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

on a brown field ornamented the walls of the kitchen. Its ceiling was irregular and grimy, and a beam ran across it … A large range stood out from the wall between the stairs and the window. The rest of the furniture comprised a table – against the wall opposite the range – a cupboard, and two Windsor chairs. Opposite the foot of the steps was a doorway, without a door, leading to two larders, dimmer even than the kitchen, vague retreats made visible by whitewash, where bowls of milk, dishes of cold bones, and remainders of fruit-pies, reposed.³

      There was a coal cellar which contained the tap – the only running water – and another cellar where coke for the range was kept and ashes were stored awaiting collection twice or thrice a year by the dustman.^*

      Arthur Munby, the civil servant, had a long-term relationship with a maid-of-all-work named Hannah Cullwick. (They eventually married.) He was sexually aroused by the idea of working-class women, and spent a great deal of time talking to working women he approached on the streets. (They were all ‘good’ women – he seemed to have no interest in prostitutes.) Despite the unusual nature of his interest, the fact remains that because of it he had far more knowledge of their working conditions than many of the middle class. Even he was shocked when once he saw Hannah in the kitchen of the house in Kilburn where she was employed as maid-of-all-work to an upholsterer and his family:

      She stood at a sink behind a wooden dresser backed with choppers and stained with blood and grease, upon which were piles of coppers and saucepans that she had to scour, piles of dirty dishes that she had to wash. Her frock, her cap, her face and arms were more or less wet, soiled, perspiring and her apron was a filthy piece of sacking, wet and tied round her with a cord. The den where she wrought was low, damp, ill-smelling; windowless, lighted by a flaring gas-jet; and, full in view, she had on one side a larder hung with raw meat, on the other a common urinal; besides the many ugly, dirty implements around her.⁴

      A roasting jack, which was fixed either to the top of a meat-screen (p. 66) or the mantelpiece. This is a bottle-jack, with a clockwork mechanism to turn the meat in front of the fire.

      It was generally recommended that kitchen floors be covered in linoleum, for easy cleaning, often laid over a cement base to foil the vermin.^* Mrs Panton suggested that ‘if the cook is careful … she should be given a rug, or good square of carpet … to put down when her work is done’.⁶ The carpet could not be permanently on the floor, for hygienic reasons. It is hard to imagine that after a long day’s work in the conditions described above the thing Hannah Cullwick most wanted to do was unroll a carpet. Anyway, there were rarely upholstered chairs in a kitchen, as only wood survived the steam and mess of an active kitchen, so she would have had no place to sit comfortably.

      The labour, steam and dirt all centred around the kitchen range. The closed range was the first technical development in Britain to move beyond cooking over an open fire. It appeared at the beginning of the century, although it took decades before it was commonly in use. Wemmick, in his ‘castle’ in Great Expectations, was still cooking with ‘a saucepan on the hob, and a brazen bijou over the fireplace designed for the suspension of a roasting-jack’.^*7 There were many styles of range, but the main features of all of them were an oven or ovens, with a boiler to heat water. Both were operated by means of a fire fuelled by coke, which generated heat that was transmitted by flues and modified by dampers. By the 1840s The English Housekeeper was advising its readers on the benefits of the range: ‘It is a great convenience to have a constant supply of hot water, and an advantage to possess the means of baking a pie, pudding or cake.’^†8 The early models had boilers that had to be filled by hand, and if the water level got too low the boiler cracked; later they became self-filling, with a tap to draw off hot water for use, and a stopcock for controlling inflow from the mains.

      By the 1860s the ‘improved’ kitcheners which Mrs Beeton recommended had hotplates, to keep soups simmering, or other items warm, and also to heat irons (see pp. 128–9), as well as a roaster with the kind of movable shelves we now expect, which could be converted from an open to a closed oven by moving valves, when it was used for baking. These ranges cost from £5 15s. to £23 10s.⁹ One of the major advantages, apart from constant hot water, was that soot no longer fell into the food while it was in the oven, although it could still come down the chimney and fall into the saucepans. Soot in food remained a major problem. Most recipe books of the day constantly reiterate the need for ‘a very clean saucepan’ and ‘a scrupulously clean pan’: it is difficult to remember that cooking over an open fire meant scorched, sooty pots every time. There was still no temperature control. (A legacy of this is the continuing reputation for being ‘difficult’ of dishes that today, with modern equipment, are really very straightforward – souffles, for example.) Instead, recipes called for ‘a bright fire’ or ‘a good soaking heat’, or a fire that was ‘not too fierce’.

      This has an integrated chimney, instead of the range being built into the old fireplace (p. 66). The boiler, with a tap to draw off the hot water, takes up the right hand side, the oven the left.

      Closed stoves or kitcheners were said to use less fuel than open ranges, but this was always qualified by ‘if managed well’,¹⁰ which probably meant they did not in practice. For those who could not afford an oven, or where the space was not available, ‘Dutch ovens’ were frequently recommended – small brick devices which held charcoal, and were mounted on four short legs. On top was a trivet where a saucepan could be placed. The advice books – again in flights of imagination – suggested that even jam could be made on these early versions of camp stoves, or ‘a light pudding or a small pie may be baked’, adding cautiously ‘with care’, which, again, probably indicated it was either difficult or impossible.¹¹

      Surprisingly, given the primary means of light in mid- to late-Victorian houses, gas cookers were rarely used: they were available from the 1880s, but were considered too expensive for the amount of cooking needed to feed a whole family. They also had no boilers, as ranges did. As constant hot water was one of the major improvements produced by ranges, this was a serious drawback. Alternative methods of heating water had to be found, but none was as satisfactory. (See p. 287.) Some houses, where the kitchen was particularly small, used a gas stove in the summer to avoid having to light the range in hot weather, although this was not common, mostly because it cut off the hot-water supply.

      Kitchen ranges and fires for heating throughout the house, together with London’s foggy climate, ensured that London was filthy, inside and out. Dr John Simon, London’s first medical officer, noted in Paris the ‘transparence of air, the comparative brightness of all colour, the visibility of distant objects, the cleanliness of faces and buildings, instead of our opaque atmosphere, deadened colours, obscured distance, smutted faces and black architecture.’ Approaching London from the suburbs, ‘one may observe the total result of this gigantic nuisance hanging over the City like a pall.’¹² This gloom was not caused by climate alone. When Sherlock Holmes and Watson went to investigate a crime in a small semi-detached house in Brixton, there was no fog, no rain, and it was midday. The Scotland Yard detective wanted to show them something: ‘He struck a match on his boot and held it up against the wall … Across the bare space there was scrawled in blood-red letters a single word.’¹³