a boy was sent up a chimney in the house of Mr. Creed, Navy Agent, No. 23 Hans Place, Knightsbridge. Being unable to extricate himself, he remained there for about half an hour, while a person went to fetch assistance. A hole was made through the brick-work, and the boy, at length, released. It appeared, that, in consequence of the unusual construction of the flue in one part, a vast quantity of soot had accumulated there, into which the boy had plunged, and was not able, probably from partial suffocation, to get back again.89
James Dunn was by now a master sweep, working in the same part of London, but he was unwilling to deal with this particular chimney: ‘So dangerous was the sweeping of this chimney considered, that James Dunn, chimney sweeper, No. 46, Hans Town, refused to let his apprentice ascend the flue’.90 A few years later, in 1814, this same house at 23 Hans Place became the home of Jane Austen’s brother Henry. ‘It is a delightful place – more than answers my expectation,’ Jane wrote that August, apparently oblivious of the wretched chimney boy’s plight.91
The boy was lucky to be pulled out alive. An inquest in London in November 1810 heard that Lewis Realy, about eight years old, had suffocated in a similar accident. He ‘was sent up a chimney in the house of Susanna Whitfield, in Little Shire Lane, Temple Bar. After ascending the first part of the flue, he came down, and objected to attempt climbing it a second time.’92 Despite his terror, he was forced back up:
He remained in the chimney a considerable time, and then a boy (William Best) went up, and tried to pull him down by the legs; this not succeeding…[he] ascended another flue, which communicated, but could not extricate Realy, though he received from him his cap and scraper. At a quarter past one, William Herring, a bricklayer, was sent for, who broke an opening into the flue, through which the body of Realy, then dead, was taken. The body, when extricated, was naked, and completely jammed in the chimney.93
The writer of this report was indignant: ‘When we assure our readers this is only one of many authenticated accounts equally dreadful, we leave it to them to reflect how much they are called on to mitigate, by every means in their power, the sufferings of these wretched children, by encouraging the use of mechanical means of sweeping chimneys.’94
Chimneys were of course swept all over England, not just in the great smoky cities. In rural Norfolk on 12 August 1797, James Woodforde had several chimneys cleaned: ‘Holland the chimney sweeper swept my study chimney, parlour ditto – and the chamber chimneys, with kitchen and back-kitchen ditto – in all six. He had a new boy with him who had likely to have lost his life this morning at Weston House in sticking in one [of] their chimnies. I gave the poor boy a shilling.’95 Campaigners had long tried to ban the use of climbing boys, and finally in June 1817 a Bill was passed, only to be thrown out in the House of Lords the following year. It was not until 1875 that the practice of employing climbing boys was banned.
FOUR
HOME AND HEARTH
She was then taken into a parlour, so small that her first conviction was of its being only a passage-room to something better.
Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen
William Pitt the Elder, who died in 1778, once declared: ‘The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail – its roof may shake – the wind may blow through it – the storm may enter – the rain may enter – but the King of England cannot enter! – all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!’1
While this centuries-old sentiment is normally expressed as ‘an Englishman’s home is his castle’, the upper classes did live in country mansions and even occasionally real castles, with an army of servants to run the house and tend the grounds. By the time of the 1801 census, England had a population of just over 8 million living in a country of some 32 million acres – and about 80 to 90 per cent of this land was owned by the aristocracy or landed gentry.2 Some of them had estates of thousands of acres, including large kitchen gardens, lawns, shrubberies and other landscape features, as well as orchards for fruit, woodlands for fuel, rivers and lakes for fishing, and huge swathes of land for farming and shooting wild animals and birds.3 They received ever-increasing income from their tenant farmers, mines and other industrial concerns, as well as from urban developments.
It was accepted that respectable individuals could ask to view these lavish homes, and usually a small sum of money was handed to the gardener or housekeeper for their trouble. In Oxfordshire in July 1785, though, John Byng, the younger son of George Byng, 3rd Viscount Torrington, who would himself succeed to the title, was annoyed to be refused entry to the fourteenth-century Shirburn Castle:
Our ride was to Wheatley, and, leaving the high road, to the village of Gt Milton…thence over an openish country to Aisley…cross’d many pasture grounds and much nasty country to Sherborne Castle, Ld Macclesfields seat, the object of our ride; but were refused admission, as his L’dship was at home. This is the second rebuff we have lately experienc’d, and which, after a tedious sultry ride of 16 miles, fretted us not a little: let people proclaim that their great houses are not to be view’d, and then travellers will not ride out of their way with false hopes.4
In Pride and Prejudice, when Elizabeth Bennet and her aunt and uncle are touring round Derbyshire, they visit Mr Darcy’s house on his Pemberley estate: ‘It was a large, handsome, stone building, standing well on rising ground, and backed by a ridge of high woody hills; and in front, a stream of some natural importance…Elizabeth was delighted.’ If the fictional Pemberley existed, it would now be considered a ‘stately home’, a term coined by Felicia Hemans in 1827 in a poem that begins ‘The stately Homes of England, How beautiful they stand!’5 While travelling from Slough to Bath in 1805, the American Benjamin Silliman noticed many such houses: ‘Throughout our whole ride, at intervals of a mile or two, beautiful country seats adorned the road, and with their forests, their parks, their sloping fields, and their herds of deer, presented a most interesting succession of objects.’6
Many grand country homes and smaller houses were being constructed or rebuilt in what we today call the ‘Georgian’ style, such as Dodington House near Bath, a sixteenth-century manor house that was completely rebuilt over many years from 1796. Other older buildings were remodelled so that, certainly from the front, they appeared to conform to fashion. At Althorp in Northamptonshire, the original sixteenth-century house was greatly in need of repair by the 1780s, and so Lord Spencer brought in the architect Henry Holland. He transformed the external appearance of the house and went on to remodel some of the interior as well. The Georgian style of architecture, which evolved over a hundred years, was at its most developed form in Jane Austen’s lifetime, influenced by classical Greek and Roman architecture and less heavily ornamented than earlier in the century. While the term Regency is now applied to architecture dating from about 1800 until about 1837, at the time it was of course regarded as modern.
Along with their servants, wealthy families moved ‘up to’ London from their country establishments, renting a house or staying in their own property for ‘the Season’, which coincided with parliamentary sittings. Benjamin Silliman explained that ‘in England, down means from London, and up, to London: they speak of going down into the country, no matter in what direction. The Londoners talk of going down to Scotland. Is this a figure of speech unconsciously adopted because London is the great fountain supplying all the kingdom with streams of wealth and knowledge. Perhaps the country might dispute the claim.’7
For want of money, John Byng reluctantly worked in London from 1782 as a commissioner of stamps and was relieved to leave his employment each summer and travel round rural England, which he so loved. In August 1790, as he headed northwards to Biggleswade, Byng witnessed the annual desertion of the city: ‘The roads are now crowded as London empties in August, and fills in February.’8 In a guide to London published that same year, advice was given on renting houses: ‘The dearest season is from Christmas to June, when families are in town and the parliament sitting;
the cheapest, when families are out of town, and the parliament prorogued.’9
Even though the poor had to stay put, London did become visibly depleted, particularly during the summer when anyone who could afford to do so would abandon the stinking city. However, in August 1811 Louis Simond, on a tour of Britain, was actually surprised that ‘London is less empty than we expected, and the wheels of numerous carriages are still rattling over the pavement of Portman Square, near which we occupy the house of an absent friend, obligingly lent to us.’10
Towns and cities across England were expanding rapidly, leading Horace Walpole in 1791 to comment: ‘There will soon be one street from London to Brentford, ay, and from London to every village ten miles round!…Bath shoots out into new crescents, circuses, and squares every year: Birmingham, Manchester, Hull, and Liverpool would serve any King in Europe for a capital.’11 The previous summer Miss Mary Heber of Weston Hall in Northamptonshire received a letter from a friend: ‘We intend going to spend the day at Bath some day this week…imagine I shall scarcely know the place, there are so many new Buildings erected since I had the pleasure of meeting you there.’12
In places like London and Bath, many new houses were appearing, including grand terraces or squares with their mews buildings behind for carriages and horses. In June 1797 George MacAulay, a merchant and insurer, remarked on London’s expansion: ‘In the evening I walked sev’ral times round Finsbury Square, a place which now approaches nearly to the elegance of the Squares in the West. I remember it a place for rubbish, and not a House built!’13 This square was where James Lackington had just established London’s largest bookstore.
The fashionable Georgian architectural style was also adopted for the more humble terraced houses of the middle classes and even those of the better-off skilled workers, but the rapid expansion of towns resulted in poorly constructed houses. On the outskirts of London Simond watched brick terraces being built: ‘their walls are frightfully thin, a single brick of eight inches, – and, instead of beams, mere planks lying on edge. I am informed, it is made an express condition in the leases of these…houses, that there shall be no dances given in them.’14 Even so, he said, ‘People live in the outskirts of the town in better air, – larger houses, – and at a smaller rent, – and stages [stagecoaches] passing every half hour facilitate communications.’15
Although England’s population was a fraction of today’s, living conditions were overcrowded by modern standards. Privacy was not valued so highly, and even families with modest incomes had live-in servants who needed basic accommodation. Simond gave a vivid description of a typical rented London terraced house ‘of the middling or low kind’:
Each family occupy a whole house, unless very poor…These narrow houses, three or four stories high,—one for eating, one for sleeping, a third for company, a fourth under ground for the kitchen, a fifth perhaps at top for the servants…The plan of these houses is very simple, two rooms on each story; one in the front with two or three windows looking on the street, the other on a yard behind, often very small; the stairs generally taken out of the breadth of the back-room. The ground-floor is usually elevated a few feet above the level of the street, and separated from it by an area, a sort of ditch, a few feet wide…and six or eight feet deep, inclosed by an iron railing; the windows of the kitchen are in this area. A bridge of stone or brick leads to the door of the house. The front of these houses is about twenty or twenty-five feet wide; they certainly have rather a paltry appearance,—but you cannot pass the threshold without being struck with the look of order and neatness of the interior.16
Filled with large families and several servants, such houses could be crowded, but nothing like the dwellings of the poor, who might not have servants but had numerous children who were squeezed into homes that often served as their workplace as well. Noisy, cramped conditions were the lot of most town dwellers, about which Jane Austen was sensitive in Mansfield Park when Fanny Price is back home in the tiny terraced house in Portsmouth: ‘The living in incessant noise was…the greatest misery of all…Here, everybody was noisy, every voice was loud…Whatever was wanted was halloo’d for, and the servants halloo’d out their excuses from the kitchen. The doors were in constant banging, the stairs were never at rest, nothing was done without a clatter, nobody sat still, and nobody could command attention when they spoke.’
In spite of his aristocratic background, John Byng was aware of problems faced by the lower classes. To him it made sense for every poor person to be housed in a cottage with some land attached. He outlined his vision of an ideal place to live:
As for poverty, rags and misery they should not exist in my village; for the cottages should not be only comfortable and low-rented, but attached to each should be, at least, 2 acres of ground, which on first possession the hirers should find well cropped with potatoes, and planted with fruit trees;– teach them how to proceed, redeem the poor from misery, make a large public enclosure at the end of the village, for their cows, &c., and then poverty would soon quit your neighbourhood.17
This was Byng’s dream, but the clergyman William Jones in 1802 made comments in his diary that were closer to reality: ‘In most towns and villages the poor and indigent class, I fear, have very wretched accommodations. They are generally crowded together in dark courts and narrow alleys, in cellars, or in garrets; where damps, stagnated air, and accumulated filthiness, injure their health, and facilitate the progress of contagious diseases.’18
In 1816 a parliamentary committee heard evidence about the state of houses in streets close to Covent Garden, including Short’s Gardens, ‘occupied by poor room-keepers, generally with families, living in apparent wretchedness, unhealthy, filthy in their persons, their rooms, and their bedding; the staircases of the houses of course common to the numerous families which occupied them, and being common to all, appeared to be cleaned by none; the rooms in want of ventilation and white-washing.’19 London was notorious for its warrens of alleyways and courts, the haunt of beggars and criminals, with squalid houses only a few streets from fashionable squares and their fine town-houses. Louis Simond was struck by the proximity of low and high life:
We have in our neighbourhood one of those no-thoroughfare lanes or courts…This one is inhabited by a colony of Irish labourers, who fill every cellar and every garret,-a family in each room; very poor, very uncleanly, and very turbulent. They give each other battle every Saturday night…We should never have known that there were such wretches as these in London, if we had not happened to reside in Orchard Street, Portman Square, which is one of the finest parts of the town.20
Renting a home was far more common than owning one. In April 1808 Nelly Weeton decided to let out the house that she had inherited from her mother at Upholland in Lancashire: ‘On Wednesday, I let my house to a Mr. Winstanley, a watchmaker, who I am told is very likely to pay his rent regularly. His wife and children are above the common order and not likely to injure the house. I mean to draw up a little agreement for him to sign; to leave the house in as good repair as he finds it; to pay half a year’s rent on entering it &c. He is to pay eight guineas a year’.21 The plan was to close her late mother’s dame school that generated a modest income, move to cheaper rented lodgings and live off her small amount of capital and Mr Winstanley’s rent, but first of all she needed to ‘dispose of my furniture, pack up what I shall want, and whitewash the house’.22
Whitewash, a solution of lime and chalk mixed with other additives, was brushed on interior and exterior walls like paint. It took several days to set, forming a white surface that could be coloured with other substances; in some areas animal blood or vegetable dye was added to give exterior walls a pink colour. Whitewash was a cheap way of decorating rooms. More expensive options included textile hangings, wallpaper, painting and wainscoting. In 1817 William Holland was decorating parts of the vicarage at Over Stowey. His daughter’s bedroom had wallpaper, but he hired a painter for some of the woodwork, inside and out: ‘The painter from
Stowey has been here and painted the outward gate green and the skirting boards along the passage and stairs a chocolate colour.’23
Wallpaper became especially popular with the middle classes from the late eighteenth century, and businesses based primarily in London would send out samples to customers far beyond the capital.24 Local upholsterers usually sold wallpaper and advertised their wares in newspapers. In April 1789 the Ipswich Journal announced: ‘John Sparrow, Upholsterer, Cabinet-maker, Appraiser, and Auctioneer, Butter-market, Ipswich…has just laid in a fresh assortment of every article in the upholstery branch, particularly…a great variety of elegant paper hangings, from 2½d. to 2s. 6d. per yard; every pattern sold at the London prices, and hung at a very low rate. Patterns sent to any distance.’25
The customer would select a wallpaper pattern and place an order for a number of rolls, just as James Woodforde did in 1785. He visited an upholsterer in Norwich to choose what to order for the Weston Longville parsonage, and when the paper arrived he and his niece did the work themselves: ‘Nancy and self very busy most of the morning and evening in papering the attic chamber over my bedchamber.’26 Whether one or two rooms were papered is unclear, but the job took them four days. The reason for middle-class people taking on such a task rather than hiring workmen or using their servants may have been the high cost of even the cheapest papers and the fear that a bungled job would waste a great deal of money.
In the summer of 1808, having let out her Upholland property, Nelly Weeton stayed with acquaintances in Liverpool until she found lodgings in an isolated house on the banks of the River Mersey, close to what is now the Wellington Dock:
I came here on the 18th of October, to a small, white, shabby-looking house, close to the sea shore, called Beacon’s Gutter…Edward Smith, his wife, and little boy (about 8 years old), compose the whole of the family, besides myself. Edward is in a tobacconist’s warehouse, as a journeyman; his wife does nothing but take care of the house. In the summer they take in lodgers. They have, in general, very respectable families.27
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