A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain (15 page)

The greatest interior difference between an early and a late Victorian house would be the existence of a bathroom and of plumbing. Prior to this development, washing would have been done with a jug and basin kept beside the bed. A bath would have been portable, kept hanging in the scullery or wash house and brought indoors to be filled with hot water in front of the bedroom fire. As attempts were made to improve domestic comfort, a gas-heated bath was invented in 1871. This involved bathing with gas flames burning underneath the tub and, as the water began to boil and the bath itself became unbearably hot, must have been like sitting in a giant saucepan. As boiler-heated piped water arrived in the late seventies, however, even a modest-sized bathroom could develop into a
temple of beauty and comfort. Baths with a shower fitting became more common. The use of – usually blue – decorated china gave unexpected elegance to everyday activities, and transformed ablution from a necessity into a pleasure. The arrival of running water also enabled those fortunate enough to have these facilities to keep themselves a good deal cleaner than had previously been possible, changing – gradually though permanently – people’s notions of personal cleanliness.

Without the necessary pipes to bring water in and carry waste out, people had not had a separate room in which to relieve themselves. The back yard was a suitable place for the privy, and in dining-rooms there was often a chamber-pot in a cupboard for the gentlemen to use after dinner, once the ladies had retired. Otherwise, these facilities were in the bedroom. The chamber-pot has a long and honourable history, and is doubtless still in use in some quarters. Before the advent of modern plumbing, people made use throughout the day and night of pots or commodes, the clearing of which (‘emptying slops’) was an entirely routine – if thoroughly unpleasant – part of a housemaid’s or manservant’s duty. The most extraordinary of these arrangements, perhaps, was the ‘night table’. This was a desk with a sloping top and three drawers underneath. The top drawer was for papers, the one below it for linen. The bottom drawer, when pulled out, had struts to support the weight of a person sitting on it, for it contained a china receptacle and was used as a lavatory. After use, the drawer would be shut until a servant could deal with the contents. While this may sound to us distasteful in the extreme, there was nothing unusual about it at the time. Indeed, there were those who resisted the notion of change. When the elderly King of Prussia was told that it was possible, for the first time, to equip his palace with flush lavatories, he harrumphed irritably: ‘We’re having none of that new-fangled nonsense around
here
!’

The water closet revolutionized all that. This useful device had been in existence, in various forms, for centuries (Queen Anne had one at Windsor) but without an efficient sewage system they could not be efficiently installed or used
en masse
. Public concern in this area was galvanized by the outbreaks of cholera that occurred from the thirties onward, and by the death in 1861 of Prince Albert, allegedly as a result of typhoid contracted from the drains at Windsor Castle. In 1858, the same year that on a summer’s day the Thames virtually solidified with raw sewage and assorted industrial waste, the Metropolitan Board of Works was established, and within twelve months work had begun on creating an efficient disposal system. The massive diggings, which produced two parallel pipes running eastwards, on either side of the river, to treatment plants, were completed by 1865. Other towns and cities followed this example, and thus created a network for sewage removal and treatment upon which we still rely.

By 1844 a water closet was available consisting of a boxed-in seat that contained a cistern. Fourteen years later a clergyman, the Reverend Mr Moule, created the ‘earth closet’. This used dry, sifted earth instead of water, but was similarly activated by pulling a handle. Moule’s reasoning was that the earth not only acted as a deodorizer but broke down the sewage. His invention worked, and enjoyed a popularity that has revived in recent years among the ecologically-minded. Water, however, remained the favoured option. The Optimus, a water closet produced by the firm of Dent and Hellyer, immediately went into extensive use and, whatever the Prussian king may have thought of them, was installed for the British monarch at Buckingham Palace. In 1875 the ‘wash-out’ closet was perfected and became standard, and in the eighties
the cistern came into general use. For the first time the type of sanitary facilities we use ourselves and regard as essential had come into being. Toilet bowls appeared in a vast range of styles, shapes and colours that suddenly made this very basic object a pleasure to look at.

Lavatory paper was introduced in the eighties. Prior to that, and indeed for a long time afterwards for those who saw it as a luxury, people made their own. Any paper that came into the home – newspapers, calendars, advertising handbills – was liable to be used in this way when it was no longer needed. One of the chores performed in even upper-middle-class households was the cutting or tearing of paper into squares, which were then threaded with string and hung on the back of the lavatory door.

The Laurels, Brickfield Terrace, Holloway, the small north London villa that is the home of the Pooter family in George and Weedon Grossmith’s novel
The Diary of a Nobody
, is surely one of the most famous of late Victorian addresses. It was entirely typical of the houses in which lower-middle-class families lived. Though the book was published in 1892, the building is clearly not up-to-date, and belongs rather to the world of half a century earlier. Pooter describes his domain:

A nice six-roomed residence, not counting basement, with a front breakfast-parlour. We have a little front garden; and there is a flight of ten steps up to the front door which, by-the-by, we keep locked with the chain up. Our intimate friends come to the little side entrance, which saves the servant the trouble of going up to the front door, thereby taking her away from her work. We have a nice little back garden which runs
down to the railway. We were rather afraid of the noise of the trains at first, but the landlord said we should not notice them after a bit, and took £2 off the rent. He was certainly right; and beyond the cracking of the garden wall at the bottom, we have suffered no inconvenience.
¹⁰

Higher up the scale of affluence and gentility, though certainly not among the grandest dwellings, is Linley Sambourne House, 18 Stafford Terrace, Kensington. It was the home of a well-known
Punch
cartoonist from 1874 until his death in 1910. It has been preserved in what is more or less its original condition and is open to the public. Though it seems spacious, compared with the homes in which many city-dwelling families live today, the Sambournes could host only small dinner-parties, for their dining-room was not large enough to accommodate many guests. They shared their house with two children and four servants.

The house is typical of the brick-and-white-stucco terraces that were built all over the area in the mid-Victorian decades (in this case 1868–74). It is five storeys high and has a small garden at the back. The kitchen, wine cellar and coal-bunkers were on the bottom floor, which is a semi-basement, and were connected with the upstairs rooms by bells and speaking-tubes that still exist. Rather than a porticoed entrance there are two pilasters framing the front door. The house is therefore of the Classical-influenced type that continued to be built throughout the century.

Inside, the hall was originally floored with coloured tiles, and the stairs are at the rear. The walls are hung with groups of pictures whose frames almost touch, but the wallpaper behind them is a Morris design. The effect when seen today is dark, but this is because the colours have faded with time. On the
ground floor, the front of the house is occupied by the dining-room. This has a plate-glass bay window, but with lace curtains, fabric curtains and blinds there is little direct daylight. There is Morris wallpaper and there are multitudes of pictures that form an eclectic mixture of original works and reproductions, paintings and photographs (framed photographs of famous paintings seem not to have been considered bad taste). A hexagonal table has Gothic, Puginesque legs, while one of the mirrors is Regency in style. There is a shelf at ‘frieze level’ – about ten feet above the floor – on which blue and white porcelain is displayed, and there are brass plates hung as wall decorations. There is also a large sideboard with painted panels. One feature that would strike visitors as distinctively Victorian is the use of curtains to cover doorways. These were often hung from a brass rail and, when not needed, were pulled to one side and secured. Before the advent of central heating they were extremely necessary for protection from draughts.

The furnishings are therefore – to use a term that is frequently applied to both architecture and interiors of the period – eclectic. The phases of developing taste in the Victorian era naturally often overlapped. This house has a combination of old and new, fashionable and passé that is not uncommon, or unexpected. The ground floor morning-room has Regency furniture that was inherited. It also has stained glass leaded windows. The staircase and upstairs drawing-room have these too. The latter fills both the width and the length of the first floor. It has embossed wallpaper in red and gold, and a gold ceiling. There are two fireplaces and a number of chests and tables whose tops seem almost invisible beneath the array of ornaments – plates, bowls, vases, statuettes, photograph frames. Again there is a high shelf running along the wall on which plates are displayed.

The householders of the middle and later Victorian era did not, as we often do, feel that large areas of blank wall are ‘restful’. It would simply not have occurred to them to leave space empty. Where they did not hang pictures, they hung shelves filled with ornaments or photographs, creating a clutter that to them represented comfort and taste. On an inventory made at 18 Stafford Terrace are the following: ‘Right of fireplace 1 drawing in oak frame, 3 engravings in ditto, 7 photographs in ditto, 1 photograph in gilt ditto. Left of fireplace 13 photographs in oak frames, 2 engravings in ditto,’
¹¹
and this was only one wall in one room!

Upstairs are the family bedrooms, and above them the day nursery, night nursery and the maid’s room. On one landing there is a bathroom with a coffin-shaped marble bath and there is a separate lavatory with tiled walls, a marble floor and a basin. Most unmistakably Victorian, perhaps, is the ‘water garden’ on the first-floor landing. This comprises a glass tank into which piped water flows, trickling over a number of stones so that their colours will be brought out. This may not sound very exciting, but it was typical of the interest which people of the era felt in minerals, plants, fish and birds – all of which could be incorporated into the home through such small displays. It was fashionable to have aviaries or fish tanks, or to keep a collection of ferns in a miniature greenhouse. In
Our Mutual Friend
Dickens refers to one of these displays. Ascending a staircase ‘tastefully ornamented’ with flowers, his characters:

came to a charming aviary, in which a number of tropical birds, more gorgeous in colour than the flowers, were flying about; and among these birds were gold and silver fish, and mosses, and water-lilies, and a fountain, and all manner of wonders.
¹²

In the middle decades, design found another direction in the Queen Anne style (the phrase was first used in 1862 in reference to furniture, but it was from the seventies that it picked up momentum as an architectural movement). This was not, in any sense, a simple nostalgic reference to the reign of Queen Anne (1702–14), for it involved few features that belonged to that era. Rather it was an attempt to rediscover the beauties of traditional English vernacular architecture and amalgamate them into modern buildings. In doing so, a quintessentially English style was created, and one that is still followed, to some extent, today. Many features found in regional English building traditions – tall brick chimney-stacks, weather-boarding, half-timbering, tile-hung walls, oriel windows, pargetting and emphasis on (often white-painted) gables – were incorporated and thus given a national, even international usage. Though the term ‘Queen Anne’ is a misnomer, for the work of architects in this style drew much more heavily on Tudor and earlier Stuart styles, one thing that their Victorian buildings had in common with the early eighteenth century was the use of red brick. In southern and eastern England, houses had largely been created from pale-grey, tan or yellow brick, and this was frequently hidden by stucco. The use of orange-coloured brick gave an entirely new look to townscapes in these regions, especially given that the scale of apartment buildings, for instance, became so much grander by the end of the century. The style was adapted for offices, libraries, fire stations, public houses and shops as well as numerous types of dwelling, and became such a pervasive influence that its tiles and gables and chimneys are still used in the design of houses and even housing estates.

The most notable instance of this style is to be found in Bedford Park, a suburb set between Acton and Chiswick in
west London that was built between 1877 and 1881. It was deliberately planned as a rural village for middle-class aesthetes. It had a church, a school, a pub and some five hundred houses of different sizes and types. This was the first ‘garden suburb’ to be created, and its rural aspect, together with the overall harmony of its buildings – which has survived – give it a character that is distinctly English and entirely of its time.

Within houses like those in Bedford Park, the colours tended to be muted. The Queen Anne style sought to escape from the garish and artificial shades of earlier decades, which in any case would not have complemented the architecture. Simplicity was not, however, a keynote, for two elements created a taste for knick-knacks. One was the fashion for collecting antiques. These commonly included porcelain and pottery, so that surfaces – such as the now-inevitable frieze shelf – might be covered with an array of vases, bowls and dishes. Another was the growing awareness of other cultures. African and Asian objects became conspicuous as ornaments in British drawing-rooms, and this was especially true of Japanese items. The country had been out of bounds to foreigners for centuries when, in 1853, an American mission succeeded in persuading its rulers to establish trading and diplomatic relations with the wider world. In the years that followed, imported artefacts proved a major influence on the aesthetic movement. Japanese furniture, fabrics, ceramics and prints became immensely popular in Western homes. Lacquered furniture (the process of applying this was called ‘japanning’), screens, fire-guards, fans – often stuck behind the corners of mirrors – and lacquered paper umbrellas joined the potted palms, fish tanks and porcelain vases that filled the interiors of middle-class homes. The fad became so all-pervading that it provoked the tribute of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta –
The Mikado
– in 1885.