Джудит Фландерс – The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed (страница 2)

Charles Dickens, the great chronicler of domestic life in all its shades, was well aware of the perils of promiscuous mixing of home and work. In Dombey and Son (1848) Mr Dombey, the head of a great shipping company, is unable to leave his business behind him when he returns home. His only thoughts are of ‘Dombey and Son’ and, by allowing his work life to contaminate his family life, he destroys the latter – and, by extension, the former. In Great Expectations (1860–61) the law clerk Wemmick bases his life entirely on the separation of work and home: ‘the office is one thing, and private life is another. When I go into the office, I leave the Castle [his house in the suburbs] behind me, and when I come into the Castle, I leave the office behind me … I don’t wish it professionally spoken about.’⁷ That the fictional Mark Rutherford, nearing the end of the century, thought no differently confirmed that this attitude was not simply a jeu d’esprit of Dickens. William Hale White (1831–1913) wrote a series of supposedly autobiographical books under the name Mark Rutherford. White was a dissenter who had trained for the ministry before he lost his faith; he then became a civil servant at the Admiralty. His alter ego, Rutherford, was also a minister who lost his faith. About his private life Rutherford wrote that at the office ‘Nobody knew anything about me, whether I was married or single, where I lived, or what I thought upon a single subject of any importance. I cut off my office life in this way from my home life so completely that I was two selves, and my true self was not stained by contact with my other self. It was a comfort to me to think the moment the clock struck seven that my second self died.’⁸

That ‘true self’ was the real man, on view only at home. Ruskin’s father wrote, ‘Oh! how dull and dreary is the best society I fall into compared with the circle of my own Fire Side with my Love sitting opposite irradiating all around her, and my most extraordinary boy.’⁹ With this the good Victorian was supposed to – and often did – rest content For, as the clerk Charles Pooter put it so eloquently in The Diary of a Nobody (1892), George and Weedon Grossmith’s comic masterpiece of genteel English anxiety. ‘After my work in the City, I like to be at home. What’s the good of a home, if you are never in it?’¹⁰ Mr Pooter’s ideal of the good life, recounted in diary form, centred on his dream house in the suburbs.

In continental Europe the opposite was happening. The Goncourt brothers wrote in their diary in 1860, ‘One can see women, children, husbands and wives, whole families in the café. The home life is dying. Life is threatening to become public.’¹¹ Europeans socialized in public: in restaurants (a French invention), in cafes (perfected by the Viennese), in the streets (Italians still perform the passeggiata in the evenings). But the English became ever more inward-turning. The small wrought-iron balconies that had decorated so many Georgian houses vanished, seemingly overnight. Thick curtains replaced the airy eighteenth-century windows, as much to block out passers-by who might look in as to prevent the damage wrought by sun and pollution.

For the house was not a static object in which changing values were expressed. In the eighteenth century and before, rooms had been multi-purpose, and furniture had been moved and adapted to serve the different functions each room acquired in turn. (The French for ‘building’ and ‘furniture’ are a legacy of this: immeuble is a building or, literally, ‘immovable’, and meuble, furniture, is literally, ‘movable’.) Now, in the nineteenth century, segregation of each function of the house became as important as separation of home and work: both home and work contained an aspect of both a public and a private sphere. The house was the physical demarcation between home and work, and in turn each room was the physical demarcation of many further segregations: of hierarchy (rooms used for visitors being of higher status than family-only rooms); of function (display rating more highly than utility); and of further divisions of public and private (so that rooms which were used for both public and private functions, such as the dining room, changed in importance with their use). ‘Subdivision, classification, and elaboration, are certainly distinguishing characteristics of the present era of civilisation,’ thought George Augustus Sala in 1859.^*12

In the eighteenth century and before, servants and apprentices had often slept in the same rooms as family members, who themselves were not separated in sleeping apartments by gender or age. Gradually the Victorian house divided rooms that were designed for receiving outsiders – the dining room, the drawing room, the morning room – from rooms that were for family members only – bedrooms, the study – and, further, from rooms that were for servants only – the kitchen, the scullery, servants’ bedrooms. Parents no longer expected to sleep with their babies, and children no longer slept together – boys and girls needed separate rooms, at the very least, and it was preferable that younger children be separated from older ones. The additional rooms required were of necessity smaller, and higher up, but the extra privacy made them desirable. Even those forced to live in houses small enough to require multi-purpose rooms felt that ‘Nothing conduces so much to the degradation of a man and a woman in the opinion of each other’ than having to perform their separate functions together in the same room. This was written by Francis Place, a radical tailor. When he managed to reach a financial level where he and his wife could afford to live with enough space so that they could work separately, ‘It was advantageous … in its moral effects. Attendance on the child was not as it had been always, in my presence. I was shut out from seeing the fire lighted, the room washed and cleaned, and the cloathes [sic] washed and ironed, as well as the cooking.’¹³

Plans for terraced houses for the lower middle classes, c. 1870s. Note there is no bathroom, and the lavatory is still reached from the outside. The kitchen is spacious, however, with a separate larder (opposite the lobby), and a scullery with a copper. These houses rented for about £30 a year.

In theory, home was the private space of families. In practice – unacknowledged – houses were another aspect of public life. ‘Home’ was created by family life, but the house itself was inextricably linked with worldly success: the size of the house, how it was furnished, where it was located, all were indicative of the family that lived privately within. His family’s mode of private living was yet a further reflection of a man’s public success in the world. Income was no longer derived primarily from land: the professional and merchant classes, as a group, were now substantially wealthier than they had ever been, and they imitated the style of their social superiors in order to live up to their new status: household possessions, types of furnishing, elegance of entertaining and dress, all these ‘home’ aspects were a reflection of success at work. Therefore the public rooms, as an expression of achievement and worldly success, often took up far more of the space in the house than we today consider convenient. The money available to spend on household goods was lavished first on those rooms that were on public display. The economist Thorstein Veblen noted the phenomenon in the US, but it holds good for Britain too: ‘Through this discrimination in favour of visible consumption it has come about that the domestic life of most classes is relatively shabby, as compared with the éclat of that overt portion of their life that is carried on before the eyes of observers.’¹⁴

Semi-detached houses Ealing, built for the prosperous middle classes, with five bedrooms, a dressing room and a bathroom. As well as a larder, there is a storeroom opening off the kitchen. These houses rented for about £50 a year.

Dickens devoted a great deal of attention to the different types of home that were available to his characters. His biographer and friend John Forster remembered, ‘If it is the property of a domestic nature to be personally interested in every detail, the smallest as the greatest of the four walls within which one lives, then no man had it so essentially as Dickens, no man was so inclined naturally to derive his happiness from home concerns.’¹⁵ The novelist gave no less attention to his characters’ home concerns. There was, first, the ideal, which he elaborated in his ‘Sketches of Young Couples’:

Before marriage and afterwards, let [couples] learn to centre all their hopes of real and lasting happiness in their own fireside; let them cherish the faith that in home … lies the only true source of domestic felicity; let them believe that round the household gods, contentment and tranquillity cluster in their gentlest and most graceful forms; and that many weary hunters of happiness through the noisy world, have learnt this truth too late, and found a cheerful spirit and a quiet mind only at home at last.¹⁶