The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed

(#litres_trial_promo) Constance Maynard and her sister were also expected to defer to their eldest brother. (As they referred to him as ‘The Fatted Calf’, it appeared that they had perhaps not accepted their subordinate role in quite the way they were expected to.)

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These were mostly girls from upper-middle-class families with no shortage of money. They were expected to perform services for their brothers not because there was no one else to do it, but because that was what girls did. Slightly down the social scale, as Molly Hughes’s experiences showed, things were no different. Helena Sickert, the sister of the artist Walter Sickert, went to day school, as did her brothers. In the afternoons, after homework was finished, the boys were allowed to play, while she ‘very often had to mend their clothes; sort their linen, and wash their brushes and combs’.

(#litres_trial_promo) And the lower-middle-class girl had more responsibilities yet. Hertha Ayrton was born Sarah Marks, the daughter of a clockmaker and a sempstress.

(#ulink_91ff09f6-e603-534d-8c47-d7c6302c21f5) Sarah/Hertha made all of her younger brothers’ clothes and took care of the boys so that her mother could take in needlework to support them after the death of her husband.

(#litres_trial_promo) Alice Wichelo, known as Lily, was the eldest of ten children (and later the mother of E. M. Forster); her father was a drawing master who had died young. By 1872, when she was seventeen, Lily had taken her youngest brother to Tunbridge Wells alone, finding a childminder to look after him and settling him in lodgings.

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It was not that all experiences of all girls were the same, but rather that the received ideas bred an attitude that many aspired to: to be the comfort-giver, whose primary function was to ensure the smooth running of the home, for the benefit of he who financed it. The engine room of this comfortable ship was the kitchen.

* (#ulink_8ebd7b69-f888-5ca2-a6df-516b7d912b0a) No one, however, can trump Augustus Hare’s parents, but as an upper-class child he can only (just) be accommodated in a footnote. Hare’s uncle, also an Augustus Hare, died shortly before his godson-to-be was born; his widow, Maria, stood god-mother instead, and she tentatively asked his parents if she could perhaps have the child to stay for a while. The answer to her letter was immediate: ‘My dear Maria, how very kind of you! Yes, certainly, the baby shall be sent as soon as it is weaned; and if anyone else would like one, would you kindly recollect that we have others.’ Maria Hare cared for him for the rest of her life, and he called her his mother.

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* (#ulink_a4fb3287-b769-53d1-9ff2-ed20291571b1) Not, please note, the mother. The wicked or incompetent servant loomed large in the minds of the middle classes. Mrs Warren told of a nursemaid who caused a child’s death by taking the child out when she was told not to. Mrs Beeton warned that the mother should learn to distinguish the different cries of her child, ‘that she may be able to guard her child from the nefarious practices of unprincipled nurses, who, while calming the mother’s mind with false statements as to the character of the baby’s cries, rather than lose their rest, or devote that time which would remove the cause of suffering, administer, behind the curtains, those deadly narcotics which, while stupefying Nature into sleep, insure for herself a night of many unbroken hours’. See a larger discussion on servants and their employers’ fears on pp. 111ff., 115–17.

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† (#ulink_c4882d6b-9013-56ff-8c8c-7daa135eec44) Ipecacuanha and calomel were used with ruthless regularity in Victorian households. Ipecac, as it was commonly called, was a powdered root, and functioned as an emetic, causing vomiting. Calomel, made of mercury chloride, was a purgative. Both were used routinely in attempts to ‘expel’ various illnesses.

* (#ulink_2bbbd155-fc3f-54b9-80fe-e2ea49e217d8) Gutta-percha was produced from the sap of the Isonandra gutta tree, native to Indonesia. When vulcanized, it acted as a waterproofing, insulating material, much as we used rubber and now use plastic. It first appeared in Britain in the 1840s, becoming widely used for, among other items, hot-water bottles, golf balls and the insulating cover for the first transatlantic telegraph cable.

* (#ulink_541476ea-2f9f-5b72-98b5-fe4b897f97b2) When she did go into detail, it is hard to imagine that some of her ideas could have been considered seriously: her children’s piano lessons consisted of playing only scales and finger exercises, with the occasional ‘sacred piece’ but no other tunes, for seven years. She did admit that this regime was ‘inexpressible weariness’, but its very wearying nature promoted discipline and was therefore to be encouraged. She also taught children drawing by letting them draw only straight lines, and then curved ones, for more than a year. It was lucky for these children that they were merely fictional devices, as real children must surely have ended up running amok.

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† (#ulink_86493665-4438-5c0b-9c13-da20fb4a6a24) Religious education, even in houses a great deal more observant than the Hughes’, was often not much more successful. Mary Jane Bradley, the wife of a clergyman, prayed every morning, first by herself, then with Wa, then with the maids (note the careful segregation). When Wa was two and a half she worried that he did not appear ‘capable of understanding the idea of God and Christ being the same’. A year later he had, she thought, understood the idea of the Resurrection; then he asked her if God would come back as a stuffed rabbit. The three-year-old appeared to understand some things better than his mother, however. On being told to thank God for his blessings, he asked why God did not give the same blessings to ‘poor little beggar boys’. She replied: ‘we know that it’s right because God does it.’

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* (#ulink_a2ac2480-2e28-558c-960a-4e723a941d33) This Guide to Science was written by the author of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fables.

* (#ulink_80c0a90a-870e-52d5-a5df-de151d325aef) The college, now part of the University of London, merged with another college and was known as Queen Mary and Westfield College; two years ago it was ‘rebranded’ as Queen Mary College.

* (#ulink_85d4b740-f0db-572d-8c2f-f9a83171c5ab) One exception whom he saw fairly regularly, but must have somehow overlooked, was his daughter. Ivy Compton-Burnett. It may be significant that her career as a novelist did not take off until after a major breakdown decades after his death, and one looks again at her gallery of tyrannical parents. (It should be noted that, although Dr Burnett was a homoeopath, his opinions coincided in this matter with those of his more conventional medical brethren.)

* (#ulink_26061439-e7e8-5fed-9f7e-8a79690ee560) Ayrton read mathematics at Girton, with her tuition paid for by George Eliot. In 1899 she was the first woman member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers.

† (#ulink_26061439-e7e8-5fed-9f7e-8a79690ee560) Compare this to Louise Creighton, p. 51.

3 (#ulink_c08bb386-8f8a-5e00-9ad7-62c94e933981)

THE KITCHEN (#ulink_c08bb386-8f8a-5e00-9ad7-62c94e933981)

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).

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.)

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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.

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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.

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A roasting jack, which was fixed either to the top of a meat-screen (p. 66) or the mantelpiece. This is a bottle-jack, with a clockwork mechanism to turn the meat in front of the fire.

It was generally recommended that kitchen floors be covered in linoleum, for easy cleaning, often laid over a cement base to foil the vermin.

(#litres_trial_promo) Mrs Panton suggested that ‘if the cook is careful … she should be given a rug, or good square of carpet … to put down when her work is done’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The carpet could not be permanently on the floor, for hygienic reasons. It is hard to imagine that after a long day’s work in the conditions described above the thing Hannah Cullwick most wanted to do was unroll a carpet. Anyway, there were rarely upholstered chairs in a kitchen, as only wood survived the steam and mess of an active kitchen, so she would have had no place to sit comfortably.

The labour, steam and dirt all centred around the kitchen range. The closed range was the first technical development in Britain to move beyond cooking over an open fire. It appeared at the beginning of the century, although it took decades before it was commonly in use. Wemmick, in his ‘castle’ in Great Expectations, was still cooking with ‘a saucepan on the hob, and a brazen bijou over the fireplace designed for the suspension of a roasting-jack’.

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(#litres_trial_promo) There were many styles of range, but the main features of all of them were an oven or ovens, with a boiler to heat water. Both were operated by means of a fire fuelled by coke, which generated heat that was transmitted by flues and modified by dampers. By the 1840s The English Housekeeper was advising its readers on the benefits of the range: ‘It is a great convenience to have a constant supply of hot water, and an advantage to possess the means of baking a pie, pudding or cake.’

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(#litres_trial_promo) The early models had boilers that had to be filled by hand, and if the water level got too low the boiler cracked; later they became self-filling, with a tap to draw off hot water for use, and a stopcock for controlling inflow from the mains.