The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed

* (#ulink_e8136734-2a87-5c7a-af7f-20889fa341e3) Alfred Rosling Bennett (1850–1928) was one of the earliest telephone engineers, and author of such books as Telephone Systems of Continental Europe (1895), as well as a memoir of his childhood, London and Londoners in the Eighteen-Fifties and Sixties (1924). He also invented a caustic-alkali-and-iron battery in 1881.

* (#ulink_10e896c2-a083-5a33-9f28-af086f513564) Linley and Marion Sambourne’s house has been preserved with the reception rooms left almost entirely as they were furnished towards the end of the nineteenth century. It now belongs to the Victorian Society, and is open to the public.

* (#ulink_3b9d42fc-99be-508b-a364-132cf2437eb4) Holland was a hard-wearing linen fabric, usually left undyed. It was much used in middle- and upper-class households to cover and protect delicate fabrics and furniture.

* (#ulink_4f6270a2-e120-5458-b66e-3766c5b015fc) Many books worry away at the location of matches, and it is understandable that it was essential to be able to find them in the dark. Mrs Panton suggested not only that the box should be nailed over the head of the bed, but that it should first be painted with enamel paint, and a small picture be cut out and stuck on it as decoration. Our Homes, written by Shirley Forster Murphy, who in the 1890s was the London County Council’s chief medical officer, was more modern, and recommended a new invention, ‘Blamaine’s Luminous Paint’, which could be applied to a clock face, ‘a bracket for matches, or a small contrivance for holding a watch’. He went on, in an excess of enthusiasm, that it could also go on bell pulls, letter boxes (one assumes for streets still not lit with gas), signposts and street signs. Maybe Mr Pooter and his red-enamel paint were not so far-fetched.

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* (#ulink_bf8c881a-c851-5a8a-b814-f6d8e4acbab7) This system, known as ‘top to bottom, bottom off’, was still being vised in British boarding schools in the 1980s – and possibly still is.

† (#ulink_bf8c881a-c851-5a8a-b814-f6d8e4acbab7) The idea that servants were especially dirty – without the congruent idea that this was because they were doing the dirtiest work – is one that will be explored in Chapter 4.

* (#ulink_f2d29328-36cc-5636-8823-d0cec27e5b19) For airing and its purpose, see pp. 104 and 118–19 and 130.

† (#ulink_f2d29328-36cc-5636-8823-d0cec27e5b19) This continues today. Cheryl Mendelson’s remarkably successful book Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House (2001) was quite confident not only that its readers regularly washed all the tins their food came in before opening them, and then the tin-opener after every use, but that before starting to cook sensible people washed their hands in a room outside the kitchen, to avoid ‘cross-contamination’.

* (#ulink_6e2e5a58-9326-57eb-9c3a-4eb373fdff49) Sulphur was also burned to disinfect rooms after illness (see p. 317–18). It is still used today as a bactericide – in the preservation of wine and dried fruits, for example – but its effectiveness as sulphur dioxide (as it becomes on burning) may be in doubt.

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† (#ulink_191172ab-0d6f-5939-957b-a3a86eef86eb) To disperse another myth regarding middle- and upper-class women, it should be noted that a small but statistically significant percentage of births in the first year of marriage – some 12 women per 1000 – had a child within seven and a half months of marriage.

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* (#ulink_0278b748-7a1d-5bdb-851f-3500098bb48d) Note that her first-person narrative was a literary device: the personal details of her ‘I’ changed from book to book.

* (#ulink_4c907409-9190-5ac4-9512-9d7ad73244d9) As a consequence, continental Europe had professionally qualified midwives decades before Britain – which did not find the need, finally, until the beginning of the twentieth century. As things stood for most of the nineteenth century, midwives had to be licensed, but this was a Bishop’s Licence, indicating moral rather than professional qualities. To receive it the midwife had simply to be recommended by any respectable married woman, take an oath to forswear child substitution, abortion, sorcery and overcharging, and pay a fee of 18s. 4d.

* (#ulink_ab262f49-49d6-51f9-adcb-fbd1090aee30) Mandell, or ‘Max’, Creighton was one of those Victorian dynamos who so astonish us today: as a young fellow at Merton he became engaged to Louise von Glehn, the daughter of a prosperous German businessman living in Sydenham. At this time fellows of Oxford colleges had to be unmarried; Creighton was so valued that the rules were changed to keep him. He soon became the incumbent of a parish in Northumberland, then in quick succession the Rural Dean of Alnwick, the Examining Chaplain to Bishop Wilberforce, Honorary Canon of Newcastle, first Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge, Canon of Worcester, Canon of Windsor, Bishop of Peterborough, representative of the English Church at the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II, Hulsean and Rede Lecturer at Cambridge. Romanes Lecturer at Oxford, and, finally, Bishop of London – all before dropping dead at the age of fifty-seven.

* (#ulink_c104eff6-fd46-5afd-9a8f-0bf94643d8c9) It has been suggested that it was Mrs Beeton who first used the phrase ‘A place for everything, and everything in its place.’ Even if there are earlier instances, it was very much a feeling for the time: something out of place was something that was, both practically and morally, wrong.

* (#ulink_daebe935-850b-5676-b8b7-badb841ad116) Dr Jaeger, a health reformer, towards the end of the century promoted his Sanitary Woollen Clothing, made of undyed knitted woollen fabric. Jaeger all-wool underwear became extremely popular. Mrs Haweis commended it as ‘the most economical, the most comfortable, and the most cleanly, seldom as the garments require washing (once a month, says the patentee), because they throw off at once the “noxious emanations” which soil the garments, and retain the benign exhalations’. Not everyone agreed. Jeannette Marshall, the daughter of a fashionable London surgeon, rejected them outright: ‘the workhouse colour is a great objection in my eyes’. Darwin’s granddaughter Gwen Raverat used ‘Jaeger’ as a synonym for dowdy (see p. 269).

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† (#ulink_466468d9-2f30-549f-bb6e-78d2010eb839) Dr Chavasse among others thought that flannel caps prevented eye inflammations, ‘a complaint to which new-born infants are subject’.

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* (#ulink_466468d9-2f30-549f-bb6e-78d2010eb839) By 1866 Mrs Pedley was telling new mothers about ‘clasp-pins’, which should be used for all the baby’s wants. In 1889, however, the Revd J. P. Faunthorpe still felt he needed to explain to his readers that ‘A special kind [of pin] is known as the safety pin, which has a wire loop to act as a sheath to protect the point’.

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2 (#ulink_3e7b4efd-9f90-5312-bd0a-9d3c77212658)

THE NURSERY (#ulink_f120773c-8f7c-55fe-97b2-a778e03f53fb)

IN AN IDEAL nineteenth-century world, all homes would have had a suite of rooms – a night nursery and a day nursery – ready and waiting for use after the birth of the first child, together with a full complement of servants: a monthly nurse for the first three months, then a nursemaid.

The nursery itself was a fairly new concept: J. C. Loudon, in The Suburban Garden and Villa Companion, published in 1838, had to explain to his readers that specialized rooms for children were called ‘nurseries’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Only twenty-five years later the idea had been so well assimilated that the architect Robert Kerr simply assumed that they were necessary when discussing the ideal house: it clearly never occurred to him that they had not always existed. Kerr’s main concern was weighing up the virtues of convenience versus segregation. Parents needed to consider that ‘As against the principle of the withdrawal of the children for domestic convenience, there is the consideration that the mother will require a certain facility of access to them.’ The size of the house and the number of servants were for him the deciding factors: ‘in houses below a certain mark this readiness of access may take precedence of the motives for withdrawal, while in houses above that mark the completeness of the withdrawal will be the chief object’.

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Outside the fantasies of upper-class living on middle-class incomes, the reality was that most houses were not big enough to make Kerr’s concern one that needed to be addressed. The bulk of the middle classes lived in houses with between two and four, or maybe five, bedrooms: hardly big enough for two separate rooms for the younger children, not counting two bedrooms for the older children of each sex, and definitely not big enough to worry about ‘facility of access’.

Within these limitations, some attempt could be made to find the children their own space. Most larger houses put the children at the top of the house, in a room or rooms near the servants’ bedroom. One of the main troubles with rooms at the top of the house was the need to carry supplies up and down. In Our Homes, and How to Make them Healthy (1883), mothers were warned that there should be no sinks on the same floor as the nursery, as ‘The manifest convenience of having a sink near to rid the nursery department of soiled water has to be weighed against the tendency of all servants to misuse such convenience, and it is best to decide against such sources of mischief’.

(#litres_trial_promo) That is, it was better to have servants run up and down the stairs all day with food, bedding and dirty nappies—all of which were always to be removed ‘immediately’ – rather than risk them ‘misusing’ a sink, a euphemism for throwing the contents of chamber pots into them. The transmission of disease via the all-encompassing drains was a perpetual worry (see pp. 90–91), but it is likely that most houses could afford neither running water on the top storeys nor the servants who might misuse the non-existent sinks.

Bassinettes (also called ‘berceaunettes’ from the French for cradle) were now lavishly decorated, as in the advertisement here, and on pages 37 and 40. Perambulators were entirely new, invented only in 1850.

Health concerns were the ones given most weight – far more than convenience or affordability. One of the main reasons why it was desirable for the children to have two rooms was that they needed the ‘change of air’ that moving from one to the other would bring, because they spent

half of [their time] – at least for the very young – in the bed-room … The strong man after free respiration out of doors may pass through foul or damp air in the basement of the house with the inner breath of his capacious chest untouched; he may sit in a hot parlour without enervation, or sleep in a chilled bed-room without his vigorous circulation being seriously depressed. Not so those who stay at home; from these evils even the strong would suffer; delicate women, susceptible youth, tender children suffer most.

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Women and children needed fresh air and light more than men was the conclusion, but all the suggestions that followed concerned how they should find those things inside the house.

For houses that had the space, the standard nursery was a room or two either on the main bedroom floor or higher, which was whitewashed or distempered instead of painted or papered, so it could be redone every year. This too was for health reasons, to ensure that any infections did not linger. Kitchens were similarly repainted every year, but in that case it was to remove smells, and the accumulation of soot from around the kitchen range. The main ingredients of the nursery were all safety oriented: bars over the widows, and a high fireguard in front of the grate, securely fastened to prevent accidents. Apart from that, the requirements were few: a central table covered in wipeable oilcloth, for meals and lessons, chairs, high chairs as necessary, a toy cupboard or box, possibly a cupboard for nursery china if the children ate apart from their parents, a carpet that was small enough to lift and beat clean weekly. Mrs Panton was very firmly against gas lighting in general, and she was particularly vehement about its effects on ‘small brains and eyes [from the] glitter and harsh glare’.

(#litres_trial_promo) However, many balanced this against the safety of a gas bracket on the wall, out of the reach of children, and the very real danger of an oil lamp on a table that could be all too easily knocked over.

The separate nursery space, in retrospect, symbolizes the distance we perceive to have been in place between parents and their children. There is no question that, however much the Victorians loved their children, they spoke of them, and thought of them, in a very different way than we have come to expect today. How much was manner, how much representative of actual distance, needs to be considered. For it appears that some parents might have been not merely ignorant of their children’s daily routines and needs, but proud of such ignorance. Initially this might be thought of as a purely upper-class trait, fostered by large numbers of servants, yet it occurred across the social spectrum. Molly Hughes was the child of a London stockbroker who died in a road accident in 1879, at the age of forty, leaving his family perilously near to tipping down into the lower middle class. As a young woman, Molly had to go out to work as a schoolteacher. However, when she was married and able to leave paid employment, she was careful to note in her autobiography that she knew little about children, and relied for information on her servant: ‘“How often should we change her nightdress, Emma?” I asked. The reply was immediate and unequivocal – “Oh, a baby always looks to have a clean one twice a week.” [Emma] knew also the odd names for the odd garments that babies wore in that era – such as “bellyband” (about a yard of flannel that was swathed round and round and safety-pinned on) and “barracoat” …’ Molly’s sister-in-law affected the same blankness when Molly was first pregnant: ‘She took the greatest interest, and loaded me with kindness, but in the matter of what to do about a baby she was, or pretended to be, a blank. “When I was married,” she said, “all I knew about a baby was that it had something out of a bottle, and I know little more now.”’

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Molly recognized pretend-ignorance in her sister-in-law, even if she did not see the same in herself. Caroline Taylor had a similar sort of background: she was the granddaughter of a shopkeeper in Birmingham; her father was a permanently out-of-work engineer. She described relations between her parents and their children tersely: it was one of ‘stiff formality’.

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Mrs Panton, the daughter of a successful artist, supported herself, and probably placed herself in the upper reaches of the middle classes – though it is to be questioned whether professional families would have concurred. She strove to catch the right tone. In her work on domestic life, she said that a good nurse would never allow ‘her baby to be a torment … She turns them out always as if they had just come out of a band-box, and one never realises a baby can be so unpleasant so long as she has the undressing of them.’ Later she added, ‘I do not believe a new baby is anything but a profound nuisance to its relations at the very first’, and a new mother would require ‘at least a week to reconcile herself to her new fate’. Children could be ‘distracting and untidy’.

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Mrs Beeton, as we saw, thought a feeding child was a ‘vampire’. Caroline Clive, an upper-middle-class woman, thought more or less the same: she referred to her child coming to ‘feed upon me’, and she confessed that, although she loved him now, a couple of months after his birth, ‘I did not care very much about him the two first days.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Louise Creighton said of her husband on the birth of their first child, ‘Max, who later was so devoted to children, had not really yet discovered that he cared about them. I am doubtful of the value of what is called the maternal instinct in rational human beings.’

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The higher up the social scale, the more open about this distance from their children the parents were. Ursula Bloom’s grandmother, at least in family legend, forgot to take her baby when leaving its grandparents’ in the country: ‘She had never cared too much for children,’ said her granddaughter, perhaps unnecessarily.

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