Domiciles: The Housing of Europeans

Sources

Peasant and Urban Working-Class Housing. The great preoccupation of pre-industrial Europeans was avoiding hunger. During the second half of the eighteenth century, subsistence continued to be a problem for the poor and a potential source of rebellion. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, concerns about housing had shifted to the fore—a change that was probably less an indication of an improved diet for the poor than a symptom of the growing bourgeois preoccupation with domestic accommodations. For the middle class, residential dwellings had implications for morality, gender relations, authority, social status, and wealth. To such observers, peasant huts in France, for example, seemed barely habitable for humans, “dug in the ground and deprived of every comfort” and “destined rather as a retreat for wild beasts.” In fact, peasants frequently shared their homes with livestock and had done so for centuries. Such intermingling of animals and humans disturbed the middle-class sense of propriety. Urban slums also troubled middle-class reformers. Friedrich Engels observed in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) that “in the workingmen’s dwellings of Manchester, no cleanliness, no convenience, and consequently no comfortable family life is possible;... only a physically degenerate race, robbed of all humanity, degraded, reduced morally and physically to bestiality, could feel comfortable and at home.” Above all, middle-class commentators called the crowding of slum housing unforgivable. Poor fam-lies were packed into single rooms, often sharing one bed. Or, they shared an apartment with other families. Sometimes they also took boarders into their already crowded dwellings. Such overcrowding obliterated the boundaries that bourgeois families had constructed around themselves as essential to the entire notion of private domesticity. In an 1891 survey of

Parisians, 14 percent of those surveyed lived in overcrowded conditions, which were defined as homes where the number of residents was more than double the number of rooms. As attuned to the significance of consumer items as to cleanliness and privacy, bourgeois observers also found household furnishings in poor residences to be wretched. In the typical home of an urban worker, middle-class observers were appalled by the unruly mix of work implements, tools, and crockery; the few tattered furnishings and filthy garments; and, above all, the unkempt bed upon which the whole family lay amid the odor of poverty.

Improvements in Housing. Despite social reformers’ gloomy portrayals of working-class housing, several important changes took place during the nineteenth century in the accommodations of the agrarian classes and the urban working poor. Despite regional variations, European peasant housing before the middle of the nineteenth century shared several characteristics. A peasant’s house was usually a single-storied building with a single chimney and often only one room. In addition, rural houses were built with few doors and windows to restrict the intrusion of cold drafts, to avoid the extra cost of latches, bolts, or other fasteners, and—in France—to avoid a “door-and-window” tax that was not abolished until 1917. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, however, roofs were more likely to be covered with slate or tiles instead of thatch or wooden shingles, and they were built with a steeper pitch to create more space for storage. Second stories were added, and increased numbers of windows and doors let in more light. These changes came

about as costs for manufactured construction materials decreased, and more-prosperous farmers copied building styles they observed in bourgeois homes. Urban working-class housing also improved. Some of the changes can be traced to the reports of reformers intent on ameliorating tenement conditions. In Paris, for example, a corporation established in 1849 to construct apartment complexes (cités) throughout the city attracted substantial investment. One such low-rent housing complex still stands today. At its opening in 1851 the Cite Napoléon included two-hundred, one-bedroom apartments and offered amenities lacking in most tenements. Each floor had its own toilet and sink instead of the privy that stood in the courtyard of a tenement, and residents had access to a laundry room and baths. Childcare, janitorial services, and even free consultations with a resident physician were offered to tenants. Philanthropic ventures encouraged similar housing experiments in provincial French cities, though the demand for subsidized housing far outstripped supply. In England, Edwin Chadwick prepared Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842), encouraging legislative and philanthropic efforts to improve working-class housing. Though the results of these efforts may be seen in housing projects throughout England, the experiments were most effective in London, particularly after 1862, as urban authorities endeavored to clear slums and regulate new construction. In Petticoat Square in London, for example, apartments built in 1885 included shop space on the ground floor with living accommodations in the rear and four floors of living space above, divided into apartments of up to three rooms. On each floor, four apartments shared two water closets and a scullery, or washroom. By the early twentieth century, though horrible slums still existed, private philanthropic and speculative building combined with governmental regulation to establish greatly improved housing for the poor and working classes in many European cities.

Middle-Class Housing. Unfavorable descriptions of working class and peasant homes tell modern scholars a good deal about the housing of the poor, but they also reveal what kinds of housing the middle classes valued. Urban apartment buildings segregated their inhabitants along a vertical axis, with the bourgeois residing on the lower floors and the poor occupying the upstairs and garret apartments. In the Ringstrasse apartments of Vienna, for example, the ground floor was rented to retailers while the second floor, known as the Nobelstock, contained spacious flats affordable only to wealthy families. In some buildings the third story repeated the spacious floor plans of the second, but just as often the third floor was subdivided into smaller apartments. “Imperial” stairways modeled on palace or monumental architecture led visitors to second- and occasionally third-floor residences. Beyond the third story, simple staircases mounted to the upper reaches of the building. The exterior fa£ade of the building also signaled this vertical segregation, with pillars, window heights, and ornamentation announcing the distinction of second story apartments. Industrial cities also began to establish horizontal segregation, as working-class neighborhoods became cut off from those of the middle classes. In 1873, for example, German industrialist Alfred Krupp, who had earlier built a family residence on the grounds of his factory in Essen, moved to the outskirts of the city, where he built a palatial new family residence on a hill overlooking the city. Middle-class housing separated work from domestic life. It established spaces specific to each gender, separated intimate spaces from areas in which guests were welcome, and, as much as possible, kept the servants—of rural or working-class origin—apart from the family. To create these divisions, the number of rooms in middle-class residences increased significantly during the nineteenth century.

Porches and Anterooms. Entry into a middle-class house or apartment was typically gained through an anteroom, or foyer, that served as a waiting room for visitors and as a cloak-room where coats, umbrellas, and other outdoor clothing was stored. In rural or small-town residences (especially in the United States) an external porch served as an additional buffer between the outside world and the home.

The Parlor. From the porch or the anteroom, a guest was led into a “grand salon,” or parlor, a visiting space where the family accorded hospitality to other members of their social class and displayed consumer items that demonstrated their middle-class taste and status. For those with social aspirations, furnishing the parlor required careful attention to changing fashions and an income adequate to making periodic changes in decor. Middle-class consumers acquired information about new home-furnishing trends from friends, family, and the many nineteenth-century advice books on home decorating. Consumers’ choices were also guided by furniture makers, who in the 1870s began to display model rooms in their showrooms. Sometimes the bourgeoisie gathered ideas from the commercial parlors of hotels, restaurants, and even steamboats or railroad cars. According to “New Furniture,” an article published in an 1850 issue of the widely read magazine Godeys Lady’s Book, the up-to-date parlor included a collection of stuffed “sofas and ordinary chairs, covered with satin damask, crimson and black, deeply tufted or knotted,” as well as “lounging or arm-chairs,” pianos, sofa tables, leather-bound books, and a long list of other accoutrements.

The Dining Room and Kitchen. Unlike modern houses, the nineteenth-century middle-class home established distance between the kitchen and the dining room. The kitchen, after all, was a work space for household servants and was filled with the odors of cooking and cleaning, which were considered unwelcome impositions on guests. Planners of nineteenth-century middle-class homes were little concerned with the appearance or efficiency of the kitchen. As the setting for family meals and dinners with guests, the dining room received somewhat more attention. An example of how these two rooms might have been furnished by a middle-class householder is the inventory made after the death of Nicolas Antoine Gruyer in 1829. His estate included a well-stocked wine collection and a kitchen well supplied with copper pots, kettles, frying pans, and many less-expensive articles of cook-ware. His dishes were kept in a marble-topped oak buffet in the dining room, which also held a walnut dining table, two walnut chairs, lamps, vases, platters, and a liquor cabinet. Though they usually spent more on the dining room than the kitchen, middle-class householders frequently allocated less than 6 percent of the value of all their possessions for furnishing the dining room. They spent far more on outfitting bed-rooms and parlors. Unlike those rooms, dining rooms rarely had stoves or fireplaces for heat. Furthermore, they often faced the rear of the house and had fewer windows than other rooms. Along with typically dark-stained, heavy wood dining furniture, a lack of direct sunlight made the dining room a decidedly dark and “masculine” space, which contrasted with the “feminine” parlor.

The Private Bedroom. In the nineteenth century the middle class increasingly aspired to have “privacy” and a room of one’s own. In part this desire was motivated by medical pre-occupations. With the development of germ theory, and particularly after the French cholera epidemic of the 1830s, middle-class dwellings began to include private bedrooms. Among the furnishings of such a bedroom was a bedside cupboard that concealed the chamber pot and held other articles of personal hygiene. In addition to hygienic considerations, segmenting the home into individualized spaces was also motivated by sexual concerns. The master bedroom then became a sanctuary where sexual relations could be carried out in privacy. As such it became a symbol of the permanence and solidity of the marital union, and—though it was no longer socially permissible to receive visitors in the bedroom as had once been the custom—the master bedroom was still furnished in a manner befitting the family’s social status. Adding to the husband and wife’s privacy, servants and children also had separate bedrooms, so that the household was separated by age, class, and gender.

The Bed. By the end of the nineteenth century even most rural peasants slept in raised, wood-framed beds with pillows, sheets, blankets, and comforters instead of straw pallets on bare floors. Generally the first possession of newlyweds, the bed was enclosed by a curtain and set apart in an alcove, affording a degree of conjugal privacy. A bed was a costly item. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, it represented a quarter of the value of a typical wage earner’s furniture, and nearly 40 percent of the value of a servant’s. Over the course of the nineteenth century, urban professionals and shopkeepers purchased beds of superior craftsmanship that were designed for more comfort. A sturdy piece of furniture, the conjugal bed was constructed from solid wood, frequently mahogany, with a high headboard and footboard and wide sideboards. In the prosperous nineteenth-century home, it was covered with rich draperies that matched the bedroom

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window curtains and furniture upholstery. By the nineteenth century, box-spring mattresses, a product of industrial manufacturing, were replacing the accumulation of straw and woolen mattresses spread over a rope-web foundation. Despite the cost, by the end of the nineteenth century the wooden bed in a private bedroom had become common in the middle-class home. Inexpensive and durable iron beds lacked the warmth and status of wood and were deemed suitable for servants or institutions.

The Bathroom. The nineteenth-century bathroom is an important example of how emerging notions of privacy intersected with the development of the public infrastructure and technological innovation. Embarrassed by the odor, sound, and filth of their bodily functions, Victorians sought privacy in which to attend to them. Water closets, or flush toilets, had been available to the wealthy since at least the early eighteenth century. Queen Anne of England (reigned 1702-1714) had a water closet constructed in her dressing room at Windsor Castle. These early water closets were privies moved indoors and enclosed in a small closet. They flushed when water placed in a cistern above the toilet was released and washed the waste into pipes leading to a sewer or the house-hold cesspool. In the 1770s two English inventors improved the earliest water closets by adding mechanical flaps to keep sewage odors from reentering the bathroom. By the turn of the nineteenth century, more than six thousand toilets had been produced; but, because they required connection to a sewer and a steady supply of water, only a handful of home-owners could afford such luxury. Throughout the nineteenth century, inventors—including Thomas Crapper (1836-1910), whose name eventually became a slang term for the flush toilet—continued to improve the toilet. Yet, most urban residents continued to relieve themselves in common privies located in tenement courtyards, or they used chamber pots that were emptied into cesspools or—as had been the case since the Middle Ages—into the street. Cesspit cleaners and street sweepers managed to turn this waste into earnings by transporting the raw sewage of urban residents into the countryside to be used as fertilizer. The lack of running water and sewer systems made it impossible for most people to have flush toilets before the late nineteenth century. By the late 1880s, architects were beginning to incorporate flush toilets into designs for houses and apartment buildings. At the same time, the separate bathroom was increasingly found in the dwellings of the wealthy, in hotels, and even in high-priced brothels. The bathroom was usually located far from living spaces, evidence that people still did not bathe often and that they wanted to remove embarrassing reminders of human waste and impurity as far as possible from the centers of domestic activity.

Public Water Works. The infrastructure that made possible clean water for flushing toilets and bathing and methods of carrying away waste required substantial public investment and committed private subscription. The first sewers, often just covered gutters, could not carry away all the waste of a modern city. Though there were several earlier attempts to develop sewage systems, urban authorities did not successfully address the problems caused by contaminated wells, overused privies, and raw-sewage discharge until after the 1830s. By 1855 enough progress had been made for the British Parliament to pass a law requiring that all urban waste be evacuated through sewage pipes. In Paris between 1852 and 1869 the network of sewer lines expanded from 87 miles to 350, and by 1911 it exceeded 750. New water-usage patterns emerged during the nineteenth century, as new ideas about cleanliness and health greatly increased the demand for water. Over the course of the century municipal authorities all over Europe endeavored to construct the municipal water services and the sewage systems on which, among other things, new notions of bathroom privacy depended. During the eighteenth century, clean water had been scarce. Even in the countryside, where rural households acquired water from nearby springs, rivers, brooks, wells, or ponds, water quality was often less than satisfactory. In large cities, clean water was even more difficult to acquire. Eighteenth-century urban residents seldom had direct access to running water. The daily supply was either drawn from wells or fountains and carried home by servants or family members or bought from water carriers, who transported it in pails. During the nineteenth century, even as water became more accessible, it was still expensive, and the number of households that could afford to be connected to public water systems varied from city to city into the early twentieth century. London was relatively well served, but even in this city of more than 2.5 million inhabitants only 300,000 residences were supplied with municipal water in 1850. Even in 1910, the French city of Nevers, with a total population of 30,000, had only 3,000 fee-paying consumers of municipal water. Working-class tenements rarely had running water, and even homes in relatively well-off urban districts had no running water on the upper floors.

Heat. In a scene from Charles Dickens’s popular tale A Christmas Carol (1843), Ebenezer Scrooge’s clerk huddles before a fire fueled by one lump of coal; he is wrapped in a comforter and tries to warm his hands over a candle. It is difficult today to conceive of life before electricity, public utilities, and relatively inexpensive and constant access to efficient heating. Europeans of the nineteenth century and earlier, however, could not completely shield themselves from changing outdoor temperatures. In the countryside, one important source of household warmth remained the body heat of livestock, which frequently shared living space with their owners. In the eighteenth century, energy from combustion depended on wood, either in the form of charcoal, “new wood” cut live from a forest and allowed to dry before it was burned, or timbers floated downriver and cut up for firewood. Though three times as efficient as char-coal, easier to light, and less likely to asphyxiate people in rooms without proper ventilation, coal was not readily available in most places and so did not replace these other sources of household heat until well into the nineteenth century. As late as 1830, coal constituted only one-quarter of the fuel consumed in Paris. (The British Isles were an exception. Wood had been scarce there since at least the mid sixteenth century, and coal was relatively plentiful.) Until the early nineteenth century, fireplaces continued to be the main source of heat in most European homes, despite innovations that made stoves more efficient and less expensive. For middle-class urban households of the nineteenth century, the fireplace had an appeal that went beyond its functional utility. An imposing fireplace provided a natural focal point for family gatherings, and the mantel above it was an ideal place to display family heirlooms—expensive ornamental clocks, candelabra, portraits, or knickknacks. Parlors—and increasingly bedrooms— were equipped with fireplaces, uniting the functional purposes of heating and lighting a residence with domestic intimacy. The cast-iron stove was increasingly used for cooking and often replaced the kitchen fireplace in which earlier generations of cooks had prepared meals. Among the urban working class, cast-iron or ceramic stoves served the double function of heating and cooking.

Light. The various means of domestic lighting at the beginning of the nineteenth century largely remained what they had been in the Middle Ages. Light was neither cheap nor efficient. Wax candles were expensive. Cheaper tallow candles smelled bad. Other kinds of artificial lighting also had disadvantages. Burning wicks in small pools of nut, kale, or rapeseed oil were too expensive for year-round use. Despite nineteenth-century innovations, the hearth provided the most consistent source of affordable evening illumination for the rural poor. Bourgeois homemakers made greater use of wax candles, but even they relied heavily on the indirect light of the fireplace. Placing candles on the dining-room table, for example, appears to have been a rare practice, so the dining room was poorly lit. For wealthy households, however, several innovations enhanced home

lighting. In 1783 the French scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur Fran£ois Ami Argand improved the oil lamp by introducing a new kind of wick that burned brighter than other wicks. Later he enclosed the flame in a glass chimney and developed a mechanism for raising and lowering the wick to increase or decrease the volume of light. The carcel lamp, patented in 1800, regulated the oil flow to the wick with a clock-like mechanism. The cost of repairs, however, made it impractical and limited its use. Moderator lamps, invented in 1836, used a spring to force oil up the wick. They became popular among the bourgeoisie, but they were too expensive for most urban residents. Ultimately, however, all these lamps were just improved versions of the oil lamp that had been used since antiquity. Developed in 1850, the first kerosene lamp was too dangerous and its fuel too costly. In the 1870s and 1880s, however, safer kerosene lamps were made, and kerosene became much more readily available after oil discoveries in the United States. These improved kerosene lamps provided an effective and safe source of light for middle-class homes. The introduction of gas and electrical home lighting in the late nineteenth century expanded the homeowner’s options, providing more consistent and brighter light sources, while at the same time linking households more tightly to urban infrastructures. By the turn of the twentieth century, light from a gas mantle provided twelve times the light from a candle or an oil lamp; an electric light bulb was one hundred times more powerful.

Sources

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Julie L. Horan, The Porcelain God: A Social History of the Toilet (Secauaus, N.J.: Birch Lane Press, 1996).

Dominique Laporte, History of Shit (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,2000).

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