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

a series of ever smaller Russian dolls: every room, every piece of furniture, every object, in theory, had its own function, which it alone could perform: nothing else would serve, and to make do with a multipurpose substitute was not quite respectable. Privacy and segregation of function, especially as the latter defined social status, were the keynotes to the terraced house. Robert Kerr, an architect, wrote in his book on The Gentleman’s House that privacy was ‘our primary classification’ for the ideal house – he put it ahead of a dozen other desirable characteristics such as ‘comfort’, ‘convenience’ and ‘cheerfulness’.⁶⁵

Nothing was to be allowed to escape from its own particular container. Kerr’s most obvious concern was that servants and their masters should remain separate: ‘the Family Rooms shall be essentially private, and as much as possible the Family Thoroughfares. It becomes the foremost of all maxims, therefore, however small the establishment, that the Servants’ Department shall be separated from the Main House, so that what passes on either side of the boundary shall be both invisible and inaudible on the other.’ Some of the examples of these boundaries being breached were servants overhearing their masters; or coal or scullery noises penetrating outside the coal-hole or scullery; or, worse, smells wafting through the house; ‘or when a Kitchen doorway in the Vestibule or Staircase exposes to the view of every one the dresser or the cooking range’.^*66 When a glimpse of inappropriate furniture through a doorway is disturbing, it seems important to examine how household life was structured, what its concerns and obligations were in daily life.

      The standard plan of the terraced house was quickly arrived at. The town houses of the gentry were taller, wider and deeper, but that was the sole distinction: the layouts of the houses of both rich and poor were eerily similar. The middle classes wanted the houses that the upper classes lived in; the poorer classes were content to live in cut-down versions of the middle-class house. The great landowners encouraged this type of housing on their estates, as something familiar to them: the earlier town houses that were their own London homes had conformed to this model. Thus, as cities were rapidly generated on their land, they forced the builders into repeating the older patterns. In turn, when speculative builders bought parcels of land to make investments of their own, they copied the more prestigious estates built by the upper classes.

      Architects at the time (and ever since) called the houses inconvenient and impractical, but if the demand had not been there, neither would the houses have been: these estates were built to meet a need, and if the population had shown a desire for something else, something else would have appeared.

      Party walls were rigidly controlled: they were the line of demarcation between houses, and ground landlords allowed no breach of them to occur. They were also the main means of fire prevention, and for this reason it was usual to require them to continue upwards at least 15 inches higher than the roof. But those who wrote about building practices noted that all the walls were too flimsy (half a brick, or 41/2 inches, thick rather than the one brick, at 9 inches, that was necessary to keep water out), that foundations were not built, and that damp-courses were not laid.⁶⁷ It was not coincidental that the word ‘jerry-built’ was first recorded in the nineteenth century. Some bricks were so rotten that, when fires were lit, smoke came out through the sides of the chimneys. In her diary Beatrix Potter noted other practices that were even more unsavoury:

      Builders are in the habit of digging out the gravel on which they ought to found their houses, and selling it. The holes must be filled. The refuse of London is bad to get rid of though the greater part is put to various uses. The builders buy, not the cinders and ashes, but decaying animal and vegetable matters etc. to fill the gravel parts. It is not safe to build on at first, so is spread on the ground to rot, covered with a layer of earth … After a while the bad smells soak through the earth and floors and cause fevers. This delightful substance is called ‘dry core’.⁶⁸

      The result of all this was houses that were no sooner finished than they needed repair. The Transactions of the Sanitary Institute of Great Britain despaired over both the lack of good building practices and the preference for display before solidity:

      Here is a house, empty, which was completed and occupied two years ago. Notice how the inside is finished, to take the eye: good mantel-pieces, showy grates, and attractive papers. Now look at the floors. Not one of them is level; they are at all sorts of angles, owing to the sinking of the walls … Notice how the damp has risen, even to the second-floor rooms, and in all the water has come through the roof, not in one, but in many places. The bath room, & c., is conspicuous, but only to the practised eye, by reason of the scamped plumbing and forbidding fittings used. Look at the exterior … Observe how the roof sags, owing to the scantlings of the rafters being insufficient …⁶⁹

      Fresh from Boston, the diarist Alice James, invalid sister of the novelist Henry James and the philosopher and psychologist William James, was shocked at the ‘dumb patience’ of the English, which allowed these practices:

      the generality of middle class houses … rock and quake when one walks across the floor, and you hear the voices of your next door neighbours … plainly … The Ashburnes, after a nine years’ search, took a large and good house and had it thoroughly ‘done up’, and then for weeks vainly tried to warm the drawing-room sufficiently to sit in it; then they were told by the people who had the house before them, that the room could never be used in cold weather: George was then inspired to climb up on a ladder and look at the top of the windows, which had all been examined by the British workmen, who had carefully left in the setting of them, several inches of ventilation into the open street.

The immensity of London is so overpowering that a superficial impression of solidity goes with it, and it makes one rather heartsick to learn by degrees that it is simply miles of cardboard houses …^*70

      Instead of solidity of structure, what the inhabitants were looking for, and seemed to love for its own sake, was regularity of form. The upper middle classes even built isolated terraced rows set in the middle of parkland, when on the same piece of land each householder could have had a separate house surrounded by a generous parcel of land.⁷¹ The eighteenth century had bequeathed the ‘building line’, the most basic regulation, which ensured that the facades of the houses were kept to a straight line, with nothing protruding – not door frames, not lintels, not even widow frames. By the middle of the nineteenth century, although the concept of the terrace had been internalized, ornamental ironwork and other architectural details were breaking up the starker Georgian rows, and other regulations, mostly based on hygienic concerns, took over: in the 1850s local municipal acts laid down that all new streets had to be 36 feet wide, and at the rear each house had to have 150 square feet of open space.

      Other elements of control were imposed by the landlord, or by the residents themselves, who equated regularity and conformity with respectability: gates were to open only in one direction; fences had to be a certain height.⁷²

      Sara Duncan, an American visitor towards the end of the century, got to the heart of the matter. Her cousin’s house, in Half-Moon Street, a fashionable address off Piccadilly, was

      very tall, and very plain, and very narrow, and quite expressionless, except that it wore a sort of dirty brown frown. Like its neighbours, it had a well in front of it, and steps leading down in to the well, and an iron fence round the steps, and a brass bell-handle lettered ‘Tradesmen’. Like its neighbours, too, it wore boxes of spotty black greenery on the window-sills – in fact, it was very like its neighbours … Half-Moon Street, to me, looked like a family of houses – a family differing in heights and complexions and the colour of its hair, but sharing all