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

that time which would remove the cause of suffering, administer, behind the curtains, those deadly narcotics which, while stupefying Nature into sleep, insure for herself a night of many unbroken hours’. See a larger discussion on servants and their employers’ fears on pp. 111ff., 115–17.³⁹

† Ipecacuanha and calomel were used with ruthless regularity in Victorian households. Ipecac, as it was commonly called, was a powdered root, and functioned as an emetic, causing vomiting. Calomel, made of mercury chloride, was a purgative. Both were used routinely in attempts to ‘expel’ various illnesses.

* Gutta-percha was produced from the sap of the Isonandra gutta tree, native to Indonesia. When vulcanized, it acted as a waterproofing, insulating material, much as we used rubber and now use plastic. It first appeared in Britain in the 1840s, becoming widely used for, among other items, hot-water bottles, golf balls and the insulating cover for the first transatlantic telegraph cable.

* When she did go into detail, it is hard to imagine that some of her ideas could have been considered seriously: her children’s piano lessons consisted of playing only scales and finger exercises, with the occasional ‘sacred piece’ but no other tunes, for seven years. She did admit that this regime was ‘inexpressible weariness’, but its very wearying nature promoted discipline and was therefore to be encouraged. She also taught children drawing by letting them draw only straight lines, and then curved ones, for more than a year. It was lucky for these children that they were merely fictional devices, as real children must surely have ended up running amok.⁶⁰

† Religious education, even in houses a great deal more observant than the Hughes’, was often not much more successful. Mary Jane Bradley, the wife of a clergyman, prayed every morning, first by herself, then with Wa, then with the maids (note the careful segregation). When Wa was two and a half she worried that he did not appear ‘capable of understanding the idea of God and Christ being the same’. A year later he had, she thought, understood the idea of the Resurrection; then he asked her if God would come back as a stuffed rabbit. The three-year-old appeared to understand some things better than his mother, however. On being told to thank God for his blessings, he asked why God did not give the same blessings to ‘poor little beggar boys’. She replied: ‘we know that it’s right because God does it.’⁶¹

* This Guide to Science was written by the author of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fables.

* The college, now part of the University of London, merged with another college and was known as Queen Mary and Westfield College; two years ago it was ‘rebranded’ as Queen Mary College.

* One exception whom he saw fairly regularly, but must have somehow overlooked, was his daughter. Ivy Compton-Burnett. It may be significant that her career as a novelist did not take off until after a major breakdown decades after his death, and one looks again at her gallery of tyrannical parents. (It should be noted that, although Dr Burnett was a homoeopath, his opinions coincided in this matter with those of his more conventional medical brethren.)

* Ayrton read mathematics at Girton, with her tuition paid for by George Eliot. In 1899 she was the first woman member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers.

† Compare this to Louise Creighton, p. 51.

       3

       THE KITCHEN

      VICTORIANS LIKED THEIR ROOMS to be single-purpose, where we often see a multiplicity of function in our own usage. The kitchen is one of the few rooms we today would think of as single-purpose, or at most dual-purpose (cooking and eating).^* The Victorian ideal held that the kitchen was for cookery only, with food storage, food preparation and dishwashing going on in, respectively, the storeroom and larder, the scullery, and the scullery or pantry, depending on the type of dish and the level of dirt. The reality in most middle-class houses was that the kitchen performed a wide range of functions. Many of the middle classes with one servant, in four-to-six-room houses, had only the kitchen for her to sleep in. (In houses this size, it was always a ‘her’: menservants were for the wealthy.) Larger houses still did not necessarily mean the kitchen was for cooking only: larger houses meant a larger staff, and the kitchen remained a bedroom to many. Less prosperous householders used the kitchen themselves: Snagsby, the law-stationer in Bleak House, used the front kitchen as the family sitting room, while ‘Guster’, his workhouse maid-of-all-work, slept in the back kitchen, or scullery.

      Bedroom, kitchen, sitting room: many uses, although it was usually the least regarded room of the house. The desire for separation meant that an often small space had even smaller portions cut out from it, to keep essential functions apart: a scullery, with running water, was for any food preparation that made a mess – cleaning fish, preparing vegetables – and for scouring pots and pans; a pantry was for storing china and glass, and silver if there was any, and it had a sink where these things were washed or polished; a larder was for fresh-food storage; a storeroom was for dried goods and cleaning equipment. Each separate room, in the ideal home, had a different type of sink: the scullery had a sink, or better yet two, for cleaning food and washing pots; the pantry sink was of wood lined with lead, to prevent the glass and crockery chipping. If there was a housemaids’ cupboard upstairs, for storing cleaning equipment, it too had a lead-lined wood sink, so that bedroom ware was not chipped, and a separate slop sink, where chamber pots were emptied. (It looked like a lavatory pan, but was higher, and was also lead-lined.)¹ In addition, after indoor sanitation arrived, the servants often had their own lavatory downstairs – not for their convenience, but to ensure that they did not use the family lavatory upstairs.

      This was, however, only the ideal. The actuality was often a dark, miserable basement, running with damp. The scullery might be a passageway off the kitchen, with the lavatory installed in it. The pantry was a china closet, the storeroom another cupboard, kept locked; the larder yet another, rather hopefully installed as far away as possible from the kitchen range, which, as it supplied the household’s hot water, blasted out heat all the year round for up to eighteen hours a day. Below ground, the kitchen received little if any light from the area.^* The gas burned all day, with at best a small window near the ceiling to remove the fumes. Often no windows were possible, and air bricks and other ventilation devices were the most that could be hoped for. In this miasma of cooking and gas, the servant unfolded her bedding to sleep after the day’s work was over.

      This was what Dickens had in mind for the kitchen belonging to Sampson and Sally Brass, the unscrupulous solicitor and his sister in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841): ‘a very dark miserable place, very low and very damp, the walls disfigured by a thousand rents and blotches’.² Dickens was showing the turpitude of the household’s occupants through the house itself, but Arnold Bennett’s kitchen of the 1860s and 1870s, belonging to the entirely upright Baines family in The Old