THE VICTORIAN HOUSE
Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed
JUDITH FLANDERS
For my mother, Kappy Flanders
CONTENTS
2 A Quick Guide to Books and Authors
IN 1909 H.G.WELLS WROTE, in a passage from his novel Tono-Bungay, of Edward Ponderevo, a purveyor of patent medicines and
terror of eminent historians. ‘Don’t want your drum and trumpet history – no fear … Don’t want to know who was who’s mistress, and why so-and-so devastated such a province; that’s bound to be all lies and upsy-down anyhow. Not my affair … What I want to know is, in the middle ages Did they Do Anything for Housemaid’s Knee? What did they put in their hot baths after jousting, and was the Black Prince – you know the Black Prince – was he enamelled or painted, or what? I think myself, black-leaded – very likely – like pipeclay – but did they use blacking so early?’1
It is a comic view of history. Or is it? History is usually read either from the top down – kings and queens, the leaders and their followers – or from the bottom up – the common people and their lives. Political history and social history, however, both encompass the one thing we all share – that at the end of the day, after ruling empires or finishing the late shift in a factory, we all go back to our homes. Different as those homes are, how we live at home, where we live, what we do all day when we’re not doing whatever it is that history is recording – these are some of the most telling things about any age, any people. Mme Merle in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881) notes how ‘one’s house, one’s furniture, one’s garments, the books one reads, the company one keeps – all these things are expressive’.2
This is true of any age, but the Victorians brought the idea of home to the fore in a way that was new. As the Victorians saw ‘home’ as omnipresent, it has seemed to me useful to rely on the same sources that surrounded them and formed their notions of what a home should be – magazines, advertisements, manuals and fiction. In describing people’s daily lives, I look first at what theory prescribed and described in these print sources, and then try to discover the reality in reportage, diaries, letters and journals. Novels are used frequently, as fiction straddles the two camps in that it both set standards for ‘proper’, or ‘normal’, behaviour in theory and also described this behaviour in actuality. In using fiction as a source for how people actually behaved I have primarily relied on novels for information that the authors regarded as background material rather than key plot devices, and have always balanced them with other, more conventional, documentary sources for corroboration.*
By the mid nineteenth century magazine titles epitomized the centrality of the home in Victorian life, boasting the growing middle classes’ new allegiance: The Home Circle, The Home Companion, The Home Friend, Home Thoughts, The Home Magazine, Family Economist, Family Record, Family Friend, Family Treasure, Family Prize Magazine and Household Miscellany, Family Paper and Family Mirror.3 They were not alone in their focus. Services were provided by ‘Family Drapers’, ‘Family Butchers’, even a ‘Family Mourning Warehouse’.4 As the Industrial Revolution appeared to have taken over every aspect of working life, so the family, and by extension the house, expanded in tandem to act as an emotional counterweight. The Victorians found it useful to separate their world into a public sphere, of work and trade, and a private sphere, of home life and domesticity. The Victorian house became defined as a refuge, a place apart from the sordid aspects of commercial life,