by Daniel Pool
Fundamentally, a wealthy family’s private quarters consisted of chambers, workrooms, and sitting rooms. “Chambers” were the bedrooms, sometimes with smaller rooms—dressing closets—where the master and the mistress of the house could dress. The children would sleep in a nursery until they were old enough to have their own bedrooms, all of which would typically be over the bedrooms of their parents. There would also be a schoolroom in the upper area of the house, where the older children had their lessons. The mistress of the house would have a boudoir for her correspondence and the handling of the household affairs; for an equivalent purpose a man would have a library or study (typically, a country gentleman would receive his tenants or keeper here) .
In grander houses, the large public rooms might be referred to as saloons. In a house that lacked a great hall, the most imposing of the reception rooms was always the drawing room, a room purely for public purposes. It was in the drawing room that a hostess received people paying calls on her and in the drawing room that guests assembled before dinner and to which they retired thereafter, when the gentlemen had been permitted a short interval in the dining room to fill up on port.
In addition to the obligatory dining room, a well-off family might have a separate breakfast room for the informal morning meal. There might also be a morning room, which was really an informal room for family gatherings, or a “sitting room.” In general, a sitting room seems to have been what we would call the living room today, an area for members of the family to sit in and chat informally or read. People renting apartments or chambers customarily had a bedroom and a sitting room, the latter serving in small dwellings as a place to receive callers as well. The “parlor,” a more formal space, was the poor man’s drawing room, it appears. In Great Expectations the Gargerys, for example, have a “state parlor” where everything is kept under wraps and cloth except on great occasions. Shops, moreover, were customarily divided into a shop area in front and a parlor behind where the owner could eat his meals and relax. “Come into the parlour,” says the rag-and-bone man in A Christmas Carol to the ghoulish beneficiaries of Scrooge’s death. “You were made free of it long ago,” the mock “parlor” in this case being “the space behind the screen of rags.”
In London the density of population, and consequent scarcity of land, meant that the great town houses of the nobility and gentry had to be organized around a vertical rather than a horizontal division of space. That is, the town houses even of the grandest aristocrats were generally buildings jammed into a space so narrow compared to that of the country that functional areas had to be stacked on top of one another rather than connected horizontally. The kitchen was always located in the basement and looked out onto a small courtyard, called the “area,” from which a set of steps led up to the street, surrounded by the “area” railing. (The newly reformed Scrooge strolled through London on Christmas Day “and looked down into the kitchens of the houses, and up to the windows.”) The dining room was always on the “ground” floor (street level), and the drawing room was always on the “first” floor above it. In spacious country houses the dining and drawing rooms were both on the ground floor—when the time came for dinner the gentlemen simply led the ladies across the hall to dine, so that in Can You Forgive Her? Lady Glencora Palliser instructs her husband’s cousin at Matching Priory, “You must take my cousin, Alice Vavasor, in to dinner.” In London, however, the gentlemen would customarily take the ladies “down” to dine. A guest awaiting the commencement of a London dinner party in the Veneering drawing room in Our Mutual Friend is told “Dinner is on the table!” and, “having no lady assigned him, goes down in the rear, with his hand to his forehead.” And when visitors came calling, the proper London hostess receiving them in her drawing room always asked the help to “Show him up.” Parental bedrooms in the town house were usually above the drawing room on the second floor, with nursery and children’s bedrooms on the third floor, and servants’ sleeping quarters above that.
As the century wore on, the desire to separate servants from the family increased, and so did the felt necessity of maintaining a proper separation of the sexes. Hence large country houses sometimes had one wing for male servants and male unmarried guests and one wing for female servants and female unmarried guests. Sometimes each group’s sleeping quarters had their own set of stairs, and there would be an additional set of back stairs for the servants to use for work. In addition, there might also be a grand staircase for use only by family and guests, running from the bedrooms on the first floor down to the great front hall.
There were also—as wealth and taste permitted—billiard and/or smoking rooms (for men only, of course), a library, conservatories to bring a touch of warmth and greenery to otherwise grim winters, and sometimes a gallery. Galleries were long rooms for indoor walking (some consequently dead-ended into a wall), which had first become popular in the 1600s and were then often rededicated to the housing of ancestral portraits.
Outbuildings, sometimes called “offices,” for any respectable country mansion would also be approriately grand. A dairy, a brewery, stables—Wuthering Heights has a washhouse to which the young Cathy Earnshaw and Heathcliff are banished for “a light offence”—would not have been unusual. Within the house itself there would be a servants’ hall where the servants ate together, a special pantry where the butler kept the plate and fine china and from which he directed the male servants, a room for the housekeeper where she bottled preserves, kept the household accounts and saw to the direction of the housemaids, plus a larder for uncooked perishables like meat, a stillroom for making spirits or storing coffee, a wine cellar, a laundry, and so on.
Even the grandest house was not terribly warm. The problem was the absence of any genuinely effective central heating. The great country houses had it only on the ground floor and then usually only in the main hall until the 1880s. In their individual rooms guests or family members made do with a coal fire religiously maintained by a housemaid or maid-of-all-work. (A thirty-bedroom mansion in the north of England went through a ton of coal a day.) To clean themselves guests generally washed in the hip baths and basins of water dragged up the stairs by these same maids or—in a few grander country houses—by the stolid watermen who made their rounds with great buckets of water on their shoulders. As for the taps, “a call on the hot water . . . did not meet with an effusive or even warm response,” wrote one memoirist of country-house life. “A succession of sepulchral rumblings was succeeded by the appearance of a small geyser of rust-coloured water, heavily charged with dead earwigs and bluebottles. This continued for a couple of minutes and then . . . ceased. The only perceptible difference between the hot water and the cold lay in its colour and the cargo of defunct life which the former bore on its bosom. Both were stone cold.” The widespread availability of heat awaited the coming of the twentieth century. The great nineteenth-century country houses were, indeed, great—but they were not warm.
HOUSES WITH NAMES
Many of the great English novels take place or develop in houses with grand-sounding names—Thrushcross Grange, Thornfield Hall, Ullathorne Court, to name a few. In some cases, a residence even gave its name to one of the novels, notably Mansfield Park, Bleak House, and, of course, there are Northanger Abbey and Wildfell Hall as well. Examination suggests that some of the generic residence names reveal something about the nature of the dwelling, those that live there, or both.
Salmeston Grange, Margate.
Court—A residence constructed around some kind of courtyard. So, at any rate, Trollope tells us in his description in Barchester Towers of Ullathorne Court, which was, he says, “properly so called; for the house itself formed two sides of a quadrangle, which was completed on the other two sides by a wall about twenty feet high.” Originally, such buildings were constructed for defensive purposes, with windows facing inward, so life within the dwelling could proceed in the courtyard even in the midst of an armed attack.
Grange—A residence like Thrushcross
Grange of the Lintons in Wuthering Heights or Mr. Brooke’s Tipton Grange in Middlemarch was so named because it was a grain storehouse or granary, sometimes attached to a large monastery. By the 1800s the term designated isolated farmsteads, too, a description that would fit Thrushcross Grange and also Moor House, the “sequestered home” St. John Rivers terms “this crumbling grange,” where Jane Eyre stumbles upon her cousins.
Hall—As in Mr. Rochester’s Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre or Sir James Chettam’s Freshitt Hall in Middlemarch. The word “hall” in the name of a dwelling meant that the house had centered on a great hall for entertainment, dining, and ceremonial living on a grand scale, as in feudal times. The term thus connoted both a certain grandeur (“a small, humble place,” a servant describes her cousin’s ancestral home to Jane Eyre, “naught to compare wi’ Mr. Oliver’s grand hall down i’ Morton Vale”) and the sort of ancient architecture likely to be associated with an old, august family. Vavasor Hall in Can You Forgive Her? belongs to “a family so old that no one knew which had first taken the ancient titular name of some old Saxon landowner—the parish or the man.”
House—There is, of course, Bleak House and Netherfield House, which Mr. Bingley rents at the outset of Pride and Prejudice and which occasions all the events that follow. The coming into use of the term “house” reflects a period when residential comfort was increasingly of concern, and the period of naming things “castle,” “abbey,” or “manor” was long past. Moreover, it is interesting that neither Bingley nor Mr. Jarndyce are titled.
Manor—The dwelling to which Mr. Rochester withdraws when Jane Eyre leaves him and Thornfield Hall burns is Ferndean Manor. The term “manor” implied a dwelling inhabited by a lord of the manor whose tenants lived on and worked the surrounding land. Obviously suggestive of a rather grand social status as well as a lineage dating back to Norman times, when the manorial system originated. In Tess the country home of her ersatz d’Urberville relatives “was not a manorial home in the ordinary sense, with fields, and pastures, and a grumbling farmer, out of whom the owner had to squeeze an income for himself and his family by hook or by crook.” Thornfield Hall was in fact probably more of a manor than the isolated Ferndean Manor; Jane Eyre describes it as “a gentleman’s manor-house” at one point. Characteristically, a manor house was often the dominant architectural feature of the local village, which was evidently the case at Thornfield. “A little hamlet, whose roofs were blent with trees, straggled up the side of one of these hills: the church of the district stood nearer Thornfield; its old tower-top looked over a knoll between the house and gates.”
Park—As in Mansfield Park. Originally, a park was an area which the king permitted a large landowner to enclose for the sake of chasing deer. Park came to mean a closed-in area, often landscaped with trees and lawn to present a pleasing and aesthetically appropriate picture. Both Mansfield Park and the park belonging to Sir Leicester Dedlock in Bleak House are the property of baronets, and having a park certainly connoted gentlemanly status; a large one is attached to Thrushcross Grange. It advertised that you had both the means to withdraw otherwise productive land from cultivation for purely esthetic appreciation and the leisure time to enjoy it.
One should not conclude that every park had at one time been the result of a special grant from the king or that each manor was the remnant of a feudal estate. Buying land and blending in with the landed gentry, after all, was the chief means of advancing into the upper echelons of English society in the 1800s. There were no doubt innumerable parks, halls, and manors whose existence dated from no earlier than the time the contractor’s men had first begun laying the foundations for some new magnate’s country estate. Also, as the case of Thornfield Hall suggests, one dwelling could combine the features of several different types of residence. Mr. Bingley’s residence in Pride and Prejudice, for example, is referred to at different times both as Netherfield House and Netherfield Park. Partly this was because an estate or house might have multiple architectural and social features, and it was also because, depending on one’s point of view, the same dwelling was notable either for its social-political function, i.e., a manor house that embodied social and political dominion, or for an architectural characteristic, such as a large hall or a big central court.
FURNITURE
She had been educated at a time when easy-chairs were considered vicious, and among people who regarded all easy postures as being so; and she could still boast, at seventy-six, that she never leaned back.” So Trollope describes Lady Macleod in Can You Forgive Her?
Perhaps this distaste for comfortable furniture was making a virtue out of a necessity, for furniture at the beginning of the 1800s was stiff and unwelcoming. For one thing, there were no springs until 1828, which meant that when one sat on a chair or sofa, it did not “give” at all. The nearest approach to a sofa was the ottoman, a long, flat board with no back or sides (although it was considered too luxurious for any except the elderly or the ill).
Making chairs more yielding by adding springs led to a corresponding movement to make them deeper, that is, deeper back to front. With suitable stuffing, you could now sit back in a chair comfortably instead of having to sit on a narrow ledge of board. But social progress always creates new problems—the fact that gentlemen with their new macassar-oiled hair could now sit back in chairs meant that ladies had to knit or crotchet antimacassars to protect the headrests on their chairs.
The growing cult of domesticity as the century wore on was no doubt a factor in the tendency to accumulate houses full of useless furniture and bric-a-brac, and an emerging upwardly mobile middle class used the proliferation and elaboration of furniture as a way to show off their newly attained wealth. The clutter and confusion were worsened by the fact that rooms were kept dark with heavy curtains to keep carpets from fading and to protect ladies’ skins against the wrinkles, freckles, and darkening of skin for which exposure to sunlight was held responsible.
Two articles of more humble furniture—usually found in a tavern or farm home—lent themselves particularly well to the novelist’s use, since they could conceal unseen listeners. The settle was a high-backed bench that could be pulled up to the fire so that the cold drafts in the rest of the room would be kept away. “It is, to the hearths of old-fashioned cavernous fireplaces, what the east belt of trees is to the exposed country estate, or the north wall to the garden,” says Hardy in The Return of the Native. “Outside the settle the candles gutter, locks of hair wave, young women shiver, and old men sneeze. Inside is Paradise. Not a symptom of a draught disturbs the air.” Precisely because of its ability to shield everyone and everything, the settle acts as a convenient means of letting Heathcliff overhear the fateful conversation in Wuthering Heights in which Cathy Earnshaw is heard to say that “it would degrade her to marry him, and then he staid no further. My companion,” says the narrator of Cathy Earnshaw, “was prevented by the back of the settle from remarking his presence or departure,” with fateful consequences.
The chimney corner, the large recess inside old-fashioned fireplaces where a person could sit to get warm, served the same purpose. “A person might sit there absolutely unobserved, provided there was no fire to light him up, as was the case now and throughout the summer,” says Hardy of the chimney corner in the Quiet Woman inn in The Return of the Native. It is there that Diggory Venn eavesdrops unnoticed on Wildeve’s activities, again with important consequences.
LIGHTING
In Great Expectations Pip wearily seeks refuge at a small hotel after finding that Estella is engaged to marry a brute and that the authorities are hot on the trail of his benefactor, Abel Magwitch. He requests a “night-light”—and so is brought “the good old constitutional rush-light of those virtuous days—an object like the ghost of a walking-cane, which instantly broke its back if it were touched, which nothing could ever be lighted at, and which was placed in solitary confinement at the bottom of a high tin tower, perforated with round holes that made a staringly w
ide-awake pattern on the walls.”
Rushlights were simply rushes dipped in drippings or other greasy substances and then set alight. They made ideal nightlights not only because they were cheap but because—unlike candles—when the wick burned down it simply crumbled into ash. They were probably the most widely used form of illumination in England before the coming of gas. The poor could make them for free, and, besides, there was a tax on all candles, tallow ones 1d. a pound, wax candles 3½d. a pound. Besides, in the country the sheep fat needed to make tallow candles could be saved and kept for soap or cooking instead. In addition, the cotton or linen from which candle wicks were made cost money.
Those who were better off used tallow candles, since they did not need to pinch pennies so much, but the really rich preferred real beeswax candles, no doubt in part because tallow could sometimes give off a faint odor, presumably sheeplike in nature, when it burned. In addition, tallow candles did not burn that well, and the wicks, unlike those of wax candles, had to be regularly “snuffed,” that is, the snuff, or wick, had to be cut off with special scissorslike instruments periodically or the candle would cease to burn properly. “There was no sound through the house but the moaning wind which shook the windows now and then,” says Isabella Linton in Wuthering Heights, recounting to Mrs. Dean how she sat at Wuthering Heights one night, “the faint crackling of the coals, and the click of my snuffers as I removed at intervals the long wick of the candle.” We can thus see in Emma when it is said admiringly of someone that “she moved in the first circle. Wax candles in the schoolroom,” that a good deal of gentility is being imputed to the party spoken of. It also would have said much to a nineteenth-century reader that when Pip first visits Miss Havisham during the daytime he finds her “in a pretty large room, well lighted with wax candles.” It suggested considerable wealth—as well as madness—to keep all those wax candles burning day and night for so many long, long years.