Here are the things you don’t think about when you’re watching something like “The Forsyte Saga.” The choking air pollution from all the coal fires. The atrophy of a woman’s stomach and chest muscles from years of relying on a corset for shape and posture. The fact that a country that saw its population almost triple within a few decades had no real sewage system, which meant that by 1858, the Thames was overflowing with human waste. And then, of course, the potato blight meant that huge numbers of English citizens were also starving. Goodman notes that the poor were markedly shorter than the wealthy, and several inches shorter than the average Londoner today. “It takes a lot of hunger to do that to people,” she adds. But even when money wasn’t an issue, self-abnegation was. In many homes children were sent to bed without dinner not as a punishment, but because “the self-control and self-denial induced by hunger were thought to teach enduring habits of self-sacrifice and to aid in fashioning a more moral individual,” Goodman writes. (Our era is clearly not the first to connect slimness and moral superiority.)

There is enough detail here on the social significance of everything from bread to laundering to hair fixatives to satisfy the most ardent history-obsessive. As a hypochondriac, I was particularly drawn to the sections on Victorian medicine. Before antibiotics, and with the new crowding and population explosion brought on by the Industrial Revolution, cholera, measles, diphtheria, whooping cough, tuberculosis and typhoid were looming threats. And with no regulation of the advertising industry, manufacturers could claim pretty much anything. Which is how the ingredients in Tuberculozyne, which purported to cure tuberculosis, could be potassium bromide, glycerin, almond flavoring, water and caramel coloring.

But drugs that did nothing might have been preferable to the “tonics” that did work, which often contained laudanum or mercury. It was speculated that as much as a third of the infant mortality rate in Manchester had to do not with disease but with drugging children. Popular tonics like Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup and Street’s Infant Quietness did indeed stop children from being pesky, as they were filled with opiates. Unfortunately they also stopped children from wanting to eat, and many an infant “slipped quietly away.”

Oddly, the details of Victorian life we’re most familiar with, or think we’re familiar with — the attitudes about sex and women as chattel to their husbands — are treated almost as afterthoughts. Maybe that’s because Goodman felt these subjects were well-covered territory already. Nevertheless, I did learn that women were supposed to enjoy sex — in the context of marriage, of course — and masturbation was considered a far more dangerous activity for men than women. Of course, that may be because so very, very few women indulged, as we all know. . . .

Goodman’s unique selling proposition as a historian is that she walks the walk of her time period, even when that walk involves hard labor in a corset and a hoop skirt. The book is peppered with her wonderful, and often wonderfully dotty, social experiments. For months on end she brushed her teeth with soot, wore the era’s recyclable sanitary towels (“an unusual idea to adjust to,” she says, in a moment of supreme understatement), set fire to herself cooking on a Victorian range and cleaned herself only with a linen towel, thus replicating the Victorian aversion to water, which was thought to possibly open the pores to infection. (PS, Goodman insists the dry-rubbing method works just fine.)