Michelle Higgs

An interesting approach to Social History that has become quite trendy over the last few years-treating the reader as a traveller in a strange and unfamiliar society. For the most part it works although sometimes has a slightly condescending tone which I found a little bit irritating. However there's lots of really interesting information here which I will find useful for my family history studies-particularly all the tables at the back listing the cost of living and how to survive on various income brackets.… (mais)

Higgs provides a highly readable discussion on the institutionalization of British Isles persons suffering from a variety of mental disorders.The majority of institutions discussed are in England, Scotland, or Wales. Higgs shows how attitudes toward the mentally ill evolved over time. The narrative includes several case studies of individuals, providing a list of sources used in each sketch. Near the end she discusses record availability, providing a few examples. As a genealogist, I wish this section had been expanded to include additional record images. Genealogists with family members spending time in an asylum in the United Kingdom will find this book helpful to their research. This review is based on an advance review copy provided through NetGalley with the expectation of an honest review.… (mais)

A Visitor’s Guide To Victorian England

There is often a romantic view of what it would have been like to visit England while Victoria was on the throne. We often hear commentators today asking for Victorian values to be brought back in to vogue. To the modern day person England was such a beautiful, honest place to visit the home of the world’s largest empire leaders in everything they did.

Michelle Higgs has written A Visitor’s Guide to Victorian England has written an honest account of what it would have been like to visit the cities and the countryside of our ‘green and pleasant land’. If anything the view is very much it was not a very green or too pleasant land to visit.

Anyone that has walked down Oxford Street in London or Deansgate in Manchester today would know what the hustle and bustle of the busy city street is like. If they were to do the same in Victorian times people would have been shocked and amazed at the streets would be just as busy but far louder, the noise of the horses on the cobbles and oh the stench. Higg’s quotes an American visitor to Liverpool who saw ‘the most disgusting sight was seeing women and young girls employed in scraping up street manure with their naked hands, and placing it in baskets or their aprons, so common as not to be noticed by the citizens’.

Higgs goes through everything you would have needed to know to be able to survive whether in the country or in the city. For those that are looking for the romantic England (that has never existed) may be shocked at some of the descriptions and advice. Whether it was food and drink or the health hazards, like avoid the Thames or don’t drink unboiled water.

To the descriptions of clothing of all sections and that included the working classes, which some today would recognise as chavs of their day. With advice of the day on how to deal with encounters with the opposite sexes, shopping and even more important on how to get around.

This is a fantastic guide that relives what life would have been like for the visitor during the Victorian era, she has not romanticised what it was like but given an honest account. This is an excellent background for any student of Victorian England.… (mais)