I am currently reading The Domestic Revolution: How the Introduction of Coal into Victorian Homes Changed Everything by Ruth Goodman. Ahh! That may sound about as interesting as watching paint dry, but I am finding it fascinating and I'm learning about things I never really considered with carefulness or any kind of precise understanding.

Goodman can be described as a practical historian which means she not only reads written documents for her research and collects folkloric accounts, she applies a hands-on approach -- if she wants to know how, say, the people of Ireland and Scotland managed to cook food on a peat fire, she learned to do it herself. She has been a consultant on several British TV series that try to impart historical accuracy to people's lives. The results are not especially pretty in her books! I haven't seen any of the TV episodes, but I think I might like to watch them. Have any RPers seen them and, if so, how good do you think they are?

This is the fourth book by Goodman I have read. I've also read:

How to Be a Victorian

How to Be a Tudor

How to Behave Badly in Elizabethan England

Back to coal for a moment: This smacked me up the side of my head -- Henry VIII watched his flagship Mary Rose sink in the strait between the Isle of Wight and the mainland in July 1545. Over four hundred years later archaeologists excavated what remained of the Mary Rose. Their finds included two galley stoves made of bricks that the archaeologists had to reassemble. Nearby they found a batterie de cuisine and larder items, some relatively intact so easily identifiable. But what fuel did the cook(s) use? It was there too -- cords of various kinds of wood. If a lump of coal was found in or nearby the wreck, it had to have been a stray piece that was dropped into the water in the four centuries after the Mary Rose settled on the bottom.

In 1558 when Elizabeth I came to the throne, the English people didn't use coal, they burnt wood, turves (cut peat), and dried grasses. Rural folk burnt dried dung -- good old cow pats. Yet by the time Elizabeth died in 1603 -- scarcely two generations later -- coal had become a common fuel in London, mainly because it was cheap, relatively compact and easier to store in crowded city conditions. The revolution had begun!

What wonderment real history is! The romanticized notions and balderdash I absorbed are put in the shade. I thank Ruth Goodman for all her efforts.