The Making of Home Read online

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  For Naomi and Evangelia Antonakos and in memory of Stephen Antonakos (1926–2013)

  Acknowledgements

  I am grateful to those who have helped me navigate the idioms of home in various European languages: Ana-Maria Astier, Ilona Chavasse, Martijn David, Béla Dekany, Marta Frankowska-Stelmach, Tobias Hoheisel, Alice James, Donna Leon, Zoltán Matyas, Ravi Mirchandani, Jussi Mononen, Jan Morris, Ekin Oklap, Sofi Oksanen, Jasper Rees, Lise Sand, Ewa Sipta, George Szirtes, Fergal Tobin, Aksel Tollåli, Jorunn Veiteberg, Hanna Weibye, Michael Wells, Shaun Whiteside and Frank Wynne. Thanks to the wonders of social media, some of these people were unaware of the ultimate destination of their information. For their disinterested good nature, I thank them twice.

  Gerard van Vuuren translated several essays from Dutch for me, and I thank him for his scrupulous care.

  I would also like to thank Rodney Bolt, Cathy Lennon, Laura Mason, Ninette Perahia and Bee Wilson; Gabrielle Allen, of Guy’s and St Thomas’ Charitable Foundation; Katie George, of the Salters’ Company; Charlotte Louise Murray, of the University of Reading; Emily Watts, house steward at Knole; and Mandy Williams and Hannah Fleming, of the Geffrye Museum. Peter Kristiansen, curator at Rosenborg Slot/De Danske Kongers Kronologiske Samling, not only responded to a stranger’s email promptly and courteously, but gave me additional insights into the painting in question. I am most grateful to him.

  As always, the members of the Victoria mailbase fielded my seemingly random queries with good temper and, even more usefully, deep expertise. My thanks in particular for specific responses are owed to Helena Brigman, Lisa Cepluch, Amy D’Antonio, David Latané, Mary Millar, Peter Orford, Malcolm Shifrin, Nancy Strickland, Elizabeth Williamson and Guy Woolnough and, as always, Patrick Leary, list-master extraordinaire. Twitter has brought me another range of experts, and I thank all those who assisted.

  At Atlantic Books, Ravi Mirchandani edited this book with rigour and enthusiasm, and in so doing improved it beyond measure. I am also grateful to Karen Duffy, Richard Evans, Lauren Finger, Lucy Howkins, Toby Mundy, James Nightingale, Bunmi Oke, James Roxburgh, Chris Shamwana, Tamsin Shelton and Margaret Stead. My agent, Bill Hamilton, is stalwart, and beyond thanks. George Lucas has supplied US support, and to him I am most grateful.

  Despite the efforts of all these good people to keep me on the straight and narrow, errors and omissions will inevitably have crept in. For these, as always, I am solely responsible.

  List of Illustrations

  1. View Down a Corridor by Samuel van Hoogstraten, 1662 (Dyrham Park, Avon, UK / National Trust Photographic Library / Johan Hammond / The Bridgeman Art Library)

  2. Interior with a Woman at a Clavichord by Emanuel de Witte, c. 1665 (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands / De Agostini Picture Library / The Bridgeman Art Library)

  3. Woman Reading a Letter by Gabriel Metsu, c. 1664–66 (National Gallery of Ireland)

  4. Petronella Dunois’ dollshouse, c. 1675–1700 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

  5. At the Linen Closet by Pieter de Hooch, 1663 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

  6. Children of King Charles I by Anthony Van Dyck, c. 1637 (Getty Images)

  7. Mr and Mrs Atherton by Arthur Devis, c. 1743 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool)

  8. Arnolfini Wedding Portrait by Jan van Eyck, 1434 (Getty Images)

  9. Claud and Peggy by David Allan, 1780s (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)

  10. Saint Barbara from the right wing of the Werl Altarpiece by Robert Campin, 1438 (Prado, Madrid, Spain / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library)

  11. Centre panel of the Merode Altarpiece by Robert Campin, c. 1427–32 (© Francis G. Mayer / Corbis)

  12. Steward at Rosenborg Castle by Wolfgang Heimbach, 1653 (Royal Danish Collections)

  13. The Artist in his Studio by Richard Morton Paye, 1783 (National Trust Images / John Hammond)

  14. A Smoking Party by William Bendz, 1828 (NY Carlsberg Glypotek, Copenhagen / Ole Haupt)

  15. Mrs Duffin’s Dining-room at York by Mary Ellen Best, 19th century (Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library)

  16. Staple Inn, High Holborn, London, prior to restoration in 1886, c. 1860–86 (English Heritage)

  17. Staple Inn, High Holborn, London, c. 1937 (Getty Images)

  18. The log cabin in which President Abraham Lincoln was said to have been born, Hodgensville, Kentucky. From a stereoscopic photograph taken in 1910 (Getty Images)

  19. Charles Francis Annesley Voysey’s design for a house for C. Turner Esq. in Frinton-on-Sea, 1908 (© Stapleton Collection / Corbis)

  20. A Peasant Family at Meal-time by Jan Steen, c. 1665 (Print Collector / Getty Images)

  21. Saying Grace by Joseph van Aken c. 1720 (© Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford)

  22. The Proposition by Judith Leyster, 1631 (The Hague, Mauritshuis)

  23. Drawing of a betty lamp by Maurice Van Felix for the Index of American Design, c. 1943 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC)

  24. John Middleton with His Family in His Drawing-room by unknown artist, c. 1796 (Heritage Images / Getty Images)

  25. Dining-room of Dr Whitridge’s as it was in the Winter of 1814–15 by Joseph S. Russell, 1814–15 (Courtesy of the New Bedford Whaling Museum)

  26. Scene in a gaming house from A Rake’s Progress by William Hogarth, 1733 (© Historical Picture Archive / Corbis)

  27. The Elegant Reader by Georg Friedrich Kersting, 1812 (Klassik Stiftung Weimar)

  28. A woman doing laundry in a tenement building, Chicago, Illinois, c. 1910 (Getty Images)

  29. Illustration of a Beecher kitchen from The American Woman’s Home by Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1869.

  30. Reconstruction of a Frankfurt kitchen in the MAK Vienna (Christos Vittoratos)

  31. Mr and Mrs Hill by Arthur Devis, c. 1750–51 (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)

  32. A family gather round the television for an evening’s entertainment, 1957 (Getty Images)

  Home Thoughts: An Introduction

  In 1900, a young girl in a strange land was asked by a resident why she wasn’t content to remain in their ‘beautiful country’, but instead longed to return to ‘the dry, grey’ place she came from. She was astonished. She wanted to return there, she said simply, because ‘There is no place like home.’ The girl was, of course, Dorothy in Oz, and only someone like the Scarecrow, famed for his lack of brains, would ask something so self-evident. To Dorothy’s creator, L. Frank Baum, writing at the end of the nineteenth century, it was a commonplace that home did not have to be beautiful, or luxurious, to be the place one wanted to be.

  Two centuries earlier, in 1719, another novel, now known simply as Robinson Crusoe, was first published. The full title of Daniel Defoe’s book was not merely the name of his main character; instead it enticed readers with promises of adventure, exotic locales, violent death and more: The Life and
Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates. The book was a staggering success, going through thirty-seven printings in its first eight months. Over the following century it was translated, adapted for the stage and rewritten for children; there were sequels; there was even a puppet show. Altogether, there were over seven hundred retellings of this story, in almost every form of entertainment.

  Defoe’s novel is more than simply a rollicking tale of shipwrecks and pirates, however. It has a deserved place in the literary pantheon, not merely for the quality of its writing, but also as the first true novel in English, and among the first in any European language. It should have another place, too, among historians, for it is the first book to treat the details of ordinary domestic life as though they were as gripping as a disaster at sea or the discovery of a fabled new land. Even in the title, Crusoe is presented as not just a mariner. He is Robinson Crusoe of York – a man with a home, a place where he belongs. Once he is shipwrecked, long passages in the novel dwell on the arrangements he makes to provide himself with the necessities of daily life: clothes, a razor, cutlery, even writing materials. On the island, Crusoe’s cave receives similar attention; its cooking, eating, sleeping and storage areas are described, as is his next ‘house’, which is a move upmarket for him – this one is large enough to contain the sleeping and living areas under one roof. Then, ‘to enjoy the Comforts I had in the World’, the castaway builds furniture, and as a good householder he puts up shelves to keep his possessions tidy: ‘everything in … their Places’. When, after two decades, another ship is wrecked on his island, he is thrilled to find, not weapons (he doesn’t bother to take the muskets he comes across), or marine equipment to help him sail away, but a kettle, a pot ‘to make chocolate’, a fire shovel and tongs, ‘which I wanted extremely’. (He also acquires that ultimate accessory for his fireside, a dog, which he finds starving on board.) This novel, ostensibly one of ‘Surprizing Adventures’, and of a man who for twenty-eight years has no home, is nevertheless awash with notions of domesticity. Time and again Crusoe uses the word ‘home’. It is how he refers to his ‘little tent’, and in the first chapter alone the word is repeated a dozen times; over the course of the novel it appears more than sixty times, recurring like a steady heartbeat.

  Home, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is ‘A dwelling place; a person’s house or abode; the fixed residence of a family or household; the seat of domestic life and interests’. But more than that, while a house is the physical structure, a home is ‘The place where one lives or was brought up, with reference to the feelings of belonging, comfort, etc., associated with it’. It is a state of being as well as the place where one lives or one’s place of origin. The word itself is ancient, most likely pre-dating modern European languages and originating in an Indo-European root, kei, meaning lying down, or a bed or couch, or something dear: even then, both a place and an attitude. The first known written use of the distinction between house and home in English appeared in a poem of 1275, which mentions separately a man’s ‘lond & his hus & his hom’ [land and his house and his home].

  To speakers of English, or the Germanic and Scandinavian languages, or the Finno-Ugric group – the languages of northwestern Europe, from Hungary to Finland and Scandinavia, the German-speaking lands, and then descending to the Netherlands and across the Channel to the British Isles – to these peoples, the differences between home and house are obvious. They are two related but distinct things, and therefore they have two words. In the languages of what I will call these ‘home’ countries, home and house are respectively otthon and ház (Hungarian), koti and talo (Finnish), kodu and maja (Estonian), Heim and Haus (German), heem and huis (Dutch), hem and hus (Swedish), hjem and hus (Danish), heim and huset (Norwegian).* Speakers of Romance and Slavic languages, living in ‘house’ countries, have by contrast just one word for both meanings. When an Italian goes home he sta andando a casa, goes to the house, while the Frenchman rentre à son foyer, returns to his hearth, or rentre chez lui, returns to his, with where he is returning to only gestured at by the word chez, which derives from the Latin casa. The French maison is also from Latin, mansio, staying or a stopping-place, and it follows the Latin in referring to both a building and those who occupy it: someone from une grande maison is from an important family. (English has this usage, but confines it to the very grandest of families – the House of Windsor, or of Atreus.) Slavic languages are similar in folding house and home together: Russians and Poles live in a dom, and return ‘housewards’, domoi and do domu, when they go home. In Russian, the nineteenth-century word for house, dvor, encompassed not merely the house and the people who lived in it, but any stables, workshops or other farm buildings, and even the measurement of human labour. Linguistically, the house was inseparable from those who lived in it, united by kinship and economic ties, and from the labour and land it took to maintain them.

  The existence of what I will call home and house languages suggests something about the societies in which they developed. There are societies where the community space, the town, village or hamlet, is the canvas on which life is painted, and where an individual house is only a more private area within that primary space. Then there are societies where the house is the focal point, while the town, village or hamlet functions mainly as the route through which one passes in order to reach the essential privacies of the houses. The reason for such differences is frequently put down to climate, and it is certainly more pleasant to spend an autumn afternoon in a market square on the Mediterranean than it is in Oslo. But while the weather is an element in the distinction between home and house countries, it is, as we shall see, only one element among many.

  Ask a western European or North American child to draw a house, and the odds are good that the result will be a picture of a detached building with some or all of the following: a pitched roof, a chimney belching out a friendly plume of smoke, a front door at the centre or at the house’s gable end, from which a path runs through a garden that is surrounded by a fence. I did not grow up in a house that looked like this, yet as a child I drew plenty that fit this description. Most western European or North American children did not and do not grow up in houses that looked like this. Yet for at least a century and more this was, and for many still is, the platonic ideal of what home looks like to many – the archetype of ‘homeness’.

  As adults, we have more elaborate notions of what that archetypal home looks like than the children’s drawings, but these notions are no less works of imagination. It is just that, for the most part, we are unaware of their equivalent disconnection from reality. We believe instinctively that ‘home’ is a concrete thing, unchanging through time in its essentials. Our ideas are, in part, based on books and images, which, even if we haven’t read or seen them ourselves, have been used by designers as the basis to create later domestic spaces, which we have seen; or they have formed the basis for re-creations in film and television, which in turn have been used by others, filtering through to popular consciousness at large. A primary component of this source material is what we consider to be the very epitome of homeness, Dutch seventeenth-century paintings. These works, by Vermeer and de Hooch, or Metsu, or Maes, or ter Borch or de Witte, show the typical bourgeois interiors of the Netherlands of the time, and say ‘home’ like no others. Emanuel de Witte’s Interior with a Woman at a Clavichord (1665; see plate section, no. 2) is, to modern eyes, obviously and primarily designed to show off the beauty of a middle-class Dutch house. Contemporary reports from travellers to the Netherlands seem to back this up: the houses of even people of ‘indifferent quality’ – that is, what today would be called the ordinary middle classes – were, one English visitor wrote, filled with ‘Costl
y and Curious’ furniture, porcelain, paintings and other items to adorn and display. But today we fail to realize that, while the travellers for the most part reported faithfully on what they saw, faithful reportage was not the aim of the painters of the same date. There is little in de Witte’s painting that any seventeenth-century Dutch citizens would have thought of as typical of their own houses, or of any house they knew.

  Modern scholars have analysed thousands of seventeenth-century inventories of personal possessions and household goods, and have examined the sale details of properties that changed hands in the period.* From this evidence it has been possible to build up a very detailed picture of what the Dutch middle and upper classes actually owned. And what these documents show is that these painted rooms, these rooms we know so well from art, never existed. It is easier to say what was realistic in the de Witte Interior, than what was not. A Dutch householder would have recognized the curtained bed in the reception room, the mirror and the map on the walls, as well as the dumpiness of the woman’s figure, which suggests she is wearing many layers of clothes as protection against the cold. And that’s all. Almost everything else in the picture, and in the hundreds of other surviving pictures from the same period, were constructions of painters’ studios.

  The beams on the ceiling are typical of Dutch domestic architecture, but they appear to run the wrong way – not parallel to the façade of the house, but placed decoratively, to frame the painting’s space for the viewer. The house’s floorplan – three rooms leading out of each other, rather than along a corridor, and with windows on both sides (visible on the right, inferred from the shadows on the left) – was an architectural implausibility in this country of terraced housing. These deviations from what would typically have been seen in Dutch cities may be attributed to the requirements of art, the desire for a harmonious composition.