by Lucy Worsley
Across town in a much grander house, Lady Russell (whose family gave their name to Russell Square) was once shocked almost out of her skin by a ‘hissing fire’ which ran all over the floor of the closet where she sat reading. She was at first totally mystified about what had caused it. Finally, a sheepish servant ‘beg’d pardon’ and admitted ‘having by mistake given [her] a candle, with a gunpowder squib in it, which was intended to make sport among the fellow servants on a rejoicing day’.
Interiors lit by candlelight were designed to make the most of the limited light available. In prosperous Georgian drawing rooms there was silver and sparkle everywhere. The gold rims on plates, the silver of keyholes, even the metallic embroidery on waistcoats: all were intended to reflect and maximise the effects of candlelight. In fact, a lady’s court dress woven with heavy silver thread had the effect of making its wearer gleam in candlelight.
A second tax upon the light was the hated yet long-lasting ‘window tax’, a ‘tax upon light and air’, as its detractors called it. Before 1696, the basic tax upon a household was levied upon the number of its hearths. But the ‘hearth tax’ was difficult to collect because tax inspectors needed to enter people’s houses to check the number of fireplaces. Clearly they weren’t going to be welcome visitors.
When in 1696 a new tax was levied instead upon windows, the inspectors had only to walk round the outside of the house and count. Initially there was a basic charge of two shillings upon all houses, which doubled to four shillings for houses with between ten and twenty windows. Changes to the banding of window tax helps to explain the mysteriously bricked-up windows in some Georgian city streets. In 1747, the bands were altered so that a house of ten windows or more had to pay sixpence per additional window. Several houses in Elder Street in London’s Spitalfields had one or more openings blocked up at this point so that they would just slip under the ten-window level. (The neat idea that the window tax is the origin of the expression ‘daylight robbery’, though, is regrettably no more than speculation.)
While it was good for government finances, the downside of the window tax was this darkening of people’s homes. ‘A proper ventilation of inhabited houses is absolutely necessary for the public health,’ thundered M. Humberstone in The Absurdity and Injustice of the Window Tax (1841). ‘It is like a demon of darkness spreading immorality and wretchedness in its path.’ The idea that a stuffy, unventilated house was unhealthy was further heightened by the continued belief in the concept of miasma.
Another annoying feature of the window tax was the lax and piecemeal fashion in which it was collected. Mobs sometimes attacked window-tax inspectors who suddenly reappeared after several years’ unexplained absence, and the 1750s saw William Sinclair’s epic and glorious battle with his local window-tax inspector in Dunbeath, Scotland. ‘As to Mr Angus, the Caithness Collector,’ he admitted,
When the rules about window tax were changed, the owner of this house in Spitalfields bricked up several openings to avoid the higher band
I shall honestly tell you the reason I was not civil to him. In the year 1753 he came here and surveyed my windows and reported them to be 28. The next half year he came and surveyed them and found them to be 31 when there was none either added or taken away. In June 1754 he … left a list showing my windows to be 47 and gave that number to the tax man. I appealed and was charged at 31. The last time he came he said there was 34, and I fell into a passion and swore him that I would be revenged.
Because of these difficulties the window tax was eventually repealed in 1851.
In the late seventeenth century, coal began gradually to replace wood as the commonest household fuel. At first it was something of a luxury, as it burned hotter and for longer than wood. But it quickly caught on, and of course caught the government’s eye as something which could be taxed. It seems somehow just that the City of London, destroyed by fire in 1666, was rebuilt partially with the proceeds of the new tax imposed upon coal.
In Georgian towns the ashes created by coal fires would be stored in people’s cellars until the twice-yearly visit of the urban ‘dustman’. In fact, dust and cinders originally formed the main business of the dustman’s life before he branched out into collecting other forms of refuse too. Even today old dustbins might be found marked with the words ‘no hot ashes’.
For your fire to burn successfully, you needed to keep your chimney swept. Until 1855, when they were outlawed and replaced by the ‘humane sweeping’ of chimneys with bendy brushes, nimble chimney boys were sent up the flues. An open fire, though, is a fairly inefficient means of heating because much of the warmth escapes up the chimney. The late-Georgian Count Rumford (he was American, his title awarded by the Bavarian government) transformed home heating when he fitted his revolutionary stoves into fireplaces. Now the fuel could be burned more effectively under better regulated conditions. His motive was fuel efficiency: ‘more fuel is frequently consumed … to boil a tea kettle than with proper management would be sufficient to cook a dinner for fifty men’, he claimed.
However, the eighteenth century’s great innovations in heating took place in hospitals, prisons and cotton mills (where thread was more elastic at higher temperatures). When water-based central heating began to penetrate the domestic sphere, it was more often than not to be found in the greenhouses and kitchen gardens of great estates, where delicate plants and pineapples required hot-water pipes and stoves to be stoked all night by a sleepless gardener. Some of Britain’s earliest domestic hot-water radiators were installed in 1833, and can still be seen at Stratfield Saye House in Hampshire today. But they heated the corridors only: in the abundant aristocratic manner, the living rooms retained the wasteful open fires that were nevertheless so pleasant for their owners. And indeed, why would you bother to install such conveniences in your home if you could afford housemaids to empty the grates before you woke each morning?
A fourteen-year-old housemaid named Harriet has left a heartbreaking letter from the 1870s, describing the heavy work she had to do when the weather turned cold in the autumn:
I have been so driven at work since the fires begun I have had hardly any time for anything for myself. I am up at half past five and six every morning and do not go to bed till nearly twelve at night and I feel so tired sometimes. I am obliged to have a good cry.
At Chatsworth House parties in the 1920s, fifteen fires still burned in the living rooms, each requiring fresh coal four times a day: a total of sixty bucketfuls for the footman to carry.
Yet ‘to the English a room without a fire is like a body without a soul’, observed Hermann Muthesius in 1904.
The many advantages the fireplace is deemed to possess … not least its aesthetic advantages … so completely convince the Englishman of its superiority to all other forms of heating that he never even remotely considers replacing it with the more efficient and more economical stove.
A tile fireplace from the twentieth century. For emotional reasons, the fondness for open flames persisted even after central heating had arrived
In an age of smoke, housemaids had many tricks for cleaning hangings, carpets and furnishings. To freshen a tapestry or hanging, the author of The Complete Servant (1830) recommends that you should ‘blow all the dust off with a pair of bellows. Cut a stale loaf into eight pieces. Beginning at the top of the wall, wipe lightly downwards with a piece of the bread.’ Likewise, food could cleanse a carpet: ‘shake well, spread over it with a brush some grated raw potatoes. Brush clean and leave to dry.’ A list of instructions for housemaids made in 1782 recommends strewing tea leaves upon the carpet and then sweeping them up, and also gives an insight into dusting: ‘books are not to be meddled with, but they may be dusted as far as a wing of a goose will go’. These cleaning tasks were endless in Victorian London, where people even thought it worth thrusting a cloth into their front-door keyholes to help prevent the dirty air of a poisoned city from seeping into their homes.
Living rooms got even dirtier when oil lamps began
to replace candles in the later eighteenth century. ‘I have seen houses almost filled with the smoke from lamps, and the stench of the oil,’ a footman recollected. In a large establishment lamps required a separate new room for the cleaning of their glass shades. The Duke of Rutland, at his home, Belvoir Castle, had a trifling 400 lamps for his hard-working servants to polish. They hated it. ‘Lamps were often neglected,’ reveals The Footman’s Directory of 1825, ‘especially in households where servants changed jobs quickly, since everyone thought they would last their time.’
But the oil lamp would soon be superseded by gas, which had long been exploited by human beings, and possibly provided the source of the perpetual flames in Greek and Roman temples. It made its appearance in modern Britain in factories, asylums and theatres long before it penetrated the home. This was coal gas, produced by baking coal. Today our gas is natural, piped from pockets beneath the sea, and it burns much more brightly than the coal gas used between late Georgian times and the 1970s.
William Murdoch, a Scottish engineer working in the Cornish mining industry, was the greatest innovator in the field of gas lighting, employing it in 1792 to illuminate his offices in Redruth. His name is less well known, though, than Frederick Windsor’s, the man who organised a public demonstration of this new lighting for George III’s birthday in 1807, and who set up the first public gas-supply company. A showman by nature, Windsor was a great proselytiser for his new product, which was mysterious and rather frightening. People marvelled at the properties of this ‘illuminated air’, but remained fearful of explosions and fires. Windsor (somewhat unconvincingly) reassured potential clients that coal gas was even ‘more congenial to our lungs than vital air’.
In 1812, the Gas Light and Coke Company set up the first gasworks in Britain. Gas was piped across towns by plumbers, the people whose skills seemed best suited to this new task, so its vocabulary is identical to that of water: ‘mains’, ‘taps’, ‘flow’, ‘pressure’ and ‘current’. At first gas was mainly used for street rather than domestic lighting. Westminster Bridge was illuminated by gas as early as 1813, and there would ultimately be more than 60,000 gas street lamps all over London. One thousand six hundred still remain today, in Westminster and around St James’s and Buckingham Palaces. They are maintained by six gas-lamp attendants employed by British Gas, a remnant of the once vast pool of lighters who went round cities at dusk with their long torches.
I’ve had the pleasure of using one of these torches in the company of Phil Banner, who’s spent forty-two years with British Gas. He showed me how his works: you squeeze a rubber bulb at one end, which forces a gust of air upwards, and the flame burning at the other end leaps out like a dragon’s tongue and ignites the gas. (The remaining lamps are usually lit today by a clockwork timer rather than a torch.) Lighters like Phil were once familiar figures on the London streets. Prostitutes might pay them not to light the lamps in corners convenient for their business, and those needing to rise early might ask the lighter to knock on their doors during the dawn round when the lamps were extinguished.
By the 1840s, supplies were working well enough for gas to make a tentative appearance in the urban home. From this point on, any British town with more than 2,500 inhabitants usually had a gasworks, and gas lighting became a must-have in middle-class living rooms. One writer in the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine even recommended that parties ‘must always be given by gas light … if it be daylight outside, you must close the shutters and draw the curtains’, the better to show off your gasoliers.
But the inexpensive and slightly lowbrow connotations of gas meant that it was still shunned by the upper classes: they stayed loyal to candles. At the same time, billing remained a quarterly affair, placing it out of the reach of the truly poor. It was only in the 1890s that the gas companies, worried about losing business to their new rivals selling electricity, introduced the ‘penny in the slot’ meter. One Victorian cartoon shows a desperate father trying to commit suicide by sticking his head in the gas oven. His concerned family beg him to put off the deed until the cheaper evening gas rate starts.
Gas must have provided a quite stunning improvement in light levels and, therefore, in people’s ability to entertain themselves in the evenings. It nevertheless had many drawbacks. There were frequent explosions and fires; it was not uncommon for gas leaks to be investigated by the light of a match. Also, gas consumed the oxygen in a room’s air, replacing it with black and noxious deposits. The aspidistra became such a popular plant because it was one of the few that survived in oxygen-starved conditions. The reason that Victorian ladies have such a reputation for fainting is partly because of tight lacing, but also because of the shortage of oxygen in gas-lit drawing rooms. In 1904, Hermann Muthesius still noticed ‘a widespread dislike of gas-lighting’, and its confinement to ‘halls and domestic offices for fear of the dirt caused by soot and the recognition of the danger to health that arises from piping gas into the room’. (Clearly the health of the servants working in the domestic offices was a lesser concern for homeowners.)
The arrival of the cleaner but more expensive electricity in the 1880s gave householders a choice. Some people started to have their gas pipes and fittings converted to take electricity instead. Yet a light bulb cost the same as the average week’s wages, and you needed to have your own generator. The armaments manufacturer Sir William Armstrong was a prominent pioneer of electric light and installed a small hydro-electric plant in his Northumberland home, Cragside. His innovation was rivalled across the Atlantic by several Fifth Avenue millionaires who also built their own small generators in 1880s New York. In 1881, Mrs Cornelius Vanderbilt even went to a ball dressed as an electric light. But these early adopters ran the risk of accidents. After her electrical system at home caught fire, Mrs Vanderbilt panicked and had it taken out.
The widespread adoption of electricity was delayed for many years because each generator produced a different level of output. This meant that different towns, or even individual houses, had their own currents. Manufacturers were therefore reluctant to invest in developing fittings because there was no national market for their products. It would take the creation of the National Grid in the 1930s to allow electricity to achieve ubiquity.
The other twentieth-century transformation in living-room light levels was the use of glass on a scale not seen since the huge windows of the strangely proto-modern Hardwick Hall. Natural light was worshipped by twentieth-century architects, who liked to blur the boundaries between indoors and out. ‘The spaciousness of the modern sitting-room is not limited by the enclosing walls, but is extended to the garden and distant landscape by means of large openings – windows, loggias or sun-porches,’ wrote F. R. S. Yorke in a round-up of the latest architectural developments in 1934. He was describing one-off, architect-designed houses for the rich, but these values would also be seen in post-war affordable housing. The influential SPAN houses produced by Eric Lyons from the 1950s, for example, have their own enclosed garden courtyards separated from the living room merely by glass, and are full of natural light. ‘The convenience and simplicity, and indeed much of the charm of the modern interior are due to open planning,’ Yorke added, describing a trend which defined the twentieth-century living room.
Oddly, the modern open-plan house represents a return to medieval times, when houses had a central, flexible and spacious hall. The difference lies in the absence of people: today a quarter of American households consist of just one person, and a further 50 per cent of them consist of couples living without children.
This leads us on to the biggest-ever change in the history of home life: the disappearance, in the early twentieth century, of the servants.
28 – ‘Speaking’ to the Servants
No relations in society are so numerous and universal as those of Masters and Servants … so it is proportionally important that they should be well defined and understood.
Samuel and Sarah Adams, The Complete Servant, 1825
Our review of living-room technology has very quickly revealed that pre-twentieth-century houses of any pretension whatsoever simply could not operate without their servants to carry coal and to clean. Perhaps the biggest difference of all between then and now is the absence of this particular variety of intimacy in the home. People in the past took it completely for granted that they’d have non-family members living cheek by jowl beneath their roof.
In Tudor and Stuart times, between a quarter and a half of the entire population were employed in domestic service at some point in their lives, and the bond between master and servant was one of the most important social relationships. Being a servant wasn’t something of which to be ashamed: you gained protection and honour by association with your own particular lord. You would be glad to wear his badge or even a cloak in his household colour, a uniform called a ‘livery’ because it was part of a living allowance that also included bed and board. People were proud to serve the man who in return met their physical needs.
Clearly this attitude was long gone by the beginning of the twentieth century, but in 1900 domestic service remained the single largest source of female employment, and liveries were still worn. Henry Bennett, a footman who started work at Chatsworth House in 1928, was issued with several sets: a state livery, ‘one semi-state and a black suit yearly, and a black mackintosh, and a white coat and cap for car work … we had to breech when over six for dinner’. Yet Bennett was a living anachronism; domestic revolution was on its way. In the most significant upheaval in a thousand years of domestic history, by 1951 a mere 1 per cent of households had a full-time residential domestic servant.
Once upon a time masters and servants were more than used to each other’s company. In the medieval house with its common hall they simply couldn’t escape from each other, and ate all their meals together. In such crowded circumstances servants were constantly enjoined to discretion, sobriety and the avoidance of gossip. The members of Henry VIII’s privy chamber, his most intimate servants, were instructed to be ‘loving together’ and not to ask questions: ‘they must leave enquiry where the King is or goeth, not grudging, mumbling or talking of the King’s pastime, late or early going to bed, or anything done by His Grace’.
