Hidden behind long skirts

Victorian England has frequently been pictured (and often saw itself) as a society sundered into separate spheres: a thrusting, rapacious, heartless public realm, a masculine space where the ruthless values of the marketplace held sway; and a private protected arena of alleged domestic bliss, the harmonious home of love, charity and family feeling that was presided over by the female of the species. Home was where the heart was.

Prominent in the carefully rendered portraits conjured up in the imagined worlds of a Dickens or a Trollope and pervading even the mundane realities recorded in contemporary diaries and letters, the cult of domesticity was a central feature of the ruling ideology of the age. Inside the Victorian home, in theory at least, masochistic matriarchs served as ministering angels to children and husbands alike, dedicating their lives to soothing and restoring their battered menfolk and happily (or perhaps not so happily) dedicating their lives to providing a refuge for male providers whose lives might otherwise have been consumed by commerce.

That all was not such sweetness and light will come as no surprise to anyone. But how, in reality, did the Victorian home function? It was not, after all, a private space but in many respects an extension of the public sphere: one as filled with labor and conflict as the “outside” world; a miniature universe that was as important a measure of a man’s (and a family’s) social standing and success as the world of employment; a contrived environment whose routines were rigidly controlled and stage-managed in a consuming effort to demonstrate its occupants’ conventionality, conformity and thus moral standing. Founded on myths and lies that could never be overtly acknowledged, the hypocrisy of home life was emblematic of the contradictions that lay at the heart of 19th century society.

In Judith Flanders’ skilled hands, the anatomy and physiology of the Victorian household are laid bare in “Inside the Victorian Home.” With wit and imagination, she probes and pokes at the illusions that generations lived by, and she provides us with unparalleled insight into the machinations that went into constructing and maintaining a “respectable” home. Flanders’ focus is limited, of course. Not for her the grand routines of the aristocrats’ country houses and urban palaces, or the sordid squalor endured by the slum-dwelling laboring classes. Instead, it is on the domestic lives of Middle England that she concentrates her gaze.

Minute gradations of social status were of overweening importance in such a class-conscious social order. Hence the overwhelming importance of display. The more publicly accessible portions of the house occupied a disproportionate amount of the available space, and comfort and convenience were routinely sacrificed to put the best possible face on one’s circumstances. For many, backstage spaces were cramped and crowded. Bedrooms were often meanly furnished to leave more resources available for the public rooms. Carpets, repositories of dust and vermin, slid inexorably down the social scale as they aged, moving from drawing room to parlor to morning room to bedroom and finally ending up in the scullery -- the furthest backstage portion of the house, where the dirtiest, smelliest, least salubrious portions of household work were accomplished (and where the servants briefly got to rest their weary bones at day’s end).

Mimicking the allegedly rigid division between inside and outside, private and public, Victorians placed great emphasis on the importance of segregating functions within the household. Bedrooms were for sleeping, for sickness and presumably for sex (though Flanders is as reticent as her subjects on the latter topic, discoursing at length on childbirth and its tribulations but largely ignoring the antecedents of pregnancy and parturition). To read or to write there was to violate an important social norm. Public reception rooms were each supposed to be reserved for their own special functions: dining, receiving guests, providing separate retreats for gentlemen and ladies. Mixing categories was a grievous social sin, as bad as having pretensions beyond one’s actual social station.

So appearances were vital, but they had to be the right appearances, and to neglect them was as disgraceful as to care too openly about them. “Breeding” was all about learning to make and maintain the requisite distinctions. For culturally competent Victorians, objects spoke eloquently about their owners. Thus to choose the wrong ones, or to use fakes or imitations to lay claim to a status one did not possess, was to commit an indiscretion or a fraud with potentially far-reaching consequences. Behavior of this sort threatened to undermine hierarchy, and with it the social and moral orders of society. Consequently, like dress, furniture was not a matter of personal taste or comfort but an indicator of one’s place in the social system; just as one’s commitment to segregation of functions within the home was vital testimony to one’s moral worth.

In reality, of course, few could afford the space or resources to live up to these standards, just as few could afford the substantial array of servants on which the full realization of Victorian ideals of domesticity was so heavily dependent. Compromise was everywhere, as was the need to pretend one did not see or smell what was not supposed to be there (and that servants, living cheek-by-jowl with masters and mistresses, did not see or hear what they inevitably must have).

Wives were allegedly decorative, their publicly visible labors deliberately devoid of point or economic value. The sorts of activities in which “respectable” women could engage without losing their respectability were limited to carefully choreographed visits to their social equals (or, if possible, superiors); charitable work (but not direct, stigmatizing contact with the poor themselves); making ceremonial pincushions and engaging in other sorts of laborious fancywork to fill up the empty hours, producing “items no-one would buy -- or perhaps even want to buy.” Meanwhile, these decorative creatures were supposed to ensure that the machinery that made the household work proceeded invisibly and in complete silence.

But Victorian houses demanded far too much work for such surface calm to be anything but another illusion. They were, for example, filthy places. The air in English towns was thick with pollution from industry, but also from the open coal fires with which Victorians still insisted on heating their homes. The streets were covered in mud and dung that boots and shoes brought inside, and when the footwear dried the resulting dust would infiltrate the home. Gas lighting, growing ever more common, deprived rooms of oxygen and added its soot to the mix. Rats, mice and insects such as spiders, flies, bed-bugs and fleas provided yet a further layer of problems. Absent more than the most rudimentary of technological aids, cooking, cleaning and the laundry were extraordinarily labor intensive, and besides supervising such servants as they could afford, women of the middle and professional classes had to devote much of their time and attention to performing some of this labor themselves -- all the while pretending they did not.

Flanders’ discussion is organized around the physical structuring of space, within what were most often rented row or town houses. The bedroom, the nursery, the kitchen, the scullery, the parlor, the drawing room, the dining room, the morning room, the bathroom and the sickroom are each taken up in their turn, the furnishing and functions explored, and, in most cases, they are illustrated through some of the well-chosen illustrations that accompany her text. Such discussions, however, provide the excuse to range far more widely through the social history and underpinnings of Victorian domesticity.

Flanders devotes considerable space, for example, to a discussion of the technology of lighting the home, examining how the advent of first gas and then electric lighting affected social life in myriad ways. The chapter on the nursery provides the occasion for extended excursions on infant feeding, sickness and mortality, and on the necessity of keeping children under wraps so that their noises, sight and smells did not annoy the master of the house on his return from his labors. (The Victorians’ sense of the pleasures and pains of domesticity was quite different from ours, and children clearly fell into the latter category for most of their childhood.)

Inevitably, attention to the social organization of the dining room entails attention to Victorians’ diet and the prescriptions for serving and entertaining one’s guests, while the activities in the kitchen and scullery (most often below street level) lead to substantial attention given to the servant problem. Similarly, the female enclave of the parlor prompts a lengthy discussion of the centrality of marriage to the fate of middle-class women. Without marriage, as Flanders notes, women could hope to survive only as dependents in someone else’s house. To be female and independent was to be an anomaly and somehow incomplete -- the opposite of our own assumptions. (Only women of the servant class were exempt from this prejudice against the single female. But their status was not problematic, since in the words of a Lancashire mill owner, William Rathbone Greg, “they fulfill both essentials of a woman’s being: they are supported by, and they minister to, men. We could not possibly do without them. Nature has not provided one too many.”)

For all the ideological emphasis on separate spheres, married men’s comfort and their status were too nearly implicated in their households for them to remain indifferent to or detached from the nature of their domestic environment. And for all the apparent hostility to the notion of middle-class women entering the working world, their management of the household economy required them to manage budgets; hire, supervise and fire labor; and engage in a great deal of manual labor themselves -- while maintaining the illusion that the whole elaborate domestic machine was self-operating and beneath their notice. With “Inside the Victorian Home,” Judith Flanders has labored long and hard to set the record straight and in the process has provided a fascinating and invaluable guide to the perils, pleasures and contradictions of Victorian domesticity. *