A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain

by Michael Paterson

  By 1844 a water closet was available consisting of a boxed-in seat that contained a cistern. Fourteen years later a clergyman, the Reverend Mr Moule, created the ‘earth closet’. This used dry, sifted earth instead of water, but was similarly activated by pulling a handle. Moule’s reasoning was that the earth not only acted as a deodorizer but broke down the sewage. His invention worked, and enjoyed a popularity that has revived in recent years among the ecologically-minded. Water, however, remained the favoured option. The Optimus, a water closet produced by the firm of Dent and Hellyer, immediately went into extensive use and, whatever the Prussian king may have thought of them, was installed for the British monarch at Buckingham Palace. In 1875 the ‘wash-out’ closet was perfected and became standard, and in the eighties the cistern came into general use. For the first time the type of sanitary facilities we use ourselves and regard as essential had come into being. Toilet bowls appeared in a vast range of styles, shapes and colours that suddenly made this very basic object a pleasure to look at.

  Lavatory paper was introduced in the eighties. Prior to that, and indeed for a long time afterwards for those who saw it as a luxury, people made their own. Any paper that came into the home – newspapers, calendars, advertising handbills – was liable to be used in this way when it was no longer needed. One of the chores performed in even upper-middle-class households was the cutting or tearing of paper into squares, which were then threaded with string and hung on the back of the lavatory door.

  Pocket Paradise

  The Laurels, Brickfield Terrace, Holloway, the small north London villa that is the home of the Pooter family in George and Weedon Grossmith’s novel The Diary of a Nobody, is surely one of the most famous of late Victorian addresses. It was entirely typical of the houses in which lower-middle-class families lived. Though the book was published in 1892, the building is clearly not up-to-date, and belongs rather to the world of half a century earlier. Pooter describes his domain:

  A nice six-roomed residence, not counting basement, with a front breakfast-parlour. We have a little front garden; and there is a flight of ten steps up to the front door which, by-the-by, we keep locked with the chain up. Our intimate friends come to the little side entrance, which saves the servant the trouble of going up to the front door, thereby taking her away from her work. We have a nice little back garden which runs down to the railway. We were rather afraid of the noise of the trains at first, but the landlord said we should not notice them after a bit, and took £2 off the rent. He was certainly right; and beyond the cracking of the garden wall at the bottom, we have suffered no inconvenience.10

  Eclectic

  Higher up the scale of affluence and gentility, though certainly not among the grandest dwellings, is Linley Sambourne House, 18 Stafford Terrace, Kensington. It was the home of a well-known Punch cartoonist from 1874 until his death in 1910. It has been preserved in what is more or less its original condition and is open to the public. Though it seems spacious, compared with the homes in which many city-dwelling families live today, the Sambournes could host only small dinner-parties, for their dining-room was not large enough to accommodate many guests. They shared their house with two children and four servants.

  The house is typical of the brick-and-white-stucco terraces that were built all over the area in the mid-Victorian decades (in this case 1868–74). It is five storeys high and has a small garden at the back. The kitchen, wine cellar and coal-bunkers were on the bottom floor, which is a semi-basement, and were connected with the upstairs rooms by bells and speaking-tubes that still exist. Rather than a porticoed entrance there are two pilasters framing the front door. The house is therefore of the Classical-influenced type that continued to be built throughout the century.

  Inside, the hall was originally floored with coloured tiles, and the stairs are at the rear. The walls are hung with groups of pictures whose frames almost touch, but the wallpaper behind them is a Morris design. The effect when seen today is dark, but this is because the colours have faded with time. On the ground floor, the front of the house is occupied by the dining-room. This has a plate-glass bay window, but with lace curtains, fabric curtains and blinds there is little direct daylight. There is Morris wallpaper and there are multitudes of pictures that form an eclectic mixture of original works and reproductions, paintings and photographs (framed photographs of famous paintings seem not to have been considered bad taste). A hexagonal table has Gothic, Puginesque legs, while one of the mirrors is Regency in style. There is a shelf at ‘frieze level’ – about ten feet above the floor – on which blue and white porcelain is displayed, and there are brass plates hung as wall decorations. There is also a large sideboard with painted panels. One feature that would strike visitors as distinctively Victorian is the use of curtains to cover doorways. These were often hung from a brass rail and, when not needed, were pulled to one side and secured. Before the advent of central heating they were extremely necessary for protection from draughts.

  The furnishings are therefore – to use a term that is frequently applied to both architecture and interiors of the period – eclectic. The phases of developing taste in the Victorian era naturally often overlapped. This house has a combination of old and new, fashionable and passé that is not uncommon, or unexpected. The ground floor morning-room has Regency furniture that was inherited. It also has stained glass leaded windows. The staircase and upstairs drawing-room have these too. The latter fills both the width and the length of the first floor. It has embossed wallpaper in red and gold, and a gold ceiling. There are two fireplaces and a number of chests and tables whose tops seem almost invisible beneath the array of ornaments – plates, bowls, vases, statuettes, photograph frames. Again there is a high shelf running along the wall on which plates are displayed.

  The householders of the middle and later Victorian era did not, as we often do, feel that large areas of blank wall are ‘restful’. It would simply not have occurred to them to leave space empty. Where they did not hang pictures, they hung shelves filled with ornaments or photographs, creating a clutter that to them represented comfort and taste. On an inventory made at 18 Stafford Terrace are the following: ‘Right of fireplace 1 drawing in oak frame, 3 engravings in ditto, 7 photographs in ditto, 1 photograph in gilt ditto. Left of fireplace 13 photographs in oak frames, 2 engravings in ditto,’11 and this was only one wall in one room!

  Upstairs are the family bedrooms, and above them the day nursery, night nursery and the maid’s room. On one landing there is a bathroom with a coffin-shaped marble bath and there is a separate lavatory with tiled walls, a marble floor and a basin. Most unmistakably Victorian, perhaps, is the ‘water garden’ on the first-floor landing. This comprises a glass tank into which piped water flows, trickling over a number of stones so that their colours will be brought out. This may not sound very exciting, but it was typical of the interest which people of the era felt in minerals, plants, fish and birds – all of which could be incorporated into the home through such small displays. It was fashionable to have aviaries or fish tanks, or to keep a collection of ferns in a miniature greenhouse. In Our Mutual Friend Dickens refers to one of these displays. Ascending a staircase ‘tastefully ornamented’ with flowers, his characters:

  came to a charming aviary, in which a number of tropical birds, more gorgeous in colour than the flowers, were flying about; and among these birds were gold and silver fish, and mosses, and water-lilies, and a fountain, and all manner of wonders.12

  Further Revival

  In the middle decades, design found another direction in the Queen Anne style (the phrase was first used in 1862 in reference to furniture, but it was from the seventies that it picked up momentum as an architectural movement). This was not, in any sense, a simple nostalgic reference to the reign of Queen Anne (1702–14), for it involved few features that belonged to that era. Rather it was an attempt to rediscover the beauties of traditional English vernacular architecture and amalgamate them into modern buildings. In doing so, a qu
intessentially English style was created, and one that is still followed, to some extent, today. Many features found in regional English building traditions – tall brick chimney-stacks, weather-boarding, half-timbering, tile-hung walls, oriel windows, pargetting and emphasis on (often white-painted) gables – were incorporated and thus given a national, even international usage. Though the term ‘Queen Anne’ is a misnomer, for the work of architects in this style drew much more heavily on Tudor and earlier Stuart styles, one thing that their Victorian buildings had in common with the early eighteenth century was the use of red brick. In southern and eastern England, houses had largely been created from pale-grey, tan or yellow brick, and this was frequently hidden by stucco. The use of orange-coloured brick gave an entirely new look to townscapes in these regions, especially given that the scale of apartment buildings, for instance, became so much grander by the end of the century. The style was adapted for offices, libraries, fire stations, public houses and shops as well as numerous types of dwelling, and became such a pervasive influence that its tiles and gables and chimneys are still used in the design of houses and even housing estates.

  The most notable instance of this style is to be found in Bedford Park, a suburb set between Acton and Chiswick in west London that was built between 1877 and 1881. It was deliberately planned as a rural village for middle-class aesthetes. It had a church, a school, a pub and some five hundred houses of different sizes and types. This was the first ‘garden suburb’ to be created, and its rural aspect, together with the overall harmony of its buildings – which has survived – give it a character that is distinctly English and entirely of its time.

  Within houses like those in Bedford Park, the colours tended to be muted. The Queen Anne style sought to escape from the garish and artificial shades of earlier decades, which in any case would not have complemented the architecture. Simplicity was not, however, a keynote, for two elements created a taste for knick-knacks. One was the fashion for collecting antiques. These commonly included porcelain and pottery, so that surfaces – such as the now-inevitable frieze shelf – might be covered with an array of vases, bowls and dishes. Another was the growing awareness of other cultures. African and Asian objects became conspicuous as ornaments in British drawing-rooms, and this was especially true of Japanese items. The country had been out of bounds to foreigners for centuries when, in 1853, an American mission succeeded in persuading its rulers to establish trading and diplomatic relations with the wider world. In the years that followed, imported artefacts proved a major influence on the aesthetic movement. Japanese furniture, fabrics, ceramics and prints became immensely popular in Western homes. Lacquered furniture (the process of applying this was called ‘japanning’), screens, fire-guards, fans – often stuck behind the corners of mirrors – and lacquered paper umbrellas joined the potted palms, fish tanks and porcelain vases that filled the interiors of middle-class homes. The fad became so all-pervading that it provoked the tribute of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta – The Mikado – in 1885.

  Arts and Crafts

  After Ruskin, the most important artistic influence of the century was one of his numerous admirers, William Morris (1834–96). Morris shared Ruskin’s veneration for craftsmanship, seeing it – in an attitude by now familiar among the thoughtful and creative – as an important expression of individuality in an era that had forgotten the value of work done by hand. He, like Ruskin, developed a socialist outlook that married neatly with his idealized view of the dignity of labour, though it was only because both men inherited sufficient wealth that they could afford to devote their lives to the pursuit of artistic integrity.

  Morris was as much in love with the Middle Ages as Pugin was, and claimed to have read all the novels of Sir Walter Scott by the age of seven. While at Oxford he formed lifelong friendships with several like-minded young men (they were known as the Brotherhood), began writing poetry, tried painting (he worked for Dante Gabriel Rossetti on neo-medieval decorations for the Oxford Union) and decided to become an architect. When he married, he commissioned another architect, Philip Webb, to create a home for him. The Red House, at Bexleyheath, was completed in 1860, and Morris designed all its furnishings and interiors. The house became a showpiece for his vision and a definition of the Arts and Crafts movement that was to form under his influence. As a history of the building states:

  Webb and Morris were young, idealistic and reformist. Their house was more than just a home. It was a statement, in three dimensions, of their beliefs, a challenge to the tyranny of the machine. It was formed and shaped in simplicity from traditional materials – brick and tile, robust walls and massive barn-like roofs.13

  Though it is original in appearance and design, it did not represent a revolution in domestic practices:

  Not all the architectural conventions of the mid nineteenth century were challenged in the design, which like other middle class homes at that time relied firmly on a ready supply of cheap domestic labour. The house was heated by coal fireplaces, and hot water by a ‘copper’ in the scullery; there were no bathrooms; and the servants slept in a dormitory.14

  Morris became not an architect but a general craftsman. He designed decorative tiles, woodwork, tapestries and carpets, wallpaper and stained glass. Though he himself worked on the carving, printing, weaving or production of all these items – for he believed in learning the processes of making things before designing them – he had the assistance of a workforce. He founded a business – Morris and Co. – to produce artefacts commercially. The firm was established at Merton Abbey Mills in Surrey, where its weaving-looms were operated exclusively by women. Perhaps the most famous of Morris’ products was his wallpaper. The plant themes of his patterns became an easily recognized trademark and they sold well. They were, however, highly complicated to make. To produce his Acanthus design in 1876, for instance, the firm of Jeffrey and Co. had to use thirty blocks to print the intricate patterns and the fifteen colours involved. Later in life he added to his fields of activity an interest in manuscript illumination and printing. He established the Kelmscott Press at a manor house of that name in Oxfordshire in which he was by then living. The press created a number of fine bindings and beautiful printings that included a work of surpassing excellence – an edition of Chaucer (1896), printed and bound as if it were a medieval book and illustrated by his friend Edward Burne-Jones. Morris died before it was completed.

  Unlike much that was created by the Victorians and reflected their taste, Morris’ designs, like those of the Arts and Crafts movement that he inspired, have never gone out of fashion. In every subsequent generation there have been admirers who have reprinted the patterns, reproduced the furnishings and written – or read – books about them. However, his notion of combining socialist principles with traditional craftsmanship was hopelessly impractical. The things made by his workshops used such expensive materials, and required so many man-hours to produce, that no one below the level of the wealthy middle class could afford to buy them. The artisan class could not directly enjoy their beauty and artistry, which de facto became the property of an elite, and it was only in the century after his death that a wider public could enjoy them through exhibitions, publications and better reproduction techniques.

  In Arts and Crafts houses the textures were very different from what had preceded them. Wooden surfaces – whether doors, tables or cupboards – were often not waxed or polished, and thus had a plain, workmanlike, natural appearance. The same would be true of metal fittings like door handles, lamps and window-catches. Colour, whether in textiles, wallpaper or painted decoration, was frequently flat and toneless – the very antithesis of the complex and ‘realistic’ floral designs of the fifties.

  It was not easy to convert an existing house to the Arts and Crafts style, and it was only with new buildings that architects and designers could pursue their ideas to fulfilment. In Britain one among many that can be visited is Blackwell, a house set on a hill above Lake Windermere in Cumbria. It was bui
lt between 1898 and 1900 by the architect M. H. Baillie Scott (1865–1945) as a summer residence for Sir Edward Holt, an industrialist and philanthropist who was twice Lord Mayor of Manchester. Scott wished to use local materials, such as Westmoreland slate for the roofs, and he was fortunate; Ruskin’s presence in the area had awakened local interest in artistic craftsmanship, and there were firms nearby that could provide both carving and textiles appropriate to the architect’s vision.

  Outside, the house is simple and not ornate, lacking the multitude of decorative touches – tiles, coloured bricks, terracotta panels – that were still in general vogue at the time. The walls are white roughcast, the windows have no hoods or deep sills, and are of small, leaded-glass panes rather than the plate glass of a previous generation. The chimney-stacks are round, in reference to the traditional style of the region, and the overall effect is vaguely that of a Tudor farmhouse. Inside, the windows have been positioned to make maximum use of sunlight (the drawing-room is oriented to catch the sun in late afternoon). There is a comparative emptiness that is a deliberate reaction against the busy and crowded interiors of the time. Walls in rooms and corridors are covered in a warm, honey-coloured oak panelling that glows in the light. The equally rich wooden floors are uncarpeted, though there would have been rugs in the rooms. There are light-shades of copper. The entrance and the main hall are half-timbered, providing another powerful Tudor echo, as does the use of stained glass, and rooms are focused – as was commonly the case with Arts and Crafts architecture – on large ingle-nook fireplaces. The drawing-room panelling is painted white – the most emphatic contrast to the darkness of earlier Victorian interiors – and the fireplace has a shelf that runs right around the walls; the shelf at ‘frieze height’ for the display of artefacts was as important as ever.