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Автор Judith Flanders

THE VICTORIAN HOUSE

Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed

JUDITH FLANDERS

DEDICATION

For my mother, Kappy Flanders

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

INTRODUCTION:

House and Home

1 The Bedroom

2 The Nursery

3 The Kitchen

4 The Scullery

5 The Drawing Room

6 The Parlour

7 The Dining Room

8 The Morning Room

9 The Bathroom and Lavatory

10 The Sickroom

11 The Street

APPENDICES

1 Mourning Clothes for Women

2 A Quick Guide to Books and Authors

3 Currency

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

LIST OF INTEGRATED IMAGES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

NOTES

PRAISE

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

INTRODUCTION

HOUSE AND HOME

IN 1909 H. G. WELLS WROTE, in a passage from his novel Tono-Bungay, of Edward Ponderevo, a purveyor of patent medicines and

terror of eminent historians. ‘Don’t want your drum and trumpet history – no fear … Don’t want to know who was who’s mistress, and why so-and-so devastated such a province; that’s bound to be all lies and upsy-down anyhow. Not my affair … What I want to know is, in the middle ages Did they Do Anything for Housemaid’s Knee? What did they put in their hot baths after jousting, and was the Black Prince – you know the Black Prince – was he enamelled or painted, or what? I think myself, black-leaded – very likely – like pipeclay – but

did

they use blacking so early?’

It is a comic view of history. Or is it? History is usually read either from the top down – kings and queens, the leaders and their followers – or from the bottom up – the common people and their lives. Political history and social history, however, both encompass the one thing we all share – that at the end of the day, after ruling empires or finishing the late shift in a factory, we all go back to our homes. Different as those homes are, how we live at home, where we live, what we do all day when we’re not doing whatever it is that history is recording – these are some of the most telling things about any age, any people.

Mme Merle in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881) notes how ‘one’s house, one’s furniture, one’s garments, the books one reads, the company one keeps – all these things are expressive’. ²

This is true of any age, but the Victorians brought the idea of home to the fore in a way that was new. As the Victorians saw ‘home’ as omnipresent, it has seemed to me useful to rely on the same sources that surrounded them and formed their notions of what a home should be – magazines, advertisements, manuals and fiction. In describing people’s daily lives, I look first at what theory prescribed and described in these print sources, and then try to discover the reality in reportage, diaries, letters and journals. Novels are used frequently, as fiction straddles the two camps in that it both set standards for ‘proper’, or ‘normal’, behaviour in theory and also described this behaviour in actuality. In using fiction as a source for how people actually behaved I have primarily relied on novels for information that the authors regarded as background material rather than key plot devices, and have always balanced them with other, more conventional, documentary sources for corroboration. ^*