The Making of Home Read online

  5. BUILDING MYTHS

  ‘thoughts of the dying’: north London house: Ayres, Domestic Interiors, pp. 2–4; souls of houses: Vickery, Behind Closed Doors, p. 29; brides: Segalen, ‘The House Between Public and Private’, Schuurman and Spierenburg, Private Domain, p. 247; ‘Don’t you sometimes’: [Andrew K. H. Boyd], The Recreations of a Country Parson (Boston, Fields, Osgood and Co., 1870), vol. 2, p. 390.

  ‘gods of home’: Lupino: cited in Hamlett, Material Relations, p. 180; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Bodley Head Scott Fitzgerald, vol. 1, The Great Gatsby (London, The Bodley Head, 1958), p. 213.

  ‘peace and contentment’: ‘The Englishman sees’: H. Muthesius, The English House, vol. 1, p. 1; footnote: Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts, trs. Peter Watts (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1964), pp. 42–3; Newton: cited in Gavin Stamp and André Goulancourt, The English House 1860–1914: The Flowering of English Domestic Architecture (London, Faber, 1986), p. 14.

  ‘cold world outside’: Renan: cited in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trs. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA, Belknap Press, 1999), p. 554.

  ‘generous and ceremonial’: Chicago: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton, The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 127; gemütlich: S. Muthesius, Poetic Home, p. 28; ‘incidents and situations from common life’: Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads, in The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth (London, E. Moxon, 1870), vol. 6, p. 826; gezellig : Henk Driessen, ‘About the Borders of Gezelligheid’, de Jonge, Ons sort mensen.

  ‘Philadelphia in the 1860s’: journal editor: cited in Clark, American Family Home, p. 23.

  ‘capturing the city’: Greek Revival for residential architecture: Burnett, A Social History of Housing, p. 104.

  ‘flat Greek roof’: The Pioneers: cited in Cohn, Palace or Poorhouse, pp. 30, 35–7.

  ‘for his workers’: workers’ housing: Ballantyne and Law, Tudoresque, pp. 90–91, 97–9.

  ‘they were “restored”’: nineteenth-century ‘restoration’: Ballantyne and Law, Tudoresque, pp. 36, 41, 44.

  ‘saying “America”’: colonial houses: Larkin, Reshaping of Everyday Life, pp. 128–31; New York and the Hudson: Garrett, At Home, pp. 17–20.

  ‘Golden Age art’: Kamer van Jan Steen: S. Muthesius, Poetic Home, pp. 235–7, 290.

  ‘peasant connotations’: development of Altdeutsch: S. Muthesius, Poetic Home, p. 227.

  ‘a physical sense’: Old Alpine: S. Muthesius, Poetic Home, pp. 264–5.

  ‘the ideal home’: north London: Alan A. Jackson, Semi-Detached London: Suburban Development, Life and Transport, 1900–39 (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1973), p. 37; 2013 advertisement for Vincent Timber UK: email of 7 March 2013, received by the author.

  ‘out of reach’: ‘A farmer’s house’ and ‘the hardest’: Lewis F. Allen, Rural Architecture: Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings … (New York, C. M. Saxton, 1852), and Henry W. Cleaveland, William Backus and Samuel D. Backus, Village and Farm Cottages: The Requirements of American Village Homes Considered … (New York, D. Appleton, 1856), cited in Grier, Culture and Comfort, pp. 103. The interpretation is my own.

  ‘happy olden days’: Franklin house: Nylander, Our Own Snug Fireside, pp. 15–16; Colonial kitchen: Grier, Culture and Comfort, p. 54; footnote: Nylander, Our Own Snug Fireside, p. 16; old forms of lighting: Andreas Blühm and Louise Lippincott, Light: The Industrial Age, 1750–1900: Art and Science, Technology and Society (London, Thames and Hudson, 2000), p. 234.

  ‘were abominations’: William Morris, ‘Manifesto of The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (S.P.A.B.)’, Art and Architecture: Essays 1870–1884 (Holicong, PA, Wildside Press, 2003) p. 14, accessed online, http://bit.ly/10bSG2I, 28 March 2013.

  ‘of an emotion’: early Heimat museum: Alon Confino, Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871–1918 (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1997), pp. 137, 144.

  ‘historical inaccuracy’: success of country-house style: Ponsonby, Stories from Home, pp. 159ff.

  ‘authentic either’: authenticity of Frankfurt kitchen: Jeremy Aynsley, ‘The Modern Period Room – A Contradiction in Terms?’, Penny Sparke, Brenda Martin and Trevor Keeble, eds, The Modern Period Room: The Construction of the Exhibited Interior, 1870 to 1950 (London, Routledge, 2006), p. 17.

  ‘99 per cent’: elegance of Colonial Williamsburg: Eric Gable and Richard Handler, ‘In Colonial Williamsburg, the New History Meets the Old’, Chronicle of Higher Education, 30 October 1998, 45, pp. B10–11.

  ‘an imaginary past’: my reading of nostalgia has been informed by Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York, Basic, 2001), especially pp. xiv–xv, 6, 11–15.

  ‘past or present’: Cape Cod’s emotional resonance: Clark, American Family Home, pp. 201–3.

  ‘only to 1750’: log cabin term: Weslager, The Log Cabin, pp. 99ff., p. 54.

  ‘Swedish settlers’: footnote: Weslager, The Log Cabin, makes the distinctions as clear as possible, pp. 56–7; Swedish-settled areas: ibid., pp. 140–2, 155.

  ‘the basic formula’: immigration waves: Weslager, The Log Cabin, pp. 199–200, 209, 212, 226.

  ‘indigenous and simple’: Harrison’s supporters: Weslager, The Log Cabin, pp. 265–7; Harrison’s ‘log cabin’: Cohn, Palace or Poorhouse, pp. 177, 183–4; [James Fenimore Cooper], The Pioneers, or, The Sources of the Susquehanna, A Descriptive Tale (London, T. Allman and C. Daly, [n.d.]), p. 223.

  ‘shape of logs’: Lincoln’s Birthplace: Weslager, The Log Cabin, p. 289–90, 305–6; footnote: http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/sites/birth.htm, accessed 25 April 2013; Lincoln logs: http://www.knex.com/Lincoln-Logs/history.php, accessed 9 October 2013; Log Cabin syrup: Deetz and Deetz, Times of Their Lives, pp. 174–5, says the tins in the 1940s in the USA were shaped like a log cabin, with the spout where the chimney should be. In my Canadian childhood in the 1960s, they were just square tins printed with a picture of the cabin. I assume the American ones were the same. For current packaging, http://www.logcabinsyrups.com/products/, accessed 9 October 2013.

  ‘in the 1850s’: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Courtship of Miles Standish (Boston, Ticknor and Fields, 1858), p. 31; the New England inventories pre-1650: cited by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), p. 84; limited yarn production: Nylander, Our Own Snug Fireside, p. 169; Mary Cooper: Boydston, Home and Work, p. 13; Olmsted: cited in Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1988), p. 121.

  ‘to the cash-rich’: ‘tear … into bits’: cited in McHugh, American Domesticity, p. 25.

  ‘dancing take place?’: apart from the citation from McHugh, above, this paragraph and the previous one derive from Nylander, Our Own Snug Fireside, pp. 228–9, and Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (New York, Metropolitan, 1999), pp. 53–9.

  ‘new one each year’: Northamptonshire: Laslett, Family Life, p. 71; servant turnover: ibid., p. 72.

  ‘age of twenty-one’: ‘40 per cent’: Laslett, Family Life, pp. 3–4, 162, 164, 166; modern figures for divorce: Michael Anderson, ‘What is new about the modern family: an historical perspective’, OPCS Occasional Paper 21, The Family, p. 5. Laslett’s figure of 40 per cent is estimated, based on the 32 per cent of children in the census figures, and extrapolating to include the parents of servants, who were not enumerated; Netherlands: Rudolf Dekker, ‘Children on their Own: Changing Relations in the Family. The Experiences of Dutch Autobiographers, Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries’, Schuurman and Spierenburg, Private Domain, p. 65; American south: Jane Turner Censer, North Carolina Planters and Their Children 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1984), pp. 20–21.

  ‘otherwise occupied’: Morning Chr
onicle: cited in Gillis, ‘Making Time for Family’, Journal of Family History, p. 13; census Sunday church attendance: Ashton, Victorian Bloomsbury (London, Yale University Press, 2012), p. 159.

  ‘or enough chairs’: survey: John R. Gillis, ‘Making Time for Family: The Invention of Family Time(s) and the Reinvention of Family History’, Journal of Family History, 21, 1996, pp. 4–5, finds this gem of a report in the New York Times, where it appeared as Daniel Goleman, ‘Family Rituals May Promote Better Emotional Adjustment’, 11 March 1992, http://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/11/news/family-rituals-may-promote-better-emotional-adjustment.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm, accessed 23 October 2013.

  6. HEARTH AND HOME

  ‘walloped, or boiled’: focus: Arien Mack, ed., ‘Home: A Place in the World’, Social Research, 58, 1, 1991, p. 42; footnote: cited in Crowley, Invention of Comfort, p. 57; church statute: McKeon, Secret History of Domesticity, p. 143; ‘camino’: Sarti, Europe at Home, p. 118; ‘potwalloper’ boroughs: Vickery, Behind Closed Doors, p. 8.

  ‘married to its hearth’: ‘a hearth of one’s own is worth gold’: this proverb is found in Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia; the German cited in Reagin, Sweeping the Nation, p. 44; Cobbett: cited in Langford, Englishness Identified, pp. 115–16.

  ‘remained standard’: first fireplace: Sarti, ‘The Material Conditions of Family Life’, Kertzer and Barbagli, History of the European Family, vol. 1, p. 3, suggests Venice, but Crowley, Invention of Comfort, p. 23, cites the much older St Gall appearance.

  ‘the brick chimney’: position of hearth: Shammas, ‘The Domestic Environment in Early Modern England and America’, Peter Charles Hoffer, ed., Colonial Women and Domesticity: Selected Articles on Gender in Early America (New York, Garland, 1988), p. 198; footnote: central hearths in Scotland and Ireland, Ayres, Domestic Interiors, p. 20.

  ‘comfortable living’: ‘old men’: William Harrison, The Description of England, George Edelen, ed. (Ithaca, for the Folger Shakespeare Library by Cornell University Press, 1968), pp. 200–1. The date of the observation is open to question: Harrison wrote the work in 1560 and revised it twice, in 1577 and 1587.

  ‘hole in the roof’: American colony chimneys: Demos, A Little Commonwealth, pp. 25–6; frontier houses: Cowan, Social History of American Technology, pp. 29–30.

  ‘way with braziers’: heating preferences: Sarti, ‘The Material Conditions of Family Life’, Kertzer and Barbagli, History of the European Family, vol. 1, p. 3.

  ‘a welcome addition’: Stube: Sarti, ‘The Material Conditions of Family Life’, Kertzer and Barbagli, History of the European Family, vol. 1, pp. 4–6.

  ‘little insulating space’: Dutch hood dimensions: Muizelaar and Phillips, Men and Women, p. 57; Dutch firepots: Zumthor, Rembrandt’s Holland, pp. 45–6; footwarmers: Franits, Paragons of Virtue, p. 50; zoldertje: Loughman, ‘Between Reality and Artful Fiction’, Aynsley and Grant, Imagined Interiors, pp. 82–3.

  ‘might have one’: repeal of coal tax: Ayres, Domestic Interiors, p. 16; Cambridgeshire and Norwich: Crowley, Invention of Comfort, pp. 56–8; numbers of fireplaces: Sarti, ‘The Material Conditions of Family Life’, Kertzer and Barbagli, History of the European Family, vol. 1, p. 8.

  ‘of the population’: Biographical information on Muthesius is drawn from the introduction to H. Muthesius, The English House, pp. xiv, xix, xx, while the sentence quoted in the footnote is from vol. 2, p. 68. The footnote’s gas take-up statistics are from Caroline Davidson, A Woman’s Work is Never Done: A History of Housework in the British Isles, 1650–1950 (London, Chatto & Windus, 1982), pp. 67, 112; acceptance of draughts: H. Muthesius, The English House, vol. 2, pp. 1–3, 30; ubiquity of coal fires: Davidson, A Woman’s Work is Never Done, p. 100; ‘Keep the Home-Fires Burning’, originally entitled ‘’Till the Boys Come Home’, 1914, by Ivor Novello and Lena Gilbert Ford.

  ‘impossible to say’: watercolour: ‘Dining Room of Dr Whitridge’s, Tiverton, Rhode Island’ is owned by the Old Dartmouth Historical Society, New Bedford, Massachusetts, and is reproduced in Garrett, At Home, p. 79.

  ‘rooms of the house’: spread of family through house: this very interesting idea is presented by Candace M. Volz, ‘The Modern Look of the Early-Twentieth-Century House: A Mirror of Changing Lifestyles’, Foy and Schlereth, American Home Life, p. 37.

  ‘value of the heat’: American fiancé: cited in Gillis, A World of Their Own Making, p. 144; Pugin houses: Stamp and Goulancourt, The English House, p. 33.

  ‘reality of home-making’: it is Gavin Stamp who points out this paradox of visual vs practical, Stamp and Goulancourt, The English House, pp. 32–4.

  ‘door or a window’: 1790 house: Vickery, Behind Closed Doors, p. 29; unspoken rule: Crowley, Invention of Comfort, pp. 36–7.

  ‘wooden shutters, or both’: Jarrow church: Crowley, Invention of Comfort, p. 39.

  ‘part of the window’: ‘no perfect house’: Crowley, Invention of Comfort, p. 65.

  ‘room became typical’: Oxfordshire inventories: Shammas, ‘The Domestic Environment in Early Modern England and America’, Hoffer, Colonial Women and Domesticity, p. 198; three glazed windows: Crowley, Invention of Comfort, p. 67.

  ‘shipped to the colonies’: colonists’ fear of windows: G. Wright, Building the Dream, p. 12; advice to settlers: Demos, A Little Commonwealth, p. 28; Flowerdew Hundred: Deetz, Flowerdew Hundred, p. 108.

  ‘wish’d they were less’: windows as furniture: Crowley, Invention of Comfort, p. 67; ‘For windowes’: cited in Demos, A Little Commonwealth, p. 28; New England minister: cited in David H. Flaherty, Privacy in Colonial New England (Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1972), p. 41.

  ‘anywhere on the property’: lack of windows in USA: Crowley, Invention of Comfort, p. 105; slatted shutters: Garrett, At Home, p. 24; Olmsted: cited in Vlach, Back of the Big House, pp. 9–10.

  ‘the wealthiest few’: Tessin and French windows: DeJean, The Age of Comfort, p. 155; luxury of French windows: ibid., p. 155.

  ‘were easily felt’: I am indebted, in the discussion of the history of the sash window that follows, to H. J. Louw, ‘The Origin of the Sash Window’, Architectural History, 26, 1983, pp. 49–72. Not only was this essay ground-breaking in its analysis of the history of the sash window, but it also repatriated its invention to England from the Netherlands.

  ‘at that date’: Boston merchant: Hentie Louw and Robert Crayford, ‘A Constructional History of the Sash-Window c. 1670–c.1725’ (Parts 1 and 2), Architectural History, 41, 1998, pp. 82–130, and 42, 1999, pp. 173–239; part 1, p. 95.

  ‘and maintained’: Dutch street patrol: Zumthor, Rembrandt’s Holland, pp. 19–20; Amsterdam brighter than Paris: de Vries, Industrious Revolution, pp. 128–9, and Sarti, ‘The Material Conditions of Family Life’, in Kertzer and Barbagli, History of the European Family, vol. 1, p. 8; London parishes: Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night, pp. 85–6, 89.

  ‘of their possessions’: breaking street lamps: Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night, pp. 97; footnote: ibid., pp. 99–100; link-bearers in London and Paris: ibid., p. 89.

  ‘on moonlit nights’: Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, Ros Ballaster, ed. ([1811], Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1995), p. 35; Lancashire minister: Brian Bowers, Lengthening the Day: A History of Lighting Technology (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 2.

  ‘domesticated stars’: spread of gas street lighting: Rybczynski, Home, p. 140; civic obligation: de Vries, Industrious Revolution, pp. 128–9; Pall Mall experiment: Hugh Barty-King, New Flame: How Gas Changed the Commercial, Domestic and Industrial Life of Britain … (Tavistock, Graphmitre, 1984), p. 28; the rest of the information is from Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night, p. 32, although he does not give population figures. He, or his translator, refers to ‘Germany’ in this pre-unification period. If Prussia is included with the German Confederation, the population was 52 million; without Prussia it was 47 million. I have compromised, therefore, on a round figure of 50 million; mid-1860s: the date is Rybczynski’s, Home, p. 140;
[Anon.], review of ‘An Historical Sketch of the Origin, Progress and Present State of Gas-Lighting’ by William Matthews, Westminster Review, October 1829, p. 302; Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘A Plea for Gas-lamps’, Virginibus Puerisque and Other Essays (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Cambridge Scholars, 2009), pp. 90–91; footnote: trials have occurred for a range of reasons, in a range of cities and towns, from Highland Park, Detroit (money-saving), to entire areas of Buckinghamshire (eco-friendly), and Toulouse (eco-friendly, with the addition that they are using heat-sensitive lights that switch on when a pedestrian walks past). Highland Park, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/us/cities-cost-cuttings-leave-residents-in-the-dark.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0; Buckinghamshire, http://www.buckscc.gov.uk/bcc/transport/Streetlights_useful_documents. page, Toulouse, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/26/toulouse-heat-sensitive-lampposts, all accessed 23 January 2013.

  ‘few alternatives’: technology of burning candles: Jonathan Bourne and Vanessa Brett, Lighting in the Domestic Interior: Renaissance to Art Nouveau (London, Sotheby’s, 1991), p. 59; resinous wood: John Caspall, Making Fire and Light in the Home pre-1820 (Woodbridge, Antique Collectors’ Club), p. 262.

  ‘relumed without danger’: wick technology: Bowers, Lengthening the Day, p. 20; tallow: Muizelaar and Phillips, Men and Women, p. 58; percentage of light loss: calculated by Count Rumford, cited in Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night, p. 43; footnote: Bourne and Brett, Lighting in the Domestic Interior, p. 59; James Boswell, Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763, Frederick A. Pottle, ed. (London, Heinemann, 1950), 21 March 1762/3, p. 224; the modern historian in the footnote is Davidson, A Woman’s Work is Never Done, p. 96.

  ‘them as “numerous”’: Ham House: Crowley, Invention of Comfort, p. 120.

  ‘varying heights’: cost of rushlight vs candlelight: this was the calculation made by the naturalist Gilbert White, cited in Bowers, Lengthening the Day, pp. 18–19.

  ‘heaped upon profligacy’: I am referring here to the Hogarth engravings; the original paintings, in Sir John Soane’s Museum, show slightly different numbers and combinations, although the increase is similar. I am indebted to Crowley, Invention of Comfort, pp. 133ff., for the reading. He, however, uses the paintings.