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

      Dickens found great comic potential in this contemporary preoccupation. In 1841, in The Old Curiosity Shop, he had mocked the urge for suburban retreat; twenty years later, in Great Expectations (1860–61), his affection for the idea of sanctuary from the outside world was so strong in every phrase of his description of the clerk Wemmick’s home in the suburbs that it was clear he now sympathized:

      Wemmick’s house was a little wooden cottage in the midst of plots of garden, and the top of it was cut out and painted like a battery mounted with guns …

      I think it was the smallest house I ever saw; with the queerest gothic windows (by far the greater part of them sham), and a gothic door, almost too small to get in at.

      ‘That’s a real flagstaff, you see,’ said Wemmick, ‘and on Sundays I run up a real flag. Then look here. After I have crossed this bridge, I hoist it up – so – and cut off the communication.’

      The bridge was a plank, and it crossed a chasm about four feet wide and two deep. But it was very pleasant to see the pride with which he hoisted it up and made it fast; smiling as he did so, with a relish and not merely mechanically.

‘At nine o’clock every night, Greenwich time,’^* said Wemmick, ‘the gun fires. There he is you see! And when you hear him go, I think you’ll say he’s a Stinger.’

      The piece of ordnance referred to, was mounted in a separate fortress, constructed of lattice-work. It was protected from the weather by an ingenious little tarpaulin contrivance in the nature of an umbrella.⁴¹

Houses, then, were something that philosophers, civil servants and novelists all thought important enough to discuss at length. They were status symbols, but the status they gave was markedly different from our own preoccupations. Today in the United Kingdom we are concerned with property ownership. The Victorians as a whole found ownership of less importance than occupancy and display. Although no firm figures exist, most historians estimate that a bare 10 per cent of the population owned their own homes;⁴² the rest rented: the poorest paying weekly, the prosperous middle classes taking renewable seven-year leases. This allowed families to move promptly and easily as their circumstances changed: either with the increase and decrease of the size of the family, or to larger or smaller houses in better or less good neighbourhoods as income fluctuated. In one area of Liverpool, it is estimated, 82 per cent of the population moved within ten years, 40 per cent moving within twelve months.⁴³ Mrs Panton, the Mrs Beeton of home decoration, saw this constant coming and going as sensible: she could not quite allow herself to suggest that family incomes might ever be imperilled, but ‘neighbourhoods alter so rapidly in character and in personelle likewise, that I cannot blame young folk for refusing more than a three years’ agreement, or at the most a seven years’ lease’.^*45

      The type of neighbourhood one lived in was as important as the type of house. It was important to have neighbours of equal standing, so that a social homogeneity was achieved. Thus shops and other services were confined where possible to busy main streets, and the more desirable houses were tucked in on quiet streets behind – the opposite of continental Europe, where the bigger, more imposing houses were to be found on the wider, more imposing streets. William Morris, after a trip to an outlying suburb, despaired: ‘villas and nothing but villas save a chemist’s shop and a dry public house near the station: no sign of any common people, or anything but gentlemen and servants – a beastly place to live in’.⁴⁶

      The notion of home was structured in part by the importance given to privacy and retreat, and in part by the idea that conformity to social norms was an outward indication of morality. This ensured that display was vested in the choice of neighbourhood, and then in interior decoration. The outside, by contrast, was as unrevealing as the stark facade of an Arab house, turned inwards upon its courtyard. Most thought this a virtue: in 1815 Walter Scott had Guy Mannering say about a house auction, ‘It is disgusting to see the scenes of domestic society and seclusion thrown open to the gaze of the curious and the vulgar.’⁴⁷ As late as 1866–7 Anthony Trollope in The Last Chronicle of Barset described the same feeling. Archdeacon Grantly is disappointed when his son Major Grantly wants to marry a disgraced curate’s daughter, but he is horrified when the Major puts his possessions up for auction to finance the marriage when his father cuts off his allowance.⁴⁸ That the masses should see into a gentleman’s private affairs was not to be borne.

      Gustave Doré produced a series of illustrations of London life. Here the backs of suburban London houses are seen from a railway cutting in a typical view of the way these brick tentacles were spreading ever-outwards into the countryside. Note the rear extensions, which house sculleries, with their small chimneys for the coppers.

      One rung down the social scale from Archdeacon Grantly and his kind were the endless rows of brick houses that stretched out to the horizon with deadening sameness. Conan Doyle situated his hero in Baker Street, right on the edge of the new developments, and he could not help describing the ‘Long lines of dull brick houses [which] were only relieved by the coarse glare and tawdry brilliancy of public-houses at the corner. Then came rows of two-storeyed villas, each with a fronting of miniature garden, and then again interminable lines of new staring brick buildings – the monster tentacles which the giant city was throwing out into the country.’⁴⁹ Picking up on the same red-brick vista, Mr Pooter’s house in Holloway was situated in the carefully named Brickfield Terrace.

      In the first half of the nineteenth century, in the inner city, houses that had earlier been the homes of the Georgian well-to-do were colonized by the new professional classes, as both homes and offices. In earlier days, living outside the city, travelling on poorly lit roads, was dangerous and, even when not dangerous, difficult, as night travel had to be regulated by the times of the full moon. (As late as 1861 Trollope had one of his characters say, ‘it turns out that we cannot get back the same night because there is no moon’.)⁵⁰ Now, with the progress of gas lighting across the country, that was one problem solved. Street-lighting was eulogized in the Westminster Review as early as 1829: ‘What has the new light of all the preachers done for the morality and order of London, compared to what had been effected by gas lighting!’⁵¹ With the increase in public transport it was no longer just the carriage owners who could live outside the bounds of the town and travel in to work daily. Gradually, the disadvantages of these old houses in inner London – they had no lavatories, or the lavatories had been installed long after the original building was planned and so were in inconvenient places; they were dark; the kitchens were almost unmodernizable – together with the increasing desire to separate home from work, meant that the professionals too moved to the ever expanding suburbs, and travelled in to work in what had previously been their homes. John Marshall, a surgeon living in Savile Row, just off Piccadilly in central London, in 1863 moved his family to suburban Kentish Town, on the edge of the city, after his fourth child was born: the better air and larger house made the daily trip back and forth to his consulting rooms in their old house worthwhile.⁵²

Mrs Panton was certain that for ‘young people’ without too much money a house ‘some little way out of London’ was the ideal. ‘Rents are less; smuts and blacks^* are conspicuous by their absence; a small garden, or even