One of the blurbs on the back of this book ends by saying, “Serious history is rarely this fun.” I submit that Ms. Foreman of The Times needs more fun in her life.

Don’t get me wrong; this book wasn’t all that bad. But it was not the most fun history book I’ve ever read, even of a scholarly sort. Especially the first chapter — I almost didn’t make it through that one, and if I hadn’t been carrying this book with me on a trip (ergo it was my only reading material), I don’t know if I would have gone on. The first chapter is dry as all hell, as it painstakingly details for the reader how many letters its subjects wrote to family members, how many to families of their own social class, how many to their social inferiors, etc, and it’s a good thing the book picked up after that, or I would not have finished it.

But it does improve, and I appreciated its subject matter, which is the lives of gentry-class women in Georgian England. Its focus is on the broader social community of Lancashire and west Yorkshire, hence different in some important ways from the kind of metropolitan life I’m writing about, but a lot of the topics (such as marriage and childbearing) don’t vary too much with geography. And it’s always good to get a history that digs into the diaries and letters and household account books, i.e. the stuff that usually gets overlooked. In fact, I was struck by a comparison between this and Roy Porter’s book, whose revised edition predates this work by eight years; Porter stated, early in his book, that “compared with men, we know little about what women felt, thought and did.” Lest you condemn him for accepting that limitation too easily, though, I should also mention that the front cover of Vickery’s book has a quote from Porter, calling it “The most important thing in English feminist history in the last ten years.” Vickery is filling in one of the gaps he acknowledged in his own work.

If you find yourself with a sudden yen to research the period, my recommendation is this: skim the first chapter, paying only enough attention to get a sense of who the women are that Vickery will be talking about all book, then move onto the next chapter posthaste. There’s good stuff in here, but you have to get past the dry statistics to find it.

This book makes a good pairing with Picard, since Porter takes a broader view, showing societal trends rather than details of the moment. The flip side is that he’s not quite as readable; it’s harder to make generalized statements about the effects of enclosure on rural tenants as entertaining as anecdotes about Fleet weddings. But it’s far from the worst piece of analytical writing I’ve ever had to tackle — far, far from it — even though Porter’s writing from something of a Marxist perspective, which all too often would bore me to tears. He doesn’t come across as having an ideological axe to grind, and that probably makes a big difference. But he does look at societal trends through the lens of changing economic conditions, and I can take that in moderated doses.

The one place he really does shine, in terms of readability, is in the opening chapter “Contrasts,” when he does a swift-moving overview of English behavior and national character during the century. To quote a good passage:

It isn’t all quite so engaging, but that gave me enough of a good start that I was willing to stick with it even when things took a drier (but still informative) turn.

I’ve been doing research for this novel for a little while, so I’m going to try to play catch-up with the book reports. How much success I’ll have is anybody’s guess.

As usual, I started with Liza Picard, whom I adore. She continues to be a delightfully readable source of random factoids on the daily life of London. She isn’t a perfectly objective source — despite drawing heavily on Johnson and Boswell for information, she has no compunctions about saying she deplores Johnson’s manners and Boswell’s style — but she pays attention to the details of lived experience, and particularly of women’s experience (interior decorating is as interesting of a topic to her as crime). For a starting point, she can’t be beat.

I really don’t know what I would do without this woman. Her books land precisely in the time-periods I’m writing about, and she’s got one for each novel I’ve written or contracted for. It will be a sad, sad day if I go on to write a Blitz book and have no Picard to start the ball rolling.

Stay tuned for more reports on daily-life-type books, before I move onto more specific topics.