Ruth Goodman is a rare person. She has not just researched the Victorian era, she has lived it. She has sewn its clothes, lived its conditions and done its work. Yes, she has washed floors in an unheated house wearing a corset.

Almost anything the reader might want to know about daily life from 1837 to 1901 is covered in “How to Be Victorian: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Victorian Life,” published late last year and covered in a most accessible way. The reader follows the Victorians through a typical day, awakening, washing, dressing, grooming, exercising, working, eating, playing, having sex and sleeping.

Although the Victorian era ended 114 years ago, the contrast with our own time is striking. Without electricity, indoor plumbing or modern medicine, people toiled endlessly to survive.

The ability to keep clean separated the respectable poor from the desperate. And keeping clean was no small feat. Baths such as we know them were rare — the Victorians regarded water as dangerous. Better to use a sitz bath, having a standing wash or rub one’s body with cloths, which would clean the skin without allowing the pores to open to infection. The author says she used this last method for four months “and nobody noticed.” Hmmm.

Victorians relied heavily on keeping a washable layer of clothing next to their skin and layers that didn’t need washing over that. The corset, for instance, was one of these unwashable layers. Nearly all women wore corsets every day — “(o)nly those who were prepared to be social outcasts went without.”

These could be easily sewn oneself in the earlier part of the era. “The body does adjust,” Goodman writes. “After a few days I found that I was able to be as vigorous in my corset and with my waist reduced by four inches as ever I was. I was soon charging around after escaped pigs and scrubbing floors, just as before.” By the 1860s the corset began to morph into the steel-boned, disfiguring garment we think of today.

For men, grooming one’s hair and beard took center stage. The full treatment included washing the face with hot water and soft soap, a shave with lather, hair oil, a facial massage with oil and aftershave. Men of all classes regarded a trip to the barber as a treat, and men who couldn’t afford the trip shaved themselves every morning with their own special soap, straight razor and propped-up mirror.

Cleaning clothes comprised another aspect of cleanliness that separated the acceptable from the shunned. Laundering Victorian fabrics could be extremely complicated, and a mistake could mean the loss of a garment at a time people might own only one or two outfits. The poorest people washed their single outfit at night, slept naked and dressed in the wet clothes in the morning.

Food often meant scraps, unless the eater was the family breadwinner. A man working in the fields might have his children deliver him a “clanger” for lunch — flour, suet and water formed into a roll and filled with bacon on one end and jam on the other. Or, he might have a steak and kidney pudding or stew and dumplings.

Women and children made do with boiled potatoes or suet pastry with gravy. Breakfast might be a hunk of bread or porridge. The evening meal varied greatly depending on the region, the affluence of the diners and the time period within the era. It might consist only of bread, baked at a professional baker’s because homes did not have their own ovens, or it might be a multicourse meal carved and served by servants.

Children were supposed to eat “plain food,” that is, carbohydrates. Malnutrition was epidemic and is reflected in skeletons of the period.

If keeping clean and fed was difficult, keeping warm was still harder. The conventional wisdom of the day posited that the body needed plenty of free-flowing air. Windows were left open whatever the weather. Children were dressed in the flimsiest of clothes and put to sleep on bare mattresses in front of open windows for their own health. Women often dressed with warm layers below the waist, but only thin ones above, leading to their needing shawls or newspapers to help keep their upper half warm.

The state of medicine was not much removed from medieval times. People relied on opiates and purgatives (induced vomiting or diarrhea) as cure-alls. Goodman considers the top end of the working class to have been the safest place for a child, a place where the mother was home to tend the children rather than older siblings or hired nursemaids, and where little money existed for medicine (the less, the better).

Goodman also discusses taboo aspects of Victorian life, including cleanliness during menstruation (difficult), baby cleanliness and diaper washing (also difficult), masturbation (bad), sex (good for men, but they shouldn’t have too much), contraception (hard to obtain but becoming less so throughout the period), abortion (not uncommon), prostitution (the money was good) and homosexuality (gay men supposedly could be recognized by their being clean-shaven and unable to whistle; the existence of lesbians was hardly acknowledged at all).

The sheer effort it took to earn the money, cook the food, heat the water, heat the house, dispose of human waste, feed and clothe oneself, not to mention one’s spouse and children, is exhausting to read about, but Goodman makes it easy reading.

This book is a must for anyone wondering how we used to live, or how relatively good we have it now.