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

However, as the covers became decorative objects in themselves, they became less and less washable. Dressing tables, for example, were usually covered with a white ‘toilet cover’. Mrs Panton recommended, as more attractive, her own version, which was a tapestry cover, ‘edged with a ball fringe to match’. She also had ‘box pincushions’ made out of old cigar boxes to hold gloves and other small objects: the boxes were given padded tops, and were then covered in plush, velveteen or tapestry, and fringed ‘so that the opening is hidden’. These covers were now themselves in need of covers: tapestry could be brushed and dabbed with benzene or other dry-cleaning fluids, but it could not be easily washed; nor could velvet or plush, and especially not fringes. Yet Mrs Panton was deeply concerned with airborne dirt: she noted that ‘in dusty weather particularly, and especially if we drive much’, it was impossible to keep a hairbrush clean – ‘our brushes look black after once [sic] using’. She suggested that three hairbrushes be kept in rotation: one to start the day clean; the second to be washed and set out to dry for the following day; and one spare to lend a friend should she need it.²¹ If hair, covered by a hat, got so dirty on a single outing, the amount of dust and dirt that landed on clothes and furniture is almost inconceivable.

      The extermination of vermin was an even more pressing problem, and, apart from the kitchen, beds were the most vulnerable places in the house. Bedding was rather more complicated than we have learned to expect. Mattresses were of organic fibre: horsehair mattresses were the best; cow’s-hair ones were cheaper, although they did not wear as well; even less expensive were wool mattresses. A straw mattress, or palliase, could be put under a hair mattress to protect it from the iron bedstead.²² Chain-spring mattresses were available in the second half of the century, but they were expensive, and they still needed a hair mattress over them. It was recommended that a brown holland square should be tied over the chains, to stop the hair mattress from being chewed by the springs. The hair mattress itself then needed to be covered with another holland case, to protect it from soot and dirt. If the bed had no springs, a feather bed – which was also expensive, hard to maintain, and a great luxury – could be added on top of the mattress. An underblanket, called a binding blanket, was recommended over the hair mattress.

      After the basics (all of which needed turning and shaking every day, as otherwise the natural fibre had a tendency to mat and clump), the bedding for cold, usually fireless rooms consisted of an under sheet (tucked into the lower mattress, not the upper, again to protect from soot), a bottom sheet, a top sheet, blankets (three to four per bed in the winter), a bolster, pillows, bolster-and pillow-covers in holland, and bolster- and pillow-cases.

With all of this bedding made of organic matter, it is hardly surprising that bedbugs were a menace. Oddly, the usually fastidious Mrs Haweis thought that blankets needed washing only every other summer, although sheets needed washing every month –‘the old-fashioned allowance’ – if on a single bed; if two people were sharing a bed it was every fortnight. Not all the sheets were changed at once: bottom sheets were taken off, as were the pillow-and bolster-cases, and the top sheet was moved down and became the bottom sheet for the next fortnight.^* It was recognized that it was impossible to go to bed clean: Mrs Haweis noted that pillowcases needed to be changed ‘rather oftener [than the sheets], chiefly because people (especially servants) allow their hair to become so dusty, that it soils the cases very soon’.^†23

The main cleaning of bedding came twice a year, in the spring and autumn cleanings, when it was recommended that the mattresses and pillows were taken out and aired (and, every few years, taken apart, the lumps in the ticking broken up and washed, and the feathers sifted, to get rid of the dust).^*24 Clearly, this kind of work could take place only with substantially more space and labour than many, if not most, middle-class households could afford. As was often the case, the advice books were describing the daily routines of upper-middle-class houses, or an ideal world that did not exist at all.^†

      It was not, however, enough simply to clean the bedding as well as possible. Although vermin had always been present, for some reason in the eighteenth century their numbers increased,²⁵ possibly because of rapid urbanization. After a vigorous war against them, by the 1880s Mrs Haweis could say that fleas were not expected in ‘decent bedrooms’, although ‘at any minute one may bring a stray parent in from cab, omnibus, or train’;²⁶ consequently vigilance had to be maintained, and the bed itself had to be examined regularly. And examine the Victorians did. Beatrix Potter wrote with an air of doom fulfilled about a Torquay hotel, where she was holidaying:

      I sniffed my bedroom on arrival, and for a few hours felt a certain grim satisfaction when my forebodings were maintained, but it is possible to have too much Natural History in a bed.

      I did not undress after the first night, but I was obliged to lie on [the bed] because there were only two chairs and one of them was broken. It is very uncomfortable to sleep with Keating’s [bug] powder in the hair.²⁷

      At home, the good housewife was supposed to check the bed and bedding every week. When Thomas and Jane Carlyle moved into their Cheyne Row house in 1834, Jane claimed that hers was the only house ‘among all my acquaintances’ that could boast of having no bugs. For a decade all was well. Then in 1843 bugs were found in the servant’s bed in the kitchen:

      I flung some twenty pailfuls of water on the kitchen floor, in the first place to drown any that might attempt to save themselves; when we killed all that were discoverable, and flung the pieces of the bed, one after another, into a tub full of water, carried them up into the garden, and let them steep there for two days; – and then I painted all the joints [with disinfectant], had the curtains washed and laid by for the present, and hope and trust that there is not one escaped alive to tell. Ach Gott, what a disgusting work to have to do! – but the destroying of bugs is a thing that cannot be neglected.²⁸

      Ten years later she gave up that particular war: when the servant’s bed was again found to be swarming, she sold the old wooden bed and bought an iron one: ‘The horror of these bugs quite maddened me for many days.’²⁹ That, she thought, was that – until a few years later Carlyle complained about his own bed. Jane was initially confident:

      Living in a universe of bugs outside, I had entirely ceased to fear them in my own house, having kept it for so many years perfectly clean from all such abominations. But clearly the practical thing to be done was to go and examine his bed … So instead of getting into a controversy that had no basis, I proceeded to toss over his blankets and pillows, with a certain sense of injury! But on a sudden, I paused in my operations; I stopped to look at something the size of a pin-point; a cold shudder ran over me; as sure as I lived it was an infant bug! And, O, heaven, that bug, little as it was, must have parents – grandfathers and grandmothers, perhaps!³⁰

The carpenter was called to dismantle the bed. The usual system at this stage was to take the pieces of the bed, and all the bedding, into an empty room, or outside, wash the bed frame with chloride of lime and water, and sprinkle Keating’s powder everywhere; then wait and repeat daily for as long as necessary. If the infestation was out of control, the bed and mattress were left in an empty room which was sealed to make it airtight, and then sulphur was burned to disinfect the bed and the surrounding area, to prevent the spread of the problem to the walls and floors.^*