The Making of Home Read online

  When change comes to large numbers of people low down on the social scale, Marxist and sociological interpretations of history every bit as much as the ‘great man’ school of political history join together in seeing the masses not as actors, but as those who are acted upon, helplessly washed about by the tides of circumstances. For the former, it was the forces of urbanization, or Protestantism, or consumerism that drove the emergence of capitalism and modern nation-states. But, while giving due weight to the difficulty of attributing agency to millions en masse, if we try to see urbanization, or Protestantism, or consumerism as the result of private desires, it becomes possible to read the emergence of the modern world not as a mighty thunderclap where these forces suddenly collided, but as the natural outcome of a series of smaller, private goals of the new middle classes.

  The Restoration of Charles II in 1660 put an end, for the moment, to political revolution by the people in England and Scotland. Comparable revolts and uprisings had occurred over the previous half-century across much of Europe, and they, too, mostly drew to a close in the 1660s and 1670s.* That the democratic impulse across the continent was strong can hardly be denied, but its eclipse in England did not necessarily mean it had died. The historian Christopher Hill suggests instead that the democratic impetus which the Restoration ended was merely redirected, emerging, unexpectedly but triumphantly, in the creation of fiction. From Robinson Crusoe onwards, the novel was a form that focused intently on ordinary men and women, presenting them as interesting in their own right. No longer did they need to be lords and ladies, or symbols of some attribute or virtue: the middle classes were now felt to be worth reading about in and of themselves; they were ‘their own justification’.

  One might, perhaps, say the same thing for the family, and for the idea of home: they too precipitated, and then embodied, the democratic revolution. That revolution was slow to develop, and did not arrive fully formed, as Robinson Crusoe had done one spring day in 1719. But if men and women on that day thereby became ‘their own justification’, so too, over the centuries, did the lives these men and women led. It is that slow, ambiguous but determined revolution that this book explores.

  2

  A Room of One’s Own

  In the summer of 1978, a helicopter carrying a party of geologists across Siberia hovered over the taiga near the Mongolian border, looking for a place to land. There, almost 250 kilometres from the nearest village, in a supposedly entirely uninhabited region, the pilot saw that most domestic of sights, a kitchen garden. The scientists decided it was worth investigation, and landed. After walking 5 kilometres up a narrow path they came to two wooden-planked storage sheds on stilts, stuffed full of potatoes in birch-bark sacks. Continuing, they reached a yard ‘piled up on all sides with taiga rubbish – bark, poles, planks’.

  At the centre of the yard was a hut, although they thought it barely worthy of the name: weather-stained black, with a single window ‘the size of my backpack pocket’, it was ramshackle and altogether ‘not much more than a burrow’ – ‘a low, soot-blackened log kennel’. Inside, the hut’s single room could be crossed in seven steps in one direction, five in the other. It held just one item of furniture, an axe-hewn table. The floor was earth covered with a layer of tamped-down potato peelings and crushed pine-nut shells for insulation, but even so the room was ‘as cold as a cellar’, heated by a tiny fire and lit at night by a single rushlight.

  This ‘kennel’ was the home of the five members of the Lykov family. Karp Lykov and his wife Akulina were Old Believers, a seventeenth-century Russian Orthodox sect. After the 1917 Revolution, persecution led many Old Believers to relocate abroad. (Large communities survive in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the USA, and many smaller ones elsewhere.) The largest group, however, was and still is in Siberia. In the 1930s, during the Stalinist terror, Lykov’s brother was murdered, and Lykov fled to the taiga with his wife and two small children. Two more children were born subsequently, and by 1978, when the geologists stumbled across them, the surviving members (Akulina had died of starvation one particularly hard year) had lived in isolation for nearly half a century.

  Five people living in one room, with no sanitation, lit and warmed by firelight, ‘cramped, musty and indescribably filthy’: although the geologists failed to recognize it, what they were seeing were not conditions of unimaginable harshness, but the ordinary living conditions of their own history. And ours. A world where every aspect of life was lived in sight of others, where privacy was not only not desired, but almost unknown. For most of human history, houses have not been private spaces, nor have they had, within them, more private spaces belonging to specific residents, nor spaces used by all the residents in turn for entirely private functions.

  * * *

  The Anglo-Saxons had no word for a house, but used heorp, hearth, as a metonym for the entire building. (The word ‘hearth’ is itself elemental, deriving from the Anglo-Saxon word for earth.) Legally the hearth also stood in for its owners: astriers were tenants with a legal right of inheritance, ‘astre’ deriving from the Norman French âtre, or hearth – the right of inheritance was here linked not to the people, nor even to the house, but to the fireplace. In the houses of the gentry and the prosperous, through the medieval period, the single most important space was the hall, the space where all social, familial, official and professional life transpired, night and day, living and sleeping. And the core of that room was always the open hearth, both a physical and an emotional centre, the focal point of the room. (It is not chance that focus is Latin for hearth).

  The well-to-do peasantry at the time lived in longhouses with byres that measured from 10 to 20 metres long, and up to 6 metres wide. Poorer inhabitants had cotts (cottages), without any space for animals. Both these types of housing had open hearths in the main room, with possibly a second room at one end; byres, in addition to the space for animals, generally contained another area for sleeping or for storage.

  There is always an inherent anachronism in how the great majority of the population experiences housing. For most of history, at the top of the social scale people lived, or wanted to live, in houses that were newly constructed. It was only in the past century that having an old house generally came to be accepted as a status symbol for the rich. Previously, among those who could afford it, each generation frequently razed and rebuilt their houses in the style of the day. Otherwise, living in an older building has always been, and continues to be, the norm. Most people living in London in the first half of the nineteenth century, for example, lived in eighteenth- or even seventeenth-century housing, just as millions of twenty-first-century Britons live in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century houses, or millions of New Yorkers live in apartment buildings that date from around World War II.

  If few people lived in new and fashionable houses, even fewer lived in houses designed by architects. There is an important distinction to be made between architecture, buildings designed by architects, and housing, buildings built by builders, or by their residents. At most, 5 per cent of the world’s housing standing today is architect-designed. (Some think it might be even less, possibly less than 1 per cent.) Those people who do employ an architect for their housing have historically been, almost without exception, the wealthy and privileged, who use buildings to make statements, express power or hierarchy, or reinforce the status quo. Yet these buildings have always been a tiny minority of what was constructed, and lived in. In the early part of the nineteenth century, the aristocracy in Britain, the architect-employing class, consisted of 350 families in a population of 18 million. Only for a few decades in the twentieth century did architects in any number design extensively for the working classes, producing social housing after both world wars. Instead, from the late seventeenth century in the British Isles, from the nineteenth century in the USA, Germany and the Netherlands, most housing was produced by speculative builders, a market-driven approach that meant houses were built for people whose tastes the builder did not know
. The results were therefore routinely conservative in style, literally reconstructions of houses that had already proved popular.

  Just as we need to be wary about assuming that the people of any one period all lived in houses dating from that time, so too caution is required in assessing the size of houses of the past from what has survived. Most of the population in most areas lived in housing not any larger than the ‘kennel’ that so shocked the geologists in Siberia. Many of what today are frequently described as old workers’ cottages were originally farmhouses of the comfortably-off, or even small manor houses. As well-to-do yeomen farmers built themselves larger houses in newer styles, the older houses were handed down to their workers, inadvertently giving later ages the notion that these houses had been what the working poor had been accustomed to. In England, this was exacerbated by what historians call the Great Rebuilding, a country-wide wave of construction that began in the southeast in the mid-sixteenth century, propelled by, among other things, relative political stability, a thriving economy and new technologies that enabled increased brick-manufacture and fireplaces that were re-sited from the centre of the room to its walls. From the late sixteenth to the seventeenth century, many of the vernacular buildings in England were rebuilt completely, many more were altered to a lesser degree, and more were entirely new. The Great Rebuilding began with upper-class housing, but by the early eighteenth century it had spread to those with less money. This pattern could be seen elsewhere: in Friesland, the standard housing of the sixteenth century, low wattle-and-daub buildings that accommodated animals and people together, was replaced in the seventeenth century by brick houses and separate barns. A second Great Rebuilding took place in the eighteenth century in the USA, but even before this, the original poorly constructed frame houses of the colonies had always been intended to be temporary: as times improved, they were torn down and replaced. As a result, no houses at all survive in the USA from the first half-century of colonial settlement, up to 1667. A 1652 inventory recorded ‘one smale house and garden’ in Plymouth. The word ‘small’ is unusual in these inventories, and it may be that this was a house surviving from the 1620s, which already by 1652 seemed unnaturally tiny. From the later part of the century, from 1668 to 1695, only five houses survived, and of these, two were heavily restored in the 1930s, to make them resemble more closely a twentieth-century vision of what colonial America had looked like. Apart from these five, the only surviving seventeenth-century houses in the colonies date from the last four years of the century, and so are, to all intents and purposes, typical of the eighteenth century. It is important to stress this, as most assumptions about early colonial housing are based on five examples, of which just three can be said to be original.

  These anachronisms of style and size are essential to keep in mind. We are so habituated to the standard types of housing that emerged with industrialization and urbanization that we have been all but blinded to what went before. We remember the scant number of great halls of the medieval nobility, overlooking the reality that this was less than 1 per cent of what existed at the time; similarly the surviving Tudor great houses or gracious colonial governors’ mansions have wiped from our minds the vanished habitations of everyone else; while the terraced townscapes that began to appear in Britain in the eighteenth century created a false history in which ‘everyone’ lived more or less as we do today. And thus centuries of hugger-mugger, cheek-by-jowl living, which almost everyone experienced, and expected, have vanished from common knowledge. Yet without knowing how people lived, it can be difficult to understand why they acted as they did. It is only when we know what the physical circumstances people lived in were like that we can appreciate how changes to those circumstances reflected changed ideas and expectations.

  In general, in sixteenth-century England, labourers who had enough money to have a house at all, or were housed by their employer, lived in a one-room building, which might have a lean-to attached to serve both as a sleeping and a storage space. Among the better-off, most houses averaged two to four rooms. Two-roomed houses consisted of a hall and a chamber; those with more had a hall, a kitchen and chambers. The main function of chambers was storage: most contained anything from two to five chests, and possibly a press to hold more goods; many were also where looms, barrels, tools, churns or other equipment were kept; in larger houses chambers were used for sleeping as well, and most of these therefore had two or three beds.

  Colonial America was little different in the size and nature of its housing. The first houses at Plymouth were wattle-and-daub single-room huts, with few, or no, windows and, possibly, thatched roofs. Three years after the Mayflower landing, of the twenty or so houses that had been erected, ‘four or five’ were considered to be ‘very fair and pleasant’. These ‘fair’ houses were mostly single-room, single-storey houses, the hall measuring about 4.5 by 6 metres, and some having an unfinished half-storey above, an open space with unplastered walls and no ceiling, merely the roof’s own rafters. There were a few houses with two rooms, the inner room usually containing another bed, and separated from the main living space by a plank wall and the chimney, to maximize the heat in both rooms. These two-roomed houses followed the English hall-and-parlour formula: the front door opened directly into the hall, and the parlour was reached from a door in the main room. A ladder in the hall sometimes led to a loft, sometimes called a chamber, which was, as in England, used for both sleeping and storage. Many of these houses had lean-to additions, also for sleeping and storage, or for the dirtiest types of food preparation, or for all of these things. The service areas tended to be at the back of the house, and later a sloping roof was added to cover these additions, the style being named ‘saltbox’.

  Such were the houses of the better-off. More common was housing like that of Nehemiah and Submit Tinkham, who emigrated to the colonies in the middle of the seventeenth century and lived a day’s journey outside Boston. For the first year, as they cleared the land, their house was a ‘half-underground shelter’; in their second year they had time and funds to erect a frame house of four rooms, as well as a barn. Their underground shelter was not at all unusual, and while the Tinkhams’ living conditions improved quickly, many others continued to live in similar housing for years. A Dutch immigrant in New Netherland described people living in cellars that were 2 metres deep, lined with timber and roofed by spars covered with bark or with furze, with, inside, wooden floors and ceilings.

  Throughout the nineteenth century on the frontiers, residents often lived in shelters dug into hills or ravines, the sole sign of the structure from aboveground being the tin chimney poking out. They were cheap – in 1872, a minister in Nebraska built a 4.3 square metre dugout for $2.78 – and their interiors were made as homelike as possible: the walls were painted with a mixture of clay and water that was genteelly referred to as ‘whitewash’ and sheets were hung to divide the space into ‘rooms’.* Like the early colonists’ cellars, these dugouts were intended to last until time and money were found for better housing. More permanent were sod houses, which were built across the prairies, from southern Minnesota to Texas; by 1890, they numbered more than a million, by then mostly in Kansas and Nebraska. Made from sod bricks, each house again comprised a single room, with one small window and a dirt or, if affordable, plank floor, and clay-and-water whitewashed walls. These houses, however, were not temporary makeshifts the way the Tinkhams’ had been, but developed from the traditional building practices of the area’s many Russian and eastern European immigrants and represented permanent housing.

  In the Middle Colonies and the south, things were little different in the early days: housing was usually poor among all income levels. The colonists arrived in Maryland in 1634, and as late as 1650 a military commander described the local houses as ‘wigwams’, ‘made of nothing but mat and reeds and the bark of trees fix’d to poles’. (Only a single pre-eighteenth-century house survives there today.) By 1679, thirty houses, ‘very mene and Little and Generally after the manner
of the meanest farme house in England’, had been erected, although by then Thomas Cornwallis, the colony’s military captain, had built himself a timber-framed house ‘A story and a half high, with A seller and Chimnies of brick toe Encourage others toe follow my Examples’. As in the north, the dominant form in the region soon became the hall-and-parlour house, with, often, two rooms above.