It was coal that created this menace, and this was formally recognized in 1882, when the Smoke Abatement Exhibition was staged. It displayed fireplaces, stoves and other heating systems that attempted to deal with this nuisance, but for decades to come housekeepers simply had to accept that soot and ‘blacks’ were part of their daily life. Latches to doors – both street and inner doors – had a small plate or curtain fitted over the keyhole to keep out dirt.14 Plants were kept on window sills to trap the dust as it flew in; or housewives nailed muslin across the windows to stop the soot, or only opened windows from the top, which diminished the amount that entered.15 Tablecloths were laid just before a meal, as otherwise dust settled from the fire and they became dingy in a matter of hours.16
Fireplaces were expensive and time-consuming, as well as dirty. The Carlyles, who had no children, and therefore had to keep fewer rooms heated, burned a ton of coal every month, costing £1 9s. per ton.17 In large houses, one servant could spend her entire day looking after only the fires and lights.* After all this, it is odd to note not only that fireplaces were not a particularly efficient form of heating, but that most of those who specialized in heating knew it, too. In the eighteenth century Count Rumford had developed improvements to fireplaces, which now reflected the heat out into the room rather than it disappearing up the chimney. These were fairly common by the mid nineteenth century, yet this was only a small improvement: most of the heat was still drawn up the flue by the drafts which allowed the fire to burn. It did not seem to matter: the idea of the fire, its importance as the focus and symbol of the home, surmounted its more obvious drawbacks. As the architect Robert Kerr noted, ‘for a Sitting-room, keeping in view the English climate and habits, a fireside is of all considerations practically the most important. No such apartment can pass muster with domestic critics unless there be convenient space for a wide circle of persons round the fire.’18
Shirley Forster Murphy ran through the options, including German closed stoves and American steam heat. He agreed that fireplaces were the least efficient system, although he rejected German stoves as dangerous, because they did not provide the ventilation that chimneys did. (It did not occur to him that the entire German population had not yet died of asphyxiation.) He summed up, ‘The open fire has this advantage, that one man may warm himself at it and get as close to it as he likes, and another may keep away from its rays, and yet to be in the society of those who profit by its heat. In a room heated by stove-pipes or warmed air this is not so.’19 He was only one of many who thought that being half burnt, half frozen was a positive feature of the English system. The architect C.J. Richardson, in his influential Englishman’s House, thought that, despite the fact that ‘We are warmed on one side and chilled on the other’, ‘neither … is too great to bear’. He condemned stoves, saying that they heated rather than warmed the air, which ‘is very different from the honest puff of smoke from an English fireplace’. He never explained this difference, but one feels that it was perhaps the foreignness of the stove which made it ‘not liked’. He certainly felt no need to elaborate further.*21
As with many aspects of the home it may be that, because the upper classes could afford large, constant fires, and had enough people to look after them, those beneath them attempted the style, without the substance to maintain it, while telling themselves it was healthy. Many books reiterated that rooms that were too warm were ‘enervating’, they sapped energy. Mrs Caddy said that ‘it is not a healthy practice to heat the passages of a house’, and a warm bedroom ‘prevents sleep’.22 A writer on eye diseases was positive that sleeping in ‘over-heated and unventilated rooms’ was a leading cause of near-sightedness.23 It was perhaps a miracle anyone was near-sighted at all, if this was the case – Shirley Forster Murphy thought 50°F right for a bedroom; the Modern Householder suggested that perhaps 60°F was more comfortable to invalids, but warned that ‘unless great care be taken, it will easily fall below this’.24 Marion and Linley Sambourne had an income putting them at the very top of the upper middle classes (often £2000 a year), and even they tended to have only four or five fires burning regularly (probably the kitchen, drawing room and dining room, with either the morning room or the nursery). They never had a fire in their bedroom, and Marion’s diary was full of entries such as ‘Bitty cold, had to keep shawl on all evening’; ‘Lin & self breakfasted in bed … Lin’s bath frozen …’25
Rooms were much colder than we now expect, and various methods were used to keep warm. The girls in The Old Wives’ Tale had heated bricks to put their feet on, and wore knitted wraps around their shoulders.26 Curtains across doorways were not solely to indulge the contemporary taste for drapery: they also prevented draughts.27 Louise Creighton and her sisters warmed themselves in front of their governess’s fire before going to bed: ‘We had flannel bags to keep our feet warm … & these were made as hot as possible by the fire & then rolled up tight under our arms when at the last minute we made a dash for bed.’28
All the fireplaces had to be cleaned daily, not just by removing the ashes, but by ensuring that the grate was kept shining by rubbing it with a dry leather, together with the fender and the fender irons. If rust appeared, then emery paper was used to rub it off, before blacklead, a paste-like substance, was applied, buffed with a blacklead brush and then polished to a shine. The kitchen range had to be cleaned even more thoroughly, otherwise the heated metal conveyed the smell of scorched fat and burning iron throughout the house. To clean a range, the fender and fire-irons first had to be removed. Then damp tea leaves were scattered over the fuel, to keep the dust down while the cleaning was in process. The ashes and cinders were raked out, and the cinders were sifted. Cinders were pieces of coal that had stopped giving off flames, but still had some combustible material left in them. Thrifty housewives riddled their cinders: they sifted the rakings of all the fireplaces to separate the cinders from the unusable ash. The ash was set aside to be collected by the dustmen, and the cinders from all the fireplaces were reused in the kitchen range. A tin cinder bucket with a wire sieve inside the lid was part of the housemaid’s stock equipment. Then the flues were cleaned and the grease was scraped off the stove. The steel part was polished with bathbrick, powdered brick which was used as an abrasive,* and paraffin; the iron parts were black-leaded and polished. In a house with one or two servants, the oven was swept and the blackleading applied only to the bars and front every day; the rest was cleaned twice a week. If there were more servants, the whole thing was done every day, including scraping out the oven and rinsing it with vinegar and water.
The kitchen range had to be large enough to cook meals for the mid-Victorian family, which might often contain a dozen people. The Marshalls had only four children, but with servants there were ten of them. Even the Sambournes, with a late-Victorian two children, were often eight at home – parents and children, Linley Sambourne’s mother, who stayed for months at a time, and three servants. Lower down the scale there were fewer servants to feed, which also meant there were fewer to do the work.
The Modern Householder in 1872 gave the following list of necessities for ‘Cheap Kitchen Furniture’:
open range, fender, fire irons; 1 deal table; bracket of deal to be fastened to the wall, and let down when wanted; wooden