The Government has therefore concluded that the right place to decide on any outcome of next month’s Inter-Governmental Conference [in Rome] is here in this House and in this Parliament.”Peter Hain, the Leader of the House – who represented the Government on M. Giscard’s] current draft treaty do not change the fundamental relationship between the EU and its member states; and on any analysis it involves less change than that in Maastricht and the Single European Act. The Government came under renewed pressure from all parties yesterday to hold a referendum on the proposed EU constitution. Ms Moore caused outrage when she sent an e-mail on 11 September 2001 suggesting bad news could be “buried”.. During the Jo Moore affair there was criticism that she was too close to Stephen Byers, the Secretary of State for Transport, to enable a proper sanction of her behaviour. Lavatories, on the other hand, feature largely, following their success at the Great Exhibition of 1851, where 800,000 visitors used a watercloset or urinal for the first time.The main message concerns Victorian dirt, from the omnipresent soots and smuts, indoors and out, to the inescapable coal-dust and horse-dung that made boots, clothes, carpets and curtains filthy.

So too is menstruation, which must have been quite a business in households filled with wives, daughters, housemaids and cooks. Although childbirth is well covered, rather in the Victorian manner of not speaking on certain subjects, copulation is ignored. The Victorians are rather like Germany or Greece – a foreign country where habits differ, but not so much that we cannot relate to them After all, many of us inhabit their houses. After all, many of us inhabit their houses.
How did those with the sensibility of, say, Elizabeth Gaskell or George Eliot live their everyday lives? How did they, would we manage without showers, central heating, fridge-freezers? Did they really wear so many garments, and eat so many courses? Such inquiry informs Judith Flanders’The Victorian House, which is not architectural but familial: domestic life in its material details, from the basement coalhole to the attic maid’s room.

There is, too, a lot about relationships, between employers and servants or husbands and wives. Indeed, most of the chapter on the Drawing Room is devoted to accounts of Victorian courtship.In a sequence of footnotes Flanders is engagingly candid about her desires to digress, at one point firmly declaring that she is far more interested in S-bends than sex. But these fleeting suggestions are not pursued as far as they might be. Galsworthy is no Ibsen, and it’s an uncompromised hero who is baited, stoned and then accidentally murdered by the mob outside one of his public meetings – an action that tragically endorses Stephen’s conviction that “if popular opinion is to control the utterances of her politicians, then goodbye to this country”.Though it is sometimes two-dimensional in its characterisation, The Mob is a rewarding revival, reinforcing the Orange Tree’s proud record of unearthing worthwhile rarities To 4 October (020-8940 3633). There are rudimentary hints here that the idealistic Stephen has too compulsive a constitutional hankering to wear the martyr’s shirt, at whatever cost to his nearest and dearest.