If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home (25 page)

The middle classes, both creators and creations of the industrial age, made a real cult of furnishings. By Victorian times, the desirable upper-middle-class home had several rooms of reception, in which weird little conventions and rituals marked out men and women of
respectability from the unfortunate families who could only afford one communal space in which to live. The living room had reached its apogee. Throughout the twentieth century it would gradually become less formal once again, so that now, if you live in an open-plan house, you probably treat your living room rather like the flexible, adaptable, all-purpose medieval hall once again. Perhaps guests are even to be found sleeping on your sofa; certainly they are upon mine.

25 – Sitting Comfortably

The common sitting room [is] an Englishman’s delight to show his wealth.

Robert Southey, 1807

At the heart of living-room life is the chair: whether for resting, writing (a much more important part of everyday life before the telephone), reading or talking. In a medieval house, only the lord or owner was allowed to sit down, while everyone else stood and watched.

The book of poems by Charles, Duc d’Orléans, written while he was a prisoner in the Tower of London after his capture at the battle of Agincourt in 1415, contains an excellent illustration of a medieval living room (
plate 21
). The
duc
sits in the best place, before the fire, while his retainers await his orders (his chaplain in red). The floor of the room is beautifully tiled; its walls have been hung with the tapestries which hide an interloper or eavesdropper in many a tale from the Middle Ages.

This was medieval life for the grand: the temporary occupation of an endless succession of draughty castles, each furnished quickly but luxuriously for the occasion. It’s almost like camping: each night the whole set-up could be recreated somewhere new. A medieval king moved around his realm constantly to show himself to his subjects, physically maintaining law and
order, while his aristocrats peregrinated round their estates in order to consume upon the spot the annual proportion of the crop owed to them as landlords. King Edward III (1312–77) and his wife Philippa had such a nomadic life that their numerous children were born variously at the Tower of London, Windsor, Woodstock, Antwerp, Clarendon, Ghent, Hatfield, Langley and Waltham in Essex.

This is why the French still call their furniture
mobiliers
, or ‘removables’: many pieces did indeed follow their owners round the country from castle to manor. Many surviving examples of medieval furniture are either easily movable or demountable.

Perhaps the classic furnishing item for the mobile household was tapestry. It served several purposes. Tapestries are portable and flexible, able to eliminate the draughts from spaces of different size and shape. Secondly, they can convey iconographic messages through their design, sending out signals about their owners’ erudition or aspirations. Henry VIII favoured a set telling the biblical story of Abraham, for example, which is about an ageing man’s ultimately successful search for a male heir; Henry himself took encouragement from this. Thirdly, tapestry is a wonderful form of conspicuous consumption, especially if woven with gold or silver thread. Cardinal Wolsey had a closet hung with cloth of gold, and had more than 600 tapestries in his collection. A Venetian ambassador was amazed to describe how, when visiting the cardinal, ‘one has to traverse eight rooms before one reaches his audience chamber, and they are all hung with tapestry’. Even more impressively than that, the tapestry displayed was ‘changed every week’.

The great hall of a medieval house was essentially the only living room for its lower servants, and we already know that it also served as their bedroom. Any leisure time would be spent there, playing dice or singing. The floors of medieval halls were made cosier with cut rushes, a kind of disposable carpet. (The scholar Erasmus, visiting England, complained that the rushes
were useful for soaking up ‘spittle and vomit and urine of dogs and men, beer that hath been cast forth and remnants of fish and other filth unnameable’.) The dirty rushes would be thrown out and renewed as a household moved from house to house.

Over time this all-purpose medieval living room began to lose some of its functions. Sleeping and sex went off to the bedchamber, as we’ve seen already. Late medieval houses had a ‘solar’ or sitting room, separate from the common hall, where the family’s ladies would sit, eat or sew. Then, as the defensive requirements of a manor house declined with the ending of the Wars of the Roses, grand houses began to acquire extra rooms purely for the purpose of receiving important guests.

In the royal palaces this led to the development of a chain of elegant reception rooms: the presence chamber, the privy chamber, the withdrawing chamber, all leading one into another. In the first the king would receive honoured strangers. The ‘privy’ or private chamber was for his intimate friends. In the ‘withdrawing’ chamber he could withdraw from company altogether. (This is the origin of the term ‘drawing room’.) By the seventeenth century, the snug ‘parlour’ (for a
parlez
, a parley, or a private conversation) had developed even in more modest homes. Parlours were furnished with the new ‘falling’ or gate-leg table: flexibility in the furnishings was still required.

Lower down the social order, the specialised living room developed more slowly than the bedchamber or kitchen, because those whose lives were dedicated to work had no need of a leisure space. The living room’s purpose was decorative, social and seemingly superfluous, but its presence indicated high social status. While it has a less obvious ‘function’ than the bedroom or bathroom, it has an even more subtle and interesting story to tell about contemporary society.

With the increasing peace and wealth of the Tudor age, aristocrats felt the need for more and different rooms for sitting around in and spending the hours. In a grand Elizabethan house
like Hardwick Hall, there were three gigantic rooms: a great chamber, a long gallery and a withdrawing chamber, all of which could be described as living rooms.

The first, of great height and beauty, was used for receiving guests, for ceremony and formal entertainment. Here, on high days and holidays, its owner, Bess of Hardwick, Countess of Shrewsbury, would sit in state on a throne-like chair under a canopy, receiving compliments. The enormous long gallery next door was for gentle exercise and the display of family portraits (thirty-seven of them at Hardwick). A gallery was for ‘pastime and health’, and Thomas Howard found himself filled with ‘delight’ as he walked up and down his own, admiring the pictures of his ‘honourable friends’ that he’d hung there. They were a daily reminder of the excellence of his connections. The gallery also had another use: for getting out of earshot of the numerous members of an Elizabethan household. It was the only place in the entire house where one could be sure of holding a private conversation.

But the withdrawing chamber at Hardwick was a slightly more exclusive space. Here, members of the family could ‘withdraw’ with favoured guests for a more intimate party, and they might spend their own leisure time here when not in their bedchambers. Eventually, impractically large and showy Elizabethan rooms like the great chamber would die out, and it was the withdrawing chamber that would survive to develop into the drawing room of the Victorian house.

Hardwick Hall sees the beginning of the specialisation of the living room, but the process reached new heights in the eighteenth century. The music room, the library and the saloon all became desirable appurtenances, while the nineteenth century saw the rise of the smoking or billiard room for gentlemen, the morning room for ladies, and the conservatory for both.

The all-purpose reception room would eventually make something of a twentieth-century comeback, in the form of the
knocked-through drawing/dining room in a terraced house or the modern open-plan lounge. The earliest indication of this trend came in the ‘studio apartment’, invented for New York’s artistic community around 1900 but quickly adopted by other city dwellers. ‘Mrs Apartment Seeker has been to a tea or reception at Mr Artist’s studio apartment,’ ran an article in the
Brickbuilder
magazine of 1912. She found it:

such an attractive place for his ‘soirée’ and so appropriate for the display of his pictures and work. How lovely it would be for her to give such teas and musicals, how effective. She immediately starts looking for one.

Common to all these living or reception rooms was the fact that they would be laid bare to the potentially disparaging eyes of guests. So they had to look as good as possible.

If the king, queen or other grand personage came to stay in a Tudor house, the owner would vacate the best rooms, happily handing them over to those placed above him in society. The decoration of the living rooms therefore got grander and grander as you went deeper into the house, and only the most important guests would get to see the innermost and most expensively decorated rooms. In later, more democratic times, when there were only one or two reception rooms, resources would be concentrated in the outer or more public rooms at the expense of the inner. That’s why the most expensive item in a Tudor house – quite possibly more expensive than everything else put together – was the master’s marital bed, while today it is the sofa or dining table that costs the most.

Below the peers in the Tudor hierarchy (there were only about fifty-five of them in the sixteenth century) came the gentlemen, the citizens, the yeomen and the labourers. William Harrison in 1577 described these four divisions in society, and their respective roles: the labourers and servants, for example, had ‘neither voice nor authority’. Each person knew exactly where they fitted in, and would attempt to decorate their own living rooms appropriately.

The great change of the seventeenth century was the rise of the citizen class: town-dwellers growing prosperous through manufacturing, trade, printing and banking. In due course, these people began to think that they too should have the luxury living rooms of their betters.

Of course, expressing the fact that you had lots of money through the design of your reception rooms was nothing new: at Hardwick Hall, and other great houses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the emphasis had been on creating an impressive, overwhelmingly rich and colourful interior. What was new in the Georgian age was the idea that ‘taste’ could separate the discerning from the ignorant among the increasingly large number of people with cash to splash upon their living rooms. Anybody could have luxury, the argument went, but luxury without refinement was mere bling. To spend your money wisely, you needed an expensive education. ‘No one can be properly stil’d a gentleman, who takes not every opportunity to enrich his own capacity and settle the elements of taste,’ we hear in 1731.

So a new elite was created, with a sense of style based on knowledge rather than just upon wealth. From the eighteenth century onwards, the drawing room was the canvas upon which the new accomplishment of ‘taste’ was expressed. ‘Of all our favourite words lately, none has been more in vogue, nor so long held its esteem, as that of taste,’ claimed
The Universal Spectator
in 1747.

By the eighteenth century, the builders of aristocratic pleasure palaces had much more influence than previously upon the less well-off but eager to learn, because their houses were more accessible. Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire, for example, was a rare statement of astoundingly high design values. Sir Nathaniel Curzon tore down his grandfather’s house and moved a village in order to build the new mansion, which was completed in 1765.

For its interiors he employed Robert Adam, who was then a relatively unknown young Scot recently returned from study in Rome. Adam was delighted with Curzon, a client ‘resolved to spare no Expence, with £10,000 a year, Good Temper’d and having taste himself for the Arts’. Adam’s brief extended from the plaster ceilings to the door handles, and the whole house was made into a (somewhat impractical) monument to ancient Rome. (Dr Johnson thought the house pompous and grandiloquent, and that it ‘would do excellently for a Town Hall’.) The family themselves lived in a separate wing, and the main reception rooms were intended for great political parties.

As soon as the house was finished, tourists were keen to see inside. Mrs Garnett, ‘a well-dressed elderly Housekeeper’ and ‘a most distinct Articulator’, had the job of showing them round. She even found it worth her while to produce her own guidebook. Her customers were looking for amusement, but also for inspiration for their own reception rooms at home.

Kedleston’s state rooms were planned to facilitate big political parties, and they also had the benefit of facilitating this new kind of visitor tour. Instead of visitors penetrating one doorway after another in an increasingly exclusive hierarchy like at Hardwick Hall, the living rooms here are arranged in a ring. They still increase in grandeur from music room to drawing room to library to saloon, but it is possible to make a complete circuit through them all, enjoying the paintings and furniture. Georgian houses like this are often described as being ‘social’ in design, intended for guests of all ranks to mingle rather than remaining in the room appointed for their own particular status.