A maid-of-all-work in 1861 earned between £9 and £14 a year. That was the wage printed in Isabella Beeton's own Book of Household Management, the Victorian bestseller that told middle-class England how a home should run. For the youngest domestic servants it meant a sixteen-hour day of raking coal ranges, black-leading grates and hauling water, often with no bedroom of their own.Over the next three hours we move through the Victorian middle-class household of the 1860s, from Pinner in Middlesex to the London suburbs. The kitchen was a half-sunken room built around a cast-iron coal range that needed hours to reach cooking heat and daily cleaning with black lead. Fashionable drawing rooms were papered in Scheele's green, a pigment made with arsenic. Crinoline hoops made open fires a real danger, dinner parties were served à la française, and cookery books by Eliza Acton, Hannah Glasse and Maria Rundell were freely borrowed by later compilers.The Book of Household Management first appeared in parts in The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine between 1859 and 1861, then as a single volume of more than 1,100 pages that sold around 60,000 copies in its first year. Its wage tables ranked every servant, with a cook worth £14 to £30 a year, while the 1861 census counted close to a million women and girls in domestic service in England and Wales, the largest female occupation in the country.What emerges is a picture of Victorian domestic life in which the ideal of the calm, orderly home rested on the unseen labour of cooks, scullery maids and general servants.