The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed. Judith Flanders

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* This system, known as ‘top to bottom, bottom off’, was still being vised in British boarding schools in the 1980s – and possibly still is.

† The idea that servants were especially dirty – without the congruent idea that this was because they were doing the dirtiest work – is one that will be explored in Chapter 4.

* For airing and its purpose, see pp. 104 and 118–19 and 130.

† This continues today. Cheryl Mendelson’s remarkably successful book Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House (2001) was quite confident not only that its readers regularly washed all the tins their food came in before opening them, and then the tin-opener after every use, but that before starting to cook sensible people washed their hands in a room outside the kitchen, to avoid ‘cross-contamination’.

* Sulphur was also burned to disinfect rooms after illness (see p. 317–18). It is still used today as a bactericide – in the preservation of wine and dried fruits, for example – but its effectiveness as sulphur dioxide (as it becomes on burning) may be in doubt.³¹

† To disperse another myth regarding middle- and upper-class women, it should be noted that a small but statistically significant percentage of births in the first year of marriage – some 12 women per 1000 – had a child within seven and a half months of marriage.³⁵

* Note that her first-person narrative was a literary device: the personal details of her ‘I’ changed from book to book.

* As a consequence, continental Europe had professionally qualified midwives decades before Britain – which did not find the need, finally, until the beginning of the twentieth century. As things stood for most of the nineteenth century, midwives had to be licensed, but this was a Bishop’s Licence, indicating moral rather than professional qualities. To receive it the midwife had simply to be recommended by any respectable married woman, take an oath to forswear child substitution, abortion, sorcery and overcharging, and pay a fee of 18s. 4d.

* Mandell, or ‘Max’, Creighton was one of those Victorian dynamos who so astonish us today: as a young fellow at Merton he became engaged to Louise von Glehn, the daughter of a prosperous German businessman living in Sydenham. At this time fellows of Oxford colleges had to be unmarried; Creighton was so valued that the rules were changed to keep him. He soon became the incumbent of a parish in Northumberland, then in quick succession the Rural Dean of Alnwick, the Examining Chaplain to Bishop Wilberforce, Honorary Canon of Newcastle, first Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge, Canon of Worcester, Canon of Windsor, Bishop of Peterborough, representative of the English Church at the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II, Hulsean and Rede Lecturer at Cambridge. Romanes Lecturer at Oxford, and, finally, Bishop of London – all before dropping dead at the age of fifty-seven.

* It has been suggested that it was Mrs Beeton who first used the phrase ‘A place for everything, and everything in its place.’ Even if there are earlier instances, it was very much a feeling for the time: something out of place was something that was, both practically and morally, wrong.

* Dr Jaeger, a health reformer, towards the end of the century promoted his Sanitary Woollen Clothing, made of undyed knitted woollen fabric. Jaeger all-wool underwear became extremely popular. Mrs Haweis commended it as ‘the most economical, the most comfortable, and the most cleanly, seldom as the garments require washing (once a month, says the patentee), because they throw off at once the “noxious emanations” which soil the garments, and retain the benign exhalations’. Not everyone agreed. Jeannette Marshall, the daughter of a fashionable London surgeon, rejected them outright: ‘the workhouse colour is a great objection in my eyes’. Darwin’s granddaughter Gwen Raverat used ‘Jaeger’ as a synonym for dowdy (see p. 269).⁸¹

† Dr Chavasse among others thought that flannel caps prevented eye inflammations, ‘a complaint to which new-born infants are subject’.⁸³

* By 1866 Mrs Pedley was telling new mothers about ‘clasp-pins’, which should be used for all the baby’s wants. In 1889, however, the Revd J. P. Faunthorpe still felt he needed to explain to his readers that ‘A special kind [of pin] is known as the safety pin, which has a wire loop to act as a sheath to protect the point’.⁸⁴

       2

       THE NURSERY

      IN AN IDEAL nineteenth-century world, all homes would have had a suite of rooms – a night nursery and a day nursery – ready and waiting for use after the birth of the first child, together with a full complement of servants: a monthly nurse for the first three months, then a nursemaid.

      The nursery itself was a fairly new concept: J. C. Loudon, in The Suburban Garden and Villa Companion, published in 1838, had to explain to his readers that specialized rooms for children were called ‘nurseries’.¹ Only twenty-five years later the idea had been so well assimilated that the architect Robert Kerr simply assumed that they were necessary when discussing the ideal house: it clearly never occurred to him that they had not always existed. Kerr’s main concern was weighing up the virtues of convenience versus segregation. Parents needed to consider that ‘As against the principle of the withdrawal of the children for domestic convenience, there is the consideration that the mother will require a certain facility of access to them.’ The size of the house and the number of servants were for him the deciding factors: ‘in houses below a certain mark this readiness of access may take precedence of the motives for withdrawal, while in houses above that mark the completeness of the withdrawal will be the chief object’.²

      Outside the fantasies of upper-class living on middle-class incomes, the reality was that most houses were not big enough to make Kerr’s concern one that needed to be addressed. The bulk of the middle classes lived in houses with between two and four, or maybe five, bedrooms: hardly big enough for two separate rooms for the younger children, not counting two bedrooms for the older children of each sex, and definitely not big enough to worry about ‘facility of access’.

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