Читать книгу The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed - Judith Flanders - Страница 8

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).^* 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.)¹ 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.^* 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’.² 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.³

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.^*

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.⁴

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.^* 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’.⁶ 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’.^*7 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.’^†8 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.⁹ 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’,¹⁰ 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.¹¹

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.’¹² 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.’¹³ 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.¹⁴ 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.¹⁵ Tablecloths were laid just before a meal, as otherwise dust settled from the fire and they became dingy in a matter of hours.¹⁶

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.¹⁷ In large houses, one servant could spend her entire day looking after only the fires and lights.^* 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.’¹⁸

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.’¹⁹ 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.^*21

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’.²² A writer on eye diseases was positive that sleeping in ‘over-heated and unventilated rooms’ was a leading cause of near-sightedness.²³ 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’.²⁴ 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^y cold, had to keep shawl on all evening’; ‘Lin & self breakfasted in bed … Lin’s bath frozen …’²⁵

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.²⁶ Curtains across doorways were not solely to indulge the contemporary taste for drapery: they also prevented draughts.²⁷ 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.’²⁸

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,^* 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;^* clothesline; clothes horse; yellow bowl for mixing dough; wooden salt-box to hang up; small coffee mill; plate rack; knife-board;^† 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.²⁹

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.³⁰ 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 …’³¹

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.’³² 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.)³³ 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.³⁴

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’:³⁵ 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.³⁶

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.³⁷ 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!’³⁸ 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’.³⁹ 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.’⁴⁰ 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 … ⁴¹

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.’⁴² 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.⁴³

(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.⁴⁴

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’.⁴⁵

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).^*

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’.⁴⁶

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.⁴⁷ New householders were advised to make an inventory of their entire household: furniture, furnishings, ornaments, pictures.^* 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.⁴⁹

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.⁵⁰ 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.⁵¹

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.’⁵² 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.⁵³ 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.⁵⁴

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’.⁵⁵ 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.’⁵⁶ (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.’⁵⁷

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.⁵⁸ 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 …’⁵⁹

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.)⁶⁰

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.’⁶¹

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’.⁶² 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,^* 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!⁶³

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’.⁶⁴ 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.’⁶⁵ 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.⁶⁶

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.⁶⁷ 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’.⁶⁸ 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.’⁶⁹

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’.⁷⁰ 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,^* they owe their unusually luxuriant appearances to a certain admixture of the sewerage’.⁷¹ 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.⁷²

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’.⁷³ 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.⁷⁴ 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