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

– still it does depend entirely on that active brain and those busy hands.’¹⁸ Sarah Stickney Ellis, an extremely popular writer for women, was even more blunt: ‘It is quite possible you may have more talent [than your husband], with higher attainments, and you may also have been generally more admired; but this has nothing whatever to do with your position as a woman, which is, and must be, inferior to his as a man.’¹⁹ George Gissing explored this view in his novel The Odd Women (1893). The ominously named Edmund Widdowson ‘regarded [women] as born to perpetual pupilage. Not that their inclinations were necessarily wanton; they were simply incapable of attaining maturity, remained throughout their life imperfect beings, at the mercy of craft, ever liable to be misled by childish misconceptions.’²⁰

      That this was generally believed, and not simply advice-book cant, can be seen in numerous letters and diaries. Marion Jane Bradley, the wife of a master at Rugby School, wrote in her diary, ‘How important a work is mine. To be a cheerful, loving wife, and forbearing, fond, wise, thoughtful mother, striving ever against self-indulgence and irritability, which often sorely beset me. As a mistress, to be kind, gentle, thoughtful both for the bodies and souls of my servants. As a visitor of the poor to spare myself no trouble so as to relieve wisely and well.’²¹ She saw herself as an entirely reactive character without the husband, children, servants and poor, she had no role. Women were there for encouragement, to help men when they were depressed – in New Grub Street (1891), George Gissing’s novel of literary life on the edge of poverty, the wife and husband quarrel. Amy says, ‘Edwin, let me tell you something. You are getting too fond of speaking in a discouraging way …’ He responds, ‘… granted that … I easily fall into gloomy ways of talk, what is Amy here for?’²²

Men set the agenda, while it was up to women to carry it through. Men are present often by their absence in the pages that follow, despite the fact that men were undoubtedly the fount from which women’s possibilities grew. It was on marriage that women achieved that great necessity, a home of their own. It is clear, however, that men were barely concerned with the running of the house: ‘Though he may, perhaps, spend less time at home than any other member of the family – though he has scarcely a voice in family affairs – though the whole household machinery seems to go on without the assistance of his management …’ Men were the source of funds, but it was women who judged other women, women who (to the rules of men) made the decisions that activated and continued the social circles that made up the lives of most families. Although there are several fine books on the role of men at home,²³ this will not be another of them.^*

      Most contemporaries accepted Ruskin’s views on women and home – home was not a place, but a projection of the feminine, an encircling, encouraging, comforting aura that was there to protect a husband and children from the harshness of the world: ‘wherever a true wife comes’, Ruskin wrote, ‘this home is always around her’.²⁴ Creating a home was the role assigned to women, but it was not something over which they could exercise free will. What made a good home was carefully laid down:

      Not only must the house be neat and clean, but it must be so ordered as to suit the tastes of all … Not only must a constant system of activity be established, but peace must be preserved, or happiness will be destroyed. Not only must elegance be called in, to adorn and beautify the whole, but strict integrity must be maintained by the minutest calculation as to lawful means, and self, and self-gratification, must be made the yielding point in every disputed case. Not only must an appearance of outward order and comfort be kept up, but around every domestic scene there must be a strong wall of confidence, which no internal suspicion can undermine, no external enemy break through.²⁵

      No small task, and success or failure would be laid entirely at the door of Mrs Ellis’s ‘Women of England’.

      Coventry Patmore’s best-selling The Angel in the House (1854–63) portrayed women as passive and self-abnegating, while his men were driven by a desire to achieve. Housework was ideal for women, as its unending, non-linear nature gave it a more virtuous air than something which was focused, and could be achieved and have a result. Gissing allowed Edward Widdowson a certain naivety in order that the novelist might express a more cynical view: ‘Women were very like children; it was rather a task to amuse them and to keep them out of mischief. Therefore the blessedness of household toil, in especial the blessedness of child-bearing and all that followed.’²⁶ Women’s household achievements had more to them than simple cleanliness: Arnold Bennett, in The Old Wives’ Tale (1908), set in the Potteries in the second half of the century, shows a drunken woman, about whom the narrator reflects in horror: ‘A wife and mother! The lady of a house! The centre of order! The fount of healing! The balm for worry and the refuge of distress!… She was the dishonour of her sex, her situation, and her years.’²⁷ It was in failing in these roles that she was repulsive, not in the act of drunkenness itself, which Bennett shows several times in men with condemnation but not with disgust.

      Housekeeping was a source of strength for women, through which they could somehow mystically influence their husbands. In Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–3) the Jellyby home is going to ruin because Mrs Jellyby is more interested in her charitable works in Africa than in her own family. And it is not only the housekeeping that is affected by her absence of purpose at home: her daughter Caddy warns that ‘Pa will be bankrupt before long … There’ll be nobody but Ma to thank for it … When all our tradesmen send into our house any stuff they like, and the servants do what they like with it, and I have no time to improve things if I knew how, and Ma don’t care about anything, I should like to make out how Pa is to weather the storm.’²⁸ Mr Jellyby’s impending bankruptcy is to be laid entirely at the door of his wife’s bad housekeeping.

      Good housekeeping improved more than just the house. Caddy Jellyby is teaching herself how to run a house: ‘I can make little puddings too; and I know how to buy neck of mutton, and tea, and sugar, and butter, and a good many housekeeping things. I am not clever at my needle yet … but perhaps I shall improve, and since I have been engaged … and have been doing all this, I have felt better-tempered, I hope, and more forgiving.’²⁹ She has become a better person through good housekeeping. The virtues that orderly housekeeping could bring about were almost unending. When in 1860 the child Francis Kent was murdered in a middle-class family home, the shock was not only at the brutal murder, but also because ‘It is in this case … almost certain that some member of a respectable household – such as your’s reader or our’s [sic] – which goes to church with regularity, has family prayers, and whose bills are punctually settled, has murdered an unoffending child.’³⁰ Note the ingredients that make up a respectable household: church, family, prayer and prompt bill-paying.

      The well-kept house directed men as well as women towards the path of virtue, while the opposite led them irretrievably astray. Most of the published warnings were for the working classes, who were always considered more likely to err:

      The man who goes home from his work on a Saturday only to find his house in disorder, with every article of furniture out of its place, the floor unwashed or sloppy from uncompleted washing, his wife slovenly, his children untidy, his dinner not yet ready or spoilt in the cooking, is much more likely to go ‘on the spree’ than the man who finds his house in order, the furniture glistening from the recent polishing, the burnished steel fire-irons looking doubly resplendent from the bright glow of the cheerful fire, his well-cooked dinner ready laid on a snowy cloth,