Laundry Bygones

For the working-class housewife before the 20th century washing aids were few and primitive. A stout hedge, a grassy bank and a good fresh wind were the best she could hope for. Paralleling progress in other domestic equipment, washing, mangling and ironing techniques were developed during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to deal with the vast quantities of personal and household linen required by the increasing middle classes. Both public and private collections provide evidence of the continuous and sometimes bizarre efforts made by Victorian inventors and manufacturers to bring relie to the laundress. This book illustrates the simple, rare, but often extremely beautiful traditional laundry aids - the glass calendars, washing bats, mangle boards and goffering stacks - as well as examples of the multitude of flat, box, solid fuel, spirit, gas and electric irons, washing machines and wringers, which, still commonly survive from the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth...