The Victorian House Judith Flanders HarperCollins, 476pp, £20 ISBN 0007131887

Judith Flanders's book about the Victorian house is a hodgepodge of miscellaneous information. Divided into 11 chapters that are intended to take us from the bedroom through the kitchen and the dining room to the sickroom and the street, it appears to have a proper architectural shape, but in practice anything can go anywhere. Diatribes on the shortcomings of female education pop up in the nursery, a tract on employment legislation appears in the scullery, and weddings occupy the parlour. All are full of interest, and maybe it is a mistake to read the book from cover to cover. Flanders is aware of her digressive tendencies, and her footnotes are packed with disarming asides and apologies.

Perhaps the eclecticism of this book is suited to its subject, as the Victorians liked clutter and pot-pourri and excrescences and sub-plots. The mass of extraordinary detail, assembled here from novels, diaries, magazines and housekeeping manuals, sheds light in odd corners. How strange that the bedside table made so late an appearance in history. How revolting the recipe for a pudding, or "second remove", called "Jaune Mange", an unpleasant cousin of the more familiar blancmange. How grotesque the "bridal, Christmas or birthday gift" described in The Young Ladies Treasure Book. This object was made of white velvet, orange blossom, ferns, fringes and balls of white carved wood, offset by a sleeping nymph in a shell, with a peeping cupid in attendance. No wonder a later generation turned against knick-knacks - all they did was collect dust.

Flanders is eloquent on the subject of dust, dirt and what was euphemistically known as soil. The chapter on the bathroom and the lavatory is the best, and her description of the influence of the D-bend and the S-bend is inspired. There is a magnificent illustration of the lavishly decorated "Iris" pedestal lavatory of 1895, and one could choose similar items from a poetic range of flowers and col-ours - orchid, carnation, morning glory, hydrangea, Pink Lucknow, Brown York, Olive Green Chicago . . .

But the domestic reality, even in the drawing room and the morning room, was less floral. The soot produced by the dependence on coal fires got everywhere, into carpets, hangings, clothes and furnishings, and a daily organised attack was needed to keep it under control. The cleaning of the house, in the era before what sociologists now call the deskilling of housework, was a serious undertaking with a fixed routine. Some well-to-do middle-class women had plenty of poorly paid domestic servants to deploy, but managing servants was a job in itself, and the cause of much advice and anguish. The less well-off pretended that they had more servants than they could afford, and were obliged to undertake a good deal of physical labour themselves. The optimistic advertisements - the new closed cooking stoves were said to use less fuel than the old open range, "if managed well", and you could bake a small pie on a new Dutch oven if you proceeded "with care" - hint at many a failure and disaster.

The differentiation of tasks celebrated in Upstairs, Downstairs was merely an aspirational dream to most of those who studied Cassell's Household Guide or Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management. Instead, there was an array of implements with which to attack the enemy of dirt, each of which served a particular purpose. My generation can still remember a puzzling forked object for dusting banisters.

The more useful clothes pulley, which was raised to the kitchen ceiling to dry the washing, enjoyed a long life. It survived well into the 20th century, thus outliving some of the exhausting and onerous aspects of the ritual washday. Schoolchildren used to be bewildered by a song with the chorus "Dashing away with the smoothing iron/She stole my heart away", in which the spectacularly inefficient charmer seems to take all week to get through her duties, but Flanders explains that this was not an unfair account of the average Victorian wash. The boiling of the water in the copper, the shaving and cutting and dissolving of the slabs of soap into soap jelly, the rubbing and the scrubbing, the rinsing and the wringing, the second-day starching, the ironing and the airing - all this was, as she says, a Herculean enterprise. Soap powder was a welcome innovation, and so was the wringer-mangle. But why the verb "to mangle" means simultaneously to chop up and to make smooth remains a mystery.

Difficulty may confer dignity, and the housewife/manager emerges as something of a heroine. Occasionally, in her desire to champion those below stairs, Flanders misreads: the objection to a kitchen Christmas crib as not being "safe" must surely have been based not on its subversive aspirations but on its "dozen coloured candles" in close proximity to its festoons of coloured paper. Flanders gives us little on domestic fire hazards, which were manifold, but she stimulates our curiosity to find out more. This is rich material, entertainingly if not very methodically handled.

Margaret Drabble's most recent novel, The Seven Sisters, is published in paperback by Penguin

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