The Making of Home Read online

  Girls’ toys were intended to encourage the habits of nurturing – dolls or dollshouses, essentially. In addition their toys were often fragile, often not actually to be played with, but merely put on a shelf where they could be admired. Only towards the end of the nineteenth century did manufactured dolls start to look like their owners – like children – instead of like their mothers. For those children who had no toys at all, it was usually the girls who went without (one historian suggests that, between 1830 and 1870, two-thirds of American boys had toys, while 80 per cent of girls had none). Although the cost of toys was diminishing, and their availability increasing, most dolls were still homemade, of rags. Books too were gendered: boys’ books typically recounted adventures, while those for girls stayed closer to home, telling their readers of careless girls who broke their toys and learned a lesson, or good girls who played quietly and became good mothers – ‘when’, as Rousseau so depressingly put it, ‘she shall be her own doll’.

  Board games began to be sold in Britain at the end of the eighteenth century, to provide the educational element that some parents worried that unstructured play lacked, while jigsaws were invented by a schoolmaster to teach children geography and history as they pieced maps or historical panoramas together. But Maria Edgeworth, whose writings on children’s education at the close of the eighteenth century were as influential as Locke’s had been a century earlier, recommended games that improved hand–eye coordination, or encouraged children to run about: kites, tops, hoops and balls were, she believed, as educational as paper and pencils, while toy towns or dollshouses cultivated the ‘power of reason’, ‘the inventive faculty’ and promoted ‘general habits … patient perseverance’.

  Children did, however, have far more freedom than we can imagine today. Thus, whatever the adult expectations of education, most of their play was unsupervised. Rural children spent their days climbing, hunting for birds’ nests, running races, playing hide-and-seek, flying kites, or simply roaming the countryside, while urban children played, equally unsupervised, in parks, cemeteries, empty lots or just on the streets. Outdoor play was encouraged. The tiny houses, and adults working at home, meant little space was available for children, while the dangers were no less inside than out: rooms were filled with tools of the adults’ trade, sometimes machinery, and of course open fires.

  At home, children were expected to adapt their lives to adults’, not the other way around. Rarely were objects expressly designed for them – a house that had at most one or two chairs was understandably unlikely to boast specialized baby-items. From the sixteenth-century, some Dutch images depict miniature chairs, or, more often, wooden stools with a hole in the centre, for babies just starting to stand, or walk. These stools were the most frequently found items of children’s furniture, possibly because they prevented children from crawling across earthen floors, which would dirty them and their clothes, and, more importantly, they stopped them from straying too close to open fires while other family members worked.

  At a time when children were considered miniature adults, their clothes, too, were, once past babyhood, essentially small versions of adult clothes, not dedicated items for a distinct period in life. In the seventeenth-century Netherlands, babies of both sexes wore baby caps, corsets and skirts until they were seven; after that, boys wore miniature men’s outfits, and girls wore women’s. Babies in the colonies were little different, wearing petticoats, a pinafore and a special baby cap called a biggin; the only difference between genders was in the shape of their pinafore collars. The petticoats marked their inferiority, even boys being dressed in this item of women’s wear. The petticoats were also extra-long, to prevent the babies from crawling, a physical characteristic that put them on the level of animals. From the age of five or six, boys, instead of directly adopting the clothes of adult men, went through an interim stage when they wore robes that resembled long frock-coats, the habitual dress of sixteenth-century men: they had achieved the status of men, but their clothes made it clear that they were yet to achieve equality with their fathers.

  Before the eighteenth century, most household items that were specifically designed for use by children were those that imposed physical restraint: swaddling bands, cradles, walking stools. When babies were swaddled, they could be laid down anywhere, as they were unable to roll. As swaddling began to disappear in the sixteenth century, so cradles are found more frequently. They were often made of wicker, which was inexpensive, lightweight and therefore convenient for moving around in a multi-purpose room. In addition, they could easily be burnt in case of infectious diseases. More generally, however, special arrangements for the smallest members of the household remained unusual, or unknown. It was only in the second half of the seventeenth century that the high-chair arrived, and even then, it was at first just a chair with longer-than-normal legs; only in the eighteenth century was a restraining bar added. Until then, toddlers, as small adults, were simply expected to learn to restrain themselves.

  In the eighteenth century, between the ages of three and five, boys from well-to-do families wore not the breeches their fathers dressed in, but the long trousers worn by working-class men. Their clothes still marked them out as inferior to adult men, but now as inferior in class, rather than gender or age: lower in the hierarchy than their fathers, and their mothers, who in turn outranked working-class men. (A typical threat for misbehaviour was a return to petticoats – to womanhood.) When boys turned seven or eight they finally took on the clothes of their fathers, although not their powdered wigs and cravats, which indicated their still less-than-full adult-male status. Girls had far fewer stages to accommodate. After they left baby-clothes behind, they were immediately dressed in tiny replicas of their mothers’ clothes. Upper-class English children took on the accoutrements of womanhood even earlier: many two- and three-year-old daughters of the wealthy already wore whalebone bodices.

  The nineteenth century, that century of specialized commodities, saw the appearance of dedicated baby-furniture. By the end of the century, high-chairs had a board added at the front, in effect forming a miniature space for the baby, its own eating area. Specialist children’s furniture was always more popular in the USA than in Britain. British nurseries, for the upper classes, were in the private rather than public areas of the house, and so were furnished with cast-off items from other rooms. In the USA, children’s lives in well-to-do homes were more integrated with the adults’, and furniture was therefore, where affordable, made especially for them.*

  As specialist baby-furniture spread, so too did specialist baby-clothes. No longer did babies wear miniature versions of adult clothing. Now, in addition to the petticoats, items such as bellybands, undershirts and nappies were widely worn. No gender differentiation was marked at this stage, and frequently, if not always, not at the next either, which included short skirts (that is ‘petty’ coats, little dresses). Unlike the older long baby gowns, which extended well past the infants’ feet, skirts were now ankle-length, making it easier for the children to crawl and then walk on their own. Between the ages of three and ten, both boys and girls now wore an entirely new outfit, of half-length petticoats and pantaloons. It was adopted for boys first, but by the middle of the century girls too were wearing them. To modern eyes, the pantaloons look very feminine, being white and trimmed with lace, but to their contemporaries they were, shockingly, trousers – men’s clothes – and many considered it ‘an abomination unto the Lord’ that girls – little women – were dressed as boys – little men. In hindsight, it can be seen that, rather, the unisex outfits signalled that gender had, for this age group, been neutralized. These small beings were no longer being dressed, and treated, as nascent adults, nor even as boys and girls. They had become a separate group, children first and foremost.

  As the idea of perfect womanhood became increasingly centred on a woman’s reproductive role, so children became pre-sexual, angelic blessings to the household. Highlighting their gender differences would be to rob th
em ‘of their innocence and happy ignorance’. Childhood was no longer primarily a stage for these small, imperfect adults to learn self-control, but had become almost a state of grace, and children in that state needed to be protected from the harshness of the outside world. Rousseau, in Émile, had prefigured the idea of keeping children well away from the pernicious influences of worldly society. Yet even he had never gone as far as suggesting that children’s needs might be placed ahead of adults. But now that was beginning to happen. Childhood was becoming the centre of what a home was perceived to be, a place where children were kept apart from the contaminations of the world.

  Yet even as they were being protected, their new importance ensured that the marketplace began to cater for them. Crawling-mats and blankets, high-chairs and prams: hundreds of commercial goods were now created for functions that had not previously been felt to need them, all to enable parents to provide their children with everything that might keep them cocooned from the outside world for just that little bit longer.

  5

  Building Myths

  In the 1960s, builders renovating a house in north London found, bricked up behind a fireplace, a basket holding two shoes, a candlestick and a drinking vessel, as well as the skeletons of two chickens that had been walled up alive, and two more that had been strangled first: votive offerings to the house-gods of the sixteenth century, resurfacing in the twentieth. Houses, according to myth, folk tale and legend, have souls, and possibly even minds. While we may no longer subscribe to these beliefs on a conscious level, many small rituals based on those beliefs were performed until recently: clocks were stopped and mirrors veiled on the death of a member of the household, while on the day of a funeral window-blinds were habitually drawn, covering the house’s ‘eyes’. Even today, brides continue to be carried over the house’s threshold, marking the ceremonial border between home and not-home. In 1870, a British clergyman stressed the fleeting nature of human life in a metaphor of household furnishings. ‘Don’t you sometimes look about you and say to yourself … those window-curtains are getting sadly faded … Those carpets must be replaced some day … These are … the things which come up in the strange, confused remembrance of the dying man in the last days of life.’ For him, and his readers, the strength of the emotional resonances of their household goods made it natural to imagine they might be among the last thoughts of the dying.

  Even the most mundane objects could embody resonances of their owners, and their owners’ lives. The actor Stanley Lupino, who had the same sort of impoverished south London childhood as the slightly older Charlie Chaplin, remembered how, when his mother died in 1899, ‘the brokers came to take away the poor little home that she had struggled to keep together for so long … The full tragedy of her loss only dawned on me the day after her funeral, when … I was left behind to see stick after stick of our furniture being taken out’. This elision between a house’s furnishings and the soul of its inhabitants achieved literary greatness in The Great Gatsby. The coloured lights Gatsby strings outside his house signify his presence. Then one day they remain unlit, and his rejection by Daisy, his lost love, and then his death, follow the house’s physical darkness. Lupino’s chairs, Gatsby’s lights – or televisions, sofas and mixing bowls: all unspoken offerings to the gods of home.

  By the nineteenth century, the centrality of domestic life had become so firmly entrenched, so all encompassing, that no one could remember a time when it had not held sway. In particular, said a German in London, ‘The Englishman sees the whole of life embodied in his house.’ Englishmen were not flâneurs, as Parisians were, finding the pleasures of life in the street, in cafés opening out onto the pavements from where they could watch the world pass by. Even those poor benighted men who had failed to marry, and thus had no home – for by this time, a house without a woman was a house, not a home – even they found homes by outsourcing their domesticity, eating in coffeehouses and chophouses, places that ran with such routine for their regulars that they barely had to speak, before spending evenings in their clubs, those commercial versions of home.* As the architect Ernest Newton said in 1891, ‘the sacredness of home-life is … itself a religion, pure and easy to believe. It requires no elaborate creeds, its worship is the simplest, its discipline the gentlest and its rewards are peace and contentment.’

  ‘Peace and contentment’ – what many would consider to be the epitome of what home, of domesticity, was all about. Home as a haven from the outside world, a place where we are cherished and protected, where we find emotional sustenance, a place where we can be ourselves, and where, in addition, we can find literal, as well as spiritual, comfort – a word that, as late as 1859, gave the French philosopher Ernest Renan pause: ‘I am forced to use this barbarous word to express an idea quite un-French.’ If the word ‘comfort’ was un-French, what, one wonders, would Renan have thought about the even more comfortable ‘cosy’, or the Dutch gezellig, or the German gemütlich, or Danish and Norwegian hygge, all of which contain undertones of a comfort that is understood to be found only indoors when set against a real or metaphorical cold world outside?

  The vocabulary of home expanded in English in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when a number of new words come into popular use: homelike, home-maker, homey. Over a hundred years later, in Chicago in the 1970s, eighty-two families were asked to describe the houses they actually lived in, and the houses they wanted to live in. The words most often chosen were not architectural, nor even descriptive, but emotive: ‘comfortable’, ‘cosy’, ‘relaxing’. German too has a range of words that evoke domesticity and comfort: heimelig and häuslich (home-ly and house-ly) are the most obvious, but behaglich, an emotional as well as physical comfort, has a sense of being inside (hag means enclosure), while another type of cosy comfort, wohnlich, comes from wohnen, to dwell. Gemüt was originally a philosophical term, a Romantic conception of mind and soul (Gemüt means soul), but by the middle of the nineteenth century, gemütlich had been domesticated, and democraticized. No longer the preserve of the literary and literate, the word represented an enjoyment of home that was now available to all. Art that had previously concerned itself with the rarefied emotions of exceptional men transformed itself, tamed itself, into a domestic idyll for all. And not just in Germany. The ‘incidents and situations from common life’, as Wordsworth phrased it, were the chosen subject for many poets and writers in nineteenth-century Britain too. The Dutch gezellig and gemak are synonyms for comfort, but many are adamant that the words are untranslatable because the sentiments are purely geographical. While each country embodies their own cosiness, with one aspect or another emphasized, they all tend to include an emotional range similar to gezellig, which, it has been suggested, means ‘homely, cosy, informal, atmospheric, entertaining, civilized, courteous, modest, decent, generous and ceremonial’.

  The increase in comfort words in northwestern Europe came first, but by the end of the nineteenth century, there was a tradition of reading emotional as well as physical comfort into architecture. Previously, houses were considered to be good if they kept the rain out, were large, or well built; they were bad if they didn’t keep the rain out, were too small, or poorly constructed. Or houses were good if they were fashionable, built in the latest style. Now a house could be small but good if it conveyed feelings of emotional wellbeing not merely in the residents, but in a viewer. Words that emphasized aesthetic value, such as beautiful, increasingly gave way to words that emphasized moral value, such as honest, or truthful. Houses were no longer only reflections of the people who lived in them: now the right kind of architecture was also thought to imbue its residents with the right kind of thoughts. In 1776, the American who spurned imported British fabrics and clothed her family in homespun was expressing her household’s patriotism; in the nineteenth century, ‘The man who has a home, presenting comfort allied to taste … is … a good citizen,’ wrote the editor of a builders’ journal in Philadelphia in the 1860s.

  By this
time, the lifestyles of the rich and famous had become a familiar feature of American popular journalism. Magazines had, for half a century, been publishing accounts of the famous that also displayed them in their own homes. And it was their physical surroundings, suggested these stories, that reflected – that possibly even enabled – their successes, a popularization of the Romantic idea that a house is a physical expression of their owners. But the style that became the ultimate expression of Americana is, at first, surprising. From the start of the nineteenth century the English style known as Greek Revival had synthesized a variety of elements taken from the Doric and Ionic buildings then being uncovered by archaeologists, creating a public architecture most frequently used for museums (both the British Museum and the National Gallery), theatres (Covent Garden) and government buildings. The style was uncommon for residential architecture in Britain, except on occasion for the wealthiest. In the USA, however, Greek Revival was adopted first as it had been used in Britain, for public buildings such as the Capitol in Washington (1803), but then, after the War of 1812, it spread more widely, for houses big and small, including the White House when it was rebuilt after the British set fire to it on (briefly) capturing the city.