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

managed that it is always cosy and cheerful when he is in it, finds there a charm, which, if he is endowed with an ordinary share of manliness and self-respect, will render him insensible to the allurements of meretricious amusements.³¹

      Working-class men who were not properly looked after by their wives retired to the pub. And, if their houses were not kept to a suitable level of comfort, even sober middle-class men were expected to vanish, although more likely to their clubs than to pubs. In East Lynne, Mrs Henry Wood’s wonderful 1861 melodrama of love betrayed, the second Mrs Carlyle, wife to a successful lawyer, is quite sure that if children are too much in evidence at home, ‘The discipline of that house soon becomes broken. The children run wild; the husband is sick of it, and seeks peace and solace elsewhere.’ She does not blame the husband, but the wife who is operating ‘a most mistaken and pernicious system’.³² Advice books echoed Mrs Carlyle: ‘Men are free to come and go as they list, they have so much liberty of action, so many out-door resources if wearied with in-doors, that it is a good policy … to make home attractive as well as comfortable.’³³

The attractive, tastefully appointed house was a sign of respectability. Taste was not something personal; instead it was something sanctioned by society. Taste, as agreed by society, had moral values, and therefore adherence to what was considered at any one time to be good taste was a virtue, while ignoring the taste of the period was a sign of something very wrong indeed.^* Conformity, conventionality, was morality. Christopher Dresser, a designer and influential writer on decorative arts, promised that ‘Art can lend to an apartment not only beauty, but such refinement as will cause it to have an elevating influence on those who dwell in it.’³⁵ The house, and its decoration, was an expression of the morality that resided within. Mrs Panton, a prolific advice-book writer, was ‘quite certain that when people care for their homes, they are much better in every way, mentally and morally, than those who only regard them as places to eat and sleep in … while if a house is made beautiful, those who are to dwell in it will … cultivate home virtue’.³⁶

      What the house contained, how it was laid out, what the occupations of its inhabitants were, what the wife did all day: these were the details from which society built up its picture of the family and the home, and it is precisely these details that I am concerned with in this book. I have shaped the book not along a floor-plan, but along a life-span. I begin in the bedroom, with childbirth, moving on to the nursery, and children’s lives. Gradually I progress to the public rooms of the house and with those rooms the adult public world, marriage and social life, before moving on, via the sickroom, to illness and death. Thus a single house contains a multiplicity of lives.

      

      The nineteenth century was the century of urbanization. In 1801 only 20 per cent of the population of Great Britain lived in cities. By the death of Queen Victoria, in 1901, that figure had risen to nearly 80 per cent. Of those cities, the greatest was undoubtedly London. London was not just the biggest city in Britain; it was the biggest city in the world: in 1890 it had 4.2 million people, compared to 2.7 million in New York, its nearest rival, and just 2.5 million in Paris.

      It was not capital cities alone that were drawing in the rural population. Until 1811, only London had a population of more than 100,000 people in Britain. By the beginning of Victoria’s reign, in 1837, there were another five such cities, and by the time of her death there were forty-nine. ‘The Victorians, indeed, created a new civilization, “so thoroughly of the town” that it has been said to be the first of its kind in human history.’³⁷

      To house the numbers of newly urbanized people was a challenge without precedent, and it was met in a unique way. As Continental cities (and New York) grew, apartment blocks sprang up: communal living became the norm. Apart from in Edinburgh, this was rejected in an unconscious yet unanimous way across the British Isles. Instead, a frenzy of house-building began. One-third of the houses in Britain today were built before the First World War, and most of these are Victorian. In a period of less than seventy-five years, over 6 million houses were built, and the majority still stand and function as homes today. Despite the speed with which this massive work went on, despite the often sub-standard building practices, the twenty-first-century cities of Britain are covered with terraced housing built by the Victorians. This once-unique solution to a sudden problem is now so ubiquitous that we no longer regard our terraced houses as anything except the epitome of ‘home’. Yet they were a pragmatic solution to a problem that arose from major upheavals in society.

      The fact that the solution was pragmatic does not mean that it did not also meet an almost visceral need. The French philosopher Hippolyte Taine wrote of his time in England, ‘it is the Englishman who wishes to be by himself in his staircase as in his room, who could not endure the promiscuous existence of our huge Parisian cages, and who, even in London, plans his house as a small castle, independent and enclosed … he is exacting in the matter of condition and comfort, and separates his life from that of his inferiors’.³⁸

      Thus wrote an outsider looking in. From the inside, the Registrar General pondered on the meaning of ‘house’ and ‘home’ revealed by the census of 1851: ‘It is so much of the order of nature that a family should live in a separate house, that “house” is often used for “family” in many languages, and this isolation of families, in separate houses, it has been asserted, is carried to a greater extent in England than it is elsewhere.’ He quoted a German naturalist:

      English dwelling-houses … stand in close connection with that long-cherished principle of separation and retirement, lying as the very foundation of the national character … the Englishman still perseveres … a certain separation of himself from others, which constitutes the very foundation of his freedom … It is that that gives the Englishman that proud feeling of personal independence, which is stereotyped in the phrase, ‘Every man’s house is his castle.’ This is … an expression which cannot be used in Germany and France, where ten or fifteen families often live together in the same large house.

      The German naturalist then went on to describe how the English lived – something the English themselves in general never bothered to think of, so natural was it to them:

      In English towns or villages, therefore, one always meets either with small detached houses merely suited to one family, or apparently large buildings extending to the length of half a street, sometimes adorned like palaces on the exterior, but separated by partition walls internally, and thus divided into a great number of small high houses, for the most part three windows broad, within which, and on the various stories, the rooms are divided according to the wants and convenience of the family; in short, therefore, it may be properly said, that the English divide their edifices perpendicularly into houses – whereas we Germans divide them horizontally into floors. In England, every man is master of his hall, stairs, and chambers – whereas we are obliged to use the two first in common with others.

      The Registrar General concluded, ‘The possession of an entire house is, it is true, strongly desired by every Englishman; for it throws a sharp, well-defined circle round his family and hearth – the shrine of his sorrows, joys, and meditations. This feeling, as it is natural, is universal, but it is stronger in England than it is on the Continent.’³⁹

      Although the German he quoted indicated clearly how foreign he found the idea to be, to the Registrar General the terraced house was so normal that he could not bring himself to believe in its uniqueness, and the most he could admit to was that it was both ‘universal’ and ‘stronger in England’. However, both he and his German source agreed that ‘An Englishman’s home is his castle.’ This phrase had first been used in the seventeenth century by the jurist Sir Edward Coke to describe a legal and political situation. By the Victorian era it had