If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home (27 page)

The items in the William Morris Company’s range complemented each other, and whole interiors could be put together, conveniently, by mail order. This is how Theodore Mander decorated his house, by choosing items out of a catalogue. And the irony of the olde-worlde, hand-made splendour of Wightwick is that the house was the dream of an industrialist who’d made his money shipping tins of ready-mixed paint around the world.

The Arts and Crafts Movement saw rich people paying
craftsmen to produce by hand items which were well beyond the purses of the working classes themselves. Thorstein Veblen, the Norwegian-American historian of conspicuous consumption and a biting critic of the American economy, points out the strange desirability of imperfection:

The ground of the superiority of hand-wrought goods … is a certain margin of crudeness. The margin must never be so wide as to show bungling workmanship, since that would be evidence of low cost, nor so narrow as to suggest the ideal precision attained only by the machine, for that would be evidence of low cost.

These contradictions between the hand-crafted and modernity are still to be found at the Sanderson wallpaper factory in Loughborough, where William Morris’s original wallpaper blocks remain in use today (
plate 26
). Some designs involve passing the paper through the printing press by hand up to twenty-two times. The result – highly wrought and very slightly flawed – remains an extremely desirable, and expensive, backdrop for a living room. (I have tried printing wallpaper myself using an original Morris block. I thought it would be easy, but I can vouch for the fact that it is a job requiring skills which must be honed over many years of experience.)

Many of the same features of the Arts and Crafts story are likewise to be found in the twentieth century, when house-builders had to pay sky-high prices to achieve the effortlessly minimal look. The modern houses of the 1930s were supposed to be pared-down, simplified machines for living:

the home is no longer permanent from generation to generation; family ties, inconsistent with freedom of living, are broken. We demand spaciousness, release from encumbrances, from furniture and trappings that overload our rooms, possessions that tie us and tools that are obsolete.

And yet houses in experimental materials and designs came at a cost. One-offs like Amyas Connell’s 1929 High and Over,
near Amersham, are like ships sailing through the countryside, full of light and air, white-painted and beautifully clutter-free. These values remain so strong that many people today pay good money to de-cluttering specialists who help them throw away their junk.

Having passed through all these minefields of potential errors of taste and judgement, you can only sit comfortably in your living room if the lighting and temperature are likewise under control.

27 – Heat and Light

On winter days in London … the smoke of fossil coal forms an atmosphere perceivable for many miles, like a great round cloud attached to the earth.

Louis Simon, a French-American
visitor to London, 1810

More than any other room in the house, a room for reception is supposed to feel comfortably warm. Heating is part of the basic hospitality that householders should extend to servants and strangers alike. This is why the great hall at Hampton Court, built in the early sixteenth century, was constructed upon the ancient model with a central open hearth. There’s no evidence that it was ever actually used, but that fireplace nevertheless formed the symbolic heart of the household.

Until the seventeenth century, the fires of great lords and lowly cottagers alike consumed wood. It was always a valuable commodity, and especially so if you had to forage for it yourself. Yet, just like plumbing, the history of domestic technology has not been governed purely by a rational desire to reduce the consumption of resources. Heating and lighting involve emotion as well as economics.

The expression ‘by hook or by crook’ is often said to come from the peasants’ right to enter their landlord’s forest to see
what resources they could glean. They were not allowed to cut down trees for firewood; those remained their master’s property. Using either a shepherd’s crook or the billhook of a reaper, though, they might grab dead branches. A wood was a carefully managed asset, and the source of much wealth and pride to its owners. One of the great distresses of the English Civil War and the associated social upheaval of the seventeenth century was the felling of forests that had been carefully managed over centuries.

The need to heat a house gave rise to perhaps the greatest architectural invention of the past millennium: the chimney. Houses without chimneys may be warm, but cannot avoid being horribly smoky and dirty as well. Chimneys began to appear in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to carry smoke out of the house and to provide an updraught to tickle the flames.

With the chimney, the modern house was born. Now it began to be possible to produce buildings of several storeys. The central stone or brick chimney would anchor a structure, as well as providing heat to chambers on several floors. Even if they lacked their own fireplaces, rooms would still gain warmth from the chimney stack. This allowed houses to become multi-roomed, with specialised spaces for cooking or sleeping or leisure. Among them was the living room.

When such rooms for sitting around in began to win an increasing proportion of a household’s budget, the art of soft furnishing was born. In the earliest parlours or withdrawing rooms Tudor and Stuart carpets were laid upon tables or cupboards, not upon the floor, where rushes provided rudimentary warming for the feet. In the late seventeenth century, a random selection of tapestries for the walls began to be replaced by a suite of matching hangings
of the same colour
, intended for use in one room only. The idea of furnishings en suite, which would culminate in the red velveteen three-piece suite of my grandmother’s sitting room, was born around 1660.

Interiors made softer and more welcoming with textiles
would have seemed even more so by the soft light of rushlights or candles. Rushlights were the poor person’s light source of choice. They were made by coating rushes in hot fat, building up the layers until the rush itself formed the wick of a rather scrawny candle. These long, gently curving lights could be thrust through and balanced in the holders still found in the walls of ancient houses. To provide twice the light, they could be lit at both bottom and top (‘burning the candle at both ends’). The twenty minutes for which each rushlight burned became a familiar unit of time. Neighbours often pooled their resources, taking turns to gather in each other’s houses for night-time sewing and mending by the eked-out glimmer. Rushes were such a cheap and reliable way of providing light that they were found in the poorest homes right into the twentieth century.

A rushlight in its holder. For a brighter light (lasting half the time), you ‘burn at both ends’

It’s also worth mentioning that firelight was the most common source of light, and people were simply quite used to dimmer light conditions than today. They were able to perform many tasks without any light at all. Matty Jenkyns, a character in Elizabeth Gaskell’s
Cranford
(1851), economises upon candles, and in winter was to be found ‘knitting in the darkness by the fire’. Lacking the light to read was not a problem in illiterate rural societies: singing and reciting ballads passed the time just as well.

Only the rich could afford a profusion of candles. The expression ‘the game’s not worth the candle’ makes it clear that
candles were economic units, and to burn a candle gave the sensation of burning money itself. Sometimes they were lit just to give exactly that feeling of profligacy: the beeswax candles imported from Venice or Antwerp for church festivals made a proud statement that the place and occasion were special. When in 1731 Sir Robert Walpole entertained the Duke of Lorraine at his Houghton mansion in Norfolk, guests were astonished by the 130 wax candles lit in the hall, with fifty more in the saloon. It was widely put about, in compliment to the Duke, that the cost of the lighting alone for his reception was £15. Beeswax candles, which burned clearly and didn’t need much trimming, were the preferred choice for hard-to-reach light fittings like chandeliers.

As everyone knew the value of candles, a daily ration was often included in employment conditions. In the royal household, an allowance of candles accompanied the issue of firewood and food to individual members. The fate of leftover candle ends was hotly disputed: in larger households, they were the preserve of certain servants, who would sell them on to supplement their wages.

The government, too, decided to cash in upon the need for domestic lighting. In 1709, a deeply unpopular tax was introduced on wax candles at the rate of fourpence a pound. So, in Georgian living rooms, the knowledge that candles were being lit for guests
despite the tax
made it a greater compliment still.

There was a cheaper alternative to the expensive beeswax candle, which was nevertheless far superior to the humble rushlight: the tallow candle made out of animal fat. The ideal tallow candle would be made out of ‘half Sheep’s Tallow and half Cow’s’, because ‘that of hogs … gives an ill smell, and a thick black smoke’. Tallow candles had a horrible brown colour and made a dreadful meaty stink: ‘those horrible scents and pernicious fumes that old tallow sends forth when it is melted’. Despite the nastiness, desperate people would in times of famine
eat tallow candles for the calories they contained. The art of creating the best blend was a valuable one, and in 1390 tallow candle-makers were listed among the crafts (called ‘misteries’) to be found in London. In 1462, the Worshipful Company of Tallow Chandlers was granted its Royal Charter.

Apart from the unpleasant smell, the great downside of tallow candles was the need to snuff. Every few minutes the wick had to be trimmed to avoid gutters and to stop the burning wick from smoking. So the candle-snuffer was a vital living-room implement until, in 1820, the French invented the plaited wick, which burned successfully without snuffing.

Of course, in an age of candle and firelight accidents were common. The London wood-turner Nehemiah Wallington had several lucky escapes from being burned to death, a fate not uncommon in his crowded parish of St Leonard Eastcheap in the City of London. Once, Wallington’s servant, Obadiah, strictly contrary to instructions, had taken a candle up to his bedchamber. There it fell over and burnt ‘half a yard of the sheet and the flock bed’. But the quick-thinking Obadiah woke up a fellow servant, and ‘both of them start up and
pissed
out the fire as well as they could’.

Across town in a much grander house, Lady Russell (whose family gave their name to Russell Square) was once shocked almost out of her skin by a ‘hissing fire’ which ran all over the floor of the closet where she sat reading. She was at first totally mystified about what had caused it. Finally, a sheepish servant ‘beg’d pardon’ and admitted ‘having by mistake given [her] a candle, with a gunpowder squib in it, which was intended to make sport among the fellow servants on a rejoicing day’.

Interiors lit by candlelight were designed to make the most of the limited light available. In prosperous Georgian drawing rooms there was silver and sparkle everywhere. The gold rims on plates, the silver of keyholes, even the metallic embroidery on waistcoats: all were intended to reflect and maximise the
effects of candlelight. In fact, a lady’s court dress woven with heavy silver thread had the effect of making its wearer gleam in candlelight.

A second tax upon the light was the hated yet long-lasting ‘window tax’, a ‘tax upon light and air’, as its detractors called it. Before 1696, the basic tax upon a household was levied upon the number of its hearths. But the ‘hearth tax’ was difficult to collect because tax inspectors needed to enter people’s houses to check the number of fireplaces. Clearly they weren’t going to be welcome visitors.