A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain (12 page)

By then, however, technology had made it possible to produce more elaborate décor, and to do so without enormous cost. It became a sign of moving with the times to cram one’s home with the marvels, fripperies and luxuries created by industry, and people began to seek status symbols that could be displayed
inside
their homes. Victorians filled their parlours with ornament and utilities not only to enjoy these things but to show visitors that they possessed the currently modish objects and styles. The simplicity of the Georgians was turned on its head, for a room with empty stretches of wall, or corners bereft of tables and ornaments, was considered poor taste – a classic example of one generation reacting against the outlook of the last.

The desire for a wealth of ornament reached its apogee in the fifties, for the Great Exhibition at the start of that decade acted as a huge market-place for domestic furnishings, showing the public what was available not only from British manufacturers – who constituted by far the largest element – but from overseas. However, this taste for heavy, elaborate, machine-made furniture and ornament had scarcely begun to make an impact when it was challenged by designers and thinkers, most notably John Ruskin and William Morris.
Though cluttered homes continued to be characteristic of Victorian living right to the end of the era, the accepted notions of popular taste were under constant, often spirited attack, and alternatives were found. No sooner, in other words, had the industrial era reached its high point than a reaction against it began. The Queen Anne revival later in the century led the way to styles of building and furnishing that were a direct repudiation of those which dominated the mid-Victorian years. Taste went from simple to elaborate and back to simple.

Because it was there that status and wealth were displayed, the home became the focus of unprecedented and increasing attention. As opportunities expanded for planning, decorating and furnishing houses, these matters developed into a national preoccupation, somewhat similar in scale to the present-day interest in do-it-yourself and renovation. The trend was reflected in the number of books and periodicals produced throughout the reign. The best-known was Charles Eastlake’s
Hints on Household Taste
, which was first published in 1868. Other titles that sold well included Shirley Hibberd’s
Rustic Adornments for Homes of Taste
(1857), Robert Edis’
Decoration and Furniture of Town Houses
(1881) – which became a standard text for the Queen Anne movement – Mrs Mary Haweis’
The Art of Decoration
(1881), and Mrs Lucy Orrinsmith’s
The Drawing-Room, its Decoration and Furniture
(1877). In addition there were multi-volume reference works such as
Cassell’s Household Guide
(1869 onwards) and
The Cabinet-Maker, a Journal of Designs
(1868). By the end of the century there were influential periodicals such as
The Artist
and, most famously,
The Studio
, which, instead of setting out the mores of taste for readers to follow, offered through their articles continuous and updated information about developments in Britain and abroad. Decorative ideas in vogue in Germany, Scandinavia or Russia, for instance, could be disseminated
through text and illustrations, and thus quickly incorporated into British homes. It is worth noticing, incidentally, given our notions of how little scope Victorian ladies had for earning income or following careers, that much of this material was written by women. As with the equally lucrative books on etiquette, household management and domestic economy, ladies were seen as the natural repository of wisdom in this area. Some of them made considerable names, as well as incomes, from their pens, though none of them matched the degree of fame achieved by Mrs Beeton.

The home was not only a showplace for one’s taste and possessions but a contrast to the violence and uncertainty outside. The Victorian wealthy, and middle classes, saw themselves as surrounded by a sea of poverty, crime and disturbance. There was always the threat of robbery, but during the unrest of the thirties and the upheavals of the forties, there was an additional likelihood of civil disorder and they felt physically endangered by political mobs. The Duke of Wellington, despite being a national hero, had felt sufficiently at risk during the Reform Bill riots to have the windows of his town house in Piccadilly fitted with bulletproof iron shutters (thus gaining his nickname ‘the Iron Duke’). In the following decade the Queen and her family fled London before the Chartist rally on Kennington Common in expectation of widespread violence.

In the comfortably off, these circumstances perhaps induced a siege mentality. The home, or at least the notion of home life, became more important in this era than at any time before or since. It was becoming sanctified in Victorian mythology as a place of refuge from the world and its troubles, and as such it
became a fortress. Sometimes, it even looked like one. The very streets in which the wealthy had their homes were often segregated from the surrounding area by hefty, though elegant, barriers. Even fairly modest homes that were built in terraces were commonly set back from the pavement behind a set of sharp-pointed railings and a ten- or fifteen-foot ‘moat’ that could only be crossed by a stone ‘drawbridge’. Arthur Schlesinger was greatly amused by what he saw as domestic premises bristling with defences, and remarked that: ‘Every English house has its fence, its iron stockade and its doorway bridge. It is exactly as if Louis Napoleon was expected to effect a landing daily between luncheon and dinner, while every individual Englishman is prepared to defend his household gods to the last drop of porter.’
¹
Whether they were expecting to sit out a revolution or were merely protecting their privacy, British people of the property-owning sort appeared to be suspicious and fearful of everything beyond their own fireside.

Town houses designed in this way were not a Victorian invention. Their predecessors the Georgians had created this type of townscape in the previous century, as can be seen by any visitor to Bath. The nineteenth century expanded it – as befitted an era in which there were far more people wealthy enough to live in grand town houses – and the Victorians made it their own with a number of architectural touches and innovations. In London, the covering of facades with a coat of off-white stucco, which looks especially attractive when lit by evening sun, was first seen in the Grosvenor Estate, the building of which began in 1824 but continued well into Victoria’s reign. Instead of the comparatively simple fan-lighted Georgian doors, the builders of later generations created more imposing entrances, the doors themselves sheltered by balustraded balconies that were supported by pairs of Corinthian columns. A street uniformly filled with this architecture, such as those on either side of Eaton
Square, presents a prospect of striking beauty and magnificence, an undeniable achievement of architects and builders. This style was imitated, in many thousands of smaller houses, throughout London and beyond. The spacious, ordered facades, pillared entrances and Italianate balustrades, which were in essence a continuation of eighteenth-century Classical styles and which had been refined in the Regency period, became characteristic of the Victorian era because houses of this sort continued to be built throughout the early and middle decades of that epoch. Buckingham Palace characterized this heavy Classical style, though it was not a product of the Queen’s reign. It had been begun by John Nash in about 1825 and he himself had died two years before she came to the throne, yet it became associated with Victoria because she was the first monarch to live there, moving in a month after her coronation in 1838. This type of architecture was seen as stately as well as familiar. It suggested to both natives and foreign visitors that in terms of national greatness Britons were the heirs to Ancient Rome. It also reflected the Mediterranean taste developed by architects who had either been on the Grand Tour or had studied under others who had. The fashion for Italianate buildings would continue throughout the reign. It would be seen not only in the design of private houses (the square campanile, two of which were such a feature of Osborne House, was much copied in suburban villas) but in communal and public buildings. Anyone walking through St James’ Park and Pall Mall in London will not fail to notice that the back of the Foreign Office looks as if it would be more suitable in Rome, and several of the gentlemen’s clubs seem to have been lifted directly from medieval Florence – as their designs largely were.

Though the huge town houses of Belgravia might represent the heights of urban domestic architecture, most Victorians who needed a home belonged to social strata that could not
dream of affording such splendour. Scaled-down versions of the classic town house were therefore built in vast numbers on the edges of cities. The terrace was a space-saving option which – as the architects of Bath had discovered a century earlier – enabled a whole group of dwellings to increase their elegance by being joined together in a uniform row that had a pleasing harmony and balance. Speculators who built such houses (one of them was ‘Superior Dosset’, the founder of the Forsyte dynasty in Galsworthy’s novels) threw up these rows of houses in fields and at roadsides, where they might remain as truncated eyesores until the arrival of neighbouring – and perhaps unsympathetic – buildings joined them together to form streets. The houses of lower-middle-class families might have half-stuccoed facades in imitation of Nash’s great projects, and even these were likely to have areas (the railing-enclosed open space at basement level in front of a house) and servants’ attics, for anyone belonging to the class of small householder was likely to have a servant, even if it were only a single young girl from the local orphanage. The houses were also likely to have touches of gentility in the form of fanlights over the door or pairs of columns or pilasters framing it. In the case of especially pretentious builders there could even be niches, Classical urns or pseudo-Greek statuary on the pediment of a terrace. All of these things, like the genteel or aristocratic names often given to streets and squares by developers in bourgeois neighbourhoods, appealed to the aspirations of a society that took its cue entirely from the top and which delighted in being able to display its own modest expressions of taste and status. The advent of the railway meant that building materials could be more widely, and rapidly, distributed around the country, and therefore that Welsh slate – to name one major example – could be used to build houses in Newcastle or Brighton.

For housing the working class there was a new development, the tenement. This word, which we tend to associate with slums, was in fact precisely the opposite. It offered a comparatively hygienic and spacious living unit in which a number of families could dwell. Though largely unknown in England, the tenement had a long and honourable history in Scotland, where families lived for generations on single floors in a building that was served by a ‘close’ or communal entrance. These continue to function, and a Victorian example is preserved in Glasgow by the National Trust for Scotland. The English versions, whether they were erected for the Guinness Trust or the Great Exhibition (Prince Albert’s ‘Model Dwellings’, a sample unit of workmen’s housing, can still be seen in London’s Kennington Park) tended to consist of blocks of single-storey dwellings that opened onto communal balconies and were reached by outside staircases. Many of them are still in use, and they often display pleasant decorative touches in the form of wrought-iron railings or patterned brick.

The pseudo-Georgian, vaguely Classical townhouse of the lower middle class, with its cube-shape and shallow roof and stucco coat, represents an important Victorian legacy. It was popular in its day in part because it was so simple in design and appearance that it was cheap to build and cheap to buy or rent, and its usefulness has been proved by the number of such houses still inhabited. A more complex style, and one that by its very nature made little appeal to builders of mass housing, had also emerged in the Regency and early Victorian eras. This was Gothic revival. It had had its beginnings, in the eighteenth century, in the garden follies and sham-temples of country-house parks. In the latter decades there had been two major and influential private buildings employing this style throughout.
One was Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill (1750–63), the other was William Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey, a structure entirely inspired by medieval models but which was so over-ambitious that its immense tower collapsed and it had to be abandoned. Gothic styles attracted a core of devoted, but often eccentric, adherents even when they were out of general fashion.

The nineteenth century’s greatest proponent of Gothic architecture was Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812–52), the son of a French émigré who was an expert on medieval architecture and the author of several volumes on the subject. The younger Pugin was already, by the age of fifteen, helping his father with the restoration of Windsor Castle by designing Gothic fixtures. He subsequently became a convert to Catholicism, and thus added to his technical ability a sense of passionate nostalgia for a lost age of faith. He found a crucial outlet for his ideas when, in 1835, he was invited by the architect Charles Barry to work on the new Palace of Westminster. Following its destruction by fire in 1834, it had been decided to rebuild it in Gothic style in order to match its neighbours – King Henry VII’s Chapel at Westminster Abbey, and the fourteenth-century Westminster Hall. The project was to occupy most of Pugin’s life. He was placed in charge of the palace interiors, and personally designed virtually every detail – carpets, wallpaper, woodwork, tiles, stained glass, furniture and lightfittings. In order to carry out these designs he assembled an army of craftsmen and apprentices who were kept busy for over a quarter of a century, for the Houses of Parliament were not completed until 1860. The project represented a flowering of individual craftsmanship that was in sharp contrast to the spirit of the times, for industrial mass-production
was creating a culture of furnishing and decoration that was filling both private homes and public buildings with factory-made ornament. Pugin’s influence on the later Arts and Crafts movement, which similarly sought a return to the values of the pre-industrial world, was profound. The mass-production of furniture and
objets d’art
against which he and others fought was not entirely to be despised, however. The cheapness of these items brought at least a hint of beauty and elegance within reach of millions of households that could not have afforded anything created by hand. An imitation Roman statue, fashioned by machinery, on the mantelpiece of a lower-middle-class household looked, at least from a distance, much like the one displayed in a country house as a relic of the Grand Tour. Machine-made floor tiles and cheaper, factory-produced wallpaper brought colour and a certain (arguably vulgar) splendour to the homes of the clerical classes.