A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain (13 page)

The influence of Pugin was enormous. When the Lords’ chamber was opened to public inspection in 1847 it caused a sensation, and brought Pugin a host of imitators. His style provoked further interest when he organized the Medieval Court at the Great Exhibition. The fact that this work coincided with a revival of both Roman Catholic church-building and increased ceremony within the Anglican Church meant that medieval-revival architecture and interiors became immensely fashionable. Not only places of worship but institutions such as schools, hospitals and almshouses came to be built in this style, which was considered particularly appropriate for seats of learning (even down to infant schools), and for which the genuine buildings of the late middle ages – such as many of the Oxbridge colleges – provided a wide range of models. Pugin also created private houses. As early as 1837 he designed Scarisbrick Hall in Lancashire, but while his great achievement will always be considered his interiors in
Parliament, his most extensive work was that which he did with the 16th Earl of Shrewsbury – the most powerful Catholic layman of the time – to create a series of Roman Catholic churches throughout the north Staffordshire countryside and elsewhere, building what are perhaps the most beautiful church interiors seen in Britain since the Reformation. He also altered the Earl’s home, Alton Towers, between 1839 and 1852 into a magnificent showpiece of neo-Gothic architecture and decoration. Pugin’s output was so prodigious that the stress proved fatal. He died after a breakdown in September 1852, though his son Edward continued his work into a third generation.

One of Pugin’s most able successors in what was to be dubbed ‘High Victorian’ taste was William Burges (1827–81). He too had grown up with a passion for medieval workmanship, and he had honed his knowledge of building and design with extensive travel abroad. All English architects with a bent toward the gothic were highly influenced by the Frenchman Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (1814–79), who had successfully remodelled a number of medieval French buildings. Like Pugin, Burges had a wealthy patron – in his case the Marquess of Bute – and therefore the opportunity to work on large and costly projects. His most significant commission was the renovation of Cardiff Castle, beginning in 1868. The buildings were originally medieval, and Burges transformed them into an almost absurd Victorian fantasy, as he did with a further commission at nearby Castell Coch. Anyone seeing the charming fireplace in the Castle’s banqueting hall, with its plaster turrets and colourful trumpeters, would realize that he had introduced, in place of Pugin’s high-minded religiosity, a lively humour and a quirkiness that are very endearing. Like Pugin, he died suddenly and relatively young.

Burges’ contemporary, George Gilbert Scott (1811–78), also made his name through the restoration of medieval buildings. He sought to make Gothic revival architecture less purist and more adaptable to the needs of the age. Unmotivated by religion or by strict adherence to accuracy, he developed a looser style that unashamedly made use of modern technology such as iron girders, and he employed to great effect the revived Renaissance decorative material terracotta. He was responsible for two of London’s best-known buildings – the Albert Monument (1862–72) and the vast and conspicuous Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras station (1868–77). Another architect who worked in the Gothic tradition and has left conspicuous monuments was William Butterfield (1814–1900). In some of his major projects – and the two most outstanding are the quadrangle and chapel at Keble College, Oxford (1868–76) and the chapel and New Quad at Rugby School (1872 and 1885) – use of brick in contrasting colours has led him to be seen as an extreme exponent of the style, and his work requires, even among those who share a taste for it, some getting used to. For those who are not admirers, it is nerve-janglingly offensive.

Another exponent of this style, who admired its combination of high-mindedness and technical skill, was John Ruskin (1819–1900). The most important artistic figure of the Victorian era, Ruskin was not an architect but an artist, writer and critic (he in fact created art criticism as a discipline), as well as a philosopher and philanthropist. His exhaustive six-volume work
Modern Painters
(1843–60) gave him a national reputation as an authority on art.
The Seven Lamps of Architecture
(1849) extended the reach of his expertise into the field of architecture. Even more of an impact was made by his next work,
The Stones of Venice
(1853), which used the architecture of that city to celebrate the virtues of individualist medieval craftsmanship and added to the gothic a moral
element – in other words, he championed the notion that this was not simply a decorative style copied from the past but a statement of idealism and faith that had relevance in the present. Ruskin became a symbol of resistance to the industrial society that had come to maturity in the Victorian era and found its expression in the artefacts at the Great Exhibition. His influence was vast, and spread so far that it could become almost a caricature. He was to lament that: ‘There is scarcely a public house near the Crystal Palace that does not sell its gin and bitters under pseudo-Venetian capitals.’
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Despite the trivialization that sometimes followed in the wake of his ideas, he was to be a guiding spirit for much of the design that characterized the later Victorian period.

Most town dwellings were terraced houses, whether this meant the vast and opulent five- and six-storey versions that can be seen in London’s Belgravia and Bayswater or the ‘two-up, two-down’ that is such a feature of the industrial north and Midlands. Houses were vertical, and the arrangement of the rooms followed a particular pattern that dictated, to a large extent, the lives of those who inhabited them. In the larger town houses – whether they were in London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester or Birmingham – the usage of the rooms was much the same and reflected a lifestyle that has now almost entirely vanished, both because of a lack of the servants that made it viable and because the prohibitive cost of property means that few can afford to run such establishments. The Victorians would not, in most cases, have
owned
these houses. They lived in a ‘rental culture’ similar to that which is still found on the Continent today. Nevertheless the cost of leasing a large town house and paying the servants who ran it would be beyond the means of
most. Looking today at the overwhelming stuccoed, Italianate terraces that were put up around Hyde Park at the time of the Great Exhibition, almost all of them now occupied by embassies or institutions, we may be intrigued to know who would have lived in them in the years after they were built. The contemporary journalist George Augustus Sala similarly wondered about their occupants. When walking one day he observed that:

magnificent lines of stately mansions, towering park gates, bring us to the two gigantic many-storeyed edifices at Albert Gate, which we have long-since christened ‘Gibraltar’, because they were for a long time supposed to be impregnable, no tenant having been found rich or bold enough to take them.
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Many houses of this type were set in terraces or culs-de-sac that were not accessible to the general public. To an extent that barely still exists, the Victorian wealthy lived in streets that were defended by railings and liveried gate-keepers. One example of this remains in fashionable London: Kensington Palace Gardens, a street of massive detached houses at the west end of the Gardens, looks much as it did when built in the 1850s. Because it houses the embassies of countries – such as Russia – with whom relations have been sensitive, its private character has deliberately been maintained. Today it is a curiosity; then it was merely one of many.

Inside a town house, whether as grand as those in the gated streets or more modest, like those in Bloomsbury, the layout followed the same general plan. Max Schlesinger, a German writer and traveller visiting London, gave this description of the interior and the uses of the various rooms:

The small space between the street-door and the stairs, hardly sufficient in length and breadth to deserve the pompous name
of a ‘hall’, is usually furnished with a couple of mahogany chairs or, in the wealthier houses, with flower-pots, statuettes, and now and then a sixth- or seventh-rate picture. The floor is covered with oil-cloth, and this again is covered with a breadth of carpet. The English houses are like chimneys turned inside-out; on the outside all is soot and dirt, in the inside everything is clean and bright.
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From the hall we make our way to the parlour – the refectory of the house. The parlour is the common sitting room of the family, the centre-point of the domestic state. It is here that many eat their dinners, and some say their prayers; in this room does the lady of the house arrange her household affairs and issue her commands. Large folding doors, which occupy nearly the whole breadth of the back wall, separate the front from the back parlour either to the purposes of a library for the master, the son, or the daughters of the house, or convert it to a boudoir, office, or breakfast room. Frequently, it serves no purpose in particular, and all in turn. These two rooms occupy the whole depth of the house.
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All the other apartments are above, so that there are from two to four rooms in each storey. Hence each storey has its particular destination in the family geographical dictionary. In the first floor are the reception rooms; in the second the bedrooms, with their large four-posters and marble-topped wash-stands; in the third storey are the nurseries and servants’ rooms; and in the fourth, if a fourth there be, you will find a couple of low garrets, for the occasional accommodation of some bachelor friend of the family.
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What also intrigued Schlesinger, as an outsider, was the servants’ territory in the basement. Unique to Britain, but found throughout the United Kingdom from Belgravia to Dublin and to Edinburgh’s New Town, was the area. As has been described,
each house was set back from the street with a narrow open space in front of it paved at basement level, and crossed at street level by a bridge. The area, which had a stairway leading down to it, allowed light into the basement. It accommodated the coal cellar and other storage space. It enabled servants and tradesmen access to the building through a separate entrance without disturbing the occupants.

Inside this basement was the kitchen, which with its range and table and shelves of pans, would be the centre of the servants’ world. Schlesinger examined this too:

In the place of the carpets which cover the floors of the upper rooms, we walk here on strong, solid oilcloths which, swept and washed, look like marble. Add to this, bright dish-covers of gigantic dimensions fixed to the wall, plated dishes, and sundry others utensils of queer shapes and silvery aspect, interspersed with copper saucepans and pots and china, the windows curtained, with a couple of flower-pots on the sill, and a branch of evergreens growing on the wall around them. A large fire is always kept burning; such is the English kitchen in its modest glory. Several doors open into sundry other subterraneous compartments. There is a back kitchen, whither the servants of the house retire for the most important part of their daily labours – the talking of scandal apropos the whole neighbourhood. There is also a small room for the washing-up of plates and dishes, the cleaning of knives and forks, of clothes and shoes. Other compartments are devoted to stores of provisions, of coals, and wine and beer.
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The fittings in such a house might well be extremely up to date, though this did not mean that the home was pleasant to live in. George Sala, who like Schlesinger was writing in the fifties, described what would be found inside:

This is the sort of house that is neatly solidly furnished from top to toe, with every modern convenience and improvement: with bathrooms, conservatories, ice-cellars, with patent grates, patent door-handles, dish-lifts, asbestos stoves, gas cooking ranges, and excruciatingly complicated ventilatory contrivances; and this is also the sort of house where, with all the conveniences I have mentioned, every living soul who inhabits it is uncomfortable.
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The exterior of a typical early Victorian terraced house, of the type lived in by lower-middle-class families, would be brick-built (though in Scotland or the north of England stone might actually be a cheaper material) and of a style that was almost entirely a continuation of Georgian. It would be three or four storeys, with the walls becoming thinner the higher it went. It would often have a ground-floor façade that was contrived to look like blocks of stone and covered in stucco, and the surrounds of the sash windows might also be painted white. The door would have a Georgian fanlight above it, and there would be a basement area. The roof would have a parapet, behind which there would be a ‘valley gutter’ – the roof would not be pointed but v-shaped, so that rainwater would run to the back of the building and could be channelled into a drainpipe. In London, such houses were required to have an ‘upstand’ – another brick parapet running front-to-rear and through the chimney-stacks that divided the roof of every individual house from its neighbours. The purpose of this was to prevent fire from spreading through a whole terrace via the roofs. Inside, the stairs were often at the back of the house, lit by a tall window that was ten or twelve feet high and bisected by the stairs. The servants’ quarters and kitchen would be in the basement, though a kitchen below the family rooms had the disadvantage that smells would
drift upward, and the kitchen was therefore often built at the back of the house instead.

The interiors of an early Victorian middle class house retained much of the simplicity associated with the Regency, for it was only with the Great Exhibition in 1851 that the notion of fussiness and ornament was to become fashionable. Another element that was missing in the early part of the reign was the nocturnal gloom that filled many later Victorian rooms, crowded – as they often were – with unnecessarily large amounts of dark furniture and protected from daylight by heavy curtains. The early Victorians lived amid a brightness and colour that would perhaps surprise us.