The Making of Home

by Judith Flanders

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  A Note on the Author

  Copyright

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

  THE MAKING OF HOME. Copyright © 2014 by Judith Flanders. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  Extract from “Newdigate Poem” from Complete Verse by Hilaire Belloc reprinted by permission of Peters Fraser & Dunlop on behalf of the Estate of Hilaire Belloc.

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  First published in Great Britain by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  First U.S. Edition: September 2015

  eISBN 9781466875487

  First eBook edition: June 2015

  * German das Heim and Dutch heem had become obsolete by the late eighteenth century, but then revived, partly as back-formations from English.

  * Much of what is known about ownership of possessions in earlier centuries, not only in the Netherlands, comes from inventories that were compiled on the deaths of their owners. Depending on the country and date, inventories might be taken for the poor as well as the rich, although they were more common among the prosperous and wealthy. While they tell us what was owned, they do not always indicate how many items were owned, or where in the house they were found, which would guide us to their usage. Still, these records are frequently all we have, and they are very useful in comparing actuality to what books and journals – or paintings – present as the norm.

  * It is thought that less than 1 per cent of these paintings have survived, so our knowledge of the genre is, by any definition, a very partial one.

  * Throughout the twentieth century, and even today, many Dutch people cover their tables with carpets, assuming it is a tradition handed down from the seventeenth century. In fact, the custom emerged when the paintings were rediscovered in the nineteenth century, at which time it was thought to be a return to a seventeenth-century custom.

  * Spittoons, also called spitting-basins or spit-boxes in the UK, and cuspidors in the USA, were bowl- or vase-shaped metal or earthenware receptacles that sat on the floor, some having an insert with a shaped hole for the spit to run down.

  * Given a book with such a long timespan, the choice of names to describe countries is not straightforward. The geographical area of the Netherlands in the sixteenth or seventeenth century is not the same as it is today; references to Italy and Germany before, respectively, 1861 and 1871 fail to reflect political reality. I have done my best to conform to contemporaneous political realities, referring to ‘the colonies’ for episodes in the USA that pre-date 1776, ‘the USA’ for those coming after, or using England/Britain before and after the Act of Union. Where necessary, however, I use the names of places before they actually existed, for example to make clear whether it is Plymouth, England or Plymouth, Massachusetts that is being discussed. Where historical reality, clarity and concision are at odds, in general I have chosen concision and clarity over history. Mea culpa.

  * The Tudor Dissolution of the Monasteries, while superficially similar and occurring only a few decades earlier, had by contrast transferred church lands to the sovereign.

  † Records are scanty, yet each time older records are discovered, the establishment of this pattern is found to have already existed.

  * Historians and sociologists say that marriages that meet these criteria conform to what they clunkingly call the Northwest European Late-Marriage Pattern. I will abbreviate the term to ‘late-marriage pattern’.

  * Some scholars have questioned whether the zadruga was in fact routine, or was a nostalgic view of how families had lived in the Good Old Days. Be that as it may, complex families were the norm in rural districts, with nuclear families limited to urban centres.

  * This is, of course, a matter of a broad correlation over an extended period of time, rather than one of complete identity, and there were many anomalies. Northern France is geographically part of northwestern Europe, but its long-surviving feudal institutions saw its marriage patterns match those of its Mediterranean south; France, Ireland and some German-speaking regions remained predominantly Catholic, and yet Ireland and the German lands culturally fit comfortably into home patterns, while France for the most part did not. I am suggesting a strong overlap over centuries, rather than precise adherence to every detail.

  * In the sixteenth century, the Catholic church adopted a similar procedure, with some modifications: there needed to be a notice period, the intent had to be announced in church for a number of weeks, the ceremony had to be performed by a priest, and a set number of witnesses needed to be present.

  * The Act was not implemented in Scotland, and hence Gretna Green, just over the border, became the place where runaways went to marry without parental consent. Marriages that took place legally but without consent in Scotland could not be annulled in England or Wales.

  * That the countries of abandoned babies are for the most part predominantly Catholic is clear. The explanation for this is not immediately apparent to me, and anyway thankfully falls outside the scope of this book. It must be stressed that abandonment does not necessarily equate with illegitimacy: poverty is always the most immediate reason for child-abandonment, and in both home and house countries there is a strong correlation between years of economic hardship and rising numbers of abandoned babies.

  * This must be read, as always, in a historic framework. I am discussing gender equality relative to other places at the same time. An interesting sidelight on companionate marriage and the relative equality it presupposed is one historian’s suggestion that the witch-hunts of northwestern Europe and colonial America, which peaked in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, were the expression of male resentment at this new equality. She notes that the accused tended to be women in non-traditional roles, running businesses or owning land, and suggests that the witch-hunts were a power-struggle in a world where male and female spheres were overlapping for the first time. Certainly the witch-hunts lasted for far longer, and were more ferocious, and more organized, in home countries in Europe and America; house countries in Europe saw far fewer.

  * Slavery was illegal within the Netherlands, but was a major economic component of Dutch trade from the 1630s and 1640s for the next three decades; in those years more slaves were shipped by the Dutch than by any other nation except the Portuguese.

  * It is important to remember how Dutch those who landed in the Mayflower at Plymouth in 1620 were. The group originated in Scrooby, in England, but in 1607 they had fled to the Netherlands in search of religious toleration. There they lived with their pastor for thirteen years, until an advance party of 102 hardy souls sailed on the Mayflower to the new world. Of those 102, fifty had either been born in the Netherlands or had been taken there as infants; most probably spoke Dutch and thought of Leiden as their home. Indeed, it was the very fact that they were beginning to sound and think like Dutchmen and -women that pushed their elders to the perilous venture of crossing an ocean. Although the plan had been to head for the British colony of Virginia, in the end, through adverse weather conditions, these Dutchified East Anglians settled geographically much closer to New Amsterdam, in what is today New York and New Jersey.

  * This network of obligations was sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit. The British writer Fanny Trollope, on lending something to an Ohio neighbour, was automatically promised ‘a turn of work for this; you may send for me when you want me’. This was simply pragmatic. If work could be purchased without cash, so much the better in a country that had long used a variety of currencies. In the nineteenth century, Dutch, Russian, French, Mexican, British and various South American coins wer
e all in circulation, with Spanish and Mexican currencies remaining legal tender until 1857. Many continued to calculate in British pounds, shillings and pence, before converting the sum into whichever currency was available.

  * In his comprehensive analysis of this century of catastrophe, Geoffrey Parker includes, in the years between 1636 and 1660, European rebellions and revolts in what are now France, Austria, Scotland, Portugal, France, Spain, Ireland, Naples, Sicily, Russia, the Ukraine, the Netherlands, Turkey, Switzerland and Denmark.

  * The minister’s house actually cost $2.78 and half a penny: $1.25 for a window, 54¢ for the lumber for the door, and 50¢ for its latch, 30¢ for a pipe to funnel smoke out through the roof, and 19.5¢ for nails.

  * The word ‘plantation’ originally meant a new settlement, to describe Ireland after England’s invasion in the sixteenth century, when the English were ‘planted’ there. It was also used by the colonists who arrived in Plymouth, and were frequently known as ‘planters’. The first use of the word to mean agricultural land tended by slave labour dates from 1706.

  * For British readers, an American root-cellar is not a cellar in the sense of being an underground room. It is a space that might be less than 1 metre wide and deep, used to keep root vegetables cool in summer and prevent them from freezing in winter.

  * The word ‘corridor’ derives from Italian, where it meant an arcade-like walkway between two buildings. English initially used the architecturally less precise ‘passage’, only in the eighteenth century adapting the Italian word to mean an interior-connecting route.

  * The Dutch author of ‘The Social History of the Curtain’ mentions only the former possibility. The omission of the idea of privacy may link to her passing comment that it is uncommon in the Netherlands today to draw the curtains at night. It has been suggested that the Dutch today don’t have curtains in the front rooms because ‘good Calvinists have nothing to hide’, that the desire for privacy is an indication of the presence of something shameful. By contrast, residents of the inward-turning homes of the UK would regard not blocking a lit room from the view of the street as anything from unusual to unimaginable. One cannot imagine a British historian omitting privacy from the list of motivating factors.

  * Although the curtains, and often their number, were listed in inventories, the number of windows rarely was, so it is difficult to say when paired curtains became the norm.

  * Gurlitt’s book, Im Bürgerhaus, was published in 1888, and the author should not be confused with his grandson, also Cornelius. Cornelius Sr’s son Hildebrand was deeply implicated in looting art treasures for the Nazi government in the 1930s; his hoard of more than a thousand works of art was kept secretly by Cornelius Jr until it was discovered in 2013.

  * There is the anomaly of Scotland, which alone in Britain took to apartment buildings for the middle classes before the twentieth century. Elsewhere, no matter how small or inconvenient, or how divided up into multiple occupancy, houses were the basis for most housing. Londoners, with 40 per cent of its families living in some form of shared occupancy, none the less grimly rejected apartment living as long as possible.

  * Back-to-back houses shared party walls not only with the houses on each side of them, but also with the house directly behind, thus having no rear lighting or access.

  * A New England household typically burnt up to 40 cords of wood a year, which theoretically stretched over 90 metres. A full third of a man’s working life was spent doing chores linked to keeping warm.

  * With care and a temperate climate, yeast can survive for a week or two, but in hot weather it perishes quickly. There were ways of drying it, but these too required time and careful planning (and the leavening power of the yeast declined). Raising agents, their availability and differences in ease of use require an entire book to themselves. In areas where spirits were distilled, yeast that could be used as a raising agent was sometimes, but not always, available as a by-product. Sourdoughs, where natural yeasts can survive for years, were the mainstay of many regions, but they too required more time and planning than low-rise breads.

  * At this stage the machines had to be started, stopped and the water filled and emptied manually – the one automated procedure was the rotating and rubbing of the laundry. That even this reduced the work so substantially gives a very clear indication of how arduous the task had been.

  * An advertisement for an electric chafing-dish in 1904 boasted that it could be used on a train or in a hotel room. It was not male travellers who were expected to cook when away from home, but women who, instead of joining the men in dining-cars or hotel restaurants, could carry their home-like isolation with them. It seems unlikely that this was common, but that advertisers thought it desirable is telling.

  * From Cowper onward, tea was frequently referred to as ‘the cup that cheers’, and the phrase is generally attributed to him, even though he borrowed it from Bishop Berkeley, who applied it rather less domestically to tar-water, a medicinal drink made from pine resin.

  * Traces of the movable history of tables can still be heard in English idiom: tables continue to be turned, if only metaphorically, laying, setting and clearing tables are equally metaphorical, since in none of these cases is a table actually laid or set out or cleared away any more.

  * The meaning of commode, convenience, has seen the word used, although now rarely, in the UK as a synonym for that ultimate convenience, the chamber-pot, and also for its container, the chamber-pot cupboard; in some parts of the USA commode is used this way, but in others it has migrated to mean a lavatory. The various euphemisms for this object, and the room that contains it, also need clarifying. Before the twentieth century, the British lavatory was a place to wash; after that, the word was transferred to the lavatory itself (which is the way I use it here), or to the room in which the lavatory was located. US usage varies with geography, a lavatory being a sink, the room that contains a sink or, as in the UK, a WC. It was not merely furniture that evolved: so too did its vocabulary.

  * These two walnut armchairs are attributed to Thomas Roberts, furniture-maker to the royal palace from 1686 to 1714, and their upholstery is thought to be by the French craftsman Jean Poitevin, who also worked for the English court. (The chairs are now at Knole, in Kent.)

  * And it may be that traces of this older style have remained, all but invisible to modern eyes. Pubs in Britain were originally simply the front rooms of private houses, and were decorated as such, the bar counter being a nineteenth-century addition. Today’s pub layouts, with tables and benches placed around an empty central space, might suggest a surviving remnant of pre-eighteenth-century furniture arrangement in daily use.

  * It must be stressed that this was life as lived among the elite in colonial Virginia, where otherwise 80 per cent of the population continued to inhabit, at most, two-roomed houses. In general, North America lagged behind Europe: as late as the 1750s, in parts of the mid-Atlantic states, only 65 per cent of households owned a table. A full century after that, many pioneer families continued to live in a style Europeans had left behind nearly two centuries previously.

  * Chinese teaware soon became entirely unsuitable for British tea-drinking, so radically did the drink alter. Chinese handleless cups were fine for their twice decanted, and therefore cooled, drink, but not for tea served, British-style, as hot as possible. A handle was therefore added. This, together with the inclusion of milk in the drink, made larger cups more practical. The addition of sugar necessitated a small spoon, the teaspoon, to stir it with, and once there was a wet spoon, a saucer was needed to rest it on.

  * To Defoe in 1708, silk was a native English product, its French origins forgotten. The Huguenots who had fled religious persecution in France from the 1680s had become so well established as silk weavers in Spitalfields in the East End of London that by the early eighteenth century silk was considered to be as English as wool. In fact, the Huguenots had not historically been weavers, but took up the trade on their arrival in England. In
France Protestants had been barred from employment in the Grandes Fabriques that held the monopolies.

  * The desire to see people in their own houses spread into many curious places. Mme Tussaud’s waxworks had shown murderers from the beginning of the nineteenth century, but after the arrival of ‘At Home’ journalism, the company began, for the first time, to purchase not merely the clothes of the convicted criminals, but the rooms in which the crimes had occurred, to be reconstructed for the delectation of the public.

  * Along the northeastern coast of North America, the word ‘hutch’, to mean a display dresser, is still in use, almost 150 years after the last citation in the Oxford English Dictionary.

  * In many countries, the arrival of the fork and the rounding of the knife-end occurred fairly close together in time, and so the fork naturally acquired the piercing element that the knife was losing. In the USA, the round knife was in use long before the fork, habitually paired with a spoon. Thus, it has been suggested, Americans eat with their forks upside-down (or right-side-up, depending on where this is being read) because, when the fork finally replaced the spoon, it took over the spoon’s scooping motion, giving a three-stage eating pattern of pierce-cut, implement transfer, scoop, instead of the European single-motion pierce-cut-balance.

  * One modern historian notes that today Amish children are given, in place of toys, a calf or lamb to call their own and take care of, or a section of a garden to plant, similar, she suggests, to Puritan forms of ‘play’.

  * Although it is not always easy to tell: small chairs that today are identified as children’s chairs were sometimes footstools for adults; little tables and chests-of-drawers were sometimes intended for children, but others were miniature models made by cabinetmakers to promote their wares.

  * Ibsen satirized this conflation of home and marriage among the middle classes in Ghosts (1881), when the conventional Pastor Manders assumes that Osvald Alving, an artist, ‘never had the chance of knowing what a real home is like’, because his friends are all artists, who cannot afford to ‘set up a home’, which he equates ‘exactly’ with marriage. Sherlock Holmes was merely one of a fictional range of middle-class bachelors who lived in a simulacrum of home, complete with professional ‘angel of the house’, a resident landlady.