A Victorian Household

An intimate and absorbing account of the inner lives and thoughts of a middle-class Victorian family, as told through the diaries of Marion Sambourne. Marion Sambourne was born in 1851 and died a few days before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. She married the Punch cartoonist Linley Sambourne an was absorbed into an artistic circle which included [John] Tenniel, du Maurier [Mr. and Mrs. G.], [G.F.] Watts, [Mr. and Mrs. Walter] Crane, [Mr. and Mrs. George] Grossmith, Rider Haggard, Bret Harte and [W.S.] Gilbert. She kept her diary for thirty-three years and it records not only what she did, but the minutiae of daily life in a Victorian household: where she shopped, what the family ate, who came to call. She also made notes on dinner parties, wrote instructions for the servants, and made inventories of household items ... Fascinating in their detail, these diaries are of enormous interest because the house where she lived all her married life - 18 Stafford Terrace, Kensington - is now, thanks to the efforts of the Victorian Society, a perfectly preserved museum of everyday bourgeois life in high Victorian England.--from back cover.