Bowen: Eating and Electric Cleaning

After years - no, decades - of meaning to (and at least once beginning to), I've finally got round to reading Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart. No doubt I'll post on it when I've finished, but, slow and distracted reader that I am, I'm barely halfway through. Leaving critical judgment, then, on one side, one of the most startling things about the novel is the endless hours of leisure Bowen's characters (even the ones who 'work') have at their disposal in those far-off prewar years, and another is the staggering quantities of food they shovel in. The typical day proceeds from hearty cooked breakfast to morning tea or coffee, with biscuits or cakes, then a full sit-down lunch, followed in short order by afternoon tea - more cakes and biscuits - to keep body and soul together till the full sit-down evening dinner, which might very well be followed by a pre-bedtime snack or two to see a body through the long hungry reaches of the night. Lord, these elegant ladies and gents know how to put it away! Did people need more food in those days, perhaps because they had no central heating and tended to walk more? Why was there no 'obesity epidemic'? Needless to say, all this food was cooked for them - by 'cook' or in restaurants - and domestic staff could also be relied upon to give the house a quite hair-raisingly thorough spring clean every year. Readers of The Death of the Heart will recall that it's the annual spring clean that causes the Quaynes to vacate their London home, pootling off to Capri for a few weeks, and sending poor Portia to the seaside. Part of the spring cleaning ritual, it seems, was the cleaning of the library, washing the shelves down and sending the books to be 'electric cleaned'. What? What on earth is that? My online researches have yielded nothing in the way of electric cleaners that doesn't involve water and undue violence, quite unsuited to books. Perhaps a machine along these lines was involved? I can't say I'm tempted to send my books away for treatment...