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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ