A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain

by Michael Paterson

  One reason for the increase in light was the advent at this time of plate glass. Since it was no longer necessary to have one’s view obstructed by wooden glazing-bars, the windows in new houses were made bigger. This was a highly noticeable symbol of technological advance and thus a feature to be shown off rather than obscured with curtains. The result was that more daylight entered the interiors of houses than had previously been possible or would shortly be considered necessary.

  The house in Doughty Street, London, in which Charles Dickens lived between 1837 and 1839 is preserved as a museum, and a number of the rooms are furnished as they were at that time. The building – a modest five-storey terraced dwelling – was typical of thousands of such homes. On its ground floor was the dining-room (at the front) and morning-room (rear). On the floor above, the drawing-room ran the whole width of the house, with Dickens’ study behind it. The second floor contained two bedrooms, one larger than the other, and a dressing-room. The attic floor would have contained servants’ bedrooms and a nursery for the Dickens children. In the basement was the kitchen (at the front, with its own entrance from the area). Behind it, the still-room was used for the storage of food but was probably also the room in which the servants relaxed. At the rear of this floor were the scullery and a wash house, as well as a small wine cellar. There was no bathroom. In the house lived Dickens, his wife, his sister-in-law and his children, together with four staff – a normal number for a family that size – a manservant, a cook, a maid and the children’s nurse.

  The furniture is heavy and substantial, with machine-made ornamentation in the form of curlicues and turned legs. The mantels and fireplaces are painted white and are Greek in inspiration. Some details are extremely plain, such as the banister or the black-and-white-tiled hall floor. The drawing-room is the centrepiece of the house, and the colours in which it is decorated tell us something about the taste of the time, which the guidebook concedes may strike visitors as gaudy. The wallpaper is mauve and white. The curtains, with their heavy pelmets, are raspberry-red. The chairs and sofa are upholstered in dark green, and the fitted carpet is in a floral pattern of greens, with touches of blue, yellow, pink and red. The solid wooden furniture is dark mahogany, and there are elaborate rococo-style mirrors. Shades of green and red are found throughout the house. Even the less formal rooms look uncomfortable.

  Furniture was still influenced, as it had been in the Regency, by Greek designs, but these years witnessed the so-called ‘battle of the styles’, for though Classical interior design was to remain influential, Gothic had made inroads. This trend had begun in 1818 when the novelist Sir Walter Scott commissioned furniture for Abbotsford, his neo-medieval house in the Scottish borders. Scott died in 1832, five years before Victoria came to the throne, but his historical novels exerted an immense influence on the imagination – and therefore the taste – of a whole generation, not only in Britain but throughout the world. By the 1830s the homes of even the most modest members of the affluent classes might contain baronial touches in the form of chairs, tables, sideboards and fireplaces of at least approximately medieval or Tudor design. Chair backs, for instance, often boasted medieval tracery, and table supports might have spandrels or other medieval touches. Though these items would recall a world of draughty and uncomfortable manor houses, they were expected also to allow for modern comfort. The increasing demand for upholstery and horsehair stuffing in chairs and sofas was evidence of a developing desire for furniture that was restful as well as merely elegant.

  Wealth of Ornament

  These fashions aside, most furniture was simple and functional. It began, however, to lose a good deal of its elegance. The slim-legged and fragile-looking chairs of the Regency were being superseded by heavier styles. The turned leg – a feature of tables, chairs and pianos that would come to be seen as archetypally Victorian – began to appear. Ornamentation became less refined. Rosewood had been favoured for furniture-making, but this began to give way to mahogany, and the progression toward interiors dominated by dark wood began. It would have been normal practice for chairs and sofas to have fitted cloth slip-covers – often in bright patterns – that were only ever removed when important entertaining made it necessary. As a result a great many items of this sort survived the Victorian era intact. Another novelty was furniture made from papier mâché. This unlikely material – pressed paper – was strong enough for chairs on which people could sit and tables at which they could dine, but it could not by its very nature become more solid as was increasingly the case with its wooden counterparts. It was normally black in colour, though it would be decorated with gay designs of painted flowers, and was much used for the making of occasional tables and other small pieces.

  The invention of coil springs led to a fashion for deep, upholstered chairs and sofas that became characteristic of the forties, fifties and sixties, stuffed with horsehair and with their surfaces punctuated by buttons. This style is now so out of favour that it is difficult to imagine any young bride aspiring to have her home filled with such pieces, but it was admired for its modernity and for the technical achievement it represented.

  If they lived in London, the middle classes found the furniture they coveted in Tottenham Court Road. There the firms of Maple and Heal began trading in 1841 and 1843 respectively, and were then joined by similar businesses. Though disdained by the snobbish as epitomizing the taste of the would-be sophisticated, both firms enjoyed considerable success (Maple’s were to furnish apartments for the Empress of Russia) and are still flourishing today.

  The lengths to which love of display could go are illustrated by the reference, in an official report, to the making of shoddy articles. The compiler of this, recalling an interview he conducted, describes how in furniture manufacturing:

  there are things done which make the article cheap, using Alga marina instead of hair, and using this cotton wool instead of hair, and using leather which is called Russian leather when it is not, and all those things that make up so that the eye is deceived and you cannot tell what the goods are. People buy them, and after a time find it out.

  Let me give you an example of this; a man told me he was a chair-maker; a lady came to him and bought some chairs. His price was 10s. 6d. each chair; so after a time the woman comes back to him and said, ‘Did I not buy half-a-dozen chairs from you for 10s. 6d. each?’ ‘Yes, you did.’ ‘But do you know that they are all in pieces?’ ‘What, all in pieces; how is that?’ ‘Well, a short time after I had them home, and we began to sit upon them, and they all fell abroad.’ ‘But,’ he said, ‘do you mean to tell me that you sat upon them?’ ‘Of course I sat upon them; what else?’ He said, ‘These ten-and-sixpenny chairs were made to be looked at, not to sit upon. If you had told me that you wanted chairs to sit upon I would have charged you 5s. a chair more for them.’9

  Explosion of Colour

  Although colours were comparatively muted in the early years of the reign, by the fifties they had become bolder and louder. One reason for this trend was the development of artificial dyes. In 1856 a chemistry student called William Perkin discovered a process for creating mauveine, the first such dye. The result was an explosion of noisy and often incompatible tones that characterized people’s clothing as well as their homes. At about the same time, the development of power-loom weaving made carpets more cheaply available, and the machine-printing of wallpapers had the same effect on another aspect of interior decoration. Improvements in the production of wallpaper meant that patterns became more elaborate, involving highly complex shapes, colours and patterns. Many designs were floral, and sought to look as three-dimensional as possible. The effect was beautiful to contemporary eyes, but extremely fussy.

  Plaids were much in vogue, both in tribute to the influence of Scott’s sentimental view of the Highlands and, from the 1850s, in imitation of the Queen’s Scottish tastes. These interior colours could well be reflected outside the house, where the iron railings in front of the area would have been painted in what
ever colours the occupier desired. There might, for instance, be an attempt to render in realistic shades the iron flowers, leaves and bunches of grapes that decorated them. The story that these railings were all painted black in mourning for Prince Albert is untrue. A gradual desire for uniformity was responsible.

  The Gothic revival also led to the greater prominence of colour in interior design. Medieval design had involved a wealth of complex patterns and bold colours, as shown in surviving stained glass or in the pages of illuminated manuscripts. The revival of this style therefore sought a similar richness in colour, making use of bright reds, blue, greens and golds, as well as a return to complexity in tracery and other ornament, a reaction against the severe lines and simplicity of the Regency. In 1856 what was to become perhaps the most influential document on the subject of design to be published in the nineteenth century appeared: Owen Jones’ The Grammar of Ornament. This was an exhaustive collection of decorative details taken from the great, and lesser known, civilizations of the past – Classical and Egyptian as well as medieval and Renaissance. Its lavish illustrations were rendered in colour, thanks to recent advances in printing technology. Artists and architects had never previously had the opportunity to evaluate so vast an assemblage of styles, or to gain such a clear idea of the extent to which they had made use of bold colour. Jones’ work became a bible for architects, painters, interior decorators and the makers of furniture, ceramics and tapestry.

  Knick-knacks

  Ornament was often fussy because what Victorians valued were skill, dexterity and cleverness. A thin glass dome that contained highly realistic flowers or fruit would be seen not only as a thing of beauty but as a triumph of craftsmanship, and the same notion would apply to displays, similarly under glass, of stuffed kittens, squirrels or other animals dressed in miniature costumes and posed as if attending a wedding, sitting in a schoolroom or involved in a battle. Though these do not appeal to modern sensitivities, the people for whom they were made thought them amusing as well as clever.

  Interior Landscape

  By the start of Victoria’s reign gas lighting was beginning to become widespread. It had first been introduced as early as 1805, but it was not until 1840 that it became more readily available to London houses with the formation of the Gas Light and Coke Company, though it was to be more than a decade before other cities were able to follow. Gas was piped into the house from the street and channelled into a – usually elaborate – ornamental lightfitting that would be either in the middle of the ceiling or in imitation candle sconces above the fireplace, perhaps flanking a painting or mirror. It gave a pleasant and constant light, creating a sense of greater cosiness than had been possible even with candlelight, and was accompanied by a gentle hissing sound.

  A newly introduced amenity that has lasted to our own day was the conservatory. The notion of attaching a greenhouse to an urban or suburban dwelling was something quite new. These conservatories were small-scale imitations of the plant-houses and orangeries that could be found on country estates. They were often very cramped, as befitted the modest homes to which they were added, but they gave a pseudo-aristocratic flourish to many thousands of humble suburban dwellings, and fitted well with the love of gardening that has always been characteristic of the British. In larger houses, conservatories often grew to monstrous size as they became a setting for summer entertaining. The Victorians, at all stages of the reign, had a passion for indoor plants – the potted aspidistra in lower-middle-class parlours became something of a cliché – and as well as placing these in drawing rooms they filled conservatories with showy, exotic and often expensive specimens: potted palms, orange trees and varieties of fern (the collecting of which was in particular vogue in the decades after the mid-century). The keeping of these would involve piped heating that made the conservatory into an actual ‘winter garden’. The plants might represent the Empire in metaphor, gathered for their associations with particular overseas territories, but would more often simply reflect individual preference. In addition to this flora there might be fauna, represented by a hanging cage containing a tame parrot or some songbirds, and there could be sculpture – a tinkling fountain with perhaps a Classical statue or a pair of urns. If space allowed, there might even be diversion in the shape of a two-seater swing. A well-stocked conservatory, with its trees and shrubs, would provide opportunities for flirtation and offer courting couples momentary privacy. The overall effect was sometimes charming, often overwhelming and – to modern taste – as cluttered and overdone as we expect a Victorian interior to be. To Victorians the conservatory was a place of escape, recreation and refuge as well as a badge of wealth and position in an age obsessed with status and its symbols. James Tissot, whose paintings of fashionable life in the seventies and eighties have given us a vivid if somewhat idealized picture of life at that time, set several of his pictures in an opulent conservatory. It was the one at his own home in St John’s Wood.

  Late Victorian

  A late Victorian terraced or semi-detached house is such a commonplace in any urban landscape that it is scarcely noticed. It was in essence the same shape as its Georgian-type predecessor – though the staircases might now be at the side rather than in the rear – but was a good deal more elaborate. In many cases there would be a front garden, even if this were only three or four feet deep. By now unashamedly of brick and not hiding behind pseudo-stone or stucco, it might be decorated with courses of contrasting coloured brick, and would have mass-produced cornices and other decorative touches to add a hint of architectural grandeur. Tiles could be attached to front walls, and were commonly used to floor a front path, a doorstep or the walls of a recessed front porch. It had lost the semi-basement, for most such houses had now sprouted a narrow extension at the back in which the kitchen and scullery and the lavatory (if there was one inside) were situated, and any basement was used simply for storing coal. Though lower-middle-class householders still had servants, these were increasingly unlikely to ‘live in’ and required no quarters. Roofs were now higher and pointed, sloping either to front and back or – especially in the case of semi-detached dwellings – to the sides, thus creating attics that were large enough to use for storage.

  The greatest interior difference between an early and a late Victorian house would be the existence of a bathroom and of plumbing. Prior to this development, washing would have been done with a jug and basin kept beside the bed. A bath would have been portable, kept hanging in the scullery or wash house and brought indoors to be filled with hot water in front of the bedroom fire. As attempts were made to improve domestic comfort, a gas-heated bath was invented in 1871. This involved bathing with gas flames burning underneath the tub and, as the water began to boil and the bath itself became unbearably hot, must have been like sitting in a giant saucepan. As boiler-heated piped water arrived in the late seventies, however, even a modest-sized bathroom could develop into a temple of beauty and comfort. Baths with a shower fitting became more common. The use of – usually blue – decorated china gave unexpected elegance to everyday activities, and transformed ablution from a necessity into a pleasure. The arrival of running water also enabled those fortunate enough to have these facilities to keep themselves a good deal cleaner than had previously been possible, changing – gradually though permanently – people’s notions of personal cleanliness.

  Without the necessary pipes to bring water in and carry waste out, people had not had a separate room in which to relieve themselves. The back yard was a suitable place for the privy, and in dining-rooms there was often a chamber-pot in a cupboard for the gentlemen to use after dinner, once the ladies had retired. Otherwise, these facilities were in the bedroom. The chamber-pot has a long and honourable history, and is doubtless still in use in some quarters. Before the advent of modern plumbing, people made use throughout the day and night of pots or commodes, the clearing of which (‘emptying slops’) was an entirely routine – if thoroughly unpleasant – part of a housemaid’s or manservant’
s duty. The most extraordinary of these arrangements, perhaps, was the ‘night table’. This was a desk with a sloping top and three drawers underneath. The top drawer was for papers, the one below it for linen. The bottom drawer, when pulled out, had struts to support the weight of a person sitting on it, for it contained a china receptacle and was used as a lavatory. After use, the drawer would be shut until a servant could deal with the contents. While this may sound to us distasteful in the extreme, there was nothing unusual about it at the time. Indeed, there were those who resisted the notion of change. When the elderly King of Prussia was told that it was possible, for the first time, to equip his palace with flush lavatories, he harrumphed irritably: ‘We’re having none of that new-fangled nonsense around here!’

  Facilities

  The water closet revolutionized all that. This useful device had been in existence, in various forms, for centuries (Queen Anne had one at Windsor) but without an efficient sewage system they could not be efficiently installed or used en masse. Public concern in this area was galvanized by the outbreaks of cholera that occurred from the thirties onward, and by the death in 1861 of Prince Albert, allegedly as a result of typhoid contracted from the drains at Windsor Castle. In 1858, the same year that on a summer’s day the Thames virtually solidified with raw sewage and assorted industrial waste, the Metropolitan Board of Works was established, and within twelve months work had begun on creating an efficient disposal system. The massive diggings, which produced two parallel pipes running eastwards, on either side of the river, to treatment plants, were completed by 1865. Other towns and cities followed this example, and thus created a network for sewage removal and treatment upon which we still rely.