identity, similar to race or sexual orientation, rather than just a hobby or lifestyle. They are religious about it - evidenced in the chapter when her husband refused to drink water from a plastic bottle even though he was risking dehydration almost as if it would be a sin. In another life, these two could have been fundamentalists in a high-demand religion. The one thing that I found missing in this book was that Sarah never addresses the fact that she gets to enjoy modern medicine, the right to vote, and many other benefits of the 21st century that would have not been available to her in 1880. Her gushing, unequivocal praise of the Victorian era seems dishonest without addressing those elephants in the room.

Sarah and her husband are two Victorian Era entrenched cosplayers who live their lives as if it were the 18th century. With this shared motivation in mind, the two have built a life together slowly acquiring goods from the bygone century to furnish almost every aspect of their lives. This period of acquisition is what is documented in the book as Sarah goes in length describing their material accumulations.While the premise is full of promise, it lacks any sort of professional editing and it's apparent in the execution. For one thing, it sort of jumps from one aspect of the Victorian era to the other without a clear segue. It is neither linear nor categorized. FOUR chapters in the back are dedicated to the Victorian bicycles while Sarah barely mentions how they came to acquire their home. Personally, I'm more interested in the latter as the home is a central motif ascribed to this era.If you're looking for a book with an amiable protagonist, look somewhere else. As mentioned in previous reviews, the author has what many would call an attitude problem. For someone who pines after a bygone era of chivalry and elegance, perhaps she would do well to be more gracious with others. This is why I call them cosplayers beyond just humorous effect: they have not acquired the Victorian mindset, just the artifacts of the era. While the author attempts to espouse the vernacular of the Victorian, the purplish prose is typically cut short with some snide anecdote with how stupid her fellow modern man is for not being able to immediately ascertain her intentions to live this way. They have a rose tinted view of the Victorian Era and tend to lash out at anyone who presents them with stereotypes. She goes on at length about how good life was back then forgetting that she is white, slavery wasn't abolished until 1865 and for a lot of people, life back then would have not only been bad but unbearably hard and cruel.Another thing to add is that neither her or her husband typify traditional Victorian gender roles as they both have the tendency to act somewhat selfishly. In one part of the book, Sarah is invited to an event in a town over but must take the bus because she can't drive and doesn't own a car. At this point, it would seem practical for her husband to drive her since he owns a Delorean but he doesn't and In the end, she has to take the public bus in fragile, historical garments which ends in a bus driver ripping her irreplaceable garment and Sarah calling the bus driver a beast. I highly doubt this unchivalrous behavior would had been permissible in the Victorian era. Men used to walk on the outside of sidewalks to shield women from carriages and this guy won't drive his wife? Forget chivalry, it demonstrates a lack in basic human decency.Finally, and this is important to note, Sarah is very protective of this era for which she feels a guardian to and this mentality is in imprinted in her worldview and what she writes. During a viewing of a historically inaccurate Victorian fashion show, she likens the experience to a black person seeing a show in blackface. Not only is this a poor analogy, it's an analogy made in poor taste. She's so protective of this era that the book is riddled with interjections of how stupid other people are because they don't immediately understand her self-imposed lifestyle. It just doesn't seem to occur to her that an outsider would reasonably confuse them for costumers because the choice to live like this is so out of left field for 99.9% of people.That said, I don't begrudge her or her lifestyle. It's definitely not something I would ever choose but it's still extremely fascinating. She is like a walking window to a time of yore and I find it admirable that they both seek to restore and preserve these historical items.Sarah and her husband have a compelling story to tell but a lack of skillful editing left something to be desired. Her website is more resourceful (and they come with more pictures) than her book. My verdict: skip the book, visit the website.

I found This Victorian Life to be interesting on two levels: the research and effort that Gabriel and Sarah had to put into the transition to living in the manner of the 1880s, and all the snippets of 19th century literature and history that supported or refuted my own knowledge of daily life 140 years ago. Why this couple would ever want to live with an Ice box, wood burning kitchen stove, and no central heating is beyond me, but I loved reading about this modern day return to the past. I would, though, if I were Sarah, draw the line at sleeping in a corset.

It was a great adventure following them through their learning curve. The shocking aspect to me was the hatred shown as they were different!

I waded through a lot of unnecessary background on everything from fountain pen ink to the over-abundance of deer in the USA, that got very tedious very quickly, and I love deer and fountain pens!On the other hand there was a serious lack of detail about the author’s day to day ‘Victorian life’. Yes, she makes all her period clothes by hand and she explains why she chooses to ignore that great Victorian invention the sewing machine. But what techniques does she use and why does it take her months or even years to finish a garment?Other areas of domestic life, such as laundry and housework, aren't mentioned at all. If that’s because she doesn't them the modern way, then fine, but she might just as well own up. The couple do have electricity and a land line telephone, as well as a car, all of which existed in the late Victorian period, and internet, which of course didn't!Again fine, but please don’t pretend that your Victorian experiment is something that it isn't. I love the Victorian era, (why else would I have paid well over the odds for a Kindle book by an unknown author?) but its darker side is unacknowledged in this rosy-glasses exploration of the period.The style is also wordy and pretentious in places, and in the end I was left with the feeling that the author wanted to write a book about her chosen lifestyle without giving too much away. Somehow that made for a very unsatisfying read, so I'm afraid I gave up on the book before the end.If you want a good book about daily life in the Victorian era I’d recommend Ruth Goodman’s ‘How to be a Victorian’.

The idea of this book is lovely, and many other authors, TV shows etc have fulfilled the premise very well and entertainingly. However, the word I'd use to describe this book is not "informative" or "entertaining" - it's smug. The author actually calls people who make mistakes or are not poker-faced and deferential when representing history "bigots" similar to racists or homophobes (I can't see a way we can put these things on a level playing field somehow) and then goes on to congratulate herself in great detail for various things that many modern people still do as hobbies.If you want to read about the era, get a book by a historian, not a niche hipster.

Excellent book. Informative and a mine of information for an author researching this era. Also great for the a history student and a gem for a teacher to rouse their pupils interest in Victoriana. It also reads as an romance holding the readers attention.. Highly recommend this.

Interesting book.

I bought the book 2 years ago when the book arrived i could not put it down. Compliment to the author Sarah Chrisman who writes so accomplish yet light those wonderful stories about her victorian life. Written very educational and very humours it was a pleasure to read her book .Sarah writes in such a detail when Gabriel and she arrived at her new house to discover everything was frozen up i was literally standing with them in the house to see it for myself .Also i had plenty of good laughs with the style she is writing her stories. This was my first book from Sarah and i have bought all her books in the meantime .My biggest wish would that i could meet her in person one day to have my book signed from this lovely lady .Sincerly Verena