The Making of Home
Page 38
* Confusingly, there is only the most tenuous connection between this nineteenth-century style and Queen Anne herself (reigned 1702–14). The early architects of Queen Anne style were thought to have drawn their inspiration from seventeenth-century red-brick country houses, although in fact many of these houses pre-dated Anne’s reign.
* As with many art terms, it was originally an insult, drawn from a fictional character in a newspaper, Gottlieb Biedermaier (sic), a portmanteau name from two poems by Joseph von Scheffel, ‘Biedermanns Abendgemütlichkeit’ and ‘Bummelmaiers Klage’ (‘Biedermann’s Cosy Evening’ and ‘Bummelmaier’s Lament’), which were merged to produce a satirical portrait of the self-satisfied middle-class man. So the term Biedermeier, applied to domestic interiors, was intended as a condemnation of bourgeois décor.
* The need for a tangible link to the past, whether authentic or imagined, has not vanished. An analysis of the wood of a chair displayed in Pilgrim Hall, Plymouth, Massachusetts, and said to have been brought to the colonies in the Mayflower, shows that it must have been made in America.
* The Vatican’s Swiss Guard is the last surviving relic of what was once Switzerland’s major export industry: mercenaries.
* The main indicators of Cape Cod today are symmetrical construction in a house of one or one and a half storeys, a pitched roof and a central chimney.
* The terms log house and log cabin were used interchangeably, although in the nineteenth century a distinction was sometimes intended. A log cabin was built from round, unhewn logs infilled with moss, straw and mud, with no window and no chimney, smoke exiting through a hole in the roof. A log house used hewn logs, which were infilled with stones and then plastered; it had glass windows, a chimney and a shingled roof. In general usage, the main distinction was whether the building was made of round or hewn logs. Many who lived in a round-logged construction that had a chimney and windows still called it a cabin. Sometimes the choice of word indicated size – cabins had one or, at most, two rooms on one floor, or one floor with an unfinished loft; more rooms, or a finished second storey, turned the cabin into a house. As all these caveats indicate, both terms were fluid.
* It must be noted that while the national parks are usually scrupulous in pointing out any inauthenticity in their historic displays, the Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Site sows a little confusion. As well as straightforwardly acknowledging that the cabin is not the original, it retains an early-twentieth-century plaque that proclaims, ‘Here over the log cabin where Abraham Lincoln was born, destined to preserve the Union and free the slave, a grateful people have dedicated this memorial to unity, peace, and brotherhood among the states.’
* The 1662 hearth tax in England, which was imposed to pay for the newly restored monarchy, engendered riots by those outraged at a levy ‘exposing every Man’s House to be entered into and searched at Pleasure’, almost the language of physical violation.
* A later version of such a hood is illustrated in the plate section, see no. 9. Hearths by partition walls, covered by hoods, or in bays, survived well into the twentieth century in both Scotland and Ireland.
* Footwarmers in art could symbolize amorous preoccupations – one engraving of a footwarmer is entitled ‘Mignon des Dames’ [favourite of the women]. The shoe slipped off in Metsu’s Woman Reading a Letter (see plate section, no. 3), encourages a symbolic reading there too. Despite this symbolic reading, there is good evidence to suggest that footwarmers and zoldertjes were used by both sexes.
* Muthesius (1861–1927), the author of Das englische Haus (The English House, 1904), was socially as well as professionally connected to many of the architects of the Arts and Crafts movement, and his work has been profoundly influential. It is important to bear in mind that, despite its title, his book is not about ‘The English House’, but about ‘The English Houses of the Rich’. Sentences such as ‘An English kitchen without a gas stove is unthinkable nowadays’ reveal his unconscious bias, for at the date he was writing only 33 per cent of those who had gas at all used gas cookers. As late as the 1930s, 40 per cent of all working-class housing had no access to gas for lighting or cooking.
* In the nineteenth century, the Dutch term for them was still ‘English windows’, but the speed of transmission between the two countries clouded the origins of the invention, and it was long thought that the windows were Dutch in design, brought to England with the court of Charles II on his restoration in 1660. (Modern Dutch simply calls them ‘sliding windows’, schuiframen.) The architectural historian Hentie Louw has, however, definitively shown that the windows’ movement was in the opposite direction.
* Rembrandt’s famous Night Watch looks both more glamorous and more martial than these mundane duties suggest; its real title, The Shooting Company of Frans Banning Cocq, makes clear that the men portrayed were members of a militia company, not the street watch.
* One historian has very plausibly suggested that it was the state’s control of street lighting that led to enemies of the people being lanterné, hanged from street lamps, after the storming of the Bastille, rather than from shop signs, or trees, or other easily available high points. He also explains that the hangings were not, as many imagine, from lamp posts, which did not yet exist in France, but from the ropes that held the lamps. Some larger squares had lamps attached to wall-fixtures, and these were also used, but they were the exception.
* It is interesting to note that some twenty-first-century cities, motivated by energy-conservation and light-pollution concerns, as well as cost, have been experimenting with a return to dark night streets. Preliminary reports suggest that these produce lower crime rates, belying centuries of fears.
* The little conical hats on rods that many today call snuffers are properly known as extinguishers. Snuffers were adapted scissors, with a small box on one blade that caught the burnt section of the wick as they were snipped. Snuffers were luxury items from the sixteenth century, appearing in ordinary households at the end of the seventeenth century.
† These boxes hung by every fireplace. Each box was divided in two. One side held a scrap of fabric, a flint and a striker. The flint was struck over the fabric, the sparks setting it alight. A candle was then lit from this small blaze before the damper, in the second compartment, was used to put out the flame. A modern historian estimates that if the user was proficient, it took three minutes to get a flame; the less skilled might need half an hour.
* Arc lighting, first demonstrated by Sir Humphry Davy as early as 1802, is produced by two electrodes separated by a gas: the light is created when a voltage is pulsed across the gap. (Fluorescent lights are arc lights, although they use mercury rather than the carbon electrodes of the nineteenth century.)
* Another prosaic reason suggests itself. When furniture was arranged against the walls, the most routine job for cabinetmakers was mending broken table- and chair-legs, weakened by the constant pulling and pushing. Did householders simply decide that leaving furniture in place would cut down on damage? No evidence survives to suggest this, but then, nor does it for the light-switch theory. Changing patterns of everyday behaviour are rarely clear-cut in origin.
* Given the prevalence of gas in British homes, it is surprising that it was barely used for cooking before the twentieth century. It may be that the range, which also heated water in a side-boiler, and provided heat for the room, made it more obviously useful. It was the installation of gas meters from the 1880s that first made a place for gas cookers. Until the twentieth century, cooking with electricity, too, was almost unknown in Britain. Being much more expensive than either coal or gas it was seen as a gimmick, best confined to gadgets such as toasters and kettles.
* Schütte-Lihotzky’s life would have the makings of an action-drama, if only films were made about kitchen designers: a committed Communist, she lived in the Soviet Union from 1930, before fleeing the Stalinist purges in 1937. In World War II she worked for the Resistance until her capture by the Gestapo; after the war, her Com
munism and vocal support for female emancipation ensured that she could not earn a living in Austria, and most of her later commissions were abroad. It was 1980 before she and her work were formally honoured in Vienna, more than half a century after her pioneering kitchen design was first manufactured.
* It had to be unplugged after it was heated, and plugged in again every time the heat dissipated, but it was still much better – cleaner, and more efficient – than an iron heated on the stove.
* The original quotation has been attributed to John Ruskin, William James, the anthropologist Mary Douglas and Sigmund Freud (of course). Lord Palmerston is now generally accepted as the phrase’s originator.
* This was no doubt considered beneficial: the nitrogen in men’s urine (women’s is more acidic) speeds up the decomposition of kitchen refuse, and is still recommended for compost heaps today.
* Seaside was where The Truman Show (1998) was filmed, this satire on reality television appropriately located in a confected town.