Victorian Paper Flowers: Part One

Or the Pastimes of the Newly created Middle Class Woman:
Or Anything Worth doing is worth doing Well
Or Making or Doing it Yourself is more Economical

It is interesting, when reading the manuals created for women in the home, to note the tone with which the advice was given. For a woman brought up in 20^th Century North America, or Europe, the paternal tone might be a tad abrasive. If we delve deeper, we see something quite different, I think. The authors of these tomes expected their readers to carry out and distinguish themselves in very complex tasks that required a great degree of skill, patience and most importantly, time. They did not think of their readers as dullards, silly or incapable, but rather the opposite.
But what was the point of it all? Was it just to fill the new amounts of time that Victorian middle class women found they had? Why did they have all this time? I hope to answer some of these questions for you and not to bore you too much.
One of the points was economical. Cassell’s in his household guide stated,
“For we believe it will be found by many that when they have learnt how to obtain economically the necessaries of the household, and to do for themselves what hitherto they have had to get done by expensive assistance, they will have in every case something left with which they can augment the convenience, the comfort, and possibly even the luxury of their house and living—bettering at once their mode of life and their measure of enjoyment”
The belief in the economical running of a household was extolled by Samuel Smiles, an influential author of the time, in his book “Thrift”. Thriftiness was a virtue Smiles encouraged and he believed that an intelligent industrious woman was the key to a happy well appointed home. “Men themselves attach little or no importance to the intelligence or industrial skill of women; and they only discover their value when they find their homes stupid and cheerless.”
Paper flowers could be produced for a third of the cost of real flowers and thus create beauty in the home, but use the family’s resources in a responsible way.
Time, as the cabbage flowers I will show were supposed to take about 3 days to create, was the primary resource used by the Victorian housewife. The Victorians were obsessed with the newly discovered germs and cleaned like crazy. Fortunately, labour was cheap and most middle class homes could afford at least one servant. She was expected to rise by 6 a.m. and it was called “considerate” to release her from her duties at 10 p.m. She didn’t get a lot of time off, even to go to church on a Sunday. The housemaid was expected to proceed directly from church services back to the home of her employ. With household chores cared for by the housemaid, the lady of the house did have larger amounts of time on her hands. This time might be spent visiting with friends, attending social/church groups concerned with helping the poor or unfortunate, or she worked on various projects to create a cheerful home.
If you would like to read a couple of resources about Victorian life and middle class ideals, “Thrift” by Samuel Smiles can be found at http://ia311324.us.archive.org/1/items/smilesthrift00smiluoft/smilesthrift00smiluoft.pdf
And links to all three volumes of Cassell’s Household guide can be found here
University of Toronto Library