The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed

By the 1860s the ‘improved’ kitcheners which Mrs Beeton recommended had hotplates, to keep soups simmering, or other items warm, and also to heat irons (see pp. 128–9), as well as a roaster with the kind of movable shelves we now expect, which could be converted from an open to a closed oven by moving valves, when it was used for baking. These ranges cost from £5 15s. to £23 10s.

(#litres_trial_promo) One of the major advantages, apart from constant hot water, was that soot no longer fell into the food while it was in the oven, although it could still come down the chimney and fall into the saucepans. Soot in food remained a major problem. Most recipe books of the day constantly reiterate the need for ‘a very clean saucepan’ and ‘a scrupulously clean pan’: it is difficult to remember that cooking over an open fire meant scorched, sooty pots every time. There was still no temperature control. (A legacy of this is the continuing reputation for being ‘difficult’ of dishes that today, with modern equipment, are really very straightforward – souffles, for example.) Instead, recipes called for ‘a bright fire’ or ‘a good soaking heat’, or a fire that was ‘not too fierce’.

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’,

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) Tablecloths were laid just before a meal, as otherwise dust settled from the fire and they became dingy in a matter of hours.

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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.

(#litres_trial_promo) In large houses, one servant could spend her entire day looking after only the fires and lights.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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 the most important. No such apartment can pass muster with domestic critics unless there be convenient space for a wide circle of persons round the fire.’

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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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) A writer on eye diseases was positive that sleeping in ‘over-heated and unventilated rooms’ was a leading cause of near-sightedness.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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

cold, had to keep shawl on all evening’; ‘Lin & self breakfasted in bed … Lin’s bath frozen …’

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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.

(#litres_trial_promo) Curtains across doorways were not solely to indulge the contemporary taste for drapery: they also prevented draughts.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

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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,

(#litres_trial_promo) 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;

(#litres_trial_promo) clothesline; clothes horse; yellow bowl for mixing dough; wooden salt-box to hang up; small coffee mill; plate rack; knife-board;

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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 types of brushes on the right.

The important thing was to have the tools to keep the house clean. In the bedroom the fight against vermin was a skirmish; in the kitchen it was total war. The plagues that infested Victorian houses have been so effectively controlled for the last hundred years that for the most part we have forgotten them. For us, mice and rats are the first thought at the word ‘vermin’; for the Victorians it was bugs: blackbeetles, fleas, even crickets. If the struggle against them was not waged with commitment and constancy, they would ‘multiply till the kitchen floor at night palpitates with a living carpet, and in time the family cockroach will make raids on the upper rooms, travelling along the line of hot water pipes … the beetles would collect in corners of the kitchen ceiling, and hanging to one another by their claws, would form huge bunches or swarms like bees towards evening and as night closed in, swarthy individuals would drop singly on to the floor, or head, or food …’

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The only way to get rid of these creatures was to stop all holes with cement, replace old, crumbling mortar with more cement, use carbolic acid in the scrubbing water when cleaning, and pour more carbolic through cracks in the floor every day. Mrs Haweis did not object to rats and mice, which she thought were ‘nice, pretty, clever little things … They … are our friends, acting as scavengers, and are to me in no wise repugnant.’

(#litres_trial_promo) For those who did not agree, traps were recommended, plus a hungry cat. Cassell’s Household Guide thought traps superior to arsenic, as the poisoned mice made a terrible smell if they died under the flooring or behind the skirting. (As an afterthought the author worried that children or animals might get at the arsenic, but this was very much secondary to the smell, which was thought to bring disease.)

(#litres_trial_promo)Our Homes suggested keeping a hedgehog to eat the insects; others were scornful of this – the amount a hedgehog ate could not begin to affect the living carpet that Beatrix Potter’s servants found at her grandmother’s house when they visited in the summer of 1886: the first night they were there, the maids had to sit on the kitchen table, as the floor heaved with cockroaches.

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The war against vermin was fought for three reasons: hygiene, status and (contingent on status) morality. Health reformers battled to convey the new information that cleanliness foiled disease. In addition, the rise of mass production gave many access to objects that only a few could have acquired earlier. Therefore the status markers moved on from the now less-expensive accumulation of possessions to another, more expensive and time-consuming, preoccupation: keeping clean. Respectability was signalled by many flourishes that did not make the house any cleaner, but indicated that here was a decent household. George Godwin, an architect, editor of The Builder magazine, and promoter of sanitary housing for the poor, stressed that ‘the health and morals of the people are regulated by their dwellings’: