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

friend, black page; even a boy from a toy shop has visited to offer his wares. But the countess is a flighty character, and her male guests are clearly undesirable, unmanly figures. Oliver Goldsmith in 1765 described such a bedchamber party:
Fair to be seen, she kept a bevy
Of powdered Coxcombs at her levy.
    His disapproval shows that this kind of bedchamber socialising was beginning to be thought inappropriate. The next stage in the bedroom’s development occurred in the Victorian age, where separation and privacy became not only desirable, but essential, and its achievement a source of paranoid anxiety. Men and women were to be kept apart, as were menservants and maids, and bed-making became an ever more time-consuming and expensive ritual.
    For the Victorian upper classes, it would be unthinkable for a husband and wife with a large house to share a bedroom. This was an age in which shame and scruple grew up around sex, with ladies knowing less about it and fearing it more, and their husbands shielding them from carnal knowledge. The activities of the bedroom were now limited to sex and sleeping alone, and the other social purposes of the room fell away. The Architect magazine was very strict on the matter, stating that using abedroom for anything other than sleeping was ‘unwholesome, immoral and contrary to the well-understood principle that every important function in life requires a separate room’.
    His dressing room was the place where a well-off gentleman often slept, perhaps slipping in late after an evening spent smoking with his male friends. A lady’s own dressing room might be called her boudoir , a room which takes its name from the French verb ‘ bouder ’, to sulk. This ideal of separation, once it became established in the homes of the rich, looked modern and desirable and was something to aspire to for the middle classes. The early twentieth century saw them emulating it in a small way by sleeping happily in twin beds in their semi-detached homes.
    The beds in the Victorian home were more elaborately made than ever. Nineteenth-century household manuals devote much attention to the need to keep beds fresh, aired and layered with a multitude of sheets and blankets. They seem almost to fetishise bed-making, but then again a damp bed could be extremely dangerous in an age of tuberculosis.
    In 1826, coiled metal springs began to replace the old rope bed strings. Now too the wool and linen of earlier beds were replaced with a new wonder product whose profits powered Britain into the industrial age. The nineteenth century was an age of cotton: half of the value of Britain’s exports lay, by the 1830s, in cotton textiles alone. It was first India, and then America, that supplied the raw cotton spun and woven in the mills of Lancashire. The number of mills in Manchester (or ‘Cottonopolis’) peaked in 1853, when there were no less than 108 of them.
    The products of these mills were jealously hoarded by Victorian housewives who prided themselves on their well-stocked linen cupboards and carefully husbanded their sheets by reusing the top sheet as the bottom one after a fortnight’s use. Victorian bed-making was tight with tension, and Mrs Panton, author of From Kitchen to Garrett (1887), confided her fears that no servant could ever make a bed to her obsessively highstandards. ‘I have never yet found in all my experience a servant who can be really and truly trusted to properly air the bed,’ she complained. Inevitably a servant’s ‘first idea is to cover it up and get it made’, leaving it ‘stuffy and disagreeable’.
    All very well – but just imagine the labour involved in ‘properly airing’ a Victorian bed. It consisted of a bedstead, a sheet of thick brown Holland fabric to cover the metal springs, then a horsehair mattress, feather mattress, underblanket, undersheet, bottom sheet, top sheet, three or four blankets, eiderdown and pillow covers. Mrs Panton recommended stripping all this off,