The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed. Judith Flanders

be found on pp. 114–15, 175–6; 191, 255, 297.

* In retrospective fairness to the jerry-builders, it is worth noting that most of these ‘cardboard houses’ still survive some 150 years later.

* Divided as we are by a common language, American readers should note that the British system gives the ground floor no number – it is ‘0’; the next floor up is the first, equivalent to the American second storey. The British style is used throughout this book.

       1

       THE BEDROOM

      IN THE SEGREGATION that permeated the Victorian house, the reception rooms were always considered the main rooms – they presented the public face of the family, defining it, clarifying its status. Bedrooms, to perform their function properly, were expected to separate servants from employers, adults from children, boys from girls, older children from babies. Initially, smaller houses had had only two bedrooms, one for parents and young children, one for the remaining children, with servants sleeping in the kitchen or basement. To accommodate the increasing demands for separation, houses throughout the period grew ever taller.

In addition, the older fashion of the bedrooms serving as quasi-sitting rooms was, in theory at least, disappearing. The Architect said that using a bedroom for a function other than sleeping was ‘unwholesome, immoral, and contrary to the well-understood principle that every important function of life required a separate room’.¹ In actual fact, bedroom function was regulated rather less rigidly than the theory of the times advocated. Throughout the period, as well as being rooms for sleeping, for illness, for sex,^* for childbirth, bedrooms served more than one category of family member. Alfred Bennett, growing up in the 1850s in Islington, slept on a small bed beside his parents’ bed.^* So did Edmund Gosse, until his mother developed breast cancer when he was seven; after she died, he slept in his father’s room until he was eleven. In small houses this was to be expected. Thomas and Jane Carlyle’s procession of servants slept in the back kitchen, or scullery, from 1834 (when the Carlyles moved into their Cheyne Row house) until 1865 (when an additional bedroom was incorporated in the attic). The house was fairly small, but they had no children, and for many years only one servant. Even in large houses with numerous servants it was not uncommon to expect them to sleep where they worked. As late as 1891 Alice James reported that a friend, house-hunting, had seen ‘a largish house in Palace Gardens Terrace [in the new part of Kensington: this was not an old house] with four reception rooms and “eight masters’ bedrooms”; when she asked the “lady-housekeeper” where the servants’ rooms were, she said: “downstairs next the kitchen” – “How many?” “One” – at [her] exclamation of horror, she replied: “It is large enough for three” – maids: of course there was the pantry and scullery for the butler and footman.’²

Like the Carlyles, it is probable that these unknown employers themselves had separate bedrooms. Even couples who shared a room often found it desirable for the husband to have a separate dressing room for himself – this was genteel: that is, what the upper middle and upper classes did, even if the shifts many had to go through to carve out this extra space often reduced the genteel to the ludicrous. (See Adolphus Crosbie’s dressing room on page xlv.) Linley and Marion Sambourne, an upper-middle-class couple living in a fairly large house in Kensington, shared a bedroom, with a separate dressing room next door for Linley.^* Their two children, a boy and a girl, slept in one room on the top floor, next to the parlourmaid, while the cook and the housemaid slept in the back kitchen.³ When the children grew too old for it to be considered proper for them to share a room, Linley’s dressing room became his son’s room, and their daughter remained in her childhood bedroom: this was all fairly standard.

      Yet even when the occupancy was dense, Mrs Haweis, an arbiter of fashionable interior decoration in several books, was firm about segregation of function: ‘Gentlemen should be discouraged from using toilet towels to sop up ink and spilt water; for such accidents, a duster or two may hang on the towel-horse.’⁴ That this warning was necessary implies that ink was regularly used in a room where there was a towel rail, and from Mrs Haweis’s detailed description that could only be the bedroom. This was clearly an on-going situation. Aunt Stanbury, Trollope’s resolutely old-fashioned spinster in He Knew He Was Right twenty years later, loathed this promiscuous mixing: ‘It was one of the theories of her life that different rooms should be used only for the purposes for which they were intended. She never allowed pens and ink up into the bed-rooms, and had she ever heard that any guest in her house was reading in bed, she would have made an instant personal attack upon that guest.’⁵

      Bedroom furniture varied widely, from elaborate bedroom and toilet suites, to cheap beds, furniture that was no longer sufficiently good to be downstairs in the formal reception rooms, and old, recut carpeting. Mrs Panton describes the bedrooms of her youth in the 1850s and 1860s with some feeling – particularly

      the carpet, a threadbare monstrosity, with great sprawling green leaves and red blotches, ‘made over’ … from a first appearance in a drawing-room, where it had spent a long and honoured existence, and where its enormous design was not quite as much out of place as it was in the upper chambers. Indeed, the bedrooms, as a whole, seemed to be furnished as regards a good many items out of the cast-off raiment of the downstairs rooms.⁶

      As the daughter of W. P. Frith, an enormously popular painter, Mrs Panton had hardly grown up in a house where the taste was either lacking or unable to be achieved through scarcity of money. Nor was her childhood home, to use one of her favourite words, ‘inartistic’: this make-do-and-mend system was the norm.

      By mid-century, bedrooms were beginning to be furnished to the standards of the reception rooms, where possible. This meant a good carpet, furniture (mahogany for preference) that included a central table, a wardrobe, a toilet table, chairs, a small bookcase and a ‘cheffonier’, a small, low cupboard with a sideboard top. The bed, if possible, was still four-postered, with curtains. There was also a washstand, in birchwood (which, unlike darker woods, did not show water stains), with accoutrements, a pier glass, and perhaps a couch or chaise longue. In Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale, in which he reworked some of his childhood memories from the Potteries of the 1870s, the master bedroom of the town’s chief linen-draper was splendid with ‘majestic mahogany … crimson rep curtains edged with gold … [and a] white, heavily tasselled counterpane’.⁷

      Multi-functionality: a suggestion for a bedroom writing table with, over it, a combination bookshelf and medicine case for when the bedroom was required to double as a sickroom.

      Heal’s and Son, the great furniture shop on Tottenham Court Road, suggested a bedroom furnished in Aesthetic style for the prosperous. Note that by 1896 the bed has no hangings, and gas jets illuminate the dressing mirror, although not the bed, which still has no bedside table.

      The range of furniture varied with income and taste. A mahogany wardrobe