The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed

(#litres_trial_promo) Picking up on the same red-brick vista, Mr Pooter’s house in Holloway was situated in the carefully named Brickfield Terrace.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, in the inner city, houses that had earlier been the homes of the Georgian well-to-do were colonized by the new professional classes, as both homes and offices. In earlier days, living outside the city, travelling on poorly lit roads, was dangerous and, even when not dangerous, difficult, as night travel had to be regulated by the times of the full moon. (As late as 1861 Trollope had one of his characters say, ‘it turns out that we cannot get back the same night because there is no moon’.)

(#litres_trial_promo) Now, with the progress of gas lighting across the country, that was one problem solved. Street-lighting was eulogized in the Westminster Review as early as 1829: ‘What has the new light of all the preachers done for the morality and order of London, compared to what had been effected by gas lighting!’

(#litres_trial_promo) With the increase in public transport it was no longer just the carriage owners who could live outside the bounds of the town and travel in to work daily. Gradually, the disadvantages of these old houses in inner London – they had no lavatories, or the lavatories had been installed long after the original building was planned and so were in inconvenient places; they were dark; the kitchens were almost unmodernizable – together with the increasing desire to separate home from work, meant that the professionals too moved to the ever expanding suburbs, and travelled in to work in what had previously been their homes. John Marshall, a surgeon living in Savile Row, just off Piccadilly in central London, in 1863 moved his family to suburban Kentish Town, on the edge of the city, after his fourth child was born: the better air and larger house made the daily trip back and forth to his consulting rooms in their old house worthwhile.

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Mrs Panton was certain that for ‘young people’ without too much money a house ‘some little way out of London’ was the ideal. ‘Rents are less; smuts and blacks

(#ulink_2e649477-c334-5354-a194-971abd7687b1) are conspicuous by their absence; a small garden, or even a tiny conservatory … is not an impossibility; and if [the man] has to pay for his season-ticket, that is nothing in comparison with his being able to sleep in fresh air, to have a game of tennis in summer, or a friendly evening of music, chess, or games in the winter, without expense.’

(#litres_trial_promo) This idyll was everything: greenery, fresh air away from city smoke, and, most importantly, a sense of privacy – a sense that once over your own doorstep you were in your own kingdom.

It was precisely this idyll, and the consequent rejection of city life, with its allurements but also its dangers – moral as well as physical – that was the impetus for the growth of suburbia. Walter Besant,

(#ulink_9f0f2d82-cad6-5aba-af5c-2e02cb33da6f) despite his interest in living conditions for the poor, remained an urbanized homme des lettres in his condemnation of this bourgeois development: ‘The men went into town every morning and returned every evening; they had dinner; they talked a little; they went to bed … the case of the women was worse; they lost all the London life – the shops, the animation of the streets, their old circle of friends; in its place they found all the exclusiveness and class feeling of London with none of the advantages of a country town …’ However, the noted urban historian Donald Olsen has argued that Besant had misunderstood the aims and desires of suburbanites: ‘The most successful suburb was the one that possessed the highest concentration of anti-urban qualities: solitude, dullness, uniformity, social homogeneity, barely adequate public transportation, the proximity of similar neighbourhoods – remoteness, both physical and psychological, from what is mistakenly regarded as the Real World.’

(#litres_trial_promo) W. W. Clarke, the author of Suburban Homes of London, published in 1881, praised districts precisely for their seclusion, their feeling of being cut off from the world.

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(#litres_trial_promo)The Builder, in 1856, suggested that all should live in the suburbs: ‘Railways and omnibuses are plentiful, and it is better, morally and physically, for the Londoner … when he has done his day’s work, to go to the country or the suburbs, where he escapes the noise and crowds and impure air of the town; and it is no small advantage to a man to have his family removed from the immediate neighbourhood of casinos, dancing saloons, and hells upon earth which I will not name.’

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While the fashionable (and wealthy) still colonized parts of central London, some inner neighbourhoods were becoming less desirable, and it was important for the prospective resident to take care in choosing a location. In Trollope’s The Small House at Allington, published in 1864, a couple settled in Westbourne Grove, Bayswater:

The house was quite new, and … it was acknowledged to be a quite correct locality … We know how vile is the sound of Baker Street, and how absolutely foul to the polite ear is the name of Fitzroy Square. The houses, however, in those purlieus are substantial, warm, and of good size. The house in Princess Royal Crescent was certainly not substantial, for in these days substantially-built houses do not pay. It could hardly have been warm, for, to speak the truth, it was even yet not finished throughout; and as for size, though the drawing room was a noble apartment, consisting of a section of the whole house, with a corner cut out for the staircase, it was very much cramped in its other parts, and was made like a cherub, in this respect, that it had no rear belonging to it. ‘But if you have no private fortune of your own, you cannot have everything,’ as the countess observed when Crosbie objected to the house because a closet under the kitchen stairs was to be assigned to him as his own dressing-room.

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If the family’s status was on display in the choice of the house, then it followed that location and public rooms were more important than comfort and convenience, and certainly more important than the private, family, spaces.

Surrounding London, the choice of suburbs was endless. Because of the railway going into the City, Camberwell and Peckham (that ‘Arcadian vale’, as W. S. Gilbert called it in Trial by Jury in 1875) were home to clerks – Camberwell was home to one in every eight clerks in London by the end of the century;’

(#litres_trial_promo) Hammersmith, Balham and Leyton, too, were all lower middle class. Penge and Ealing, with no direct railway, were middle class; Hampstead was upper middle. These were not arbitrary designations made after the event. Contemporary guidebooks allocated St John’s Wood to authors, journalists and publishers; Tyburnia (Marble Arch) and Bayswater, Haverstock Hill, Brixton and Clapham, Kennington and Stockwell to ‘City men’ – stockbrokers, merchants and commercial agents. Denmark Hill, where Ruskin had grown up, was ‘the Belgravia of South London’. Sydenham, Highgate, Barnes and Richmond were, simply, for the rich.

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Arthur Munby, an upper-middle-class civil servant, in his journal in 1860 noted the class distinctions of each district as naturally as we note street signs:

Walked to S. Paul’s Churchyard, and took an omnibus to Brentford … In Fleet St. and the Strand, small tradesmen strolling with wives and children, servant maids with their sweethearts, clerks in gorgeous pairs: westward, ‘genteel’ people, gentry, ‘swells’ & ladies, till the tide of fashionable strollers breaks on Hyde Park Corner: then, beyond Knights-bridge and all the way to Brentford, middle-class men & women staring idly over the blinds of their suburban windows, and slinking back when you look that way: lower class ditto ditto standing & staring at their doors, equally idle, but much more frank and at their ease; staring openly & boldly, having purchased rest and tobacco by a good week’s work.

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Trollope was one of the finest arbiters of what made one suburb work and another a failure, although he admired, against the trend, the lawyer who was ‘one of those old-fashioned people who think a spacious substantial house in Bloomsbury Square, at a rent of a hundred and twenty pounds a year, is better worth having than a narrow, lath-and-plaster, ill-built tenement at nearly double the price out westward of the parks’.

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All of these suburbs, however remote, had one focus: the city they surrounded. However segregated, secluded and private, every morning the suburbs emptied as the workers headed off to the city, here watched by the journalist G. A. Sala:

Nine o’clock … If the morning be fine, the pavement of the Strand and Fleet Street looks quite radiant with the spruce clerks walking down to their offices governmental, financial, and commercial …

… the omnibuses meet at the Bank and disgorge the clerks by hundreds; repeating this operation scores of times between nine and ten o’clock. But you are not to delude yourself, that either by wheeled vehicle or by the humbler conveyances known as ‘Shank’s mare’, and the ‘Marrowbone stage’ – in more refined language, walking – have all those who have business in the city reached their destination. No; the Silent Highway has been their travelling route. On the … bosom of Father Thames, they have been borne in swift, grimy little steamboats, crowded with living freights from Chelsea, and Pimlico, and Vauxhall piers, from Hungerford, Waterloo, Temple, Blackfriars, and Southwark – to the Old Shades Pier, hard by London Bridge. Then for an instant, Thames Street Upper and Lower, is invaded by an ant-hill swarm of spruce clerks, who mingle strangely with the fish-women and the dock-porters. But the insatiable counting-houses

(#ulink_f01d48c7-9a45-5524-b9eb-6afc064d0fd5) soon swallow them up …

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The segregation and classification that came so naturally to Munby and Sala permeated every aspect of Victorian life. Suburbs were ranked to keep the classes separate; neighbourhoods without shops or services kept functions – home versus work – apart. Once inside the house, the need to classify and divide did not end: houses were designed to keep the function of any one group of inhabitants from impinging on any other. Home was a private space, guarded watchfully from contamination by the life of the world; but within the home, too, each separate space had its own privacy, and each enclosed a smaller privacy within it, like a series of ever smaller Russian dolls: every room, every piece of furniture, every object, in theory, had its own function, which it alone could perform: nothing else would serve, and to make do with a multipurpose substitute was not quite respectable. Privacy and segregation of function, especially as the latter defined social status, were the keynotes to the terraced house. Robert Kerr, an architect, wrote in his book on The Gentleman’s House that privacy was ‘our primary classification’ for the ideal house – he put it ahead of a dozen other desirable characteristics such as ‘comfort’, ‘convenience’ and ‘cheerfulness’.

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Nothing was to be allowed to escape from its own particular container. Kerr’s most obvious concern was that servants and their masters should remain separate: ‘the Family Rooms shall be essentially private, and as much as possible the Family Thoroughfares. It becomes the foremost of all maxims, therefore, however small the establishment, that the Servants’ Department shall be separated from the Main House, so that what passes on either side of the boundary shall be both invisible and inaudible on the other.’ Some of the examples of these boundaries being breached were servants overhearing their masters; or coal or scullery noises penetrating outside the coal-hole or scullery; or, worse, smells wafting through the house; ‘or when a Kitchen doorway in the Vestibule or Staircase exposes to the view of every one the dresser or the cooking range’.

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(#litres_trial_promo) When a glimpse of inappropriate furniture through a doorway is disturbing, it seems important to examine how household life was structured, what its concerns and obligations were in daily life.

The standard plan of the terraced house was quickly arrived at. The town houses of the gentry were taller, wider and deeper, but that was the sole distinction: the layouts of the houses of both rich and poor were eerily similar. The middle classes wanted the houses that the upper classes lived in; the poorer classes were content to live in cut-down versions of the middle-class house. The great landowners encouraged this type of housing on their estates, as something familiar to them: the earlier town houses that were their own London homes had conformed to this model. Thus, as cities were rapidly generated on their land, they forced the builders into repeating the older patterns. In turn, when speculative builders bought parcels of land to make investments of their own, they copied the more prestigious estates built by the upper classes.

Architects at the time (and ever since) called the houses inconvenient and impractical, but if the demand had not been there, neither would the houses have been: these estates were built to meet a need, and if the population had shown a desire for something else, something else would have appeared.

Party walls were rigidly controlled: they were the line of demarcation between houses, and ground landlords allowed no breach of them to occur. They were also the main means of fire prevention, and for this reason it was usual to require them to continue upwards at least 15 inches higher than the roof. But those who wrote about building practices noted that all the walls were too flimsy (half a brick, or 41/2 inches, thick rather than the one brick, at 9 inches, that was necessary to keep water out), that foundations were not built, and that damp-courses were not laid.

(#litres_trial_promo) It was not coincidental that the word ‘jerry-built’ was first recorded in the nineteenth century. Some bricks were so rotten that, when fires were lit, smoke came out through the sides of the chimneys. In her diary Beatrix Potter noted other practices that were even more unsavoury:

Builders are in the habit of digging out the gravel on which they ought to found their houses, and selling it. The holes must be filled. The refuse of London is bad to get rid of though the greater part is put to various uses. The builders buy, not the cinders and ashes, but decaying animal and vegetable matters etc. to fill the gravel parts. It is not safe to build on at first, so is spread on the ground to rot, covered with a layer of earth … After a while the bad smells soak through the earth and floors and cause fevers. This delightful substance is called ‘dry core’.

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The result of all this was houses that were no sooner finished than they needed repair. The Transactions of the Sanitary Institute of Great Britain despaired over both the lack of good building practices and the preference for display before solidity:

Here is a house, empty, which was completed and occupied two years ago. Notice how the inside is finished, to take the eye: good mantel-pieces, showy grates, and attractive papers. Now look at the floors. Not one of them is level; they are at all sorts of angles, owing to the sinking of the walls … Notice how the damp has risen, even to the second-floor rooms, and in all the water has come through the roof, not in one, but in many places. The bath room, & c., is conspicuous, but only to the practised eye, by reason of the scamped plumbing and forbidding fittings used. Look at the exterior … Observe how the roof sags, owing to the scantlings of the rafters being insufficient …

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Fresh from Boston, the diarist Alice James, invalid sister of the novelist Henry James and the philosopher and psychologist William James, was shocked at the ‘dumb patience’ of the English, which allowed these practices:

the generality of middle class houses … rock and quake when one walks across the floor, and you hear the voices of your next door neighbours … plainly … The Ashburnes, after a nine years’ search, took a large and good house and had it thoroughly ‘done up’, and then for weeks vainly tried to warm the drawing-room sufficiently to sit in it; then they were told by the people who had the house before them, that the room could never be used in cold weather: George was then inspired to climb up on a ladder and look at the top of the windows, which had all been examined by the British workmen, who had carefully left in the setting of them, several inches of ventilation into the open street.

The immensity of London is so overpowering that a superficial impression of solidity goes with it, and it makes one rather heartsick to learn by degrees that it is simply miles of cardboard houses …

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