The Making of Home Read online

  Some could afford neither the goods, nor did they have the space for these types of improvement. Others, even among those who could afford it, chose to live in old-fashioned multi-purpose style long after. The architect Sir John Soane’s family, at least according to a watercolour of 1798, ate breakfast in a room that also contained a desk; his library, meanwhile, as late as 1830, was also the family’s reception room, dining and drawing room. Far below both of these examples in terms of income, a 1790s painting shows a shopkeeper and his family at home above the shop (see plate section, no. 24). The family here appears to eat in this space as well as using it for a sitting room – there is a sideboard with a knife-box for cutlery on it, and a drop-leaf table to pull out at mealtimes. While the painting is obviously intended to be a record of the family’s prosperity, the modern fashion in room allocation was not part of their self-presentation. As we have seen, pictures may not reflect reality, but these two examples at least imply a wider range of possibility than household manuals suggest.

  Among the working classes, the main room continued to be a place of labour. This might include sewing, weaving and other types of piecework, or taking in laundry, but also included many trades that with industrialization would shortly move out of the house to dedicated workspaces. An early-eighteenth-century widow in Birmingham kept a shop in her downstairs room, from which she also carried on her trade as a file-maker, the room therefore also containing an anvil and a bellows. Things were much the same in the USA, where in the late eighteenth century, 90 per cent of the population had beds or tools in the main room of their houses. In 1822, a blacksmith’s family of five moved into a house in Barre Four Corners, in Massachusetts, that had been built twenty years earlier. It had a kitchen at the front, a bedroom at the back where the family also ate, and a small sitting room that served as the family’s workroom. In the 1840s, however, they became ‘parlour people’ when the bedroom’s rear door was blocked up, a second window was added, and the room became the house’s best room.

  The nineteenth-century parlour was more important as a symbol than as a physical space, marking the final shift from a multi- to a single-purpose room, for the parlour was a place for receiving company, and only for receiving company. Even then, it was reserved for the most important guests, more routine visitors being accommodated in the houseplace. Some families did not even do this, but kept the parlour for much rarer, ceremonial occasions – weddings, or the laying out of the dead. Others used it once a year, for their Christmas dinner. As late as the 1920s, in a cooper’s house in Sweden, the best room was kept for holidays, or for serious ill-health: ‘you had to be very sick to get to lie down in there’, remembered the cooper’s son. The parlour became such a status symbol that many householders who could otherwise have had one good-sized living area instead divided that space into two tiny rooms, in order that one could be kept for use only once or twice a year.

  That urbanization and the desire for privacy went hand-in-hand was not because fashion tends to originate in the prosperous cities. The urge physically to mark the boundary of one’s house, and family, from the undifferentiated masses living all around occurred first in densely populated areas. In all the inventories for the city of Leiden up to 1650, there were only two that listed window-curtains; in the following decade, half the inventories of the rich in The Hague, Delft and Leiden, the Netherlands’ most populous centres, included them. No reason for this particular change has been found, and therefore we must piece together the impetus for their arrival from their usage. That these early curtains indicated a new desire to regulate light indoors is unlikely, for they covered just the lower sections of each window. Furthermore, the curtains were without exception hung only in the windows of the voorhuis or the zijkamer, the ground-floor rooms that faced the street and were the public face of the house. Thus two possibilities emerge: the desire to display new trade goods to the world passing outside; or the desire to screen a newly private home life from the gaze of the same world passing outside.* In reality, it was probably a combination of the two, with the predominant urge being privacy, for if it was display, it seems likely that the upstairs rooms that fronted the street would also have had curtains, and they did not. Furthermore, the curtains were generally hung singly, rather than in pairs, without any gesture towards classical symmetry, a preoccupation of the interior décor style of the period.* Nor was this simply a matter of cost. Single curtains were found at the very apex of society, in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, in the 1680s, and the Rijswijk Palace, just outside the city, even after it was redecorated in 1697.

  As they were adopted first in urban centres in the Netherlands, so too in England were curtains at first almost entirely a London phenomenon: between the mid-seventeenth and the mid-eighteenth century, 81 per cent of houses in the densely crowded city had at least one set of curtains, while 87 per cent of their provincial counterparts did not. This disparity strongly suggests that privacy, not light-regulation, or fashion, was the motivating factor. This is reinforced by evidence from the sparsely populated colonies, which were slow to adopt curtains. Between 1645 and 1681, only ten inventories in one county in Massachusetts included any curtains at all. Theophilus Eaton, the Governor of New Haven colony, was extraordinarily wealthy – he died in 1658 leaving an estate valued at £1,565 – yet only his wife’s chamber was furnished with curtains. A full century after that, another wealthy landowner, this time in Delaware, had none.

  For those who didn’t live in cities, or among the aristocracy, window-boards in many middle-class eighteenth-century houses gave privacy and protected the room’s inhabitants from draughts. These boards slid out from a slot in the panelling below the window, and pulled a third of the way up the window at night (see plate section, no. 13). By the end of the century, however, the price of textiles fell, and curtains became affordable for the majority of the middle classes – so much so that many could even afford more than one set for each window: a roller or venetian blind to control the light; lace, net or muslin curtains for privacy during the day; and a heavier set of curtains over them, often drawn back in swags by ornamental ties or pins, and finished at the top by a pelmet or more fabric. By the 1820s, curtains had become an integral element of many middle-class houses. It was not just their decorative appeal. Now privacy was so valued that further elements continued to be added to protect the inhabitants from prying eyes during daylight hours, as well as when the rooms were lit at night. The dining room of a comfortable widow in York had decorative curtains as well as a green silk shade that pulled across the bottom of the sash, which functioned not unlike the earlier window-boards (see plate section, no. 15).

  This mix of form and function was seen in Denmark too. In Wilhelm Bendz’s 1827 A Smoking Party the students in the room obtain privacy by both a blind and a pair of thin curtains pulled across the lower two-thirds of the window; in contrast to these objects of utility, the great fabric swag above them appears to have no purpose apart from the decorative (see plate section, no. 14).

  By the mid-nineteenth century, living without curtains would have seemed as odd to the British as living without corridors. No longer simply a protective barrier to shield those inside from the gaze of strangers outside, curtains had now come to be viewed also as a way to protect the inside of the house, more generally, from everything outside, even light. In the seventeenth century, Enlightenment thinkers had used light as a symbol of the age of reason. Dr Johnson, in his great dictionary, suggested that the ‘sash’ in sash windows came from the French verb savoir, to know, as ‘a sash window [is] made particularly for the sake of seeing and being seen’, that is, automatically equating light and knowledge. (In reality, the word ‘sash’ is a corruption of the French chassis, a frame; the English was originally ‘shashes’, or ‘shassis’, or ‘shashis’.) In the nineteenth century, light became more available – new technologies produced cheaper glass in bigger panes; artificial lighting technologies proliferated; improvements to heating meant the size of windo
ws could increase. And as it did so, many began to see light itself as breaching the household’s privacy. ‘Hard, sharp sunlight’, previously in scarce supply and therefore valued, was now seen as a nuisance, ‘a glaring mass of light’. The sheer availability of cheap and easy daylight had increased the value of darkness across the home countries.

  Darkness had become aesthetically valued for its ability to create mood, or at least moodiness. The Anglo-German taste for Gothic fiction, fed by books like Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Friedrich Schiller’s Schauerroman (shudder novel) Die Räuber (1817), spread the fashion for gloomy medieval castles and moonlight meetings. The Romantic movement built on these ideas of the tenebrous, linking them to the emotional responses its adherents valued above reason, and identified in the irregular picturesque rather than the classically balanced. Gothic Revival architects such as Viollet-le-Duc in France and Augustus Pugin in Britain attempted to express these feelings in their work. They reconfigured ecclesiastical features to accommodate them to secular buildings, creating interiors that, Pugin claimed, were stone versions of spiritual truths. They were, according to one influential contemporary American landscape designer and writer on architecture, found desirable by ‘those who love shadow, and the sentiment of antiquity and repose’. As a consequence, home-makers, and those who wrote on home-making, were united in rejecting clear, unfiltered light indoors. ‘No one could possibly detect properties of beauty in large sheets of glass,’ wrote one guide to interior decoration. Instead, light must be ‘educated’ – that is, filtered, softened and dulled – ‘to accord with indoor life’.

  Germany adopted these darkened interiors wholesale (so much so that some sarcastically dubbed this the braune Soße – gravy – school of interior decoration). Curtains, by keeping light out, became not just useful, but acted as an indicator of the morality of the household, a way of showing that, through the ‘educating’ of the light, the residents too were educated. How to Furnish a House and Make it a Home (c.1853) was clear that curtains were there to ‘show order to the outside’, to indicate to passers-by that decent people lived inside. This survived into the twentieth century. German colonists in Africa felt they transported both their style of home and its values. One woman wrote of her pleasure in hanging clean white muslin curtains at the windows of her African dwelling, which gave it ‘the stamp of a German home’. It was clear from her letter that all three words – clean, white, muslin – were to her redolent of Germany, and expressions of household virtue.

  As darkness became more desirable, curtains alone were no longer enough, and stained-glass was recommended for domestic settings – Jakob von Falke, the author of the influential Die Kunst im Hause (Art in the House, 1871), thought clear glass indicated ‘banality’. Windows and lamps began to be obscured. Cathedral glass, a textured, usually green, opaque coloured glass, became popular, as did the even denser Butzensheiben, bottle-glass, through which only vague suggestions of shapes could be seen. In 1890, a furnishing company used engravings to show the modern style. One view of a room had large-paned plain-glass windows, the second small-paned bottle-glass. Underneath, the caption marvelled, ‘How unfinished and cold a room can be without coloured glass lowering the light.’ In the USA Louis Comfort Tiffany and John La Farge were the foremost artist-designer-manufacturers of coloured glass, making an art out of an emotional response to new technologies.

  Two hundred years earlier, as the new sash windows arrived in England, they had been valued for making it possible to admire the outdoors from inside the home: ‘what can be more pleasant and Beautiful … than to look out of the Parlour and Chamber windows into the Gardens,’ enthused even a writer who specialized in gardening and agriculture. Now this viewpoint was turned upside down across the home countries. Jakob van Falke spoke for them: ‘There is no need for a good view of the outside from the dwelling’. Instead, the ‘attraction must be directed inside’, while the German art-historian Cornelius Gurlitt added that a ‘dusky, hidden’ light indoors was even better, as it allowed one to feel that ‘What is happening outside is far away’.* This was widespread. In Britain Oscar Wilde pronounced that looking through windows, whether from inside or out, was simply an ‘extremely’ bad habit. Coloured glass was commended precisely for the degree it demarcated the separation of inside and outside. William Morris added that small panes of glass rather than large were preferable, as ‘we shall then at all events feel we are indoors’.

  The question of indoors vs outdoors was one that exercised, in particular, the British, who increasingly felt that for a house to be a home, it had to be separate from the world. As a consequence, the British looked at the development of the European apartment block with horror.* In Paris, new buildings were up to eight storeys high, with shops, restaurants and cafés on the ground floor, and a concierge, or porter, posted just inside the front door. The boundaries between street and home were, to the eyes of those from home countries, constantly being breached: the ground-floor shops were commercial premises in residential buildings; the concierge was neither a family member nor a family employee and often did not live on the premises; the restaurants’ shellfish stands were open to the street; and the cafés had outdoor seating. From 1833, too, benches were placed at intervals on the main grands boulevards, making the indoor act of sitting an outdoor activity.

  In home countries, therefore, alternatives to apartment buildings were found where possible. In both Britain and the USA, lodgings could be pleasant, desirable even, for those with some money, with a woman or a family – not a single man – living in the basement to look after all the residents. (Sherlock Holmes and Watson, for example, do very nicely as lodgers.) Up to half of all Americans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had at some point either been a lodger or lived in a boarding house. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, couples frequently did not set up their own household – did not ‘go to housekeeping’, it was called – immediately after marriage. Yet, unlike early-marriage societies, they also did not expect to live with their parents. Instead they moved into a boarding house for a period of time.

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  However achieved, by the nineteenth century the middle classes routinely expected to be able to create privacy through architecture. Middle-class and urban upper-class houses had public façades, their frontages set proudly to the streets, even as what went on behind them became increasingly hidden. By contrast, a large proportion of working-class housing had long been hidden by being situated in courts set behind the public streets. These tenements and lodging houses bore no resemblance to middle-class lodgings, especially as urbanization and the Industrial Revolution increased overcrowding by a large degree: 2,500 people lived in just 222 houses in one area of Leeds in 1851, with five people for every two beds. Within these courts, however, much of life had been lived in public. The privies and the running water were located in the courtyards, as well as what little fresh air there was, and they were therefore much used by the residents, happy to be out of their tiny, overcrowded, damp and poorly ventilated rooms. In the nineteenth century, slum clearances led to the imposition of middle-class standards, by rehousing workers in suburban developments or in back-to-backs, the first housing specifically planned for the working classes. The back-to-backs, particularly in Britain’s industrial heartland, had one downstairs room and one (sometimes two) upstairs.* To middle-class observers, these houses provided their residents with the privacy of a home, and thus seemed to be an improvement on the old courts. Yet the water and privies were still situated outside, and so the residents’ lives continued to be lived in public, outdoors. Tucked away behind the main streets, the life of the courts had been partly sheltered; as the back-to-back design meant privies and standpipes had to be located on the streets, the residents’ lives, paradoxically, became more exposed.

  The domestic privacy of the middle and upper classes, meanwhile, was being redefined in quite another way. In the early eighteenth century, Robert W
alpole redesigned his family home, Houghton Hall in Norfolk, separating it into two areas. The grand state rooms were the ‘floor of taste, expense, state and parade’, for public display, while the ground floor was given over to the ‘noise, dirt and business’ of family life. This architectural division between family and working life was of course not possible for most, but as many men’s work was being moved out of the family home and into specialized workplaces, the distinction between working life and home life began to appear not as an artificial one created by history and circumstance, but as one that merely reflected a divinely ordained social structure. And, it followed, if that were the case, then men and women should logically inhabit ‘separate spheres’, men in the public world, women in the privacy of the family home. This idea was to dominate notions of home for the next century and more.

  3

  Home and the World

  In colonial New England, men and women were seated in separate sections in church, with their children sitting together in a group at the rear, rather than with either parent. Within each of the three groups seating was then determined first by age, then social status, then wealth. It was only from the early nineteenth century that families began to sit together, a development that can be seen to typify changing attitudes to families more generally. Families were no longer considered to be one group among many interlocking, and competing, social groups. The family was now given precedence. It was the primary unit in society.

  Ostensibly the family was a private group – out in the public sphere, men were considered, at least theoretically, on their individual merits. Politically, its privacy had been confirmed in 1763, when William Pitt rejected a bill in parliament that gave the excise – tax – authorities the right to search private houses for contraband. No contemporaneous record was made of his speech, so his exact words are unknown, but within three decades it was reported that ‘He [had] opposed this bill very strongly … Every man’s house was his castle he said.’ If Pitt did use those precise words, he had chosen them as a reference to the seventeenth-century legal-writer Sir Edward Coke, who had first written ‘A man’s house is his castle’. But by the mid-nineteenth century, this bare statement was no longer sufficiently forceful, and Pitt’s reported speech had been endowed with greater emotional resonance: ‘The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the crown. It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storms may enter, the rain may enter – but the King of England cannot enter.’ The privacy of the home, and the family, had come to be acknowledged to be paramount, overriding the considerations and the needs of the public sphere.