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"Karen Roe" by Ickworth Park (NT) 02-03-2012 is licensed underCC BY 2.0.

Everyday Life as a Learning ExperienceHow Historic Living Enriches the Modern World

By Sarah A. Chrisman2016

Sarah A. Chrisman is an American author who gives presentations on nineteenth-century clothing, dress,and culture with her husband Gabriel. The couple lives in Port Townsend, Washington, in a nineteenth-century home that has been restored to its original Victorian status. As you read, take notes on what lessonsthe author claims she has learned by living this way.

“From my earliest boyhood, ancient wearingapparel, old household and kitchen utensils, andantique furniture, have appealed to me withpeculiar force, telling facts and relating incidentsto me in such a plain, homely1 but graphicmanner of the every-day life of our ancestors,that I look upon them more as text-books than ascuriosities; for it is only by the light of truthreflected from these objects that we are enabledto…pierce the…fiction with which the perspectiveof years surrounds the commonest objects ofthose remote times.” — Beard, Dan C. “Six Feet ofRomance.” The Cosmopolitan. July, 1889. p. 226.

Learning doesn’t have to stop at the schoolhouse door — and, in fact, it shouldn’t. The best way tolearn about something is to live it: to drink it in through daily experience until familiarity and constantrepetition make it second nature. It’s one thing to read a book about a foreign country; it’s quiteanother to go there and befriend its people, eat its foods and learn its language. This immersiontechnique can be applied to a wide variety of subjects: my husband Gabriel and I use it to engage withour love of history — specifically the late Victorian era of the 1880s and ‘90s. We can’t travel to the pastin exactly the same way we would go to a foreign country (by boarding a ship or an airplane), but wecan bring history to us by incorporating as many of its details as possible into our daily lives.

When people visit our home they say it’s like walking into a museum — or stepping back in time. Ourhouse was built in 1888 and ‘89: it was started late one year and finished early the next. Before wepurchased our home it had been a rental property for many decades. Very little had been added overthe past century — although many things had been stripped out. Settling in was a long, slow process ofbringing back systems and appliances which would have been standard at the end of the nineteenth-century.

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Years ago, we started collecting everyday items from the past, things people like us were interactingwith on a daily basis back in the Victorian era. Most textbook history focuses on extreme cases: politics,war, and Great Names or, on the other end of the spectrum, criminals and the destitute. We’ve neverbeen privileged to keep company with monarchs2 and presidents in the modern world, so wherehistory is concerned we’ve always been drawn far more strongly to people we ourselves can relate to.We love simple stories of approachable people. Using the things they used everyday and adopting theirroutines helps us connect with their culture and understand their lives.

The artifacts3 which make up our home are a working collection. When we get our antiques, most areat a severe level of deterioration.4 Some people wouldn’t think twice about smashing such low-qualityitems to bits for decorating Steampunk5 jewelry, or ripping them to shreds for scrap material. We fixthem up and put them back to the use for which they were originally intended. As we use and interactwith them, they become our teachers.

It took years, but through patient saving and dedication we’ve been able to restore the functionalsystems in our house, things which every American household had at the end of the nineteenth-century. As we’ve been able to replace modern objects in our lives with their historic equivalents,6 eachappliance, tool, and other object from history has taught us increasingly more about the rhythms of lifein the past.

Period-appropriate lighting was one of the easiest things to institute, and at the same time it’s beenone of the things that’s changed our interactions with our world the most. When we’re the only ones athome we use oil lamps. I fill these lamps, clean their chimneys and care for their wicks several times aweek in the dark months of the year; in the brighter seasons they last longer. It’s a wonderful way toconnect with the changing seasons; by linking us to the light rhythms of the natural world, it makes usfeel more alive ourselves. It heightens our awareness of the resources we’re using as well: when a lamphas to be filled and cared for, one is naturally more mindful of when it’s really needed, instead ofsimply using it by habit. The lamps connect us in a very real way to the technologies of our forebears:7

we’ve learned how much brighter circular wick8 lamps are than those with flat wicks, and we’ve beenfascinated to see how much brighter antique lamps (which were made for use) are than modernreplicas (often intended for mere ambiance).

The electric lights in our house (mostly used for company) are all replicas of early light bulb patents,made from hand-blown glass. A few are Edison designs because people inevitably expect to see theGreat Names of History represented. Really though, we prefer the hidden stories of the past: most ofthe light bulbs in our home are Westinghouse designs, based on the brilliant work of Nikola Tesla.9

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2. kings and queens3. Artifact (noun): an old object of great value4. Deterioration (noun): the process of becoming progressively worse5. As it is used here, “Steampunk” refers to a trend in fashion based on the Steampunk genre of fiction writing, which

emphasizes outdated technology, usually from the Victorian era.6. Equivalent (noun): equal7. Forebears are ancestors.8. A wick is a strip of fabric that fuel travels up to feed the flame of a candle or lantern.9. Nikola Tesla was a Serbian-American inventor and electrical engineer who is credited with the design of the modern

alternating current electricity supply system.

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We long ago sold the electric refrigerator which came with our house and bought an antique ice box tokeep our perishables fresh. We stock it with sixty pounds of block ice once or twice a week, and we’vegotten so practiced at loading it together that the process almost feels like dancing. The slow drip ofmelting ice is one of the constant, quiet sounds of our home, and every morning I empty the meltwaterfrom the driptray.

In the opposite corner of the kitchen from our icebox sits its complement: our wood-burning CharmCrawford stove, a beautifully restored antique from 1901. It took us years to save up for it, and the dayit arrived was an occasion of enormous pride. Tending the stove — cleaning its firebox, sifting theashes, laying new fires, and keeping the fire going — has become another element of my daily routine.Caring for the stove is incredibly grounding,10 and a constant, tangible11 connection to history. Itconstantly has new things to teach me, and I delight in every moment of it. I bake all our bread fromscratch in this beautiful stove, and am constantly trying new recipes from our collection of antiquenineteenth-century cookbooks: they truly provide flavors of the past to our everyday lives.

Every detail of our home is as authentically Victorian as we can possibly make it. Our bed is an antique(a lucky yard-sale find), and I sewed its feather mattress by hand. Every morning I wash using anantique ewer12 and basin. Not only does this conserve water dramatically, but it’s also much kinder tomy skin than daily showers — and it gets me just as clean. When I wash my hair I use castille soap, justas suggested in an 1889 edition of Good Housekeeping.

Our whole life together is an experiential study into the period we love. Like any other historians, weread extensively in primary sources, books and other texts written during the period. Unlike mosthistorians, we take things significantly farther and build our daily lives around the culture.

Even the clothes we wear every day are scrupulously13 patterned after Victorian antiques andnineteenth-century fashion plates. Clothes are incredibly intimate. They influence how we move, and atthe same time record tiny details about us that seem too mundane to write down — things likewhether the items in our pockets are light or heavy, or what we do with our hands when we don’t havepockets at all. I sew all my own clothes by hand, and Gabriel’s are made for him by a seamstress inSeattle.

I’m an author; as with any true writer it’s not just my profession but how I experience the world. I keepa diary every day, using an antique mother-of-pearl fountain pen I bought with part of my first bookadvance. I draft a lot of my manuscripts the same way: I enjoy this tangible connection to my words.(There have been some really interesting studies done showing the human brain processesinformation more thoroughly when it’s written by hand as opposed to typed.) When I take notes fromantique books and magazines I use a pencil to avoid dribbling ink on irreplaceable antique volumes.

Since no publisher on Earth will accept a handwritten manuscript anymore, I still have to type out mywork before I submit it. I used to throw away my rough drafts after I had transcribed them: they hadserved their function and there seemed little purpose in them continuing to take up space. However,after the publication of my third book people started expressing interest in my handwritten pages so Istarted saving them. One of the biggest challenges in collecting bits of history is deciding what to saveand what to throw away. (This is just as true for personal history as for history in general.)

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10. Grounding (adjective): realistic and modest11. Tangible (adjective): able to be touched12. A ewer is a large jug with a wide mouth, formerly used for carrying water for someone to wash in13. hardworking, thorough, and extremely attentive to details

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I’ve written several narrative non-fiction books about the Victorian era and our relationship with it.Currently I’m working on a series of novellas set in the 1880s and ‘90s. All our first-hand experienceswith the technologies and everyday items of the time provide incredibly valuable insights on which tobuild these works.

My husband Gabriel works at a bicycle shop. The B.I. Cycle Shop is a modern store, with brandsfamiliar to twenty-first-century cyclists. However, its products do have this in common with earlycycling: the mechanical technology is very advanced, yet it’s still technology which people can see andunderstand. Better yet, it’s technology which originated in our favorite period!

I’ve never had a driver’s license, and my bicycle is from a company that has been making bikes with thesame basic frame geometry since the 1890s. My bicycle serves the same function for me as mostpeople’s “daily driver” car serves for them. It weighs fifty pounds, which would have been extremelyheavy even by 1890s standards. Yet I’ve covered hundreds of miles on it. It helps me do my errands(whether I’m riding a mere four or five miles around town, or twenty-five miles out and back to afarmstand), but I’ve ridden much farther on it as well. Longer rides ranged anywhere from fifty milesout and back to visit another Victorian town, to one hundred miles to see the flowers in bloom inAmerica’s top tulip-producing county, to an international ride up to Canada last year with Gabriel, whorode one of his high wheel bicycles. I have my own high wheel, an 1880s-style ladies’ tricycle which ataround seventy-five pounds is even heavier than my bike. In the 1880s there were women whomanaged to ride high wheel tricycles over the Alps, but the farthest I’ve managed on mine was aseventy-five mile trip across the Idaho panhandle last year. (Gabriel was on one of his high wheelbicycles, of course.)

Besides adding joy to our lives, bringing us closer together, and being extremely useful to my ownwriting, our first-hand experiences with everyday aspects of Victorian life are valuable to others as well.We’ve done consulting work for other writers, for film-makers, and for various researchers. We’ve givenpresentations for schools ranging from small elementary-level homeschooling groups to largeuniversity classes. We do historical outreach all the time. As a way to engage others with the history welove, we curate a virtual museum of our collection through a website and a Facebook page.

The Victorians believed that husbands and wives should “Consult and advise together in all that comeswithin the experience and sphere of individuality.” Gabriel and I do exactly that. He has a degree inhistory and a Master’s in Library Science; my own university degrees are in the field of Cultural Studies.We’ve combined Gabriel’s love of primary-source research with immersion techniques from myCultural Studies background, and by doing so we’ve created a life which is uniquely beautiful — anduniquely ours.

We can’t travel to the past, but we can immerse ourselves in its details. By doing so, we attain anintimate knowledge of it which books alone can never supply. Some things can only be learned byexperience repeated so often it becomes second nature. Like the different sounds a fire makes when itwants more fuel or air, or when it can take care of itself without fussing. The reflexes involved withriding a fixed gear highwheel tricycle. How wearing long skirts can become an extra sense forexperiencing the world, the way cats use their whiskers. People of the past knew all these things; bylearning them ourselves through our own experiences, we come that much closer to experiencinghistory.

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“Everyday Life as a Learning Experience: How Historic Living Enriches the Modern World" by Sarah A. Chrisman. Copyright © 2016 byCommonLit, Inc. This text is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

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Text-Dependent QuestionsDirections: For the following questions, choose the best answer or respond in complete sentences.

1. PART A: What is one central idea in “Everyday Life as a Learning Experience”?A. Bicycles are a more efficient mode of transportation than cars.B. Living with artifacts from the past can teach us about history.C. Twenty-first century technology makes life much easier.D. People in the twenty-first century are much more wasteful of time and

resources.

2. PART B: Which TWO pieces of evidence from the text best support your answer toPart A?

A. “The best way to learn about something is to live it...” (Paragraph 2)B. “Some people wouldn’t think twice about smashing such low-quality items to

bits for decorating Steampunk jewelry...” (Paragraph 5)C. “…when a lamp has to be filled and cared for, one is naturally more mindful of

when it’s really needed, instead of simply using it by habit.” (Paragraph 7)D. “Clothes are incredibly intimate. They influence how we move…” (Paragraph 13)E. “Some things can only be learned by experience repeated so often it becomes

second nature.” (Paragraph 21)F. “How wearing long skirts can become an extra sense for experiencing the world,

the way cats use their whiskers.” (Paragraph 21)

3. PART A: What does the phrase “Great Names” mean as used in paragraph 4?A. famous people celebrated by historyB. last names that signify noble ancestryC. current day political leadersD. proper nouns

4. PART B: Which TWO phrases from the text best support your answer to Part A?A. “…on the other end of the spectrum, criminals and the destitute.” (Paragraph 4)B. “We’ve never been privileged to keep company with monarchs and presidents in

the modern world.” (Paragraph 4)C. “The artifacts which make up our home are a working collection.” (Paragraph 5)D. “As we use and interact with them, they become our teachers.” (Paragraph 5)E. “A few are Edison designs because people inevitably expect to see the Great

Names of History represented.” (Paragraph 8)F. “Really though, we prefer the hidden stories of the past…” (Paragraph 8)

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[RI.5]5. How does the quoted section in the first paragraph contribute to the development ofideas in the article?

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Discussion QuestionsDirections: Brainstorm your answers to the following questions in the space provided. Be prepared toshare your original ideas in a class discussion.

1. What modern-day technologies or conveniences could you not go without? Are theredownsides to taking advantage of all modern technologies?

2. Today, there is a small movement toward older technology—some people favor vinylrecords over digital copies; some people learn how to make their own soaps and candles,or sew their own clothes; others forego using social media and smartphones. How do youthink Sarah Chrisman would explain this phenomenon?

3. Is there something you wish you knew how to do, or could do better, but you never learnedbecause you had tools that could do it for you?

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