If Walls Could Talk

by Lucy Worsley

  And so each small household today sees to its own vacuuming or laundry or rat-catching, and men and women argue constantly about whose gender bears the heaviest burden. Maybe, as the world becomes a more hostile place with shortages of water and oil, we will return to the larger units of living favoured in dangerous medieval times. And perhaps then the basic activities of cleaning and preparing food will rise in status once again.

  30 – Sitting Up Straight

  When we rejoined the ladies in the drawing room, Princess took me by the arm and hand and led me into a corner. Most intimate and cosy. Is flirtatious. I tried not to press her hand back, lest lèse-majesté.

  James Lees-Milne on meeting Princess

  Michael of Kent, 23 August 1983

  When there are guests in your living room, there’s always been a tension between paying respect – which means keeping at a suitable distance from another individual’s personal space – and offering intimacy. As a form of flattery intimacy trumps respect, because it implies the dropping of barriers and the creation of trust. Hence the informal barbecues for world leaders that George W. Bush used to host at Camp David.

  Henry VIII would likewise drape an arm round the shoulders of a favoured ambassador or courtier. But then – just like a lion – he could round upon and maul a man just as soon as he became overfamiliar: the king ‘could not abide to have any man stare in his face when he talked with them’.

  This knife-edge that has to be walked between respect and intimacy creates another danger: manners that are simply too nice. Then as now, being overly well-mannered is unmanly and debilitating. In a Stuart snuff shop full of fops, ‘bows and cringes of the newest mode were here exchanged twixt friend and friend, with wonderful exactness’. It’s a recognisable description of high camp. Behaviour books from every period recommend striking a balance between manners and brutality, but no one can ever define exactly what that balance should be. Learning it at the knee of one’s mother is the mark of a true gentleman, and the pretenders who have to read about such things in books never quite catch up.

  In his classic Über den Prozess der Zivilisation (1939), Norbert Elias made a striking link between fancy manners and political absolutism. He traced a path through history which saw societies dominated by independent warriors, or knights, gradually give way to courtly ones, in which a single dominant figure lords it over everyone else. The knights were uncouth and violent – as they had to be, to win power. They used brute physical force to seize the food and land to which they felt entitled. The courtiers of an absolutist king did not win their power through force, because the physical needs of the upper classes were now met by a taxation system. Instead, they competed with each other through their exquisite, nuanced and civilised behaviour.

  If we follow in Elias’s footsteps from the medieval to the modern period, we can chart the arrival of new concepts such as ‘shame’ or ‘embarrassment’, emotions that had a much weaker hold on medieval psyches. Elias describes ‘shame’ as ‘a fear of social degradation … which arises characteristically on those occasions when a person who fears lapsing into inferiority can avert this danger neither by direct physical means nor by any other form of attack’. Bowing, hat etiquette, proposing toasts, dancing: all provided a Tudor or Stuart with new means of humiliating his enemies or winning admiration from his friends.

  In the grand, formal and stately great chambers of Hardwick Hall, or its seventeenth-century successors, one was expected to behave in a grand, formal and stately manner. It was unthinkable for a servant on duty in these rooms to address his master without making a bow. Good servants were expected to be:

  so full of courtesy as not a word shall be spoken by their masters to them, or by them to their masters, but the knee shall be bowed … their master shall not turn sooner than their hat will be off.

  And this kind of behaviour was not just for servants. The fifteen-year-old wife addressed in the advice book Le Ménagier de Paris is told, literally, not to look at another man, or even another woman:

  Keep your head upright, eyes downcast and immobile. Gaze four toises (about 24 feet) straight ahead and toward the ground, without looking or glancing at any man or woman to the right or left, or looking up, or in a fickle way casting your gaze about.

  In the reception rooms of a Tudor house, it would be equally unthinkable for two people of different rank to be seated in the same kind of chair: inevitably the more elaborate chair, placed nearer to the fire, would be occupied by the more senior person. Even walking up and down the long gallery had its own terms of engagement, described in this essay called Rules to be Observed in Walking with Persons of Honour (1682):

  If you walk in a Gallery … be sure to keep the left hand; and without affectation or trouble to the Lady, recover that side at every turn. If you make up the third in your walk, the middle is the most honourable place, and belongs to the best in the company, the right hand is next, and the left in the lowest estimation.

  And yet it’s worth remembering that all this was a performance for the benefit of others. When alone, people could, and did, behave more naturally. Off duty, you might ‘loosen your garters or your buckles, lie down upon a couch, or go to bed, and welter in an easy chair … negligences and freedoms which one can take only when quite alone’. Queen Elizabeth I, always very conscious of her image, would never allow herself to be seen in an un-queenly state. She had the windows overlooking the Privy Garden at Hampton Court blocked up so that on cold mornings, when she liked to lollop about vigorously in the gardens ‘to catch her a heat’, she could do so unobserved.

  Britain’s political revolution of the seventeenth century caused another revolution: in body language. Charles I was defeated in battle and eventually executed by his own subjects for pushing his royal prerogative too far. During the period after his defeat, when the English Commonwealth replaced monarchical rule, a new form of greeting began to appear that reflected the fact that the social hierarchy had been destroyed. The doffing of the hat to one’s superior was replaced by a form of greeting which assumed that both parties were equals: England’s new, democratic rulers prided themselves upon refusing to bow, insisting instead upon shaking hands.

  Once absolute political rule began to decline, the most extreme excesses of courtly behaviour and manners also lay in the past. Even after Charles II had been ‘restored’ to England’s throne, a series of further revolutions saw the power of the Stuart kings eroded in the much more limited job descriptions of the Hanoverian kings. Likewise, the new, sociable age of the eighteenth century was less formal than the previous one in its behaviour. The Georgians aimed to create an atmosphere of relaxation rather than stern stateliness: as Lord Chesterfield put it, ‘one ought to know how to come into a room, speak to people, and answer them, without being out of countenance, or without embarrassment’.

  Chesterfield still paid serious attention to body language, but now the emphasis was on elegance rather than formality. ‘I desire you will particularly attend to the graceful motion of your arms,’ he recommended, in ‘the manner of putting on your hat, and giving your hand’. Conduct was even more relaxed across the Atlantic. ‘Formal compliments and empty ceremonies’ did nothing for Martha Washington, chatelaine of the US’s presidential household from 1789. ‘I am fond only of what comes from the heart,’ she said.

  Clothing also dictates body language, and for women the wearing of stays encouraged a stiff and upright carriage. It’s handy to have something to do with the hands placed on display by the wearing of hooped skirts, so Georgian accessories were brought into service: ‘snuff, or the fan supplies each pause of chat’. The French today are much bigger kissers than the English, but this was not so in the eighteenth century. Then, a Swiss visitor wrote home from England: ‘let not this mode of greeting scandalise you … it is the custom of this country, and many ladies would be displeased should you fail to salute them thus’.

  Hints on how to bow, from A Complete Practical Guide to the Art of Dancing (
1863)

  In the nineteenth century, though, a certain pursing of the lips occurred, and the free and easy Georgian manners began to be seen as vulgarly uninhibited. Ironically, it was partly the medical advances of the Enlightenment which seemed to push women back into a more ceremonial age. The realisation that women were fundamentally different from, rather than a weaker version of, men led to the idea that ladies were fragile things needing constant protection. This was achieved by turning attention to decorum and manners. Ladies were considered to have mislaid the ability to make jokes, or even to walk; thus the now-lost art of leaning upon a gentleman’s arm was born. This new morality brought to an end the kind of entertainments that had enlivened Georgian drawing rooms. There was no more dubious gambling or dancing. ‘Waltzing is so dangerous’, wrote the anonymous author of Advice to Governesses (1827), ‘that I wonder how a prudent mother can tolerate the amusement.’

  In the late Victorian period, America and Europe clash in Edith Wharton’s historical novel The Buccaneers. ‘The friendly bustle of the Grand Union, the gentlemen coming in from New York … with the Wall Street news’ were sadly lacking in the cold, aristocratic British drawing rooms which a group of young American heiresses nevertheless wish to conquer. The young conquistadors found themselves ‘chilled by the silent orderliness’ of the British household. The maidservants were ‘painfully unsociable’, and they ‘were too much afraid of the cook ever to set foot in the kitchen’.

  This makes British drawing rooms sound stiff and retrograde, but they had at least become the part of the house dominated by women. Once, the master of the house had controlled his family’s social life, just as he did its financial or reproductive plans, but somewhere along the way men relinquished their role as hosts. In 1904, Hermann Muthesius explained that

  the Englishwoman is the absolute mistress of the house, the pole round which its life revolves … the man of the house, who is assumed to be engrossed in his daily work, is himself to some extent her guest when at home. So the drawing-room, the mistress’s throne-room, is the rallying-point of the whole life of the house.

  Muthesius also noted that the woman ‘keeps an eye on all exchanges with the outer world, issues invitations and receives and entertains guests’, and this is the topic of the next chapter.

  31 – A Bright, Polite Smile

  Everyone complains of the pressure of the company, yet all rejoice at being so divinely squeezed.

  François de La Rochfoucauld

  on London parties, 1784

  Everyone has seen the bright, polite and slightly false smile pasted upon the lips of a host and hostess. Now we move on to the actual hour of a living-room performance, from the amazing conspicuous consumption of the Stuart masque to the formal Victorian fifteen-minute call.

  Being sociable has always been something of a duty, and the line between the convivial and the tedious is a fine one. Eleanor Roosevelt calculated that in the year of 1939 she had shaken hands with 14,046 people. ‘My arms ached,’ she recollected, ‘my shoulders ached, my back ached, and my knees and feet seemed to belong to someone else.’ But the people whose hands were shaken were doubtless pleased with their experience. Generosity, gift-giving and hospitality are essential for holding society together.

  How to entertain your guests? Well, Tudor or Stuart guests might have been treated to a formal masque, a kind of dramatic and musical entertainment involving professional and amateur performers alike. Henry VIII thought it amusing to appear in disguise at one of Cardinal Wolsey’s parties, and to make the ladies dance with him. On another court occasion, Anne Boleyn made her debut in a masque called ‘Le Chateau Vert’ in the character of ‘Perseverance’ (this turned out to be most appropriate in light of the subsequent lengths to which she would go to bag the king). Singing or musical entertainments were always popular, and Henry VIII poached some of the best singers from Cardinal Wolsey’s boys’ choir for his own. Masques continued into the next century, getting more and more lavish or even debauched: at one performance for the rather seedy James I, the actress playing the Queen of Sheba smeared cream and jelly all over the drunken King Christian of Denmark. The two ladies supposed to be playing Faith and Hope drank too much and were found spewing behind the scenes.

  Francis Willoughby’s seventeenth-century Book of Games is full of bright ideas for cheaper parties, describing the rules of backgammon and ‘ticktack’ and giving instructions for playing cards, beginning with the very manufacture of the cards themselves: take ‘3 or 4 pieces of white paper pasted together and made very smooth that they may easily slip from one another, and be dealt & played. If they grow dank, they must be dried and rubbed one by one to make them slip again.’

  As well as creating a lot of labour, the open fire led to a whole lost slice of life: the art of amusing yourself while warming yourself in low light levels. Indeed, there is a whole genre of caricature which might be described as ‘person caught in the undignified position of warming their naked backside against an open fire’. In such a place, at such a time, the intimate art of storytelling thrived, as did silly games like the ‘Laughing Chorus’ described in the Young Ladies’ Treasure Book (1880). To be played ‘round a good fire in the long winter evenings’, ‘the person in the corner by the fire says, “Ha!” and the one next to him repeats, “Ha!” and so on … No one who has not played this game can realise its mirth-provoking capacities.’

  Francis Willoughby suggests simpler seventeenth-century games suitable for firelight conditions, such as capping rhymes. He commemorates one quick-witted Mr Booker, who, when challenged to find a rhyme to ‘porringer’, came up with ‘The King had a Daughter & he gave the Prince of Orange her.’ Now, one might play such a brain game in the car, but not at home, as the modern living room is packed with other, less effortful forms of stimulation.

  In the noble great chambers of houses like the Elizabethan Hardwick Hall, the parties generally remained stiff and formal, with people staying in their proper places. As we’ve already seen, though, the mid-eighteenth century saw London townhouses like Norfolk House acquire state apartments planned upon a circuit rather than a straight line and which were thrown open for processional parties. The mingling of different ranks in an informal manner became more common as the eighteenth century passed. Sitting upon chairs arranged in a perfect oval for a measured discussion, a formation central to the drawing rooms of the baroque age, fell out of fashion. ‘All the ladies sitting in a formal circle is universally the most obnoxious to conversation,’ claimed a character in a novel of 1817, ‘here I am like a bird in a circle of chalk that dare not move as much as its head or its eyes.’

  So great became the drawing room’s emphasis on sociability that by the nineteenth century some visitors were bored almost senseless by the long, relentlessly chatty days common to nineteenth-century house parties. ‘This day we have been all sitting together in the drawing room going on with our various little employments,’ wrote Maria Edgeworth in 1819. These entertainments included making puppets, copying pictures and sorting ribbons, but there was the frustrated ‘Fanny in the library by her recluse philosophical self for some time – Then joining the vulgar herd in the drawing room’. Likewise, Prince Pückler-Muskau, who visited England between 1826 and 1828, found that he couldn’t even go to his own room to write a letter because it was ‘not usual, and therefore surprises and annoys people’. And so it went on, in sociable country houses, into the twentieth century. Here’s James Lees-Milne visiting Wallington, in Northumberland:

  After dinner I am worn out, and long for bed. But no. We have general knowledge questions. Lady T. puts the questions one after another with lightning rapidity … all most alarming to a tired stranger.

  The art of conversation received a blow in the twentieth century. ‘The amount of time in the home has in recent years been much reduced through such innovations as the cinema, cheap travel, playing and watching games, careers for women, crèches, and so on,’ wrote F. R. S. Yorke in 1937. For those still
spending the occasional evening at home, the valve radio became the new focus of the living room (plate 30). Now the ‘host’ of the evening’s entertainment might not even be present in the room, but presiding over an event recorded elsewhere.

  The British Broadcasting Corporation was created in 1922 from a consortium of the six biggest wireless manufacturers, including Marconi and General Electric. The transmission of nightly BBC programmes provided people with a social, not a solitary, experience, as they listened with friends and family. By 1925, there were 1.5 million licence holders. The BBC published pamphlets on topics such as how to form a ‘radio circle’, or listening club; on ‘How To Conduct a Wireless Discussion Group’; and even ‘How to Listen’. ‘Listen as carefully at home as you do in a theatre or concert hall,’ its author instructed the would-be listener. ‘It is just as important to you to enjoy yourself at home as at the theatre.’

  The first regular television broadcasts were made in 1932, a year in which seventy-six half-hour programmes went out. But no one was sure how many living rooms they reached. In 1933, viewers were asked: ‘The BBC is most anxious to know the number of people who are actually seeing this television programme. Will those who are looking in send a postcard marked “Z” to Broadcasting House immediately?’

  And TV was much slower to catch on than radio had been. It was the Coronation of 1953 that brought the set into many living rooms, as many people bought theirs especially for the occasion. People rushed round to their neighbours’ houses (and those who had attempted to keep up with the Joneses by installing an aerial on their roofs to suggest that they too had TV were caught out). The Radio Times for Coronation Day devotes only a very small box to television programming, with radio programmes taking up nearly all the space. From 1952, however, the number of radio licences issued finally began to fall, while in the same year TV licences reached 1.5 million. In 1955, the launch of ITV brought adverts into people’s living rooms, and also, with the introduction in the 1960s of Coronation Street, working-class culture.