by Lucy Worsley
But thirdly, and most importantly, Victorian living rooms contained more stuff than ever before. Some of this clutter was familiar from living rooms of the past, reborn into modern form. Edith Wharton, the American novelist, decoded the language of the nineteenth-century drawing room in a scene set in Victorian Mayfair. The contemporary equivalent of a long gallery full of portraits expressing a family’s noble relatives, the room
was crowded with velvet-covered tables and quaint corner-shelves, all laden with photographs in heavy silver or morocco frames, surmounted by coronets, from the baronial to the ducal – one, even, royal (in a place of honour by itself, on the mantel).
Because it was so much easier to collect photographs of your friends than it was to commission painted portraits, it was no wonder that such things multiplied.
Much of the stuff in a Victorian drawing room was showier than ever before; some of it could even be described as vulgar. An 1870s advert for a suite of drawing-room furniture makes grandiose claims: it contained ‘six well-carved chairs upholstered in rich silk, centre table on massive carved pillar and claws, the top beautifully inlaid with marquetry, large size chimney glass in handsome oil-gilt frame … pair of handsome ruby lustres’. Such ‘rich’, ‘handsome’ and ‘massive’ objects were Victorian must-haves. The sea-god sofas at Kedleston were rather overwhelming, but they were placed in an enormous room where few other pieces competed with them for attention. In the Victorian living room, variety was queen.
Its owners also wished to display the fruits of their industry and their empire. The Great Exhibition of 1851 inspired people to bring the whole world into their living rooms. Lucy Orrinsmith, author of The Drawing Room, Its Decoration and Furniture (1878), suggested that one’s ambition ought to extend beyond a coal scuttle decorated with a picture of Warwick Castle and a screen showing ‘Melrose Abbey by Moonlight’. Instead, homeowners should look out for quirky, exotic flourishes for their best room: ‘a Persian tile, an Algerian flower-pot, an old Flemish cup, a piece of Nankin blue, an Icelandic spoon, a Japanese cabinet, a Chinese fan … each in its own way beautiful and interesting’.
This craze to possess had in fact started long before the nineteenth century. The late-seventeenth-century invention of shops and shopping by an urban middle class who lived by trade was mirrored by the growth of a new type of domestic space. What might be termed the ‘middle-class’ living room was full of superfluous objects, chosen for ornament rather than use yet cheap and not truly beautiful: a barricade of possessions intended to stabilise a precarious position in the world.
For those without the resources of the Curzons of Kedleston, wallpaper was an amazing material for a quick and cheap living-room makeover. When it first appeared in the seventeenth century, wallpaper was purchased at stationers’ shops. As it was so inexpensive to put up, it’s not surprising to find that between 1690 and 1820 there were more than five hundred stationers and paper-hanging businesses in London. In 1712, wallpaper became popular enough to attract a special tax. In 1836, the tax was repealed, and an even more marvellous world of choice was opened up: a visitor to the Sanderson Company’s wallpaper showroom in 1901 found ‘papers of a magnificence, a beauty, such as we had never imagined even in our wildest dreams of marble halls’.
Yet wallpaper was deceptive: it literally covered up problems. The business of making and selling it also attracted deceivers. A lively trade developed in counterfeits of the date stamps applied by wallpaper-tax inspectors to the backs of rolls. By 1806, the punishment for being caught creating these phoney stamps was increased to the death penalty. Wallpaper could even be hazardous to health: some inks contained arsenic, and when people went on holiday to the seaside, they felt better simply because they were no longer breathing in poisonous fumes from their drawing-room walls each day.
Despite its cheerfulness, wallpaper was sometimes too cheap, and looked tawdry. In nineteenth-century novels, a wallpapered room became a metaphor for a shallow, duplicitous character who overvalues appearances. In Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), the untrustworthy Sergeant Troy is displeased by the casements and dark corners of an ‘honest’ old farmhouse: ‘my notion is that sash-windows should be put in throughout … the walls papered’.
The literary scholar Julia Prewitt Brown argues that the first ever of these ‘bourgeois interiors’ (the crowded and slightly shoddy living rooms of the socially insecure) to be created in literature was situated on a desert island. In Daniel Defoe’s novel of 1719, the adventurer Robinson Crusoe was taught by his father to aspire to belong to the ‘middle state’ of society, and he was taught that honest industry would lead to a life of well-earned ease. After his shipwreck Crusoe is trapped on his desert island. Being a good member of the ‘middling sort’, he devotes himself to the archetypally bourgeois pastime of inventorying and protecting the stores and tools salvaged from the sea. He fortifies a cave to protect his possessions from ravenous beasts, and is rarely to be seen outside it without his umbrella and his gun.
Robinson Crusoe was followed by a horde of successors: everyone can recognise the overcluttered, stuffy, uptight living room of a truly anxious status-conscious person with neither the ease of aristocratic riches nor the genuine restrictions of poverty. This phenomenon reached its apogee in an imaginary Victorian living room forever damned by Henry James and smothered in
… trumpery ornament and scrapbook art, with strange excrescences and bunchy draperies, with gimcracks that might have been keepsakes for maidservants … they had gone wildly astray over carpets and curtain; they had an infallible instinct for disaster.
From the late nineteenth century, two new design movements began to blow the cobwebs out of the overfurnished living room. The Arts and Crafts Movement, and then the twentieth-century Modernist Movement based on the minimalist aethestic of the factory and the machine, were both in their own ways reactions to the tide of clutter.
It was Oscar Wilde (1844–1900), travelling the world to give his renowned lecture on ‘The House Beautiful’ to packed halls, who began to get the Victorians to throw away their junk. Some of them went on to become patrons of the Arts and Crafts Movement, which combined a love of craftsmanship with a devotion to the dignity and beauty of labour. The idea was to banish the machine-made, meretricious or the modern from the Victorian home and to return to an age of simplicity, authenticity and beauty.
One of Oscar Wilde’s listeners went on to create the ultimate Arts and Crafts house, Wightwick Manor near Wolverhampton. The teetotal and Congregationalist Theodore Mander made his fortune from his paint business, and in 1884 he attended a performance of Wilde’s ‘The House Beautiful’ in Wolverhampton. Mander made careful notes, including the celebrated dictum that your house should contain nothing ‘which you do not know to be useful or think to be beautiful’ (a phrase which Wilde himself had cribbed from the designer William Morris, 1834–96).
Full of enthusiasm for this new way of thinking, the paint magnate began work on a brand-new house, which would nevertheless appear to be terribly old. Wightwick had all the modern conveniences, yet might at first glance be mistaken for a Tudor manor. Mander’s architect, the appropriately named Edward Ould, intended that its timber frame should ‘soon pass through the crude and brand-new period’ to become a timeless, misty-eyed memory of a pre-industrial age. To furnish his house, Mander inevitably turned to William Morris, whose company produced entire interiors inspired by medieval colours and designs.
The items in the William Morris Company’s range complemented each other, and whole interiors could be put together, conveniently, by mail order. This is how Theodore Mander decorated his house, by choosing items out of a catalogue. And the irony of the olde-worlde, hand-made splendour of Wightwick is that the house was the dream of an industrialist who’d made his money shipping tins of ready-mixed paint around the world.
The Arts and Crafts Movement saw rich people paying craftsmen to produce by hand items which were well beyond the purses of the
working classes themselves. Thorstein Veblen, the Norwegian-American historian of conspicuous consumption and a biting critic of the American economy, points out the strange desirability of imperfection:
The ground of the superiority of hand-wrought goods … is a certain margin of crudeness. The margin must never be so wide as to show bungling workmanship, since that would be evidence of low cost, nor so narrow as to suggest the ideal precision attained only by the machine, for that would be evidence of low cost.
These contradictions between the hand-crafted and modernity are still to be found at the Sanderson wallpaper factory in Loughborough, where William Morris’s original wallpaper blocks remain in use today (plate 26). Some designs involve passing the paper through the printing press by hand up to twenty-two times. The result – highly wrought and very slightly flawed – remains an extremely desirable, and expensive, backdrop for a living room. (I have tried printing wallpaper myself using an original Morris block. I thought it would be easy, but I can vouch for the fact that it is a job requiring skills which must be honed over many years of experience.)
Many of the same features of the Arts and Crafts story are likewise to be found in the twentieth century, when house-builders had to pay sky-high prices to achieve the effortlessly minimal look. The modern houses of the 1930s were supposed to be pared-down, simplified machines for living:
the home is no longer permanent from generation to generation; family ties, inconsistent with freedom of living, are broken. We demand spaciousness, release from encumbrances, from furniture and trappings that overload our rooms, possessions that tie us and tools that are obsolete.
And yet houses in experimental materials and designs came at a cost. One-offs like Amyas Connell’s 1929 High and Over, near Amersham, are like ships sailing through the countryside, full of light and air, white-painted and beautifully clutter-free. These values remain so strong that many people today pay good money to de-cluttering specialists who help them throw away their junk.
Having passed through all these minefields of potential errors of taste and judgement, you can only sit comfortably in your living room if the lighting and temperature are likewise under control.
27 – Heat and Light
On winter days in London … the smoke of fossil coal forms an atmosphere perceivable for many miles, like a great round cloud attached to the earth.
Louis Simon, a French-American
visitor to London, 1810
More than any other room in the house, a room for reception is supposed to feel comfortably warm. Heating is part of the basic hospitality that householders should extend to servants and strangers alike. This is why the great hall at Hampton Court, built in the early sixteenth century, was constructed upon the ancient model with a central open hearth. There’s no evidence that it was ever actually used, but that fireplace nevertheless formed the symbolic heart of the household.
Until the seventeenth century, the fires of great lords and lowly cottagers alike consumed wood. It was always a valuable commodity, and especially so if you had to forage for it yourself. Yet, just like plumbing, the history of domestic technology has not been governed purely by a rational desire to reduce the consumption of resources. Heating and lighting involve emotion as well as economics.
The expression ‘by hook or by crook’ is often said to come from the peasants’ right to enter their landlord’s forest to see what resources they could glean. They were not allowed to cut down trees for firewood; those remained their master’s property. Using either a shepherd’s crook or the billhook of a reaper, though, they might grab dead branches. A wood was a carefully managed asset, and the source of much wealth and pride to its owners. One of the great distresses of the English Civil War and the associated social upheaval of the seventeenth century was the felling of forests that had been carefully managed over centuries.
The need to heat a house gave rise to perhaps the greatest architectural invention of the past millennium: the chimney. Houses without chimneys may be warm, but cannot avoid being horribly smoky and dirty as well. Chimneys began to appear in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to carry smoke out of the house and to provide an updraught to tickle the flames.
With the chimney, the modern house was born. Now it began to be possible to produce buildings of several storeys. The central stone or brick chimney would anchor a structure, as well as providing heat to chambers on several floors. Even if they lacked their own fireplaces, rooms would still gain warmth from the chimney stack. This allowed houses to become multi-roomed, with specialised spaces for cooking or sleeping or leisure. Among them was the living room.
When such rooms for sitting around in began to win an increasing proportion of a household’s budget, the art of soft furnishing was born. In the earliest parlours or withdrawing rooms Tudor and Stuart carpets were laid upon tables or cupboards, not upon the floor, where rushes provided rudimentary warming for the feet. In the late seventeenth century, a random selection of tapestries for the walls began to be replaced by a suite of matching hangings of the same colour, intended for use in one room only. The idea of furnishings en suite, which would culminate in the red velveteen three-piece suite of my grandmother’s sitting room, was born around 1660.
Interiors made softer and more welcoming with textiles would have seemed even more so by the soft light of rushlights or candles. Rushlights were the poor person’s light source of choice. They were made by coating rushes in hot fat, building up the layers until the rush itself formed the wick of a rather scrawny candle. These long, gently curving lights could be thrust through and balanced in the holders still found in the walls of ancient houses. To provide twice the light, they could be lit at both bottom and top (‘burning the candle at both ends’). The twenty minutes for which each rushlight burned became a familiar unit of time. Neighbours often pooled their resources, taking turns to gather in each other’s houses for night-time sewing and mending by the eked-out glimmer. Rushes were such a cheap and reliable way of providing light that they were found in the poorest homes right into the twentieth century.
A rushlight in its holder. For a brighter light (lasting half the time), you ‘burn at both ends’
It’s also worth mentioning that firelight was the most common source of light, and people were simply quite used to dimmer light conditions than today. They were able to perform many tasks without any light at all. Matty Jenkyns, a character in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1851), economises upon candles, and in winter was to be found ‘knitting in the darkness by the fire’. Lacking the light to read was not a problem in illiterate rural societies: singing and reciting ballads passed the time just as well.
Only the rich could afford a profusion of candles. The expression ‘the game’s not worth the candle’ makes it clear that candles were economic units, and to burn a candle gave the sensation of burning money itself. Sometimes they were lit just to give exactly that feeling of profligacy: the beeswax candles imported from Venice or Antwerp for church festivals made a proud statement that the place and occasion were special. When in 1731 Sir Robert Walpole entertained the Duke of Lorraine at his Houghton mansion in Norfolk, guests were astonished by the 130 wax candles lit in the hall, with fifty more in the saloon. It was widely put about, in compliment to the Duke, that the cost of the lighting alone for his reception was £15. Beeswax candles, which burned clearly and didn’t need much trimming, were the preferred choice for hard-to-reach light fittings like chandeliers.
As everyone knew the value of candles, a daily ration was often included in employment conditions. In the royal household, an allowance of candles accompanied the issue of firewood and food to individual members. The fate of leftover candle ends was hotly disputed: in larger households, they were the preserve of certain servants, who would sell them on to supplement their wages.
The government, too, decided to cash in upon the need for domestic lighting. In 1709, a deeply unpopular tax was introduced on wax candles at the rate of fourpence a pound.
So, in Georgian living rooms, the knowledge that candles were being lit for guests despite the tax made it a greater compliment still.
There was a cheaper alternative to the expensive beeswax candle, which was nevertheless far superior to the humble rushlight: the tallow candle made out of animal fat. The ideal tallow candle would be made out of ‘half Sheep’s Tallow and half Cow’s’, because ‘that of hogs … gives an ill smell, and a thick black smoke’. Tallow candles had a horrible brown colour and made a dreadful meaty stink: ‘those horrible scents and pernicious fumes that old tallow sends forth when it is melted’. Despite the nastiness, desperate people would in times of famine eat tallow candles for the calories they contained. The art of creating the best blend was a valuable one, and in 1390 tallow candle-makers were listed among the crafts (called ‘misteries’) to be found in London. In 1462, the Worshipful Company of Tallow Chandlers was granted its Royal Charter.
Apart from the unpleasant smell, the great downside of tallow candles was the need to snuff. Every few minutes the wick had to be trimmed to avoid gutters and to stop the burning wick from smoking. So the candle-snuffer was a vital living-room implement until, in 1820, the French invented the plaited wick, which burned successfully without snuffing.
Of course, in an age of candle and firelight accidents were common. The London wood-turner Nehemiah Wallington had several lucky escapes from being burned to death, a fate not uncommon in his crowded parish of St Leonard Eastcheap in the City of London. Once, Wallington’s servant, Obadiah, strictly contrary to instructions, had taken a candle up to his bedchamber. There it fell over and burnt ‘half a yard of the sheet and the flock bed’. But the quick-thinking Obadiah woke up a fellow servant, and ‘both of them start up and pissed out the fire as well as they could’.
