Название: The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed
Автор: Judith Flanders
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9780007404988
isbn:
† 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.
IN THE SEGREGATION that permeated the Victorian house, the reception rooms were always considered the main rooms – they presented the public face of the family, defining it, clarifying its status. Bedrooms, to perform their function properly, were expected to separate servants from employers, adults from children, boys from girls, older children from babies. Initially, smaller houses had had only two bedrooms, one for parents and young children, one for the remaining children, with servants sleeping in the kitchen or basement. To accommodate the increasing demands for separation, houses throughout the period grew ever taller.
In addition, the older fashion of the bedrooms serving as quasi-sitting rooms was, in theory at least, disappearing. The Architect said that using a bedroom for a function other than sleeping was ‘unwholesome, immoral, and contrary to the well-understood principle that every important function of life required a separate room’.1 In actual fact, bedroom function was regulated rather less rigidly than the theory of the times advocated. Throughout the period, as well as being rooms for sleeping, for illness, for sex,* for childbirth, bedrooms served more than one category of family member. Alfred Bennett, growing up in the 1850s in Islington, slept on a small bed beside his parents’ bed.* So did Edmund Gosse, until his mother developed breast cancer when he was seven; after she died, he slept in his father’s room until he was eleven. In small houses this was to be expected. Thomas and Jane Carlyle’s procession of servants slept in the back kitchen, or scullery, from 1834 (when the Carlyles moved into their Cheyne Row house) until 1865 (when an additional bedroom was incorporated in the attic). The house was fairly small, but they had no children, and for many years only one servant. Even in large houses with numerous servants it was not uncommon to expect them to sleep where they worked. As late as 1891 Alice James reported that a friend, house-hunting, had seen ‘a largish house in Palace Gardens Terrace [in the new part of Kensington: this was not an old house] with four reception rooms and “eight masters’ bedrooms”; when she asked the “lady-housekeeper” where the servants’ rooms were, she said: “downstairs next the kitchen” – “How many?” “One” – at [her] exclamation of horror, she replied: “It is large enough for three” – maids: of course there was the pantry and scullery for the butler and footman.’2
Like the Carlyles, it is probable that these unknown employers themselves had separate bedrooms. Even couples who shared a room often found it desirable for the husband to have a separate dressing room for himself – this was genteel: that is, what the upper middle and upper classes did, even if the shifts many had to go through to carve out this extra space often reduced the genteel to the ludicrous. (See Adolphus Crosbie’s dressing room on page xlv.) Linley and Marion Sambourne, an upper-middle-class couple living in a fairly large house in Kensington, shared a bedroom, with a separate dressing room next door for Linley.* Their two children, a boy and a girl, slept in one room on the top floor, next to the parlourmaid, while the cook and the housemaid slept in the back kitchen.3 When the children grew too old for it to be considered proper for them to share a room, Linley’s dressing room became his son’s room, and their daughter remained in her childhood bedroom: this was all fairly standard.
Yet even when the occupancy was dense, Mrs Haweis, an arbiter of fashionable interior decoration in several books, was firm about segregation of function: ‘Gentlemen should be discouraged from using toilet towels to sop up ink and spilt water; for such accidents, a duster or two may hang on the towel-horse.’4 That this warning was necessary implies that ink was regularly used in a room where there was a towel rail, and from Mrs Haweis’s detailed description that could only be the bedroom. This was clearly an on-going situation. Aunt Stanbury, Trollope’s resolutely old-fashioned spinster in He Knew He Was Right twenty years later, loathed this promiscuous mixing: ‘It was one of the theories of her life that different rooms should be used only for the purposes for which they were intended. She never allowed pens and ink up into the bed-rooms, and had she ever heard that any guest in her house was reading in bed, she would have made an instant personal attack upon that guest.’5
Bedroom furniture varied widely, from elaborate bedroom and toilet suites, to cheap beds, furniture that was no longer sufficiently good to be downstairs in the formal reception rooms, and old, recut carpeting. Mrs Panton describes the bedrooms of her youth in the 1850s and 1860s with some feeling – particularly
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