‘to be eternal truths’: 1710 households: Tim Meldrum, ‘Domestic Service, Privacy and the Eighteenth-Century Metropolitan Household’, Urban History, 26, 1999, pp. 33–4.
‘the Victorian widow’: ‘be untaught and rude’: Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, W. L. Renwick, ed. (Oxford, Clarendon, 1970), pp. 1–3; 1865 inquest: this inquest was cited in John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies: Two Lectures ([1867], Orpington, George Allen, 1882), pp. 78–9. He dated it to the year of his lecture, 1867, and named the Daily Telegraph as his source. While I have been unable to locate the article he cites, the inquest, which in reality was held on 10 February 1865, was widely reported, for example in the Caledonian Mercury, 13 February 1865, p. 3.
1. THE FAMILY WAY
‘the world combined’: Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trs. Talcott Parsons, foreword by R. H. Tawney (London, G. Allen & Unwin, 1930); coal mining: E. A. Wrigley, Continuity, Chance and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 54.
‘cumulative great effect’: Samuel Johnson, The Works of Samuel Johnson, D. J. Greene, ed. (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1977), vol. 10, pp. 365–6, cited by Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (London, Yale University Press), p. xxvi.
‘wreck of his ship’: Christopher Hill, ‘Robinson Crusoe’, History Workshop, autumn 1980, pp. 6–24.
‘much more valuable’: ‘Writing upon Trade’: Daniel Defoe, A Weekly Review of the Affairs of France, vol. 9, 11 June 1713, p. 214.
‘consumer revolution was’: Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London, Hutchinson, 1982), pp. 9–33, and Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford, Blackwell, 1987), pp. 17–57, passim.
‘but necessary’: revolutions: Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behaviour and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. ix, outlines the period 1650–1850, and the American, French and British revolutions. He doesn’t specifically name the Dutch Revolt, because it is the starting point of his argument; ‘capitalist economy’: Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500–1815 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 167, 129; land-ownership: ibid., p. 169.
‘property-enhancing purposes’: Mary S. Hartman, The Household and the Making of History: A Subversive View of the Western Past (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004), passim.
‘reconcile your friends’: Alberti cited in David Gaunt, ‘Kinship: Thin Red Lines or Thick Blue Blood’, David I. Kertzer and Marizio Barbagli, eds, The History of the European Family, vol. 1, Family Life in Early Modern Times, 1500–1789 (London, Yale University Press, 2001), p. 259; Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, T. J. B. Spencer, ed. (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1967), III.iv.150–52.
‘part of the family’: Pepys, Diary, 31 December 1662, vol. 3, p. 301; eighteenth-century diarist: Gaunt, ‘Kinship: Thin Red Lines or Thick Blue Blood’, Kertzer and Barbagli, The History of the European Family, vol. 1, p. 259; Census of Great Britain, 1851 (London, Longman Brown, 1854), p. xxxiv.
‘much of Europe’: Hartman, The Household and the Making of History, pp. 118ff. I rely heavily on this volume for my description of the northwest European late-marriage pattern, as well as using it as a jumping-off point for my own ideas on the creation of home. Readers of Professor Hartman’s revolutionary work will recognize my enormous debt to her work throughout this chapter. Her thesis, that it was the northwest European marriage pattern that precipitated the consumer revolution, is one of those radical insights that seem obvious once they are pointed out. I have merely extended her theory, to suggest that, if it was the marriage pattern that precipitated the consumer world, then it was home that acted as the reagent between the young couple with cash and the consuming world. My puzzlement at the quiet academic reception of Hartman’s ground-breaking work, and my admiration for it, know no bounds.
‘non-nuclear kin resident’: Rhode Island and England: Peter Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations: Essays in Historical Sociology (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 30–31; Netherlands: de Vries and van der Woude, First Modern Economy, p. 163.
‘calling patroness’: Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Vivien Jones, ed. ([1813], Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1996), p. 103.
‘good life companions’: James Wood, ‘God Talk: The Book of Common Prayer at Three Hundred and Fifty’, New Yorker, 22 October 2012, pp. 73–6, identifies Pride and Prejudice’s parody of the Book of Common Prayer. Its origins in the changing role of marriage is my own.
‘communal decision’: the Bible verses are, respectively, 1 Corinthians 7:9, and Genesis 2:18.
‘personal wellbeing’: ‘as a property arrangement’: John Boswell, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe (New York, Vintage, 1995), pp. xxi–xxii, cited in John R. Gillis, A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual and the Quest for Family Values (New York, Basic, 1996), p. 134; domestic service: Hartman, The Household and the Making of History, p. 251; 40 per cent: Kertzer and Barbagli, History of the European Family, vol. 1, p. x; adolescents: Hartman, The Household and the Making of History, pp. 55ff.
‘drove capitalism’s supply’: Protestantism and late marriage: Hartman, The Household and the Making of History, pp. 210–12, 215; Black Death estimate: Dictionary of the Middle Ages, Joseph R. Strayer, ed. (New York, Scribner, 1983), vol. 2, pp. 257–67.
‘marriage was void’: this and the previous two paragraphs based on Raffaella Sarti, Europe at Home: Family and Material Culture, 1500–1800, trs. Allan Cameron (London, Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 14–19, and Kertzer and Barbagli, History of the European Family, vol. 1, pp. xii–xiii.
‘around 50 per cent’: women’s longevity: Hartman, The Household and the Making of History, p. 96; the outline list is hers too, p. 39; interpretation of records: it is Emanuel le Roy Ladurie who suggests that women were just omitted from the records; the suggestion of infanticide is from Hartman, The Household and the Making of History, pp. 118, 158; population data: John R. Gillis, For Better, for Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the Present (New York, Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 11.
‘at the same date’: illegitimate births: Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, p. 522; Suffolk: Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt, Children in English Society (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969–73), vol. 2, p. 584; Austria: Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500 (London, Longman, 1995), pp. 82–3; high rates: ibid., pp. 91, 93, 94; the figures cited are from David Kertzer, Sacrificed for Honor: Italian Infant Abandonment and the Politics of Reproductive Control (Boston, Beacon, 1993), pp. 72–3.
‘these do not appear’: bundling: Hartman, The Household and the Making of History, p. 62.
‘to begin withal’: Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (London, Harper, 1977), p. 284; fiction: John Hajnal, ‘European Marriage Patterns in Perspective’, D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley, eds, Population in History: Essays in Historical Demography (London, Edward Arnold, 1969), pp. 101–43. I have also drawn on John Hajnal, ‘Two Kinds of Pre-Industrial Household Systems’, Population and Development Review, 8, 3, 1982, pp. 449–94. Note that this contains sections that did not appear when the essay was republished in Richard Wall, with Jean Robin and Peter Laslett, eds, Family Forms in Historic Europe (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983); Hertfordshire woman: cited in Hartman, The Household and the Making of History, p. 27.
‘trade and colonization, slaves’: Honorourable East India Company: M. W. van Boven, ‘Towards a New Age of Partnership: An Ambitious World Heritage Project (UNESCO Memory of the World – reg.form, 2002)’, in VOC Archives, accessed online, 20 January 2014, http://portal.unesco.org; fo
otnote: de Vries and van der Woude, First Modern Economy, p. 400.
‘10 per cent’: VOC: de Vries and van der Woude, First Modern Economy, pp. 359, 368, 384; ‘The revolution in trade’: Daniel Defoe, A Plan of the English Commerce: Being a compleat prospect of the Trade of this Nation as well the home Trade as the Foreign ([1728], Oxford, Blackwell, 1927), pp. 36–8; urban Netherlands: Sarti, Europe at Home, p. 86.
‘falling on the righteous’: Reformation: these triggers for change, in slightly different form, and with different emphases, appear in André Burguière and François Lebrun, ‘The One Hundred and One Families of Europe’, André Burguière, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Martine Segalen, Françoise Zonabend, eds, A History of the Family, vol. 2: The Impact of Modernity, trs. Sarah Hanbury Tenison (Cambridge, MA, Belknap Press, 1996), pp. 21–2; conduct books: Wayne E. Franits, Paragons of Virtue: Women and Domesticity in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 66; footnote: John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York, Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 25–33, pp. 3–4, and John Navin, ‘“Decrepit in Their Early Youth”: English Children in Holland and Plymouth Plantation’, James Marten, ed., Children in Colonial America (New York, New York University Press, 2007), p. 138.
‘harmony and philosophy’: ‘in the manner of thrifty and modest households’: cited in Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, p. 53; Plutarch’s metaphor: the interpretation of the painting is from Franits, Paragons of Virtue, p. 88; Sarah B. Pomeroy, ed., Plutarch’s Advice to the Bride and Groom and A Consolation to His Wife, trs. Donald Russell (New York, Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 5.
‘the work repainted’: Laura Lunger Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity: From Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 4, highlights the portrait of the children of Charles I, p. 26, although the domestic interpretation is my own.
‘porcelain vase on display’: Devis: [Anon.], Polite Society by Arthur Devis, 1712–1787: Portraits of the English Country Gentleman and His Family (Preston, Harris Museum and Art Gallery, 1983).
‘take on with him’: Anthony Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, Stephen Wall, ed. (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1986), pp. 168, 128, cited by Deborah Cohen, Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2006), p. 92.
‘consumption and socialization’: Spenser: cited in Crowley, Invention of Comfort, p. 77; household and economy: Marion W. Gray, Productive Men, Reproductive Women: The Agrarian Household and the Emergence of Separate Spheres during the German Enlightenment (New York, Berghahn Books, 2000), pp. 51, 78–9, except for das ganze Haus and definition, Gaunt, ‘Kinship: Thin Red Lines or Thick Blue Blood’, Kertzer and Barbagli, History of the European Family, vol. 1, p. 280.
‘valued, and invaluable’: USA: Jack Larkin, The Reshaping of Everyday Life, 1790–1840 (New York, Harper & Row, 1988), pp. 36–7; wives’ roles: Hartman, The Household and the Making of History, pp. 160–81; widows: ibid., p. 65–6.
‘70 per cent’: New York: Diana diZerega Wall, ‘Separating the Spheres in Early Nineteenth-Century New York City: Redefining Gender among the Middle Classes’, James Symonds, ed., Table Settings: The Material Culture and Social Context of Dining, AD 1700–1900 (Oxford, Oxbow Books, 2010), p. 82.
‘nature of home’: children and the Industrial Revolution: de Vries and van der Woude, First Modern Economy, pp. 603–4, point out that in 1801, of more than 500 companies in two regions of the Netherlands in 1801, 15 per cent employed women, while 47 per cent employed children; Familie: Gaunt, ‘Kinship: Thin Red Lines or Thick Blue Blood’, in Kertzer and Barbagli, History of the European Family, vol. 1, p. 280.
‘emotional investment’: Italian: cited in Paul Langford, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character, 1650–1850 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 44; birth announcements: Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, p. 521, except for the description of the favour, which is from Zumthor, Rembrandt’s Holland, p. 96.
‘were the norm’: late-marriage pattern and Industrial Revolution: Hartman, The Household and the Making of History, p. 11–12; James I cited in Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), p. 114; democracy: Hartman, The Household and the Making of History, p. 227.
‘new middle classes’: change for the masses: this is a point made by Hartman, The Household and the Making of History, pp. 78ff., and also Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Ghosts, King, and Progeny: Some Features of Family Life in Early Modern France’, Daedalus, 106, 1977, pp. 87–114. It doesn’t take a particularly acute eye to note that both these historians who stress the agency of family life are women.
‘their own justification’: revolts: Parker, Global Crisis, p. xix; ‘their own justification’: Hill, ‘Robinson Crusoe’, History Workshop, pp. 6–24.
2. A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN
‘a single rushlight’: the information for this Siberian story comes from Vasily Peskov, Lost in the Taiga: One Russian Family’s Fifty-Year Struggle for Survival and Religious Freedom in the Siberian Wilderness, trs. Marian Schwartz (New York, Doubleday, 1994), from The End of the Taiga: Siberian Mysteries, part 2, a Russian-language television documentary, http://rutube.ru/video/509db87f36887fd03a7ff61a0ef1db2e/, accessed 20 March 2013, and translated for me by Ilona Chavasse, and from Mike Dash, ‘For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact, Unaware of WWII’, in Smithsonian.com, 29 January 2013, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/For-40-Years-This-Russian-Family-Was-Cut-Off-From-Human-Contact-Unaware-of-World-War-II-188843001.html, accessed 20 March 2013.
‘Latin for hearth’: hearth: Crowley, Invention of Comfort, p. 8.
‘or for storage’: there is some confusion over the word ‘byre’ in English. A byre was historically a place to house cows, but in the nineteenth century, the love of the archaic, and an etymological confusion between the Old English for byre and the Old Norse for farmhouse led to the application of the word ‘byre’ to farmhouses.
‘already proved popular’: architect-designed housing: Rapoport, House, Form and Culture, p. 2, suggests 5 per cent, while Paul Oliver, Dwellings: The Vernacular House Worldwide (London, Phaidon, 2003), p. 15, thinks it is under 1 per cent; British aristocracy: Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2009), p. 6; speculative builders: Stefan Muthesius, The English Terraced House (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 4–5.
‘said to be original’: workers’ houses: Peter Ennals and Deryck W. Holdsworth, Homeplace: The Making of the Canadian Dwelling over Three Centuries (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1998), p. 52. This was said in relation to Canadian housing, but it is no less true elsewhere; Friesland: de Vries and van der Woude, First Modern Economy, pp. 202–3; colonial houses: James Deetz and Patricia Scott Deetz, The Times of Their Lives: Life, Love, and Death in Plymouth Colony (New York, W. H. Freeman and Co., 2000), p. 184.
‘two or three beds’: labourers’ housing: N. W. Alcock, People at Home: Living in a Warwickshire Village, 1500–1800 (Chichester, Phillimore, 1993), pp. 121–2; sixteenth-century houses: the contents itemized in this and the next paragraph are drawn from Warwickshire inventories, ibid., pp. 49–50.
‘named “saltbox”’: Plymouth colony: the thatch suggestion appears in Deetz and Deetz, Times of Their Lives, pp. 176–7, 183. Many historians think that thatch was banned, but I am persuaded by their suggestion that this is a misreading; house types: outlined in Demos, A Little Commonwealth, and Edward A. Chappell, ‘Housing a Nation: The Transformation of Living Standards in Early America’, Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, Peter J. Albert, eds, Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1994), p. 171.
‘floors and ceilings’: Tinkhams: J. B. Jackson, Landscapes: Selected Writings of J. B. Jackson, Ervin H. Zube, ed. ([no place of public
ation], University of Massachusetts Press, 1970), p. 11–15; cellars: Deetz and Deetz, Times of Their Lives, p. 179.
‘permanent housing’: sod houses: Thomas J. Schlereth, Victorian America: Transformations in Everyday Life, 1876–1915 (New York, HarperCollins, 1991), pp. 88–90, and Daniel E. Sutherland, The Expansion of Everyday Life, 1860–1876 (New York, Harper and Row, 1989), p. 44.
‘two rooms above’: Maryland: C. A. Weslager, The Log Cabin in America: From Pioneer Days to the Present (New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press, 1969), pp. 135ff.
‘purpose-built quarters’: footnote: John Michael Vlach, Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1993), p. 2; Virginia Plantation: the complex archaeological history of this plantation is explored in James Deetz, Flowerdew Hundred: The Archaeology of a Virginia Plantation, 1619–1864 (Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1993), passim; late 1600s: Vlach, Back of the Big House, pp. 2–3; slaves and indentured servants: Barbara Heath, ‘Space and Place within Plantation Quarters in Virginia, 1700–1825’, Clifton Ellis and Rebecca Ginsburg, eds, Cabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and Landscapes of North American Slavery (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2010), p. 162.
‘a single privy’: Philadelphia: Dell Upton, Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2008), p. 26.
‘were behind’: kitchens: Vlach, Back of the Big House, pp. 43.
‘dozen people per room’: the suggestion of the tainting of the word ‘cabin’ with the reality of slavery comes from Jan Cohn, The Palace or the Poorhouse: The American House as a Cultural Symbol (East Lansing, Michigan State University Press, 1979), pp. 182–3; partition of slave housing: Dell Upton, ‘White and Black Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Virginia’, Ellis and Ginsburg, Cabin, Quarter, Plantation, pp. 123–6; multiple occupancy: Vlach, Back of the Big House, pp. 21–2, except for the final figure, which comes from John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (rev. edn, New York, Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 254–5.
The Making of Home Page 28