The Making of Home

by Judith Flanders

  This increasing enjoyment of appearance for appearance’s sake did not meet with unanimous approbation. Adam Smith, in 1759, was disturbed by the lack of utility of many new goods. ‘How many people ruin themselves by laying out money on trinkets of frivolous utility?… All their pockets are stuffed with little conveniences. They contrive new pockets … in order to carry a greater number. They walk about loaded with a multitude of baubles … all of which might at all times be very well spared…’ Daniel Defoe’s objection was grounded in the perceived threat to honest English manufacture. He viewed these new luxuries as foreign invaders infiltrating the country to despoil the simplicity of the good old days: Indian chintz fabrics ‘crept into our houses, our closets and bedchambers, curtains, cushions, chairs, and at last beds themselves’, replacing what had previously been English wools and silks.* Yet to others, this new consumerism was beneficial, serving the national interest through both trade and manufacture. In 1821, in Baltimore, Niles’ Weekly Register wrote, ‘We never reflect upon the progress and prospects of that portion of the national labor which is applied to household manufactures, without feeling our hearts warmed with a national pride; for all the virtues, moral, religious and political, are interested in it.’ It was a virtuous circle: buying goods was patriotic because it promoted industry, industry enshrined national virtues, the goods were burnished with those virtues, which made those who possessed them better people.

  But patriotism, industry, status and even fashion were not the only forces driving the spread of commodities. Another equally intangible benefit, also played a crucial role: comfort. Luxury, or merely costly, items, had been valued by the rich; in the new commodity markets, taste and comfort, both infinitely replicable, won the day. Comfort is an elastic word, and there were different ways of acquiring it. Some comfort was directly purchased, in new houses, or upholstered furniture. Comfort was also achieved via new technologies: rooms were better heated; they were better lit; and, particularly in the USA in the nineteenth century, where labour costs remained high in comparison to Europe, a plethora of labour-saving devices, especially for the kitchen – potato-peelers and -mashers, raisin-seeders, coffee-grinders, cherry-pitters, apple-corers, meat-grinders and eggbeaters – produced another kind of technological comfort.

  Yet even as comfort and ease through technology, upholstery and improved housing standards became widespread, the display of status could in some strata of society also be expressed by their very rejection. In Britain in the nineteenth century, technology made warmth, for example, more readily available. New, improved Rumford stoves burnt fuel more efficiently, producing more heat at lower cost. But the upper classes, with their many fireplaces, and many servants to clean and tend them, felt no need to make the change, and kept the older, more inefficient open fires. The middle classes, in emulation, also rejected the comfort that new technology might have brought them, instead genteelly and emulatively freezing in their drawing rooms. So too with lighting technology. With servants to tend candles and oil lamps, the rich could afford not to acquire the more efficient, but smelly and dirty, gas lighting. Homes without the new technology were therefore considered to be of higher status, and in 1857 a character in a novel by Anthony Trollope is marked out as irredeemably vulgar for installing gas. Similarly the rich in large houses could afford to devote a room, or many rooms, to activities that occurred only infrequently; the middle classes, with their parlours, did the same, even though their comfort was diminished by reducing the amount of space available for everyday living. Similarly, parlour furniture was not created with comfort in mind, but was designed to be admired, imitating, in small, often parochial form, the grand architectural statements of the French courts.

  This was the theory, at least. While the origin of these domestic display rooms was located in the French courts, the parlour also drew on commercial spaces, hotels in particular, for its decorative effects. Then, as world fairs and expositions became popular in the second half of the nineteenth century, a variety of model rooms gave ‘glimpses of the surroundings of the classes who set the fashions’ to those with far less money. The reach of these showrooms was extended first via engravings, and then, when photographs could be inexpensively printed, magazines became prime disseminators of the ideal of home, and the ideal home. (The magazine Ideal Home first appeared in 1909 in the USA, and 1919 in the UK.) In 1876, Britain’s The World ran a series called ‘Celebrities at Home’, which presented biographies of famous people – Disraeli, Rowland Hill (of penny-post fame), the philosopher Thomas Carlyle, the sensation-novelist Wilkie Collins, and Tennyson, the poet laureate. This had been done before, but now the magazine offered in addition photographs of what their twentieth-century equivalents would come to call ‘their lovely homes’.* Thus the display style of a previous age was reinterpreted through elements drawn from commercial premises and from the houses of the famous, combined to produce an ideal of what a parlour should look like, one accepted by millions who could only ever aspire to such furnishings, but who none the less believed absolutely in the social merit they represented: the drapery, the piano, the mantelpiece loaded with ornaments; the damask or silk or embroidered or velvet fabrics; and the all-important matching ‘suites’ of furniture.

  For one of the precepts of the parlour was that items in multiples, and in even numbers so they could be arranged symmetrically, were superior to the same number of single pieces: six chairs were most frequently advertised, although a dozen was preferred if space were available, with two armchairs to match. Tables, sofas, mirrors, all were designed for display rather than utility, while china was placed carefully on what was known as a buffet (or a boffett, beaufat or bowfat).* These parlour furnishings were available both at enormous prices for the rich, and at modest ones for the rest – in the USA in 1897, a three-piece suite was available from Sears, Roebuck for $18.50. But whether expensive or economical, these items shared a common feature: they were designed not to be used. The chairs were often higher than would be comfortable for most people, upholstered in fabrics that were impossible to clean; the tables were narrow, to be set against a wall. The symbolic value of these furnishings had become all-important.

  Even for those with little, the possession of objects, and their display, was not necessarily merely a matter of fashion or status. Individual objects could suggest a higher standard of living than a family had achieved, a way of indicating their owners’ hopes and dreams. The pioneer mother of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who from the 1870s moved from log cabin to sod house to claim shanty across nearly 2,500 kilometres, carefully transported a china shepherdess to each new house, placing it ceremoniously on a purpose-built shelf that the children were not allowed to touch. After one move it was unpacked only once a wooden floor had replaced the house’s original earthen one. Then, with a ‘red-checked cloth on the table’, she sighed, ‘Now we’re living like civilized folks again.’

  The tablecloth – even for this family where furniture was constructed out of tree-stumps – was another sign of ‘civilized’ living, one of the markers of the new emphasis put on communal meals. As late as the seventeenth century, while the rich ate off pewter, or, among the greatest, silver or even gold, most had no individual dishes, and helped themselves directly from a central dish, into which food had been ladled from the cooking vessel. Over time more households began to acquire wooden trenchers or pewter dishes, and where that happened, diners were now expected to take their portion from the main platter with a knife and fingers. Earthenware and stoneware then began to replace wood and pewter: three-quarters of households in London and half of country families in Britain owned some earthenware goods by the early eighteenth century, a five-fold increase over half a century. After that, different types of china and tableware spread widely. By the last third of the century, many of the German middle classes naturally expected to own pewter, earthenware or porcelain. One Hamburg merchant had all of these things, as well as fifteen knives, twenty silver spoons, and a fork, while even a hu
mble blacksmith and his family owned a number of cups, coffee pots, jugs, bowls, plates and soup plates, as well as fifteen spoons and three serving spoons.

  The single fork and the odd numbers of knives and spoons are telling. Spoons dated back to the Romans, and had been used across Europe forever after, while table knives had arrived in Europe with the ‘barbarian’ invasions of the early Middle Ages. Both of these implements were regarded as personal items, belonging to the individual diner, rather than being household goods held in common, and visitors routinely brought their own with them. This pattern of behaviour is still reflected in several languages. In Italian, cutlery is posate, from the verb posare, to place: diners were expected to place their knives on the table when they were ready to eat. In German, the word is Besteck, a sheath, the one that held the knife that diners carried to the table (the sheath later expanded to include a spoon and fork too).

  During the Renaissance, the sharp points of table knives were blunted, domesticating them for household mealtimes. As this new round-ended implement was no longer capable of spearing food to lift it from the serving dish on to an individual plate, another stabbing implement was needed to replace it. The Romans had used forks for cooking and in food preparation, but not at table; the fork had then vanished entirely from the continent, not reappearing until the tenth and eleventh centuries, as an import from the Byzantine Empire, and it remained a foreign oddity, not embraced by the general population. It was in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that forks became objects of daily use in Italy, when pasta became a local staple: unlike spoons and knives, forks are perfectly designed tools for noodles. The fork may have travelled to France from Italy with Catherine de’ Medici, who married Henri II of France in 1547, but a quarter of a century later their son, Henri III, was still trying, and failing, to encourage their use. In Tudor England two-pronged sucket forks were used to spear sticky sweetmeats, but otherwise (larger) forks were known only as agricultural implements. Later, James I used a fork, but few imitated him. The masses certainly didn’t, and the practice of eating with knives and spoons was what was exported to the new world. At Plymouth colony, from its foundation to the middle of the seventeenth century, spoons were the most common eating implement. Even knives were rare, while forks were, says one historian, simply ‘non-existent’.

  In the Netherlands in the same century, even in the heart of the new commodity market, while forks were not unknown, they were confined to the very rich. A merchant boasted that, at his daughter’s wedding, ‘There were forty-two complete place settings for the guests – knife, fork and spoon, as well as glassware, plate and napkin’. It is telling that he itemizes each piece of cutlery, but not the other components of the table setting. For most of the population, in most places, however, it was the eighteenth century before the fork became more than a fanciful luxury for the wealthy. Even in London, the urban centre, only 14 per cent of households owned table knives or forks at all, and a scant 2 per cent of rural households did. Little had altered half a century later, when fewer than two households in ten in some counties of New York possessed a fork, and only half of the inventories in Massachusetts at the same date listed even a single knife or fork. The residents of Greifswald, a busy German Hanseatic port city, began to use knives and forks around this time, but as a trade hub, it was perhaps more open to new fashions.

  As the fork had appeared in the Renaissance as a response to the changing shape of the knife, so its spread in the eighteenth century was also a response to changing fashion, this time to the increasing prevalence of earthenware. Wooden trenchers were slightly hollowed in the centre and had a rim around the edge, the perfect shape to allow the bowl of a spoon to gather food from the bottom and neaten it up on the edge before lifting it to the mouth. China and earthenware plates were flat, with at most a raised border, and those eating from new plates with spoons found themselves chasing their food around the plate. The solution was to add a spearing implement to hold the food in place while it was cut, or to raise an already bite-sized piece: the fork.* Not everyone accepted the novelty – the British Navy persisted in its refusal to accept new-fangled forks until 1897.

  For others, it was not so much that they rejected the new implements, rather that they had simply never encountered them. In the USA, as elsewhere, the dissemination of these utensils was frequently confined to urban areas, or to relatively prosperous rural ones. A ferryman and his wife in Maryland in the middle of the eighteenth century still ate entirely as their ancestors had done, from a single wooden dish with their hands: ‘They used neither knife, fork, spoon, plate, or napkin’. They were not unusual. Even when eating utensils became more common, and most no longer lived with quite such a minimal level of possessions, many still had far less than urban middle-class writers might lead us to suppose. As late as the 1870s, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s family’s table implements were personal: each person had a tin plate, a steel knife and a fork; the adults also had a tin cup each, as did the smallest child, while the two older girls shared one mug between them.

  That the adults took more of the scant resources than the children was the norm. Adults automatically took priority, not only in possessions, but every other respect too. Adults had their own utensils, while children shared; adults were served first and, when food was scarce, most plentifully; and adults sat while children stood. The world was made by and for adult men, and children were required to adapt to their requirements, not vice versa.

  For most of history, children had been treated as small, imperfect adults. This meant, on the one hand, that children were treated as inferior, but on the other, it also meant adults and children interacted together without the boundaries that, since the twentieth century, both age groups have expected. Play, for example, was rarely age dependent. As late as the seventeenth century, children participated in adult games: they bowled, gambled, or played at skittles or dice, just as adults enjoyed games – hide-and-seek, blindman’s buff – that today are considered for children. Rather than produce items specifically designed for children, manufacturers merely produced smaller versions of adult goods, be they scaled-down whistles and rattles, bows and arrows, or battledores and shuttlecocks. Delft tiles from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries show children not only skipping and rolling hoops, but also playing with skittles and miniature golf clubs. On Twelfth Night, whoever found the bean hidden in the seasonal Twelfth Night cake was named king of the evening. A painting by Jan Steen from 1668 shows a toddler with a paper crown being handed a glass of wine to drink the traditional toast; had an adult found the bean, the scene would have been exactly the same. The line between adults’ and children’s possessions, and adults’ and children’s play, was fluid. ‘Babies’, the English word for dolls until the eighteenth century, were, for the most part, not the ragged and worn objects of children’s affections that have become familiar, but expensive adult possessions, usually manufactured to display the new fashions. In 1699, a fractious child in Warwickshire was lent a visiting adult’s ‘wax baby in swaddles’, but the story ended unhappily: the little girl dropped it, and, being wax and therefore not a toy in the modern sense, it ‘broke to pieces … [its] life was very short’.

  The word ‘toy’ itself reflected the lack of age-defined expectations for play. From the sixteenth century, a toy was a trifle, or an inexpensive ornamental object. Shakespeare used it to mean anything of no value but great charm or cleverness (‘Why ’tis a … knacke, a toy, a tricke…’), a funny story (‘I never may believe These antique fables, nor these Fairy toyes’), or even a woman’s cap (‘Any Silke, any Thred, any Toyes for your head’). By the eighteenth century, it referred to an entire classification of small decorative items made of metal: shoe buckles, or boutonnieres, were toys. (But so, confusingly, was a button-hook.) Until the late eighteenth century, toys specifically designed to amuse children needed to have a prefix: ‘playing-toys’.

  Before 1750, few toys are mentioned in the colonies, almost none are depic
ted in portraits, and fewer still have survived. It was only as the century progressed that toys took a more prominent part in the lives of children. The popularization of the writings of the philosopher John Locke, who thought children learned through play, encouraged hopeful mothers to buy toys for their offspring. Eliza Pinckney, in South Carolina, bought her three-month-old son alphabet bricks, to ‘play himself into learning’. As babies’ and young children’s dress was unisex, so too were their toys: rattles, hoops, Noah’s Arks, jigsaws, pull-toys. And as children began to wear gender-specific clothes, so too were they given gender-specific toys. Running-about toys (hoops, hobbyhorses, balls, kites) were for boys, while girls had dolls and miniature versions of household objects. Boys had a wider range of toys, from variations on military themes (lead soldiers, guns, swords, bugles, drums and so on) to outdoor items such as wagons. In the new world, toys – and attitudes towards them – varied geographically. The south and the Middle Colonies saw children playing with kites, skittles, hoops and tops, as well as outdoor games – races, tag, blindman’s buff and others – while in the more Puritan New England, many elements of play were distrusted as time-wasting and unproductive, and so ungodly.*