by Daniel Pool
In addition to candles there were always lamps, for which kerosene and paraffin were the favored fuel. These lamps, however, required constant refilling, and they got very dirty. Between lamps and candles, lighting a house could be quite a chore. At the duke of Rutland’s Belvoir in the 1890s there were three or more men who worked all day cutting wicks, removing wax from the candelabra, filling lamps, cleaning black off lamp chimneys, and pouring paraffin oil. At night they snuffed the candles, adjusted wicks, and removed wax from the extinguishers that were used to put out candles. This was not a small task; even a modest home might have some twenty or so lamps.
But what everyone associates with nineteenth-century England, particularly London, is gas light, and gas lamps came into use quite early. Before the advent of gas, London streetlamps were lit with whale oil, but it did not provide very good light. Then gas—made, like almost every other product for fuel or heating in the 1800s, from coal—appeared. Textile manufacturers used it first in order to keep their factories going all night and cut their insurance premiums; by 1814 gas light was spreading through London, and the first theaters were lit by gas in 1817. By 1834, London had over 600 miles of gas lines for street lighting. The coal gas, derived from the heating of coal (the by-product was coke), was water cooled, purified, and then driven underground through a network of cast-iron pipes to the lamps from which it issued. At dusk the lamplighter made his rounds, carrying a pole with a fixture in the end which, when inserted into the bottom of the lamppost, turned the gas on for that streetlight. He then released a small burst of flame with the pole—how, no one seemed to know exactly—which ignited the flame in the lamp.
Gas light did not, however, in its first incarnation, produce the mysterious, softly lit city of swirling fogs that we associate with the Sherlock Holmes stories. For one thing, outdoor gas lighting was not evenly distributed throughout the city. In the 1860s, for example, a visitor to London would have found gas lamps concentrated in the larger thoroughfares, with fewer on the sidestreets, and none at all in some poorer areas. Secondly, as sources of indoor illumination, the early gas lamps had definite drawbacks. They were smelly and they could leave terrible black marks on ceilings.
In rural areas there was no outdoor illumination at all. Private drivers carried lanterns on their coaches so as to be seen by other on-coming riders or vehicles. There were no lanterns powerful enough to illuminate the road. For this reason, balls and dinner parties in the countryside were planned to coincide with the full moon. Sir John Middleton apologizes in Sense and Sensibility for not having more people for the Dashwood ladies to meet when they come to dine with him. However, “he had been to several families that morning in hopes of procuring some addition to their number, but it was moonlight and everybody was full of engagements.”
Domestic sanitary regulations.
HOW THE ENGLISH KEPT CLEAN
In the early part of the nineteenth century you would have been well advised to stand up wind of anyone with whom you were having a conversation.
Only the hands, neck, and arms were frequently washed. By mid-century, however, houses were beginning to install special rooms for baths, and a vicar’s daughter from Hertfordshire reported in her memoirs that as a child during this period she bathed every day. This seems to have been the rule among the well-to-do. An 1869 etiquette manual also recommended daily baths for young ladies, two in summer, in fact, although it cautioned against prolonged immersion in baths over 100 degrees in temperature “as it exhausts the physical powers.” Wholesale ablution could not have been all that uncommon, for in Can You Forgive Her?, written in 1864, Trollope advises that “it is better to pull the string at once when you are in the shower-bath, and not to stand shivering, thinking of the inevitable shock which you can only postpone for a few minutes.”
However, the poor must have bathed infrequently, at best. The middle class, although they apparently washed their hands and feet daily, usually made do in the 1860s with one big bath on Saturday night in which the entire household took part, perhaps because it was such a nuisance to boil all that water. And at Mrs. Browning’s Academy in Blackheath for young ladies a weekly hot bath was charged as an extra.
Partly this was due to a lack of readily available water. In the countryside water came from streams, rivers, wells, or—though presumably only in villages—pumps. Typically, the great country houses had no piped water at all above the ground floor. Guests wishing to wash or bathe were dependent on the hordes of housemaids (or watermen) who carried buckets of water up and down the stairs all day long with which the guests could wash their hands and bathe.
Many houses had rain barrels, or water butts, that caught the rain coming off the roof. The water was then poured from a tap. When Pip is to visit Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, he tells us, “my head was put under taps of water-butts” in the process of cleaning him. London had a water supply conducted into various houses by old elm pipes. This system lasted until the 1840s, although the pipes broke often and had to be replaced every two to four years, could not withstand much pressure, and were small of diameter. If they were well off, residents might also obtain water from water carriers who brought their casks around with a horse and wagon.
In London the introduction of metal pipes made the supply of water more accessible, but it did not magically transform conditions overnight. The water supply was not a public service provided to all but was instead a system controlled by private companies—and they turned on the water for only a few hours a day until 1871.
The intermittent character of this water supply was one reason for the unsanitary conditions that prevailed with respect to toilets. A primitive kind of toilet was in use in many London houses fairly early in the century, but there was no way to prevent fumes from backing up into the house. Some houses had “earth closets” in which a supply of fine earth in an attic area was periodically discharged down through the pipes to carry away waste. Some dwellings, especially those of the poor, where a backyard privy substituted for a water closet, emptied their waste into cesspools. With luck, “nightmen” would come around periodically to empty them. Sewage pipes in other parts of the city conducted waste away from homes directly into the Thames, where it helped fuel the periodic epidemics of cholera that swept the city until efforts were made in the 1840s to filter and empty the waste farther down the river from the water intake and at high—rather than low—tide. At the great country houses cesspits were used. There were some fifty-three of them, overflowing, discovered at Windsor Park at mid-century, and a carriage simply disappeared partway into an old one at a mansion in the northern part of the country one day.
Washing clothes was not easy in the early part of the 1800s. The poor fared worst. Few of their houses in the city had piped-in water until late in the century. This meant standing in line at pumps and wells to get water for washing or cooking. In the countryside some did their work in a river or stream and beat the clothes with a paddle until they were clean. Soap—until it became widely and cheaply available—had to be made from tallow, which, in the countryman’s view, was better saved for food or other purposes.
Also, like most useful articles in the early part of the century, soap that was not homemade was taxed. In certain respects, too, soap was rather a mixed blessing, since, unlike the other methods of washing, it required hot water. This made laundry day such a chore that many better-off households hired a washerwoman to do it, since immense amounts of water had to be boiled, the clothes blued and starched by hand, ironed, and then put through a mangle, a tablelike contraption with two rollers through which you rolled the clothing until it was pressed.
“PLEASE, SIR, I WANT SOME MORE.”
So goes the most famous request for seconds in history—and it was for workhouse gruel. But then, gruel was made from oats or barley—the “corn” which, in the form of bread, was the basic building block of the English workingman’s diet.
The poor man lived on bread. “ ‘There’s nothing like bread,
’ say the men,” recounted a mid-century observer of working-class life. “ ‘It’s not all poor people can get meat; but they must get bread.’ ” Bread and onion if the poor man were lucky, or bread “and—,” the “and” consisting of potatoes or bacon, while his wife and children often had only bread—the breadwinner being the one who needed to keep up his strength. He ate cheese rather than butter, fish rather than meat—because they were cheaper. He also ate oysters, no doubt because they could be pickled to keep several weeks and salted so as to taste reasonably fresh. “Poverty and oysters always seem to go together,” Sam Weller observes in Pickwick, “ . . . the poorer a place is, the greater call there seems to be for oysters,” he remarks of Whitechapel, a fact reflected in the virtual depletion of natural oyster beds by the 1850s. In 1864 a student of the matter found the average farm laborer had one hot meal a week; fuel was often expensive, and those who cooked had to do so over an open fire, since few of the poor had ovens. On Sunday and Christmas, the poor therefore generally took their geese or other meals to the local bakehouse or baker’s to get them cooked. Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Present witness “innumerable people, carrying their dinners to the bakers’ shops,” which Scrooge soberly reflects are “their means of dining every seventh day, often the only day on which they can be said to dine at all.”
The middle-class diet was built around mutton, well-cooked vegetables, and potatoes. Salads were out—no one knew about vitamins, and it was thought that eating raw foods was tough on the digestion. Cheese was a lower-class favorite, as was bacon (pigs, unlike cattle, could be kept on a small plot of land—sometimes even in the city). Pigs were a sign of decent rural lower-class food. “Everybody was well off in Lowick,” the curate tells Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch of the village where she had hoped to exercise her altruistic impulses; “not a cottager in those double cottages at a low rent but kept a pig, and the strips of garden at the back were well tended.” Pigs could be converted into a number of dishes, including black pudding, brawn, bacon, and ham. In addition, they were fecund, fast growing, able to forage in wooded areas, and replete with fat, as well as being easy to preserve through smoking and salting. Its lower-class connotations kept bacon away from upper-class menus, however.
Apart from the limited diet, perhaps the major problem with food was keeping things fresh. In poor households when the pig was killed in autumn, the sides, or “flitches,” were hung up in the chimney to be smoked and preserved. On first arriving at Wuthering Heights, Lockwood notices that the ceiling of the “family sitting-room” is concealed by “clusters of legs of beef, mutton, and ham.” Due to the lack of refrigeration, housekeepers were forever bottling things and making preserves. In general, where perishables like meat and vegetables were obtained in advance, a good deal of kitchen time was spent curing, bottling, or otherwise preserving them.
No one drank water because it was feared, often rightly, to be unsafe and impure. The preferred drinks were beer and ale—later in the century, coffee and tea. It might be thought that at least children would have been given a somewhat healthier diet but they were not. In infancy, babies whose mothers did not want to breastfeed them found wet nurses instead, like Mrs. Toodle, little Paul Dombey’s wet nurse in Dombey and Son. (Failing that, donkey’s milk was often pressed into service in the upper classes.) After infancy, though, it was all down hill. The child was fed on mutton, potatoes, and bread (both preferably some days old because new food was viewed with disfavor), milk, suet or rice pudding, and oatmeal. Anything more adventurous was strictly avoided until about the age of seventeen—children’s stomachs were thought to be more delicate and more incapable of digestion than adult digestive systems. Fresh milk, especially in towns, was too expensive for the poor and was often contaminated and germ laden before the advent of widespread pasteurization in the 1890s. It was also not appreciated that growing children need great amounts of food—one reason, besides neglect and cruelty, that there were the sometimes appallingly niggardly portions of bread and potatoes meted out at workhouses like the one in which Oliver Twist finds himself. Even at the great public schools, where money was certainly no object to the parents of most of the students, the children often went hungry.
There was a thriving confectionery trade, but the process of selling sugar in caked sugarloafs made the preparation of cakes and desserts in the home difficult, perhaps a factor in the popularity of pastry cooks and of treacle (which was nothing more than molasses). Unfortunately, too, colored food additives were in their infancy: to get gold and silver colors, copper and zinc were added; for blues, iron; and lead was used for reds. Occasionally, arsenic seems to have been used to achieve greens with fatal results in at least one case.
It was a standing complaint in a good many better-off households that the cooks hired to prepare all this food drank. And no wonder. Typically, they worked in a hot kitchen, often in the basement—probably badly ventilated—since holes for ventilation were taxed as windows. And once a roaring fire in the coal stove was built to cook something it heated up the whole kitchen; it couldn’t just be turned off like a gas or electric range. Not surprisingly, the cook could develop a thirst, which was aggravated by the constant tasting of food and perhaps by the addition of spirits to certain dishes now and then as well.
Taking up the Christmas pudding.
PUDDING!
Hallo! A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing-day! That was the cloth. A smell like an eating-house, and a pastry cook’s next door to each other, with a laundress’s next door to that! That was the pudding. In half a minute Mrs. Cratchit entered: flushed, but smiling proudly: with the pudding, like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.”
This was Christmas plum pudding, but there was also batter pudding, black pudding, kidney pudding, marrow pudding (Bleak House), bread and butter pudding (Little Dorrit), blood pudding, suet pudding, roly-poly pudding, and so on and on. Pudding was one of the favorite lower-class English dishes.
Pudding was a favorite of the Romans, who evidently brought with them when they conquered England the urpudding, sausage. Into a skin of animal’s intestines they poured meat or blood, spices, and other ingredients. Sometimes this package was then smoked. Pepper and the smoke kept microorganisms from forming in the food and hid the taste if it started to go bad, and spices made the food tastier when it was finally eaten. This was the origin of the blood, or black, pudding (sometimes called blackpot in Hardy), a sausage whose name was derived from the blood that was brushed on it when it was stuffed. When Jude Fawley first meets Arabella Donn, the daughter of a pig breeder, in Jude the Obscure, she explains that her companions “are helping me wash the innerds for black-puddings and such like.” In Tess, similarly, we are told Angel Clare looks around when he returns home for the food he has brought with him from the dairy where he worked, “black pudding, which he had directed to be nicely grilled.”
After the Romans had had their day, some clever person invented pudding cloth, thereby eliminating the need for an animal-skin container. This was a great improvement, since animal intestines were messy and available only at animal-killing time. Moreover, with the new cloth packaging, the pudding could be wrapped up in a ball and dropped in the cooking pot along with whatever else was cooking over the poor man’s fire—thus saving costly fuel by cooking two courses at once. Pudding also had the great merit of not needing to be cooked in an oven, something most lower-class homes didn’t have. Then people began adding things like dried fruit and sugar to puddings, with the consequence that dessertlike items such as the Christmas plum pudding evolved. True to its origins, however, the plum pudding was still made with meat in some parts of the British Isles as late as the early 1800s, and, especially at Christmastime, the so-called plums from which it drew its name were always raisins, not the plump, juicy fruits that the name suggests today.
Pudding
was an excellent dish for the poor, in part because you didn’t need as much fat for a pudding as you needed for other kinds of pastry, and you could get away with less filling than a meat pie required. Batter pudding, of which Yorkshire pudding was a variant, for example, was made principally from dough and “dripping.” This is the dish the greedy waiter consumes from David Copperfield’s dinner when the young boy stops, unescorted, while traveling, at a hostelry for a meal. In London, while working for Mr. Murdstone’s firm, the perpetually hungry David alternates between two pudding shops, depending on how much money he has, one with a pudding “made of currants,” the other—cheaper—with “a stout pale pudding, heavy and flabby, and with great flat raisins in it.” Street vendors sometimes sold puddings that were really no more than dumplings to hungry street children. On the whole, however, puddings were a sensible and economical bundle of food values for the relatively less well off. The carbohydrates and the fat kept you from getting too cold, while the sugar and the fruit kept you from running out of energy.
TEA
Tea caught on long before the nineteenth century. By the 1800s, it rivaled beer in popularity even among the lower classes—it was, after all, a hot item to liven up the otherwise cold meals of the poor, and the fact that the water was boiled made it safe to drink, unlike beverages made with water right out of the ground.
Originally, tea was imported from China by the East India Company under a virtual monopoly, and for a long time it was so expensive that it was sometimes kept in locked boxes called tea caddies. The tea was not very strong, and the monopoly was broken in 1833, but until the early 1870s 85 percent of British tea came from China. Subsequently, imports of the substance began to pour in from India and Ceylon (gunpowder-green being a favorite type), but in the meantime a flourishing market in ersatz and secondhand tea had grown up, so great was the demand. Enterprising “tea” merchants busied themselves converting things like blackthorn leaves into reasonable facsimiles of tea leaves by the addition of artistic coloring here and there, a business so successful that the government estimated that for every seven pounds of authentic East India tea being sold under the monopoly, there were four phony pounds being sold to unsuspecting buyers. Even when the import monopoly ended, import duties kept the price very high. So people recycled—sometimes for profit. Indeed, by the 1840s there were eight factories in London busily recycling used tea leaves, often dyeing them and then mixing them with new tea for resale. At one point it was estimated that about 80,000 pounds of tea were gathered annually and rejuvenated in this manner.