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

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      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 СКАЧАТЬ