If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home Read Free Page A

up tonight for his sister to teach him to put me to bed’. A man of his time, his bedroom hours were not restricted to sleeping: in his diaries, he may also be found using the room for playing his lute, reading, singing duets, discussing music with a friend, hearing his serving boy’s Latin translation, arguing and teaching his wife astronomy.
    Pepys’s bed would have been made with a feather mattress placed on top of the one stuffed with straw. A feather bed was a prized possession: no wonder, as fifty pounds of feathers had to be saved from the plucking of numerous geese. Sometimes female servants in the kitchen were allowed to keep the feathers of the birds they’d plucked for the table as a kind of dowry, and saved them up for a marital feather bed. Such a bed needs constant punching, turning and shaking to keep it fresh and to disperse the lumps, and a new one was not necessarily more desirable than an old one because of the farmyard scent it would emit.
    Efficient housewives would try to amass a large amount of bedlinen so that they only needed to do a big load of laundry once a month. When James Boswell and Samuel Johnson visited the Isle of Skye in 1773, the latter slept in the actual bed at Flora Macdonald’s house in which Bonnie Prince Charlie had spentthe night when he was on the run from the English a few years previously. Mrs Macdonald even had the Bonnie Prince’s own dirty sheets kept safe and reverently unwashed, and was rather ghoulishly saving them for the wrapping of her own corpse.
    Boswell noted that on this remote Scottish island people continually came barging into his bedroom. ‘During the day, the bedrooms were common to all … children and dogs not excepted.’ He was rather surprised by this because, by the Georgian age, the wealthy urban classes had begun for the first time to expect to be left alone in their bedrooms.
    The conventional design of a middling seventeenth-century house – perhaps a farmer’s, or a tradesman’s – had an upper floor with the bedrooms leading off each other. This meant that the users of the second room could only access it through the first. In the eighteenth-century townhouse, though, an increasing demand for privacy meant that space was now being given over purely to circulation. The classic tall, thin, terraced townhouse had a landing on each floor, with two separate bedrooms opening off it. Now the people occupying the smaller, back bedroom could reach their room directly from the stairs, without passing through someone else’s room first.
    The next step, in larger houses, would be the corridor: its appearance at the very end of the seventeenth century allowed every bedroom to become completely independent and private. Cassandra Willoughby, an interested poker-about in other people’s houses, thought it worth noting with approval in 1697 that one Mr Arthington’s new house had an arrangement of balconies which allowed ‘a very convenient passage from one room to another without making any of the Bed Chambers a thorough fair’.
    So the Georgians began to treat their bedrooms as more exclusive, private spaces than the Tudors had done. It became customary to hang a bedroom door so that it opened inwards, towards the bed. ‘The idea behind this is that the person entering shallnot be able to take in the whole room at a glance as he opens the first crack of the door,’ explained Hermann Muthesius, a German commentator on British homes, in 1904. Instead, a visitor must circumnavigate the door ‘to enter the room, by which time the person seated in the room will have been able to prepare himself suitably for his entry’.
    But bedrooms were still to some extent social, used for cards or tea or gatherings of friends, or else for writing or business or study. In William Hogarth’s picture The Countess’s Levee (1743), the countess in question has no less than ten people in attendance to help her dress: hairdresser, flautist, singer, priest, female