Читать книгу The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed - Judith Flanders - Страница 5

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?’¹

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’.²

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.^*

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.³ They were not alone in their focus. Services were provided by ‘Family Drapers’, ‘Family Butchers’, even a ‘Family Mourning Warehouse’.⁴ 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.⁵

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.⁶ 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.’⁷ 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.’⁸

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.’⁹ 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?’¹⁰ 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.’¹¹ 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.^*12

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.’¹³

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.’¹⁴

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.’¹⁵ 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.¹⁶

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.’¹⁷

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.’¹⁸ 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.’¹⁹ 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.’²⁰

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.’²¹ 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?’²²

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,²³ this will not be another of them.^*

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’.²⁴ 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.²⁵

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.’²⁶ 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.’²⁷ 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.’²⁸ 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.’²⁹ 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.’³⁰ 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.³¹

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’.³² 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.’³³

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.^* 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.’³⁵ 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’.³⁶

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.’³⁷

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’.³⁸

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.’³⁹

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.⁴⁰

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,’^* 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.⁴¹

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;⁴² 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.⁴³ 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’.^*45

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’.⁴⁶

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.’⁴⁷ 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.⁴⁸ 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.’⁴⁹ 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’.)⁵⁰ 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!’⁵¹ 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.⁵²

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^* 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.’⁵⁴ 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,^† 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.’⁵⁵ 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.^*57 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.’⁵⁸

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.⁵⁹

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;’⁶⁰ 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.^*61

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.⁶²

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’.⁶³

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^* soon swallow them up …⁶⁴

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’.⁶⁵

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’.^*66 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.⁶⁷ 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’.⁶⁸

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 …⁶⁹

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 …^*70

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.⁷¹ 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.⁷²

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.⁷³

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:

Top floor:	servants’ and children’s bedrooms (usually two)
Half-landing:	bathroom (often)
Second floor:*	master bedroom, dressing room (in larger houses), second bedroom
First floor:	drawing room
Ground floor:	dining room, morning room
Basement:	kitchen, scullery, possibly a breakfast room

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.’⁷⁴

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.⁷⁵

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.

* Appendix 2, p. 382ff., is a quick guide to the authors and books I have made use of.

* 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.

* 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.

* 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’.³⁴

* For precise timekeeping, see pp. 231–2, 361n.

* 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’.⁴⁴

* 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.⁵³

† 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.

* 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.’⁵⁶

* 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.

* 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.

* This is a theme that permeates the era; some examples can be found on pp. 114–15, 175–6; 191, 255, 297.

* In retrospective fairness to the jerry-builders, it is worth noting that most of these ‘cardboard houses’ still survive some 150 years later.

* 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.