A history of the home

Lucy Worsley is an historian who appears on television a lot and also writes books. I don’t watch much television so I have not actually seen the series on which If Walls Could Talk is based. It might have been better if I had seen it because I found this book quite superficial and lacking a lot of content – much of the content was interesting stories and insights rather than a lot of facts to place things in context.

The book guides us through the history of the British home through looking at how various rooms were used over the ages. It’s a huge scope and obviously one book is never going to cover everything. It might have been better had the author restricted her narrative to one or two time periods. Judith Flanders’ book The Victorian House does exactly that using the same format but is longer than Lucy Worsley’s book even though it is dealing with less than 100 years – it’s well worth a read.

The rooms that the author talks about in this book are the bedchamber, the bathroom, the living room and the kitchen. The book looks at the activities which were carried out in these rooms and how their use changed over the centuries. This opens the narrative to stories about how things were invented, how people slept and what the servants did (where there were any). This is all fascinating stuff which has been carefully curated to make the book as interesting as possible but it’s not comprehensive and doesn’t cover all types of house and of all the past because it can’t do that in the space available. I assume that what was included was to give us an overview and encourage further reading to fill in the gaps.

This is a light read and it contains anecdotes and stories to illuminate the facts. I enjoyed reading it but felt that it should have been smaller or more focussed in its scope. I have also read the same author’s biographies of Jane Austen (see review here) and Agatha Christie (see here) which I enjoyed.