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

breast, simply using a deal board, pegs and a curtain in front. Trays and boxes for storing clothes were common – hangers were not in general use until the 1900s (when they were referred to as ‘shoulders’), so clothes either hung from pegs or were folded. Small houses and yards of fabric in every dress meant that advice books were constantly contriving additional storage: in hollow stools, benches, ottomans. Even bulkier items were folded: Robert Edis, another interiors expert, recommended that halls should have cupboards ‘with shelves arranged for coats’.⁸ ‘Ware’ – shorthand for toilet-ware – also came in a range of qualities. The typical washstand had towel rails on each side, and often tiles at the back to protect against splashing water. It was expected there would be a basin, a ewer or jug, a soapdish, a dish to hold a sponge, a dish to hold a toothbrush, a dish to hold a nailbrush, a water bottle and a glass. A chamber pot might be of the same pattern as the ware. Mrs Panton recommended that identical ware should be bought for most of the bedrooms, as breakages could then be replaced from stock – breakages of bedroom items, she implied, were frequent. A hip bath might also live in the bedroom, to be filled by toilet cans: large metal cans of brass or copper, which were used to carry hot water up from the kitchen.

      No room was finished without its ration of ornaments: Mrs Haweis said that even without much money one could have a pretty room: ‘A little distemper in good colours, one or two really graceful chairs … a few thoroughly good ornaments, make a mere cell habitable.’⁹ Mrs Caddy, in her book on Household Organization, suggested that, as with the furniture and carpets, second best would do for the bedroom – ‘light ornaments … which may be too small, or too trifling, to be placed with advantage in the drawing room’.¹⁰ Certainly the desire for small decorative objects was no less upstairs than down. Marion Sambourne’s dressing table in the 1880s had on it five jewel boxes, a brush-and-comb set, a card case, two sachets, six needlework doilies, three ring trays, a pin cushion and a velvet ‘mouchoir case’.¹¹

      Bedside tables as we know them were not current. In sickroom literature, nurses were always being advised to bring a table to the bedside to hold the medicines. Mrs Panton, with her love of soft furnishings, suggested for the healthy ‘a bed pocket made out of a Japanese fan, covered with soft silk, and the pocket itself made out of plush, and nailed within easy reach’, to hold a watch, a handkerchief etc., and then, as an innovation which required explanation, ‘furthermore … great comfort is to be had from a table at one’s bedside, on which one can stand one’s book or anything one may be likely to want in the night’.¹²

      Mrs Panton’s bed was a brass half-tester, which had fabric curtains only at the head, lined to match the furniture. This was in keeping with the style of the later part of the century. As more became known about disease transmission, home decorators were urged to keep bedroom furnishings to a minimum, although this frequently given advice must be compared to actuality. A list of objects in Marion Sambourne’s room included a wardrobe, a cupboard to hold a chamber pot, a towel rail, a sofa, a box covered in fabric, two tables, a bookcase, a linen basket, a portmanteau, a vase, two jardinières, plus ten chairs and the dressing table with its display.¹³ For not all agreed that bed-hangings were unhealthy: Cassell’s Household Guide as late as 1869 thought that draughts were more of a worry than the hangings that kept them away from the sleeper.¹⁴ In general, however, four-posters were vanishing. Even if people were not switching to simple iron or brass beds, as advised, they were at least replacing the traditional heavy drapery with beds with only vestigial curtains. The simplified lines of such beds were disturbing to some: Mrs Panton advised that ‘If the bare appearance of an uncurtained bed is objected to’, one could mimic the more familiar style by putting the startlingly naked bed in a curtained alcove.¹⁵ Likewise, while carpets did not disappear entirely, they were modified so that they could be taken up and beaten regularly, or rugs were substituted, so that the floor could be scrubbed every week.

As the second half of the century progressed, hygiene became the overriding concern. Mrs Panton, still distressed about bedroom carpets, remembered a carpet that had spent twenty years on the dining-room floor, ‘covered in holland in the summer,^* and preserved from winter wear by the most appallingly frightful printed red and green “felt square” I ever saw’. When it was no longer considered to be in good condition, it was moved to the schoolroom, then demoted once more, to the girls’ bedroom. (Note that the schoolroom, a ‘public’ room for children, got the carpet before the children’s bedroom did.) After that, it was cut into strips and put by the servants’ beds, ‘and when I consider the dirt and dust that has become part and parcel of it, I am only thankful that our pretty cheap carpets do not last as carpets used to do, for I am sure such a possession cannot be healthy’.¹⁶

      As suggested by Heal’s for a servant’s bedroom. Instead of modern peacock-feather wallpaper (p. 5), the servants make do with old-fashioned flowers, and plain deal furniture replaces the more elaborate versions given to their employers. Many of the middle classes slept in rooms much like these.

Hygiene was not just a matter of dust. Three things were paramount: the extermination of vermin (which encompassed insects as well as rodents), the protection from dirt of various kinds, and the proper regulation of light. Gas lighting was not recommended for bedrooms. If gas was used, the servants lit the bedroom lights in the evenings while the family was still downstairs; by bedtime much of the oxygen in the room would have been depleted by it; the fireplace, being seldom if ever lit, added no ventilation, and in cold weather, with closed windows, a headache was the least the sleeper could expect to awake to. A single candle, brought upstairs on retiring, was the approved bedroom lighting, but for the more prosperous a pair of candlesticks on the mantel, and another on the dressing table, ‘with the box of safety matches in a known position, where they can be found in a moment’, was more comfortable.^*18

      The lack of lighting was complicated by the fact that the bed needed to be positioned carefully to meet the conflicting demands of health and privacy. The bed should be ‘screen [ed], and not expose [d]’ by the opening of the bedroom door, and yet at the same time, it could not be placed in a draught from the window, door or fireplace, nor should there be overmuch light (which could be ‘trying’ when the occupant was ill).¹⁹ Given these many requirements, and the limited floor plans of most terraced houses, these niceties were probably acknowledged more in the abstract than they were practised.

      Protection from dirt was still more difficult. Dust was not just the airborne particles, causing no particular damage, that we know. Our Homes warned that

      Household dust is, in fact, the powder of dried London mud, largely made up, of course, of finely-divided granite or wood from the pavements, but containing, in addition to these, particles of every description of decaying animal and vegetable matter. The droppings of horses and other animals, the entrails of fish, the outer leaves of cabbages, the bodies of dead cats, and the miscellaneous contents of dust-bins generally, all contribute … and it is to preserve a harbour for this compound that well-meaning people exclude the sun [by excessive drapery], so that they may not be guilty of spoiling their carpets.²⁰

      Compounded with this, coal residue was omnipresent, both as dust when coals were carried to each fireplace and then, after the fires were lit, as soot thrown out by the fire, blackening whatever it touched. The most common system of