The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed
Judith Flanders
The bestselling social history of Victorian domestic life, told through the letters, diaries, journals and novels of 19th-century men and women.Some images were unavailable for this electronic edition.The Victorian age is both recent and unimaginably distant. In the most prosperous and technologically advanced nation in the world, people carried slops up and down stairs; buried meat in fresh earth to prevent mould forming; wrung sheets out in boiling water with their bare hands. This drudgery was routinely performed by the parents of people still living, but the knowledge of it has passed as if it had never been. Running water, stoves, flush lavatories – even lavatory paper – arrived slowly throughout the century, and most were luxuries available only to the prosperous.Judith Flanders, author of the widely acclaimed ‘A Circle of Sisters’, has written an incisive and irresistible portrait of Victorian domestic life. The book itself is laid out like a house, following the story of daily life from room to room: from childbirth in the master bedroom, through the scullery, kitchen and dining room – cleaning, dining, entertaining – on upwards, ending in the sickroom and death.Through a collage of diaries, letters, advice books, magazines and paintings, Flanders shows how social history is built up out of tiny domestic details. Through these we can understand the desires, motivations and thoughts of the age.Many people today live in Victorian terraces, and so the houses themselves are familiar, but the lives are not. ‘The Victorian House’ will change all that.
THE VICTORIAN HOUSE
Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed
JUDITH FLANDERS
DEDICATION (#uc9a65d27-1101-5a60-9c59-979931e09e8c)
For my mother, Kappy Flanders
CONTENTS
COVER (#ua2bdb250-cf03-5de3-ba10-8382608b569f)
TITLE PAGE (#u8601864d-6fbc-55ca-8370-6fd533f974bc)
DEDICATION (#u5c2854a3-3378-5f16-a9af-f735613009c2)
INTRODUCTION: House and Home (#ue4c83bbc-0752-5271-921e-acfd5191ad0a)
1 The Bedroom (#udb308d40-dc1f-50fb-bbae-f1460dd78649)
2 The Nursery (#u5293c7ea-7b54-5905-bcdc-91a97d9f34ab)
3 The Kitchen (#u74d7f17e-6864-5bd8-b713-e0403d565f25)
4 The Scullery (#litres_trial_promo)
5 The Drawing Room (#litres_trial_promo)
6 The Parlour (#litres_trial_promo)
7 The Dining Room (#litres_trial_promo)
8 The Morning Room (#litres_trial_promo)
9 The Bathroom and Lavatory (#litres_trial_promo)
10 The Sickroom (#litres_trial_promo)
11 The Street (#litres_trial_promo)
APPENDICES (#litres_trial_promo)
1 Mourning Clothes for Women (#litres_trial_promo)
2 A Quick Guide to Books and Authors (#litres_trial_promo)
3 Currency (#litres_trial_promo)
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY (#litres_trial_promo)
INDEX (#litres_trial_promo)
LIST OF INTEGRATED IMAGES (#litres_trial_promo)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)
NOTES (#litres_trial_promo)
PRAISE (#litres_trial_promo)
ALSO BY THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)
COPYRIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#litres_trial_promo)
INTRODUCTION (#ulink_f120773c-8f7c-55fe-97b2-a778e03f53fb)
HOUSE AND HOME (#ulink_f120773c-8f7c-55fe-97b2-a778e03f53fb)
IN 1909 H.G.WELLS WROTE, in a passage from his novel Tono-Bungay, of Edward Ponderevo, a purveyor of patent medicines and
terror of eminent historians. ‘Don’t want your drum and trumpet history – no fear … Don’t want to know who was who’s mistress, and why so-and-so devastated such a province; that’s bound to be all lies and upsy-down anyhow. Not my affair … What I want to know is, in the middle ages Did they Do Anything for Housemaid’s Knee? What did they put in their hot baths after jousting, and was the Black Prince – you know the Black Prince – was he enamelled or painted, or what? I think myself, black-leaded – very likely – like pipeclay – but did they use blacking so early?’
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It is a comic view of history. Or is it? History is usually read either from the top down – kings and queens, the leaders and their followers – or from the bottom up – the common people and their lives. Political history and social history, however, both encompass the one thing we all share – that at the end of the day, after ruling empires or finishing the late shift in a factory, we all go back to our homes. Different as those homes are, how we live at home, where we live, what we do all day when we’re not doing whatever it is that history is recording – these are some of the most telling things about any age, any people. Mme Merle in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881) notes how ‘one’s house, one’s furniture, one’s garments, the books one reads, the company one keeps – all these things are expressive’.
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This is true of any age, but the Victorians brought the idea of home to the fore in a way that was new. As the Victorians saw ‘home’ as omnipresent, it has seemed to me useful to rely on the same sources that surrounded them and formed their notions of what a home should be – magazines, advertisements, manuals and fiction. In describing people’s daily lives, I look first at what theory prescribed and described in these print sources, and then try to discover the reality in reportage, diaries, letters and journals. Novels are used frequently, as fiction straddles the two camps in that it both set standards for ‘proper’, or ‘normal’, behaviour in theory and also described this behaviour in actuality. In using fiction as a source for how people actually behaved I have primarily relied on novels for information that the authors regarded as background material rather than key plot devices, and have always balanced them with other, more conventional, documentary sources for corroboration.
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By the mid nineteenth century magazine titles epitomized the centrality of the home in Victorian life, boasting the growing middle classes’ new allegiance: The Home Circle, The Home Companion, The Home Friend, Home Thoughts, The Home Magazine, Family Economist, Family Record, Family Friend, Family Treasure, Family Prize Magazine and Household Miscellany, Family Paper and Family Mirror.
(#litres_trial_promo) They were not alone in their focus. Services were provided by ‘Family Drapers’, ‘Family Butchers’, even a ‘Family Mourning Warehouse’.
(#litres_trial_promo) As the Industrial Revolution appeared to have taken over every aspect of working life, so the family, and by extension the house, expanded in tandem to act as an emotional counterweight. The Victorians found it useful to separate their world into a public sphere, of work and trade, and a private sphere, of home life and domesticity. The Victorian house became defined as a refuge, a place apart from the sordid aspects of commercial life, with different morals, different rules, different guidelines to protect the soul from being consumed by commerce. Or so it seemed.
Domesticity began to acquire a new importance in the late eighteenth century, and in half a century it had made such strides that the house as shelter from outside forces was regarded as the norm. The eighteenth century had been the age of the club and the coffee house for those who could afford them, the gin shop and street gatherings for those who could not. Male companionship in leisure time was the norm for men. Now women at home were looked at in a different light: they became, as John Ruskin was later to describe the home, the focus of existence, the source of refuge and retreat, but also of strength and renewal.
It was not one thing alone that created this powerful urge to domesticity, but a combination: the rise of the Evangelical movement and, almost simultaneously, of Methodism and other dissenting sects; improvements in mortality figures; and the creation of the factory as a place of employment. It is for these reasons that I have chosen to focus primarily on the period 1850 to 1890 – from the rise of the High Victorian era to the end of the recession that marked the 1870s and 1880s and led to the long Edwardian summer. These forty years were a dynamic era of much change. Yet it seems that this very dynamism led people to try to create a still centre in their homes, where things changed as little as possible. In many areas this period can be discussed as a unity, because that is how its participants hoped to see it: as a stable period, although the reality of rapid technological change could make this desire for stasis seem almost ludicrous. These conflicting desires are, I hope, represented with equal weight here.
One of the first forces of change came with the wave of Evangelical fervour that swept the country in the early part of the century. Evangelicals hoped to find a Christian path in all their actions, including the details of daily life: a true Christian must ensure that the family operated in a milieu that could promote good relations between family members and between the family members and their servants, and between the family and the outside world. The home was a microcosm of the ideal society, with love and charity replacing the commerce and capitalism of the outside world. This dichotomy allowed men to pursue business in a suitably capitalist – perhaps even ruthless – fashion, because they knew they could refresh the inner man by returning at the end of the day to an atmosphere of harmony, from which competition was banished. This idea was so useful that it was internalized by many who shared no religious beliefs with the Evangelicals, and it rapidly became a secular norm.
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At the same time advances in technology were changing more traditional aspects of home life. With improved sanitation and hygiene, child mortality was falling. The middle classes had more disposable income, and thus anxiety about the fundamentals of life – enough food, affordable light and heat – diminished. With the increase in child survival rates came coincidentally the gradual phasing out of the apprenticeship system for middle-class professions such as medicine and the law, which meant that for the first time many parents could watch their children reach adulthood in their own homes. The Romantic movement’s creation of the cult of innocence promoted an idealized view of childhood, and produced what has sometimes been referred to as ‘the cult of the child’: the child-centred home was developing.
That work was moving outside the home was the third essential factor in the creation of nineteenth-century domesticity. Previously, many of the working classes had found occupation in piecework, which was produced at home. With the coming of the factories, work moved to a place of regimentation and timekeeping. The middle classes too had been used to work at home: at the lower end of the scale, shopkeepers lived above their shops; slightly higher up, wholesalers lived above their warehouses. Doctors and lawyers had consulting rooms at home, as did many other professionals. Women who had helped their husbands with their work – serving in the shop, doing the accounts, keeping track of correspondence or clients – were now physically separated from their husbands’ labour and became solely housekeepers. Slowly the cities became segregated: those who could afford it no longer lived near their work. An early example was the suburb of Edgbaston, on the edge of Birmingham, planned in the early part of the century by Lord Calthorpe to provide ‘genteel homes for the middle classes’, and proudly known as the ‘Belgravia of Birmingham’. Its homes were for the families who owned and ran the industries on which the town thrived – but who did not want to live near them. The leases for houses in Edgbaston were clear: no retail premises were permitted, nor was professional work to be undertaken in these houses. Edgbaston was the first residential area that assumed that people wanted to live and work in different locations.
(#litres_trial_promo) Over the century this same transformation occurred across the country. In London the City became a place of work, the West End a place of residence; gradually, as the West End acquired a work character too, the suburbs became the residential areas of choice.
Charles Dickens, the great chronicler of domestic life in all its shades, was well aware of the perils of promiscuous mixing of home and work. In Dombey and Son (1848) Mr Dombey, the head of a great shipping company, is unable to leave his business behind him when he returns home. His only thoughts are of ‘Dombey and Son’ and, by allowing his work life to contaminate his family life, he destroys the latter – and, by extension, the former. In Great Expectations (1860–61) the law clerk Wemmick bases his life entirely on the separation of work and home: ‘the office is one thing, and private life is another. When I go into the office, I leave the Castle [his house in the suburbs] behind me, and when I come into the Castle, I leave the office behind me … I don’t wish it professionally spoken about.’
(#litres_trial_promo) That the fictional Mark Rutherford, nearing the end of the century, thought no differently confirmed that this attitude was not simply a jeu d’esprit of Dickens. William Hale White (1831–1913) wrote a series of supposedly autobiographical books under the name Mark Rutherford. White was a dissenter who had trained for the ministry before he lost his faith; he then became a civil servant at the Admiralty. His alter ego, Rutherford, was also a minister who lost his faith. About his private life Rutherford wrote that at the office ‘Nobody knew anything about me, whether I was married or single, where I lived, or what I thought upon a single subject of any importance. I cut off my office life in this way from my home life so completely that I was two selves, and my true self was not stained by contact with my other self. It was a comfort to me to think the moment the clock struck seven that my second self died.’
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That ‘true self’ was the real man, on view only at home. Ruskin’s father wrote, ‘Oh! how dull and dreary is the best society I fall into compared with the circle of my own Fire Side with my Love sitting opposite irradiating all around her, and my most extraordinary boy.’
(#litres_trial_promo) With this the good Victorian was supposed to – and often did – rest content For, as the clerk Charles Pooter put it so eloquently in The Diary of a Nobody (1892), George and Weedon Grossmith’s comic masterpiece of genteel English anxiety. ‘After my work in the City, I like to be at home. What’s the good of a home, if you are never in it?’
(#litres_trial_promo) Mr Pooter’s ideal of the good life, recounted in diary form, centred on his dream house in the suburbs.
In continental Europe the opposite was happening. The Goncourt brothers wrote in their diary in 1860, ‘One can see women, children, husbands and wives, whole families in the café. The home life is dying. Life is threatening to become public.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Europeans socialized in public: in restaurants (a French invention), in cafes (perfected by the Viennese), in the streets (Italians still perform the passeggiata in the evenings). But the English became ever more inward-turning. The small wrought-iron balconies that had decorated so many Georgian houses vanished, seemingly overnight. Thick curtains replaced the airy eighteenth-century windows, as much to block out passers-by who might look in as to prevent the damage wrought by sun and pollution.
For the house was not a static object in which changing values were expressed. In the eighteenth century and before, rooms had been multi-purpose, and furniture had been moved and adapted to serve the different functions each room acquired in turn. (The French for ‘building’ and ‘furniture’ are a legacy of this: immeuble is a building or, literally, ‘immovable’, and meuble, furniture, is literally, ‘movable’.) Now, in the nineteenth century, segregation of each function of the house became as important as separation of home and work: both home and work contained an aspect of both a public and a private sphere. The house was the physical demarcation between home and work, and in turn each room was the physical demarcation of many further segregations: of hierarchy (rooms used for visitors being of higher status than family-only rooms); of function (display rating more highly than utility); and of further divisions of public and private (so that rooms which were used for both public and private functions, such as the dining room, changed in importance with their use). ‘Subdivision, classification, and elaboration, are certainly distinguishing characteristics of the present era of civilisation,’ thought George Augustus Sala in 1859.
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In the eighteenth century and before, servants and apprentices had often slept in the same rooms as family members, who themselves were not separated in sleeping apartments by gender or age. Gradually the Victorian house divided rooms that were designed for receiving outsiders – the dining room, the drawing room, the morning room – from rooms that were for family members only – bedrooms, the study – and, further, from rooms that were for servants only – the kitchen, the scullery, servants’ bedrooms. Parents no longer expected to sleep with their babies, and children no longer slept together – boys and girls needed separate rooms, at the very least, and it was preferable that younger children be separated from older ones. The additional rooms required were of necessity smaller, and higher up, but the extra privacy made them desirable. Even those forced to live in houses small enough to require multi-purpose rooms felt that ‘Nothing conduces so much to the degradation of a man and a woman in the opinion of each other’ than having to perform their separate functions together in the same room. This was written by Francis Place, a radical tailor. When he managed to reach a financial level where he and his wife could afford to live with enough space so that they could work separately, ‘It was advantageous … in its moral effects. Attendance on the child was not as it had been always, in my presence. I was shut out from seeing the fire lighted, the room washed and cleaned, and the cloathes [sic] washed and ironed, as well as the cooking.’
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Plans for terraced houses for the lower middle classes, c. 1870s. Note there is no bathroom, and the lavatory is still reached from the outside. The kitchen is spacious, however, with a separate larder (opposite the lobby), and a scullery with a copper. These houses rented for about £30 a year.
In theory, home was the private space of families. In practice – unacknowledged – houses were another aspect of public life. ‘Home’ was created by family life, but the house itself was inextricably linked with worldly success: the size of the house, how it was furnished, where it was located, all were indicative of the family that lived privately within. His family’s mode of private living was yet a further reflection of a man’s public success in the world. Income was no longer derived primarily from land: the professional and merchant classes, as a group, were now substantially wealthier than they had ever been, and they imitated the style of their social superiors in order to live up to their new status: household possessions, types of furnishing, elegance of entertaining and dress, all these ‘home’ aspects were a reflection of success at work. Therefore the public rooms, as an expression of achievement and worldly success, often took up far more of the space in the house than we today consider convenient. The money available to spend on household goods was lavished first on those rooms that were on public display. The economist Thorstein Veblen noted the phenomenon in the US, but it holds good for Britain too: ‘Through this discrimination in favour of visible consumption it has come about that the domestic life of most classes is relatively shabby, as compared with the éclat of that overt portion of their life that is carried on before the eyes of observers.’
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Semi-detached houses Ealing, built for the prosperous middle classes, with five bedrooms, a dressing room and a bathroom. As well as a larder, there is a storeroom opening off the kitchen. These houses rented for about £50 a year.
Dickens devoted a great deal of attention to the different types of home that were available to his characters. His biographer and friend John Forster remembered, ‘If it is the property of a domestic nature to be personally interested in every detail, the smallest as the greatest of the four walls within which one lives, then no man had it so essentially as Dickens, no man was so inclined naturally to derive his happiness from home concerns.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The novelist gave no less attention to his characters’ home concerns. There was, first, the ideal, which he elaborated in his ‘Sketches of Young Couples’:
Before marriage and afterwards, let [couples] learn to centre all their hopes of real and lasting happiness in their own fireside; let them cherish the faith that in home … lies the only true source of domestic felicity; let them believe that round the household gods, contentment and tranquillity cluster in their gentlest and most graceful forms; and that many weary hunters of happiness through the noisy world, have learnt this truth too late, and found a cheerful spirit and a quiet mind only at home at last.
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That even Dickens became entangled in a circular notion that defined itself by referring to itself – that the domestic realm was the place where one found domestic happiness – that even he could not (or found no need to) explain this idea better, is surely telling. Domesticity was so much a part of the spirit of the times that simply to say ‘it is what it is’ was adequate.
Dickens also used the language of domesticity both to create and to mock the role of women at home. In Edwin Drood (1870) Rosa worked at her sewing while her chaperone, Miss Twinkleton, read aloud. Miss Twinkleton did not read ‘fairly’, however:
She … was guilty of … glaring pious frauds. As an instance in point, take the glowing passage: ‘Ever dearest and best adored, said Edward, clasping the dear head to his breast, and drawing the silken hair through his caressing fingers … let us fly from the unsympathetic world and the sterile coldness of the stony-hearted, to the rich warm Paradise of Trust and Love.’ Miss Twinkleton’s fraudulent version tamely ran thus: ‘Ever engaged to me with the consent of our parents on both sides, and the approbation of the silver-haired rector of the district, said Edward, respectfully raising to his lips the taper fingers so skilful in embroidery, tambour, crochet, and other truly feminine arts; let me call on thy papa … and propose a suburban establishment, lowly it may be, but within our means, where he will be always welcome as an evening guest, and where every arrangement shall invest economy and the constant interchange of scholastic acquirements with the attributes of the ministering angel to domestic bliss.’
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However comic the intent in the passage above, ‘the ministering angel to domestic bliss’ was what both Dickens and the majority of the population believed women should be. Evangelical ideas had linked the idea of womanliness to women carrying out their biological destiny – to being wives and mothers. That was their job, and to expect to have any other job was a rejection of their God-given place, despite the fact that, by the second half of the century, 25 per cent of women had paying work of necessity, in order to survive. Most of the remaining 75 per cent worked at home. As will be seen, among the middle classes only the very top levels could afford the number of servants that made work for housebound women unnecessary. In spite of this uncomfortable reality, the hierarchy of authority was undisputed: God gave his authority to man, man ruled woman, and woman ruled the household, both children and servants, through the delegated authority she received from man. One of the many books of advice and counsel on how to be better wives and mothers reminded women, ‘The most important person in the household is the head of the family – the father … Though he may, perhaps, spend less time at home than any other member of the family – though he has scarcely a voice in family affairs – though the whole household machinery seems to go on without the assistance of his management – still it does depend entirely on that active brain and those busy hands.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Sarah Stickney Ellis, an extremely popular writer for women, was even more blunt: ‘It is quite possible you may have more talent [than your husband], with higher attainments, and you may also have been generally more admired; but this has nothing whatever to do with your position as a woman, which is, and must be, inferior to his as a man.’
(#litres_trial_promo) George Gissing explored this view in his novel The Odd Women (1893). The ominously named Edmund Widdowson ‘regarded [women] as born to perpetual pupilage. Not that their inclinations were necessarily wanton; they were simply incapable of attaining maturity, remained throughout their life imperfect beings, at the mercy of craft, ever liable to be misled by childish misconceptions.’
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That this was generally believed, and not simply advice-book cant, can be seen in numerous letters and diaries. Marion Jane Bradley, the wife of a master at Rugby School, wrote in her diary, ‘How important a work is mine. To be a cheerful, loving wife, and forbearing, fond, wise, thoughtful mother, striving ever against self-indulgence and irritability, which often sorely beset me. As a mistress, to be kind, gentle, thoughtful both for the bodies and souls of my servants. As a visitor of the poor to spare myself no trouble so as to relieve wisely and well.’
(#litres_trial_promo) She saw herself as an entirely reactive character without the husband, children, servants and poor, she had no role. Women were there for encouragement, to help men when they were depressed – in New Grub Street (1891), George Gissing’s novel of literary life on the edge of poverty, the wife and husband quarrel. Amy says, ‘Edwin, let me tell you something. You are getting too fond of speaking in a discouraging way …’ He responds, ‘… granted that … I easily fall into gloomy ways of talk, what is Amy here for?’
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Men set the agenda, while it was up to women to carry it through. Men are present often by their absence in the pages that follow, despite the fact that men were undoubtedly the fount from which women’s possibilities grew. It was on marriage that women achieved that great necessity, a home of their own. It is clear, however, that men were barely concerned with the running of the house: ‘Though he may, perhaps, spend less time at home than any other member of the family – though he has scarcely a voice in family affairs – though the whole household machinery seems to go on without the assistance of his management …’ Men were the source of funds, but it was women who judged other women, women who (to the rules of men) made the decisions that activated and continued the social circles that made up the lives of most families. Although there are several fine books on the role of men at home,
(#litres_trial_promo) this will not be another of them.
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Most contemporaries accepted Ruskin’s views on women and home – home was not a place, but a projection of the feminine, an encircling, encouraging, comforting aura that was there to protect a husband and children from the harshness of the world: ‘wherever a true wife comes’, Ruskin wrote, ‘this home is always around her’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Creating a home was the role assigned to women, but it was not something over which they could exercise free will. What made a good home was carefully laid down:
Not only must the house be neat and clean, but it must be so ordered as to suit the tastes of all … Not only must a constant system of activity be established, but peace must be preserved, or happiness will be destroyed. Not only must elegance be called in, to adorn and beautify the whole, but strict integrity must be maintained by the minutest calculation as to lawful means, and self, and self-gratification, must be made the yielding point in every disputed case. Not only must an appearance of outward order and comfort be kept up, but around every domestic scene there must be a strong wall of confidence, which no internal suspicion can undermine, no external enemy break through.
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No small task, and success or failure would be laid entirely at the door of Mrs Ellis’s ‘Women of England’.
Coventry Patmore’s best-selling The Angel in the House (1854–63) portrayed women as passive and self-abnegating, while his men were driven by a desire to achieve. Housework was ideal for women, as its unending, non-linear nature gave it a more virtuous air than something which was focused, and could be achieved and have a result. Gissing allowed Edward Widdowson a certain naivety in order that the novelist might express a more cynical view: ‘Women were very like children; it was rather a task to amuse them and to keep them out of mischief. Therefore the blessedness of household toil, in especial the blessedness of child-bearing and all that followed.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Women’s household achievements had more to them than simple cleanliness: Arnold Bennett, in The Old Wives’ Tale (1908), set in the Potteries in the second half of the century, shows a drunken woman, about whom the narrator reflects in horror: ‘A wife and mother! The lady of a house! The centre of order! The fount of healing! The balm for worry and the refuge of distress!… She was the dishonour of her sex, her situation, and her years.’
(#litres_trial_promo) It was in failing in these roles that she was repulsive, not in the act of drunkenness itself, which Bennett shows several times in men with condemnation but not with disgust.
Housekeeping was a source of strength for women, through which they could somehow mystically influence their husbands. In Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–3) the Jellyby home is going to ruin because Mrs Jellyby is more interested in her charitable works in Africa than in her own family. And it is not only the housekeeping that is affected by her absence of purpose at home: her daughter Caddy warns that ‘Pa will be bankrupt before long … There’ll be nobody but Ma to thank for it … When all our tradesmen send into our house any stuff they like, and the servants do what they like with it, and I have no time to improve things if I knew how, and Ma don’t care about anything, I should like to make out how Pa is to weather the storm.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Mr Jellyby’s impending bankruptcy is to be laid entirely at the door of his wife’s bad housekeeping.
Good housekeeping improved more than just the house. Caddy Jellyby is teaching herself how to run a house: ‘I can make little puddings too; and I know how to buy neck of mutton, and tea, and sugar, and butter, and a good many housekeeping things. I am not clever at my needle yet … but perhaps I shall improve, and since I have been engaged … and have been doing all this, I have felt better-tempered, I hope, and more forgiving.’
(#litres_trial_promo) She has become a better person through good housekeeping. The virtues that orderly housekeeping could bring about were almost unending. When in 1860 the child Francis Kent was murdered in a middle-class family home, the shock was not only at the brutal murder, but also because ‘It is in this case … almost certain that some member of a respectable household – such as your’s reader or our’s [sic] – which goes to church with regularity, has family prayers, and whose bills are punctually settled, has murdered an unoffending child.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Note the ingredients that make up a respectable household: church, family, prayer and prompt bill-paying.
The well-kept house directed men as well as women towards the path of virtue, while the opposite led them irretrievably astray. Most of the published warnings were for the working classes, who were always considered more likely to err:
The man who goes home from his work on a Saturday only to find his house in disorder, with every article of furniture out of its place, the floor unwashed or sloppy from uncompleted washing, his wife slovenly, his children untidy, his dinner not yet ready or spoilt in the cooking, is much more likely to go ‘on the spree’ than the man who finds his house in order, the furniture glistening from the recent polishing, the burnished steel fire-irons looking doubly resplendent from the bright glow of the cheerful fire, his well-cooked dinner ready laid on a snowy cloth, and his wife and children tidy and cheerful … the man who has a clever and industrious wife, whose home is so managed that it is always cosy and cheerful when he is in it, finds there a charm, which, if he is endowed with an ordinary share of manliness and self-respect, will render him insensible to the allurements of meretricious amusements.
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Working-class men who were not properly looked after by their wives retired to the pub. And, if their houses were not kept to a suitable level of comfort, even sober middle-class men were expected to vanish, although more likely to their clubs than to pubs. In East Lynne, Mrs Henry Wood’s wonderful 1861 melodrama of love betrayed, the second Mrs Carlyle, wife to a successful lawyer, is quite sure that if children are too much in evidence at home, ‘The discipline of that house soon becomes broken. The children run wild; the husband is sick of it, and seeks peace and solace elsewhere.’ She does not blame the husband, but the wife who is operating ‘a most mistaken and pernicious system’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Advice books echoed Mrs Carlyle: ‘Men are free to come and go as they list, they have so much liberty of action, so many out-door resources if wearied with in-doors, that it is a good policy … to make home attractive as well as comfortable.’
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The attractive, tastefully appointed house was a sign of respectability. Taste was not something personal; instead it was something sanctioned by society. Taste, as agreed by society, had moral values, and therefore adherence to what was considered at any one time to be good taste was a virtue, while ignoring the taste of the period was a sign of something very wrong indeed.
(#ulink_d6eeec4d-3570-5253-af62-a8a14b3ae447) Conformity, conventionality, was morality. Christopher Dresser, a designer and influential writer on decorative arts, promised that ‘Art can lend to an apartment not only beauty, but such refinement as will cause it to have an elevating influence on those who dwell in it.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The house, and its decoration, was an expression of the morality that resided within. Mrs Panton, a prolific advice-book writer, was ‘quite certain that when people care for their homes, they are much better in every way, mentally and morally, than those who only regard them as places to eat and sleep in … while if a house is made beautiful, those who are to dwell in it will … cultivate home virtue’.
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What the house contained, how it was laid out, what the occupations of its inhabitants were, what the wife did all day: these were the details from which society built up its picture of the family and the home, and it is precisely these details that I am concerned with in this book. I have shaped the book not along a floor-plan, but along a life-span. I begin in the bedroom, with childbirth, moving on to the nursery, and children’s lives. Gradually I progress to the public rooms of the house and with those rooms the adult public world, marriage and social life, before moving on, via the sickroom, to illness and death. Thus a single house contains a multiplicity of lives.
The nineteenth century was the century of urbanization. In 1801 only 20 per cent of the population of Great Britain lived in cities. By the death of Queen Victoria, in 1901, that figure had risen to nearly 80 per cent. Of those cities, the greatest was undoubtedly London. London was not just the biggest city in Britain; it was the biggest city in the world: in 1890 it had 4.2 million people, compared to 2.7 million in New York, its nearest rival, and just 2.5 million in Paris.
It was not capital cities alone that were drawing in the rural population. Until 1811, only London had a population of more than 100,000 people in Britain. By the beginning of Victoria’s reign, in 1837, there were another five such cities, and by the time of her death there were forty-nine. ‘The Victorians, indeed, created a new civilization, “so thoroughly of the town” that it has been said to be the first of its kind in human history.’
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To house the numbers of newly urbanized people was a challenge without precedent, and it was met in a unique way. As Continental cities (and New York) grew, apartment blocks sprang up: communal living became the norm. Apart from in Edinburgh, this was rejected in an unconscious yet unanimous way across the British Isles. Instead, a frenzy of house-building began. One-third of the houses in Britain today were built before the First World War, and most of these are Victorian. In a period of less than seventy-five years, over 6 million houses were built, and the majority still stand and function as homes today. Despite the speed with which this massive work went on, despite the often sub-standard building practices, the twenty-first-century cities of Britain are covered with terraced housing built by the Victorians. This once-unique solution to a sudden problem is now so ubiquitous that we no longer regard our terraced houses as anything except the epitome of ‘home’. Yet they were a pragmatic solution to a problem that arose from major upheavals in society.
The fact that the solution was pragmatic does not mean that it did not also meet an almost visceral need. The French philosopher Hippolyte Taine wrote of his time in England, ‘it is the Englishman who wishes to be by himself in his staircase as in his room, who could not endure the promiscuous existence of our huge Parisian cages, and who, even in London, plans his house as a small castle, independent and enclosed … he is exacting in the matter of condition and comfort, and separates his life from that of his inferiors’.
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Thus wrote an outsider looking in. From the inside, the Registrar General pondered on the meaning of ‘house’ and ‘home’ revealed by the census of 1851: ‘It is so much of the order of nature that a family should live in a separate house, that “house” is often used for “family” in many languages, and this isolation of families, in separate houses, it has been asserted, is carried to a greater extent in England than it is elsewhere.’ He quoted a German naturalist:
English dwelling-houses … stand in close connection with that long-cherished principle of separation and retirement, lying as the very foundation of the national character … the Englishman still perseveres … a certain separation of himself from others, which constitutes the very foundation of his freedom … It is that that gives the Englishman that proud feeling of personal independence, which is stereotyped in the phrase, ‘Every man’s house is his castle.’ This is … an expression which cannot be used in Germany and France, where ten or fifteen families often live together in the same large house.
The German naturalist then went on to describe how the English lived – something the English themselves in general never bothered to think of, so natural was it to them:
In English towns or villages, therefore, one always meets either with small detached houses merely suited to one family, or apparently large buildings extending to the length of half a street, sometimes adorned like palaces on the exterior, but separated by partition walls internally, and thus divided into a great number of small high houses, for the most part three windows broad, within which, and on the various stories, the rooms are divided according to the wants and convenience of the family; in short, therefore, it may be properly said, that the English divide their edifices perpendicularly into houses – whereas we Germans divide them horizontally into floors. In England, every man is master of his hall, stairs, and chambers – whereas we are obliged to use the two first in common with others.
The Registrar General concluded, ‘The possession of an entire house is, it is true, strongly desired by every Englishman; for it throws a sharp, well-defined circle round his family and hearth – the shrine of his sorrows, joys, and meditations. This feeling, as it is natural, is universal, but it is stronger in England than it is on the Continent.’
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Although the German he quoted indicated clearly how foreign he found the idea to be, to the Registrar General the terraced house was so normal that he could not bring himself to believe in its uniqueness, and the most he could admit to was that it was both ‘universal’ and ‘stronger in England’. However, both he and his German source agreed that ‘An Englishman’s home is his castle.’ This phrase had first been used in the seventeenth century by the jurist Sir Edward Coke to describe a legal and political situation. By the Victorian era it had become a social description.
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Dickens found great comic potential in this contemporary preoccupation. In 1841, in The Old Curiosity Shop, he had mocked the urge for suburban retreat; twenty years later, in Great Expectations (1860–61), his affection for the idea of sanctuary from the outside world was so strong in every phrase of his description of the clerk Wemmick’s home in the suburbs that it was clear he now sympathized:
Wemmick’s house was a little wooden cottage in the midst of plots of garden, and the top of it was cut out and painted like a battery mounted with guns …
I think it was the smallest house I ever saw; with the queerest gothic windows (by far the greater part of them sham), and a gothic door, almost too small to get in at.
‘That’s a real flagstaff, you see,’ said Wemmick, ‘and on Sundays I run up a real flag. Then look here. After I have crossed this bridge, I hoist it up – so – and cut off the communication.’
The bridge was a plank, and it crossed a chasm about four feet wide and two deep. But it was very pleasant to see the pride with which he hoisted it up and made it fast; smiling as he did so, with a relish and not merely mechanically.
‘At nine o’clock every night, Greenwich time,’
(#ulink_a8365d45-1318-5544-ab59-99400599fa0c) said Wemmick, ‘the gun fires. There he is you see! And when you hear him go, I think you’ll say he’s a Stinger.’
The piece of ordnance referred to, was mounted in a separate fortress, constructed of lattice-work. It was protected from the weather by an ingenious little tarpaulin contrivance in the nature of an umbrella.
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Houses, then, were something that philosophers, civil servants and novelists all thought important enough to discuss at length. They were status symbols, but the status they gave was markedly different from our own preoccupations. Today in the United Kingdom we are concerned with property ownership. The Victorians as a whole found ownership of less importance than occupancy and display. Although no firm figures exist, most historians estimate that a bare 10 per cent of the population owned their own homes;
(#litres_trial_promo) the rest rented: the poorest paying weekly, the prosperous middle classes taking renewable seven-year leases. This allowed families to move promptly and easily as their circumstances changed: either with the increase and decrease of the size of the family, or to larger or smaller houses in better or less good neighbourhoods as income fluctuated. In one area of Liverpool, it is estimated, 82 per cent of the population moved within ten years, 40 per cent moving within twelve months.
(#litres_trial_promo) Mrs Panton, the Mrs Beeton of home decoration, saw this constant coming and going as sensible: she could not quite allow herself to suggest that family incomes might ever be imperilled, but ‘neighbourhoods alter so rapidly in character and in personelle likewise, that I cannot blame young folk for refusing more than a three years’ agreement, or at the most a seven years’ lease’.
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The type of neighbourhood one lived in was as important as the type of house. It was important to have neighbours of equal standing, so that a social homogeneity was achieved. Thus shops and other services were confined where possible to busy main streets, and the more desirable houses were tucked in on quiet streets behind – the opposite of continental Europe, where the bigger, more imposing houses were to be found on the wider, more imposing streets. William Morris, after a trip to an outlying suburb, despaired: ‘villas and nothing but villas save a chemist’s shop and a dry public house near the station: no sign of any common people, or anything but gentlemen and servants – a beastly place to live in’.
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The notion of home was structured in part by the importance given to privacy and retreat, and in part by the idea that conformity to social norms was an outward indication of morality. This ensured that display was vested in the choice of neighbourhood, and then in interior decoration. The outside, by contrast, was as unrevealing as the stark facade of an Arab house, turned inwards upon its courtyard. Most thought this a virtue: in 1815 Walter Scott had Guy Mannering say about a house auction, ‘It is disgusting to see the scenes of domestic society and seclusion thrown open to the gaze of the curious and the vulgar.’
(#litres_trial_promo) As late as 1866–7 Anthony Trollope in The Last Chronicle of Barset described the same feeling. Archdeacon Grantly is disappointed when his son Major Grantly wants to marry a disgraced curate’s daughter, but he is horrified when the Major puts his possessions up for auction to finance the marriage when his father cuts off his allowance.
(#litres_trial_promo) That the masses should see into a gentleman’s private affairs was not to be borne.
Gustave Doré produced a series of illustrations of London life. Here the backs of suburban London houses are seen from a railway cutting in a typical view of the way these brick tentacles were spreading ever-outwards into the countryside. Note the rear extensions, which house sculleries, with their small chimneys for the coppers.
One rung down the social scale from Archdeacon Grantly and his kind were the endless rows of brick houses that stretched out to the horizon with deadening sameness. Conan Doyle situated his hero in Baker Street, right on the edge of the new developments, and he could not help describing the ‘Long lines of dull brick houses [which] were only relieved by the coarse glare and tawdry brilliancy of public-houses at the corner. Then came rows of two-storeyed villas, each with a fronting of miniature garden, and then again interminable lines of new staring brick buildings – the monster tentacles which the giant city was throwing out into the country.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Picking up on the same red-brick vista, Mr Pooter’s house in Holloway was situated in the carefully named Brickfield Terrace.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, in the inner city, houses that had earlier been the homes of the Georgian well-to-do were colonized by the new professional classes, as both homes and offices. In earlier days, living outside the city, travelling on poorly lit roads, was dangerous and, even when not dangerous, difficult, as night travel had to be regulated by the times of the full moon. (As late as 1861 Trollope had one of his characters say, ‘it turns out that we cannot get back the same night because there is no moon’.)
(#litres_trial_promo) Now, with the progress of gas lighting across the country, that was one problem solved. Street-lighting was eulogized in the Westminster Review as early as 1829: ‘What has the new light of all the preachers done for the morality and order of London, compared to what had been effected by gas lighting!’
(#litres_trial_promo) With the increase in public transport it was no longer just the carriage owners who could live outside the bounds of the town and travel in to work daily. Gradually, the disadvantages of these old houses in inner London – they had no lavatories, or the lavatories had been installed long after the original building was planned and so were in inconvenient places; they were dark; the kitchens were almost unmodernizable – together with the increasing desire to separate home from work, meant that the professionals too moved to the ever expanding suburbs, and travelled in to work in what had previously been their homes. John Marshall, a surgeon living in Savile Row, just off Piccadilly in central London, in 1863 moved his family to suburban Kentish Town, on the edge of the city, after his fourth child was born: the better air and larger house made the daily trip back and forth to his consulting rooms in their old house worthwhile.
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Mrs Panton was certain that for ‘young people’ without too much money a house ‘some little way out of London’ was the ideal. ‘Rents are less; smuts and blacks
(#ulink_2e649477-c334-5354-a194-971abd7687b1) are conspicuous by their absence; a small garden, or even a tiny conservatory … is not an impossibility; and if [the man] has to pay for his season-ticket, that is nothing in comparison with his being able to sleep in fresh air, to have a game of tennis in summer, or a friendly evening of music, chess, or games in the winter, without expense.’
(#litres_trial_promo) This idyll was everything: greenery, fresh air away from city smoke, and, most importantly, a sense of privacy – a sense that once over your own doorstep you were in your own kingdom.
It was precisely this idyll, and the consequent rejection of city life, with its allurements but also its dangers – moral as well as physical – that was the impetus for the growth of suburbia. Walter Besant,
(#ulink_9f0f2d82-cad6-5aba-af5c-2e02cb33da6f) despite his interest in living conditions for the poor, remained an urbanized homme des lettres in his condemnation of this bourgeois development: ‘The men went into town every morning and returned every evening; they had dinner; they talked a little; they went to bed … the case of the women was worse; they lost all the London life – the shops, the animation of the streets, their old circle of friends; in its place they found all the exclusiveness and class feeling of London with none of the advantages of a country town …’ However, the noted urban historian Donald Olsen has argued that Besant had misunderstood the aims and desires of suburbanites: ‘The most successful suburb was the one that possessed the highest concentration of anti-urban qualities: solitude, dullness, uniformity, social homogeneity, barely adequate public transportation, the proximity of similar neighbourhoods – remoteness, both physical and psychological, from what is mistakenly regarded as the Real World.’
(#litres_trial_promo) W. W. Clarke, the author of Suburban Homes of London, published in 1881, praised districts precisely for their seclusion, their feeling of being cut off from the world.
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(#litres_trial_promo)The Builder, in 1856, suggested that all should live in the suburbs: ‘Railways and omnibuses are plentiful, and it is better, morally and physically, for the Londoner … when he has done his day’s work, to go to the country or the suburbs, where he escapes the noise and crowds and impure air of the town; and it is no small advantage to a man to have his family removed from the immediate neighbourhood of casinos, dancing saloons, and hells upon earth which I will not name.’
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While the fashionable (and wealthy) still colonized parts of central London, some inner neighbourhoods were becoming less desirable, and it was important for the prospective resident to take care in choosing a location. In Trollope’s The Small House at Allington, published in 1864, a couple settled in Westbourne Grove, Bayswater:
The house was quite new, and … it was acknowledged to be a quite correct locality … We know how vile is the sound of Baker Street, and how absolutely foul to the polite ear is the name of Fitzroy Square. The houses, however, in those purlieus are substantial, warm, and of good size. The house in Princess Royal Crescent was certainly not substantial, for in these days substantially-built houses do not pay. It could hardly have been warm, for, to speak the truth, it was even yet not finished throughout; and as for size, though the drawing room was a noble apartment, consisting of a section of the whole house, with a corner cut out for the staircase, it was very much cramped in its other parts, and was made like a cherub, in this respect, that it had no rear belonging to it. ‘But if you have no private fortune of your own, you cannot have everything,’ as the countess observed when Crosbie objected to the house because a closet under the kitchen stairs was to be assigned to him as his own dressing-room.
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If the family’s status was on display in the choice of the house, then it followed that location and public rooms were more important than comfort and convenience, and certainly more important than the private, family, spaces.
Surrounding London, the choice of suburbs was endless. Because of the railway going into the City, Camberwell and Peckham (that ‘Arcadian vale’, as W. S. Gilbert called it in Trial by Jury in 1875) were home to clerks – Camberwell was home to one in every eight clerks in London by the end of the century;’
(#litres_trial_promo) Hammersmith, Balham and Leyton, too, were all lower middle class. Penge and Ealing, with no direct railway, were middle class; Hampstead was upper middle. These were not arbitrary designations made after the event. Contemporary guidebooks allocated St John’s Wood to authors, journalists and publishers; Tyburnia (Marble Arch) and Bayswater, Haverstock Hill, Brixton and Clapham, Kennington and Stockwell to ‘City men’ – stockbrokers, merchants and commercial agents. Denmark Hill, where Ruskin had grown up, was ‘the Belgravia of South London’. Sydenham, Highgate, Barnes and Richmond were, simply, for the rich.
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Arthur Munby, an upper-middle-class civil servant, in his journal in 1860 noted the class distinctions of each district as naturally as we note street signs:
Walked to S. Paul’s Churchyard, and took an omnibus to Brentford … In Fleet St. and the Strand, small tradesmen strolling with wives and children, servant maids with their sweethearts, clerks in gorgeous pairs: westward, ‘genteel’ people, gentry, ‘swells’ & ladies, till the tide of fashionable strollers breaks on Hyde Park Corner: then, beyond Knights-bridge and all the way to Brentford, middle-class men & women staring idly over the blinds of their suburban windows, and slinking back when you look that way: lower class ditto ditto standing & staring at their doors, equally idle, but much more frank and at their ease; staring openly & boldly, having purchased rest and tobacco by a good week’s work.
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Trollope was one of the finest arbiters of what made one suburb work and another a failure, although he admired, against the trend, the lawyer who was ‘one of those old-fashioned people who think a spacious substantial house in Bloomsbury Square, at a rent of a hundred and twenty pounds a year, is better worth having than a narrow, lath-and-plaster, ill-built tenement at nearly double the price out westward of the parks’.
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All of these suburbs, however remote, had one focus: the city they surrounded. However segregated, secluded and private, every morning the suburbs emptied as the workers headed off to the city, here watched by the journalist G. A. Sala:
Nine o’clock … If the morning be fine, the pavement of the Strand and Fleet Street looks quite radiant with the spruce clerks walking down to their offices governmental, financial, and commercial …
… the omnibuses meet at the Bank and disgorge the clerks by hundreds; repeating this operation scores of times between nine and ten o’clock. But you are not to delude yourself, that either by wheeled vehicle or by the humbler conveyances known as ‘Shank’s mare’, and the ‘Marrowbone stage’ – in more refined language, walking – have all those who have business in the city reached their destination. No; the Silent Highway has been their travelling route. On the … bosom of Father Thames, they have been borne in swift, grimy little steamboats, crowded with living freights from Chelsea, and Pimlico, and Vauxhall piers, from Hungerford, Waterloo, Temple, Blackfriars, and Southwark – to the Old Shades Pier, hard by London Bridge. Then for an instant, Thames Street Upper and Lower, is invaded by an ant-hill swarm of spruce clerks, who mingle strangely with the fish-women and the dock-porters. But the insatiable counting-houses
(#ulink_f01d48c7-9a45-5524-b9eb-6afc064d0fd5) soon swallow them up …
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The segregation and classification that came so naturally to Munby and Sala permeated every aspect of Victorian life. Suburbs were ranked to keep the classes separate; neighbourhoods without shops or services kept functions – home versus work – apart. Once inside the house, the need to classify and divide did not end: houses were designed to keep the function of any one group of inhabitants from impinging on any other. Home was a private space, guarded watchfully from contamination by the life of the world; but within the home, too, each separate space had its own privacy, and each enclosed a smaller privacy within it, like a series of ever smaller Russian dolls: every room, every piece of furniture, every object, in theory, had its own function, which it alone could perform: nothing else would serve, and to make do with a multipurpose substitute was not quite respectable. Privacy and segregation of function, especially as the latter defined social status, were the keynotes to the terraced house. Robert Kerr, an architect, wrote in his book on The Gentleman’s House that privacy was ‘our primary classification’ for the ideal house – he put it ahead of a dozen other desirable characteristics such as ‘comfort’, ‘convenience’ and ‘cheerfulness’.
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Nothing was to be allowed to escape from its own particular container. Kerr’s most obvious concern was that servants and their masters should remain separate: ‘the Family Rooms shall be essentially private, and as much as possible the Family Thoroughfares. It becomes the foremost of all maxims, therefore, however small the establishment, that the Servants’ Department shall be separated from the Main House, so that what passes on either side of the boundary shall be both invisible and inaudible on the other.’ Some of the examples of these boundaries being breached were servants overhearing their masters; or coal or scullery noises penetrating outside the coal-hole or scullery; or, worse, smells wafting through the house; ‘or when a Kitchen doorway in the Vestibule or Staircase exposes to the view of every one the dresser or the cooking range’.
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(#litres_trial_promo) When a glimpse of inappropriate furniture through a doorway is disturbing, it seems important to examine how household life was structured, what its concerns and obligations were in daily life.
The standard plan of the terraced house was quickly arrived at. The town houses of the gentry were taller, wider and deeper, but that was the sole distinction: the layouts of the houses of both rich and poor were eerily similar. The middle classes wanted the houses that the upper classes lived in; the poorer classes were content to live in cut-down versions of the middle-class house. The great landowners encouraged this type of housing on their estates, as something familiar to them: the earlier town houses that were their own London homes had conformed to this model. Thus, as cities were rapidly generated on their land, they forced the builders into repeating the older patterns. In turn, when speculative builders bought parcels of land to make investments of their own, they copied the more prestigious estates built by the upper classes.
Architects at the time (and ever since) called the houses inconvenient and impractical, but if the demand had not been there, neither would the houses have been: these estates were built to meet a need, and if the population had shown a desire for something else, something else would have appeared.
Party walls were rigidly controlled: they were the line of demarcation between houses, and ground landlords allowed no breach of them to occur. They were also the main means of fire prevention, and for this reason it was usual to require them to continue upwards at least 15 inches higher than the roof. But those who wrote about building practices noted that all the walls were too flimsy (half a brick, or 41/2 inches, thick rather than the one brick, at 9 inches, that was necessary to keep water out), that foundations were not built, and that damp-courses were not laid.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was not coincidental that the word ‘jerry-built’ was first recorded in the nineteenth century. Some bricks were so rotten that, when fires were lit, smoke came out through the sides of the chimneys. In her diary Beatrix Potter noted other practices that were even more unsavoury:
Builders are in the habit of digging out the gravel on which they ought to found their houses, and selling it. The holes must be filled. The refuse of London is bad to get rid of though the greater part is put to various uses. The builders buy, not the cinders and ashes, but decaying animal and vegetable matters etc. to fill the gravel parts. It is not safe to build on at first, so is spread on the ground to rot, covered with a layer of earth … After a while the bad smells soak through the earth and floors and cause fevers. This delightful substance is called ‘dry core’.
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The result of all this was houses that were no sooner finished than they needed repair. The Transactions of the Sanitary Institute of Great Britain despaired over both the lack of good building practices and the preference for display before solidity:
Here is a house, empty, which was completed and occupied two years ago. Notice how the inside is finished, to take the eye: good mantel-pieces, showy grates, and attractive papers. Now look at the floors. Not one of them is level; they are at all sorts of angles, owing to the sinking of the walls … Notice how the damp has risen, even to the second-floor rooms, and in all the water has come through the roof, not in one, but in many places. The bath room, & c., is conspicuous, but only to the practised eye, by reason of the scamped plumbing and forbidding fittings used. Look at the exterior … Observe how the roof sags, owing to the scantlings of the rafters being insufficient …
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Fresh from Boston, the diarist Alice James, invalid sister of the novelist Henry James and the philosopher and psychologist William James, was shocked at the ‘dumb patience’ of the English, which allowed these practices:
the generality of middle class houses … rock and quake when one walks across the floor, and you hear the voices of your next door neighbours … plainly … The Ashburnes, after a nine years’ search, took a large and good house and had it thoroughly ‘done up’, and then for weeks vainly tried to warm the drawing-room sufficiently to sit in it; then they were told by the people who had the house before them, that the room could never be used in cold weather: George was then inspired to climb up on a ladder and look at the top of the windows, which had all been examined by the British workmen, who had carefully left in the setting of them, several inches of ventilation into the open street.
The immensity of London is so overpowering that a superficial impression of solidity goes with it, and it makes one rather heartsick to learn by degrees that it is simply miles of cardboard houses …
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Instead of solidity of structure, what the inhabitants were looking for, and seemed to love for its own sake, was regularity of form. The upper middle classes even built isolated terraced rows set in the middle of parkland, when on the same piece of land each householder could have had a separate house surrounded by a generous parcel of land.
(#litres_trial_promo) The eighteenth century had bequeathed the ‘building line’, the most basic regulation, which ensured that the facades of the houses were kept to a straight line, with nothing protruding – not door frames, not lintels, not even widow frames. By the middle of the nineteenth century, although the concept of the terrace had been internalized, ornamental ironwork and other architectural details were breaking up the starker Georgian rows, and other regulations, mostly based on hygienic concerns, took over: in the 1850s local municipal acts laid down that all new streets had to be 36 feet wide, and at the rear each house had to have 150 square feet of open space.
Other elements of control were imposed by the landlord, or by the residents themselves, who equated regularity and conformity with respectability: gates were to open only in one direction; fences had to be a certain height.
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Sara Duncan, an American visitor towards the end of the century, got to the heart of the matter. Her cousin’s house, in Half-Moon Street, a fashionable address off Piccadilly, was
very tall, and very plain, and very narrow, and quite expressionless, except that it wore a sort of dirty brown frown. Like its neighbours, it had a well in front of it, and steps leading down in to the well, and an iron fence round the steps, and a brass bell-handle lettered ‘Tradesmen’. Like its neighbours, too, it wore boxes of spotty black greenery on the window-sills – in fact, it was very like its neighbours … Half-Moon Street, to me, looked like a family of houses – a family differing in heights and complexions and the colour of its hair, but sharing all the characteristics of a family – of an old family.
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These houses were indeed all of a family; and the pattern-book house was simple. It could not be more than four times as deep as it was wide, or it would be too dark. Schematically laid out, the generic house looked like this:
Smaller houses might have only three floors: basement, ground and first. This meant a six-room house, consisting of kitchen and scullery in the basement, two reception rooms on the ground floor, two bedrooms upstairs. All houses, of whatever size and number of rooms, were built on a vertical axis, with the stairs at the centre of household life. As a woman in H. G. Wells’s Kipps noted, ‘Some poor girl’s got to go up and down, up and down, and be tired out, just because they haven’t the sense to give their steps a proper rise … It’s ‘ouses like this wears girls out. It’s ‘aving ‘ouses built by men, I believe, makes all the work and trouble.’
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Not everyone thought the same. Nathaniel Hawthorne, in his years in England, learned to love the regularity and system. In Leamington Spa he approved of
a nice little circle of pretty, moderate-sized, two-story houses, all on precisely the same plan, so that on coming out of any one door, and taking a turn, one can hardly tell which house is his own. There is a green space of grass and shrubbery in the centre of the Circus, and a little grass plot, with flowers, shrubbery, and well-kept hedges, before every house, and it is really delightful … so cleanly, so set out with shade-trees, so regular in its streets, so neatly paved, its houses so prettily contrived, and nicely stuccoed, that it does not look like a portion of the work-a-day world. ‘Genteel’ is the word for it … The tasteful shop-fronts on the principal streets; the Bath-chairs; the public garden; the servants whom one meets … the ladies sweeping through the avenues; the nursery maids and children; all make up a picture of somewhat unreal finery … I do not know a spot where I would rather reside than in this new village of midmost Old England.
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These were houses for the middle-classes, and they are what will be discussed in the coming pages. The houses of the working classes and the poor had their own problems, and the houses of the upper classes varied too much to be comprehended in one book. But middle-class houses – from the four-to-six-room house of the lower middle class to the twelve rooms or so of the upper middle class – all conformed to a pattern. All, as Sara Duncan noted, shared a family likeness.
* (#ulink_6aeaa476-cbfa-53e0-b102-7bedd7d0c1ae) Appendix 2, p. 382ff., is a quick guide to the authors and books I have made use of.
* (#ulink_8200fbba-0c1d-506e-8369-d4fb2b2ab521) George Augustus Sala (1828–96), journalist. Dickens sent him to report on the Crimea at the end of the war there, and he made his name as a special correspondent covering the Civil War in America for the Daily Telegraph, He wrote a column called Echoes of the Week’ for the Illustrated London News from 1860 to 1886, and he reported for the Sunday Times from 1886 to 1894.
* (#ulink_9209598f-2a2e-5b3d-bdc5-1b4b7661f4b2) This is only one of many elements I have been unable to encompass and still have a book of a manageable length: domestic life is protean, and any reader will, with no effort at all, be able to come up with a dozen fields of equal importance that I have not touched on. The bibliography will lead interested readers to books on many more subjects.
* (#ulink_c6234295-00e0-54ef-a873-5e06322c0e86) A tiny indication of the large importance of conformity: ‘pattern’ was the word used to describe something or someone who was approved of – Esther Summerson in Bleak House is commended by Mr George as ‘a pattern young lady’.
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* (#ulink_dc8e994b-2bd4-58ca-b2dd-29b6b57cc3fe) For precise timekeeping, see pp. 231–2, 361n.
* (#ulink_9a2965ff-d4a6-5b36-adb2-d32b7f00466a) Jane Ellen Panton (1848–1923), a journalist and early exponent of the new concept of ‘interior decoration’, was the daughter of the immensely successful genre painter William Powell Frith. Her obituary in The Times said she was a ‘witty and outspoken conversationalist with the courage of her opinions, and under a naturally impatient temperament there lay a fund of real kindness’. This, for an obituary in the 1920s, was shatteringly outspoken, and well described the startlingly rude woman of From Kitchen to Garret, her most successful book (by 1897 it had been through eleven editions). At various points she commented on ‘some friends of mine who had a [dinner] service with a whole flight of red storks on, flying over each plate, and anything more ugly and incongruous it is difficult to think of’, and suggested that women should write down what they wanted for Christmas and birthdays, ‘then one is sure of receiving something one requires, and not the endless rubbish that accumulates when well-meaning friends send gifts qua gifts to be rid themselves of an obligation’.
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* (#ulink_768b2d45-b9c2-5b17-91c2-ef0a64bf3c89) Blacks were a common nineteenth-century nuisance. They were flakes of soot, black specks that floated on the air, marking everything they touched. Ralph Waldo Emerson was told when he visited England that no one there wore white because it was impossible to keep it clean.
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† (#ulink_3beb32be-b73e-5da8-a9cd-00bd34511d23) Sir Walter Besant (1836–1901) was the author of several popular novels written together with James Rice, including Ready-Money Mortiboy (1872) and The Chaplain of the Fleet (1881). He also wrote biographies, works on London and on literary life, and an autobiography, as well as reforming works on the appalling living conditions of the poor. In 1884 he founded the Society of Authors.
* (#ulink_3beb32be-b73e-5da8-a9cd-00bd34511d23) This feeling was strong enough that in Kensington Square in the 1890s a local shopkeeper’s van had written on it ‘Van to and from London, daily.’
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* (#ulink_3ef11dfe-a2bc-587f-b791-65ae1ae53e54) Chelsea, now a prime district for the rich, does not appear on this list – it was, and remained until after the Second World War, an area inhabited by the lower middle and working classes. Only with the building of the Chelsea Embankment in 1874, which stopped the Thames from regularly flooding the area, and, in the mid-twentieth century, with the disappearance of servants, did these houses, small by mid-Victorian standards, became the ideal size for the newly applianced rich.
* (#ulink_3a825626-ff9e-5ca2-86f0-a525a9782610) Counting houses were not simply banks, but anywhere that accounts were kept – offices, in other words. The word ‘office’ itself was more commonly used to describe a governmental or diplomatic position – ‘holding office’. At home, the offices were the working parts of the house: the kitchen, scullery, pantry and, especially, the privy or lavatory.
* (#ulink_6b5630cf-3b0c-54ad-9ee7-9a720f59ea7f) This is a theme that permeates the era; some examples can be found on pp. 114–15, 175–6; 191, 255, 297.
* (#ulink_2926cbba-26bd-57b6-bcd2-b5c904217f47) In retrospective fairness to the jerry-builders, it is worth noting that most of these ‘cardboard houses’ still survive some 150 years later.
* (#litres_trial_promo) Divided as we are by a common language, American readers should note that the British system gives the ground floor no number – it is ‘0’; the next floor up is the first, equivalent to the American second storey. The British style is used throughout this book.
1 (#ulink_883dea40-1142-5577-a4f3-5ef35b87f8e5)
THE BEDROOM (#ulink_883dea40-1142-5577-a4f3-5ef35b87f8e5)
IN THE SEGREGATION that permeated the Victorian house, the reception rooms were always considered the main rooms – they presented the public face of the family, defining it, clarifying its status. Bedrooms, to perform their function properly, were expected to separate servants from employers, adults from children, boys from girls, older children from babies. Initially, smaller houses had had only two bedrooms, one for parents and young children, one for the remaining children, with servants sleeping in the kitchen or basement. To accommodate the increasing demands for separation, houses throughout the period grew ever taller.
In addition, the older fashion of the bedrooms serving as quasi-sitting rooms was, in theory at least, disappearing. The Architect said that using a bedroom for a function other than sleeping was ‘unwholesome, immoral, and contrary to the well-understood principle that every important function of life required a separate room’.
(#litres_trial_promo) In actual fact, bedroom function was regulated rather less rigidly than the theory of the times advocated. Throughout the period, as well as being rooms for sleeping, for illness, for sex,
(#ulink_b16f7d4d-bd6c-538e-b7d6-3f9e053ffa98) for childbirth, bedrooms served more than one category of family member. Alfred Bennett, growing up in the 1850s in Islington, slept on a small bed beside his parents’ bed.
(#ulink_0e11c430-e89f-5a9c-8a0f-4ec3281ae0c3) So did Edmund Gosse, until his mother developed breast cancer when he was seven; after she died, he slept in his father’s room until he was eleven. In small houses this was to be expected. Thomas and Jane Carlyle’s procession of servants slept in the back kitchen, or scullery, from 1834 (when the Carlyles moved into their Cheyne Row house) until 1865 (when an additional bedroom was incorporated in the attic). The house was fairly small, but they had no children, and for many years only one servant. Even in large houses with numerous servants it was not uncommon to expect them to sleep where they worked. As late as 1891 Alice James reported that a friend, house-hunting, had seen ‘a largish house in Palace Gardens Terrace [in the new part of Kensington: this was not an old house] with four reception rooms and “eight masters’ bedrooms”; when she asked the “lady-housekeeper” where the servants’ rooms were, she said: “downstairs next the kitchen” – “How many?” “One” – at [her] exclamation of horror, she replied: “It is large enough for three” – maids: of course there was the pantry and scullery for the butler and footman.’
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Like the Carlyles, it is probable that these unknown employers themselves had separate bedrooms. Even couples who shared a room often found it desirable for the husband to have a separate dressing room for himself – this was genteel: that is, what the upper middle and upper classes did, even if the shifts many had to go through to carve out this extra space often reduced the genteel to the ludicrous. (See Adolphus Crosbie’s dressing room on page xlv.) Linley and Marion Sambourne, an upper-middle-class couple living in a fairly large house in Kensington, shared a bedroom, with a separate dressing room next door for Linley.
(#ulink_b0b0048c-73b8-5dbb-ab13-0f0ebee04c4d) Their two children, a boy and a girl, slept in one room on the top floor, next to the parlourmaid, while the cook and the housemaid slept in the back kitchen.
(#litres_trial_promo) When the children grew too old for it to be considered proper for them to share a room, Linley’s dressing room became his son’s room, and their daughter remained in her childhood bedroom: this was all fairly standard.
Yet even when the occupancy was dense, Mrs Haweis, an arbiter of fashionable interior decoration in several books, was firm about segregation of function: ‘Gentlemen should be discouraged from using toilet towels to sop up ink and spilt water; for such accidents, a duster or two may hang on the towel-horse.’
(#litres_trial_promo) That this warning was necessary implies that ink was regularly used in a room where there was a towel rail, and from Mrs Haweis’s detailed description that could only be the bedroom. This was clearly an on-going situation. Aunt Stanbury, Trollope’s resolutely old-fashioned spinster in He Knew He Was Right twenty years later, loathed this promiscuous mixing: ‘It was one of the theories of her life that different rooms should be used only for the purposes for which they were intended. She never allowed pens and ink up into the bed-rooms, and had she ever heard that any guest in her house was reading in bed, she would have made an instant personal attack upon that guest.’
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Bedroom furniture varied widely, from elaborate bedroom and toilet suites, to cheap beds, furniture that was no longer sufficiently good to be downstairs in the formal reception rooms, and old, recut carpeting. Mrs Panton describes the bedrooms of her youth in the 1850s and 1860s with some feeling – particularly
the carpet, a threadbare monstrosity, with great sprawling green leaves and red blotches, ‘made over’ … from a first appearance in a drawing-room, where it had spent a long and honoured existence, and where its enormous design was not quite as much out of place as it was in the upper chambers. Indeed, the bedrooms, as a whole, seemed to be furnished as regards a good many items out of the cast-off raiment of the downstairs rooms.
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As the daughter of W. P. Frith, an enormously popular painter, Mrs Panton had hardly grown up in a house where the taste was either lacking or unable to be achieved through scarcity of money. Nor was her childhood home, to use one of her favourite words, ‘inartistic’: this make-do-and-mend system was the norm.
By mid-century, bedrooms were beginning to be furnished to the standards of the reception rooms, where possible. This meant a good carpet, furniture (mahogany for preference) that included a central table, a wardrobe, a toilet table, chairs, a small bookcase and a ‘cheffonier’, a small, low cupboard with a sideboard top. The bed, if possible, was still four-postered, with curtains. There was also a washstand, in birchwood (which, unlike darker woods, did not show water stains), with accoutrements, a pier glass, and perhaps a couch or chaise longue. In Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale, in which he reworked some of his childhood memories from the Potteries of the 1870s, the master bedroom of the town’s chief linen-draper was splendid with ‘majestic mahogany … crimson rep curtains edged with gold … [and a] white, heavily tasselled counterpane’.
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Multi-functionality: a suggestion for a bedroom writing table with, over it, a combination bookshelf and medicine case for when the bedroom was required to double as a sickroom.
Heal’s and Son, the great furniture shop on Tottenham Court Road, suggested a bedroom furnished in Aesthetic style for the prosperous. Note that by 1896 the bed has no hangings, and gas jets illuminate the dressing mirror, although not the bed, which still has no bedside table.
The range of furniture varied with income and taste. A mahogany wardrobe cost anything from 8 to 80 guineas, while an inexpensive cupboard could be made in the recess of the chimney breast, simply using a deal board, pegs and a curtain in front. Trays and boxes for storing clothes were common – hangers were not in general use until the 1900s (when they were referred to as ‘shoulders’), so clothes either hung from pegs or were folded. Small houses and yards of fabric in every dress meant that advice books were constantly contriving additional storage: in hollow stools, benches, ottomans. Even bulkier items were folded: Robert Edis, another interiors expert, recommended that halls should have cupboards ‘with shelves arranged for coats’.
(#litres_trial_promo) ‘Ware’ – shorthand for toilet-ware – also came in a range of qualities. The typical washstand had towel rails on each side, and often tiles at the back to protect against splashing water. It was expected there would be a basin, a ewer or jug, a soapdish, a dish to hold a sponge, a dish to hold a toothbrush, a dish to hold a nailbrush, a water bottle and a glass. A chamber pot might be of the same pattern as the ware. Mrs Panton recommended that identical ware should be bought for most of the bedrooms, as breakages could then be replaced from stock – breakages of bedroom items, she implied, were frequent. A hip bath might also live in the bedroom, to be filled by toilet cans: large metal cans of brass or copper, which were used to carry hot water up from the kitchen.
No room was finished without its ration of ornaments: Mrs Haweis said that even without much money one could have a pretty room: ‘A little distemper in good colours, one or two really graceful chairs … a few thoroughly good ornaments, make a mere cell habitable.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Mrs Caddy, in her book on Household Organization, suggested that, as with the furniture and carpets, second best would do for the bedroom – ‘light ornaments … which may be too small, or too trifling, to be placed with advantage in the drawing room’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Certainly the desire for small decorative objects was no less upstairs than down. Marion Sambourne’s dressing table in the 1880s had on it five jewel boxes, a brush-and-comb set, a card case, two sachets, six needlework doilies, three ring trays, a pin cushion and a velvet ‘mouchoir case’.
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Bedside tables as we know them were not current. In sickroom literature, nurses were always being advised to bring a table to the bedside to hold the medicines. Mrs Panton, with her love of soft furnishings, suggested for the healthy ‘a bed pocket made out of a Japanese fan, covered with soft silk, and the pocket itself made out of plush, and nailed within easy reach’, to hold a watch, a handkerchief etc., and then, as an innovation which required explanation, ‘furthermore … great comfort is to be had from a table at one’s bedside, on which one can stand one’s book or anything one may be likely to want in the night’.
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Mrs Panton’s bed was a brass half-tester, which had fabric curtains only at the head, lined to match the furniture. This was in keeping with the style of the later part of the century. As more became known about disease transmission, home decorators were urged to keep bedroom furnishings to a minimum, although this frequently given advice must be compared to actuality. A list of objects in Marion Sambourne’s room included a wardrobe, a cupboard to hold a chamber pot, a towel rail, a sofa, a box covered in fabric, two tables, a bookcase, a linen basket, a portmanteau, a vase, two jardinières, plus ten chairs and the dressing table with its display.
(#litres_trial_promo) For not all agreed that bed-hangings were unhealthy: Cassell’s Household Guide as late as 1869 thought that draughts were more of a worry than the hangings that kept them away from the sleeper.
(#litres_trial_promo) In general, however, four-posters were vanishing. Even if people were not switching to simple iron or brass beds, as advised, they were at least replacing the traditional heavy drapery with beds with only vestigial curtains. The simplified lines of such beds were disturbing to some: Mrs Panton advised that ‘If the bare appearance of an uncurtained bed is objected to’, one could mimic the more familiar style by putting the startlingly naked bed in a curtained alcove.
(#litres_trial_promo) Likewise, while carpets did not disappear entirely, they were modified so that they could be taken up and beaten regularly, or rugs were substituted, so that the floor could be scrubbed every week.
As the second half of the century progressed, hygiene became the overriding concern. Mrs Panton, still distressed about bedroom carpets, remembered a carpet that had spent twenty years on the dining-room floor, ‘covered in holland in the summer,
(#ulink_ed5a8f7f-7b93-59e1-9eba-e724b4de0e1b) and preserved from winter wear by the most appallingly frightful printed red and green “felt square” I ever saw’. When it was no longer considered to be in good condition, it was moved to the schoolroom, then demoted once more, to the girls’ bedroom. (Note that the schoolroom, a ‘public’ room for children, got the carpet before the children’s bedroom did.) After that, it was cut into strips and put by the servants’ beds, ‘and when I consider the dirt and dust that has become part and parcel of it, I am only thankful that our pretty cheap carpets do not last as carpets used to do, for I am sure such a possession cannot be healthy’.
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As suggested by Heal’s for a servant’s bedroom. Instead of modern peacock-feather wallpaper (p. 5), the servants make do with old-fashioned flowers, and plain deal furniture replaces the more elaborate versions given to their employers. Many of the middle classes slept in rooms much like these.
Hygiene was not just a matter of dust. Three things were paramount: the extermination of vermin (which encompassed insects as well as rodents), the protection from dirt of various kinds, and the proper regulation of light. Gas lighting was not recommended for bedrooms. If gas was used, the servants lit the bedroom lights in the evenings while the family was still downstairs; by bedtime much of the oxygen in the room would have been depleted by it; the fireplace, being seldom if ever lit, added no ventilation, and in cold weather, with closed windows, a headache was the least the sleeper could expect to awake to. A single candle, brought upstairs on retiring, was the approved bedroom lighting, but for the more prosperous a pair of candlesticks on the mantel, and another on the dressing table, ‘with the box of safety matches in a known position, where they can be found in a moment’, was more comfortable.
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The lack of lighting was complicated by the fact that the bed needed to be positioned carefully to meet the conflicting demands of health and privacy. The bed should be ‘screen [ed], and not expose [d]’ by the opening of the bedroom door, and yet at the same time, it could not be placed in a draught from the window, door or fireplace, nor should there be overmuch light (which could be ‘trying’ when the occupant was ill).
(#litres_trial_promo) Given these many requirements, and the limited floor plans of most terraced houses, these niceties were probably acknowledged more in the abstract than they were practised.
Protection from dirt was still more difficult. Dust was not just the airborne particles, causing no particular damage, that we know. Our Homes warned that
Household dust is, in fact, the powder of dried London mud, largely made up, of course, of finely-divided granite or wood from the pavements, but containing, in addition to these, particles of every description of decaying animal and vegetable matter. The droppings of horses and other animals, the entrails of fish, the outer leaves of cabbages, the bodies of dead cats, and the miscellaneous contents of dust-bins generally, all contribute … and it is to preserve a harbour for this compound that well-meaning people exclude the sun [by excessive drapery], so that they may not be guilty of spoiling their carpets.
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Compounded with this, coal residue was omnipresent, both as dust when coals were carried to each fireplace and then, after the fires were lit, as soot thrown out by the fire, blackening whatever it touched. The most common system of protection was to cover whatever could be covered, and wash the covers regularly. However, as the covers became decorative objects in themselves, they became less and less washable. Dressing tables, for example, were usually covered with a white ‘toilet cover’. Mrs Panton recommended, as more attractive, her own version, which was a tapestry cover, ‘edged with a ball fringe to match’. She also had ‘box pincushions’ made out of old cigar boxes to hold gloves and other small objects: the boxes were given padded tops, and were then covered in plush, velveteen or tapestry, and fringed ‘so that the opening is hidden’. These covers were now themselves in need of covers: tapestry could be brushed and dabbed with benzene or other dry-cleaning fluids, but it could not be easily washed; nor could velvet or plush, and especially not fringes. Yet Mrs Panton was deeply concerned with airborne dirt: she noted that ‘in dusty weather particularly, and especially if we drive much’, it was impossible to keep a hairbrush clean – ‘our brushes look black after once [sic] using’. She suggested that three hairbrushes be kept in rotation: one to start the day clean; the second to be washed and set out to dry for the following day; and one spare to lend a friend should she need it.
(#litres_trial_promo) If hair, covered by a hat, got so dirty on a single outing, the amount of dust and dirt that landed on clothes and furniture is almost inconceivable.
The extermination of vermin was an even more pressing problem, and, apart from the kitchen, beds were the most vulnerable places in the house. Bedding was rather more complicated than we have learned to expect. Mattresses were of organic fibre: horsehair mattresses were the best; cow’s-hair ones were cheaper, although they did not wear as well; even less expensive were wool mattresses. A straw mattress, or palliase, could be put under a hair mattress to protect it from the iron bedstead.
(#litres_trial_promo) Chain-spring mattresses were available in the second half of the century, but they were expensive, and they still needed a hair mattress over them. It was recommended that a brown holland square should be tied over the chains, to stop the hair mattress from being chewed by the springs. The hair mattress itself then needed to be covered with another holland case, to protect it from soot and dirt. If the bed had no springs, a feather bed – which was also expensive, hard to maintain, and a great luxury – could be added on top of the mattress. An underblanket, called a binding blanket, was recommended over the hair mattress.
After the basics (all of which needed turning and shaking every day, as otherwise the natural fibre had a tendency to mat and clump), the bedding for cold, usually fireless rooms consisted of an under sheet (tucked into the lower mattress, not the upper, again to protect from soot), a bottom sheet, a top sheet, blankets (three to four per bed in the winter), a bolster, pillows, bolster-and pillow-covers in holland, and bolster- and pillow-cases.
With all of this bedding made of organic matter, it is hardly surprising that bedbugs were a menace. Oddly, the usually fastidious Mrs Haweis thought that blankets needed washing only every other summer, although sheets needed washing every month –‘the old-fashioned allowance’ – if on a single bed; if two people were sharing a bed it was every fortnight. Not all the sheets were changed at once: bottom sheets were taken off, as were the pillow-and bolster-cases, and the top sheet was moved down and became the bottom sheet for the next fortnight.
(#ulink_a966cab4-58b0-500f-9b8e-5f5e08e614b9) It was recognized that it was impossible to go to bed clean: Mrs Haweis noted that pillowcases needed to be changed ‘rather oftener [than the sheets], chiefly because people (especially servants) allow their hair to become so dusty, that it soils the cases very soon’.
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The main cleaning of bedding came twice a year, in the spring and autumn cleanings, when it was recommended that the mattresses and pillows were taken out and aired (and, every few years, taken apart, the lumps in the ticking broken up and washed, and the feathers sifted, to get rid of the dust).
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(#litres_trial_promo) Clearly, this kind of work could take place only with substantially more space and labour than many, if not most, middle-class households could afford. As was often the case, the advice books were describing the daily routines of upper-middle-class houses, or an ideal world that did not exist at all.
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It was not, however, enough simply to clean the bedding as well as possible. Although vermin had always been present, for some reason in the eighteenth century their numbers increased,
(#litres_trial_promo) possibly because of rapid urbanization. After a vigorous war against them, by the 1880s Mrs Haweis could say that fleas were not expected in ‘decent bedrooms’, although ‘at any minute one may bring a stray parent in from cab, omnibus, or train’;
(#litres_trial_promo) consequently vigilance had to be maintained, and the bed itself had to be examined regularly. And examine the Victorians did. Beatrix Potter wrote with an air of doom fulfilled about a Torquay hotel, where she was holidaying:
I sniffed my bedroom on arrival, and for a few hours felt a certain grim satisfaction when my forebodings were maintained, but it is possible to have too much Natural History in a bed.
I did not undress after the first night, but I was obliged to lie on [the bed] because there were only two chairs and one of them was broken. It is very uncomfortable to sleep with Keating’s [bug] powder in the hair.
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At home, the good housewife was supposed to check the bed and bedding every week. When Thomas and Jane Carlyle moved into their Cheyne Row house in 1834, Jane claimed that hers was the only house ‘among all my acquaintances’ that could boast of having no bugs. For a decade all was well. Then in 1843 bugs were found in the servant’s bed in the kitchen:
I flung some twenty pailfuls of water on the kitchen floor, in the first place to drown any that might attempt to save themselves; when we killed all that were discoverable, and flung the pieces of the bed, one after another, into a tub full of water, carried them up into the garden, and let them steep there for two days; – and then I painted all the joints [with disinfectant], had the curtains washed and laid by for the present, and hope and trust that there is not one escaped alive to tell. Ach Gott, what a disgusting work to have to do! – but the destroying of bugs is a thing that cannot be neglected.
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Ten years later she gave up that particular war: when the servant’s bed was again found to be swarming, she sold the old wooden bed and bought an iron one: ‘The horror of these bugs quite maddened me for many days.’
(#litres_trial_promo) That, she thought, was that – until a few years later Carlyle complained about his own bed. Jane was initially confident:
Living in a universe of bugs outside, I had entirely ceased to fear them in my own house, having kept it for so many years perfectly clean from all such abominations. But clearly the practical thing to be done was to go and examine his bed … So instead of getting into a controversy that had no basis, I proceeded to toss over his blankets and pillows, with a certain sense of injury! But on a sudden, I paused in my operations; I stopped to look at something the size of a pin-point; a cold shudder ran over me; as sure as I lived it was an infant bug! And, O, heaven, that bug, little as it was, must have parents – grandfathers and grandmothers, perhaps!
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The carpenter was called to dismantle the bed. The usual system at this stage was to take the pieces of the bed, and all the bedding, into an empty room, or outside, wash the bed frame with chloride of lime and water, and sprinkle Keating’s powder everywhere; then wait and repeat daily for as long as necessary. If the infestation was out of control, the bed and mattress were left in an empty room which was sealed to make it airtight, and then sulphur was burned to disinfect the bed and the surrounding area, to prevent the spread of the problem to the walls and floors.
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Another anxiety was that laundry sent out to washerwomen would come back infested,
(#litres_trial_promo) and, for the same reason, secondhand furniture was distrusted – ‘How can we know we are not buying infection?’
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Even if the major infections – cholera, typhoid, diphtheria – were set to one side, the women who used these bedrooms spent, by the 1870s, approximately twelve years of married life either pregnant or breastfeeding: they were often, in terms of health, at a disadvantage in the bedroom. Women had an average of 5.5 births (although somewhat fewer children were born alive), with 80 per cent of women having their first child within a year of marriage.
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(#litres_trial_promo) Marriage and motherhood were virtually synonymous to many.
Advice literature, which proliferated in all walks of life, really came into its own regarding childbirth. Motherhood, the books implied, was a skill to be acquired, not innate behaviour. Nor was it to be acquired simply by watching one’s own mother. Books on this subject in the early part of the century were written by clergymen, and were most concerned with the spiritual aspects of child-rearing. In the second half of the century motherhood was ‘professionalized’, and doctors, teachers and other experts took over. A Few Suggestions to Mothers on the Management of their Children, by ‘A Mother’ (1884), was confident that mothers could not act ‘without knowledge or instruction of any kind … [the belief that they could] is one of the popular delusions which each year claims a large sacrifice of young lives.’
(#litres_trial_promo) It was not just ignorance these books wanted to combat. For their authors, what women knew was even more suspect than what they did not know: mothers ‘are cautioned to distrust their own impulses and to defer to the superior wisdom of the medical experts’.
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The first signs of pregnancy were not easy to detect. Mid-century, Dr Pye Chavasse, author of Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Offspring (a book so popular it was still in use at the turn of the century) and other similar works, gave the signs of pregnancy, in order of appearance, as ‘ceasing to be unwell’ (i.e. menstruate); morning sickness; painful and enlarged breasts; ‘quickening’ (which would not have been felt until the nineteenth week); increased size. That meant that no woman could be absolutely certain she was pregnant until the fifth month. As early as the 1830s it had been known to doctors that the mucosa around the vaginal opening changed colour after conception, yet this useful piece of information did not appear in a lay publication until the 1880s, and the doctor who wrote it was struck off the medical register – it was too indelicate, in its assumption that a doctor would perform a physical examination. Neither doctors nor their patients felt comfortable with this.
(#litres_trial_promo) Discussion itself was allusive. Mrs Panton, at the end of the 1880s, felt she could ‘only touch lightly on these matters [of pregnancy]’ because she didn’t know who might read her book. Kipling, from the male point of view, was very much of his time when he wrote, ‘We asked no social questions – we pumped no hidden shame – / We never talked obstetrics when the Little Stranger came –’.
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It would be pleasant to be able to refute the idea that middle-class Victorians found in pregnancy something that needed to be hidden, but that really was the case. Pregnancy for them was a condition to be concealed as far as possible. Mrs Panton called her chapter on pregnancy ‘In Retirement’, and never used any word that could imply pregnancy. Instead, it was ‘a time … when the mistress has perforce to contemplate an enforced retirement from public life’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Ursula Bloom, who told her upper-middle-class mother’s story, noted that ‘it would have been unpropitious if a gentleman had caught sight of her … Even Papa was supposed to be ignorant of what was going on in the house … He did not enquire after Mama’s nausea … and her occasional bursts of tears.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The class aspect was important. Cassell’s Household Guide warned expectant mothers:
When a woman is about to become a mother, she ought to remember that another life of health or delicacy is dependent upon the care she takes of herself … We know that it is utterly impossible for the wife of a labouring man to give up work, and, what is called ‘take care of herself,’ as others can. Nor is it necessary. ‘The back is made for its burthen.’ It would be just as injurious for the labourer’s wife to give up her daily work, as for the lady to take to sweeping her own carpets or cooking the dinner … He who placed one woman in a position where labour and exertion are parts of her existence, gives her a stronger stage of body than her more luxurious sisters. To one inured to toil from childhood, ordinary work is merely exercise, and, as such, necessary to keep up her physical powers.
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Seclusion and lack of exercise during pregnancy were givens for many in the upper reaches of society. At the very top of the pyramid. Queen Victoria complained to her daughter that ‘the two first years of my married life [were] utterly spoilt by this occupation! I could … not travel about or go about with dear Papa.’
(#litres_trial_promo) While this may have been how those who could afford it behaved, they knew (for they were regularly told) that it was not healthy. Mrs Warren, yet another prolific advice writer, who specialized in works aimed at lower-income middle-class families, wrote of pregnancy in 1865:
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Before the birth of my first child I was irritable, peevish and self-indulgent: to work was a burden; all my baby clothes were put out to make, for I did not know how to cut them out or make them up … I lay on the sofa all day under pretence of weakness – indeed, in the latter part of the time to move from one room to the other was a journey hardly to be accomplished. I could eat and drink well enough, and often idly desired dainties …
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But by the end of the century Maud Berkeley, from a comfortably prosperous home, painted a frieze on the new nursery walls when seven months’ pregnant, then spent the last month making bedding for the crib.
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The expectant mother also needed to prepare her own clothes. By the 1840s, the idea that corsets needed to be worn throughout the pregnancy was beginning to disappear. While the corsets lingered for many, at least now women were told that they could have expandable lacings over the bosom, and steel stays should be replaced by whalebone. They were also, luckily, told that stays during labour were not a good idea, although a chemise, a flannel petticoat and a bed gown were all expected of a woman in the later stages of labour, not to mention ‘A broad bandage, too, [which] must be passed loosely round the abdomen as the labour advances to its close … it should be wide enough to extend from the chest to the lowest part of the stomach.’
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For households that could afford it (and only the more prosperous of the middle classes could), a monthly nurse was engaged. She arrived a month before the baby was due, and stayed until it was three months old, if the parents could afford her that long. Her tasks were to keep the bedroom clean, wash the baby’s clothes, and wait on the mother. She also cared for the baby throughout the night, bringing it to the bedroom to be fed if it was not sleeping there, or feeding it herself if it was bottle-fed.
The nurse was also useful for morale and for practical information, as gradually through the century women were being pushed out of the previously almost entirely female sphere of childbirth. When Dickens’s first child was born, in the late 1830s, Catherine Dickens’s sister, Mary (aged seventeen), and Dickens’s mother were both present at the birth. This behaviour was not just for the middle classes: Prince Albert was at Queen Victoria’s bedside at her first confinement in 1841;
(#litres_trial_promo) Gladstone was at his wife’s bedside for all six of his children’s births, beginning with his first son in 1840. But by the 1860s Dr Chavasse condemned the idea of anyone except the doctor and nurse being in attendance. Not even the pregnant woman’s mother was encouraged to be present.
(#litres_trial_promo) If women went back to their mother’s for their first child, as many (including Marion Sambourne) did, it was likely that even then she was no longer in the room during labour.
The increasing professionalization of medicine meant that experienced midwives were being squeezed out of middle-class childbirth. Doctors liked attending childbirths – they saw it as a good way for a young practitioner to forge a bond with a newly set up family which, with luck, would continue for the rest of the family’s lifespan. For this reason they fought the possibility of midwives being formally qualified.
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(#litres_trial_promo) Even if half to three-quarters of all births were still attended by midwives, that would mean that by the end of the century as many as three-quarters of a million women a year were being attended by a doctor – possibly the bulk of the middle classes.
Another reason to have a doctor was the increasing use of chloroform. It had been administered safely as early as 1847; in 1857 it gained wide recognition when Queen Victoria was given it during childbirth. Yet the drug still had to be defended repeatedly: it was not generally accepted until the late 1870s – the delay being caused not by women, who were clamouring for it, but by doctors, who were deeply resistant.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was not so much the danger – medicine had not reached a stage where practitioners expected to save every patient – as the immorality of the drug: did not Genesis 3:16 remind women everywhere that, for Eve’s sin, ‘in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children’? Dr Charles Meigs, two years after chloroform was first administered successfully, spoke for many in his profession: ‘To be insensible from whisky, gin, and brandy, and wine, and beer, and ether and chloroform, is to be what in the world is called Dead-drunk. No reasoning – no argumentation is strong enough to point out the 9th part of a hair’s discrimination between them.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Not all felt this way. Both Charles Darwin and his friend, the botanist Joseph Hooker were, in the old-fashioned manner, present when their wives gave birth but – new style – they administered the chloroform themselves.
Despite this divergence on medical treatment, both women and doctors agreed in regarding childbirth as an illness. Mrs Panton called it a ‘plight’, and warned that ‘Naturally these times are looked forward to with dread by all young wives.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The lower middle classes, and a substantial swath of the more prosperous, did not have the servants to permit them to lie in bed for weeks (or even days). And it was they – overburdened with heavy housework which they performed themselves, and with the care, feeding, clothing and education of children – who would probably have benefited from time in bed. Some were forced to remain in bed, whether or not they had servants: Emily Gosse was unable to leave her room for six weeks.
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Prosperous middle-class women, on the other hand, were expected to stay in bed after the birth for at least nine days; those who got up earlier did so, it was supposed, not because they felt well enough, but out of ‘bravado’, and they were considered to be acting foolishly, because ‘the strength and health of the mother’s whole life depend upon judicious treatment at such a critical time’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Louise Creighton, an upper-middle-class woman married to an Oxford fellow,
(#ulink_d2139fbc-e6d4-5f13-9e2b-95f7e6b704ee) accepted this fully. She gave birth to her second child in 1874, and a month later a close friend who had also just had a child came to visit. ‘We spent the afternoon happily together wondering which was the most fit to get up & ring the bell when we needed anything.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Ursula Bloom noted that, in her upper-middle-class family, after giving birth the women were kept flat on their backs and fed with a feeding cup, a china cup with a partial covering and a spout, through which the recumbent patient could drink. The windows remained closed, and small sandbags were laid along the edges of the frames to keep out any draughts. A lamp was left burning all night, and the monthly nurse slept on a sofa in the room. This lying-in lasted a month, and was then followed by churching, which no men attended (and seems to have been relatively uncommon – Bloom came from a clergy family).
(#litres_trial_promo) The woman was usually faint and weak at the end of the month: without any fresh air or exercise, and with only an invalid diet, all the while breastfeeding, it was to be expected.
Serious illness always lurked. Although women had a slightly longer life expectancy than men throughout the period, all joined in regarding them as the frailer vessel. The most dangerous time was childbirth: childbed fever (or puerperal fever, now simply septicaemia) was the most common cause of death in childbirth. From 1847 to 1876, 5 women per 1000 live births died, with puerperal fever causing between a third and a half of these deaths. There was no cure available: doctors merely prescribed opium, champagne, and brandy-and-soda, trying to ease the passing, rather than making a vain attempt to cure a mortal illness.
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In Vienna in 1795 Ignaz Semmelweis had radically cut the number of deaths from septic poisoning among his patients by insisting that anyone who entered his wards first scrubbed with chloride of lime. A paper on the subject, noting his results, was read before the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society in 1848,
(#litres_trial_promo) but general acceptance was extremely slow: after the Female Medical Society in 1865 warned doctors against coming from dissecting rooms straight to childbed. The Lancet dismissed their suggestion as ‘all erroneous’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Instead, doctors insisted that ‘mental emotion’ and overexcitement were what caused death – women suffered in childbirth because they led ‘unnatural lives’, and therefore they were entirely responsible for their failure to thrive.
(#litres_trial_promo) Many women colluded with this attitude: Mrs Warren’s imaginary narrator was ill after the birth of her child because, according to her monthly nurse, she ‘shouldn’t have eaten all sorts of fanciful trash, but kept yourself to pure wholesome food, for a depraved appetite soon comes’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The ideas behind this comment were sound enough, but the ‘depravity’ of the mother’s thoughtlessness added the requisite moral as well as a physical dimension to women’s illness.
With childbirth being regularly repeated, one can see the women’s insistence on their weakness as making a certain amount of sense, even if it was not always phrased in ways that today we feel an immediate bond with. Mrs Panton was vehement that the mother ‘should be the first object of every one’s care until she has been for at least a fortnight over her trouble, and I trace a good deal of my own nervous irritability and ill-health to the fact that after my last baby arrived I had an enormous quantity of small worries that the presence in the house of a careful guard would have obviated’. The monthly nurse, she went on, should be ‘a dragon of watchfulness’ who keeps ‘away all those small bothers which men can never refrain from bringing to their wives, regardless that at such times the smallest worry becomes gigantic’. It was essential that, ‘if at no other time can we obtain consideration and thought, it is imperative that for at least three weeks after the arrival of a baby the wife should have mental as well as bodily rest, and that she should be absolutely shielded from all domestic cares and worries’. The querulous tone was unattractive, but when she pointed out that, by the time a woman had had her fifth or sixth child, her husband might have become so used to the event that he would ‘so depress and harass his wife by his depression that she may slip out of his fingers altogether’, one does feel for the overburdened woman.
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There was not much escape, either. Mrs Beeton was firm that babies should not sleep with either their nurse or their mother: ‘The amount of oxygen required by an infant is so large, and the quantity consumed by mid-life and age, and the proportion of carbonic acid thrown off from both, so considerable, that an infant breathing the same air cannot possibly carry on its healthy existence while deriving its vitality from so corrupted a medium.’ This was always the case, but it was exacerbated at night, when doors and windows were closed, ‘and amounts to a condition of poison, when [the baby is] placed between two adults in sleep, and shut in by bed-curtains’.
(#litres_trial_promo) However, the separation of the child from the mother in its own space was nothing but a hoped-for ideal: the space was rarely available. Without a nurse, to get any sleep at all, mothers had to share their bedroom with the child they were feeding. Mrs Beeton was not keen on this: she thought there was a risk that, while the mother was asleep, the child would continue to feed, ‘without control, to imbibe to distension a fluid sluggishly secreted and deficient in those vital principles which the want of mental energy, and of the sympathetic appeals of the child on the mother, so powerfully produce’. The mother, on waking, was then ‘in a state of clammy exhaustion, with giddiness, dimness of sight, nausea, loss of appetite, and a dull aching pain through the back and between the shoulders. In fact, she wakes languid and unrefreshed … caused by her baby vampire.’
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Breastfeeding, indeed, she thought ‘a period of privation and penance’,
(#litres_trial_promo) which continued for between nine and fifteen months. Many other advice books echoed this idea of the suffering of the mother in various ways, or considered pre-empting the penitential period altogether, suggesting not only that bottle-feeding brought improved health to the child and mother, but that ‘In these days of ours few women … have sufficient leisure to give themselves up entirely to the infant’s convenience; and here I maintain that a woman has as much right to consider herself and her health, and her duties to her husband, society at large, and her own house, as to give herself up body and soul to a baby, who thrives as well on the bottle.’
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There are no statistics for the number of women breastfeeding their children instead of bottle-feeding, or, as it was known, bringing them up ‘by hand’.
(#litres_trial_promo) However, with the advent of prepared foods and cheaper glass bottles, the shift to bottle-feeding began. Mrs Beeton, by 1860, was already a little squeamish: a child protractedly nursing was ‘out of place’ and ‘unseemly’.
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(#litres_trial_promo) (Dr Chavasse also disapproved of postponed weaning, but his concern was that women who fed their child for more than a year exposed themselves to consumption.)
(#litres_trial_promo) Mrs Beeton thought bottle-feeding ‘more nutritious’, and that the babies ‘will be thus less liable to infectious diseases, and more capable of resisting the virulence of any danger’. Breastfed children might develop ‘infantine debility which might eventuate in rickets, curvature of the spine, or mesenteric [intestinal] diseases, where the addition to, or total substitution of, an artificial … aliment’ would help.
(#litres_trial_promo) This might have been true, in particular among lower-income families where the women were not able to get sufficient food themselves, although these were the ones who could least afford patent food.
Until bottles arrived, the standard infant food was a bread-and-water pap, sweetened with sugar and fed to the baby on a spoon. The slowness and difficulty of this method made it unattractive to many mothers: partly for the time every feeding took, and also because it was difficult to ensure that the baby was receiving sufficient food. Bottles were more convenient, enabling lower-middle-class mothers with both a baby and other small children to feed the former without taking too much time out from an already arduous day. Unknowingly, these bottles caused illness. Sterilization became widespread only in the 1890s. Before rubber nipples became common later in the century a calf’s teat nipple, bought at the chemist, was tied on the bottle and ‘When once properly adjusted, the nipple need never be removed till replaced by a new one’ – roughly once a fortnight, or even several weeks ‘with care’.
(#litres_trial_promo) And mothers, particularly in the lower income groups, could not always afford appropriate food for their children. Women living right up to a small income would perhaps be at the limits of their own physical endurance without breastfeeding their children as well, but processed foods, particularly in the early days, were expensive, and what the right kinds of food were was not always obvious.
Manufactured baby food began to appear in the 1860s. By the 1870s promotions like this one, for ‘Dr Ridge’s food for mothers’ ducks’ (p. 25) were common. Note that it promises to cure babies’ indigestion, a worrying indication of what they were being ted.
In the 1860s it was mostly home-made varieties of baby food that were on offer: Mrs Beeton suggested ‘arrowroot, bread, flour, baked flour’. Some mothers could afford to buy the new pre-prepared farinaceous foods, and Mrs Beeton thought these best if available. Dr Chavasse, in 1861, followed the same route, but told mothers how farinaceous foods could be prepared at home. He suggested that mothers boil breadcrumbs in water for two to three hours, adding a little sugar. When the child reached five to six months, milk could be substituted in part for the water, with more milk added as the child got older, until the dish was almost all milk. Otherwise he suggested taking a pound of flour, putting it in a cloth, tying it tightly, and boiling it for four to five hours. The outer rind was then peeled off and the hard inner substance was grated, mixed with milk, and sweetened. He also liked ‘baked flour’, which was simply that: flour baked in the oven until it was pale brown, then powdered with a spoon; he also approved of baked breadcrumbs. Both formed the basis of a gruel with water and a small amount of sugar. He disapproved of broth, which others recommended, and he was firm that the milk for all the above foods must come from one cow only, otherwise it would turn ‘acid and sour and disorder the stomach’.
(#litres_trial_promo) For this the mother was to make an arrangement with a dairy that ‘her’ nominated cow would be the only one used to supply the milk for her household, which was not to come from the mixed output of all the cows in the dairy. (For the likelihood of this being carried out, see the discussion of food adulteration, p. 243ff.)
Mrs Warren, a few years later, suggested a German prepared food for two-month-old babies: a mixture of wheat flour, malt flour, bicarbonate of potash (to be bought at the chemist), water and cow’s milk.
(#litres_trial_promo) A decade after that, an instructional guide for nursery maids (so-called, but more likely for their employers) recommended patent food – ‘Swiss milk’ and ‘Dr. Ridge’s food’ – as a matter of course.
(#litres_trial_promo) By the late 1890s a birth announcement inserted in The Times would automatically bring a flood of sample proprietary products, including patent foods, from firms keen to get the new parents’ custom.
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This at least alleviated the kind of situation one doctor found himself in in 1857. He wrote, ‘When I see the ordinary practice of a nursery … I am astonished, not that such numbers die, but that any live! It was but a day or two ago that a lady consulted me about her infant, seven weeks old who was suffering from diarrhoea. On enquiry what had been given it I was told that … she had given it oatmeal. She could hardly believe that oatmeal caused the diarrhoea.’
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While patent foods were new, other infant care continued much as before. Many books and journals addressed questions that implied that bathing young babies was dangerous: Chavasse assured mothers that, while babies should not be put in a tub, they could be sponged all over, although only their hands, necks and faces needed soap.
(#litres_trial_promo) Mrs Pedley, the author of the influential Infant Nursing and the Management of Young Children (1866), agreed that soap was not necessary, ‘except in those parts which are exposed to injurious contact’
(#litres_trial_promo) – one rather hopes that this is a discreet reference to their bottoms: Dr Chavasse’s babies must have been awfully smelly.
The amount of clothes the baby wore, even in summer, would have ensured that all smells lingered. Mothers were told that every infant needed a binder, which was a strip of fabric – usually flannel, sometimes calico or linen – which was swathed around the baby’s stomach and was variously said to keep its bowels warm, its bowels compressed, or its spine firm.
(#litres_trial_promo) Throughout the century doctors and advice writers argued against these binders, never particularly convincingly. Even Mrs Bailin, a prominent clothing reformer, thought babies needed to wear one, although instead of linen she recommended Jaeger fabric,
(#ulink_7a764d47-272f-5ac7-b7ba-4ef40979a558) which would give ‘just enough pressure to prevent the protrusion of the bowels’.
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Between what babies were said to need in the way of clothes and what they actually had was a large gap. A list given by Mrs Panton included 12 very fine lawn shirts; 6 long flannels for daytime, 4 thicker flannels for nightwear; 6 fine long-cloth petticoats; 8 monthly gowns of cambric, trimmed with muslin embroidery on the bodice; 8 nightgowns; 4 head-flannels;
(#ulink_00f95305-c519-508b-9e32-6c0aa596b601) 1 large flannel shawl, to wrap the child in to take it from room to room; 6 dozen large Russian diapers (to be used as hand towels for 3–4 months first to soften them up); 6 flannel pilches (triangular flannel wrappers that went over nappies); 3–4 pairs woollen shoes; 4 good robes; 4 binders. As well as this a nursery needed at the ready thread, scissors, cold cream, pins, safety pins,
(#ulink_2c00670e-78c4-5721-baa7-5c84fc0f8943) old pieces of linen, a large mackintosh (i.e. waterproof) sheet, 2 old blankets and 3 coarse blanket-sheets.
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Fulminations about these overloaded infants abounded:
a broad band is so rolled on as to compress the abdomen, and comes up so high on the chest as to interfere both directly and indirectly with free breathing; then come complex many-stringed instruments of torture, while thick folds of linen, flannel or even mackintosh, curiously involve the legs; over all comes an inexplicable length of garment that is actually doubled on to the child, so as to ensure every form of over-heating, pressure, and encumberment. After a month of this process, aided by hoods, flannels, shawls, and wraps of all kinds, a strange variation is adopted; the under bands and folds are left, but a short outer garment is provided, with curious holes cut in the stiffened edges, so as to make sure that it shall afford no protection to legs, arms, or neck …
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Yet most mothers no more were able to achieve this magnificence than they were able to achieve what today we assume was standard for every nineteenth-century middle-class child: the separate nursery.
* (#ulink_e8136734-2a87-5c7a-af7f-20889fa341e3) It has been suggested that I am more interested in S-bends than I am in sex. For the purposes of social history this is so, and I do not plan to discuss sex at all. There is a great deal to say on the little we know about the Victorians’ attitudes to sex, but I am not the person to do it. For S-bends, however, see p. 293.
* (#ulink_e8136734-2a87-5c7a-af7f-20889fa341e3) Alfred Rosling Bennett (1850–1928) was one of the earliest telephone engineers, and author of such books as Telephone Systems of Continental Europe (1895), as well as a memoir of his childhood, London and Londoners in the Eighteen-Fifties and Sixties (1924). He also invented a caustic-alkali-and-iron battery in 1881.
* (#ulink_10e896c2-a083-5a33-9f28-af086f513564) Linley and Marion Sambourne’s house has been preserved with the reception rooms left almost entirely as they were furnished towards the end of the nineteenth century. It now belongs to the Victorian Society, and is open to the public.
* (#ulink_3b9d42fc-99be-508b-a364-132cf2437eb4) Holland was a hard-wearing linen fabric, usually left undyed. It was much used in middle- and upper-class households to cover and protect delicate fabrics and furniture.
* (#ulink_4f6270a2-e120-5458-b66e-3766c5b015fc) Many books worry away at the location of matches, and it is understandable that it was essential to be able to find them in the dark. Mrs Panton suggested not only that the box should be nailed over the head of the bed, but that it should first be painted with enamel paint, and a small picture be cut out and stuck on it as decoration. Our Homes, written by Shirley Forster Murphy, who in the 1890s was the London County Council’s chief medical officer, was more modern, and recommended a new invention, ‘Blamaine’s Luminous Paint’, which could be applied to a clock face, ‘a bracket for matches, or a small contrivance for holding a watch’. He went on, in an excess of enthusiasm, that it could also go on bell pulls, letter boxes (one assumes for streets still not lit with gas), signposts and street signs. Maybe Mr Pooter and his red-enamel paint were not so far-fetched.
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* (#ulink_bf8c881a-c851-5a8a-b814-f6d8e4acbab7) This system, known as ‘top to bottom, bottom off’, was still being vised in British boarding schools in the 1980s – and possibly still is.
† (#ulink_bf8c881a-c851-5a8a-b814-f6d8e4acbab7) The idea that servants were especially dirty – without the congruent idea that this was because they were doing the dirtiest work – is one that will be explored in Chapter 4.
* (#ulink_f2d29328-36cc-5636-8823-d0cec27e5b19) For airing and its purpose, see pp. 104 and 118–19 and 130.
† (#ulink_f2d29328-36cc-5636-8823-d0cec27e5b19) This continues today. Cheryl Mendelson’s remarkably successful book Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House (2001) was quite confident not only that its readers regularly washed all the tins their food came in before opening them, and then the tin-opener after every use, but that before starting to cook sensible people washed their hands in a room outside the kitchen, to avoid ‘cross-contamination’.
* (#ulink_6e2e5a58-9326-57eb-9c3a-4eb373fdff49) Sulphur was also burned to disinfect rooms after illness (see p. 317–18). It is still used today as a bactericide – in the preservation of wine and dried fruits, for example – but its effectiveness as sulphur dioxide (as it becomes on burning) may be in doubt.
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† (#ulink_191172ab-0d6f-5939-957b-a3a86eef86eb) To disperse another myth regarding middle- and upper-class women, it should be noted that a small but statistically significant percentage of births in the first year of marriage – some 12 women per 1000 – had a child within seven and a half months of marriage.
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* (#ulink_0278b748-7a1d-5bdb-851f-3500098bb48d) Note that her first-person narrative was a literary device: the personal details of her ‘I’ changed from book to book.
* (#ulink_4c907409-9190-5ac4-9512-9d7ad73244d9) As a consequence, continental Europe had professionally qualified midwives decades before Britain – which did not find the need, finally, until the beginning of the twentieth century. As things stood for most of the nineteenth century, midwives had to be licensed, but this was a Bishop’s Licence, indicating moral rather than professional qualities. To receive it the midwife had simply to be recommended by any respectable married woman, take an oath to forswear child substitution, abortion, sorcery and overcharging, and pay a fee of 18s. 4d.
* (#ulink_ab262f49-49d6-51f9-adcb-fbd1090aee30) Mandell, or ‘Max’, Creighton was one of those Victorian dynamos who so astonish us today: as a young fellow at Merton he became engaged to Louise von Glehn, the daughter of a prosperous German businessman living in Sydenham. At this time fellows of Oxford colleges had to be unmarried; Creighton was so valued that the rules were changed to keep him. He soon became the incumbent of a parish in Northumberland, then in quick succession the Rural Dean of Alnwick, the Examining Chaplain to Bishop Wilberforce, Honorary Canon of Newcastle, first Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge, Canon of Worcester, Canon of Windsor, Bishop of Peterborough, representative of the English Church at the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II, Hulsean and Rede Lecturer at Cambridge. Romanes Lecturer at Oxford, and, finally, Bishop of London – all before dropping dead at the age of fifty-seven.
* (#ulink_c104eff6-fd46-5afd-9a8f-0bf94643d8c9) It has been suggested that it was Mrs Beeton who first used the phrase ‘A place for everything, and everything in its place.’ Even if there are earlier instances, it was very much a feeling for the time: something out of place was something that was, both practically and morally, wrong.
* (#ulink_daebe935-850b-5676-b8b7-badb841ad116) Dr Jaeger, a health reformer, towards the end of the century promoted his Sanitary Woollen Clothing, made of undyed knitted woollen fabric. Jaeger all-wool underwear became extremely popular. Mrs Haweis commended it as ‘the most economical, the most comfortable, and the most cleanly, seldom as the garments require washing (once a month, says the patentee), because they throw off at once the “noxious emanations” which soil the garments, and retain the benign exhalations’. Not everyone agreed. Jeannette Marshall, the daughter of a fashionable London surgeon, rejected them outright: ‘the workhouse colour is a great objection in my eyes’. Darwin’s granddaughter Gwen Raverat used ‘Jaeger’ as a synonym for dowdy (see p. 269).
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† (#ulink_466468d9-2f30-549f-bb6e-78d2010eb839) Dr Chavasse among others thought that flannel caps prevented eye inflammations, ‘a complaint to which new-born infants are subject’.
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* (#ulink_466468d9-2f30-549f-bb6e-78d2010eb839) By 1866 Mrs Pedley was telling new mothers about ‘clasp-pins’, which should be used for all the baby’s wants. In 1889, however, the Revd J. P. Faunthorpe still felt he needed to explain to his readers that ‘A special kind [of pin] is known as the safety pin, which has a wire loop to act as a sheath to protect the point’.
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2 (#ulink_3e7b4efd-9f90-5312-bd0a-9d3c77212658)
THE NURSERY (#ulink_f120773c-8f7c-55fe-97b2-a778e03f53fb)
IN AN IDEAL nineteenth-century world, all homes would have had a suite of rooms – a night nursery and a day nursery – ready and waiting for use after the birth of the first child, together with a full complement of servants: a monthly nurse for the first three months, then a nursemaid.
The nursery itself was a fairly new concept: J. C. Loudon, in The Suburban Garden and Villa Companion, published in 1838, had to explain to his readers that specialized rooms for children were called ‘nurseries’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Only twenty-five years later the idea had been so well assimilated that the architect Robert Kerr simply assumed that they were necessary when discussing the ideal house: it clearly never occurred to him that they had not always existed. Kerr’s main concern was weighing up the virtues of convenience versus segregation. Parents needed to consider that ‘As against the principle of the withdrawal of the children for domestic convenience, there is the consideration that the mother will require a certain facility of access to them.’ The size of the house and the number of servants were for him the deciding factors: ‘in houses below a certain mark this readiness of access may take precedence of the motives for withdrawal, while in houses above that mark the completeness of the withdrawal will be the chief object’.
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Outside the fantasies of upper-class living on middle-class incomes, the reality was that most houses were not big enough to make Kerr’s concern one that needed to be addressed. The bulk of the middle classes lived in houses with between two and four, or maybe five, bedrooms: hardly big enough for two separate rooms for the younger children, not counting two bedrooms for the older children of each sex, and definitely not big enough to worry about ‘facility of access’.
Within these limitations, some attempt could be made to find the children their own space. Most larger houses put the children at the top of the house, in a room or rooms near the servants’ bedroom. One of the main troubles with rooms at the top of the house was the need to carry supplies up and down. In Our Homes, and How to Make them Healthy (1883), mothers were warned that there should be no sinks on the same floor as the nursery, as ‘The manifest convenience of having a sink near to rid the nursery department of soiled water has to be weighed against the tendency of all servants to misuse such convenience, and it is best to decide against such sources of mischief’.
(#litres_trial_promo) That is, it was better to have servants run up and down the stairs all day with food, bedding and dirty nappies—all of which were always to be removed ‘immediately’ – rather than risk them ‘misusing’ a sink, a euphemism for throwing the contents of chamber pots into them. The transmission of disease via the all-encompassing drains was a perpetual worry (see pp. 90–91), but it is likely that most houses could afford neither running water on the top storeys nor the servants who might misuse the non-existent sinks.
Bassinettes (also called ‘berceaunettes’ from the French for cradle) were now lavishly decorated, as in the advertisement here, and on pages 37 and 40. Perambulators were entirely new, invented only in 1850.
Health concerns were the ones given most weight – far more than convenience or affordability. One of the main reasons why it was desirable for the children to have two rooms was that they needed the ‘change of air’ that moving from one to the other would bring, because they spent
half of [their time] – at least for the very young – in the bed-room … The strong man after free respiration out of doors may pass through foul or damp air in the basement of the house with the inner breath of his capacious chest untouched; he may sit in a hot parlour without enervation, or sleep in a chilled bed-room without his vigorous circulation being seriously depressed. Not so those who stay at home; from these evils even the strong would suffer; delicate women, susceptible youth, tender children suffer most.
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Women and children needed fresh air and light more than men was the conclusion, but all the suggestions that followed concerned how they should find those things inside the house.
For houses that had the space, the standard nursery was a room or two either on the main bedroom floor or higher, which was whitewashed or distempered instead of painted or papered, so it could be redone every year. This too was for health reasons, to ensure that any infections did not linger. Kitchens were similarly repainted every year, but in that case it was to remove smells, and the accumulation of soot from around the kitchen range. The main ingredients of the nursery were all safety oriented: bars over the widows, and a high fireguard in front of the grate, securely fastened to prevent accidents. Apart from that, the requirements were few: a central table covered in wipeable oilcloth, for meals and lessons, chairs, high chairs as necessary, a toy cupboard or box, possibly a cupboard for nursery china if the children ate apart from their parents, a carpet that was small enough to lift and beat clean weekly. Mrs Panton was very firmly against gas lighting in general, and she was particularly vehement about its effects on ‘small brains and eyes [from the] glitter and harsh glare’.
(#litres_trial_promo) However, many balanced this against the safety of a gas bracket on the wall, out of the reach of children, and the very real danger of an oil lamp on a table that could be all too easily knocked over.
The separate nursery space, in retrospect, symbolizes the distance we perceive to have been in place between parents and their children. There is no question that, however much the Victorians loved their children, they spoke of them, and thought of them, in a very different way than we have come to expect today. How much was manner, how much representative of actual distance, needs to be considered. For it appears that some parents might have been not merely ignorant of their children’s daily routines and needs, but proud of such ignorance. Initially this might be thought of as a purely upper-class trait, fostered by large numbers of servants, yet it occurred across the social spectrum. Molly Hughes was the child of a London stockbroker who died in a road accident in 1879, at the age of forty, leaving his family perilously near to tipping down into the lower middle class. As a young woman, Molly had to go out to work as a schoolteacher. However, when she was married and able to leave paid employment, she was careful to note in her autobiography that she knew little about children, and relied for information on her servant: ‘“How often should we change her nightdress, Emma?” I asked. The reply was immediate and unequivocal – “Oh, a baby always looks to have a clean one twice a week.” [Emma] knew also the odd names for the odd garments that babies wore in that era – such as “bellyband” (about a yard of flannel that was swathed round and round and safety-pinned on) and “barracoat” …’ Molly’s sister-in-law affected the same blankness when Molly was first pregnant: ‘She took the greatest interest, and loaded me with kindness, but in the matter of what to do about a baby she was, or pretended to be, a blank. “When I was married,” she said, “all I knew about a baby was that it had something out of a bottle, and I know little more now.”’
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Molly recognized pretend-ignorance in her sister-in-law, even if she did not see the same in herself. Caroline Taylor had a similar sort of background: she was the granddaughter of a shopkeeper in Birmingham; her father was a permanently out-of-work engineer. She described relations between her parents and their children tersely: it was one of ‘stiff formality’.
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Mrs Panton, the daughter of a successful artist, supported herself, and probably placed herself in the upper reaches of the middle classes – though it is to be questioned whether professional families would have concurred. She strove to catch the right tone. In her work on domestic life, she said that a good nurse would never allow ‘her baby to be a torment … She turns them out always as if they had just come out of a band-box, and one never realises a baby can be so unpleasant so long as she has the undressing of them.’ Later she added, ‘I do not believe a new baby is anything but a profound nuisance to its relations at the very first’, and a new mother would require ‘at least a week to reconcile herself to her new fate’. Children could be ‘distracting and untidy’.
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Mrs Beeton, as we saw, thought a feeding child was a ‘vampire’. Caroline Clive, an upper-middle-class woman, thought more or less the same: she referred to her child coming to ‘feed upon me’, and she confessed that, although she loved him now, a couple of months after his birth, ‘I did not care very much about him the two first days.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Louise Creighton said of her husband on the birth of their first child, ‘Max, who later was so devoted to children, had not really yet discovered that he cared about them. I am doubtful of the value of what is called the maternal instinct in rational human beings.’
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The higher up the social scale, the more open about this distance from their children the parents were. Ursula Bloom’s grandmother, at least in family legend, forgot to take her baby when leaving its grandparents’ in the country: ‘She had never cared too much for children,’ said her granddaughter, perhaps unnecessarily.
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(#litres_trial_promo) Those lower down the ladder reflected the same views in smaller ways. Georgiana Burne-Jones, the wife of the then-struggling Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, referred to their first child as ‘the small stranger within our gates’.
(#litres_trial_promo) As the daughter of a Methodist minister, she knew the original Bible verse, and was not just thoughtlessly parroting the standard usage whereby a baby was ‘a little stranger’. Deuteronomy 14:21, detailing the laws concerning food, says, ‘Ye shall not eat of anything that dieth of itself: thou shalt give it to the stranger that is in thy gates, that he may eat it.’ Was the stranger within the gates a second-class citizen?
Possibly not: but the expression does reinforce the shift that has occurred over the past 150 years, from a parent-centred universe to our own child-centred one. In earlier centuries households were run by adults for adults. Children were an integral part of a functioning economic unit – whether as providers of labour in less prosperous families or as potential items of value in the business and marriage markets for the wealthier. Children were to be trained and disciplined, both to promote their own well-being and to promote the well-being of the family unit. In addition, various of the more fundamentalist versions of Christianity had said that to spare the rod was not simply to spoil the child in practical matters, but to spoil his soul. Original sin, thought the Evangelicals, meant that all children were born needing to find salvation.
In less religious houses this developed into a sense of authority for authority’s sake. Samuel Butler wrote of his father’s childhood early in the century, as well as his own, in his semi-autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh (1873–80):
If his children did anything which Mr. Pontifex disliked they were clearly disobedient to their father. In this case there was obviously only one course for a sensible man to take. It consisted in checking the first signs of self-will while his children were too young to offer serious resistance. If their wills were ‘well broken’ in childhood, to use an expression then much in vogue, they would acquire habits of obedience which they would not venture to break through …
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As the century progressed, improved standards of living meant that many children who would earlier have gone out to work now had a childhood. Further, Rousseau’s theories of child education, promoting the ideal of individual development in natural surroundings, struck a chord, and converged with the Romantic movement’s eloquence on the innocence and purity of childhood. Many books agreed with the Revd T. V. Moore in his ‘The Family as Government’ in The British Mothers’ Journal, when he advised parents that ‘The great agent in executing family law is love.’
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Yet while physical coercion was used less as the century progressed, and persuasion more, there was little doubt about the virtues of authority and obedience. Frances Power Cobbe, a philanthropist and worker for women’s rights, outlined in her Duties of Women what was to be expected from a child by way of obedience:
1st. The obedience which must be exacted from a child for its own physical, intellectual, and moral welfare.
2nd. The obedience which the parent may exact for his (the parent’s) welfare or convenience.
3rd. The obedience which parent and child alike owe to the moral law, and which it is the parent’s duty to teach the child to pay.
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Moral law was to many synonymous with religious law. It enshrined the duty of obedience owed to God. The head of the family derived his authority from God; the wife of the head derived hers from the head; and so on. Any disobedience subverted this notion of order. Therefore disobedience was, of itself, subversive, and it was the idea of rebellion that needed to be punished, not whatever the act of disobedience itself was. Laura Forster, a clergyman’s daughter (and later the aunt of E. M. Forster), noted that ‘We were expected to be obedient without any reason being given’, but she tried to give extenuating circumstances: ‘we shared our mother’s confidence as soon as we were of a suitable age, and I think this helped to give us the conviction that we all had that nothing was forbidden us capriciously, and that some day we should know, if we did not understand at the time, why this or that was forbidden’.
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Most parents felt that discipline could not begin too early. A mother or nurse’s refusal to feed her infants except at stated hours taught the infants the benefits of ‘order and punctuality’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Having their crying ignored taught babies self-restraint: Mrs Warren said that, if a child cried for something, on principle it should never be given – ‘even a babe of three months, when I held up my finger and put on a grave look, knew that such was the language of reproof.’ Instead of beatings, which children earlier in the century might have routinely expected, children were told of the disappointment they caused, to their parents and to God. Mrs Warren suggested that children who were disobedient should be told they were breaking the Fifth Commandment, by not honouring their fathers and mothers;
(#litres_trial_promo) Mary Jane Bradley, wife of a master at Rugby School, told her son that ‘God was looking at him with great sorrow and saying “that little boy has been in a wicked passion, he cannot come up and live with me unless he is good”.’
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Corporal punishment, although lessened in force and frequency, vanished only slowly over the next hundred years. When Mary Jane Bradley’s son Arthur (nicknamed ‘Wa’) was three, ‘He was not good yesterday and surprised me by saying, “Wa was naughty in London Town and Papa and Mama did whip Wa very hard” – I did not believe he could have remembered anything so long ago [three months before]. This whipping certainly had its effect. It was the first and last.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Louise Creighton, who said that in her own childhood she was never beaten, but put in a dark cupboard that induced only boredom, punished her own children in a way she acknowledged ‘may be considered brutal by some people. Cuthbert was a very mischievous boy, & used to play with fire & cut things with knives, so when he played with fire I held his finger on the bar of the grate for a minute that he might feel how fire burnt, & when he cut woodwork with his knife I gave his fingers a little cut.’ Despite what might today be described as savagery, she thought it important to end, ‘I never whipt any child.’
(#litres_trial_promo) What seemed harsh changed over time. A guide to the sickroom advised, almost in passing, that if a child refused medicine, ‘at once fasten the child’s hand behind him, throw him on his back, pinch his nose to force his mouth apart, and … pour [the liquid] down his throat with a medicine spoon’. This is called acting with ‘firmness’.
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It was still, however, a different world to the one in which Mr Pontifex had ruled. Children were moving to the centre of their parents’ lives. This was displayed in graphic form over the century by the pattern books that furniture-makers and shops produced to advertise their wares. In the early part of the nineteenth century there was no furniture made specifically for children; then in 1833 Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture (which, despite its name, was a very metropolitan, bourgeois publication) had a short section for children’s furniture, most of it miniaturized versions of adult objects. By the end of the century every shop and every catalogue had a full range of furniture designed specially for children’s needs.
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Different families adapted to this new ethos more or less quickly and comfortably: how quickly and comfortably was based on character and on personal and social background. Many remained convinced that the marital relationship was the primary one: Louise Creighton reported that Walter Pater’s sister had once said to her about the novelist Mrs Humphry Ward and her husband that ‘she always preferred Mary [Ward]’s company when Humphry was present, because if he was absent Mary was always wondering where he could be; but she preferred me without Max, for when he was there I was so occupied with him & with what he was saying that I was no use to anyone else … I think this was true all my life.’ She did not make the connection with her own mother’s behaviour in her childhood: when Mr von Glehn was due back from London in the evenings ‘My mother always grew expectant some time before his train arrived & was very fidgety & anxious.’ Her husband was her focus, as had been her mother’s, and ‘only the fact that I nursed [my children] kept me from going about much, and this … did prevent me sharing many of Max’s expeditions & walks which was a very real deprivation’.
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Advice books, fiction and reality converge here: Mrs Warren’s model housewife always made her children understand that when their father came home from work he was to be considered first in all things, otherwise she felt it was entirely to be expected if he became ‘cold and indifferent’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Mrs Panton believed children should have rooms where they do not ‘interfer[e] unduly with the comfort of the heads of the establishment’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Many novels touched on the same theme: in George Gissing’s New Grub Street the failed novelist Edwin Reardon looks back on his collapsing marriage: ‘Their evenings together had never been the same since the birth of the child … The little boy had come between him and his mother, as must always be the case in poor homes.’
(#litres_trial_promo) His view is that marriages prosper not because they become child-centred, but because the family can afford servants to remove the children from the adult sphere.
Mrs Henry Wood, in East Lynne, provided the clearest apologia for this adult-centred view. Mr Carlyle’s second wife expounds her views to her predecessor, Lady Isabel (for complex plot reasons currently disguised as a French governess, Mme Vine). The two women agree on this point, and as the reader has spent hundreds of pages learning to sympathize with Lady Isabel it is hard to imagine that theirs was not Mrs Henry Wood’s view too. It is worth quoting at length, for the insight it gives into the adult-centred world-view. Mrs Carlyle says:
I never was fond of being troubled with children … I hold an opinion, Madame Vine, that too many mothers pursue a mistaken system in the management of their family. There are some, we know, who, lost in the pleasures of the world, in frivolity, wholly neglect them: of those I do not speak; nothing can be more thoughtless, more reprehensible, but there are others who err on the opposite side. They are never happy but when with their children; they must be in the nursery; or, the children in the drawing-room. They wash them, dress them, feed them; rendering themselves slaves … [Such a mother] has no leisure, no spirits for any higher training: and as they grow old she loses her authority … The discipline of that house soon becomes broken. The children run wild; the husband is sick of it, and seeks peace and solace elsewhere … I consider it a most mistaken and pernicious system …
Now, what I trust I shall never give up to another, will be the training of my children … Let the offices, properly belonging to a nurse, be performed by the nurse … Let her have the trouble of the children, their noise, their romping; in short, let the nursery be her place and the children’s place. But I hope I shall never fail to gather my children round me daily, at stated periods, for higher purposes: to instil into them Christian and moral duties; to strive to teach them how best to fulfil life’s obligations. This is a mother’s task …
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Or, as the novelist Mrs Gaskell had the governess in Ruth (1853) say more succinctly to the children in her care, ‘All that your papa wants always, is that you are quiet and out of the way.’
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Marion Jane Bradley kept a diary of her children’s first years, from 1853 to 1860. In about 1891 she reread it and added a note to the manuscript: ‘I tried to make our children fill their proper subordinate places in the family – Father always to be first considered, their arrangements to be subject to his … Not to seem anxious about their health or to fuss over their comfort and convenience, but to make them feel it was proper for them to give up and be considered secondary. Of course, this is quite old fashioned …’
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It was, truly, quite old-fashioned by the end of the century – for the mother, at least. Fathers remained more distant. Caroline Taylor’s father ‘had a quick temper and we children stood in fear of him. We were never allowed to express our ideas … My father had a knowledge of many subjects and was artistic and musical, but he never conversed on things to his children … Parents always assumed such dignity, and we felt so small.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Fifty years before, Mrs Gaskell had reflected the prevailing views in her novels, even while her personal view, in her letters and journal, had long been moving towards precisely that child-centred universe which was the opposite of the children being ‘quiet and out of the way’. Mrs Gaskell was the wife of a Unitarian minister, and the daughter of another, but there was nothing of Evangelical stringency in her attitude to her children. Although she was deeply concerned about their moral welfare, she did not see that children should suffer for it. She was very much of her time in reading numerous advice books, and she carefully considered the instructions they gave. She agreed with those that said that moral fibre was not developed by privation and denial:
I don’t think we should carry out the maxim of never letting a child have anything for crying. If it is to have the object for which it is crying I would give it, directly, giving up any little occupation or purpose of my own, rather than try its patience unnecessarily. But if it is improper for it to obtain the object, I think it right to with-hold the object steadily, however much the little creature may cry … I think it is the duty of every mother to sacrifice a good deal rather than have her child unnecessarily irritated by anything [my italics].
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This was not lip-service: she wrote in her journal, when her daughter Marianne was six months old, ‘If when you [that is, the future, grown-up Marianne] read this, you trace back any evil, or unhappy feeling to my mismanagement in your childhood forgive me, love!’
(#litres_trial_promo) This view took concrete form. Earlier, children were to give things up to their elders; now the elders deprived themselves. Because of the cost of Marianne’s schooling, and the larger house they had bought, ‘we aren’t going to furnish the drawing room, & mean to be, and are very œconomical because it seems such an addition to children’s health and happiness to have plenty of room’.
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The interest in children’s happiness was new, but children’s health had always been a concern. Mortality rates for the general population were high, but they were dropping none the less: from 21.8 deaths per 1000 in 1868, to 18.1 in 1888, down to 14.8 in 1908. The young benefited soonest: children first felt the improvements as understanding of disease transmission, a drop in the real price of food, and, most importantly, improved sanitation worked their way through the population.
(#litres_trial_promo) (It must be remembered that until this point the most likely time of death was not in old age, but in infancy: as late as 1899, more than 16 per cent of all children did not survive to their first birthday.)
(#litres_trial_promo) A child born in the earlier part of the century would probably have watched at least one of its siblings die; a child born in the 1880s would have had fewer siblings, and would also have had less chance of seeing them die.
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This improvement, together with the increasingly child-centred world they inhabited, made parents ever more solicitous of the health of their children. It was difficult not to worry when a parent could expect to have to deal with scalds, burns, falls, children being dropped by the nursemaid,
(#ulink_25b41cad-0b78-5bfd-b6fd-671ef44ed0e9) swallowed lotions or liniment, swallowed lucifers (matches), clothes catching fire, drowning, stings, overdoses of laudanum, paregoric, Godfrey’s Cordial or Dalby’s Carminative (all four opium derivatives), peas up the nose or in the ears, and swallowed glass or coins.
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Some fears appeared relatively trivial, but uncertain diagnostic techniques meant that many major illnesses could not be identified and separated from minor ones. Seemingly harmless childhood ailments might end in death. Mrs Gaskell reported in her journal on Marianne’s sudden attack of croup: ‘We heard a cough like a dog’s bark … We gave her 24 drops of Ipec: wine, and Sam & Mr Partington both came. They said we had done quite rightly, and ordered her some calomel powders
(#ulink_59ea2520-fe11-5660-9be1-0d61a6e0ce77) … [W]e have reason to be most thankful that she is spared to us … Poor little Eddy Deane was taken ill of croup on the same night, and died on the following Monday.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Poor little Eddy Deane may very well have had diphtheria: this and croup were often confused.
Even teething, that routine, ordinary, minor fret of babydom, was a major cause of anxiety. Mrs Pedley estimated that 16 per cent of child deaths were teething-related, rather than actually from teething itself. She tried to persuade parents that it was not the malady but the cure that was killing their children. She wrote that, when their babies fretted before their new teeth began to show, worried parents decided that ‘milk no longer agrees with the child’, so they stopped the milk and instead fed the infants on unsuitable foods. This upset their digestions; they were therefore given drugs, most of which contained opium, and, not unnaturally, the babies died in convulsions – more deaths put down to that dread disease, teething.
(#litres_trial_promo) Her common sense, however, was drowned out by others who recommended syrup of poppies (Mrs Warren) or purgatives (Dr Chavasse, Mrs Beeton and Mrs Warren) or surgery – lancing the gums (all of the above).
Mrs Beeton listed the symptoms of teething, and they included, apart from the ones we would recognize today – inflamed gums and an increase of saliva – restlessness, irregular bowel movements, fever, disturbed sleep, ‘fretfulness … rolling of the eyes, convulsive startings, labourious breathing’: pretty well everything, in fact. The answer was to give purgatives and a teething ring, put the child in a hot bath, and if necessary lance the gums, ‘which will often snatch the child from the grasp of death … [otherwise] the unrelieved irritation endanger[s] inflammation of the brain, water on the head, rickets, and other lingering affections’. Indeed, Mrs Beeton stressed that rickets and water on the brain were ‘frequent results of dental irritation’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Mrs Beeton at least made one concession to the strength of the drugs routinely given to infants: she suggested that, before weaning, medicine could be given via the milk, the mother swallowing the appropriate dose. That was an improvement on many systems, where it was generally expected that the nurse would give the newborn infant a few drops of castor oil as soon as it was born. Mrs Gaskell followed the general trend: Marianne ‘had one violent attack … but we put her directly into warm water, & gave her castor oil, sending at the same time for a medical man, who decided that the inflammatory state of her body was owing to her being on the point of cutting her eye-teeth’.
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‘Convulsions’ were a similarly created illness: death due to convulsions was common, but even at the time many attributed the deaths to the opium-based medicines used as a cure. Mrs Beeton (whose chapter on child-rearing, it should be emphasized, was written for her by a doctor) gave a description of a convulsion: ‘the infant cries out with a quick, short scream, rolls up its eyes, arches its body backwards, its arms become bent and fixed, and the fingers parted; the lips and eyelids assume a dusky leaden colour, while the face remains pale, and the eyes open, glassy, or staring’. This might last a few minutes only, and could surely describe almost any crying child. Yet the worried carers who saw a convulsion in these symptoms were advised to put the baby in a hot bath, give it a teaspoonful of brandy and water and, an hour after the bath, administer a purgative, repeated once or twice every three hours.
(#litres_trial_promo) Such ‘spasms’ could also be treated by patent medicines such as J. Collis Browne’s Cholodyne, ‘advertised as a cure for coughs, colds, colic, cramp, spasms, stomach ache, bowel pains, diarrhoea and sleeplessness’. This contained not only opium, but also chloral hydrate and cannabis.
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Children who had once had trouble with fits, or with their teething (and, given these symptoms, all babies did: has anyone ever had a baby who did not at some stage suffer from ‘disturbed sleep’ or ‘fretfulness’?), would shortly have problems caused by the purgatives and opium that had been administered to treat them, starting off a fresh round of medication. Mrs Pedley again tried to calm fears, pointing out that nurses often said children were subject to fits when what they meant was that they had a twitch, or they blinked frequently, or moved their arms and legs after feeding (which she attributed to flatulence).
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Although teething seems a bizarre worry from our perspective, nineteenth-century parents had many more real anxieties than their descendants: by the time they reached the age of five, 35 out of every 45 children had had either smallpox, measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping cough, typhus or enteric fever (or a combination), all of which could kill.
(#litres_trial_promo) Lesser illnesses, such as chickenpox and mumps, were also more dangerous than today, because of the drugs given to treat them. So much of what we take for granted was simply not available, or only barely. A great deal of progress had been made by mid-century: the stethoscope, the thermometer and the percussive technique for listening to the patient’s chest had all been developed; the smallpox vaccine was routinely urged on all parents. Yet what was available and what was commonly used were not necessarily the same thing. Louise Creighton, as late as the early 1880s, was misled when her son complained only mildly of feeling ill: she therefore did nothing for some time. When she finally sent for the doctor, the child was found to have fluid on his lungs; she said later that ‘had I then known the use of the clinical thermometer, which was not yet considered even a desirable instrument … for any mother to use’, she would have recognized the gravity of the illness earlier.
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Even something as basic as a hot-water bottle, to keep a sick child warm, was not easily obtainable. ‘Bottles’ were generally made of stone, and corked at the top. Wriggly fretful children had a nasty tendency to kick the corks out, sending scalding water gushing over themselves. ‘Gutta-percha’ bags were available by mid-century, but they were expensive, and so only for the rich.
(#ulink_2ea33325-34ce-5136-92e7-883c6a4377ea) The most common method was to heat sand in a pan over the kitchen range and fill cloth bags with it.
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The best solution to illness was to prevent it, all agreed. All also agreed on how this was to be done: a child should lead an orderly, well-regulated daily life, simple in every element. Meals were to be plain and ‘wholesome’ – a wonderful word embodying not only basic nutrition, but also a moral element. In this moral universe food was a danger as well as a benefit: books warned against children being given specific foods – usually strong-tasting ones (especially for girls: such foods were thought to arouse passion, and were troublesome during puberty in particular), though vegetables and fruits could be equally hazardous. It was notable that expensive foods, or ones that tasted good enough to be consumed from desire rather than hunger, were often considered the most unwholesome. Mrs Beeton was not alone in warning of the dangers of fresh bread. Day-old bread was infinitely to be preferred, while ‘Hot rolls, swimming in melted butter … ought to be carefully shunned’ – especially by children, who were to have the most restricted diets. She recommended that suet pastry be made with 5 oz of suet for every pound of flour – although a scant 4 oz would ‘answer very well for children’. Another of her puddings was made with eggs and brandy – unless it was intended for children, when ‘the addition of the latter ingredients will be found quite superfluous’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Meat was the basis of children’s diet, as it was of that of their elders, for, as Mrs Pedley noted, ‘The highest form of diet is animal food. It appears that children who, at a befitting age, are judiciously fed on meat, attain a higher standard of moral and intellectual ability than those who live on a different class of food.’
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Breakfast for children in prosperous middle-class houses was almost as Spartan as it was for their lower-middle-class coevals. Gwen Raverat, a granddaughter of Charles Darwin and the daughter of a Cambridge don, throughout her childhood ate toast and butter, and porridge with salt. Twice a week the toast was ‘spread with a thin layer of that dangerous luxury, Jam. But, of course, not butter, too. Butter and Jam on the same bit of bread would have been unheard-of indulgence – a disgraceful orgy.’ She first tasted bacon when she was ten years old and away from home on a visit.
(#litres_trial_promo) Louise Creighton first tasted marmalade and jam only after her marriage, when she was in her twenties.
(#litres_trial_promo) Compton Mackenzie, the novelist, had a similar prospect in his childhood:
Nor did the diet my old nurse believed to be good for children encourage biliousness, bread and heavily watered milk alternating with porridge and heavily watered milk. Eggs were rigorously forbidden, and the top of one’s father’s or mother’s boiled egg in which we were indulged when we were with them exceeded in luxurious tastiness any caviar or pate de foie gras of the future. No jam was allowed except raspberry and currant, and that was spread so thinly that it seemed merely to add sweetish seeds to the bread.
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The bread and milk (or bread and milk and water) eaten by most lower-middle-class children was not substantially different from this upper-middle-class fare.
Mackenzie was a more rebellious child than Raverat or Creighton, and one day
I thought of a way to exasperate Nanny by telling her that I preferred my bread without butter. I was tired of the way she always transformed butter into scrape, of the way in which, if a dab of butter was happily caught in one of the holes of a slice of … bread … she would excavate it with the knife and turn it into another bit of scrape. I was tired of the way she would mutter that too much butter was not good for me and, as it seemed to me, obviously enjoyed depriving me of it. If I told her that I preferred my bread without butter she would be deprived the pleasure of depriving me.
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No doubt his going without butter was a worry – he was removing the possibility of a lesson in the moral values implicit in food.
Morality was at the heart of home education. When Marianne Gaskell came back from her school in London, her mother was well pleased with what she had learned there: ‘It is delightful to see what good it had done [Marianne], sending her to school … She is such a “law unto herself” now, such a sense of duty, and obeys her sense. For instance, she invariably gave the little ones 2 hours of patient steady teaching in the holidays. If there was to be any long excursion for the day she got up earlier, that was all; & they did too, influenced by her example.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The merit of her schooling was not the knowledge she had acquired, but that she had become dutiful.
Most children, boys and girls, were initially taught at home by their mothers. This might begin at a young age, although Mrs Gaskell was concerned not to start Marianne’s schooling too early – ‘We heard the opinion of a medical man latterly, who said that till the age of three years or thereabouts, the brain of an infant appeared constantly to be verging on inflammation, which any little excess of excitement might produce’ – so she waited until after the child’s second birthday. By her third birthday Marianne had begun to read and sew, ‘and makes pretty good progress … I am glad of something that will occupy her, for I have some difficulty in finding her occupation, and she does not set herself to any employment’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The expectation that a three-year-old would set herself to specific tasks and that lessons could usefully be learned so young was not uncommon. By his third birthday Marian Jane Bradley’s son Wa was learning to read. Six months later his mother worried that he was very difficult to teach: one day he would read his lessons through with no problem, the next he could not. It took her six weeks to teach him to read ‘cab … which he can’t remember from one day to the next’. But she felt this was her fault – that she was a bad teacher, because ‘It requires more patience than I have’ – not that he was simply too young.
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For, oddly enough, there were few instructions in how to teach small children, despite the preponderance of advice being given in all other areas of life. Mothers were supposed to know simply by virtue of being mothers. Mrs Warren was one of the small number who did discuss this subject. Her book How I Managed My Children on £200 a Year was precisely for mothers who could not expect to be able to afford any outside help. However, although it listed which subjects to teach, she never said how to teach most of these subjects: she assumed that all women knew.
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They did not, of course. Molly Hughes (who later became a teacher) left an account of her education at home – intended to be comic, but hair-raising in the barrenness it revealed. Mid-morning her mother would ‘open an enormous Bible. It was invariably at the Old Testament, and I had to read aloud … No comments were ever made, religious or otherwise, my questions were fobbed off by references to those “old times” or to “bad translations”, and occasionally mother’s pencil, with which she guided me to the words, would travel rapidly over several verses, and I heard a muttered “never mind about that”.’
(#ulink_41e19292-f232-5dcc-8f5e-9392cebab872) Then Molly would parse a verse. Her mother painted in watercolour while Molly did ‘a little reading, sewing, writing, or learning by heart’. Geography consisted of looking at an atlas,
but all I can recall of my little geography book is the opening sentence. ‘The Earth is an oblate spheroid’, and the statement that there are seven, or five, oceans. I never could remember which … For scientific notions I had Dr. Brewer’s Guide to Science, in the form of a catechism … It opens firmly thus: ‘Q. What is heat?’ and the A. comes pat: ‘That which produces the sensation of warmth.’ … Some of the information is human and kindly. Thus we have: ‘Q. What should a fearful person do to be secure in a storm? A. Draw his bedstead into the middle of the room, commit himself to the care of God, and go to bed.’
(#ulink_acd7f386-ceb7-50b6-bbe5-ab06d4149c70) … Mother’s arithmetic was at the level of the White Queen’s, and I believe she was never quite sound about borrowing and paying back, especially if there was a nought or two in the top row … Often when sums were adumbrated I felt a little headachy, and thought I could manage a little drawing and painting instead.
If the weather was good, lessons were cancelled and mother and daughter went for a walk, to the West End to shop or to Hamp-stead to sketch. By the age of twelve Molly had never learned how to add currency – she had never even seen the symbols for pounds, shillings and pence.
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Mothers were the teachers in most houses, of their daughters for their entire school career, and their sons usually to the age of seven. Only the most prosperous could afford governesses. Our impression today is that all middle-class households had governesses for their children, but his impression is based on the aspirational nature of so much writing of the time. There were over 30,000 upper-class families by mid-century, with 25,000 governesses listed in the census of 1851. If we assume only half of these families had young children, that leaves a mere 10,000 governesses to be spread among the families of the 250,000 professional men listed in the 1851 census. Again, assume only half had young children. That is still only one governess for every twelve families, and that is not counting the many tens of thousands of clergy, prosperous merchants, bankers, businessmen, factory-owners, all of whom would have had equal call on this precious commodity.
Even where governesses were employed, teaching was not necessary any better. As Gwen Raverat said of her governess: ‘They were all kind, good, dull women; but even interesting lessons can be made incredibly stupid, when they are taught by people who are bored to death with them, and who do not care for the art of teaching either.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Charles Dickens’s portrait of Gradgrind, with his love of Facts, was not only a comic fiction: literature both high and low reflected this idea of education as chunks of information. Charlotte M. Yonge gave a vivid picture in The Daisy Chain (1856). There the children had a visiting French master who knew the language well and could tell Ethel, the clever child, when she had gone wrong, but he could not explain why. Ethel
did not like to … have no security against future errors; while he thought her a troublesome pupil, and was put out by her questions … Miss Winter [the governess] … summoned her to an examination such as the governess was very fond of and often practised. Ethel thought it useless … It was of this kind: –
What is the date of the invention of paper?
What is the latitude and longitude of Otaheite?
What are the component parts of brass?
Whence is cochineal imported?
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Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1857) spoke the same language as Miss Winter:
I learnt a little algebra, a little
Of the mathematics, – brushed with extreme flounce
The circle of the sciences …
I learnt the royal genealogies
Of Oviedo, the internal laws
Of the Burmese empire, – by how many feet
Mount Chimaborazo outsoars Teneriffe.
What navigable river joins itself
To Lara, and what census of the year five
Was taken at Klagenfurt, – because she liked
A general insight into useful facts.
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The Daisy Chain and Aurora Leigh both appeared in the mid-1850s. Many girls were still being taught the same things in the same way at the end of the century. Eleanor Farjeon, the children’s writer, remembered her schoolroom days in the 1890s:
Miss Milton taught us Spelling … and the Capitals of Europe, and Tables, and Dates. There was no magic in these things as she taught them …
‘What is the date of the Constitutions of Clarendon?’
‘Eleven-hundred-and-sixty-four.’
‘Quite right. You know that now.’
‘Yes, Miss Milton.’
But what exactly did I know, when I knew that? … I didn’t know what ‘Constitutions of Clarendon’ was. Was it to do with somebody’s health? Who was Clarendon? Or perhaps with the way red wine was made … What was Clarendon? Miss Milton never told me, and I never asked.
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Eleanor Farjeon did not come from a philistine background: her father was a successful author. His sons went to school, while his daughter was doomed to Miss Milton not because he was unkind, but because, as Louise Creighton said a quarter of a century before, ‘I do not think that such an idea was ever entertained.’
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Girls and boys, once past infancy and early childhood, received gender-based conditioning. An advertisement in the back of The Busy Hives All Around Us, a book for children, gave a list of some ‘Popular Illustrated Books’. Their titles are revealing. Girls got The Star of Hope and the Staff of Duty: Tales of Women’s Trials and Victories; Women of Worth; Friendly Hands and Kindly Words: Stories Illustrative of the Law of Kindness, the Power of Perseverance, and the Advantages of Little Helps. Boys got Men Who Have Risen; Noble Tales of Kingly Men; Small Beginnings: or, The Way to Get On.
(#litres_trial_promo) Even more startlingly at variance, since they were by the same author, Louisa Tuthill, were two books called I Will be a Lady: A Book for Girls and Get Money: A Book for Boys.
(#litres_trial_promo) Girls were to read of ‘duty’, ‘trials’, ‘perseverance’, which would make them ‘Women of Worth’. Boys read of ambition, achievement, success – their ‘nobility’ would be in accomplishment, not abnegation.
Boys left home early – they were mostly at school by the age of seven, if school could be afforded. Even a day school ensured that boys spent much of their time with other boys: they became socialized early. The reverse was true of girls: the more prosperous the family, the less likely girls were to leave its shelter. Instead they were encouraged to remain children as long as possible. Boys had their first emotional rupture, their first taste of the outside world, when they went to school, then a bigger rupture if they went to university or when they started work, by which time they were considered adult. Girls who did not need to go out to work had no break to mark their passing from childhood to adolescence: they were often children up until they married. Louise Creighton had barely been out for a walk alone until her marriage in her twenties – if she wanted to go anywhere she had to be accompanied by her governess; if the governess was not available she bribed her young brothers with sweets to go with her.
(#litres_trial_promo) In The Way We Live Now (1875) Trollope notes that ‘The young male bird is supposed to fly away from the paternal nest. But the daughter of a house is compelled to adhere to her father till she shall get a husband.’
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Yet women could not be sheltered for ever, although they remained hampered long into adult life by their home-made educations. Gwen Raverat’s mother plagued her family with her dim grip on basic numeracy:
My mother … insisted on keeping accounts down to every halfpenny; but no one, least of all herself, ever understood them … [A]fter my father’s death The Accounts became a constant menace to everyone in the family … It was so hopeless and so useless. It was impossible to add up one page without being dragged into the complications of all the other pages of all the other account books, which were used indiscriminately for everything. The only system was that every item had to be written down somewhere – on any scrap of paper, or any page of any account book; and then, from time to time, everything must be rounded up and added together in one enormous sum. Fortunately no odious deductions were drawn from the resulting total, as quite often the Credits had got mixed up with the Debits, and they had all been added up together.
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Fortunately for Mrs Darwin, she had married into a wealthy family, and the accounts were more form than content. For the much larger number of women who needed to work, a similar lack of basic education meant blighted lives. A pamphlet called A Choice of a Business for Girls, published in 1864, warned:
The power of making out a bill with great rapidity and perfect accuracy is also necessary, and this is the point where women usually fail. A poor half-educated girl keeps a customer waiting while she is trying to add up the bill, or perhaps does it wrong, and in either case excites reasonable displeasure. This displeasure is expressed to the master of the establishment, who dismisses the offender and engages a well-educated man in her place. He pays him double wages …
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John Ruskin spoke for many of the middle class when he set out his thoughts on the relative educational needs of men and women in his 1865 essay ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’:
[Woman’s] intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision … Her great function is Praise … All such knowledge should be given her as may enable her to understand, and even to aid, the work of men: and yet it should be given, not as knowledge, – not as if it were, or could be, for her an object to know; but only to feel, and to judge … Speaking broadly, a man ought to know any language or science he learns, thoroughly – while a woman ought to know the same language, or science, only so far as may enable her to sympathise in her husband’s pleasures, and in those of his best friends.
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His ideas were welcomed, and other reasons for the non-education of women were added. George Gissing, in many of his novels an ardent supporter of education for women, in others drew characters whose education encouraged them to move beyond their natural sphere, so that they committed the cardinal sin of not knowing their place, disrupting the ordered segregation of the world. In New Grub Street Dora and Maud, daughters of a vet, have the grave misfortune to attend a Girls’ High School, which gives them ‘an intellectual training wholly incompatible with the material conditions of their life’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Their intellectual station now no longer matches their income, and they therefore remain near-friendless, because their intellectual equals are their economic and social superiors, and they cannot meet on an equal footing.
It was not only the cost of an education that prevented girls from being sent to school. Constance Maynard came from a wealthy family, and her father was happy to spend money on his daughters in other ways, but when she was sixteen he ‘said he didn’t see why he should go on paying for an expensive school when I should do quite well at home with the three sisters above me who had been educated till they were eighteen’ and who could therefore pass along any extra education she needed. When she said she wanted to go to Girton, Cambridge’s newly created women’s college, he ‘offered to get me a new pony if I would give it up.’
(#litres_trial_promo) (She did not, and later became the founder of Westfield College.)
(#ulink_78d7c3e9-a1b4-5759-8867-a68cac473cd4) Schools were, many thought, breeders of disease, places of dubious, if not downright poor, morals, and, as Gwen Raverat noted, just ‘Bad’.
Even for girls who knew their place, social life imposed requirements which they could not fulfil while undergoing full-time education. Molly Hughes, aware that she was going to have to support herself, rushed with her friend to tell her parents that they had matriculated. She found the friend’s sister had brought her new baby for a visit, and ‘When we burst out with “We’ve passed the matriculation … we’re members of the University,” we received the response, “Yes, dears? … and did it love its granny den!”’ Molly’s brother grudgingly admitted that, as Molly’s fiance was not earning enough for them to marry on, she might as well work for a degree, adding, ‘Don’t work too hard.’
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That was the key. Girls and young women must not give their undivided attention to anything. Florence Nightingale, who certainly broke out of her family’s expectations, wrote an impassioned essay on the subject in 1852, when she was thirty-two. She thought it important enough to revise it seven years later, on her return from the Crimea. On the advice of her friend John Stuart Mill she did not attempt to publish it. A great advocate of women’s equality, he was none the less probably right: the anguish she felt was so nakedly apparent that she might have subsequently found it difficult to get men in power to take her health-care concerns seriously. She wrote:
How should we learn a language if we were to give it an hour a week? A fortnight’s steady application would make more way in it than a year of such patch-work. A ‘lady’ can hardly go to ‘her school’ two days running. She cannot leave the breakfast-table – or she must be fulfilling some little frivolous ‘duty’, which others ought not to exact, or which might just as well be done some other time …
If a man were to follow up his profession or occupation at odd times, how would he do it? Would he become skilful in that profession? It is acknowledged by women themselves that they are inferior in every occupation to men. Is it wonderful? They do everything at ‘odd times’ …
We can never pursue any object for a single two hours, for we can never command any regular leisure or solitude …
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All study had to give way to other members of the family – Maud Berkeley and her friends found that even practising the piano, that ladylike occupation par excellence, was difficult to achieve: ‘[My father] came in while I was hard at work on my arpeggios, to say he had just started a course of reading Plato and found he was vastly distracted by my music. Very difficult, attempting to be studious when each attempt brings only reproach … Heard from Lillian later that Mr Barnes made a similar protest.’
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Sarah Stickney Ellis, in The Daughters of England, was very firm. There was no point in educating women, because men had done everything before, and done it better. ‘What possible use’, she asked rhetorically, ‘can be the learning of dead languages?’ There were already translations available of all the major works, from which girls would ‘become more intimately acquainted with the spirit of the writer, and the customs of the time’ than they ever could by attempting to read works in the originals. Likewise, a girl need not study science more than superficially. A mere acquaintanceship would render her ‘more companionable to men’, because luckily ‘it should not be necessary for her to talk much, even on his favourite topics, in order to obtain his favour’. Knowledge was important only for a girl to be able ‘to listen attentively’, otherwise she would ‘destroy the satisfaction which most men feel in conversing with really intelligent women’.
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The Daisy Chain was enormously successful, and considered a very sound moral tale, helpful to young girls. Ethel, a bookish, hoydenish girl, is gradually brought to understand that the pinnacle of womanhood is in the renunciation of the use of her intelligence. At first she studies with her brother. He attends school, and passes on to her the gist of his lessons, which she is permitted to indulge herself with after she has performed such essentials as mending her frocks. However, by being clever and untidy and having no aptitude for household work, she will. Miss Winter fears, grow up ‘odd, eccentric and blue’. Soon her family decides that the time has come for her to stop studying Latin and Greek. Her brother, who has been her champion, agrees: ‘I assure you, Ethel, it is really time for you to stop, or you would get into a regular learned lady, and be good for nothing.’ So Ethel gives up all her aspirations, and crowns the sacrifice (which she now thinks of as a triumph) by finding pleasure instead in stitching up her brother’s Newdigate Prize submission in Balliol colours.
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Girls who were not prepared to give up all personal aspirations, as Ethel had done so cheerfully, had other reasons to desist from serious study. Education for adolescent girls was a serious health risk, they were warned. The educator Elizabeth Missing Sewell’s Principles of Education, Drawn from Nature and Revelation was concerned with the upper classes, but she pointed out universal truths:
[A boy] has been riding, and boating, and playing cricket, and both body and mind have been roused to energy; and so, when he comes to study, he has a sense of power, which acts mentally as well as physically, and enables him to grasp difficulties, and master them. The girl, on the contrary, has been guarded from over fatigue, subject to restrictions with regard to cold and heat, and hours of study, seldom trusted away from home, allowed only a small share of responsibility; – not willingly, with any wish to thwart her inclinations – but simply because, if she is not thus guarded, if she is allowed to run the risks, which, to the boy, are a matter of indifference, she will probably develop some disease, which, if not fatal, will, at any rate, be an injury to her for life.
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Dr James Burnett, in Delicate, Backward, Puny and Stunted Children (1895), assured his readers that a girl would, at puberty, always fall behind her brothers in academic achievement: her ‘disordered pelvic life’ guaranteed that she ‘must necessarily be in ill-health more or less [ever after] … Not one exception to this have I ever seen.’
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Despite this consensus, many popular novelists deplored the lack of female education: Dickens, Thackeray and also Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot painted vivid pictures of the resulting misery of ignorance, for both sexes. Jeannette Marshall’s father, a surgeon and Professor of Anatomy at the Royal Academy, encouraged his daughters to attend lectures at University College. He even hoped they would sit exams. They refused to do the latter, and attended few lectures. It was not surprising. From the schoolroom onwards, girls were never tested, never matched against others, never socialized in any form. Jeannette and her sister Ada managed one term before the requirements of their social life supervened: they had made no friends with any of the other women attending the college; from Jeannette’s diary, it is not clear that they ever learned any of their names. For Jeannette, education was a matter of passing the time – she studied algebra in late adolescence as ‘a cure for boredom’ – or, more importantly, of prestige. She had piano lessons with the well-known pianist (and founder of the English Wagner Society) Edward Dannreuther, and noted of some new acquaintances, ‘I went up 100 per cent in their estimation when they heard Mr. Dannreuther was my [music] master. A good card to play!’
(#litres_trial_promo) Jeannette enjoyed her music, and intermittently worked hard at it, while she never became one of those women condemned by the author of Maternal Counsels to a Daughter. ‘Who would wish a wife or a daughter, moving in private society, to have attained such excellence in music as involves a life’s devotion to it?’
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Ignorance was, in many ways, a desirable state. Knowledge was burdensome, and could overwhelm those unable to bear its weight. Mrs Gaskell worried about sending the toddler Marianne to school, where ‘she may meet with children who may teach her the meaning of things of which at present we desire to keep her ignorant’.
(#litres_trial_promo) This need to protect girls from knowledge did not grow less when they became adult. Half a century after Mrs Gaskell expressed her anxiety, Gissing depicted his characters arguing about the same subject. Monica, a woman who had been forced to marry for economic security, disagreed with her new husband on whether or not a mutual friend was ‘nice’ for her to know. He responded:
‘… In your ignorance of the world’ –
‘Which you think very proper in a woman,’ she interrupted caustically.
‘Yes, I do! That kind of knowledge is harmful to a woman.’
‘Then, please, how is she to judge her acquaintances?’
‘A married woman must accept her husband’s opinion, at all events about men.’ He plunged on into the ancient quagmire. ‘A man may know with impunity what is injurious if it enters a woman’s mind.’
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Knowledge of a fact could corrupt not because of the fact itself, but because of the gender of the mind it resided in. This was not to say that girls and women were expected to know nothing. It was just that their accomplishments and abilities were important in reactive ways: as Mrs Ellis said earlier, girls needed to know enough about science so that they could look intelligent while men talked. Equally, girls should be able to play the piano, not for the pleasure derived from music, but because it was useful. Mrs Panton thought that girls’ natural reason for learning to play the piano was ‘because they can be useful either to accompany songs and glees or to play dance-music’,
(#litres_trial_promo) not love of music. Nearly half a century later the function of a daughter had not altered: ‘it is the daughter’s privilege … to act the part of sympathiser and interested listener in the home circle. No other claim is greater.’
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Girls were only to respond to others, not have thoughts of their own. It took Molly Hughes some time before her place as a reactive rather than an active family member became clear to her:
the family pooled what gossip they had got from school … discussing future plans and telling the latest jokes … I, as the youngest, seldom got a word in and was often snubbed when I did. Thus, after venturing, ‘I did well in French today’, I had the chilling reminder from [her brother] Charles, ‘Self-praise is no recommendation.’ If I related a joke, ‘We’ve heard that before’ would come as a chorus. Once when I confided to Dym [another brother] that we had begun America, he called out, ‘I say, boys, at Molly’s school they’ve just discovered America.’
That kidnap victims take on the ideology of their captors in order to survive is a well-known psychological effect, called the Stockholm Syndrome. Molly Hughes was a prime example. She used the word ‘chilling’ for her brother’s crushing retort, but she little appeared to recognize quite how chilling the scene related above was. She ended, ‘In short, I was wisely neglected’, and confided that ‘I tried to carry out the wishes of these my household gods by being as ordinary and as little conspicuous as I could.’
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Felix and Henrietta Carbury, the brother and sister in Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, showed similar characteristics, albeit heightened for fictional purposes. Felix Carbury was a wastrel who had run through his inheritance and was now battening on his mother, who could ill afford to support herself and her daughter. Henrietta, however,
had been taught by the conduct of both father and mother that every vice might be forgiven in a man and in a son, though every virtue was expected from a woman, and especially from a daughter. The lesson had come to her so early in life that she had learned it without the feeling of any grievance … That all her interests in life should be made subservient to him was natural to her; and when she found that her little comforts were discontinued, and her moderate expenses were curtailed because he, having eaten up all that was his own, was now eating up also all that was her mother’s, she never complained.
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This deference to men was not a single hierarchical one: fathers at the top of the family pyramid, mothers next by virtue of authority vested in them by their husbands, and children at the bottom. The children were in their own little pyramid too, with boys, of whatever age, above girls. Eleanor Farjeon spelled it out:
Whatever pains and penalties, whatever joys and pleasures, were dispensed to us by the parental powers in the Dining-room and Drawing-room … in the Nursery there was one Law-Giver who made the Laws: our eldest brother Harry.
… he invented rules and codes with Spartan strictness; if they were to be enforced, he enforced them; if relaxed, only he might relax them …
In our Nursery he exemplified Plato’s ‘benevolent despotism’ with so much benignity, entertainment, and impartiality, that we began life by accepting it without question.
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The last sentence implied that Farjeon grew out of her deference. Molly Hughes, when she came to write her autobiography nearly half a century after the events described, still thought her family’s viewpoint was reasonable: ‘I suppose there was a fear on my mother’s part that I should be spoilt, for I was two years younger than the youngest boy. To prevent this danger she proclaimed the rule “Boys first”. I came last in all distribution of food at table, treats of sweets, and so on. I was expected to wait on the boys, run messages, fetch things left upstairs, and never grumble, let alone refuse.’ Yet even after all those years she tried to rationalize their behaviour. ‘All this I thoroughly enjoyed, because I loved running about.’ And surely it must have been all right, because, after all, ‘The boys never failed to smile their thanks, call me “good girl” …’ She was unable to distinguish between herself and her captors: ‘We were given a room to ourselves – all to ourselves.’ In it ‘there were four shelves, and … each [of the four boys] had one to himself.’ It did not even cross her mind that she alone had not got a shelf. Furthermore she was allowed to enter this room that was ‘ours’ only with the permission of her brothers, and for the most part she spent her afternoons alone in her bedroom.
(#litres_trial_promo) Laura Forster noted the same isolation: ‘The boys could and did come into the nursery when they liked, but they never played there or stayed long, whilst I had no other room open to me, except by special invitation [from them], until the evening, when we all went down to my parents.’
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The responsibilities for a girl were more onerous too. Laura, as the oldest girl, looked after the younger children in the nursery, staying there longer than was customary because the nursemaid ‘said I could not be spared, and Miss Maber, who taught my three eldest brothers, avowedly cared only for boys and would not accept me in the school-room’.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was a given that girls waited on their brothers: Louise Creighton, as a younger sister, only once had the ‘privilege usually reserved to the elder ones of getting up early on the Monday to give the boys their breakfast before they went back to school’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Constance Maynard and her sister were also expected to defer to their eldest brother. (As they referred to him as ‘The Fatted Calf’, it appeared that they had perhaps not accepted their subordinate role in quite the way they were expected to.)
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These were mostly girls from upper-middle-class families with no shortage of money. They were expected to perform services for their brothers not because there was no one else to do it, but because that was what girls did. Slightly down the social scale, as Molly Hughes’s experiences showed, things were no different. Helena Sickert, the sister of the artist Walter Sickert, went to day school, as did her brothers. In the afternoons, after homework was finished, the boys were allowed to play, while she ‘very often had to mend their clothes; sort their linen, and wash their brushes and combs’.
(#litres_trial_promo) And the lower-middle-class girl had more responsibilities yet. Hertha Ayrton was born Sarah Marks, the daughter of a clockmaker and a sempstress.
(#ulink_91ff09f6-e603-534d-8c47-d7c6302c21f5) Sarah/Hertha made all of her younger brothers’ clothes and took care of the boys so that her mother could take in needlework to support them after the death of her husband.
(#litres_trial_promo) Alice Wichelo, known as Lily, was the eldest of ten children (and later the mother of E. M. Forster); her father was a drawing master who had died young. By 1872, when she was seventeen, Lily had taken her youngest brother to Tunbridge Wells alone, finding a childminder to look after him and settling him in lodgings.
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It was not that all experiences of all girls were the same, but rather that the received ideas bred an attitude that many aspired to: to be the comfort-giver, whose primary function was to ensure the smooth running of the home, for the benefit of he who financed it. The engine room of this comfortable ship was the kitchen.
* (#ulink_8ebd7b69-f888-5ca2-a6df-516b7d912b0a) No one, however, can trump Augustus Hare’s parents, but as an upper-class child he can only (just) be accommodated in a footnote. Hare’s uncle, also an Augustus Hare, died shortly before his godson-to-be was born; his widow, Maria, stood god-mother instead, and she tentatively asked his parents if she could perhaps have the child to stay for a while. The answer to her letter was immediate: ‘My dear Maria, how very kind of you! Yes, certainly, the baby shall be sent as soon as it is weaned; and if anyone else would like one, would you kindly recollect that we have others.’ Maria Hare cared for him for the rest of her life, and he called her his mother.
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* (#ulink_a4fb3287-b769-53d1-9ff2-ed20291571b1) Not, please note, the mother. The wicked or incompetent servant loomed large in the minds of the middle classes. Mrs Warren told of a nursemaid who caused a child’s death by taking the child out when she was told not to. Mrs Beeton warned that the mother should learn to distinguish the different cries of her child, ‘that she may be able to guard her child from the nefarious practices of unprincipled nurses, who, while calming the mother’s mind with false statements as to the character of the baby’s cries, rather than lose their rest, or devote that time which would remove the cause of suffering, administer, behind the curtains, those deadly narcotics which, while stupefying Nature into sleep, insure for herself a night of many unbroken hours’. See a larger discussion on servants and their employers’ fears on pp. 111ff., 115–17.
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† (#ulink_c4882d6b-9013-56ff-8c8c-7daa135eec44) Ipecacuanha and calomel were used with ruthless regularity in Victorian households. Ipecac, as it was commonly called, was a powdered root, and functioned as an emetic, causing vomiting. Calomel, made of mercury chloride, was a purgative. Both were used routinely in attempts to ‘expel’ various illnesses.
* (#ulink_2bbbd155-fc3f-54b9-80fe-e2ea49e217d8) Gutta-percha was produced from the sap of the Isonandra gutta tree, native to Indonesia. When vulcanized, it acted as a waterproofing, insulating material, much as we used rubber and now use plastic. It first appeared in Britain in the 1840s, becoming widely used for, among other items, hot-water bottles, golf balls and the insulating cover for the first transatlantic telegraph cable.
* (#ulink_541476ea-2f9f-5b72-98b5-fe4b897f97b2) When she did go into detail, it is hard to imagine that some of her ideas could have been considered seriously: her children’s piano lessons consisted of playing only scales and finger exercises, with the occasional ‘sacred piece’ but no other tunes, for seven years. She did admit that this regime was ‘inexpressible weariness’, but its very wearying nature promoted discipline and was therefore to be encouraged. She also taught children drawing by letting them draw only straight lines, and then curved ones, for more than a year. It was lucky for these children that they were merely fictional devices, as real children must surely have ended up running amok.
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† (#ulink_86493665-4438-5c0b-9c13-da20fb4a6a24) Religious education, even in houses a great deal more observant than the Hughes’, was often not much more successful. Mary Jane Bradley, the wife of a clergyman, prayed every morning, first by herself, then with Wa, then with the maids (note the careful segregation). When Wa was two and a half she worried that he did not appear ‘capable of understanding the idea of God and Christ being the same’. A year later he had, she thought, understood the idea of the Resurrection; then he asked her if God would come back as a stuffed rabbit. The three-year-old appeared to understand some things better than his mother, however. On being told to thank God for his blessings, he asked why God did not give the same blessings to ‘poor little beggar boys’. She replied: ‘we know that it’s right because God does it.’
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* (#ulink_a2ac2480-2e28-558c-960a-4e723a941d33) This Guide to Science was written by the author of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fables.
* (#ulink_80c0a90a-870e-52d5-a5df-de151d325aef) The college, now part of the University of London, merged with another college and was known as Queen Mary and Westfield College; two years ago it was ‘rebranded’ as Queen Mary College.
* (#ulink_85d4b740-f0db-572d-8c2f-f9a83171c5ab) One exception whom he saw fairly regularly, but must have somehow overlooked, was his daughter. Ivy Compton-Burnett. It may be significant that her career as a novelist did not take off until after a major breakdown decades after his death, and one looks again at her gallery of tyrannical parents. (It should be noted that, although Dr Burnett was a homoeopath, his opinions coincided in this matter with those of his more conventional medical brethren.)
* (#ulink_26061439-e7e8-5fed-9f7e-8a79690ee560) Ayrton read mathematics at Girton, with her tuition paid for by George Eliot. In 1899 she was the first woman member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers.
† (#ulink_26061439-e7e8-5fed-9f7e-8a79690ee560) Compare this to Louise Creighton, p. 51.
3 (#ulink_c08bb386-8f8a-5e00-9ad7-62c94e933981)
THE KITCHEN (#ulink_c08bb386-8f8a-5e00-9ad7-62c94e933981)
VICTORIANS LIKED THEIR ROOMS to be single-purpose, where we often see a multiplicity of function in our own usage. The kitchen is one of the few rooms we today would think of as single-purpose, or at most dual-purpose (cooking and eating).
(#litres_trial_promo) The Victorian ideal held that the kitchen was for cookery only, with food storage, food preparation and dishwashing going on in, respectively, the storeroom and larder, the scullery, and the scullery or pantry, depending on the type of dish and the level of dirt. The reality in most middle-class houses was that the kitchen performed a wide range of functions. Many of the middle classes with one servant, in four-to-six-room houses, had only the kitchen for her to sleep in. (In houses this size, it was always a ‘her’: menservants were for the wealthy.) Larger houses still did not necessarily mean the kitchen was for cooking only: larger houses meant a larger staff, and the kitchen remained a bedroom to many. Less prosperous householders used the kitchen themselves: Snagsby, the law-stationer in Bleak House, used the front kitchen as the family sitting room, while ‘Guster’, his workhouse maid-of-all-work, slept in the back kitchen, or scullery.
Bedroom, kitchen, sitting room: many uses, although it was usually the least regarded room of the house. The desire for separation meant that an often small space had even smaller portions cut out from it, to keep essential functions apart: a scullery, with running water, was for any food preparation that made a mess – cleaning fish, preparing vegetables – and for scouring pots and pans; a pantry was for storing china and glass, and silver if there was any, and it had a sink where these things were washed or polished; a larder was for fresh-food storage; a storeroom was for dried goods and cleaning equipment. Each separate room, in the ideal home, had a different type of sink: the scullery had a sink, or better yet two, for cleaning food and washing pots; the pantry sink was of wood lined with lead, to prevent the glass and crockery chipping. If there was a housemaids’ cupboard upstairs, for storing cleaning equipment, it too had a lead-lined wood sink, so that bedroom ware was not chipped, and a separate slop sink, where chamber pots were emptied. (It looked like a lavatory pan, but was higher, and was also lead-lined.)
(#litres_trial_promo) In addition, after indoor sanitation arrived, the servants often had their own lavatory downstairs – not for their convenience, but to ensure that they did not use the family lavatory upstairs.
This was, however, only the ideal. The actuality was often a dark, miserable basement, running with damp. The scullery might be a passageway off the kitchen, with the lavatory installed in it. The pantry was a china closet, the storeroom another cupboard, kept locked; the larder yet another, rather hopefully installed as far away as possible from the kitchen range, which, as it supplied the household’s hot water, blasted out heat all the year round for up to eighteen hours a day. Below ground, the kitchen received little if any light from the area.
(#litres_trial_promo) The gas burned all day, with at best a small window near the ceiling to remove the fumes. Often no windows were possible, and air bricks and other ventilation devices were the most that could be hoped for. In this miasma of cooking and gas, the servant unfolded her bedding to sleep after the day’s work was over.
This was what Dickens had in mind for the kitchen belonging to Sampson and Sally Brass, the unscrupulous solicitor and his sister in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841): ‘a very dark miserable place, very low and very damp, the walls disfigured by a thousand rents and blotches’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Dickens was showing the turpitude of the household’s occupants through the house itself, but Arnold Bennett’s kitchen of the 1860s and 1870s, belonging to the entirely upright Baines family in The Old Wives’ Tale, was an only marginally more salubrious version of the same thing:
Forget-me-nots on a brown field ornamented the walls of the kitchen. Its ceiling was irregular and grimy, and a beam ran across it … A large range stood out from the wall between the stairs and the window. The rest of the furniture comprised a table – against the wall opposite the range – a cupboard, and two Windsor chairs. Opposite the foot of the steps was a doorway, without a door, leading to two larders, dimmer even than the kitchen, vague retreats made visible by whitewash, where bowls of milk, dishes of cold bones, and remainders of fruit-pies, reposed.
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There was a coal cellar which contained the tap – the only running water – and another cellar where coke for the range was kept and ashes were stored awaiting collection twice or thrice a year by the dustman.
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Arthur Munby, the civil servant, had a long-term relationship with a maid-of-all-work named Hannah Cullwick. (They eventually married.) He was sexually aroused by the idea of working-class women, and spent a great deal of time talking to working women he approached on the streets. (They were all ‘good’ women – he seemed to have no interest in prostitutes.) Despite the unusual nature of his interest, the fact remains that because of it he had far more knowledge of their working conditions than many of the middle class. Even he was shocked when once he saw Hannah in the kitchen of the house in Kilburn where she was employed as maid-of-all-work to an upholsterer and his family:
She stood at a sink behind a wooden dresser backed with choppers and stained with blood and grease, upon which were piles of coppers and saucepans that she had to scour, piles of dirty dishes that she had to wash. Her frock, her cap, her face and arms were more or less wet, soiled, perspiring and her apron was a filthy piece of sacking, wet and tied round her with a cord. The den where she wrought was low, damp, ill-smelling; windowless, lighted by a flaring gas-jet; and, full in view, she had on one side a larder hung with raw meat, on the other a common urinal; besides the many ugly, dirty implements around her.
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A roasting jack, which was fixed either to the top of a meat-screen (p. 66) or the mantelpiece. This is a bottle-jack, with a clockwork mechanism to turn the meat in front of the fire.
It was generally recommended that kitchen floors be covered in linoleum, for easy cleaning, often laid over a cement base to foil the vermin.
(#litres_trial_promo) Mrs Panton suggested that ‘if the cook is careful … she should be given a rug, or good square of carpet … to put down when her work is done’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The carpet could not be permanently on the floor, for hygienic reasons. It is hard to imagine that after a long day’s work in the conditions described above the thing Hannah Cullwick most wanted to do was unroll a carpet. Anyway, there were rarely upholstered chairs in a kitchen, as only wood survived the steam and mess of an active kitchen, so she would have had no place to sit comfortably.
The labour, steam and dirt all centred around the kitchen range. The closed range was the first technical development in Britain to move beyond cooking over an open fire. It appeared at the beginning of the century, although it took decades before it was commonly in use. Wemmick, in his ‘castle’ in Great Expectations, was still cooking with ‘a saucepan on the hob, and a brazen bijou over the fireplace designed for the suspension of a roasting-jack’.
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(#litres_trial_promo) There were many styles of range, but the main features of all of them were an oven or ovens, with a boiler to heat water. Both were operated by means of a fire fuelled by coke, which generated heat that was transmitted by flues and modified by dampers. By the 1840s The English Housekeeper was advising its readers on the benefits of the range: ‘It is a great convenience to have a constant supply of hot water, and an advantage to possess the means of baking a pie, pudding or cake.’
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(#litres_trial_promo) The early models had boilers that had to be filled by hand, and if the water level got too low the boiler cracked; later they became self-filling, with a tap to draw off hot water for use, and a stopcock for controlling inflow from the mains.
By the 1860s the ‘improved’ kitcheners which Mrs Beeton recommended had hotplates, to keep soups simmering, or other items warm, and also to heat irons (see pp. 128–9), as well as a roaster with the kind of movable shelves we now expect, which could be converted from an open to a closed oven by moving valves, when it was used for baking. These ranges cost from £5 15s. to £23 10s.
(#litres_trial_promo) One of the major advantages, apart from constant hot water, was that soot no longer fell into the food while it was in the oven, although it could still come down the chimney and fall into the saucepans. Soot in food remained a major problem. Most recipe books of the day constantly reiterate the need for ‘a very clean saucepan’ and ‘a scrupulously clean pan’: it is difficult to remember that cooking over an open fire meant scorched, sooty pots every time. There was still no temperature control. (A legacy of this is the continuing reputation for being ‘difficult’ of dishes that today, with modern equipment, are really very straightforward – souffles, for example.) Instead, recipes called for ‘a bright fire’ or ‘a good soaking heat’, or a fire that was ‘not too fierce’.
This has an integrated chimney, instead of the range being built into the old fireplace (p. 66). The boiler, with a tap to draw off the hot water, takes up the right hand side, the oven the left.
Closed stoves or kitcheners were said to use less fuel than open ranges, but this was always qualified by ‘if managed well’,
(#litres_trial_promo) which probably meant they did not in practice. For those who could not afford an oven, or where the space was not available, ‘Dutch ovens’ were frequently recommended – small brick devices which held charcoal, and were mounted on four short legs. On top was a trivet where a saucepan could be placed. The advice books – again in flights of imagination – suggested that even jam could be made on these early versions of camp stoves, or ‘a light pudding or a small pie may be baked’, adding cautiously ‘with care’, which, again, probably indicated it was either difficult or impossible.
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Surprisingly, given the primary means of light in mid- to late-Victorian houses, gas cookers were rarely used: they were available from the 1880s, but were considered too expensive for the amount of cooking needed to feed a whole family. They also had no boilers, as ranges did. As constant hot water was one of the major improvements produced by ranges, this was a serious drawback. Alternative methods of heating water had to be found, but none was as satisfactory. (See p. 287.) Some houses, where the kitchen was particularly small, used a gas stove in the summer to avoid having to light the range in hot weather, although this was not common, mostly because it cut off the hot-water supply.
Kitchen ranges and fires for heating throughout the house, together with London’s foggy climate, ensured that London was filthy, inside and out. Dr John Simon, London’s first medical officer, noted in Paris the ‘transparence of air, the comparative brightness of all colour, the visibility of distant objects, the cleanliness of faces and buildings, instead of our opaque atmosphere, deadened colours, obscured distance, smutted faces and black architecture.’ Approaching London from the suburbs, ‘one may observe the total result of this gigantic nuisance hanging over the City like a pall.’
(#litres_trial_promo) This gloom was not caused by climate alone. When Sherlock Holmes and Watson went to investigate a crime in a small semi-detached house in Brixton, there was no fog, no rain, and it was midday. The Scotland Yard detective wanted to show them something: ‘He struck a match on his boot and held it up against the wall … Across the bare space there was scrawled in blood-red letters a single word.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Without the match, in daylight alone, they could not see the red word painted on a wall. Granted this was for dramatic effect in fiction, yet its readers did not appear to find it remarkable.
It was coal that created this menace, and this was formally recognized in 1882, when the Smoke Abatement Exhibition was staged. It displayed fireplaces, stoves and other heating systems that attempted to deal with this nuisance, but for decades to come housekeepers simply had to accept that soot and ‘blacks’ were part of their daily life. Latches to doors – both street and inner doors – had a small plate or curtain fitted over the keyhole to keep out dirt.
(#litres_trial_promo) Plants were kept on window sills to trap the dust as it flew in; or housewives nailed muslin across the windows to stop the soot, or only opened windows from the top, which diminished the amount that entered.
(#litres_trial_promo) Tablecloths were laid just before a meal, as otherwise dust settled from the fire and they became dingy in a matter of hours.
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Fireplaces were expensive and time-consuming, as well as dirty. The Carlyles, who had no children, and therefore had to keep fewer rooms heated, burned a ton of coal every month, costing £1 9s. per ton.
(#litres_trial_promo) In large houses, one servant could spend her entire day looking after only the fires and lights.
(#litres_trial_promo) After all this, it is odd to note not only that fireplaces were not a particularly efficient form of heating, but that most of those who specialized in heating knew it, too. In the eighteenth century Count Rumford had developed improvements to fireplaces, which now reflected the heat out into the room rather than it disappearing up the chimney. These were fairly common by the mid nineteenth century, yet this was only a small improvement: most of the heat was still drawn up the flue by the drafts which allowed the fire to burn. It did not seem to matter: the idea of the fire, its importance as the focus and symbol of the home, surmounted its more obvious drawbacks. As the architect Robert Kerr noted, ‘for a Sitting-room, keeping in view the English climate and habits, a fireside is of all considerations practically the most important. No such apartment can pass muster with domestic critics unless there be convenient space for a wide circle of persons round the fire.’
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Shirley Forster Murphy ran through the options, including German closed stoves and American steam heat. He agreed that fireplaces were the least efficient system, although he rejected German stoves as dangerous, because they did not provide the ventilation that chimneys did. (It did not occur to him that the entire German population had not yet died of asphyxiation.) He summed up, ‘The open fire has this advantage, that one man may warm himself at it and get as close to it as he likes, and another may keep away from its rays, and yet to be in the society of those who profit by its heat. In a room heated by stove-pipes or warmed air this is not so.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He was only one of many who thought that being half burnt, half frozen was a positive feature of the English system. The architect C.J. Richardson, in his influential Englishman’s House, thought that, despite the fact that ‘We are warmed on one side and chilled on the other’, ‘neither … is too great to bear’. He condemned stoves, saying that they heated rather than warmed the air, which ‘is very different from the honest puff of smoke from an English fireplace’. He never explained this difference, but one feels that it was perhaps the foreignness of the stove which made it ‘not liked’. He certainly felt no need to elaborate further.
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As with many aspects of the home it may be that, because the upper classes could afford large, constant fires, and had enough people to look after them, those beneath them attempted the style, without the substance to maintain it, while telling themselves it was healthy. Many books reiterated that rooms that were too warm were ‘enervating’, they sapped energy. Mrs Caddy said that ‘it is not a healthy practice to heat the passages of a house’, and a warm bedroom ‘prevents sleep’.
(#litres_trial_promo) A writer on eye diseases was positive that sleeping in ‘over-heated and unventilated rooms’ was a leading cause of near-sightedness.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was perhaps a miracle anyone was near-sighted at all, if this was the case – Shirley Forster Murphy thought 50°F right for a bedroom; the Modern Householder suggested that perhaps 60°F was more comfortable to invalids, but warned that ‘unless great care be taken, it will easily fall below this’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Marion and Linley Sambourne had an income putting them at the very top of the upper middle classes (often £2000 a year), and even they tended to have only four or five fires burning regularly (probably the kitchen, drawing room and dining room, with either the morning room or the nursery). They never had a fire in their bedroom, and Marion’s diary was full of entries such as ‘Bitt
cold, had to keep shawl on all evening’; ‘Lin & self breakfasted in bed … Lin’s bath frozen …’
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Rooms were much colder than we now expect, and various methods were used to keep warm. The girls in The Old Wives’ Tale had heated bricks to put their feet on, and wore knitted wraps around their shoulders.
(#litres_trial_promo) Curtains across doorways were not solely to indulge the contemporary taste for drapery: they also prevented draughts.
(#litres_trial_promo) Louise Creighton and her sisters warmed themselves in front of their governess’s fire before going to bed: ‘We had flannel bags to keep our feet warm … & these were made as hot as possible by the fire & then rolled up tight under our arms when at the last minute we made a dash for bed.’
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All the fireplaces had to be cleaned daily, not just by removing the ashes, but by ensuring that the grate was kept shining by rubbing it with a dry leather, together with the fender and the fender irons. If rust appeared, then emery paper was used to rub it off, before blacklead, a paste-like substance, was applied, buffed with a blacklead brush and then polished to a shine. The kitchen range had to be cleaned even more thoroughly, otherwise the heated metal conveyed the smell of scorched fat and burning iron throughout the house. To clean a range, the fender and fire-irons first had to be removed. Then damp tea leaves were scattered over the fuel, to keep the dust down while the cleaning was in process. The ashes and cinders were raked out, and the cinders were sifted. Cinders were pieces of coal that had stopped giving off flames, but still had some combustible material left in them. Thrifty housewives riddled their cinders: they sifted the rakings of all the fireplaces to separate the cinders from the unusable ash. The ash was set aside to be collected by the dustmen, and the cinders from all the fireplaces were reused in the kitchen range. A tin cinder bucket with a wire sieve inside the lid was part of the housemaid’s stock equipment. Then the flues were cleaned and the grease was scraped off the stove. The steel part was polished with bathbrick, powdered brick which was used as an abrasive,
(#litres_trial_promo) and paraffin; the iron parts were black-leaded and polished. In a house with one or two servants, the oven was swept and the blackleading applied only to the bars and front every day; the rest was cleaned twice a week. If there were more servants, the whole thing was done every day, including scraping out the oven and rinsing it with vinegar and water.
The kitchen range had to be large enough to cook meals for the mid-Victorian family, which might often contain a dozen people. The Marshalls had only four children, but with servants there were ten of them. Even the Sambournes, with a late-Victorian two children, were often eight at home – parents and children, Linley Sambourne’s mother, who stayed for months at a time, and three servants. Lower down the scale there were fewer servants to feed, which also meant there were fewer to do the work.
The Modern Householder in 1872 gave the following list of necessities for ‘Cheap Kitchen Furniture’:
open range, fender, fire irons; 1 deal table; bracket of deal to be fastened to the wall, and let down when wanted; wooden chair; floor canvas; coarse canvas to lay before the fire when cooking; wooden tub for washing glass and china; large earthenware pan for washing plates; small zinc basin for washing hands; 2 washing-tubs;
(#litres_trial_promo) clothesline; clothes horse; yellow bowl for mixing dough; wooden salt-box to hang up; small coffee mill; plate rack; knife-board;
(#litres_trial_promo) large brown earthenware pan for bread; small wooden flour kit; 3 flat irons, an Italian iron, and iron stand; old blanket for ironing on; 2 tin candlesticks, snuffers, extinguishers; 2 blacking brushes, 1 scrubbing brush; 1 carpet broom, 1 short-handled broom; cinder-sifter, dustpan, sieve, bucket; patent digester; tea kettle; toasting fork; bread grater; bottle jack (a screen can be made with the clothes-horse covered with sheets); set of skewers; meat chopper; block-tin butter saucepan; colander; 3 iron saucepans; 1 iron boiling pot; 1 fish kettle; 1 flour dredger; 1 frying pan; 1 hanging gridiron; salt and pepper boxes; rolling pin and pasteboard; 12 patty pans; 1 larger tin pan; pair of scales; baking dish.
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While this list appears to a modern eye to be extraordinarily long, by contemporary standards it was fairly compact. Mrs Haweis gave ‘An useful [sic] little kitchen list for a very small household’ which comprised 109 items, not including cutlery or dishes. Among the brushes for her little list were sets of stove brushes, boot brushes and scrub brushes, a brass (or fibre) brush, a hair broom, a carpet broom, a sweep’s broom and a broom for the banisters, none of which could serve any other purpose.
(#litres_trial_promo) However much space all this took up, the total cost was under £10, so it was possibly not unreasonable for many middle-class couples setting up house.
A showcard displaying goods for the well-stocked kitchen. The interior of the meat-screen with its jack can be seen on the left. Note the half-dozen types of brushes on the right.
The important thing was to have the tools to keep the house clean. In the bedroom the fight against vermin was a skirmish; in the kitchen it was total war. The plagues that infested Victorian houses have been so effectively controlled for the last hundred years that for the most part we have forgotten them. For us, mice and rats are the first thought at the word ‘vermin’; for the Victorians it was bugs: blackbeetles, fleas, even crickets. If the struggle against them was not waged with commitment and constancy, they would ‘multiply till the kitchen floor at night palpitates with a living carpet, and in time the family cockroach will make raids on the upper rooms, travelling along the line of hot water pipes … the beetles would collect in corners of the kitchen ceiling, and hanging to one another by their claws, would form huge bunches or swarms like bees towards evening and as night closed in, swarthy individuals would drop singly on to the floor, or head, or food …’
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The only way to get rid of these creatures was to stop all holes with cement, replace old, crumbling mortar with more cement, use carbolic acid in the scrubbing water when cleaning, and pour more carbolic through cracks in the floor every day. Mrs Haweis did not object to rats and mice, which she thought were ‘nice, pretty, clever little things … They … are our friends, acting as scavengers, and are to me in no wise repugnant.’
(#litres_trial_promo) For those who did not agree, traps were recommended, plus a hungry cat. Cassell’s Household Guide thought traps superior to arsenic, as the poisoned mice made a terrible smell if they died under the flooring or behind the skirting. (As an afterthought the author worried that children or animals might get at the arsenic, but this was very much secondary to the smell, which was thought to bring disease.)
(#litres_trial_promo)Our Homes suggested keeping a hedgehog to eat the insects; others were scornful of this – the amount a hedgehog ate could not begin to affect the living carpet that Beatrix Potter’s servants found at her grandmother’s house when they visited in the summer of 1886: the first night they were there, the maids had to sit on the kitchen table, as the floor heaved with cockroaches.
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The war against vermin was fought for three reasons: hygiene, status and (contingent on status) morality. Health reformers battled to convey the new information that cleanliness foiled disease. In addition, the rise of mass production gave many access to objects that only a few could have acquired earlier. Therefore the status markers moved on from the now less-expensive accumulation of possessions to another, more expensive and time-consuming, preoccupation: keeping clean. Respectability was signalled by many flourishes that did not make the house any cleaner, but indicated that here was a decent household. George Godwin, an architect, editor of The Builder magazine, and promoter of sanitary housing for the poor, stressed that ‘the health and morals of the people are regulated by their dwellings’:
(#litres_trial_promo) decent houses produced decent people, not the other way around. He was not alone in this belief. Dr Southwood Smith, in Recreations of a Country Parson (1861), had no doubt that
A clean, fresh, and well-ordered house exercises over its inmates a moral, no less than a physical influence, and has a direct tendency to make the members of the family sober, peaceable, and considerate of the feelings and happiness of each other; nor is it difficult to trace a connexion between habitual feelings of this sort and the formation of habits of respect for property, for the laws in general, and even for those higher duties and obligations the observance of which no laws can enforce.
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Expressions that reflected this idea became commonplace. It was John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, who first said that ‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness’: an idea that before the nineteenth century would simply have made no sense. Good Methodists, and soon the general population, had a moral as well as physical duty to clean their houses. Thus tasks like blackleading the grates and whitening the front steps, which made the grates and the steps no cleaner than they had been before, were important in that they were time-consuming, had to be repeated daily, and therefore indicated that the householders were serious in their commitment. Front steps had to be rewhitened every morning. Whiting was made up of size, ‘stone blue’ (a bleaching agent), whitening and pipeclay. The stones were swept, scrubbed with water, and then covered with this mixture. When it was dry they were rubbed with a flannel and brushed. In later years a hearthstone or donkey stone – a piece of weathered sandstone – could be used instead of the whiting; it was rubbed over the step, and did not need buffing afterwards. The whiting was highly impermanent: once walked on, the steps were marked until they were whitened again the next day. But a ‘good’ neighbourhood was one where ‘each house you passed had its half-circle of white pavement and its white-scrubbed doorstep’. In many parts of Britain doorsteps were whitened daily well into the 1960s.
(#litres_trial_promo) Mrs Haweis noted that ‘If an old house has been lived in by respectable and careful people, it is not uncommon to find it … actually free from a single blackbeetle!’
(#litres_trial_promo) Careful people who were not respectable, it was clear, would have had blackbeetles.
The link between morality and housekeeping was made time after time. Carlyle, coming from a poor farming background, thought his future mother-in-law’s drawing room was the finest room he had ever seen: ‘Clean, all of it, as spring water; solid and correct’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The same conflation of cleanliness and virtue could not have been put more clearly than by the old-fashioned newly married man in Gissing’s The Odd Women: he thought that his wife’s ‘care of the house was all that reason could desire. In her behaviour he had never detected the slightest impropriety. He believed her chaste as any woman living.’
(#litres_trial_promo) And Dickens, as usual, both adhered to and mocked the prevailing notion. In Our Mutual Friend (1864–5), Eugene Wrayburn and Mortimer Lighthouse, two bachelors, take chambers together. Eugene insists on their having a ‘very complete little kitchen’, where
the moral influence is the important thing … See! … miniature flour barrel, rolling-pin, spice box, shelf of brown jars, chopping-board, coffee-mill, dresser elegantly furnished with crockery, saucepans and pans, roasting jack, a charming kettle, an armoury of dish-covers. The moral influence of these objects, in forming the domestic virtues, may have an immense influence upon me … In fact, I have an idea that I feel the domestic virtues already forming …
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In the 1851 census, just over a quarter of a million men were of the professional ranks – doctors, barristers and solicitors, and so on. Twenty years later the number had trebled, to more than 800,000. Professionalization, a set of skills to be mastered, was not confined to the outside world: women were expected to acquire the necessary skills to be good managers, administrators, organizers in their own realm. Mrs Beeton put it most famously in the opening sentence of Household Management (1861): ‘As with the COMMANDER OF AN ARMY, or the leader of any enterprise, so it is with the mistress of the house.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Shirley Forster Murphy, in Our Homes twenty years later, used a similarly martial image:
If once we commence a war against dirt, we can never lay down our arms and say, ‘now the enemy is conquered.’ … Women – mistresses of households, domestic servants – are the soldiers who are deputed by society to engage in this war against dirt … As in a campaign each officer is told off to a particular duty, let each servant in a house, and each member of the family who can take a part understand clearly what is the duty for which she is responsible.
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(Note how part of respectability was in allocating each person a separate task, instead of one person performing a multiplicity of roles.)
The mistress of the house was advised to be businesslike:
it will be found a good plan to write down the daily work of each servant in a little book that can hang in her cupboard, and the hours for doing it, as well as the days on which extra cleaning is required. The hours of rising, meals, dressing, shutting up, going to bed, and all matters relating to comfort and order, should also be inscribed in the book, with existent rules, concerning ‘followers’, Sundays out, times for returning, the lists of silver, china, linen, pots and pans, or whatever goods are entrusted to her, the sweep’s days, the dustman’s days, &c., &c.
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Pre-printed account books were sold to simplify the requisite noting of all household expenditure. Their headings and columns for butcher, baker, rent, wages etc. mimicked office ledgers. This was in addition to each of the tradesman’s own books: the housewife wrote her order in the book she kept for each separate supplier when he came to take her daily or weekly order. The tradesman took the book away, filled in the prices, and brought it back with her delivery later in the day. The good housewife then transferred these prices to her own ledger, and every week or month reconciled all the figures. It was, said the journal Publisher’s Weekly, ‘an age of selections and collections, of abstracts and compilations, of anthologies and genealogies, indexes, catalogues, bibliographies, and local histories’.
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These ideas were very much a part of the Zeitgeist. Linnaeus, the eighteenth-century Swedish naturalist, had been the first to propose a system for defining and classifying the animal kingdom by genera and species within an ordered hierarchy, and when his collection was brought to London to form the basis of the Linnean Society in the 1790s, it promoted and upheld the single, static classification system, which was popular by virtue of its clarity and simplicity.
The sheer amount of new information available – new inventions firing the Industrial Revolution, new flora and fauna brought back in the age of Imperial expansion – fed an urge to numerate, to classify. The Register of Births, Marriages and Deaths, set up in 1837, was an approach to classifying the population at three major points in their lifespan. The census was instituted in the first attempt to number the population of the British Isles. Much of the classification followed the hierarchical patterns set down by Linnaeus. The British Museum (now the British Library) began to create its massive catalogue; the Great Exhibition of 1851 graded and classified all production into four categories (‘raw materials’, ‘machinery and mechanical inventions’, ‘manufacture’ and ‘sculpture and fine arts’); Peter Roget, a physiologist, separated and categorized the entire English language into five classes (‘abstract relations’, ‘space’, ‘matter’, ‘intellect’, ‘volition’ and ‘emotion, religion and morality’) in his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases (1852).
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Yet the notion of the natural world following a relentless progressive law, of historical progress moving in a linear fashion towards a single future goal, was becoming popular in tandem with this urge to describe what was present in the here and now. The Oxford English Dictionary, conceived in 1857, was the first dictionary that was not a guide to current usage (or not only a guide to current usage), but instead a chronological ordering of the historical development of the language, a completely new approach. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) had two themes, progress (evolution) and competition (natural selection). Evolution was generally accepted in a very short time for such a radical thesis; for evolution could be interpreted as progress. Natural selection was at odds with historical progress: it was arbitrary, unclassifiable, and it therefore had to wait until the twentieth century for its turn. Even something as seemingly straightforward and non-scientific as how to display paintings was radically altered by this linear notion: Charles Eastlake rehung the pictures in the National Gallery to take account of school and chronology for the first time.
Women’s preoccupations were not neglected in this urge to classify: Eliza Acton, in her cookery books at the beginning of the century, was the first person to write a recipe more or less as we would recognize it today, by separating out the ingredients from the method, which no one had thought of doing before. No longer was a cook told to take ‘some flour’ or ‘enough milk’, but now quantities and measures were introduced. Department stores were seen as the epitome of this classificatory ideal: Whiteley’s, in Westbourne Grove – one of the earliest department stores, and the biggest – was, said the Paddington Times, ‘the realisation of organisation and order’.
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The expectation was that such organization could (and should) be replicated at home: Houlston’s Industrial Library, which offered would-be servants advice on how to ready themselves for new and better jobs in service, suggested that ladies’ maids keep inventories of all their mistress’s clothes, checking them every few weeks against the clothes and updating them accordingly.
(#litres_trial_promo) New householders were advised to make an inventory of their entire household: furniture, furnishings, ornaments, pictures.
(#litres_trial_promo) Then ‘once a year … the mistress should overlook every single possession she has, comparing them with a list made at the time she entered the house, which she should never let out of her own possession, and which she should alter from time to time, as things are broken or lost or bought’. This must include ‘every glass, tumbler, cup, saucer’. The maid and her employer should go through the list together, after which they should both sign and date it, so that no questions might later occur.
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Supervision extended to every aspect of the relationship between mistress and servant. The usual system, for a woman with one or more servants, was that in the morning the mistress would perform her household functions of overseeing the running of her house: checking that the rooms had been cleaned properly, if there were enough servants, or cleaning the house with her servant if she had only one. Then she would go to the kitchen, to look at the food left from the day (or days) before, and plan and order her meals accordingly. She also gave out stores from the locked storeroom. Some gave out stores once a week, but the paragon found in the advice books was to do it every day, based on the servant’s requirements for that day alone.
The English Housekeeper acknowledged that few houses had storerooms that could meet the requirements of the ideal promoted in advice books, and then went on to outline them anyway: shelves for preserves and pickles, drawers for cleaning cloths, boxes for candles and soap. The price of starch varied with the price of flour, so the canny housekeeper stocked up when prices dropped. Rice could be stored for ‘more than three years, by spreading a well-aired linen sheet in a box, and folding it over the rice, the sheet being lifted out on the floor, once in two or three months, and the rice spread about upon the sheet for a day or two’. If the space was available, dried goods were to be bought only twice or three times a year.
(#litres_trial_promo) When possible, shopping was to be done seasonally, when things were cheapest: towards the end of the century coals cost about 15s. a ton in summer; £1 1s. a ton in winter. A 112 lb sack of potatoes cost about 6s. and lasted four or five people three months – an outlay of about 6d. a week. If a smaller quantity was bought, or the potatoes were bought out of season, it might cost 1s. a week to feed the same number of people.
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Weekly stores to be handed out to the cook included ‘Baked flour, prepared crumbs of bread, garlic, shallots, onions, black onions, burnt sugar, stock, glaze, salt, mustard, pepper, cayenne, all kinds of spice, dried herbs, vinegar, oil, string, pudding-cloths [one for every pudding ordered that week], paper for roasting, paper for fried fish, etc; fish napkins, plenty of clean towels, oatmeal, groats, flour, split peas … lard, butter, eggs, etc, etc.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The cook also needed every week a dishing-up cloth, a dresser cloth, a tablecloth, six kitchen cloths, a dish cloth, a knife cloth, a floor cloth, a rubber (to clean linoleum), three dusters and a flannel.
(#litres_trial_promo) Good housewives did not give these things out promiscuously: Mrs Haweis expected her model women to inspect each old duster to ensure it was sufficiently worn out before exchanging it for a new one.
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The handing out always caused problems: many servants were insulted by the implication that they were not responsible enough, or honest enough, to be allowed to take what they needed when they needed it. Gwen Raverat’s mother had the same cook for thirty years, but to the end the cook ‘had to go through the farce of asking for every pot of jam or box of matches to be given out of the store cupboard, for she herself was never allowed to hold the key for a single instant’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The system mortified Hannah Cullwick. After more than two years working for a widow and her daughter in north London, she said bitterly, ‘Every little thing I’ve to ax for & I carina always remember at the time what I may want to use, & so it’s inconvenient – besides I think it shows so little trust & treating a servant like a child.’
(#litres_trial_promo) (The equation of servants with children will be discussed in the next chapter.)
Women were taught that running a house economically was a virtue in itself, regardless of income. If waste and excess were present, no matter what the household could afford, the housewife was a bad housekeeper and, consequently, a bad person: a thrifty woman was a morally upright woman. Elizabeth Grant, a Scottish woman living near Dublin, wrote in her diary, ‘A poor woman with a sickly baby came [to the door] … luckily I had some old flannel and socks of Johnny’s for the little wretched thing – and mind, dear little girls, never to throw away anything – all old clothes I put carefully away, sure that some day some distressed person will want them. The merest rag goes into a rag bag which when full a poor woman will sell for a few pennies.’
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By contrast, the second Mrs Finch in Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch (1872) was an obviously bad housekeeper, and therefore the reader knew from the outset to regard her household with a dubious eye. When the narrator first met her, ‘Her hair was not dressed; and her lace cap was all on one side. The upper part of her was clothed in a loose jacket of blue merino; the lower part was robed in a dimity dressing gown of doubtful white. In one hand, she held a dirty dogs’-eared book, which I at once detected to be a Circulating Library novel.’ She was not properly dressed, not clean and she read novels: the narrator was unsurprised later to find that Mrs Finch came from a lower-class background before her marriage.
(#litres_trial_promo) She gave out the stores improperly dressed, and had no control over her household:
‘Eight pounds of soap? Where does it all go to I wonder!’ groaned Mrs Finch to the accompaniment of the baby’s screams. [Note that the baby is in the wrong place: by being out of the nursery, it emphasized Mrs Finch’s bad housekeeping.] ‘Five pounds of soda for the laundry? … Six pounds of candles? You must eat candles … who ever heard of burning six pounds of candles in a week? Ten pounds of sugar? Who gets it all? I never taste sugar from one year’s end to another. Waste, nothing but waste …’
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Mrs Finch, it was plain, never checked her maid’s dusters before giving out new ones.
Even the charitably inclined Mrs Grant was, by many advice books’ reckoning, profligate: sheets were expected to last between five and seven years (or three to four years if there were only two sets: one on the bed, one in the wash); then, when the centre part of each sheet became worn, they were cut in half and sewn ‘sides to middle’ – the sides which tucked in and were therefore fresher became the middle, and the old, worn centre became the sides. After a few more years they were demoted to dust sheets for a further few years, to be used to cover furniture when cleaning out fireplaces, dusting, etc. Only then they could be torn into strips for bandages, or given to the poor. To give things to the poor too soon – when they were still ‘good’ – was as foolish as any of Mrs Finch’s behaviour.
Items from the kitchen were even more urgent candidates for what we now know as recycling and was then considered simply thrifty. Rubbish was divided into two parts: dust (coal dust, ashes from the fires) and refuse (everything else). From 1875 refuse was removed by the municipality as a legal obligation. Until then many suburbs had no regular collections at all, and residents had to arrange for removal as necessary, paying per collection. For this reason, as well as the moral value of thrift, housewives were encouraged to reuse everything possible.
There was, of course, less to dispose of: packaging as we know it had yet to be created, and goods came either unwrapped or wrapped in paper. Open fires allowed an overly dirtied paper (that had wrapped meat or fish, for example) to be disposed of immediately. Cleaner paper was kept for reuse, and really clean paper had two further uses. One was as lavatory paper (see p. 295). Secondly, many households used waste paper to make ‘spills’ – long strips of twisted paper, used to light fires or candles. In Mrs Gaskell’s novel Cranford (1851–3), Miss Matty, the elderly spinster, sets aside one evening a week for this. She has done her weekly accounts and her correspondence, and so uses the old bills and letters for the task. (She also makes spills out of coloured paper, in decorative feather shapes, which she gives as presents.)
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One system of disposal that has vanished was the number of street traders who regularly visited the back doors to buy various items. Paper was bought by the paper mills, and by manufacturers of papier-mâché furniture and ornaments. Dealers also bought old iron, metal, wood and lead. Mrs Haweis, really getting into her stride, gave prices that the virtuous housewife could expect for empty biscuit boxes, jars, tins and other household goods. She advised that ‘Champagne bottles with the labels on are worth more than without them.’
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Old textiles and bones were bought by the rag-and-bone man, who sold his wares to paper mills and to glue, gelatine, match, toothpick and fertilizer manufactures. In Bleak House, Krook’s shop carries signs which would have been familiar to all: ‘RAG AND BOTTLE WAREHOUSE; BONES BOUGHT; KITCHEN-STUFF BOUGHT; OLD IRON BOUGHT; WASTE PAPER BOUGHT; LADIES’ AND GENTLEMEN’S WARDROBES BOUGHT’.
(#litres_trial_promo) By 1865 Henry Mayhew thought this type of sign very old-fashioned: rag-and-bone men now pasted up coloured prints which showed characters with speech bubbles advertising their services. Mayhew describes one such print thus:
The youthful Sammy, dressed in light-blue trousers, gamboge [bright yellow] waistcoat, and pink coat, is throwing up his arms in raptures at the ‘stylish appearance’ of his sweetheart Matilda, who, like Sammy himself, is decked out in all the chromatic elegance of these three primary colours,
(#litres_trial_promo) while the astonished swain is exclaiming, by means of a huge bubble which he is in the act of blowing out of his mouth, ‘My gracious, Mathilda! how ever did you get that beautiful new dress?’ To which rather impertinent query the damsel is made to bubble forth the following decided puff: ‘Why, Sammy by saving up all my old rags, and taking them to Mr.—, who gives the best prices likewise for bones, pewter, brass, and kitchen-stuff!
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This style of advertising caught on, moving from rag-and-bone men to other working-class environments, such as fried-fish shops and stalls that produced cheaply prepared foods – stewed eels, baked potatoes – and finally soap companies (see pp. 119–21).
Kitchen waste, was, of course, the main item to be disposed of regularly, and advice books were full of information on what could be got rid of, in what way. It is difficult to know how far their precepts were followed – the stress laid on the immorality of straightforward disposal implies that probably many people threw out much more than they were expected to. Cooks who were not thrifty put all the kitchen leavings into a bucket. The content was called ‘wash’, and the washman visited regularly to buy it: he then sold it as ‘hog-wash’, or pigswill. Employers were warned solemnly about the evils of this system. First, it gave servants no incentive to reuse food. Some might even be encouraged to dishonesty: by telling an inexperienced housewife that she had to pay the washman to take the wash away, the cook could pocket money from both the wife and the washman.
The buckets waiting for collection also encouraged vermin, but this was hard to avoid: the local need for wash was high. Even late in the century, pigs were kept by working-class families in cities to provide a little extra income. Shepherds Bush in London ‘might perhaps be termed the pigsty of the metropolis; for here every house has its piggery, and the air is sonorous with the grunting of porkers’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Henry Mayhew reported that Jacob’s Island, south of the Thames, near Bermondsey, had houses built out on stilts over the river: ‘At the back of every house that boasted a square foot or two of outlet … were pig-sties.’
(#litres_trial_promo) It was hard for the thrifty cook to see why what was to her waste should not be usefully disposed of.
Instead, a great deal of time was spent in suggesting ways to avoid the creation of wash. Many of these are procedures that are still accepted today, though followed by only the most conscientious and regular of cooks: fish heads were used to make fish soup; vegetables and the water they were cooked in went to make soup or gravy, as did plate scrapings and wine; stale bread was used for breadcrumbs, and for puddings. Anything that survived these operations was then fed to the dogs, cats or chickens. Tea leaves were rinsed and scattered over carpets to aid in collecting dust when sweeping, then they were burned in the range; cold tea was used to clean windows, or as a tonic for the eyes; mutton and veal fat could be clarified and used for frying.
Concern about hygiene always went hand in hand with food. Early in the century, meat mostly came from the city it was purchased in: even if the animals were driven to market there, they were butchered only on arrival, so beef, mutton and pork were relatively fresh when bought. With the rapid expansion of the railways, by mid-century animals as far away as Scotland were slaughtered for the London markets: Aberdeen, noted one journal, was ‘little else than a London abattoir’. More than half a million rabbits were shipped from Ostend to London alone; plovers came from Ireland, quail from Egypt. Seventy-five million eggs were imported every year from Europe.
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Before refrigeration, the best that could be managed at home was (rarely) a cool cellar or a tiled room on a north-facing wall: neither was ideal, but when meat was butchered locally, probably only the day before it was purchased, this was not too serious. As the distances grew, so did the amount of time food had to stay fresh. Likewise, local dairies were preferred to milk that arrived by train, but this too became more and more difficult to avoid.
Much advice was given to housewives on how to ensure that the food they had bought was good, and how to prolong its life in that condition.
(#litres_trial_promo) Meat needed to be examined regularly, and powdering it with ginger or pepper against flies was recommended. Charcoal kept meat fresh, and also removed the taint from already putrescent meat. Scalded milk stayed drinkable for several hours longer than fresh. To keep it for several days, grated horseradish added to the jug would help, ‘even in hot weather’. Boiled and then packed in sawdust, eggs would keep fresh for up to three months, or they could be covered in flax-seed oil, to keep for six months. Even with these tips, menus still had to be changed with the weather. Jane Brookfield, the wife of the curate of St James’s Church, Piccadilly, wrote to her husband when she was away, ‘the Salmon from Exeter and the green-pea soup and the chickens and jellies have to be eaten at an early dinner to-day … the hot weather not permitting any delays’.
(#litres_trial_promo) And, despite preventatives and precautions, Marion Sambourne’s diaries are filled with entries that say ‘Bad fowl’, ‘Bad mutton at lunch’, ‘Very late dinner, duck bad, had to send out for lobster & steak.’
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Preventative measures were laborious, but could not be ignored. If butter was bought in quantity, by the tub, ‘the first thing to be done is to turn the whole of the butter out, and, with a clean knife, to scrape the outside; the tub should then be wiped with a clean cloth, and sprinkled all round with salt, the butter replaced, and the lid kept on to exclude the air. It is necessary to take these precautions, as sometimes a want of proper cleanliness in the dairymaid causes the outside of the butter to become rancid.’
Bread was known to be filthy. A parliamentary report in 1862 had suggested that ‘the principal fact’ about bakeries
was their extreme dirt, and in many places the almost total covering of the entire space between the rafters with masses of cobwebs, weighed down with the flour dust that had accumulated upon them, and hanging in strips just above your head. A heavy tread or a blow upon the floor above, brought down large fragments of them, as I witnessed on more than one occasion; and as the rafters immediately over the troughs in which the dough is made are as thickly hung with them as any other part of the bakehouse, masses of these cobwebs must be frequently falling into the dough …
Animals in considerable numbers crawled in and out of and upon the troughs where the bread was made, and upon the adjoining walls …
In addition the ‘air of those small bakehouses is generally overloaded with foul gases from the drains, from the ovens, and from the fermentation of the bread, and with the emanations from [the bakers’] own bodies’.
(#litres_trial_promo) After this description it seems natural that a completely machine-mixed, yeastless bread was soon created: the Aerated Bread Company produced this sanitary product, and sold it in their own Aerated Bread Company tea shops. (The ABCs, as they become known, were among the first tea shops that respectable ladies could patronize without a male escort, and they survived well into the second half of the twentieth century.)
Even something as apparently straightforward as watercress was dangerous. Little girls sold it on the street, and door to door, but everyone knew that London cress came mostly from Camden Town, where the ‘beds are planted in an old brick-field, watered by the Fleet Ditch; and though the stream at this point is comparatively pure,
(#litres_trial_promo) they owe their unusually luxuriant appearances to a certain admixture of the sewerage’.
(#litres_trial_promo) There was even a publication, Water-Cresses without Sewage (1878), which told how to grow your own, to avoid cress grown in sewage and very likely bearing typhus.
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For, however worrying dirt was, what it really betokened was disease. ‘Drains’ was the shorthand used by all to indicate water-borne illness. Mid-century, when the miasma theory of disease transmission was popular, the smell from drains was thought to bring illnesses; later, with germ theory, gradually the understanding that it was the water itself was disseminated. Whatever the case, drains were trouble. In a Sherlock Holmes story two houses have remained empty for some time ‘on account of him that owns them, who won’t have the drains seed to, though the very last tenant what lived in one of them died o’ typhoid fever’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Professionals made the same association. The Plumber warned, ‘There are a “thousand gates to death!” Few are wider, or open more readily, than those in our own homes’ – the drains.
(#litres_trial_promo) After all, the linking of houses to a communal sewer was a new concept. For the first part of the century, people had continued much as they had before, with cesspools beneath their houses. And as late as 1888 Mrs Haweis was still writing, ‘between you and me, the old cesspool, if properly emptied and deodorized
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