The Making of Home Read online

  Most people welcomed these pieces for their convenience. Yet a minority dissented, not for practical reasons, but because they were somehow too insubstantial, too French. The aversion was both instinctive, and almost visceral – an upper-class Englishman at the end of the eighteenth century shuddered at the ‘little skuttling’ things, his objection apparently vested in their very lightness and mobility. Two decades later, at the other end of the political and economic spectrum, the radical journalist and MP William Cobbett was outraged that a simple farmhouse had ‘a parlour!’, and one furnished with a mahogany table, a sofa and even ‘showy chairs’, not to mention a carpet, a bell-pull, decanters, glasses, a dinner service and ‘some swinging book-shelves’. It is hard to say what upset Cobbett more – the number of objects, their novelty or their quality. All these elements played a part in his outrage, no doubt, for they were all features of the great changes in domestic furnishings that had come with the Industrial Revolution.

  Previously, the possessions of the upper classes had been distinguished from those of the less wealthy by their quality. They were made from rare materials, or costly ones, or, preferably, both. In the thirteenth century, a list of the contents of an English gentleman’s house included, in its entirety: ‘a decent table, a clean cloth, hemmed towels, high tripods [for the fireplace], strong trestles, firebrands, fuel logs, stakes, bars, benches, forms, armchairs, wooden frames and chairs made to fold, quilts, bolsters, and cushions’. While the economic and social distance between peasants and aristocrats was great, nevertheless comfortably-off peasants owned similar items: a table, at least one stool, a chest or two, pots and pans, cooking technology, serving dishes, spoons, drinking vessels, towels and bedding. The difference was almost entirely in the quality of the goods. And for centuries, that was how it remained. In the seventeenth century, one aristocratic Englishwoman wrote to her husband to discuss the acquisition of a number of household items. She grouped ‘earthen things’ (earthenware) or ‘wouden things’ merely by material, but when it came to porcelain, she listed each piece by its function as well: ‘tee dishes & plates to them’, ‘a shuger thing’ and a ‘coufey pot’.

  This woman would have recognized the impetus behind the comic parable written by the French philosopher Denis Diderot in 1772, in which he satirized the lust for fashionable novelty. The narrator of ‘Regrets for My Old Dressing-Gown’ relates his tragi-comic tale: once dressed in a glamorous new scarlet dressing-gown, he begins to feel his old desk looks shabby in comparison; on replacing that, the prints that are hanging above it now show their age, and so on, until his cane chair has been supplanted by a Moroccan-leather one, his pinewood bookshelves by inlaid marquetry cupboards, the old plain list rug by a Savonnerie carpet. He ends, finally, with a lament against the ‘fatal longing for luxury’, and inveighs against ‘Sublime fashion that … empties our father’s treasuries’, as each new item produces a desire for another novelty.

  This rage to buy was the culmination of a series of social upheavals. In the seventeenth century, the English and the Dutch had fought a cycle of wars in the attempt to gain domination of the world’s markets. But the great discovery of the age was that trade was infinitely expandable, because desire was infinitely expandable. Unsatisfied desires continued to seek satiation, while satisfied desires only created new demands, which had to be satiated in turn. The expansion of trade made goods that had once been luxury items more widely, and inexpensively, available, which in turn drove down costs even further. These trade goods were not things that made daily life possible; they were things that made it more comfortable, or more enjoyable. And, readily available, these items, once reserved for the rich and aristocratic, became quickly assimilated into the daily life of bourgeois domesticity.

  Bedding was one of the earliest consumer goods. Beds had originally been objects of status and display for those fortunate enough to have them, and significant proportions of a family’s wealth were frequently invested in its bedding: in the seventeenth century, up to a third of a Dutch household’s worth might be tied up in the bedding; into the eighteenth it might be up to 40 per cent for a working man’s family. More generally, a quarter of all expenditure on household goods was typically laid out on bedding upon marriage. Initially, the focus was on an increase in quantity, rather than quality: beds for more members of the household, or more mattresses. Mattresses were still nothing more than stuffed sacks, and increased comfort was achieved only by piling one mattress on top of another. Some engravings show beds with what may be up to five in a heap. This was followed by acquisition in range, with different types of bedding becoming available – bolsters, pillows, sheets, blankets, various types of covers, spreads and quilts. And then came improvement in quality: straw was replaced by hemp or flock stuffing, and then by wool; feathers ranged from down, to goosedown, to eider, while from the eighteenth century, factory-manufactured cotton waste was also available; finer wool blankets replaced felted ones; and flax and linen replaced coarse canvas.

  All forms of fabric, particularly linens, an industry in which the Dutch excelled, were valued. While clothing styles remained fairly limited, the desire for quantity seemed ever-increasing, even among middling families. One seventeenth-century Dordrecht housewife owned nearly three hundred shirts, as well as bonnets, handkerchiefs, neckerchiefs and other linens – not just her own and her family’s, but pieces inherited from her mother and grandmother as well. These were kept with her almost five hundred tablecloths and napkins, which had been set aside to pass on in turn to her children when they married. She was not unusual. A less well-to-do Amsterdam tradesman of the time owned sixty sheets and more than three hundred napkins.

  Linens were just the most extreme example. Amsterdam tradesmen filled their houses with items of local manufacture that would have staggered their English counterparts. The very wealthiest lived in houses containing ‘at least’ fifty paintings, up to a dozen cupboards, as many as fifty chairs and ten or more tables. Mirrors were found in every home that had even a little disposable income, and so were clocks, maps, pewter, silver, vases, jugs, tea services, tiles, candlesticks, snuffboxes and books, all ranged on mantelpieces, tables and cupboards, or placed in cupboards behind glass doors. Amsterdam, as a great trading city, was also a showcase for the new luxury goods being imported from the east: ebony, silks, chintzes, cottons, or Japanese porcelain wine-pitchers made to order to traditional Dutch designs. For those with less money, local manufacturers copied the imports, often integrating Far Eastern shapes with Dutch motifs – delftware pitchers were one prized example. Even households with much lower incomes commonly contained mats on the floor, curtains, a mirror, one or two prints, or perhaps a painting. Everyone, wrote a visitor to Amsterdam in 1640, ‘in generall striv[es] to adorne their houses’ with ‘Furniture and Ornaments … very Costly and Curious’, including ‘Ritche Cupboards, Cabinetts, etts., Imagery, porcelaine, Costly Fine cages with birds, etts.’, which together make a space ‘Full off pleasure and home contentment’. Nor was the urge to acquire confined to urban centres. Householders in rural areas quickly gained both knowledge of and access to the newest goods. Pendulum clocks were invented in 1657. Two decades later, no modestly prosperous Dutch farmer owned such a novelty; but twenty years after that, nearly nine in ten did.

  In England, too, the spread of better quality goods occurred first among the wealthy, and by 1727 in Bath, that most fashionable of fashionable towns, the changes in construction materials of new houses, and their contents, were reminiscent of the Dutch gradations to their bedding, with improvements in both quantity and kind. Now floors were made of oak instead of the deal that had previously been considered good enough, and the floorboards were covered with carpets; walls were panelled instead of plaster, and marble chimneypieces replaced stone, while rush-bottomed chairs gave way to leather-upholstered ones, oak chests were replaced by mahogany and walnut chests-of-drawers. Mirrors appeared over mantelpieces, and brass fire-irons adorned hearths, while ‘the Linnen f
or the Table and Bed grew better and better till it became suitable even for People of the highest Rank.’ Households of the middling sort had somewhat broadened their number of possessions too. By the late seventeenth century over half owned tables, cooking pots and pewter dishes; nearly half had table linen; one in five owned a mirror, a chest-of-drawers or a cupboard or books; one in four owned some earthenware dishes; one in three a feather-bed. And as with the Dutch, as well as quantity, the reasonably affluent also turned their attention to quality, replacing their wooden trenchers with pewter, their wooden spoons with silver and their iron candlesticks with bronze. And yet at the same time, none of these middling households owned any cups at all, and barely any – under 1 per cent – had knives or forks. Just fifty years later, these houses were transformed: over three-quarters of households had not only tables, cooking pots and pewter, but also upholstered furniture; half had feather-beds, chests-of-drawers, earthenware dishes and mirrors; over a third had table linen; more than one in five owned books, clocks or pictures. The number of households possessing cups had risen from virtually none to one in six. In thriving parts of London, nearly everyone owned what had, half a century before, been rarities – earthenware dishes, books, clocks, pictures, mirrors, table linen, curtains, even cups. The consumer revolution had crossed the Channel. And then it crossed the Atlantic.

  As this revolution spread, those who had the means but nevertheless did not choose to acquire or enjoy the fashions of the day were regarded as somehow failing in their obligations to society, just as previously among the landed gentry those who chose not to serve as magistrates, or attend church regularly, had failed in their duty to their class and birth. In 1715, it was reported, shockingly, that a wealthy planter in Virginia had ‘nothing in or about his house … He hath good beds … but no curtains; and instead of cane chairs, he hath stools made of wood.’* For the successful, furniture had become a way of expressing gentility. A chair no longer conferred status only on the person who sat in it, but on the entire household in which it was found. Even those with very little could participate. Militiamen on the American frontier in 1744 owned brass snuffboxes, imported drinking glasses and earthenware, and they wore metal buckles on their shoes and knee-breeches. By the 1760s in Virginia, the wealthy began to wear imported silks, disdaining the imported cottons that, a generation before, they had been proud to purchase. These cottons were, in this new world of commodity, now fit only for their slaves. In the north, earthenware was within the reach of the working poor, and they could even afford to buy it in sets that matched, and in quantity, so that no one had to eat from shared dishes. These purchases were partly a matter of comfort, partly a matter of status, but none of them were a matter of necessity. And there was always something new to acquire. In 1758, a New York merchant was instructed by his British supplier that his order for ‘dishes’ was meaningless, and he had to be far more specific. Did he want ‘round or long common Dishes for Meat, Soup Dishes, or deep Sallad or Pudding Dishes’?

  There were, of course, many who disapproved. Philosophers, educationalists and clergymen warned of the damage that was done to the moral fabric of the country by this new, and insatiable, appetite for things. In 1714, a magazine with a readership in the urban English upper classes claimed that the desire for these new goods was so great that, if women were not permitted by their husbands to purchase these things, they would trade their petticoats or their husbands’ breeches for them. It was presented as a joke, but the intent behind it was serious: the necessities of life were, it suggested, being recklessly discarded for useless luxuries. It is notable that most who indulged in this type of debate in Britain tended to see the desires of the groups below or above them as damaging; their own desires, generally, were assumed to be proportionate and reasonable.

  In the colonies, however, consumer goods became a political matter. The American Revolution and its boycott of, especially, manufactured textiles, which were almost entirely imported, turned what had previously been dismissed as frivolities into items with a symbolic status. Now consumption was an engine of revolution, and women, as the managers of household expenditure and the makers of domestic choices, had moral as well as economic force.

  It is possible to view the American Revolution as a revolution of consumption. The spark that ignited the revolt was after all the imposition by the mother country of taxes on items of consumption, such as glass and, most famously, tea. And one of the most effective weapons of rebellion was therefore a consumer boycott of imported goods. The list of proscribed items, as one historian has noted, sounds very much like the contents of a fashionable shop, including as it does ‘hats … furniture, gloves … shoes … gold and silver and thread lace … gold and silver buttons … plate … diamond, stone and paste-ware … clocks and watches, silversmith and jeweler’s ware, broad cloths that cost above 10 shillings per yard, muffs, furs and tippets, and all sorts of millenery [sic] ware … china ware, silk and cotton velvets, gauze, pewter … lawns, cambricks, silks of all kinds, malt liquors…’ The origin of these items had made them politically unacceptable; the goods themselves, however, continued to be valued. By general consensus, purchasing a new table, or curtains, or pewter, or even a cambric handkerchief manufactured in Britain was aiding the oppressor; purchasing North American versions of the same items was an act of support for the rebel cause: consumption as patriotism.

  Such patriotism, combined with the new mass market which increased access to well-made, well-designed items in a range of prices and styles for many more of the population, came to make owning goods seem a democratic right. Each generation possessed more goods, and better quality goods, than the one before. This proliferation, together with the development in the meaning of goods, produced a change in how they were valued. And the change in value, in turn, also changed the most basic element of the possession of goods: how they were stored. The Dutch had long shown off their china and silver on the tops of cabinets; in Britain, sideboards had had display spaces for tea sets and other pieces of status ware. In the colonies, however, many had continued to use chests as their primary means of storage, which meant that the new consumer goods could only be seen when they were in use. By the mid-eighteenth century, the spread and elaboration in design of that democratic luxury, inexpensive earthenware, provided the impetus for a new fashion for cupboards, where the dishes could be displayed even when not in use. These cupboards in turn became objects of display in their own right, as Diderot’s fable had foretold.

  Other objects achieved their status not simply because they were desirable luxury goods in themselves, but as a result of developments that took place a world away. Sugar was the first new mass-consumed foodstuff, its price dropping sharply as trade routes were regularized. In the late seventeenth century in England, sugar consumption was less than a kilo per person annually; by the 1770s, that had risen to just under a kilo per person every fortnight. (A rise that seems almost impossible, until today’s annual consumption – 37.5 kilograms – is considered.) Tea and coffee were initially luxury imports, and only in the eighteenth century, with the establishment of plantations under European control, did the consequent drop in price see tea, in particular, change from being an exotic drink taken in a public place to a comforting drink made at home. Soon milk and sugar were added to the original oriental beverage; the result saw it become a panacea. Even those who could not necessarily afford a hot dinner could afford this hot, sugary substitute. For the poor, the drink was enough. For the rich, the objects used to make and consume hot drinks were also markers of status: kettles, spirit-lamps, tea caddies, teapots, hot-water jugs, strainers, sugar basins, sugar tongs, milk jugs, slop bowls (which held the dregs of emptied teacups), teaspoons, cups and saucers, and more.*

  The new commodities, the increase in the number of people who could purchase them, and most importantly the status that derived from their ownership and display, meant that birth alone was no longer sufficient to establish a person’s place in society. Joseph
Cabell was linked by birth and marriage to many of the great families of Virginia. But by the 1780s, to maintain what had been his by right at birth, a friend advised, ‘you should have a home … Until you do this you can have no real weight or influence in society’. That ‘home’, of course, would be nothing more than a house until it was furnished, and furnishings alone were not enough. Cabell would only maintain the necessary social cachet if the interiors and objects were displayed to the right people. By the early nineteenth century, a visitor observed a similar development in Britain, and not merely among the upper classes: ‘custom demands many luxuries … as much … at a shopkeeper’s house as at the Duke’s; a handsomely fitted up house, with elegant furniture, plate … a profusion of dishes … True hospitality this can hardly be called; it is rather the display of one’s own possessions, for the purpose of dazzling…’ Display had become the essence of the house. This public display of the private was considered to have a moral dimension too. Immanuel Kant thought that ‘No one in complete solitude will decorate or clean his house; he will not even do it for his … wife and children … but only for strangers, to show himself to advantage.’ Without a public face, the private sphere would not be maintained.

  This is not to suggest that people in previous ages had been unconcerned by the appearance of household objects, but now many more owned objects whose appearance could be valued independently of their utility. From the end of the sixteenth century, it is possible to discern a widespread desire to be identified with one’s possessions: initials were carved on boxes and chests, dates into lintels and mantelpieces, plaques bearing their owners’ names were affixed on houses and barns. And even in small, rude one-room houses, with unplastered walls or earthen floors, even there, possessions were decorated, cupboards and chests were carved or painted in cheerful colours – they were considered worth making beautiful. But in the new urban, mercantile world, these goods, and others, were more commonly purchased than inherited, purchased to establish, or maintain, status. Because now paintings, furniture, china and ornaments were no longer solely the status symbols of the aristocracy, but the products of the marketplace, trade and mass production. And with urbanization, and the anonymity an increasingly mobile population created, appearances had more value than they had had when everyone’s family history was known. The question now was, what do people, who may not know me at all, make of me based on what they learn as they pass my house? What do relative strangers think when they call on me? And thus the question of style, which until then had been an issue for the very rich, became important to the middling classes too. Their houses were expected to reflect the qualities of those who lived in them, to present their owners as people of taste and cultivation, of ‘sensibility’, to use the contemporary idiom.