The Writer's Guide to Everyday Life in the 1800s

Fast, because of the excellent organization on the part of the author, you don't have to hunt all over to answer whatever question you have; interesting because, once you have your answer, chances on you'll read a bit further on.

When I read the description of the book I thought that this book would actually provide information about everyday life in the 1800's; instead, it is merely a dictionary. There are no passages that describe fashion, etiquette, industry, clothing, or anything else useful to a historian. Instead, the book merely provides one sentence descriptions of objects you probabaly can already identify. This book may be useful if you come across the name of an item in a primary text and you are not sure what it is. However, it provides very little useful general information

As a history buff and aspiring novelist of the California Gold Rush period, I found this volume fascinating. I learned a great deal about slang, clothing, courtship, and how people entertained themselves. Unfortunately, a text-only book is insufficient to properly describe clothing and hairstyles -- or convey exactly what their houses looked like. The book desperately needs drawings or pictures!! The dictionary-style organization is useful, but I would have preferred more narrative text describing each subject before McCutcheon launches into definitions. This volume is definitely worth a spot on my bookshelf, but I'll keep hunting for something that provides the visuals.

I've been researching the 19th Century (with specific attention to the Old West, but a lot of Eastern culture got transplanted there, so inevitably I've had to learn about that too) for 35 years now, and I still find that a book can occasionally give me some information I didn't have. This is one such volume. Though not by any means an in-depth treatment of the period--no one book could ever cover all the fascinating details of everyday life and society in a hundred crowded years--it did provide me with an assortment of vernacular terms I'd never seen before, a sidebar on stagecoach etiquette, another on the treatment of various common contagions, some information on how safecrackers cracked safes, a good chronology of popular magazines, and various other tidbits to add to my ever-expanding files of information. Author McCutcheon does occasionally neglect to give facts that would soften some of the gloomy picture he paints. He states that "The nineteenth-century home was a woman's...confines...[and her] work was never done...," but fails to add that household help was cheap and abundant, and even "mechanics" (what we would call skilled workers) earning less than a dollar a day could afford at least a maid-of-all-work; also that the housewife was generally assisted by a resident aunt, mother or mother-in-law, unmarried sister, older daughter, or some combination, as well as neighbors. He doesn't point out that women's rights were a focus of much attention through much of the century and their status did improve, especially after about 1845. Nor does he give any space to the many eccentrics and rebels, from Dr. Mary Walker to Calamity Jane, who defied convention and got away with it. The reader will need to consult other books to obtain a more balanced, to say nothing of a more detailed, picture of the era, and although the many references used in the text are enumerated, there is no bibliography of suggested readings in this volume as there have been in others in the series (I strongly advise looking in the bibliographical essays of assorted American histories to find some titles worth seeking out, as well as checking out the "Recommendations" and "Readers Who Bought This Book..." listings on this page). Still, you will definitely learn things from McCutcheon that you won't readily find elsewhere, and the book is certainly worth your read.

An amazing book! This book offers everything you ever needed or wanted to know about the 19th century. It has everything from slang speech to crime on the streets! Find a comfortable seat, sit back and enjoy your time travel ride back to the 1800's.