The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed

While this list appears to a modern eye to be extraordinarily long, by contemporary standards it was fairly compact. Mrs Haweis gave ‘An useful [sic] little kitchen list for a very small household’ which comprised 109 items, not including cutlery or dishes. Among the brushes for her little list were sets of stove brushes, boot brushes and scrub brushes, a brass (or fibre) brush, a hair broom, a carpet broom, a sweep’s broom and a broom for the banisters, none of which could serve any other purpose.30 However much space all this took up, the total cost was under £10, so it was possibly not unreasonable for many middle-class couples setting up house.

A showcard displaying goods for the well-stocked kitchen. The interior of the meat-screen with its jack can be seen on the left. Note the half-dozen types of brushes on the right.

The important thing was to have the tools to keep the house clean. In the bedroom the fight against vermin was a skirmish; in the kitchen it was total war. The plagues that infested Victorian houses have been so effectively controlled for the last hundred years that for the most part we have forgotten them. For us, mice and rats are the first thought at the word ‘vermin’; for the Victorians it was bugs: blackbeetles, fleas, even crickets. If the struggle against them was not waged with commitment and constancy, they would ‘multiply till the kitchen floor at night palpitates with a living carpet, and in time the family cockroach will make raids on the upper rooms, travelling along the line of hot water pipes … the beetles would collect in corners of the kitchen ceiling, and hanging to one another by their claws, would form huge bunches or swarms like bees towards evening and as night closed in, swarthy individuals would drop singly on to the floor, or head, or food …’31

The only way to get rid of these creatures was to stop all holes with cement, replace old, crumbling mortar with more cement, use carbolic acid in the scrubbing water when cleaning, and pour more carbolic through cracks in the floor every day. Mrs Haweis did not object to rats and mice, which she thought were ‘nice, pretty, clever little things … They … are our friends, acting as scavengers, and are to me in no wise repugnant.’32 For those who did not agree, traps were recommended, plus a hungry cat. Cassell’s Household Guide thought traps superior to arsenic, as the poisoned mice made a terrible smell if they died under the flooring or behind the skirting. (As an afterthought the author worried that children or animals might get at the arsenic, but this was very much secondary to the smell, which was thought to bring disease.)33 Our Homes suggested keeping a hedgehog to eat the insects; others were scornful of this – the amount a hedgehog ate could not begin to affect the living carpet that Beatrix Potter’s servants found at her grandmother’s house when they visited in the summer of 1886: the first night they were there, the maids had to sit on the kitchen table, as the floor heaved with cockroaches.34

The war against vermin was fought for three reasons: hygiene, status and (contingent on status) morality. Health reformers battled to convey the new information that cleanliness foiled disease. In addition, the rise of mass production gave many access to objects that only a few could have acquired earlier. Therefore the status markers moved on from the now less-expensive accumulation of possessions to another, more expensive and time-consuming, preoccupation: keeping clean. Respectability was signalled by many flourishes that did not make the house any cleaner, but indicated that here was a decent household. George Godwin, an architect, editor of The Builder magazine, and promoter of sanitary housing for the poor, stressed that ‘the health and morals of the people are regulated by their dwellings’:35 decent houses produced decent people, not the other way around. He was not alone in this belief. Dr Southwood Smith, in Recreations of a Country Parson (1861), had no doubt that

A clean, fresh, and well-ordered house exercises over its inmates a moral, no less than a physical influence, and has a direct tendency to make the members of the family sober, peaceable, and considerate of the feelings and happiness of each other; nor is it difficult to trace a connexion between habitual feelings of this sort and the formation of habits of respect for property, for the laws in general, and even for those higher duties and obligations the observance of which no laws can enforce.36

Expressions that reflected this idea became commonplace. It was John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, who first said that ‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness’: an idea that before the nineteenth century would simply have made no sense. Good Methodists, and soon the general population, had a moral as well as physical duty to clean their houses. Thus tasks like blackleading the grates and whitening the front steps, which made the grates and the steps no cleaner than they had been before, were important in that they were time-consuming, had to be repeated daily, and therefore indicated that the householders were serious in their commitment. Front steps had to be rewhitened every morning. Whiting was made up of size, ‘stone blue’ (a bleaching agent), whitening and pipeclay. The stones were swept, scrubbed with water, and then covered with this mixture. When it was dry they were rubbed with a flannel and brushed. In later years a hearthstone or donkey stone – a piece of weathered sandstone – could be used instead of the whiting; it was rubbed over the step, and did not need buffing afterwards. The whiting was highly impermanent: once walked on, the steps were marked until they were whitened again the next day. But a ‘good’ neighbourhood was one where ‘each house you passed had its half-circle of white pavement and its white-scrubbed doorstep’. In many parts of Britain doorsteps were whitened daily well into the 1960s.37 Mrs Haweis noted that ‘If an old house has been lived in by respectable and careful people, it is not uncommon to find it … actually free from a single blackbeetle!’38 Careful people who were not respectable, it was clear, would have had blackbeetles.

The link between morality and housekeeping was made time after time. Carlyle, coming from a poor farming background, thought his future mother-in-law’s drawing room was the finest room he had ever seen: ‘Clean, all of it, as spring water; solid and correct’.39 The same conflation of cleanliness and virtue could not have been put more clearly than by the old-fashioned newly married man in Gissing’s The Odd Women: he thought that his wife’s ‘care of the house was all that reason could desire. In her behaviour he had never detected the slightest impropriety. He believed her chaste as any woman living.’40 And Dickens, as usual, both adhered to and mocked the prevailing notion. In Our Mutual Friend (1864–5), Eugene Wrayburn and Mortimer Lighthouse, two bachelors, take chambers together. Eugene insists on their having a ‘very complete little kitchen’, where

the moral influence is the important thing … See! … miniature flour barrel, rolling-pin, spice box, shelf of brown jars, chopping-board, coffee-mill, dresser elegantly furnished with crockery, saucepans and pans, roasting jack, a charming kettle, an armoury of dish-covers. The moral influence of these objects, in forming the domestic virtues, may have an immense influence upon me … In fact, I have an idea that I feel the domestic virtues already forming … 41

In the 1851 census, just over a quarter of a million men were of the professional ranks – doctors, barristers and solicitors, and so on. Twenty years later the number had trebled, to more than 800,000. Professionalization, a set of skills to be mastered, was not confined to the outside world: women were expected to acquire the necessary skills to be good managers, administrators, organizers in their own realm. Mrs Beeton put it most famously in the opening sentence of Household Management (1861): ‘As with the COMMANDER OF AN ARMY, or the leader of any enterprise, so it is with the mistress of the house.’42 Shirley Forster Murphy, in Our Homes twenty years later, used a similarly martial image:

If once we commence a war against dirt, we can never lay down our arms and say, ‘now the enemy is conquered.’ … Women – mistresses of households, domestic servants – are the soldiers who are deputed by society to engage in this war against dirt … As in a campaign each officer is told off to a particular duty, let each servant in a house, and each member of the family who can take a part understand clearly what is the duty for which she is responsible.43

(Note how part of respectability was in allocating each person a separate task, instead of one person performing a multiplicity of roles.)

The mistress of the house was advised to be businesslike:

it will be found a good plan to write down the daily work of each servant in a little book that can hang in her cupboard, and the hours for doing it, as well as the days on which extra cleaning is required. The hours of rising, meals, dressing, shutting up, going to bed, and all matters relating to comfort and order, should also be inscribed in the book, with existent rules, concerning ‘followers’, Sundays out, times for returning, the lists of silver, china, linen, pots and pans, or whatever goods are entrusted to her, the sweep’s days, the dustman’s days, &c., &c.44

Pre-printed account books were sold to simplify the requisite noting of all household expenditure. Their headings and columns for butcher, baker, rent, wages etc. mimicked office ledgers. This was in addition to each of the tradesman’s own books: the housewife wrote her order in the book she kept for each separate supplier when he came to take her daily or weekly order. The tradesman took the book away, filled in the prices, and brought it back with her delivery later in the day. The good housewife then transferred these prices to her own ledger, and every week or month reconciled all the figures. It was, said the journal Publisher’s Weekly, ‘an age of selections and collections, of abstracts and compilations, of anthologies and genealogies, indexes, catalogues, bibliographies, and local histories’.45

These ideas were very much a part of the Zeitgeist. Linnaeus, the eighteenth-century Swedish naturalist, had been the first to propose a system for defining and classifying the animal kingdom by genera and species within an ordered hierarchy, and when his collection was brought to London to form the basis of the Linnean Society in the 1790s, it promoted and upheld the single, static classification system, which was popular by virtue of its clarity and simplicity.

The sheer amount of new information available – new inventions firing the Industrial Revolution, new flora and fauna brought back in the age of Imperial expansion – fed an urge to numerate, to classify. The Register of Births, Marriages and Deaths, set up in 1837, was an approach to classifying the population at three major points in their lifespan. The census was instituted in the first attempt to number the population of the British Isles. Much of the classification followed the hierarchical patterns set down by Linnaeus. The British Museum (now the British Library) began to create its massive catalogue; the Great Exhibition of 1851 graded and classified all production into four categories (‘raw materials’, ‘machinery and mechanical inventions’, ‘manufacture’ and ‘sculpture and fine arts’); Peter Roget, a physiologist, separated and categorized the entire English language into five classes (‘abstract relations’, ‘space’, ‘matter’, ‘intellect’, ‘volition’ and ‘emotion, religion and morality’) in his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases (1852).*

Yet the notion of the natural world following a relentless progressive law, of historical progress moving in a linear fashion towards a single future goal, was becoming popular in tandem with this urge to describe what was present in the here and now. The Oxford English Dictionary, conceived in 1857, was the first dictionary that was not a guide to current usage (or not only a guide to current usage), but instead a chronological ordering of the historical development of the language, a completely new approach. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) had two themes, progress (evolution) and competition (natural selection). Evolution was generally accepted in a very short time for such a radical thesis; for evolution could be interpreted as progress. Natural selection was at odds with historical progress: it was arbitrary, unclassifiable, and it therefore had to wait until the twentieth century for its turn. Even something as seemingly straightforward and non-scientific as how to display paintings was radically altered by this linear notion: Charles Eastlake rehung the pictures in the National Gallery to take account of school and chronology for the first time.

Women’s preoccupations were not neglected in this urge to classify: Eliza Acton, in her cookery books at the beginning of the century, was the first person to write a recipe more or less as we would recognize it today, by separating out the ingredients from the method, which no one had thought of doing before. No longer was a cook told to take ‘some flour’ or ‘enough milk’, but now quantities and measures were introduced. Department stores were seen as the epitome of this classificatory ideal: Whiteley’s, in Westbourne Grove – one of the earliest department stores, and the biggest – was, said the Paddington Times, ‘the realisation of organisation and order’.46

The expectation was that such organization could (and should) be replicated at home: Houlston’s Industrial Library, which offered would-be servants advice on how to ready themselves for new and better jobs in service, suggested that ladies’ maids keep inventories of all their mistress’s clothes, checking them every few weeks against the clothes and updating them accordingly.47 New householders were advised to make an inventory of their entire household: furniture, furnishings, ornaments, pictures.* Then ‘once a year … the mistress should overlook every single possession she has, comparing them with a list made at the time she entered the house, which she should never let out of her own possession, and which she should alter from time to time, as things are broken or lost or bought’. This must include ‘every glass, tumbler, cup, saucer’. The maid and her employer should go through the list together, after which they should both sign and date it, so that no questions might later occur.49

Supervision extended to every aspect of the relationship between mistress and servant. The usual system, for a woman with one or more servants, was that in the morning the mistress would perform her household functions of overseeing the running of her house: checking that the rooms had been cleaned properly, if there were enough servants, or cleaning the house with her servant if she had only one. Then she would go to the kitchen, to look at the food left from the day (or days) before, and plan and order her meals accordingly. She also gave out stores from the locked storeroom. Some gave out stores once a week, but the paragon found in the advice books was to do it every day, based on the servant’s requirements for that day alone.

The English Housekeeper acknowledged that few houses had storerooms that could meet the requirements of the ideal promoted in advice books, and then went on to outline them anyway: shelves for preserves and pickles, drawers for cleaning cloths, boxes for candles and soap. The price of starch varied with the price of flour, so the canny housekeeper stocked up when prices dropped. Rice could be stored for ‘more than three years, by spreading a well-aired linen sheet in a box, and folding it over the rice, the sheet being lifted out on the floor, once in two or three months, and the rice spread about upon the sheet for a day or two’. If the space was available, dried goods were to be bought only twice or three times a year.50 When possible, shopping was to be done seasonally, when things were cheapest: towards the end of the century coals cost about 15s. a ton in summer; £1 1s. a ton in winter. A 112 lb sack of potatoes cost about 6s. and lasted four or five people three months – an outlay of about 6d. a week. If a smaller quantity was bought, or the potatoes were bought out of season, it might cost 1s. a week to feed the same number of people.51

Weekly stores to be handed out to the cook included ‘Baked flour, prepared crumbs of bread, garlic, shallots, onions, black onions, burnt sugar, stock, glaze, salt, mustard, pepper, cayenne, all kinds of spice, dried herbs, vinegar, oil, string, pudding-cloths [one for every pudding ordered that week], paper for roasting, paper for fried fish, etc; fish napkins, plenty of clean towels, oatmeal, groats, flour, split peas … lard, butter, eggs, etc, etc.’52 The cook also needed every week a dishing-up cloth, a dresser cloth, a tablecloth, six kitchen cloths, a dish cloth, a knife cloth, a floor cloth, a rubber (to clean linoleum), three dusters and a flannel.53 Good housewives did not give these things out promiscuously: Mrs Haweis expected her model women to inspect each old duster to ensure it was sufficiently worn out before exchanging it for a new one.54

The handing out always caused problems: many servants were insulted by the implication that they were not responsible enough, or honest enough, to be allowed to take what they needed when they needed it. Gwen Raverat’s mother had the same cook for thirty years, but to the end the cook ‘had to go through the farce of asking for every pot of jam or box of matches to be given out of the store cupboard, for she herself was never allowed to hold the key for a single instant’.55 The system mortified Hannah Cullwick. After more than two years working for a widow and her daughter in north London, she said bitterly, ‘Every little thing I’ve to ax for & I carina always remember at the time what I may want to use, & so it’s inconvenient – besides I think it shows so little trust & treating a servant like a child.’56 (The equation of servants with children will be discussed in the next chapter.)

Women were taught that running a house economically was a virtue in itself, regardless of income. If waste and excess were present, no matter what the household could afford, the housewife was a bad housekeeper and, consequently, a bad person: a thrifty woman was a morally upright woman. Elizabeth Grant, a Scottish woman living near Dublin, wrote in her diary, ‘A poor woman with a sickly baby came [to the door] … luckily I had some old flannel and socks of Johnny’s for the little wretched thing – and mind, dear little girls, never to throw away anything – all old clothes I put carefully away, sure that some day some distressed person will want them. The merest rag goes into a rag bag which when full a poor woman will sell for a few pennies.’57

By contrast, the second Mrs Finch in Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch (1872) was an obviously bad housekeeper, and therefore the reader knew from the outset to regard her household with a dubious eye. When the narrator first met her, ‘Her hair was not dressed; and her lace cap was all on one side. The upper part of her was clothed in a loose jacket of blue merino; the lower part was robed in a dimity dressing gown of doubtful white. In one hand, she held a dirty dogs’-eared book, which I at once detected to be a Circulating Library novel.’ She was not properly dressed, not clean and she read novels: the narrator was unsurprised later to find that Mrs Finch came from a lower-class background before her marriage.58 She gave out the stores improperly dressed, and had no control over her household:

‘Eight pounds of soap? Where does it all go to I wonder!’ groaned Mrs Finch to the accompaniment of the baby’s screams. [Note that the baby is in the wrong place: by being out of the nursery, it emphasized Mrs Finch’s bad housekeeping.] ‘Five pounds of soda for the laundry? … Six pounds of candles? You must eat candles … who ever heard of burning six pounds of candles in a week? Ten pounds of sugar? Who gets it all? I never taste sugar from one year’s end to another. Waste, nothing but waste …’59

Mrs Finch, it was plain, never checked her maid’s dusters before giving out new ones.

Even the charitably inclined Mrs Grant was, by many advice books’ reckoning, profligate: sheets were expected to last between five and seven years (or three to four years if there were only two sets: one on the bed, one in the wash); then, when the centre part of each sheet became worn, they were cut in half and sewn ‘sides to middle’ – the sides which tucked in and were therefore fresher became the middle, and the old, worn centre became the sides. After a few more years they were demoted to dust sheets for a further few years, to be used to cover furniture when cleaning out fireplaces, dusting, etc. Only then they could be torn into strips for bandages, or given to the poor. To give things to the poor too soon – when they were still ‘good’ – was as foolish as any of Mrs Finch’s behaviour.

Items from the kitchen were even more urgent candidates for what we now know as recycling and was then considered simply thrifty. Rubbish was divided into two parts: dust (coal dust, ashes from the fires) and refuse (everything else). From 1875 refuse was removed by the municipality as a legal obligation. Until then many suburbs had no regular collections at all, and residents had to arrange for removal as necessary, paying per collection. For this reason, as well as the moral value of thrift, housewives were encouraged to reuse everything possible.

There was, of course, less to dispose of: packaging as we know it had yet to be created, and goods came either unwrapped or wrapped in paper. Open fires allowed an overly dirtied paper (that had wrapped meat or fish, for example) to be disposed of immediately. Cleaner paper was kept for reuse, and really clean paper had two further uses. One was as lavatory paper (see p. 295). Secondly, many households used waste paper to make ‘spills’ – long strips of twisted paper, used to light fires or candles. In Mrs Gaskell’s novel Cranford (1851–3), Miss Matty, the elderly spinster, sets aside one evening a week for this. She has done her weekly accounts and her correspondence, and so uses the old bills and letters for the task. (She also makes spills out of coloured paper, in decorative feather shapes, which she gives as presents.)60

One system of disposal that has vanished was the number of street traders who regularly visited the back doors to buy various items. Paper was bought by the paper mills, and by manufacturers of papier-mâché furniture and ornaments. Dealers also bought old iron, metal, wood and lead. Mrs Haweis, really getting into her stride, gave prices that the virtuous housewife could expect for empty biscuit boxes, jars, tins and other household goods. She advised that ‘Champagne bottles with the labels on are worth more than without them.’61

Old textiles and bones were bought by the rag-and-bone man, who sold his wares to paper mills and to glue, gelatine, match, toothpick and fertilizer manufactures. In Bleak House, Krook’s shop carries signs which would have been familiar to all: ‘RAG AND BOTTLE WAREHOUSE; BONES BOUGHT; KITCHEN-STUFF BOUGHT; OLD IRON BOUGHT; WASTE PAPER BOUGHT; LADIES’ AND GENTLEMEN’S WARDROBES BOUGHT’.62 By 1865 Henry Mayhew thought this type of sign very old-fashioned: rag-and-bone men now pasted up coloured prints which showed characters with speech bubbles advertising their services. Mayhew describes one such print thus:

The youthful Sammy, dressed in light-blue trousers, gamboge [bright yellow] waistcoat, and pink coat, is throwing up his arms in raptures at the ‘stylish appearance’ of his sweetheart Matilda, who, like Sammy himself, is decked out in all the chromatic elegance of these three primary colours,* while the astonished swain is exclaiming, by means of a huge bubble which he is in the act of blowing out of his mouth, ‘My gracious, Mathilda! how ever did you get that beautiful new dress?’ To which rather impertinent query the damsel is made to bubble forth the following decided puff: ‘Why, Sammy by saving up all my old rags, and taking them to Mr.—, who gives the best prices likewise for bones, pewter, brass, and kitchen-stuff!63