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

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.

* 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.

* 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).⁸¹

† Dr Chavasse among others thought that flannel caps prevented eye inflammations, ‘a complaint to which new-born infants are subject’.⁸³

* 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’.⁸⁴

       2

       THE NURSERY

      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’.¹ 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’.²

      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’.³ 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.⁴

      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’.⁵