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

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       3

       THE KITCHEN

      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