Architectural Identities: Domesticity, Literature and the Victorian Middle Class 9781442686649

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Illustrations
1 Domestic Boundaries: The Character of Middle-Class Architecture
2 Redesigning Femininity: Expanding the Limits of the Drawing Room
3 Accommodating Masculinity: Staging Manhood in the Dining Room
4 Boundaries in Flux: The Liminal Spaces of Middle-Class Femininity
5 Fictions of Family Life: Building Class Position in the Nursery
Coda: Remodelling the Architecture of Identity
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

ARCHITECTURAL IDENTITIES

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ANDREA KASTON TANGE

Architectural Identities Domesticity, Literature, and the Victorian Middle Classes

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2010 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-4113-6 (cloth)

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Tange, Andrea Kaston, 1970– Architectural identities : domesticity, literature and the Victorian middle classes / Andrea Kaston Tange. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4113-6 1. Architecture, Domestic, in literature. 2. Identity (Psychology) in architecture – England. 3. Dwellings – Social aspects – England – History – 19th century. 4. Middle class – England – History – 19th century. 5. Architecture, Domestic – Social aspects – England – History – 19th century. 6. Architecture and society – England – History – 19th century. I. Title. NA7328.T36 2010

728.094209034

C2010-903125-3

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

For Rick, who cooks for me and keeps me laughing; for Quinn, whose wit and empathy both make me proud; and for Naomi, whose play with language delights me daily. It is this family that makes our house into a home.

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Contents

Acknowledgments List of Illustrations

ix xiii

Introduction: The Architecture of Identity

3

I 1 Domestic Boundaries: The Character of Middle-Class Architecture 26 2 Redesigning Femininity: Expanding the Limits of the Drawing Room 62

I Earthquakes in London: Passages through One Middle-Class Home 111

I 3 Accommodating Masculinity: Staging Manhood in the Dining Room 135 4 Boundaries in Flux: The Liminal Spaces of Middle-Class Femininity 177 5 Fictions of Family Life: Building Class Position in the Nursery 221

I Coda: Remodelling the Architecture of Identity Notes

279

Works Cited Index

321

303

260

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Acknowledgments

The idea for this book grew out of a footnote. As a small aside in a paper that had little to do with domestic spaces, I found myself observing that the madwoman’s attic and the Victorian child’s nursery were physically synonymous spaces. Although I could not immediately identify parallels between Bertha Mason Rochester and the young daughter of a middle-class household, I finally concluded that both were figures whom the Victorian middle classes preferred to sequester from public view because they were not (or not yet) wholly capable of respectable femininity. And that nugget, which begged for more research, eventually became this entire book on the relationship between particular Victorian identities and the spaces with which they were most closely aligned. My sense of the role of domestic architecture in shaping and reflecting middle-class notions of the self, as well as providing a location within which those identities might be revised or contested, evolved from a wide range of reading about and experiencing Victorian homes – much of which would not have been possible without the support of many individuals and organizations to whom I owe my deepest gratitude. An early scholarship from The Victorian Society in London enabled me to spend nearly a month in England learning about Victorian architecture, touring homes, and spending time perusing the work of well-known nineteenth-century architects in the archives of the Royal Institute of British Architects. For someone trained in archival research in literary studies, this opportunity for intensive study of architecture history was invaluable. It would have been impossible to include the myriad small details that create the rich fabric of Victorian domestic life without the invalu-

x Acknowledgments

able help of the VICTORIA discussion list, whose generous members never hesitate to suggest resources, answer questions, and offer up the kind of wonderful minutiae that make historical study so fascinating. Friends and colleagues have read drafts of chapters and helped me usefully complicate my arguments on more than one occasion. Joseph Csicsila has talked me through multiple drafts and minor crises with unfailing generosity of time and attention. I owe a debt of intellectual gratitude to him and to other colleagues at Eastern Michigan University who have read, commented on, and helped shape this project: Craig Dionne, Laura George, Christine Neufeld, and Martin Shichtman. Rebecca Walsh gave me tremendously helpful and detailed notes on chapter 3, as well as dear friendship since we met in graduate school. Back when this project was in its infancy as a dissertation, Susan David Bernstein and Dale Bauer were generous and thought provoking with their comments. Readers at Victorian Literature and Culture provided extremely useful feedback on an earlier version of chapter 2, as did anonymous readers of earlier versions of this manuscript. And the anonymous readers at University of Toronto Press did a fantastic job of drawing my attention to big-picture issues that helped me frame the project and clarify certain elements. I am deeply appreciative of the time they put into providing such constructive feedback. Eastern Michigan University has been an unfailing supporter of my research. The Provost’s New Faculty Award provided release time to devote to writing. Grants to aid in the production of a volume with so many wonderful illustrations came from the Provost’s Faculty Research Fund, the Josephine Keal Scholarship Fund, the Dean of Arts and Sciences, and the English Department Publications Committee. I am grateful to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Putnam Dana McMillan Fund, for permission to reproduce Peace Concluded on the cover of this volume, and to the Carlyle House Museum, British National Trust, for their graciousness in allowing me to reproduce A Chelsea Interior. The generosity of both collections in supporting this academic work is most appreciated. And, of course, no such project would have been possible without my family. My parents always believed I would finish, no matter how long it seemed the book was taking, and I am grateful for their unconditional faith in me. My sisters kept me laughing throughout the process, for which I owe them more than they may ever know. I could not have made it through the long nights of writing, the days of research, the sleeplessness of parenting infants, or the demands of juggling my own

Acknowledgments xi

career and motherhood without the support – practical and emotional – of Rick Tange. Him I thank for always knowing precisely what sort of help to offer and for his unfailing assurances that one day this work would see publication. He and our children, Quinn and Naomi, keep me grounded and daily remind me of the value of the home we have built together.

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Illustrations

Figure 1

Table of servants’ employment and wages in relation to family income, Isabella Beeton, Book of Household Management, page 8. 49 Figure 2 Isabella Beeton’s October dinner party layout and October weekly family dinner suggestions, Book of Household Management, pages 943–5. 51 Figure 3 ‘Plans of Different Floors of Town House,’ J.H. Walsh, A Manual of Domestic Economy, figure 47, facing page 96. 56 Figure 4 ‘Basement Plan’ from C.J. Richardson, Picturesque Designs, page 392. 58 Figure 5 ‘Plan of Basement Floor,’ Gervase Wheeler, The Choice of a Dwelling, page 163. 59 Figure 6 ‘First Floor (drawing rooms),’ Robert Kerr, The Gentleman’s House, plate 44, ‘Design for a Row of London Houses.’ 72 Figure 7 ‘Drawing Room Floor,’ Gervase Wheeler, The Choice of a Dwelling, page 144. 73 Figure 8 ‘Drawing-Room Chimney-Piece,’ from Rhoda and Agnes Garrett, Suggestions for House Decoration, facing page 61. 75 Figure 9 Drawing-room furniture, taken from Thomas Webster’s Encyclopaedia of Domestic Economy, multiple pages. 78 Figure 10 A Chelsea Interior, oil on canvas, Robert Scott Tait, 1857. Reproduced courtesy of Carlyle’s House, Chelsea (The National Trust), ©NTPL/John Hammond. 112 Figure 11 ‘Ground Floor,’ Gervase Wheeler, The Choice of a Dwelling, page 143. 143

xiv

Illustrations

Figure 12 ‘Ground Floor (dining room &c),’ Robert Kerr, The Gentleman’s House, plate 44, ‘Design for a Row of London Houses.’ 144 Figure 13 ‘Dining-Room Chimney-Piece,’ from Rhoda and Agnes Garrett, Suggestions for House Decoration, facing page 46. 150 Figure 14 Linley Sambourne at work in his drawing-room studio, from Kensington Picturesque and Historical, page 251. 157 Figure 15 ‘Thoroughfare Plan,’ Robert Kerr, The Gentleman’s House, plate 52, ‘Thoroughfare plan for house shown in plate 21,’ facing page 470. 183 Figure 16 ‘Plan of First Floor,’ Gervase Wheeler, The Choice of a Dwelling, p. 166. 188 Figure 17 Peace Concluded, oil on canvas by Sir John Everett Millais, 1856. Reproduced courtesy of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The Putnam Dana McMillan Fund. 224 Figure 18 ‘Fourth Floor (Nurseries & Servants’ Rooms)’ Robert Kerr, The Gentleman’s House, plate 44, ‘Design for a Row of London Houses.’ 231

ARCHITECTURAL IDENTITIES

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Introduction The Architecture of Identity

Tucked into uniformly unassuming black portfolios in the archives of the Royal Institute of British Architects lie sketches for archways and cornices, decorative details and street-side elevations, working drafts and contract drawings for a some of the most impressive as well as the most modest homes constructed in Victorian Britain. Poring over the papers of C.J. Richardson, William Burn, Sir Charles Barry, Philip Webb, Sir George Gilbert Scott, Edward Paley, and so many others, one encounters designs for country estates, suburban villas, terraced homes in Chelsea, labourers’ cottages, aristocratic mansions, lodges, and almshouses. With time and the benefit of reiteration, the markings on these house plans – thin triple lines, surprising washes of colour – resolve themselves into a system of architectural information, marks, and codes that ensure that builders and workmen properly locate windows and chimneys or finish floors with the correct materials. Sitting in the softly lit RIBA archives, it is hard not to marvel as one turns over pages drawn by the most prominent and highly respected British architects of the nineteenth century. Among the luminaries, Richard Norman Shaw has come to be remembered primarily for designing country retreats for the landed gentry and enormous homes for the likes of wildly popular children’s book author and illustrator Kate Greenaway. In his RIBA portfolios are plans for Lowther Lodge, a magnificent edifice of red brick in Kensington, commissioned as the home of an MP and now the headquarters of the Royal Geographical Society. There are drawings for numerous churches and other public buildings, as well as those for Shaw’s own home at No. 6 Ellerdale Road. But in 1877, Shaw began working on a much more modest, though no less ground-breaking, suburban project: Bedford Park. Widely rec-

4 Architectural Identities

ognized as the first planned garden suburb of London, Bedford Park marked a turning point in suburban planning, taking the lead in organizing artistic, affordable middle-class homes around existing mature trees and a purpose-built town centre in ways that mimicked the organic development of more rural villages. The primary architect for the largest phases of Bedford Park planning and building, Shaw designed terraced, semi-detached, and detached homes of various sizes along leafy streets. Despite the historical significance of this community and the artistic vision that shaped its development, relatively few documents from his work on Bedford Park survive in the archives – perhaps because, as Hermann Muthesius notes, these ‘small houses … were in a way extra to his main work,’ a mere side-note in a career marked by the design of grand and prestigious buildings (138). And yet, slipped between pages devoted to other projects in Shaw’s RIBA portfolios, one encounters the following arresting note, whose few lines give a better sense of the character of the man than reams of precise contract drawings ever could. Written hastily on what appears to be a scrap of paper torn from something else, and scrawled alongside some drawings clearly meant to rectify the problems the brief letter outlines, it is addressed to the architect who served as Shaw’s chief clerk for nearly a decade. It opens most vividly: Hampstead – Friday evening~ Dear Lethaby: Bedford Park is Convulsed about the design for the School of art – and Bloodshed is imminent. I have promised to send [W–?] on Monday a modified design. The tracing is what I want done, and a tracing will do …

He goes on to outline the necessary changes and point to his sketched ideas for the drawings he expects his clerk to execute over the weekend, and he ends with an underlined reiteration that ‘a tracing will do perfectly,’ as if to suggest that people capable of such dramatics do not require their behaviour to be indulged by overmuch effort. The drollness of his commentary on unnecessary histrionics aside, one might reasonably wonder that anyone could be ‘convulsed’ over the scale of dormer windows and addition of a pediment and porch to an art school. However, Bedford Park had been carefully designed around a town centre, including a pub, a church, and a club, all with the intention of creating

The Architecture of Identity 5

not just a housing estate but a community. For this reason, I would suggest, the design for the School of Art, which was originated by another architect and was by all accounts pretty terrible before Shaw was called upon to rescue it, threatened the very sense of community it was meant to foster because it was so far below the architectural standards that had hitherto prevailed. In the Victorian period, home carried such significant meaning – its outward aspects were so central to defining the self – that any blemish upon the burgeoning community of homes that was already beginning to be identified as representing the best of modest middle-class opportunity was likely to be reviled. Reviled not just on its own demerits but because its faults threatened the identities of all of those respectable professional people who were already, a mere five years after Bedford Park had first been conceived, defining themselves through this innovative species of home. To begin to understand why ‘Bloodshed is imminent’ in Bedford Park, at least in a metaphoric sense, one need only recall that the word home, with all of its connotations of loving comfort, is – in English at least – not at all the same as the word house. The latter signifies a physical structure with roof and walls, while the former more often than not indicates an emotional state of well-being. A home may be considered portable in many senses; in the nineteenth century, it carried comfort, in the words of John Ruskin, ‘wherever a true wife comes’ (60). As if to follow Ruskin’s implicit sense that the material location of a home is of secondary importance, scholars of Victorian domesticity have largely focused their efforts on exploring ideological issues surrounding the creation of a home, considering variously the implications of a system of ‘separate spheres,’ the conception of what counted as ‘work’ in the home, the troubling hierarchies among household members, or the cultural position of the man of the house, for example.1 Yet it remains an unalterable fact that even if one grants that a woman may carry ‘home’ with her, Victorian middle-class status required not only a clear sense of the ideological imperatives of domesticity but also a proper house in which to create that home. At perhaps no other time in English history was there such a tremendous boom in the building of houses as there was in the second half of the nineteenth century, and those physical spaces had substantial implications for coalescing middle-class identity.2 Architectural Identities builds upon and complicates the existing scholarship on Victorian domesticity by starting with the premise that, for the Victorians, home was not just an idea; it was an idea that was explicitly rooted in a material object – a house that was properly laid

6 Architectural Identities

out, carefully decorated, meticulously managed, thoroughly cleaned, and thoughtfully displayed. A house was made into a home not merely through the emotions, behaviour, and ideological investment of its occupants, but also through careful attention to the interplay between the physical space and the identities contained within. Indeed, as Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine explained, a house was ‘the very acme of comfort, the very object of all labour, the only thing that makes life worth living for, in the opinion of three-fourths of Queen Victoria’s loving subjects’ (‘How to…’ no. I, 759). A house was ‘the only thing that makes life worth living’ in large part because a house metonymically stood for its inhabitants. Its location positioned people within the social hierarchy and within their communities, the work of maintaining it shaped the rhythm of their lives, and its walls managed their daily interactions. The way a house was designed to distribute people through space helped establish the personal and social identities of everyone who entered. In short, British middle-class identity from the 1830s through the 1870s was clearly architectural. It was carefully constructed from the building blocks of family name and gentility, and it was maintained primarily through the vigilant creation of a house that would be not just a home but also a stage for displaying the successful achievement of middle-class identity. Indeed, as Judith Flanders notes, ‘Victorians as a whole found ownership of less importance than occupancy or display’ and were more inclined to rent, as that gave them the chance to ‘move promptly and easily as their circumstances changed’ to ensure the most accurate displays of their social positions (23). Small wonder, then, that a school of art whose architectural inadequacies threatened to undermine the very display of taste that confirmed the middle-class position of the relatively modest families establishing themselves in Bedford Park would leave that community’s occupants nearly convulsed.3 Although to claim that the middle-class home had a foundation of good breeding built up into an edifice of good taste is to buy completely into the Victorian ideal, defining the Victorian middle classes with precision is a notoriously difficult undertaking. Yet despite the complexities of pinning down precisely who was middle-class, scholars have found it useful to strive towards a definition – in no small part because the Victorians themselves were so committed to demarcating class difference. The minimum requirement for being considered middle-class in the period, we are often told, was the retention of a single live-in servant. But that might be done, according to the redoubtable exper-

The Architecture of Identity 7

tise of Mrs Beeton, on an annual income of merely £150–200.4 And as Sally Mitchell points out, bank clerks were often required to be making £150 per annum before they were even allowed to marry, on the assumption that any married man making less than that would be too tempted to embezzle funds to keep up respectable appearances (Daily Life 36). A couple retaining a servant on such an income – even one who would necessarily be a very young maid-of-all-work – would lead a life of Spartan simplicity compared to one that kept a carriage and pair, hosted several important dinners each season, and vacationed abroad or at the seaside periodically. And yet, both might fall under the general term ‘middle class’ according to many calculations. Indeed, some would consider that the upper bound of the middle-class scale is anyone who stops short of having a title. Moreover, throughout the Victorian period, increasing economic prosperity enabled tremendous growth in the number of people whose financial positions might reasonably identify them as middle-class. In response to these permeable and indefinite boundaries, the British struggled to distinguish those who were ‘truly’ middle-class, often insisting upon the innate nature of middle-class sensibility as a marker. I contend that the Victorian efforts to perpetuate a notion that there was a single, unified, easily identifiable middle class in the mid-nineteenth century are in part responsible for the modern perplexity in trying to determine precisely what (if anything) defined the homogeneity of the middle class. Absolute income might seem the obvious means of delineating class boundaries; hitting a median point, one might choose to look only at families making £300–500 per year, and call those ‘middle-class.’ But that is not what Victorians would have done for themselves. Many highly respectable families might have had relatively modest incomes. The artist Linley Sambourne (eventually Second Cartoon for Punch magazine), for example, married a woman who came from a wealthy family, but they relied upon his up-and-coming career for their income and lived in a respectable but modest home that rendered them unable to give ‘return dinners’ in the same excessive style of those to which they were invited. While later in Sambourne’s career, his family might have been the epitome of the middle-class median, the issue of income as a measure of this status is complicated when one draws comparisons across professions: a large-scale farmer, for example, might earn far more per year than did Sambourne at the beginning of his career, and yet the former would not have been considered genteel enough to count as middle class to most city dwellers. Moreover, what constituted

8 Architectural Identities

‘modest’ entertaining for the Sambournes would certainly have been lavish by comparison with those at the lower boundary of the middleclass scale who had not married independently wealthy women. Labour and source of earnings thus might demarcate social categories more effectively. It would seem reasonable to argue that those who earned money by dint of work of the mind were middle-class; those whose work depended upon physical labour were working-class; and those whose income was provided solely through interest on their prodigious investments were upper-middle-class or beyond. But where does this leave the wealthy industrialist who had grown up ‘over the shop’ and was the first in his family to amass a prodigious fortune? To answer that question, Victorians avowed the primacy of birth and breeding as measures of class position. The notion of good taste as a middle-class birthright was repeatedly asserted as particularly useful for the purposes of drawing class boundaries, on the assumption that anyone who had quickly earned a lot of money would not simultaneously be able to earn the sensibility to display a proper middle-class taste. Yet, despite cultural assertions that ‘real’ middle-class status was impossible simply to earn, this is a theoretical distinction that could not have been easy to uphold in practice, particularly when those with a comfortable income could learn the parameters of middle-class housekeeping through any number of widely available printed texts such as Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861). Other potential measures of middle-class position might include literacy, education level, enfranchisement, and political power – yet all of these are in fact more likely to separate the population by gender than by class. I would suggest that for the Victorians themselves, the term middle class designated a category whose precise boundaries were difficult to delineate, but whose opposites were easy to define. For this reason, while we can begin to establish some of the outlines of middle-class life, definitively marking the middle class on the basis of income distribution, labour, or family connections, while tempting, is ultimately nearly impossible. This study thus proposes that it is more productive to resist the notion that the Victorian middle classes comprised a specific entity and instead to explore how the culture itself relied upon domesticity – both domestic ideals and the creation of a physical home – to create a fiction of a stable, knowable, homogeneous middle class. In assuming that it is useful to resist the Victorian impulse to fix the boundaries of the middle class, I use the term middle classes specifically to highlight the tension within that Victorian project itself: it was precisely because the mid-

The Architecture of Identity 9

dle classes were not homogeneous that there was so much anxiety to define them as such in contradistinction to the increasingly-perceivedas-derelict aristocracy and the ‘vulgar’ and embodied working classes. It is my contention that British Victorians made their best effort to resolve this thorny issue through recourse to domesticity in both its ideological and physical manifestations. In studiously avoiding attention to the physical bodies of its members, through assumptions that the minimum boundary of middle-class status was that one did not labour physically to earn a living, the middle classes turned instead to the bodies of their homes for physical expressions of their class position. Those houses, as described in myriad print sources and as built and occupied, present a range of scale concomitant with the multiplicity of positions – from minor bank clerk to wealthy and prominent physician – that were ostensibly middle-class. Furthermore, as this study reveals, the scale of the home mattered far less than the specific ways in which its walls encoded norms of middle-class status. A house defined one’s class position by revealing both the ideals to which one aspired and the degree to which – no matter the scale – one was able to achieve the dream of the ideologically perfect home. Aspiring to the upper boundary, participating in setting cultural domestic ideals rather than merely responding to them, the middle-class home is not best defined as a building of a specific size or based on a particular income level, but rather as an edifice built upon a specific set of ideals and designed to forward a particular image that constructed its occupants as properly middle-class. In order to reach useful conclusions from the study of domestic architecture, one cannot completely sidestep drawing boundaries within the potentially tremendous range that the Victorians themselves might have considered middle-class; at the very least, it is imperative to choose a subset of houses for examination. This necessity in turn raises questions about how to draw the lines. The largest parameters are obvious: at the lower end, rule out tenements or buildings containing multiple flats or apartments and limit the study to single-family dwellings (multi-storey row houses would of course count in this equation, even though they might have walls adjoining their neighbours’ homes). At the upper end, eliminate country houses that were seasonal retreats for the exceedingly wealthy. But this nonetheless leaves a wide range of houses, from narrow row houses to the mansions of Belgravia in which the wealthiest of untitled Britons might have the peerage for neighbours, from the country parson’s home to the semi-detached suburban villa. Throughout this study, I have considered homes from points

10 Architectural Identities

across this range, not because I contend that such variations of scale are all equally representative of some general middle-class experience, but rather because this collection accurately captures the set of ideals within which both reality and aspiration existed for many members of the middle classes. Indeed, narrowing the limits of what physical scale ‘counts’ as middle-class not only presents an incomplete picture; it also negates the vital fact that the middle-class home was a site for individual progress. Ruling out the most modest or most ostentatious homes, to satisfy the contention that only the actual median counts as the middle, leaves out too many people who would have considered themselves members of the middle classes – and too many domestic establishments that had aspirations to better themselves and that tried to live up to the spirit of middle-class ideals no matter how modest their budget. As the following chapters will show, the home was not merely the obvious ‘proof’ that one was middle-class; it was the way to get there. As such, the home was the site for fascinating experiments in identity. In some cases, it was the location in which to uphold social norms in order to prove one’s worth; in other cases, it was the site for fighting against the ideological restrictions of middle-class identity as they intersected with notions of proper gendered identities. Studying the broadest range of middle-class homes, then, provides a vision of how Victorians tried to negotiate the boundaries of middle-class identity. For while ideals of domesticity provided a benchmark to which people might aspire, their homes gave them a space in which to work through (or against) these definitions. The portrait of the middle-class home that emerges from this examination is a case, in many ways, of inventing averages, of seeking some balance between ideals and realities. Because it is so often the case that excess helps shape aspirations, which in turn create an ideological framework within which people choose to operate, I have found it worthwhile to examine some of the most excessive and unattainable examples of ‘middle-class’ architecture within this study. Housekeeping guides (in both book and article form), architects’ floor plans, and architectural guides written for consumption by the lay public often showcase homes whose scale is far beyond the means of those of average income, even while addressing the ostensible average middleclass audience. In much the way that Architectural Digest today appeals largely to readers who could never afford the homes pictured on its pages, these homes helped set the lofty goals that constructed the ideals to which people aspired. As Robert Kerr’s tremendously popular The

The Architecture of Identity 11

Gentleman’s House; Or, How to Plan English Residences from the Parsonage to the Palace makes clear from its very subtitle, middle-class ideals did not shift based on income; merely the scale of their execution changed. In focusing his book on ‘English Residences from the Parsonage to the Palace,’ he explains in his Preface that ‘the fundamental idea of [my] treatise is that large houses and small houses, from the largest indeed to the smallest, if well devised as English Residences, have all alike the selfsame principles of plan, differing of necessity in scale, because they differ in size, but not differing in purpose’ (viii–ix). Because the vagaries of financial markets could complicate the categories that seemed so easy to name on paper – middle-class, respectable, genteel, and tasteful on one side as distinguished from all of their opposites on the other – his notion that ‘principles of plan’ are more important than the particular scale of any given home is the most salient aspect of a Victorian home. What, then, were the ‘principles’ on which a middle-class home would be built? The answer to this question resides in ideological tenets. Perhaps most central is the common understanding that the Victorian ideal of home relied on the notion of separate spheres, which defined the private, feminine, domestic realm against the public, masculine world of work and commerce. Home was not just the opposite of public; it was its antidote. The middle-class home was figured as the location for comforting men who faced anxieties produced by public life, nursing the sick, providing a refuge from care and worry of all sorts, and teaching children proper manners and morals to prepare them to resist worldly pitfalls. Feminizing the domestic sphere, conduct manuals and housekeeping guides represented the role of the woman of the house as extending to the physical structure itself. Her ‘natural’ moral sense and capacity for nurture were expected to ensure that the home she created was a private haven from the dangers of the public world.5 Indeed, pervasive textual conflation of physical and ideological notions of women’s ‘proper place’ makes clear that domestic spaces are a major constituent of Victorian middle-class women’s identity.6 The concept of the ‘Angel in the House’ itself demonstrates that the ideology of domestic femininity is built not only on notions of gender difference but also on a class position that locates a woman in a specific kind of home. Fundamentally a spatial metaphor, the phrase ‘Angel in the House’ identifies the ideal middle-class woman by positioning her within an actual place and highlighting the symbiosis required to define both home and woman: a respectable middle-class home by definition had a

12 Architectural Identities

good woman at its centre, just as a good middle-class woman defined herself largely through her capacity to manage her home. In a system of separate spheres, the physical boundary the home placed between family and public was supposed to provide a separation between feminine moral influence and the public problems produced by competition and industrialization. Yet geographers interested in how people conceptualize the spaces in which they live, and literary scholars who investigate representations of these concepts, have shown that the Victorian house sheltered a family from the elements without providing any real barrier to the entrance of ‘public’ – political, legal, social – concerns into the home. Certainly, it is hard to imagine how the home could have provided such a barrier. Men brought home the details of their work day, people read newspapers over breakfast, the vagaries of financial market affected households, and the idea that women should provide moral balm often took them into the homes of the needy, all of which would have made it impossible for socio-political issues not to be present within the middle-class home. However, the desire to figure domesticity as an antidote to all such problems was a primary value placed on the middle-class home throughout the second half of the century. Interrogating that desire has become a cornerstone of many studies of nineteenth-century domesticity, ever since Lenore Davidoff and Catherine Hall’s groundbreaking work in Family Fortunes.7 Davidoff and Hall traced the development of the nineteenth-century ideal of separate spheres by focusing in large part on its roots in religious faith, and later studies have added valuable nuance to discussions of domesticity by demonstrating the practical impossibilities of maintaining a public/private binary and by usefully complicating the notions of work on which class and gender differences were often based. Studies such as Monica Cohen’s Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel and Elizabeth Langland’s Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture have done much to suggest ways in which women were not, in fact, separated from the class politics that helped produce middle-class identity. Yet even when they are critical of the gender bias inherent in the notion of separate spheres, these and other studies of Victorian home life have tended to focus on the condition of women. Thus, while offering useful challenges to the Victorian supposition that home could be a sphere separate from ‘public’ life, scholars have demonstrated how the home was not purely private even while implying that it was largely feminine. One notable exception to this ten-

The Architecture of Identity 13

dency to replicate the Victorian assumption that to talk about domesticity is to talk about women is John Tosh’s important book, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England, which provides a detailed examination of masculinity in relation to home life. Yet even with Tosh’s addition to the mix, there is as yet an important aspect of domestic life largely unexplored. Considering work on Victorian domesticity as a trajectory from the religious underpinnings that were the focus of Davidoff and Hall through a series of secular permutations, it is time now to add the component of architectural material culture. Like many of these previous studies, I am interested in the impracticability of the public/private binary, although I also think it is vital to keep in mind that the rhetoric of separate spheres served Victorian efforts to establish cultural hierarchies of power in a matrix of class and gender relations.8 Moreover, I argue that it is vital to take this work beyond the theoretical discussion of spheres and to ground this theory in the physical spaces that shaped everyday life, as far as they can be ascertained at a distance of more than a century. There has been tremendous interest among literary scholars since the mid-1990s in geographies of identity, that is, in the spaces people occupy and the ways in which those occupations shape their own and other’s understandings of who they are. Prior to that point, architectural histories, such as the still-unsurpassed The English House by Hermann Muthesius (1904), had not devoted much analysis to lived experience within those buildings. Literary scholarship had long considered the ideological and metaphoric implications of homes particularly as they revealed the interiority of characters, without giving much thought to the material facts of these homes’ creation. And, as geographer Joanne P. Sharp wrote in 1996, geographers had become accustomed to using literature to ‘conjure up the image and “feel” of a place’ because their role as social scientists often seemed to preclude their ability to produce such evocative language on their own (119). But just as Sharp’s article marked a call for a more nuanced use of literature by geographers, to account both for the value of genre and the inability of language to be strictly mimetic, so literary scholars began to rely on geographers’ theories of space to conceptualize identity politics in more concrete ways. This work has been most prolific in studies of modernity, whether focusing on diasporas, modernism, or post-colonial encounters. There have been fewer studies of private than of public spaces, and an even smaller number of those consider domestic architecture in depth. Philippa Tristram’s Living Space in Fact and Fiction was one of the earliest books by a

14 Architectural Identities

literary scholar to examine Victorian home life in a sustained manner. Her argument that Victorians were less interested in building spaces than in decorating them as a function of class-based notions of taste seems to have influenced more recent studies, which often focus on the decorative arts (as, for example, does The Victorian Parlour by Thad Logan). Two notable recent books that explicitly connect analyses of literary representations of cultural identity to the physical domestic architecture of their respective periods are Victoria Rosner’s Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life and Milette Shamir’s Inexpressible Privacy: The Interior Life of Antebellum American Literature. In a similar vein, architectural historian Annmarie Adams’s Architecture in the Family Way examines the social and cultural implications of domestic architecture in terms of the healthy home movement in the nineteenth century. And the richly detailed and copiously illustrated social history Inside the Victorian Home by Judith Flanders provides the most comprehensive study of the middle-class house to date, using each room of the home as a jumping-off point for discussing practices of everyday life – from cleaning fireplace grates to feeding children a proper diet to starching fine lace frills. Architectural Identities is deeply indebted to the inroads made by all of these studies, which have set precedents for serious consideration of architecture and its implications on identity formation and laid the groundwork for my present efforts to bring together the physical and the metaphoric, the fictional and the floor plan, the ideal and the autobiographical, the guidebook and the lived experience. The present study fills a gap in the current scholarship by revelling in the tensions between domestic ideals and the practical limitations contained within real walls. Building on work such as Flanders’s fascinating study, which provides a compendium of details about the daily labour of middleclass living, I aim to complicate our understanding of the British Victorian domestic space by demonstrating that it was largely built upon paradox: apparently the most stable, visible marker of solid middleclass status, the Victorian home in fact embodied all the challenges of defining middle-class gendered identities while simultaneously offering the possibility for manipulating the boundaries of those identities. As the foregoing suggests, geography theories and architecture studies together provide an extremely useful set of premises for considering both the physical spaces of the Victorian middle-class home and their implications for gender identities. The first key assumption underpinning my work is that the middle-class home was not an uncomplicat-

The Architecture of Identity 15

edly feminine space; the lenses of architecture and geography enable a closer look at how specific places within the home were coded according to rules that in part incorporate gendered prerogatives. Of particular importance to this assumption is the distinction originally put forth by humanistic geographers between space and place. Gillian Rose, in Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge, defines place as ‘a specific set of interrelationships between environmental, economic, social, political and cultural processes … locations which, through being experienced by ordinary people, became full of human significance’ (41). That is, the concept of place includes people’s interpretations of the social space they inhabit. Spaces, on the other hand, are physical locations unimbued with such complex meanings – uninhabited places, for example – ‘represented through scientifically rational measurements of location’ (Gillian Rose 43). Feminist geographers have refined this now-commonplace space/place distinction by resisting earlier efforts to generalize the experience of places and by instead examining those experiences specifically in terms of identity categories. For example, they argue that just as the binaries of public/ private, culture/nature, or mind/body are untenable in practice, so cultural efforts to gender particular places may be undermined by the dynamic use of spaces. Mark Wigley observes that gender is ‘a concept underpinned by a spatial logic’ but generally presumed to be ‘a prearchitectural given,’ an assumption he is interested in refuting (330). In terms of British Victorian culture, a geographical and architectural approach to understanding middle-class identities reveals that they were ‘a pre-architectural given,’ in that they were addressed by careful floor plans designed to preserve presumably fixed gender differences. At the same time, they were also a post-architectural subject for negotiation; that is, although assumptions about gendered identities were built into the design of homes, examples of how those built environments were lived in also demonstrate that home spaces were part of a dynamic process of creating gendered identities. A second important premise of my work that is informed by geography studies is that the physical and social constructions of spaces are reciprocal. While early geographers insisted on a causal relationship in which spaces were built in deference to their projected uses, more recent work argues that just as ideology and social practices influence the design of spaces to suit accepted social rules and needs, so spatial organization affects social practice by dictating the behaviour permitted in particular places.9 Such a spatial understanding of identity helps

16 Architectural Identities

explain the range of positions of authority occupied by a single member of a household: a Victorian husband would be the authority in the home dining room but on entering the drawing room would have already extinguished his smoking materials and given up his alcohol in favour of tea, in deference to his wife’s feminine authority in that place. This symbiotic relationship between built environment and behaviour articulates how spaces may simultaneously be invested with certain norms and yet permit multiple uses and relationships within them. And while behaviour obviously does not solely constitute identity, assuming such reciprocity also illuminates how the gendered boundaries of certain spaces within the Victorian home were fixed as well as how and when they might in fact become more fluid – providing interesting insights into the gendered boundaries of Victorian identities as well. Considering the rules of behaviour as location-dependent thus becomes only one-half of the equation when examining nineteenth-century identities. Equally important is taking into account how individuals might exploit the expectations of a particular space in order to create a place for themselves that may even challenge the norms ostensibly built into the domestic architecture. Although geography studies focus on the boundaries that delimit spaces, much of this work in fact does not pay a high degree of attention to details of what architects call the ‘built environment.’ With priorities similar to those that have prevailed in Victorian studies, many geographers consider what spaces and places ‘mean’ rather than how they are built. A focus on how ‘gendered spaces themselves shape, and are shaped by, daily activities’ often results in privileging the use of the space over its construction or physical qualities (Spain 28). I augment such analysis of the gendered implications of spatial geographies, demonstrating that in the Victorian context, interplay between uses or interpretations of spaces and their very physical nature is vital, given the nineteenth-century near-obsession with the process of home building and the power of the physical structure to articulate social position. A thorough examination of the Victorian middle-class home, which served as a marker of class position through its function as an arbiter of taste, must recall – in the terms explicated by Pierre Bourdieu and Michel de Certeau – that notions of taste and habit rely heavily on physical structures and consumption of everyday goods.10 The cultural capital one gained from being a proper consumer of the objects of everyday life cannot be ignored at a moment in time when identity was so clearly tied to the creation of a proper domestic space. Although the

The Architecture of Identity 17

scope of this project cannot include an extended assessment of Victorian middle-class practices of consumption, I do find it useful to consider the material elements of home construction in order to articulate fully the interdependence of Victorian class and gender identities within the home. Throughout the Victorian period, there was a tremendous proliferation of texts that represented the meanings of ‘home’ and that offered advice on how to create the perfect physical home space in accordance with ideals of propriety and respectability. Although housekeeping guides written for women have been the most common scholarly referent for information about Victorian domestic ideals and practices, architectural treatises, generally aimed at a male audience, offer useful additional information such as floor plans and details of room design, as well as revealing the roles of men in creating the domestic universe. Architectural Identities thus brings these two bodies of work together, adding a layer of complexity to our previous understandings of the Victorian domestic sphere. While housekeeping and architectural texts were both clearly invested in maintaining class and gender hierarchies through domestic architecture, read against each other, they yield greater insight into the power that control over domestic places might afford members of a household. As Daphne Spain has observed, ‘once spatial forms are created, they tend to become institutionalized and in some ways influence future social processes … Although space is constructed by social behavior at a particular point in time, its legacy may persist (seemingly as an absolute) to shape the behavior of future generations’ (6). Efforts to ‘institutionalize’ the form of middle-class houses may be seen in the remarkable consistency with which a wide range of Victorian texts discuss the imperatives of middle-class homes. Kerr’s notion that homes ‘well devised as English Residences, have all alike the selfsame principles of plan, differing of necessity in scale, because they differ in size, but not differing in purpose’ (ix), for example, is complemented by directions such as those in Beeton’s Book of Household Management – aimed at the women who would manage such houses. Together such sources helped institutionalize, partly through the rhetoric of professionalism that they employ, the construction of domestic spaces and the relationships among household occupants that such domiciles intended to fix. While architectural and housekeeping sources from the nineteenth century tend to operate with clear class- and gender-based expectations about their readers, it is extremely important to recognize that – de-

18 Architectural Identities

spite these ideals – it would be impossible for domestic architecture to erect a physical set of barriers that simply mimic and manage social and ideological divisions. Although floor plans imply that walls are static, immovable features designed both to accommodate and to control the interactions of their occupants, in fact such plans provide dynamic templates for the definition and subsequent segregation of a home’s members. Indeed, the ‘meaning’ of the home itself and of its occupants depends on how those spaces are used, on how actual bodies inhabit the spaces that were designed according to ideals of social interaction, behaviour, and identity. Hence, while careful management of physical home spaces was predicated on a middle-class need to uphold the boundaries that helped define both class position and gender norms within the hierarchies of Victorian culture, efforts to fix those boundaries often revealed their flexibility. For this reason, I have chosen to use these home-making paradigms as a lens through which to read autobiographical documents and novels, augmenting the architectural historian’s focus on the concrete built environment to provide a vision of possibilities for lived space that goes beyond the theoretical. Even filtered through time and imagination, even accounting for the fact that fiction no more represents reality mimetically than do impossibly large-scale house plans to which the modest middle-class might aspire, stories of Victorian domestic life reveal not only the homes people built but also the identities they envisioned for themselves through those homes. If one function of the home was to confirm middle-class status by putting one’s position on display, then it was assumed that only impeccable taste, proper etiquette, and faultless management of one’s domestic space and its occupants could render the display genuine. To fail in any of these particulars would indicate that one was merely performing a middle-class position unsupported by one’s ‘true’ (inherited) social background. Bourdieu’s conception of taste as revealed through everyday practices is highly relevant here, as a good middle-class home was expected at all times to reflect the ‘character’ of its occupants, whose behaviour and possessions marked them as respectable. Although taste is a slippery denominator to use in retrospect, the Victorian desire to preserve a sense of middle-class privilege most often relied upon the assumption that taste could not be learned but merely would be effortlessly displayed in the daily actions of those who were ‘truly’ middleclass. Indeed, the notion that taste is a part of one’s inheritance rather than something one can learn is located as eloquently in the gaps in

The Architecture of Identity 19

information presented by architectural and housekeeping texts as it is in what they say. Among directions for building, decorating, and maintaining a middle-class home, such texts repeatedly advocate ‘moderation’ and caution against ‘over-ornament’ and ‘vulgar’ decoration without defining any of these terms concretely.11 Robert Kerr, for example, opens the first chapter of his treatise on home design as follows: Let it again be remarked that the character of a gentleman-like Residence is not a matter of magnitude or of costliness, but of design, – and chiefly of plan; and that, as a very modest establishment may possess this character without a fault, all unadorned; so also the stately Seat of a millionaire may perchance have so little of it that the most lavish expenditure shall but magnify its defects. The qualities which an English gentleman of the present day values in his house are comprehensively these: – Quiet comfort for his family and guests, – Thorough convenience for his domestics, – Elegance and importance without ostentation. (66)

Thus, while ostensibly helping a new generation of middle-class homeowners avoid pretension or awkwardness, texts like Kerr’s paradoxically indicate that if one does not know how to identify the difference between middle-class ‘elegance’ and vulgar ‘ostentation,’ then one is not ‘truly’ middle-class. Resistance to defining these terms is not a matter of the failure of language to signify abstract concepts; rather, it is a statement of the assumption that taste could not be learned. Implicitly, and even despite what appear to be external directions for achieving an appropriate middle-class display, Victorians assumed that good taste was either in-born or impossible to accomplish. It is my contention that the reiteration of these subjective terms of judgment performed important cultural work by subtly confirming that only those who were born middle-class would be successful at reproducing the domestic image from the page into three-dimensional life. As the emphasis on taste might suggest, home was the central site wherein families could continually reaffirm their middle-class status through a process of careful display. For in addition to offering a place of repose and rejuvenation, the home served as the venue for social occasions and a microcosm of class relations through the interactions of family, servants, and tradespeople. In short, the Victorian middle classes relied upon the home to be both private and public. As a space centred on the family and arranged with the concerns of individual members

20 Architectural Identities

in mind, the home was distinctly private. Yet even the architecture of privacy complemented the goal of establishing a social hierarchy by subdividing spaces to make it more feasible for a woman to provide adequately for the various needs of the members of her household while carefully maintaining the hierarchies among them.12 Furthermore, as a place where guests were able to see and judge the household’s character – through both taste and actions – home was a highly public place for display. Offering the balm of domesticity to a much larger circle of people, the middle-class home, like the middle-class woman, was ideally selfless in its capacity to suggest that the ease and comfort of occupants and guests were paramount. As Isabella Beeton notes, ‘To invite a person to your house is to take charge of his happiness so long as he is beneath your roof’ (1869, 908). This study thus remodels our understanding of the Victorian middle classes by relying upon a matrix of wide-ranging representations of middle-class domesticity to reveal the profound tensions that form the basis of middle-class identities – tensions between abstract fantasies of domesticity and the financial and physical limits on their material manifestations; tensions between the ideal of ‘natural’ class positions and the fact that places in the class hierarchy were neither inherent nor neatly boundaried; and tensions in the notion that private domestic spaces must also always be public, and yet purposefully constructed so as to publicize their respectable privacy. In short, abstract notions of middle-class relationships to space were often at odds with the real, material conditions of existence in fascinating ways. Conversely, within the spaces carved out for negotiating between ideals and the desire to resist them, selves could be reconfigured. The tension at the heart of middle-class identity, then, is not just that which always exists in the disjunction between ideals and reality but rather is a deeper paradox: in the Victorian period, being middle-class meant embracing a fundamental tension between the imagined spaces of the self and the actual walls of the home. The architecture of middle-class identity lies in those interstices and is made manifest in the distinction between building and architecture: a building is a simple physical edifice; architecture encompasses the conceptual power of creating such an edifice as well as its physical instantiation. It is my contention, then, that middle-class identities must be understood first and foremost as architectural, lying between ideas and buildings, between imagined selves and the limits of bodies, between ideals and the physical dispersion of humans in domestic spaces. Because the architecture of Victorian middle-class iden-

The Architecture of Identity 21

tity itself demanded careful construction in order to produce an edifice that appeared natural rather than constructed, this book re-imagines the concept of identity as a construct by focusing explicitly on the physical domestic spaces built to confirm, and renovated to remodel, Victorian notions of what it meant to be a respectable member of the middle classes. The layout of this book foregrounds my interest in texts and perspectives that articulate the intersection between physical spaces, the production of identity, and the reproduction of domestic ideology. After an initial chapter that examines the wide range of advice texts designed to help the homeowner achieve the domestic ideal, subsequent chapters are organized spatially. Each takes on a specific area of the home and investigates its role in setting the boundaries of a particular middle-class identity, as well as offering readings of ways individuals might resist those boundaries even through the very process of creating an iteration of those spaces for themselves. Throughout the book, architectural and housekeeping texts provide detailed information about the physical home space, including its layout, construction, and decorative principles. Novels provide a vision of the lived uses of these spaces, as fiction is particularly valuable for offering vibrant examples of how the ideals articulated in a wide range of non-fictional texts might be put into practice. Autobiographical writings and, in the chapter on the nursery, children’s books, round out the perspectives I consider. Drawing together these disparate texts with a careful attention to their nuances and details demonstrates the importance of reconsidering Victorian domesticity in terms of the relationship between control of space and cultural authority. The first chapter lays out the boundaries of Victorian domesticity as put forth in primary texts that give advice for building and maintaining a successful middle-class home. These include floor plans and books about building houses that were typically aimed at a male readership, as well as conduct manuals and housekeeping guides generally written for a female audience. I argue that reading the two bodies of material against each other adds useful complexity to an understanding of Victorian domesticity in two ways: first, by nuancing the relationship between masculinity and femininity in creating the cultural paradigm of domestic perfection; and second, by showing how, despite the predominant notion of separate spheres, the concept of character subsumed notions of gender difference in an effort to ensure that domestic architecture supported and controlled norms of middle-class behaviour.

22 Architectural Identities

Chapter 2 relies on architectural and housekeeping texts to reveal how the drawing room was established as a place of feminine primacy at the heart of the home. Analysis of Margaret Oliphant’s Miss Marjoribanks (1866) – a novel particularly preoccupied with the power and prerogatives of the drawing room – demonstrates the difficulties of ‘finding a sphere’ for a woman who is intelligent, energetic, and unfulfilled by a wholly domestic position. The eponymous character, Lucilla, is able to expand her sphere of influence by initially containing her actions within the socially approved feminine locale of her drawing room, which serves as the setting of the bulk of the novel. Having had tremendous social success within her drawing room, she uses the fact that she has proven her middle-class propriety to expand the cultural limits of femininity for herself. Ultimately, however, the novel leaves a reader with a pointed social critique, for despite her ability to expand her place, Lucilla is still too severely limited by gendered assumptions about women’s proper place. A case-study of the marriage of Thomas and Jane Carlyle serves as an inter-chapter, a passageway that connects the chapters on the drawing room and the dining room through an exploration of one couple’s movements through their domestic spaces. The drawing room’s feminine imperatives and the dining room’s masculine prerogatives come under scrutiny here, as both Jane and Thomas struggled to articulate clear places for themselves within their household. Jane’s need for a drawing room in which she could be a central figure and Thomas’s uneasy desire to locate his work within his home – and his inability to do so comfortably – do more than just reveal a quirky couple. Their negotiations reveal the deeper tensions at stake in defining the self through the middle-class home and point to the uncomfortable lack of fixity that was middle-class architectural identity. In providing a real-life example that nuances the fictional possibilities and limitations suggested by Lucilla Marjoribanks, Jane Carlyle’s interactions with her husband also serve to set up the third chapter, which examines the tensions inherent in accommodating masculinity within an ideally feminized domestic space. Victorian notions of masculinity variously deploy terms such as professional, paternal, manly, and respectable. Significantly, all of these designations of middle-class manhood are predicated on a notion of maleness defined either within or against domesticity. In this chapter, I argue that – contrary to the apparently logical assumption that dining would be associated with women who served as hostesses – the Victorian middle-class dining

The Architecture of Identity 23

room privileged domestic masculinity and, inadvertently, also enacted the contradictory ideals of manliness by giving men a place to display their manhood while simultaneously requiring them to rely on their wives’ work to create that proper display. This chapter offers a reading of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1864–5) in terms of the use of dining as a litmus test of ‘failed’ or ‘successful’ manhood, arguing that this novel, which has traditionally been read as a tome on middleclass femininity, must be reconsidered in light of its sustained attention to the relationship between domesticity and masculinity. The final section of the chapter draws on documents from the Linley Sambourne House in London to provide an example of how one successful and prominent middle-class man dealt with these issues. The fourth chapter builds on the idea that the boundaries of middleclass identity were less fixed than fluctuating by examining attempts to position the ideal middle-class woman against those who were to supposed to define her opposite. The architectural focus of this chapter is liminal spaces within the home – such as stairs and corridors – that are not identified with a particular person’s privilege or identity. While the previous chapters argue that class position is central to the gender constructions that the drawing and dining room spaces build, this chapter delves into the ways that class identities might be as unstable as gender constructions. I examine Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) briefly, in order to make clear how Victorian culture understood the position of ‘liminal’ women within a highly structured system of identification. Jane Eyre introduces the most obvious liminal women in Victorian culture: the governess and the madwoman. These women, like the liminal spaces with which they are often associated, are caught between identity positions. Just as the passageways in Victorian homes are threatening for the links they create between supposedly differentiated figures (such as women and their servants), liminal women such as Jane Eyre and Bertha Mason Rochester threaten the culture’s notion of stable middle-class feminine identity. The bulk of this chapter, however, focuses on Magdalen Vanstone, the protagonist of Wilkie Collins’s No Name (1863), whose position as a sensation fiction heroine enables a much stronger critique of middle-class feminine ideals than does Jane Eyre. Examining Magdalen’s complex liminal status, I argue that an ability to capitalize on the multiple identity categories that correspond to liminal spaces might in fact provide women a more radical model of how to create satisfying places for themselves. The final chapter turns to the nursery in the middle-class home, ar-

24 Architectural Identities

guing that this space performed significant cultural work in shaping Victorian children to become ‘respectable’ members of the middle-class community, conceived as it was to provide the venue for teaching children to grow up into the ideological positions their parents held. The nursery as a physical space was far removed from the rest of the house, emphasizing the fact that the children contained within it were part of the middle-class household (still under the same roof) but were not yet sanctioned to appear throughout the house as fully integrated members of the middle class. They arrived in dining room and drawing room – the public rooms in which the middle-class family’s identity was most prominently on display – only by invitation and at prescribed times of day. This fact makes clear that the nursery was not simply a training ground for middle-class children; it was also a place in which the noise, dirt, petty arguments, and other undesirable elements of childhood might easily be sequestered until the children themselves learned to control these aspects of their persons. The first half of this chapter relies largely on children’s literature to examine how the nursery functioned as a policing space for the middle classes by enabling families to divert attention from the child’s character as developing – and thus to sidestep the corollary implication of the constructed nature of its parents’ identities as well. The second half of this chapter examines how autobiography as a genre enabled the representation of childhood – and class position – as constructed, even while supporting notions of middleclass privilege. The book ends with a reprise of sorts, a final case study of one lived example of home creation that draws together the varying expressions of and challenges to Victorian domestic ideals hitherto examined. Discussing the application of notions of ‘feminine’ versus ‘masculine’ roles in creating an ideal home, I read letters written by Elizabeth Gaskell during the time period when she was actively acquiring a new house for her family. These letters bring to life the tensions within Victorian domesticity by demonstrating that people who embraced both their class and gender positions might find it desirable nonetheless to remodel cultural ideals to suit their individual situations. Elizabeth Gaskell’s fascinating project to acquire and fit out a house for her husband’s retirement, completely as a surprise for him, pits the fantasy of gendered divisions of labour against the material practicalities of homemaking experience. Through this layering of texts, I aim to offer a vision of the reciprocal power of domestic spaces to shape and be reconfigured by the identi-

The Architecture of Identity 25

ties of their occupants. Moreover, the composite picture that emerges from these considerations reveals the power of domestic ideals in consolidating middle-class identities at the same time that it highlights the often-contradictory impulse to challenge those ideals while still retaining a respectable position within the culture. Ultimately, I would argue, Victorian middle-class identity must be understood as standing in a complex relation to the middle-class home – at once retaining all the idealism of the emotional power of home while also struggling to assert control over a physical space whose solid walls in fact betrayed the often tenuous nature of a middle-class cultural position.

1 Domestic Boundaries: The Character of Middle-Class Architecture

The fact is, the genuine Englishman so loves his home and its belongings, that he gives even the most uncouth arrangements a certain charm, by investing them with individuality. Gervase Wheeler, The Choice of a Dwelling

As the nineteenth century progressed, there was growing emphasis on maintaining the ‘natural’ distinctions between gentlefolk and the ‘lower orders,’ particularly in the face of the class mobility (both up and down) that was a characteristic of England’s booming growth. Rapid industrialization, colonial endeavours, and the centralization of the national economy within cities rather than decentralized agrarian pursuits combined to create a sense of cultural movement. People commuted on trains to work, raw materials moved across oceans to be processed before returning to their home countries in the form of goods to be sold, information telegraphed quickly to towns that previous generations had found inaccessibly distant. In much the same way that people today speak of a ‘global village,’ nineteenth-century England was shrinking in the face of progress. Through these processes, the middle classes were growing. As I have suggested in the Introduction, it is not only difficult but something of an over-simplification to try to define a unified Victorian middle class on the basis of income alone. Nonetheless, some numbers are useful for helping to establish parameters. Writers of advice books aimed at middle-class readers, for example, include information tailored to specific household budgets that range from £100 to £1,000 per year.1 This is, of course, an immense range, which in itself suggests

The Character of Middle-Class Architecture 27

the necessity of the plural term ‘middle classes,’ but such range seems consistent with the broad Victorian definition of the category. Dudley Baxter’s important 1868 study National Income, for example, takes an expansive view of the occupations that might confer middle-class status. John Burnett, basing his more recent Plenty and Want in part on Baxter’s figures, includes teachers, merchants, shopkeepers, clerks, manufacturers, minor government officers, and ‘commercial travellers,’ along with ‘other professionals’ (presumably, white-collar occupations such as architecture, law, and medicine) and those in ‘financial occupations’ in quantifying the middle classes (66). Burnett concludes that in counting these professionals, as well as their wives and children, the middle classes would have been approximately 3.3 million strong at mid-century (66). Baxter, he notes, numbered the middle classes at 5.5 million (or 23 per cent of the population) in 1867, which suggests the rapid growth of this segment of the population.2 However, it is also important to note that 96 per cent of the families identified by Baxter as having incomes in the £100–£1,000 range in fact had incomes between £100 and £300 per year. This would suggest that while there was a generally broad view of ‘middle classes’ as a concept, in fact, only a very tiny fraction (approximately 5 per cent) of the population would have been in the comfortable, ideal middle-class position of employing multiple servants and having abiding financial security. Indeed, Charles Booth, in his late-Victorian mapping of the city of London on the basis of income level on every street, defined as ‘well-to-do’ those families that kept one or two servants and as ‘wealthy’ those who kept three or more servants (Life and Labour 41). Perhaps more tellingly, his discussion of initial data for this study, in a paper read before the Royal Statistical Society, differentiates the ‘Lower Middle classes’ from the ‘Upper Middle classes’ while simultaneously pointing out that ‘it is to be remembered that the dividing lines between all these classes are indistinct; each class has, so to speak, a fringe of those who might be placed with the next division above or below; nor are the classes, as given, homogeneous by any means’ (333). Despite, and probably because of, the fact the ‘dividing line’ between classes was ‘indistinct’ at best, articulations of cultural ideals reiterated the value of middle-class status at every turn. It is hardly surprising, then, that domesticity became the central focus of efforts to preserve the notion of middle-class privilege. In the face of slippery identity categories, uncomfortably ‘indistinct’ class boundaries, and the tremendous range that constituted the middle classes, the solidity of built environments must have provided a reassuring sense

28 Architectural Identities

that one’s identity was not wholly unstable. If anyone from a prosperous lawyer to his most humble copy clerk might in theory be middleclass, then an avenue for establishing class distinction was obviously necessary. As Davidoff and Hall have shown, by the 1840s the middleclass home had become a ‘repository of stability and firm values’ in the face of the rapidly changing economic and social landscape (180ff).3 Importantly, then, creating a particular kind of home became the means of marking class distinction and thereby retaining significant control over others’ perceptions of one’s class status. In the service of enumerating the relationship between the physical walls of the home and the boundaries of middle-class identity, architects and writers of conduct manuals and housekeeping guides had the delicate task of offering advice that perpetrated the illusion of ‘natural’ middle-class attributes, despite the fact that their readership was predominantly those who were new to middle-class wealth. Writers of such books in the 1840s and 1850s negotiated this difficulty by not offering any practical advice whatsoever but instead focusing on emotional, moral, and theoretical realms of knowledge. Later writers made a shift to practical concerns, but even they struggled with the paradox of providing directions for how to create the appearance of inborn gentility. One important solution to making the learned seem innate was for advice writers to draw clear class and gender distinctions both in addressing their audiences and in describing both the spatial requirements of a middle-class home and the arrangement of bodies in those spaces. Positing gender difference as a marker of class coherence, these authors create the image of middle-class stability through their practice of focusing on domesticity as a series of knowable parts. Yet despite their efforts to segregate middle-class life into manageable parts and discrete identities, reading these texts against one another reveals the complexities of mutually defining domesticity and middle-class identity and the difficulties of maintaining ‘desirable’ boundaries of all kinds within the domestic space. Home is a culturally specific term with connotations that vary according to historical moment, economic factors, and social categories; hence, the ‘typical’ home of a given period is necessarily an over-simplified construct. Nonetheless, understanding how the Victorian middle-class home was generalized in the period provides a meaningful beginning to analysing its iterations in a wide range of texts. Tellingly, the Oxford English Dictionary parses ‘home’ as an emotional as well as physical space: home is ‘the place of one’s dwelling or nurturing, with the condi-

The Character of Middle-Class Architecture 29

tions, circumstances, and feeling which naturally and properly attach to it, and are associated with it.’ This is a particularly Victorian definition, one can infer from careful reading, for the entry also notes that in other parts of the world, and in more recent times, the word is ‘increasingly’ being used ‘to designate a private house or residence merely as a building.’ Indeed, the mid-nineteenth-century examples of the word’s usage indicate significant connections between emotional and physical notions of home. Macaulay’s History of England (1849) is cited for enumerating the ‘attachment which every man naturally feels for his home,’ while Dickens is praised in A.W. Ward’s biography (1882) as being ‘most English in that love of home to which he was never weary of testifying.’4 As I reveal, the ‘most English … love of home’ was particularized in efforts to create an ideal living space that both reflected and shaped Victorian domestic ideology. The historical texts on which this study draws – those that offer advice on creating an ideal middleclass home – do not merely set forth these ideals; they brilliantly illuminate the interplay of gender and class considerations that defined the boundaries of Victorian domesticity. John Ruskin’s famous 1864 lecture ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’ is often quoted as succinctly capturing how the Victorian domestic ideal relied upon the notion of separate spheres, and the following passage especially is taken to express Ruskin’s definition of domesticity: ‘This is the true nature of home – it is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and divisions. In so far as it is not this, it is not home … And wherever a true wife comes, this home is always around her’ (59).5 In the notion that the ‘true wife’ will create a home as a ‘shelter’ from all the bad things in the world, Ruskin expresses the Victorian desire to effect a gender-based separation of public and private. Aligning ‘Peace’ and ‘shelter,’ constructed as the natural products of feminine influence, with the physical space of the home confirms the notion that home was woman’s rightful place and reiterates the feminization of domesticity that was key to this binary of separate spheres. While scholars as wide-ranging as Catherine Gallagher, Elizabeth Langland, Mary Poovey, and Gillian Rose have aptly demonstrated the tenuousness of the Victorian boundary between public and private, Victorianists tend to read Ruskin as voicing unqualified support for the feminine-home-private versus masculine-workplacepublic binary, desperate though they may argue his measures are. Yet in the ellipses between the ‘true nature of home’ and the ‘true wife’ is the following elaboration: ‘so far as the anxieties of the outer life penetrate

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into it, and the inconsistently-minded, unknown, unloved, or hostile society of the outer world is allowed by either husband or wife to cross the threshold, it ceases to be home; it is then only a part of that outer world which you have roofed over, and lighted a fire in’ (59; emphasis added). While I would not suggest that Ruskin’s position on feminine duty necessarily sets up less restrictive boundaries for women than many scholars have claimed, it is significant that he insists that ‘either husband or wife’ may be responsible for allowing domestic bliss to be disturbed.6 In arguing that both women and men have responsibilities to safeguard home from the hostilities of the ‘outer world,’ Ruskin inadvertently troubles a gender-based public-private divide. In the process of articulating domestic ideals as predicated on class-based notions of gender difference, Ruskin simultaneously indicates that the actual process of creating a home requires efforts from both men and women. Thus this lecture, which with its companion ‘Of King’s Treasuries’ James Eli Adams has called the ‘ne plus ultra of Victorian gendered binaries’ (9), in fact offers the interesting possibility that domestic space may be gendered feminine without necessarily simply privileging the feminine or women’s work. Although nineteenth-century texts by, for, and about women have generally been used as the primary source of information about Victorian domesticity, the equally large body of work aimed at the male homeowner corroborates Ruskin’s claim that husband and wife have parallel obligations for creating ‘home.’ Although some Victorian texts work hard to insist upon the easy correlation – indeed, even the interchangeability – of home and woman, the middle-class domestic sphere was not exclusively associated with women’s identities. Indeed, concern that the home would not retain the feminine character so necessary to maintaining the boundary between home and ‘the outer world’ may be read in the doggedness with which texts reiterate this character, since a fixed boundary presumably requires little reiteration. Thus I have found it useful to consider Ruskin’s invocation of the complementarity of the sexes – that ‘each completes the other, and is completed by the other’ – not only as it is commonly employed to justify drawing a boundary between home and public spaces, but also within the context of the home itself (58). Examining how home was constructed – both built and understood – reveals that the boundaries of Victorian domestic space were troubled by questions of gender even in the very texts whose purpose was to create on the page an ideal home on which readers might model their own.

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It has long been accepted that the attributes of home and woman converged around a fairly constant set of purposes in the middle decades of the nineteenth century: nurturing the family and confirming its identity as middle-class. I would argue, however, that just as the parameters of middle-class gendered identities were slippery, so were the domestic boundaries that were presumed to fix these categories. One useful means of complicating our view of Victorian domesticity is to look closely at how the functions of the home were articulated for the various members of the household and at how those articulations shifted focus from the 1840s to the 1870s. In this context, architectural treatises aimed at male readers – including articles about home building in periodicals, dictionaries of architectural concepts written for young architects, and detailed books on house design and building written for prospective homeowners – complement conduct manuals and housekeeping guides written for women on how to turn a house into a home.7 Circumventing the question of how ‘private’ spaces compose half of a gendered binary when they are daily constructed through the cooperation of men and women, these texts address single-sex audiences by focusing on highly gender-specific issues associated with the home. House-building and financing information is aimed at men, while texts for women variously discuss women’s emotional and moral contributions to the household, as well as decorating, cooking, managing servants, and childrearing. Perhaps the most striking feature of architectural treatises and women’s advice books is that despite their apparently uncomplicated claims about the gendered divisions within domestic spaces and duties, these texts share an underlying concern to position the home as middleclass, which results in parallel purposes and structures. Writers in both genres desire to produce a moral, proper home and offer overlapping conceptions of what that should entail, and they work in tandem to articulate domestic ideology and the roles of the members of the household. Furthermore, in this process, each borrows on the rhetoric of the other. Women’s advice manuals rely on physical metaphors to uphold the centrality of the middle-class home as a means of defining femininity and integrating women physically with the home, pointing to feminine influence as the ‘cornerstone’ of family, for example (H.G.C., English Maiden 73). Likewise, architectural treatises turn to notions of character and personality as a means of evaluating a home. The 1846 series in Blackwood’s Magazine, entitled ‘How to Build a House and Live in It’ praises a house that ‘has a certain air of ease and comfort and

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respectability about it, that corresponds to a nicety with the character of its worthy inmate’ (no. II, 351). Significantly, the ‘air of ease and comfort and respectability’ is not predicated on a narrowly defined level of income but on the more ethereal notions of character and taste, thereby enabling potentially anyone to create an ideal middle-class home. This at once exclusive and yet egalitarian approach makes Victorian visions of the ideal home fascinating precisely because of what lies in the spaces between what these texts say. While they presume to delimit the boundaries of class position through attention to specific gendered identities, taken together the texts reveal a deep cultural ambivalence about the possibility of such fixity. ‘Fireside virtues’: Building a Solid Foundation with a Stable Domestic Character The predominant feature of both conduct manuals and architectural treatises of the 1840s and 1850s is their focus on the ‘character’ of a good middle-class home. Architectural treatises address the middleclass husband with a focus on the physical house and express character as dependent upon aesthetic considerations and architectural style. Conduct manuals focus on the atmosphere of home and the wife’s responsibility for creating it, and the character at stake is a woman’s own. In both cases, the concrete details of design – the practical layout of the home or the processes by which women would learn skills at homemaking – are in fact given little attention. Instead, discussions centre on more abstract concepts like style, emotion, and ‘natural’ qualities of one’s gendered identity that contribute to producing an admirable domestic character. Both descriptive and prescriptive in identifying the qualities of the proper middle-class domestic sphere, these books seem designed to confirm cultural expectations of class-based, gendered behaviour. That is, in them women, men, and their homes are expected to have a certain character, on the assumption that one’s character provides a solid foundation for a home and erects barriers between the dangers of the public world and the vulnerable family members. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the etiquette books of the eighteenth century gave way to conduct manuals that addressed middle-class women’s moral obligation to fulfil roles as wives and mothers.8 As the author of the 1842 The English Maiden: Her Moral and Domestic Duties insists: ‘woman affects vitally the interests of society, from the transcendent influence she exerts on the domestic relations

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in general. The prosperity of nations depends intimately on the prevalence of the fireside virtues. Unless the foundations of order, peace, and a genuine benevolence, be laid in our homes, we can hope for none of these essential blessings’ (31).9 Asserting that the ‘foundations’ of national prosperity depend on women’s capacity to maintain the ‘transcendent influence’ of the domestic ‘fireside,’ the author here sets forth the prevailing assumption about the relationship between domesticity and national interests: the power of the nation depends upon the sanctity of the home, since today’s leaders are sustained by their wives, and tomorrow’s leaders are nurtured by the ‘foundations’ provided by today’s mothers. Such rhetoric is perhaps the most useful means of discerning how Victorians themselves idealized the middle classes: they were the classes whose women did not labour for money and whose sons would inherit the kingdom. Thus it is fitting that just as domestic efforts are here expected to transcend the individual home and affect the domestic prosperity of the nation, so the ethereal quality of the Angel in the House will transcend the merely mortal in her efforts. Ideal femininity as enumerated in conduct manuals defines the quotidian responsibilities of the transcendent angel through the cultural concept of true womanhood – an assumption of the innate domestic propensities of anyone female. Focusing on major categories of female domestic identity, a brief sampling of conduct manuals includes: The English Maiden, Her Moral and Domestic Duties (by H.G.C., 1842); Mrs Sarah Stickney Ellis’s hugely popular series Women of England: Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits (1839), Daughters of England: Their Society, Character, and Responsibilities (1842), Wives of England: Their Relative Duties, Domestic Influence, and Social Obligations (1843), and Mothers of England: Their Influence and Responsibilities (1844); the anonymous Hints on Husband Catching, or A Manual for Marriageable Misses, published in 1846 and dedicated to the ‘Spinsters of England’ in a clear jab at Ellis’s assumption that all women naturally marry; Home Truths for Home Peace, or Muddle Defeated (1851); and the anonymous, somewhat late The Lady’s Own Book: An Intellectual, Moral, and Physical Monitor (1859). The reiteration of obligation, responsibility, and duty in these titles alone indicates an assumption that women should cultivate their natural attributes within the domestic sphere, as this is the appropriate locale for disseminating this goodness into the culture. The expectation that home should serve as a morally redemptive place is a central tenet of conduct manuals and was pervasive enough to become an implicit premise of countless Victorian novels. Charles

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Dickens plays on this assumption in Our Mutual Friend (1864–5), for example, when two bachelors set up a home for themselves and insist on having a fully fitted kitchen because of the ‘moral influence of these objects, in forming domestic virtues’ (336). With typically Dickensian irony, both men admit that ‘nothing will ever be cooked’ in this kitchen, implying of course that they have no real interest in using the objects that are supposed to offer them ‘moral influence’ (337). Yet at the same time, their sincere feeling that it is important to stock the kitchen properly suggests how very intertwined the notions of domesticity and morality had become by the 1860s. They idealize the stability promised by these moral objects at the same time that they find such strictures somewhat too limiting. In fact, as the novel plays out, Mortimer and Eugene’s domestic experiment fails to contribute the necessary ‘moral influence’ in their lives largely because it is a bachelor establishment. While their playing house may initially have seemed like a jab at domestic morality, ultimately the novel demonstrates that the influence of a good woman is able to reform their laziness and other immoral habits. This correlation between the moral influence of the home and the good woman who is at its centre is paramount, and it dominates conduct manuals from the first half of the century. The English Maiden, for example, urges a woman to ‘value her domestic bonds as a means of moral culture’ (73) and characterizes her as having the ‘constitutional advantage’ of ‘virtue and piety’ which will enable her to do so (15). It is precisely this cultural assumption of the link between domesticity and ‘moral culture’ that, for example, Edward Rochester endeavours to exploit in order to get Jane Eyre to spend more time with him relatively early in the novel. He justifies talking to the seventeen-year-old Jane of his past with the opera dancer Céline Varens on the grounds that Jane has brought a kind of moral balm to his home. Claiming that ‘the more you and I converse, the better; for while I cannot blight you, you may refresh me,’ Rochester voices the Victorian commonplace that a feminine moral influence may ‘refresh’ a man and turn his home into a retreat from worldly sins (144). Tellingly, the guilt-ridden Rochester later urges Jane to understand Thornfield as ‘your home,’ signalling his desire to locate the agent of his redemption within the physical space the culture would commonly associate with her moral influence (249). To Jane, his urging that she consider Thornfield her ‘home’ – which would only be possible through marriage, since as a governess she would merely consider this her place of employment – is somewhat disconcerting. For a

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reader, particularly as the novel continues, his urgings not only indicate his physical desire for Jane but also reveal the degree to which a man might take advantage of assumptions about domestic space for his own purposes: he employs the language of morality to characterize Jane’s presence in his home space even as his veiled intention of bigamy precisely contradicts the idea that Jane’s becoming his wife would improve his moral position. Claiming he would like to legitimate Jane’s womanly influence over him by placing her in the position of lady of his house, Rochester is later discovered to be a man who would rather replace his unmanageable foreign wife with a woman whom he assumes represents the ideal English domestic character. Rochester claims that the monstrosity that is Bertha has driven him to the desperate act of trying to redeem himself through association with a good woman, and he implicitly tries to excuse his intentions of bigamy on the grounds that the current ‘mistress’ of the house – although locked up – has only an immoral influence to impart. Charlotte Brontë thus offers, through Rochester’s twisted logic, critical commentary on the consequences of assuming a necessary correlation between the character of a home and the character of its mistress, pointedly demonstrating that such cultural paradigms sacrifice individual women on the altar of untenable generalizations. Yet despite such examples (which reviewers, one must note, were quick to label as ‘unnatural,’ as if abnormality might effectively erase Brontë’s critique), the rhetoric of natural womanhood that characterizes conduct manuals embraces the language of place, implying that a woman naturally knows how to make the physical space she inhabits into a nurturing and redemptive place for others. Moreover, these books describe a role for women through attention to the symbolic, emotional notion of home and give little advice on how to achieve the ideals they describe. Ellis in Wives of England emphasizes, ‘the high moral obligation laid upon [a woman], to be as a mother to her own household’ (233). In Ellis’s estimation, a woman’s ‘high moral obligation’ to mother indicates not only the imperative to heterosexual marriage but also the sense that a woman’s role as a mother extends beyond the boundaries of biology and compels her to mother her entire household. In addition, this formulation posits that mothering and household obligations may be guided by morality rather than practical skills, as the subtitle to The English Maiden: Her Moral and Domestic Duties suggests. Indeed, the author of The English Maiden writes: ‘The happiness or misery of married life does not consist so much in external circumstances, as in the inter-

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nal disposition of the mind and heart’ and argues that ‘a really feeling heart will dictate the conduct which will be most acceptable’ in fulfilling feminine obligations (194, 190). With the ‘external circumstances’ of married life (the process of living within a household budget, preparing food, cleaning clothes, caring for babies) thus dismissed as of relative unimportance, the author assures women that ‘to secure this state of terrestrial bliss – this antepast of heaven, above all things is a good temper and amiable disposition necessary’ (193). Offering women a vision of domesticity based on ‘good temper and amiable disposition,’ the author suggests that a woman’s ‘disposition of the mind and heart’ and ‘conduct’ are the primary areas of domestic duty to which the book’s subtitle refers. In privileging attitude over skills, these texts perpetuate the image of the disembodied, transcendent Angel in the House at the same time that they paradoxically locate her in a concrete place. The central role of a woman’s character in creating a successful home is not particularly unexpected, given the high value Victorian culture placed on character more generally as a means of evaluating one’s worth.10 However, it may seem somewhat surprising to find the concept of character attached to the middle-class home itself, as architectural treatises often do, as though the home were a member of the family. Describing the appropriate character of the drawing room, dining room, study, or boudoir, architectural treatises do not merely talk of the room’s appearance but imply the value of these spaces for confirming class position to visitors and maintaining household hierarchies even among the family members.11 As numerous scholars have noted, the Victorian sense of character encompassed far more than merely style or personality, and included morality, reliability, and ‘natural’ attributes such as feminine modesty or manly autonomy.12 This formulation of character in fact enables a parallel between the domestic body and the bodies of those who inhabit the house.13 Upholding the boundary between domestic and public spaces by restricting the movement of bodies between them was considered one easy means of policing character, since keeping those with vulnerable characters – i.e., impressionable young women, children, servants whose morality might be easily swayed – safely enclosed within the home may avert potential disaster.14 The 1851 Home Truths for Home Peace explains, for example, that not asking servants to run errands prevents their exposure to the temptation of loitering in public and thereby avoids many worse-butunmentionable vices involving the opposite sex (90). Similarly, Ellis argues, ‘It needs but little acquaintance with domestic duty, to know

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that there must be something wrong in the home of that woman who is always leaving it’ (Wives 238–9). The accusation that women who regularly leave home are not doing their ‘domestic duty’ assumes that the possibility of ‘something wrong in the home’ derives from its mistress’s dubious character. There is, in short, an importantly reciprocal notion of home and character: architectural treatises are inclined to assume the home presents the character of its occupant, just as the bachelor’s flat example from Our Mutual Friend indicates that a good home may impart its solid character upon its occupants.15 How houses are taken as symbolic representations of people’s ‘true’ identities may be understood through a brief example from Jane Eyre.16 When Jane takes possession of her own little house as schoolmistress in the village of Morton, she tidily makes the best of things, satisfied only when ‘all about me was spotless and bright – scoured floor, polished grate, and well rubbed chairs’ (380). As if scouring the floors helps cleanse herself of the impurity of Rochester’s offer to make her his mistress but call her his wife, Jane demonstrates through her housekeeping that she possesses both the exacting standards of middle-class femininity and its concomitant sense of propriety, even if she is not financially solvent enough to afford more than occasional help with the most onerous cleaning tasks. In this sense, a reader is invited to see that the ‘natural’ middle-class state that is her birthright shines through despite her monetary circumstances. Although Rochester refers to her reluctance to pretend to be his wife as ‘the hitch in Jane’s character’ (309), the ‘spotless and bright’ character of Jane and her cottage provides a dramatic contrast to the ‘blackened ruin’ of Thornfield, to which she soon pays a visit (407). The only standing ‘shell-like wall, very high and very fragile-looking’ emphasizes the tenuous morality of Rochester’s attempts to reject Jane’s character and force her to consent to his bigamy (407). It recalls in its ‘grim blackness’ something of his earlier ominous threat to ‘try violence’ if she wouldn’t ‘hear reason’ in his plan (309). Furthermore, in viewing the destroyed family seat, one thinks of the destruction of the family line Rochester would have perpetuated had he commenced a family with an illegitimate wife. It is important to note, however, that the image Jane encounters on her return to the burned-out structure carries its symbolic power not just because it is a ruin that dramatically highlights Rochester’s desire to ‘ruin’ Jane; any number of ruined abbeys, storm sequences, or lightening-forked trees might have similarly served for a setting if that were the only point. This image of the shell of Thornfield

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has particular resonance and power because of the cultural significance of physical home spaces to stand as personal testament to the true character of the inhabitants. Hence, the ruined Thornfield provides a vivid portrait of the dire consequences of failing to follow conduct manuals’ advice to found a home on the moral stability of the woman of the house. This is a failure from any perspective – whether one believes Rochester’s self-serving account of Bertha’s physical excesses as a failure of femininity or one reads the failure as Rochester’s attempt to redefine morality in terms that would absolve him from any guilt over turning to nearly successful bigamy rather than nurturing the character of his wife. If conduct manuals of the 1840s predicate domestic harmony on manifestations of the natural morality of the truly middle-class woman, architectural treatises written for men provide a parallel exploration of a home’s character by defining a good home on the basis of qualities represented as inherent to a respectable middle-class man. In these texts, character is revealed through taste and style, which are taken to be the outward manifestations of propriety and, by extension, morality. Furthermore, a focus on the aesthetics of home design emphasizes the masculine identity of readers by taking on an intellectual perspective that assumes the reader is well educated in classical art and history. Aimed at a lay audience of male homeowners and renters, these texts were written by prominent professional architects and focus on the fitness of certain architectural models of domestic design, rightness of proportion in building, and appropriate aesthetic taste. They include Joseph Gwilt’s Elements of Architectural Criticism for the Use of Students, Amateurs, and Reviewers (1837) and An Encyclopedia of Architecture Historical, Theoretical, and Practical (1842), Richard Brown’s Domestic Architecture: Containing a History of the Science and the Principles of Designing (1852); James Fergusson’s The Illustrated Handbook of Architecture (1855), advertised as ‘being a Concise and Popular Account of the different Styles of Architecture prevailing in all Ages and Countries’; Owen Jones’s The Grammar of Ornament (1856); and Robert Scott Burn’s Ornamental Drawing and Architectural Design (1857). Often emphasizing ornament or design as a function of aesthetics, these architects do not always confine themselves to English homes, or even to domestic architecture, preferring to range broadly through Classical, Asian, and European architecture in their discussions of taste and style. Moreover, even where, as with Gwilt’s 1842 book, their titles indicate an interest in practicality, the ‘practice of architecture’ is considered ‘as a Fine Art’ rather than

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in terms of actual physical design. ‘The characters of strength, grace, and elegance, of lightness and of richness, are distinguishing features of the several orders,’ Gwilt tells his readers, as a preface to an art history lesson in the proportions that derive from Ionic, Corinthian, and Doric models (680). In their conjunction of character with architectural subject matter, the authors ultimately imply that having achieved the proper character for one’s home will – like women’s femininity – be immediately apparent to anyone who is middle-class. Just as conduct manuals rarely tell women what constitutes appropriate modesty (a potential conundrum given that her home ought to display her class position but do so without ostentation), these books do not tell men how to distinguish good style from bad, although they are quick to condemn bad proportions or lack of consistency in design. Like other texts from the early Victorian period, Richard Brown’s Domestic Architecture: Containing a History of the Science, and the Principles of Designing, considers the history of domestic architecture by tracing architectural developments and comparing ‘modern’ houses with those of ancient Greece or Rome. His discussion of the ideal proportions of rooms, for example, draws on assessing the relative merits of Gothic and Classical revival.17 Brown uses historically important edifices as examples, implying that the ‘history of the science’ of architecture is in fact one of aesthetic understanding. Texts from this period similarly position themselves as reporters, noting historic changes in design norms, such as the shift from planning homes around a series of courtyards to planning room access via corridors. Significantly, however, books like Brown’s make no comment upon the implications of such changes despite their direct correlation to class-based value systems.18 The assumption of education on the part of readers notwithstanding, the focus of these books is the relationship between classical and modern architecture rather than an effort to theorize Victorian domesticity. Yet far from being merely an aesthetic fashion trend, the nineteenth-century architect’s standard use of corridors confirms middle-class values. In homes built on a plan of interconnecting rooms (as was the case in prior centuries), it is impossible completely to regulate the presence of individuals in specific spaces because access to some rooms necessitates passing through others. Homes with corridors, on the other hand, enable privacy, gender-based segregation of space, and control of servant/family interaction by managing access to spaces: doors along corridors may be closed, denying entrance, and the work of a household will remain unimpeded.

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In a similar way, early architectural treatises draw attention to issues like the home’s site, its health and sanitation, and its owner’s finances without addressing their practical implications, just as housekeeping guides are almost obsessively titled in terms of women’s duties and responsibilities but express those only in emotional terms within their pages. Early architectural treatises tend to focus on the views out the widows of a house in a given situation, for example, rather than explaining in practical terms how one is supposed to site a house to achieve ‘the most judicious distribution and division of the apartments’ (Brown, Domestic Architecture 81). Much like the conduct books’ emphasis on the ‘really feeling heart’ to take care of all of a woman’s obligations within her home, these architectural books value proper character as the primary force shaping one’s understanding of any given home. Moreover, they imply a certainty that the physical bodies of home and occupants cannot help but reveal their internal characters, as though the body is the ‘natural’ external manifestation of pre-existing internal qualities. In both types of texts, then, the ideological principles informing home design are normalized without any analysis. For example, if one does not know, in reading these books, how the architecture of the home and the behaviour of its occupants will reaffirm the proper relationships between employers and servants (worse, still, if one is not sure what those relationships must properly entail in the minutest detail), these books will provide no information to answer the ‘what?’ ‘how?’ or ‘why?’ While these books provide a nagging reminder that one’s home will indeed reveal whether one is properly middle-class, the intangible concepts of character and taste on which this judgment relies remain undefined. This tendency to intellectualize and aestheticize architecture – at least in terms of its discussion in texts – has serious implications for how we understand male relationships to domesticity in particular. In an architectural context, the concept of character turns the ostensibly private space of home into a supremely public one with a responsibility for displaying middle-class identity. Providing men with standards not only for creating their own homes but also for judging those of others, architectural discussions of the middle-class home enable readers to represent and assess propriety through the physical structures of a house. One way to read these efforts is that in thereby grafting a ‘masculine’ public focus onto the domestic sphere, these books manage to address men on the topic of home without threatening the notion that masculinity depends upon a public identity: after all, their job is to at-

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tend to the public aspects of home life.19 On the other hand, such a move belies the ability to separate public and private at all, clarifying – at least to those with the benefit of being removed in time from this period – how very public a woman’s duties at home might be, how private a turn a man’s concerns could take, and how thoroughly a house was always simultaneously a public and a private place. Efforts to focus on masculine aspects of domestic creation highlight the distinction between buildings and architecture. Architecture, in Brown’s book for example, represents the ‘History’ and ‘Principles’ that create an enduring edifice. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, it was still common not to employ an architect on a housebuilding project at all, but for the builder and the homeowner to decide the requirements of the plan between themselves. However, as middleclass work became increasingly specialized, the distinction between building and architecture helped legitimate the authority of architecture as a profession by suggesting that producing a good home requires professional teaching. Participating in the larger movement to professionalize the middle classes, the Royal Institute of British Architects was formed in 1834, and early architectural treatises written by RIBA members limit the information they contain as if to suggest that an untrained man could not understand professional, scientific, architectural principles. Indeed, J.C. Loudon, in his Encyclopedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture (1838), was unique in lamenting that architecture has been so long regarded as a ‘mystery … the science and rules of which have been almost exclusively confined to Architects’ that ordinary people – to whom he credits all practical improvements in areas such as home heating – do not have sufficient sense of the principles of design to make any improvements in ‘taste’ in domestic architecture (v). He is ahead of his time by several decades in decrying the privileging of such information by professional architects and makes an early call for bringing lay people into the equation in order for the usefulness of domestic architectural design to progress for the general good.20 In addition to creating a distance between the profession of architecture and the homeowner, early architectural treatises also invoke the notion of taste to confirm the link between domesticity and class position and carefully delimit the role of men in creating a proper domestic space. Participating in the cultural concern over distinguishing the nouveau riche from the ‘truly’ middle class, architectural treatises rarely define the good taste that characterizes a proper middle-class home, on the assumption that if one has good taste, one needs no defi-

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nition, and if one does not have it, it cannot be taught. Disparaging the ‘egregious folly’ of ‘fashionable’ taste (‘How to…’ no. II, 353) and lamenting ‘the popular ignorance’ about architecture, which results in the public judging a building’s worth by how much it cost to build, authors merely nod in the direction of a definition by insisting that capitulating to the vagaries of fashion is not good taste, whereas achieving a level of ornament that is useful, that allows decoration with a complete absence of pretension, is the height of taste (‘Present State’ 344).21 The failure of newly wealthy members of even the uppermost middle classes to understand that taste is not synonymous with expense is perhaps most obviously pilloried in the Veneerings of Our Mutual Friend. Their over-ornamented dining table, covered with a caravan of gold camels, at once critiques ostentation and defends the apparent architectural oxymoron of useful ornamentation. In both the novel and the architectural treatise, the problem of ostentation speaks for itself as the authors work from the common assumption that middle-class readers know the degree of ornament useful for confirming class status and making guests feel comfortable. Such emphasis on the happy medium of useful ornamentation may indicate that architectural treatises respond more to questions of class position than to those of gender identity; however, the way these texts raise the issue of taste implies a gendered audience. While explaining that the truly middle-class will eschew over-ornament as vulgar, texts aimed at male readers focus on the style of the architecture itself and the taste of the home’s permanent features. Given that women were presumed primarily responsible for making household decorative choices, these texts’ simultaneous emphasis on the aesthetic qualities of houses and lack of attention to their decor confirms their assumption of a male audience. Insisting that ‘the architect should, when possible, accomplish by his design a large part of what at present is left to the upholsterer,’ texts written for men implicitly separate the ‘masculine’ concerns about home creation from the ‘feminine’ ones (‘How to…’ no. II, 354). For the ‘upholsterer’ did not simply re-cover furniture with new fabric; he served as a consultant on questions of fashion, and his shop provided fabrics for curtain and upholstery, wallpaper samples, and views of the latest furniture styles. Women and the upholsterers they regularly turned to for advice are clearly devalued in cautionary statements against the ‘absurdity first of allowing subsidiary parts to become principles, and then of making the ornaments more important than the spaces’ (‘How to…’ no. II, 350; emphasis added). In the warning

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that a good decorator cannot make up for a bad architect lives real anxiety about the balance of power within the home, implying that male architectural authority needs to assert itself lest feminine decoration become ‘more important’ than the primacy of male money, intellect, architectural taste, and decision making in building a good home. In aligning feminine ornamentation with ‘subsidiary parts’ and identifying male-built spaces as ‘principles,’ this text symbolically displaces women from the creation of home in a move parallel to conduct manuals’ focus on feminine character to suggest home is created by women alone. Claiming to design family spaces, architectural treatises in fact rely on rhetoric that prioritizes male needs and masculine spaces even within a culture that symbolically aligned domesticity with the feminine. Because they position themselves as telling the ‘history of the science,’ architectural books cannot account for the emotional and nurturing aspects of home that we have seen were considered the province of women to supply. Gillian Rose has observed that the history of geography studies is characterized by purportedly neutral generalizations about the construction of space that in fact reiterate masculinist conceptions of how places operate, an observation that accurately describes the stance of Victorian architects and their discussions of built environments. Displacing from their pages the women who were culturally central to the domestic sphere, early architectural treatises uphold a gender hierarchy through their presentation of architecture as an academic discipline based in historical precedents and aesthetic models that value male-identified knowledge. Interestingly, even books written for women support this conditional positioning of women within the domestic sphere by constructing women’s primary role as domestic supporter of men. Insisting that a husband is ‘entitled’ to be indulged at home (Ellis, Wives 76), they argue that ‘the consecration of one room to the especial use of the master of the house’ is of such importance that ‘few sacrifices are too great,’ if they will enable a woman to procure this (Home Truths 67). While men are thus explicitly assumed to require a study, library, or other room of retreat, women are expected to eschew the privilege of private spaces within the home, as the author of Home Truths suggests when she cautions women to be prepared for constant interruption and to consider ‘the dignity and privilege of being thus wanted and called upon continually’ (84; emphasis in original). These examples suggest an important modification of previous conceptions of Victorian domesticity

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is in order. Victorianists have long insisted that the ideology of separate spheres was a practical impossibility due to the inherently overlapping nature of ‘public’ and ‘private’ life. However, such claims have largely been predicated on the notion that home was essentially a feminized sphere; in fact, many Victorian articulations of that domestic space at once emphasize women’s moral responsibility for creating a refuge while also indicating that the space itself ought primarily to privilege the masculine. As the rest of this study demonstrates, there are significant tensions inherent in configuring an ostensibly feminine realm so that it will quietly privilege men. The spatial dynamics of these power relations are perhaps most succinctly captured in Ellis’s justification of deference to men in Wives of England: ‘After all, it is influence rather than authority, which governs a household’ (217). Given that the word ‘influence’ was typically prefaced by ‘moral’ or ‘spiritual’ to indicate a woman’s sphere, Ellis here both invokes and qualifies women’s cultural power. While Victorian men derived authority from their power to transact business, own property, and pursue professions, women were often described as having influence rather than authority. Much like Ruskin’s later bid to crown women ‘Queens’ as a means of sugarcoating the fact that he was consigning them to a domestic realm characterized by ‘influence’ rather than action, conduct manuals offer women the realm of moral and spiritual influence as a palliative in the service of retaining ‘authority’ for the husband.22 The implicit distinction between influence and authority is that authority gives one the power to compel something to be done, while influence merely enables one to suggest that something ought to be done and then to rely on others to see the wisdom of the suggestion.23 Thus to argue that ‘influence rather than authority … governs a household’ is to imply that it is a woman’s province to govern the domestic sphere, but that her governing ‘influence’ ultimately relies on the sanction of others for its success, just as her physical location within the household is contingent on first securing sufficient space for her husband.24 Within this context, it becomes clearer why the practical concerns of running a household were downplayed in conduct manuals of the 1840s and 1850s, in favour of a focus on the character of the woman who is at the centre of the home, for a woman’s success as a homemaker depended upon others’ assessment that her influence was valuable. As the author of The English Maiden explains: ‘In conclusion, we would remark that the foundation and the crown of every virtue and

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grace is consistency … Be amiable, virtuous, orderly, and attentive to your domestic, social and religious duties by fits and starts, and you will soon find that you have lost one half of your influence’ (204). The sense that a consistently ‘virtuous’ and dutiful character is paramount to a woman’s retaining her ‘influence’ indicates the culturally tenuous nature of female power even within the domestic sphere. The concept of ‘influence’ at once relies upon supposedly natural feminine characteristics to ensure the emotional and moral functioning of the home and yet ultimately asserts that the boundaries of her ‘natural’ place are limited by the authority and needs of a husband. Just as the legal designation of femme covert rendered the Victorian wife a legal non-entity and displaced her from the public realm, so did the rhetoric of domestic obligation spatially create a gender hierarchy. Taken together, then, early architectural treatises and conduct manuals draw boundaries that apparently confirm the opposition of domestic space against the masculine public while simultaneously relying on both cultural constructions of character as ‘natural’ and of domesticity as a woman’s realm to privilege male authority within that private space. Interestingly, as later texts by and for women began to insist on greater authority within the home, they also tried to ensure that her authority would remain there by strengthening the domestic boundaries of a woman’s place. As we shall see, however, this gendered binary between those who act and those who influence was complicated by the ways in which men and women interacted within domestic spaces to maintain their homes. Shifting Boundaries and Managing Domestic Authority With the high growth rate of the middle classes throughout the nineteenth century, it is not surprising that texts on domesticity began to change their focus to accommodate the needs of a first generation of middle-class homeowners who needed more explicit directions for creating a proper middle-class home.25 Although Sarah Ellis had explicitly addressed herself to the various wives and women of England on a moral level, writers such as Isabella Beeton explicitly noted in the 1860s that ‘there is no more fruitful source of family discontent than a housewife’s badly-cooked dinners and untidy ways … a mistress must be thoroughly acquainted with the theory and practice of cookery, as well as be perfectly conversant with all the other arts of making and keeping a comfortable home’ (Preface). Thereby declaiming an urgent need for practical information, Beeton’s Preface encapsulates the move

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of texts for both women and men away from a primary focus on character and its expression through middle-class morality or taste. Writing to a burgeoning middle-class audience, a series of domestic experts shifted cultural priorities from discussing the ‘natural’ basis of the ideal home to mapping practical directions onto that base. Thus architectural treatises began to transition from their detailed discussion of classical architectural precedents to include careful sets of plans and building suggestions so that men could have the proper information to play a significant role in designing their own homes. Likewise, women’s conduct manuals gave way to housekeeping guides, which explicitly addressed the female homemaker with the assumption that she had the taste and character to create a moral and feminine place but that she might need guidance regarding the work of managing a household.26 In both cases, the primary occupants of the middle-class home are described as constructing their homes through a skilful marriage of their natural character and taste with their mastery of the sciences of domestic economy and architecture. Mitigating the notion that creating a home is a natural thing, such texts tacitly admit that the newly middle-class will not inherently know how to maintain standards of proper housekeeping. At the same time, recourse to concepts of ‘natural’ feminine character and masculine taste enables later texts to uphold the ideal of class boundaries even while offering explicit directions to new housekeepers about how to achieve middle-class domesticity. The housekeeping guides that began to emerge in the 1850s and continued to gain popularity borrow the rhetoric of conduct manuals that stresses a woman’s moral and spiritual duty to be a good wife and mother; however, these books focus almost exclusively on the ‘external circumstances’ that books like The English Maiden had dismissed as insignificant in creating a good home. Isabella Beeton’s Book of Household Management (serialized 1859–60, first published in book form in 1861) sold an astonishing 125,000 copies within eight years of its initial publication and is still one of the most widely cited sources on Victorian domesticity.27 Like other housekeeping guides, such as the Manual of Domestic Economy (1856) by James Walsh, F.R.C.S., or Cassell’s Household Guide: Being a Complete Encyclopaedia of Domestic and Social Economy, and forming a Guide to Every Department of Practical Life (1869–71), Beeton’s book acknowledges the multiple demands placed on women in the language of moral obligation, character, and propriety.28 Yet such books use the concept of ‘character’ in a way importantly modified from the early conduct manuals. Beeton explains in her opening paragraph: ‘Of

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all those acquirements, which more particularly belong to the feminine character, there are none which take a higher rank, in our estimation, than such as enter into a knowledge of household duties’ (1). Assuming that one might judge a woman’s character not solely by moral standards but by her ability to know all the ‘duties’ of everyone who makes up the household, Beeton immediately signals how housekeeping guides rewrite the priorities of conduct manuals. Largely replacing the conduct manual language of ‘duty’ – defined as a combination of moral obligation and middle-class sensibility – Beeton’s reference to ‘duties’ is predicated on mastering the encyclopedic, scientific quantities of information required to run a household. That notion of mastering the duties of housewifery was articulated in terms that strikingly professionalize domesticity. As Kristen Guest has shown, Beeton describes a leadership style based on creating a ‘professional’ model of womanhood that emphasizes how qualifications and knowledge create a good household mistress. With the advent of books that address The Practical Housewife (1855), the concepts of ‘household management … domestic economy … and the comfort of home’ were linked, ‘comfort’ in fact being predicated on practical skills rather than on ‘feminine’ sympathy and morality (‘Dedication’). As the emphasis on guidance in the titles of these later books suggests, such eminently practical tomes provided information ranging from medicine recipes to tips on hiring servants.29 The Household Encyclopaedia; or Family Dictionary of Everything Connected with Housekeeping and Domestic Medicine (1858–60), for example, offers alphabetized entries giving directions on topics from making cucumber cream to setting a dislocated thigh. For her part, Beeton opens by asserting her intention to ‘point out the plan which may be the most profitably pursued for the daily regulation of affairs’ (2). Her efforts to provide women a ‘plan’ that will enable them to regulate their days and make the household run smoothly are far from the confident assertion of The English Maiden that ‘a really feeling heart’ is all that is required to produce a good home (190). Yet more striking even than this shift from ‘feeling’ to ‘plan’ as an operative principle for regulating the home space is the degree to which these books demonstrate that such plans can be learned. Against the commonplace Victorian assumption of natural gender qualifications, housekeeping guides found it useful to focus on readers as housewives-in-training. As Margaret Beetham succinctly puts it, Beeton’s book ‘simultaneously addressed and sought to bring into being the middle-class domestic woman’ (20).30 Eschewing the senti-

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ment stereotypically associated with femininity in the period, Beeton and her peers knew that the truly successful homemaker would benefit from rational and detailed attention to the nuances of her job description. In many advice books, women are explicitly addressed as employers who must be fully cognizant of the appropriate boundaries for interactions between mistresses and servants; common processes for hiring, firing, and recommending them; the regular duties of every conceivable house servant; and even tables of reasonable yearly wages for dozens of servant positions. Beeton’s wage table (figure 1) is one of many similar examples provided in other guides, such as Thomas Webster’s 1844 An Encyclopedia of Domestic Economy.31 While Beeton’s 1861 book indicates a slightly higher upper bound for servant wages in nearly all positions (at a rate perhaps reflective of inflation), Webster dictates wage minimums that are substantially higher across the board than the wages Beeton recommends – a fact that becomes significant if one considers carefully the 1871 Census General Report. According to census population and employment data, between 1851 and 1871, the number of servants in England and Wales increased by nearly 52 per cent, while the general population expanded by roughly 27 per cent.32 While one might be tempted to conclude that starting servant wages went down over time simply because of a burgeoning supply of servant labour, W.T. Layton points out, in a Royal Statistical Society paper on servant wages for the Victorian period, that far greater numbers of families were employing servants by 1871, and were doing so on smaller incomes. Read together, data from these sources imply that starting servant wages declined for the simple reason that families with very modest incomes, who were increasingly striving to employ at least one servant full time and thereby to claim middle-class status, were unable to afford the handsomer salaries paid in earlier decades of the century by wealthier families. Indeed, consideration of Beeton’s wage table against Webster’s implicitly confirms this extension of servant employment into more modest homes. Both tables give wages adjusted for the provision of livery for men and of several vital (and expensive) food items, such as tea, sugar, and beer for women; however, Beeton also indicates at what levels of family income one might expect to employ different types of servants. Webster apparently deems this information unnecessary, and he identifies as a ‘small’ household one with a cook who ‘presides at table’ in the absence of a steward, housekeeper, or butler (352). Given that Beeton identifies a cook as the third servant a middle-class household

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Figure 1: Table of servants’ employment and wages in relation to family income, from Isabella Beeton, Book of Household Management, p. 8.

would hire, once it had a minimum annual income of £500, it seems clear that in these mid-century decades, the notion of being middleclass was extending substantially downwards into the ranks of the upand-coming. The practical focus of advice books, characteristic of the later period, thus indicates that they were implicitly geared towards creating the middle classes and not merely defining them. J.H. Walsh’s Manual of Domestic Economy, for example, aids newly married couples in living within their financial means by providing a meticulous list of household furnishing and supplies that would be wanted on each

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of four budgets ranging from £100 to £1000 per year.33 Cassell’s Household Guide and The Household Encyclopaedia define ‘domestic economy’ as maintaining the maximum of comfort within one’s means, and both provide sample monthly and annual budgets for household supplies. Such tables evoke the kind of advice implied by Lady Cumnor’s wedding present to Cynthia Kirkpatrick in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters. Hoping to ensure that Cynthia is able to maintain the household of her middle-class husband appropriately, Lady Cumnor gives her ‘a collection of household account-books, at the beginning of which Lady Cumnor wrote down with her own hand the proper weekly allowance of bread, butter, eggs, meat, and groceries per head, with the London prices of the articles, so that the most inexperienced housekeeper might ascertain if her expenditure exceeded her means’ (640–1). While the present is certainly dull and perhaps condescending, it represents precisely the sort of acknowledgment that housekeeping guides offer: an ‘inexperienced housekeeper’ may need assistance in learning how to live a middle-class lifestyle without either being too frugal or living beyond her means – an important corrective to the assumption that middle-class femininity is an innately occurring state. In addition to offering women advice on expenditures, housekeeping guides assume she will need to be intimately familiar with all the workings of the kitchen offices, both in terms of ordering the food and planning the meals. They thus modify Ellis’s earlier stance on middleclass women in relation to their kitchens. ‘It can never be said,’ Ellis admonished, ‘that the atmosphere of the kitchen is an element in which a refined and intellectual woman ought to live; though the department itself is one which no sensible woman would think it a degradation to over[see]’ (Wives 193). In contrast to Ellis’s implication that a ‘refined’ woman ought not spend time in her kitchen beyond the necessary oversight of servants, Beeton recognizes that the quantity of work necessary to maintain a middle-class home requires even women whose husbands have very high incomes to manage their households actively. (That Lady Cumnor herself knows ‘the London prices of the articles’ she lists in Cynthia’s account books suggests that even aristocratic women had to ensure that their household budgets were rigorously managed.) Far from disdaining this focus on the kitchen, Beeton’s book offers not only sample menus for large parties and special occasions, but also sample weekly menus for each month using foods that are in season. Beeton’s monthly dinner-party menus are graphically presented as a dining-table layout (see figure 2), so that there will be no mistake about

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Figure 2: October ‘Dinner for 18 Persons’ and October ‘Plain Family Dinners,’ Isabella Beeton, Book of Household Management, pp. 943 and 945.

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how to display the food appropriately. Each lavish dinner-party menu is followed immediately by specific menus for dinners for twelve, eight, or six people, with two options offered for the last. Then come equally seasonally appropriate directions for ‘Plain Family Dinners.’ Although only one week of October’s ‘Plain Family Dinners’ is reproduced in figure 2, in fact Beeton offers two weeks’ worth of these plain menus. Each month of the year is similarly treated, so that even the most inexperienced homemaker will have no trouble planning menus and purchasing foods based on what is in season. With a full year of sample menus for different sizes of households, in addition to recipes for cooking hundreds of these dishes, Beeton’s focus on domestic economy and household management extends even to careful provisions for using leftovers from one meal to form the basis of the next. In figure 2, for example, the main course is constructed from the ‘remains’ of the previous day’s dinner on three separate days. In short, Beeton seems less concerned with ensuring that women never work in their own kitchens than with explaining to women the principles of what ought to be going on there, regardless of who does it. Ultimately, and with Beeton’s help, women are rendered authorities within the domestic domain through their mastery of the requisite knowledge to manage the space and its occupants.34 Ceding greater authority to women was part of a larger cultural move to distinguish the ‘real’ professional from the domestic professional. For women, the significant difference lay in the fact that despite the increasing professionalization of domesticity and the rhetorical parallels between wives and professional men, housewives had neither the pay nor the external structures of professional organizations, formal courses of training, or a hierarchy of ranks that demarcated white-collar professionals. As the professional status accorded ordinary women was carefully contained within the domestic sphere, anxieties over laymen potentially undermining architects’ professional authority simultaneously abated. In texts from mid-century onwards, the earlier concern that homeowners (or decorators, or builders, or wives) might usurp architects’ roles gives way to advocacy for ‘a common-sense development of structural necessity, with ordinary materials honestly employed’ (Wheeler 180). The invocation of ‘common-sense’ at once suggests that a well-educated layman can reasonably understand the basic principles of architecture and will be a better homeowner for attempting to do so, while also distinguishing the homeowner’s knowledge from the highly specialized field of professional architects. On the

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grounds that ‘the owner of the house is himself a practical authority on the subject of his requirements’ in a home (Kerr vi), it became convenient for authors writing after the 1850s to assume that the science of architecture was not beyond the comprehension of the layman insofar as the practicalities of domestic economy required personalization for an individual family’s needs in conjunction with the science of building. Although the general intent remained to explain architectural principles to the male house owner in a way that privileged his intellectual involvement in the science of architecture, emphasis in these later books shifts from aesthetic considerations to practical concerns such as building site, drainage, and the distribution of windows, doors, and fireplaces to minimize drafts while maximizing light, air, heat, and the view. The very titles of these later books make clear that architectural texts for men were shifting along a practical handbook model that paralleled the pervasive housekeeping texts for women. A representative sampling of some of the most influential architectural titles includes: William Bardwell’s Healthy Homes and How to Make Them (1854), Thomas Morris’s A House for the Suburbs, Socially and Architecturally Sketched (1860), Robert Kerr’s The Gentleman’s House; Or, How to Plan English Residences from the Parsonage to the Palace (1864), C.J. Richardson’s Picturesque Designs for Mansions, Villas, and Lodges (1870), Gervase Wheeler’s The Choice of a Dwelling: A Practical Handbook of Useful Information on All Points Connected with Hiring, Buying, or Building a House (1871), and J.J. Stevenson’s House Architecture (1880).35 The prominent architects here writing for the lay homeowner deploy the concept of ‘practical authority’ articulated by Kerr in large part through attention to technical language and the need for personal decision making rather than professional design. Whether focusing on design, building, or furnishing, these books (like their parallel housekeeping guides) focus squarely on the useful and quotidian details: note the emphasis on practicality and planning in their titles by comparison with the earlier books, which focused on providing a compendium of styles of ornament. They highlight the internal, invisible parts of the house that enable a home to work properly, such as the structural principles of good plumbing. Some go so far as to provide highly detailed, technical language to describe the obligations of each of the workmen who might be employed in building a house, explaining their responsibilities and giving estimated fees for each portion of the work. While a layperson would not understand what it means to ‘turn and parget all chimney flues, and finish the shafts with salient courses six inches in height’ or to ‘prepare two pair of trussed

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principals with queen-posts, and fix the same,’ Walsh’s 1857 Manual of Domestic Economy provides useful contract language to ensure that the job is done correctly (96–7). (This unique cross-over text has a substantial chapter on architecture aimed at male readers, tucked among chapters on housekeeping aimed at women.) Furthermore, in informing readers, for example, that it is the responsibility of the bricklayer to ‘provide good and sufficient scaffolding … which are to remain until the whole is covered in, and the plyving work finished, without extra charge for the use of them by the various tradesmen,’ Walsh helps guarantee that first-time home builders will not be cheated by extra costs if they serve as their own general contractors (96). Investing the male homeowner with access to architectural practices previously deemed inappropriate for the layman, such texts bear consideration in terms of the hierarchy of power within a household. For, in addition to increased architectural knowledge, as John Tosh has pointed out in A Man’s Place, by mid-century being a family man was a requirement for complete middle-class respectability. Yet there was no simple increase in male authority within the home. The counterpoint to increasing masculine domestic prerogatives was that men’s professional labour was largely taking place outside the home at the same time that women’s labour was being professionalized within the home. The home itself was consequently more forcefully characterized as a feminine, private space. Hence there had to be definitions of a man’s role in the home that did not rely on qualities previously determined to be feminine – and as the upcoming chapter on masculinity and the Victorian dining room shows, this was a particularly difficult balance to negotiate. Architectural books attempted to provide a masculine realm of homemaking by focusing on ways in which the man of the house should become knowledgeable about how to inspect a home to discern it healthfulness, its structural integrity, and its suitability for his family. The formulation from earlier in the century, in which men were presumed responsible for the physical house, while women were responsible for the emotional home, was no longer compelling as women’s work within the home was so focused on physical tasks. As Beeton lauded the daily labour of middle-class women, the role of men within the home had at least tacitly to acknowledge that women increasingly had not just influence but authority within their own homes. In an effort to balance the hierarchy of authority within the domestic space, both architectural treatises and housekeeping guides took recourse in

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compartmentalization as a means of simultaneously establishing power and eliding the question of power relations. Thus, even as class boundaries predominated in the formulation of the home, gender boundaries were also constructed into the distribution of spaces and bodies within that home. Physical home design carefully demarcated the identities of household occupants (men, women, children, servants) by assigning gender- and class-based characteristics to individual locations within the home and regulating access to those places by distributing individuals in space according to a plan. In this way, the spatial boundaries within the home became an effective means of reiterating people’s proper ideological places and confirming their authority without doing so in explicitly relative terms.36 A representative sample of plans for the main floors of a moderate middle-class house (see figure 3) illustrates the labour necessary in even a relatively compact home. Built up rather than sprawling across expensive real estate, its rooms would occupy a minimum of three storeys in addition to the basement kitchens, rendering it absolutely necessary to plan well in order to avoid endless trips up and down stairs.37 (It is worth noting that only floors above the ground floor are numbered on British plans. Hence, what North Americans would call the ‘second floor’ is identified as the ‘first floor’ on British plans. Because I am quoting from British novels and plans, I have used British designations throughout this book.) As Walsh’s plan (figure 3) indicates, a large proportion of space in a townhouse would be devoted to staircases, in order to ensure a separation of servants from family. On the ground floor, marked A, the front door opens into a passageway that feeds into the spacious entry hall containing the home’s main staircase; this same passageway terminates at the top of the narrow stair that leads down to the basement kitchen regions. On the three upper floors (B, C, and D), a second, tighter staircase opens onto the common landing with the main stairs but provides a means of segregating employers from employees. Its central location facilitates the distribution of heavy coals or water from basement to bedrooms, yet the sheer number of storeys certainly makes clear that this was no minimal labour. Even something as apparently simple as a bath would have necessitated tremendous effort in this house: there is no bathroom marked on the plans, hence likely no running water, which suggests that baths would involve hip tubs filled by maidservants carrying numerous buckets of water from the basement kitchen to the appropriate bedroom, and then emptying the used water in the same manner. With such practical considerations

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Figure 3: ‘Plans of Different Floors of Town House,’ J.H Walsh, A Manual of Domestic Economy, figure 47, facing p. 96.

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in mind, there is little wonder that a second staircase was considered indispensible. In addition to masking the more unpleasant aspects of housekeeping through the use of back stairs, the seemingly obsessive details of household segmentation in architectural treatises also stem in part from practical concerns for streamlining the labour of housekeeping. Architectural books from the 1850s onwards identify every room in the house with its primary occupants. Labels such as ‘gentleman’s room’ and ‘boudoir’ designate the places in which specific members of the household conduct the business of their days, and floor plans of the period often go so far as to identify specific places for members of the household staff (as, for example, in figure 4, the ‘Basement Plan’). Rooms catalogued according to the identities and jobs of a household’s occupants distinctly mark where everyone does and does not belong. Such a rigid structure breaks the household down into manageable parts, facilitating its finer workings. With such divisions, if something seems amiss, it becomes easier to pinpoint the source of the problem and thus to repair it. Hence, such compartmentalization had the practical consequence of enabling easier management of domestic establishments. A consideration of the kitchen area of the household provides a clear example of this necessity. By contrast with figure 4, which is a plan for an elaborate and large kitchen region for a grand house, figure 5 offers a much more modest plan for a town house kitchen floor. As figure 5 suggests, even in a fairly modest house, the kitchen floor had to be divided into distinct spaces: pantry for dry goods, larder for keeping foods cool, coal and wood fuel rooms, a scullery for cleaning foods and dishes, and some kind of space for the use of servants (in this case, a ‘Servants Hall’ which would serve as both dining room and sitting room for the household staff as well as any servants of overnight visitors). Larger houses might have, in addition to the rooms labelled on figure 5, some or all of those indicated on figure 4, including: wine cellars, a still-room for brewing beer, butler’s and housekeeper’s rooms (private sitting rooms and spaces for doing paperwork), and locations for storage of valuables kept under the especial care of these two head servants – such as plate (i.e., expensive metal ware of silver or gold), linen, and china – depending on the size of the household. These last might be identified as plate or china closets or might, as in figure 4, be labelled merely as ‘strongclosets’ (i.e., safes or locked areas) and identified with the servant who was responsible for the items contained therein. That there were separate rooms for the storage of different food items was largely a function

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Figure 4: ‘Basement Plan’ from C.J. Richardson, Picturesque Designs, p. 392. Richardson explains the plan as follows: a is the kitchen, b the scullery, and c the larder. The kitchen is provided with a lift f, and a small service window; d is the pastry room, and e the still-room with the lift. g is the dairy, h the washhouse, i the laundry, j the butler’s pantry, k the steward’s room with its strong-closet; l is the house-keeper’s, with the cook’s room between it and the still-room; m is the servants’ hall, n the men’s sleeping room; o o are wine-cellars, p the butler’s wine-cellar, q the footman’s stairs under the principal staircase, r the warm water furnace by the steward’s room, placed at the back of his strong closet; s is the stable, containing eight stalls, one loose box, and a harness room; t t t are cart sheds, u is the cowhouse, v the dung-pit, w the coach-house, xx two of the three coal cellars, y the dust-pit, and z z z are the closets. The carriage-road to the side entrance is formed over the cart sheds and coal cellars.

The Character of Middle-Class Architecture 59

Figure 5: ‘Plan of Basement Floor,’ Gervase Wheeler, The Choice of a Dwelling, p. 163.

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of health concerns. Lacking a system of refrigeration, a house would naturally need separate cool rooms for foods that would spoil rapidly if stored in a kitchen that was heated by both fireplace and range. In addition, the division of spaces within the kitchen regions helped ensure careful monitoring of servant tasks and maximum efficiency. The practical imperatives, however, merge with the ideological in many of these distinctions. Corridors assigned to particular members of the household, for example, help avoid accidental, unsavoury meetings even on the way to and from the highly segregated places within the home. If one considers that before indoor plumbing became common in rooms other than the kitchen or scullery (i.e., before the 1890s), bathing water, cleaning supplies, and the contents of chamber pots would have to be carried in buckets to or from every room, it is hardly surprising that families would not want to encounter their servants on the stairs in the course of the day. This is not predominantly a question of facilitating labour (the bucket must be carried up and down some stairs) but of segmentation on the principle of propriety. Although Robert Kerr notes that ‘the House of an English gentleman is divisible into two departments; namely that of the family and that of the servants,’ in fact these ‘two departments’ were more compartmentalized than even he suggests (64). Delicacy required not only shielding the family from the servants, but also the ladies of the house from men with dirty boots, and guests from noisy children. Only family and distinguished guests used the main, visible staircase, for example, while servants and children, whose presence it was preferable to mask, used the private back stairs. In addition to enhancing efficiency, then, the domestic structure maintained household hierarchical relationships among the inhabitants and enforced power differentials. For this reason, whether a household was vast or modest, it operated on the same principle of careful segregation. As the following chapters explore, it is interesting to see how this principle plays out in a range of middle-class homes where there is not necessarily the luxury of endless space in which to maintain such easy segregation. One particularly useful consequence of reading housekeeping guides against architectural texts is to complicate the presumption that the Victorian middle classes unambiguously celebrated women’s authority within the domestic realm. On one hand, women were the managers of household funds, of domestic servants, and of the moral and spiritual character of the household occupants; housekeeping guides make obvious that a middle-class woman’s duties were complex and

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her schedule demanding, even at the upper end of the middle-class spectrum where servants did much of the physical housework. On the other hand, women’s position as inspectors of a domestic system of classification that created a proper place for everyone and everything in the household was somewhat qualified. Feminine identity was ideally bounded by the home as well as compartmentalized within the home, and – as other studies have shown – women’s domestic power was circumscribed by notions of femininity limited to a sphere of private influence rather than public, cultural authority.38 Housekeeping guides took the discrete roles conduct manuals identify – wife, mother, hostess, manager of servants – and connected them to specific places within the home. Describing a woman’s duties and behaviour, Beeton, for example, locates women in a series of roles in different rooms of the house, such as the kitchen, dining room, and nursery. Kristen Guest has commented on the ‘divided role of the mistress within the domestic world Beeton maps,’ noting that ‘the ideological difficulties encountered by middle-class women caught between competing, essentialized roles within the home surface in the discontinuous textual voice evident throughout Household Management’ (15–17). Guest highlights how fracturing of women into a series of tasks may undermine a sense of coherent individual identity.39 However, it is also important to recognize that artificially compartmentalizing women’s behaviour through an association with places may also have made it easier for women themselves to catalogue (and therefore follow) the norms of middle-class domesticity – particularly if they were new to a middle-class lifestyle.40 Victorian architectural design provided a useful system of surveillance by segregating household occupants and controlling their interactions, and women contributed to that surveillance in their roles as managers whose duty it was to know everything that was going on in their homes at all times. However, with cultural questions of a woman’s proper place circulating, architectural treatises offered a means of delineating the parameters of female authority by presenting the male homeowner with practical means of asserting some control over the construction of home. Thus, while domesticity continued to be understood as feminine, the role of men in creating this space helped preserve cultural hierarchies of power while simultaneously complicating the easy gendering of domestic obligations.

2 Redesigning Femininity: Expanding the Limits of the Drawing Room

‘As for furniture and things, they matter a great deal, I assure you, to people’s happiness.’ Margaret Oliphant, Miss Marjoribanks

The Victorian drawing room was the quintessential feminized space within the home. It was, quite simply, the place in which women spent most of their days, whether engaged in letter writing, plain or decorative sewing, reading, visiting, conversation, going over household accounts, interviewing servants, or undertaking the many other tasks that might occupy their time. Bedrooms were for sleeping and dressing, dining rooms were for eating, kitchens were for labour ideally left to servants. Children remained largely in nurseries and school rooms. At prescribed times of day, women of the ‘comfortable’ middle classes would occupy bedrooms or dining rooms, would enter kitchens to supervise or – if ambitious – to concoct a little pastry, or would visit children for a romp or for lessons in the spaces that were theirs. But the majority of women’s time at home would be spent in the drawing room. It is perhaps not surprising, then, to find that descriptions of these spaces tend to represent drawing rooms as women’s privileged places and to characterize drawing rooms and womanhood in reciprocal terms. This reciprocity may be most readily understood through the concept of the Angel in the House, the Victorian moniker that makes the ideal of femininity inseparable from domesticity. Without the physical house, the Angel is not only locationally adrift; she is purposeless. For without the house, she has no incentive for action and – significantly

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– no place in which to demonstrate her competence to hold this title. The house grounds the otherwise heavenly creature in a physical and temporal realm, and the drawing room is central to this definition of respectable femininity not only because middle-class women would have spent so much of their time there but also because the drawing room was the space in which their accomplishments were expected to be on display. The drawing room was not only a private space; it was also one that brought to the foreground women’s actions in order to confirm the respectability and the status of the family. By contrast, the kitchen regions, for example, were made visible only in the negative. That is, neither family nor visitors would see or think about a woman’s actions in this region of the house unless the dinner arrived burned, the portions were scanty, the servants’ tempers carried from the kitchen into other portions of the house, or other visible evidence of ill-management drew attention to a woman’s lack of competence. In short, much of the work of a successful household manager was expected to be behind the scenes. The drawing room, on the other hand, was understood as a successful space when the woman of the house was an active presence within it, and the heights of her feminine perfection were defined both through those actions and through the space itself. The ideal drawing room, much like the ideal middle-class woman, was delicate, tasteful, orderly – a location bespeaking quiet, feminine authority.1 Given the tremendous cultural power of the drawing room as a space, its unquestioned associations with Victorian femininity, and the degree to which the respectability and worth of a woman were considered ascertainable through observing her drawing-room abilities, the question of precisely what kinds of authority were granted to a woman through her location within this carefully defined space is worth exploring in some detail.2 Susan K. Harris has explored how the hostess – the most public function a woman would undertake in her drawing room – occupied a position of tremendous influence. She focuses on the lives of two real women, Annie Adams Fields and Mary Gladstone, conceptualizing the role of the hostess as a function of literacy (cultural literacy as well as being thoroughly well read in literature and history). Harris argues that the late-Victorian hostess ‘influenced by creating the material – the spatial – possibility for influence’ (6). However, in demonstrating how Fields and Gladstone created themselves on paper (in letters and diaries) and subsequently shaped influential discussions on literature, politics, and social reform, Harris offers no sustained discussion of the ‘spatial’ element of their influence. Furthermore, the

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influence she describes seems strikingly similar to John Ruskin’s formulation of the distinction between men’s and women’s capabilities: ‘Now their separate characters are briefly these. The man’s power is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for speculation and invention … But the woman’s power is for rule, not for battle, – and her intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement and decision’ (59). This distinction between men as ‘doers’ and women as managers, between ‘invention’ and ‘arrangement’ articulates a clear sense that men’s work creates change while women’s work maintains the status quo. While Harris claims that the ‘influence’ of well-known hostesses is a sign of their cultural authority, she does not push on the significant fact that in Victorian terms influence was often opposed to power. ‘Power’ was what men had – the ability to take action, shape laws, make change; ‘influence’ was what women had – the ability to persuade and shape opinions but not to take any legal action on behalf of those opinions. In unwitting accordance with Ruskin’s assessment of gendered boundaries, the influence Harris so adeptly describes is in fact authorized by the margins of the home space, and of the drawing room in particular, in which women could enter public discourses while remaining respectably ensconced within their private domains. What Harris misses in thinking of the drawing room as a simple location for women’s social gatherings, what Ruskin elides in his subsequent call for women to extend their good influence even beyond their own gardens, what even Isabella Beeton sidesteps in ascribing authority to women through their ‘professional’ domestic labours, is that cultural power for women in this period was by necessity defined through the physical and ideological parameters of the middle-class drawing room. For the drawing room operated as a microcosm of a woman’s ‘public’ face, a space in which female domestic authority was quietly confirmed through the adept performance of leisure. At its most successful, a drawing room revealed a women’s capacity as household manager by positioning her as a non-labouring hostess. As the narrator of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1853) explains: The Cranfordians had that kindly esprit de corps which made them overlook all deficiencies in success when some among them tried to conceal their poverty. When Mrs Forrester, for instance, gave a party in her babyhouse of a dwelling, and the little maiden disturbed the ladies on the sofa by a request that she might get the tea-tray out from underneath, everyone

Expanding the Limits of the Drawing Room 65 took this novel proceeding as the most natural thing in the world, and talked on about household forms and ceremonies as if we all believed that our hostess had a regular servants’ hall, second table, with housekeeper and steward, instead of the one little charity-school maiden, whose short ruddy arms could never have been strong enough to carry the tray upstairs, if she had not been assisted in private by her mistress, who now sat in state, pretending not to know what cakes were sent up, though she knew, and we knew, and she knew that we knew, and we knew that she knew that we knew, she had been busy all the morning making tea-bread and sponge cakes. (3)

As this quotation implies, Beeton’s opening assertion to her Book of Household Management (1861), which identifies a woman as the ‘Alpha and Omega’ of her household, depends not only on a woman understanding herself to be in a position of authority over her servants; it depends equally on her neighbours authorizing her power as well (1). This peer-based sense of authority requires both a common definition of her class status and a public adjudication of a hostess’s fitness in regards to the finer points of maintaining her position. Thus, it is not enough that a middle-class woman have an appropriate sense of the division of labour between herself and her servant(s). She must also have neighbours who tacitly agree on the boundaries of gentility (Cranford is about nothing if not the delineation of the genteel from the non-genteel) and who quietly fabricate their own narratives about class position, despite (or indeed because of) the fact that ‘she knew, and we knew, and she knew that we knew, and we knew that she knew that we knew’ that they were building a mutual, if powerful, fiction. In some sense, then, this passage encapsulates the ur-function of the Victorian drawing room: to create a material space for the perpetuation of the powerful cultural illusion that a woman need be nothing other than an Angel in her own home. While her position of domestic authority could be confirmed within her drawing room during her daily interactions with guests as well as members of her household, a woman’s ability to exercise authority beyond that space was implicitly denied precisely because of the disjunction between the activities that produced her authority and those that confirmed it. That is, because the public function of the drawing room space highlighted a woman’s position as hostess, its success was predicated on muting the minutiae of domestic labour that produced that image of leisure (i.e., her management of servants and ability to un-

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dertake certain portions of housekeeping work). If she could not carry beyond her home the domestic tasks that granted her authority within it, and if her public authority in her drawing room constructed her as an entertainer, then one might reasonably ask: to what degree did cultural assumptions about the drawing room affect the power available to women, and – as a corollary – were women able to modify the boundaries of their proper places in ways that provided them avenues to cultural power beyond the position of hostess? The cultural narrative of proper middle-class femininity as a path towards marriage and homemaking had a compelling authority (as do all such normative stories) that is evident throughout a tremendous variety of textual discussions of domesticity. Domestic architecture, and the texts that articulated its principles and ideals, created the drawing room as a space of privilege as well as of enclosure. Considering the physical and rhetorical boundaries of the drawing room, then, may be usefully juxtaposed with examples of women’s usage of these spaces. Margaret Oliphant’s Miss Marjoribanks (1866) is particularly valuable for consideration in this regard, as it is set almost entirely in the title character’s drawing room and provides a dynamic vision of the active role a woman might take in remodelling the boundaries of her drawing room. Though ‘only’ a fictional character, Lucilla Marjoribanks has both successes and frustrations that are explicitly engendered through the drawing-room space she occupies. Oliphant thereby showcases the opportunities that cultural conventions of the drawing room might afford an enterprising woman, while also highlighting the limits placed on feminine power through those very conventions. Defining the Respectable Drawing Room as ‘the Lady’s Apartment essentially’ The Victorian drawing room was physically constructed and managed, not only to contain and privilege the feminine, but also to enhance the public positions and respectability of the entire family and establishment.3 Encoding femininity within the drawing room’s walls, domestic architecture invited remodelling in both a literal and figurative sense if a woman wanted to turn her drawing-room influence into more concrete forms of power. A range of Victorian texts explain the considerations that ought to go into producing a proper drawing room, although cultural differences of taste make it difficult to ascertain exactly what ‘look’ writers of homemaking advice are suggesting, given their fre-

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quent use of relative terms like ‘ostentation’ or ‘harmony.’ While many authors devote only a paragraph or a few pages to the drawing room as part of an overview of the whole house, a general picture of the Victorian middle-class drawing room can be compiled by assembling the details offered in a number of texts. Just as the drawing room created a space of feminine prerogative, it also provided a spatial means of preserving feminine delicacy. The original function of the drawing room is well-known: ‘The Drawing room is properly the withdrawing room or retiring-room of the ladies from the hall, and in old castles has adjuncts fitting it for this purpose’ (Stevenson 57). Isabella Beeton notes that in ‘former times, when the bottle circulated freely amongst the guests … the gentlemen of the company soon became unfit to conduct themselves with that decorum which is essential in the presence of ladies’ (14). While Beeton claims better behaviour for Victorian men, Victorian women – whether at a large party or a family meal – formally ‘withdrew’ in a group from the dinner table at the close of the meal to allow men to smoke and discuss subject matter considered unsuitable for ladies. Moreover, Victorian men were certainly not immune to excess: the diaries of Marion Sambourne contain a description of one all-male dinner party at which her husband Linley – prominent Punch cartoonist – and his guests consumed thirty-seven bottles of wine and champagne (cited in Nicholson 125). Given that his table could only accommodate twelve diners, this is a prodigious amount of drinking, even if his wife does not mention any untoward consequences. The use of the drawing room to preserve the association of femininity with ‘decorum’ highlights the paradoxical elements of a space that is at once one of privilege, circumscription, and substantial influence. That is, although women withdrew to the sanctuary that protected them from male indelicacies, this withdrawing simultaneously enabled women to police the habits of tobacco and alcohol, since etiquette maintained that gentlemen should not linger too long in the dining room before rejoining the ladies in the drawing room for tea. Thus the very space of their cautious protection also became a space that asserted women’s cultural authority to reform men. The drawing room’s rules of etiquette were distinctly based on the Victorian sense of feminine propriety. Hence, voices were never raised in a drawing room; smoking and even smelling of smoke were not permitted; the beverage of choice was tea; the food served was delicate and modest; the occupations and conversations were demure and appropriate for mixed company. If a

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man was required to rejoin the ladies following a relatively short afterdinner indulgence, and if he could neither drink alcohol there nor foul the drawing room with tobacco odours that would be nearly impossible to remove from fine fabrics and papers, then one might argue that the social boundaries of the space itself granted women the power to shape the habits of men – to the degree, of course, that men were willing to comply. Thomas Carlyle, for example, was as unwilling to give up his pipe habit as he was uncomfortable intruding it upon his wife’s drawing room. His solution, when he could not smoke outdoors, was to use as ‘feminine’ a pipe as possible (delicately curved and white) and smoke it while sitting only marginally within the room itself, on the floor by the door so the smoke would be carried out of the room.4 Middle-class women’s domestic authority was further promoted by this architectural space because it was not reserved for use only on rare, special occasions or for formal parties. J.J. Stevenson thoroughly describes the usages of the drawing room in his House Architecture (1880): in addition to providing ‘the place for evening entertainments, for dancing, music and receptions,’ it was ‘the lady’s sitting room and reception-room for callers’ where a woman might be found ‘settling her household accounts, [engaging] in reading, music, sewing, or worsted work,’ situated so as to be ‘convenient for the access of servants and others coming to receive orders’ and ‘for daily use’ (57–66).5 Stevenson’s litany indicates that the drawing room was the most common everyday space for female activity. Because the woman of the house spent most of her time in the drawing room, it came to be associated with her personal tastes and interests as well as serving as the central gathering place of the home. It was, as architect Robert Kerr aptly expresses it in The Gentleman’s House (1864), ‘the Lady’s Apartment essentially’ (107), for it symbolically unified the disparate roles of the woman of the house, locating her functions as hostess, friend, household manager, and wife all within a single space. The emotional centre of Victorian social and family circles, architecturally, the drawing room was also located at the heart of the house, occupying most, if not all, of the central storey of a house in town. With the dining room and men’s rooms such as the study, library, and/or billiard room on the floor below, and family bedrooms on the floor above, the drawing room was carefully protected from the noise or the more ‘vulgar’ associations of the street, the basement kitchen regions, or the servants’ attic.6 Moreover, the importance of the drawing room in the

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lives of the middle classes went far beyond the simple metaphor of its location within the house, for it served to connect the daily lives of the family with the lives of their friends and guests by providing the space in which guests were invited to judge the respectability of the house. Thad Logan’s social history of the drawing room, The Victorian Parlour (she uses the terms parlour and drawing room interchangeably), provides a wealth of information on decorative arts and furnishings as well as discussions of the role of the room in family life. I would like to offer here a complement to her work by considering the drawing room specifically in terms of the relationship between the creation of the place and the formation of women’s identities. The capability of the female manager, her grace as a hostess, her taste and style, and the degree to which she could maintain a proper household were all on display in the drawing room. Furthermore, while the efficacy of the woman of the house might be measured by a visit to her drawing room, it was also true that the rules of the space both reflected and defined Victorian notions of femininity. Given that the Victorian woman was taken to be the heart of the household and that the drawing room was the unquestioned locus of her realm, then, it is not surprising that the drawing room came to stand for the qualities of middle-class femininity – moral righteousness, propriety, grace, ease, decorativeness, and a pervasive concern for others’ comfort. In fact, textual discussions of the drawing room imply that this space had the power to make the ideals of domesticity a physical reality, embodying all that a woman was supposed to be and extending those domestic comforts to all who might be received within the space. Significantly, Victorian descriptions of a ‘good’ woman, an able manager, or of feminine accomplishments often employ phrases identical to descriptions of ideal drawing rooms. This is not to suggest that the terminology of one influenced the other, but rather that the two were so intimately bound together that it became simply convenient to use the same language to describe both. The alignment of the drawing room with femininity is made explicit by architectural treatises, which infuse their discussions of the creation of this space with the rhetoric of middle-class femininity. They uniformly argue that ‘a drawing room should be cheerful’ (Stevenson 58), aligning the room with the woman of the house, whom housekeeping guides routinely insist ought to maintain a cheerful countenance for her husband and family in all circumstances.7 Architect Robert Kerr, for example, explains that the room should display ‘especially cheerfulness, refinement of elegance, and what is called

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lightness as opposed to massiveness. Decoration and furniture ought therefore to be comparatively delicate; in short, the rule in everything is this – if the expression may be used – to be entirely ladylike’ (107; emphasis in original). In focusing on refinement, elegance, and delicacy, Kerr’s exhortations are consistent with those of numerous other architects as well as the guides offering women advice on middle-class femininity. Similarly, both architects and women’s advice manual writers urge consumers to avoid creating a room ‘much too fine for daily use,’ arguing that costly formal decoration in the drawing room makes it impractical to maintain and ‘uncomfortable’ as a regular gathering place, rendering the space virtually useless (Stevenson 59). Mrs Orrinsmith’s 1878 The Drawing-Room, for example, opens with a lengthy warning against the objectionable ‘withdrawing-room to which, because of its showy discomfort, no one withdraws; wherein visitors do penance at morning calls’ (2).8 Instead, Orrinsmith offers details designed to help a reader create a drawing room that ‘make[s] the hearth the rallying spot of the home’ (32). Isabella Beeton offers a warning at the other end of the spectrum, cautioning housewives that ‘economy and frugality must never, however, be allowed to degenerate into parsimony and meanness’ (2). Depicting the drawing room’s decor in the language of ‘hearth’ and ‘home,’ as a happy medium between stinginess and ostentation, and as a blending of ‘economy’ with comfort emphasizes the degree to which the physical space was conceived of as embodying the same middle-class ideals that women were expected to display in their own persons. The difficulties of producing a room whose atmosphere is cheerful yet refined, modest yet elegant, a place for display yet not ostentatious, were the same difficulties a middle-class woman faced in dress and manners; successfully negotiating these middle grounds was tantamount to proving one’s ‘true’ middle-class character. Yet while there may be tremendous consensus that both drawing rooms and the women they housed ought to be ‘light, cheerful, and elegant,’ ‘ladylike’ and ‘refined,’ only architect Gervase Wheeler admits that ‘how to make it so is not so easy to define’ (215). This difficulty is more than mere presumption; it is a matter of implicitly drawing class boundaries. Just as most architects apparently take for granted that readers will know what features of decoration are not ‘overfinished,’ writers like Beeton and Ellis assume their readers retain the ‘good taste’ to value ‘beauty, fitness, and harmony’ over that which is merely ‘costly, elaborate, or superb’ (Ellis 177). Even advice books such as Thomas Webster’s Encyclopaedia of Domestic Economy (1844) or

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John Walsh’s Manual of Domestic Economy (1856) or Charles Eastlake’s Hints on Household Taste (1868) – which provide lists and drawings of necessary furniture, wallpaper samples, sketches of cornice detail, and sample colour schemes – ultimately rely on a consumer’s taste to assemble the parts into a pleasing whole. In all of these cases, authors assume that the personal qualities of one’s character translate effortlessly into tangible qualities of one’s household decor. That is, they operate on the premise that true middle-class taste is inborn and cannot be learned. Neglecting to define concretely the relative terms – such as beauty or taste – by which a middle-class woman is to ensure that her drawing room accurately reflects her feminine accomplishments, these authors subtly indicate how the drawing room functions as an arbiter of propriety. In admonitions that ‘ornament, it must be remembered, is the medium between what is necessary and what is overfinished,’ we may read not simply warnings against the impulse to over-decorate (Richard Brown 200). We should see, in addition, an assertion of the parameters of the Victorian middle classes: anyone whose taste ventured into the ‘overfinished’ might be, like the Veneerings in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1865), very wealthy but utterly lacking in taste and hence in true middle-class respectability. Thus it begins to become clear that the concept of proper femininity – like the concept of respectable middle-class status – depended both on the tangible, spatial assertion of secure finances and on the intangible, personal assertion of both character and taste. Some basic structural elements of the drawing room may be useful at this point. A first-floor (North American second-floor) drawing room in a town house was generally rectangular, ranging in size from 16′ × 18′ (which Kerr describes as ‘small’) to 22′ × 100′ (Stevenson 57), while an average size might be around 18′ × 24′. ‘Better’ houses had a pair of drawing rooms that opened into one another for large parties. The plans by Robert Kerr (figure 6) and by Gervase Wheeler (figure 7) offer an elegant alternative in which the two drawing rooms are connected by a large ‘Ante Room.’ Both plans provide vertical openings to admit light and air into the rooms – a necessity for row houses. Kerr’s plan is for a house by far the larger, with drawing rooms 30′ × 20′ reached by a large and gracefully turned staircase and connected by a long, windowed ante-room that has its own fireplace. The presence of the lift (elevator) and the bowed window overlooking the back terrace that is shown in his accompanying ground floor plan (figure 12) make it clear that this is a particularly upscale house. Even Wheeler’s more modest design con-

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Figure 6: ‘First Floor (drawing rooms),’ Robert Kerr, The Gentleman’s House, plate 44, ‘Design for a Row of London Houses.’

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Figure 7: ‘Drawing Room Floor,’ Gervase Wheeler, The Choice of a Dwelling, p. 144.

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tains spacious rooms, the front 20′ × 20′ and the back slightly larger. In any such house where there was a suite of drawing rooms, the smaller areas might function as music room, boudoir, or family gathering point on a daily basis, given that large drawing rooms meant for entertaining were neither economical nor intimate enough for the family alone. In fact, however, many respectable middle-class houses (such as those of the Carlyles and the Dickenses) had only one drawing room that was multi-purpose. Figure 3 shows such a plan, in which the first floor (B) contains a single drawing room, and the remainder of the storey is devoted to a bedroom and dressing room. The tremendous success of Jane Welsh Carlyle’s drawing room as a gathering place for intellectual London – a drawing room, incidentally, whose size was ultimately determined by how many feet could be eked out of Jane’s bedroom to be added to the more public space – signals quite clearly that scale was of far less importance than character in creating the ideal space. Structurally, row houses shared walls with their neighbours, which had important implications for design. Windows (indicated in plans by horizontal breaks in the wall labelled with three parallel lines), as we see in Wheeler’s plan, were only inserted in the front and rear walls unless, as in Kerr’s design, there was substantial space allotted to a light shaft. Bays and high sash windows opening onto balconies maximized light; bays were particularly favoured because they also afforded alcoves for intimate conversation. End houses in a row might take advantage of the possibility of enlarging the drawing room and introducing more greenery into it by adding a conservatory to one side – often with a glass ceiling. The conservatory might then serve to connect multiple drawing rooms by running parallel to the staircase hall. Given that ‘the drawing room is that to which embellishments permanent and portable are most liberally devoted,’ architectural features built into the room were typically grander here than in any other room of the house (Morris 159). Large fireplaces for heating were ornamented with mantelpieces of carved marble or wood, decorative tiles, iron, plasterwork, or some combination of these materials. Ceilings were often bordered with detailed mouldings in fruit or flower motifs, and solid wood floors (fine enough for dancing when wanted) were typically covered with carpets that could be removed for cleaning.9 Figure 8 provides a vision of fireplace and ceiling detail in a drawing room. The numerous symmetrically arranged, small ornaments over the carved mantel, in conjunction with the unadorned chairs that flank the fireplace, suggest principles of aesthetic design that came into vogue in the

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Figure 8: ‘Drawing-Room Chimney-Piece,’ from Rhoda and Agnes Garrett, Suggestions for House Decoration, facing p. 61. As the discussion in the next chapter suggests, it is worth comparing this illustration with the Garrett sisters’ illustration of a ‘Dining-Room Chimney-Piece’ (figure 13).

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1860s. Fashionable decorative details, such as large over-mantel mirrors or the desirability of floral decor, changed over time. For example, while Brown reminds his readers in 1852 that ‘the enrichments … of the drawing room [should consist chiefly] of flowers’ (200), Charles Eastlake in 1868 refers to the ‘vulgarity of garlands and bouquets for the decoration of our drawing room floors’ (74), and Morris and Company’s floral wallpapers and fabrics came into high demand in the 1870s after a decade of producing more abstract designs (which had also been a response to public pressure).10 Such rapid fluctuations in the interest of particular types of design indicate why writers might have focused so heavily on practical elegance rather than fashionability: few families would have redecorated regularly, and writers of advice books would have investment in producing long-lasting rather than fashion-oriented texts if their real goal was to help define the middle classes and their values through architecture. While fashions fluctuated, an overall sense of good design was a means of establishing one’s position within the community, and Victorian texts spend significant effort suggesting to new homeowners what furniture would be most important in this space. Occasionally nodding towards the potential for clutter that may result from the ‘quantities of fragile furniture and ornaments with which a drawing room is usually encumbered’ (Stevenson 65), texts on homemaking nevertheless imply that the significance of these ‘quantities’ of highly specified furniture is not to be underestimated. Kerr helpfully gives a comprehensive list of what one ought to consider purchasing.11 ‘In a small [drawing] room,’ he writes, ‘there will be probably a centre table, perhaps with chandelier over, the usual chairs and couch, occasional table, sofa-table or writing-table, occasional chairs, a cheffonier [sic] generally, or one or more fancy cabinets, perhaps one or more pier-tables, a what-not or the like, one or more mirrors, and a cabinet pianoforte’ (111). Space permitting, he notes, one might add ottomans, and in a large room, one would double everything. Work tables and musical instruments suggested feminine occupations, while the centre table, ‘without which no ladies’ drawing room is considered to be complete’ (Stevenson 59), held large picture books and provided a place for playing cards or ‘parlour games.’ Chairs and couches were arranged into a series of intimate groupings, perhaps in nooks or bay windows, in order to subdivide the room into friendly clusters for entertaining (Stevenson 57) and to enable the family to assemble ‘without formality’ when no guests were present (Wheeler 217). Lest this catalogue appear an impossible ideal

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to which no family would really be required to adhere, one need look no further than the 1844 inventory of the contents of the quite modestly sized Dickens drawing room at Devonshire Terrace, which was Dickens’s home from 1839 to 1851, as his family grew to include nine children. Figure 9 makes an effort to demonstrate the prodigious contents of Dickens’s drawing room with illustrations taken from Thomas Webster’s Encyclopaedia of Domestic Economy, which was published in the same year that the Dickens inventory was taken.12 As this collection clearly demonstrates, furnishing a drawing room accounted for a range of needs and required significant financial investment.13 The expense of housekeeping could be so prodigious, in fact, that it was not until 1843 (nine years into their marriage) that the Carlyles could afford drawingroom decoration that included the purchase of their first sofa. That so many books give such attention to the minutiae of drawing-room decor indicates the extent to which furniture was taken as a metonymic sign of a family’s propriety. The extent to which domestic architecture might build one’s identity is demonstrated by the eponymous heroine of Margaret Oliphant’s novel Miss Marjoribanks, who manages to reform her father’s habits by creating a drawing room to which he finds himself retiring every night for tea and conversation. Although the narrator remarks that this drawing room habit ‘was against his principles,’ the passage clearly celebrates Lucilla’s accomplishment by suggesting that the doctor’s principles on this matter are somewhat socially lacking (89). As this example – or the instance of Thomas Carlyle’s white pipe – suggests, the role of domestic architecture was inextricably linked to that of the woman of the house in exerting positive influence over a home’s occupants and preserving their morality. Although such assumptions might seem to indicate a fixity in middle-class domestic architecture and corresponding identities, in fact the notion that the drawing room was ‘the Lady’s Apartment essentially’ offers a model of bounded flexibility. On one hand, phrases such as this create a rhetorical enclosure, both indicating the essential primacy of women in this ‘Apartment’ and limiting their sphere of action to this space. In this formulation, the ‘rules’ of the drawing room are both prescriptive and descriptive in relation to Victorian femininity. On the other hand, the prerogatives that the drawing room offered a middle-class woman were not simply built into the space itself. Women had to create their drawing rooms of opportunity, and, as examining Miss Majoribanks reveals, women who took particularly active roles in the management of this space might derive substantial power through the process.

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Figure 9: Drawing-room furniture, taken from Thomas Webster’s Encyclopaedia of Domestic Economy, multiple pages.

Lucilla, notably, is not just created by her drawing room – made into a demure, contained creature – she also creates this space to display her ability to appear demure and contained. Highlighting the constructed nature of identity, she both constructs the space that defines her and builds the definition of herself that she wants others to understand. ‘Make it a point to give in to the prejudices of society’ Relatively early in the novel that traces her rise to social prominence,

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Lucilla Marjoribanks explains to her father the value of living up to ideals of middle-class femininity, asserting the importance of ‘mak[ing] it a point to give in to the prejudices of society’ if one is to be socially acceptable (72). Giving in to ‘the prejudices of society’ in the particular case they are discussing means locating a chaperone for Lucilla, who has just returned home from boarding school and will now attend her widowed father’s weekly dinner parties. According to etiquette, the unmarried nineteen-year-old Lucilla cannot be hostess at a dinner with all-male company. Lucilla’s explanation to her father of why she needs a chaperone for a dinner party in their own home would not have been illuminating to Margaret Oliphant’s largely middle-class, female readers. While Lucilla needs to educate her father on what would have been an obvious point of Victorian etiquette to a ‘truly’ middle-class young lady, her statement is also clearly designed to mark her as a woman who knows and respects the social ‘prejudices’ with which she must contend in order to reassure the community that she will occupy what might be termed the proper place for women of her age and class position. Unwilling to locate herself at the head of her father’s dining table without another woman present, Lucilla understands that in placing herself within her father’s home, she must also control public perception of that placement by occupying only acceptable spaces within the home, such as the drawing room on which this novel centres. More generally, then, this conversation represents a reassuringly middle-class acknowledgment that Lucilla values capitulating to conventions that serve as cultural markers of her position and concomitant reputation. In thus presenting the title character as one whose identity is largely understood through the domestic spaces she occupies, the novel illustrates that Lucilla Marjoribanks has a precisely developed sense of what others consider to be her proper place. At the same time, Miss Marjoribanks is like many of Oliphant’s novels, which have recently received substantial attention for the portrayal of heroines who struggle against the confines of proper middle-class femininity, who are sympathetic and yet do not fit the model of the submissive Victorian domestic angel.14 Without fully discounting the Victorian notion that there is a proper place women ought to occupy, Miss Marjoribanks raises complex questions about how that place is defined and limited. Throughout the novel, Lucilla’s modesty, good taste, high moral code, skilful household management, and clear understanding of the finer points of etiquette and social interaction demonstrate that she knows what is expected of the daughter of one of the most prominent men in town. Dutifully, she

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proclaims repeatedly that her ‘one object in life’ is ‘to be a comfort to poor papa,’ and she and everyone else in Carlingford seem to accept the perfect truthfulness of this statement. Yet despite the fact that she has all the advantages of a comfortable home and the social rank established by her father’s extremely successful medical practice, Lucilla’s conventional behaviour sits in sharp contrast to ways she is simultaneously unlike the stereotypical novel heroine. Most visibly, she has an insistent physical presence. She is a large young woman with unmanageable hair and an unfaltering appetite, who takes over her father’s chair at the breakfast table and insists on taking charge of the spaces she will occupy. She refuses to entertain thoughts of marriage for hundreds of pages on the practical grounds that she has more important things to do for ten years or so, until she will have begun to ‘go off.’ Far from the delicate, soft-spoken, dependent ideal of a middle-class young lady whom many advice manuals describe, Lucilla ‘always enjoys perfect health,’ always says exactly what she means, and can clearly take care of herself far better than could any of the intellectually inferior suitors who pay her attention.15 The novel unfolds to highlight the opportunities available to such an intelligent and energetic woman, even as it points out the shortcomings of containing her within the narrow boundaries of the feminine norm. Lucilla shows herself to be carefully calculated in her efforts to ‘give in to the prejudices of society.’ Once she ‘is known,’ she demonstrates that such capitulation can have the valuable result of opening up possibilities for an enterprising middle-class woman rather than closing them off. Given that she declares the dictates of propriety ‘quite absurd’ and yet recognizes the value of adhering to them so as not to alienate her community, it is not surprising that scholars have generally concurred that Lucilla’s success lies in her ability to ‘subvert convention and have things her own way by appearing to personify conventionality itself’ (O’Mealy 72). Commenting upon the ways in which Lucilla defies convention by seeming to epitomize it, they offer interpretations of this process that focus variously on Lucilla’s class position, her gendered identity, and narrative choices in depicting this heroine.16 Yet while studies of the ‘subversive’ nature of Oliphant’s heroines mention Lucilla often as a prime example, there are few sustained examinations of precisely how Lucilla walks the line between subversion and convention – or of why she is so successful. Elizabeth Langland’s chapter ‘Margaret Oliphant’s Parliamentary Angels’ is the notable exception. Arguing that Lucilla derives power from her ability to manipu-

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late the discourse of domesticity, Langland demonstrates how Lucilla takes the authority granted by her class position and grafts that onto her proper femininity to create a ‘subversive’ middle-class woman. More commonly, however, scholars definitively claim Lucilla loses her subversive power by the end of the novel. Susan Harris’s argument helps explain this response to Lucilla; Harris identifies the position of hostess as ‘ontologically relational,’ a position focused on facilitating other people’s interactions, rather than on being the ‘principal actor on a stage’ (5). Similarly, Margaret Homans, in her investigation of the Victorian notion of the middle-class Queen, concludes that to be a ‘queen’ (a moniker applied often to Lucilla) means ‘someone whose public powers – whether direct or indirect – are subordinated to the exigencies of her domestic life’ (83).17 The vision of a ‘relational’ character who subordinates her public self to her domestic one is consistent with the events of Lucilla’s life: after ten years of actively independent thinking, Lucilla finally agrees to marry her simple-but-adoring cousin. The critical commonplace of labelling Lucilla a subversive heroine who is ultimately contained by a conventional marriage unduly simplifies Oliphant’s novel, however. Furthermore, such a subversion/containment model begs the questions: If Lucilla is a consummate actress, able to make it look like she is conventional in ways she is not, why does everyone in her world apparently believe in her perfect sincerity? And even if no one in Carlingford finds her out, where is the moral censure on the part of the narrator that one would expect in a ‘respectable’ Victorian novel about a woman who is merely performing the part of respectability?18 Importantly, the model of subversion and containment relies upon a spatial metaphor of enclosure to explain how ideology is (re)inscribed upon individuals despite their resistance. Yet even while deploying the spatial metaphor of containment, many feminist scholars focus on the ideological issues at stake without considering whether these too might have spatial implications. Yet I would argue that the specific physical structure that contains a woman has substantial connotations: certainly Bertha Mason Rochester’s attic creates a very different kind of containment than does Lucilla Marjoribanks’s graceful drawing room. Indeed, it is the particular qualities of Lucilla’s drawing room, and its reciprocal power to define her and be defined by her, that enable her to create a reasonably satisfying identity for herself at the same time that she demonstrates the limits of such a project. While Lucilla defines success as knowing when to give in to prejudices and knowing when this is no

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longer necessary, in fact her success in Carlingford is made possible precisely through her ingenious manipulation of physical spaces. As Lucilla works to establish an identity that is not wholly bounded by traditional definitions of femininity, it is of paramount importance that her actions explicitly do not reject the comfortable place offered by her class position. Lucilla is careful to act strictly within the physical spaces that are considered feminine, creating her drawing room as the town’s social centre and thereby giving in to the prejudice that a woman should locate her energies in the workings of the home and the social opportunities that arise therein. Because she is so careful about the space she occupies, she quickly becomes acknowledged as the social genius of Carlingford. Moreover, the authority Lucilla derives from establishing herself as the premiere hostess of Carlingford is precisely what enables her to move beyond simply being a consummate hostess. For this reason Langland has argued that Lucilla ‘seizes control of local society through a dexterous manipulation of domestic discursive practices and a clever staging of class and femininity’ (156). As I will demonstrate, however, it is not simply the ideals that Lucilla manipulates but the location of that staging – her elegant drawing room – that is the most important ingredient of her success. Lucilla’s drawing room, coded as it is with all the middle-class respectability one could muster, becomes the container for her original and often remarkably ‘unfeminine’ projects. Hence Lucilla stages her ‘battles’ (to borrow the narrator’s militaristic descriptor of Lucilla’s efforts) on wall-to-wall carpet and under the brilliant candlelight of a well-appointed drawing room. Ever mindful of the dictum, aptly expressed by Mrs Orrinsmith in her treatise on decoration entitled The Drawing-Room, that ‘we might lead ourselves to believe that it would be impossible to commit a mean action in a gracefully furnished room,’ Lucilla’s ‘battles’ often appear to be of only the slightest real consequence (8). Ironically, however, Orrinsmith’s widely held belief, in conjunction with Ruskin’s articulation that ‘women’s power is for rule, not for battle’ (59), enables Lucilla to take risks in her social leadership. Because her ‘gracefully furnished’ drawing room sanctions her actions, Lucilla is ultimately able to become involved in politics in a way she never could were she not so comfortably settled among fine upholstery. That is, it is precisely because she has limited her world to this accepted feminine space that she can assert the expansive nature of the boundaries of femininity without suggesting that she has forgotten the proper ideological place of women.

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While the novel highlights the paradox of expanding one’s social or cultural authority by limiting one’s physical space, this does not make Lucilla explicitly subversive. She is well educated and wants for nothing financially, but hers is the privilege of comfortable middle-class existence rather than of an elite, titled, or nationally visible position. (Unlike the real hostesses Susan Harris studies, Lucilla is daughter to a wealthy town doctor, rather than wife to the prime minister.) Far from rejecting her middle-class privilege, she embraces it to the extent that her behaviour is sincerely conventional, and she recognizes the value of propriety for maintaining her comfortable social position. Rather than using the appearance of conventionality to disguise her real intentions, she relies on her conventional beliefs to legitimate her intentions, enabling her to act openly. Miss Marjoribanks bears closer inspection, then, for it significantly reverses the subversion/containment model. Far from being a subversive woman whose actions are ultimately contained by novel’s end, Lucilla creates a contained space first and then uses all the advantages of that respectable containment to gain power by redesigning cultural notions of proper femininity. In Miss Marjoribanks, then, Oliphant presents an alternative to the notion that power is only available to men and through masculine pursuits, challenging the assumption that power is predicated on following a particular path from the right public schools through a university education and membership in the most prestigious clubs into the most high-profile careers. Instead, Miss Marjoribanks suggests that if one epitomizes middle-class femininity, one might follow an equally organized path to a parallel success. Scholarly understanding of ‘power’ is largely predicated on models that interrogate the hierarchy of public, institutional forms of power. In such models, the spheres to which Victorian women were explicitly denied access (business, politics, education) are understood to derive their power through their position of authority over the private sphere. This hierarchy of power is the backbone of Victorian understanding of a system of (ostensibly) separate spheres. In turn, this conception of power has led scholars like Thad Logan – writing on women’s uses of decorative arts – to argue that Victorian women ‘lacked social power’ (217).19 While women certainly lacked social power as defined by the ability to take action in public forums, it seems overly simplistic to assume that ‘social power’ is wholly synonymous with traditional forms of political power like the ability to vote or hold public office. While many scholars seem to assume that to have social power one must have access to these political forms, Miss Marjoribanks

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demonstrates that although social and political power are not identical, the social power available in a variety of spheres may enable political influence.20 To a certain extent, then, Oliphant follows the Victorian convention of defining women’s power not as a finite series of specific processes but as a concept of influence. She expands the potential for influence, however, through her emphasis on control of one’s physical space and the authority that such control provides. While Langland (among others) has suggested that middle-class women derived power from their position of authority over their servants, this emphasis on containing women’s power within the home participates in the limiting hierarchy of public versus private power. Compounding such limitations, numerous Victorian texts that offer women information on household management suggest concealing the work involved. And Victorian architecture complied: even the simple expedient of a second staircase in the back of the house aids in this concealment by removing the physical labour of household daily life from public view.21 Oliphant’s novel resists this impulse, both by focusing specifically on the work its heroine undertakes and by asserting that a woman’s power lies in the possibility for feminine taste to accomplish action. ‘Work,’ however, is redefined as the primarily aesthetic efforts of creating a place for entertaining rather than as physical labour. Although Jane Welsh Carlyle’s letters reveal the degree to which such separation of aesthetic and physical labour in home creation – even in decoration – is practically impossible, Lucilla’s model of power through taste is provocative. As Susan Harris has demonstrated, Victorian hostesses achieved significant influence through their cultural positions. However, I would like to extend her model to suggest that it was not just the position of being the foremost hostess within a community that gave particular women influence; in fact, Lucilla Marjoribanks demonstrates that impeccable taste and careful self-creation may be the province not just of the select few but of women more generally. Moreover, she highlights the paradox of a drawing-room existence by revealing how one might use this locationally based identity to move beyond the position of hostess – a goal both in Lucilla’s fictional world and in Jane’s factual one. ‘For a woman who feels that she is a Power, there are so few other outlets’: Creating a Drawing Room of Opportunity While Lucilla’s careful efforts to ‘give in to people’s prejudices’ suggest that she is supremely capable of creating herself as a model domestic

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woman, Miss Marjoribanks problematizes the notion that a woman’s place is limited by ‘natural’ female capabilities. Forwarded by dozens of Victorian texts – from conduct manuals to Ruskin’s ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’ – biologically based arguments about the feminine character and temperament claim that women are ideally suited for domestic concerns and naturally incapable of pursuing public careers. Though the sheer quantity of such texts might raise some doubts about how ‘natural’ these ideals are, Lucilla Marjoribanks, in particular, counters the Victorian rhetoric of natural womanhood in significant ways. Fundamentally, her claim that one must ‘give in’ to people’s prejudices insinuates that acting in accordance with the norms that define proper femininity is not a natural consequence of being female. Instead, the development of the novel clearly shows that to adhere to such ideals requires a lifetime of decisions and a recognition – carried by the negative connotations of ‘giving in’ – that the process of being properly feminine is not necessarily always a positive experience. In Lucilla, for example, a reader finds not only traits of modesty and family loyalty that are presumed naturally feminine; one also finds the intellect, diplomacy, social savvy, and personable nature that would create a great politician. Although she cannot legally occupy a public professional role, Lucilla exhibits, as the narrator observes, ‘a mind made to rule,’ a mind that perfectly suits her to move from the domestic stage of her drawing into the national stage of politics (83). As she repeatedly belies the idea that women do not belong in politics due to a natural lack of the necessary qualities, Lucilla demonstrates that creating spatial and ideological boundaries for women on the basis of their ‘natural’ capabilities is ‘quite absurd.’ Here and elsewhere, the novel suggests the practical problems of confining an intelligent and energetic woman to a domestic sphere that has very little to occupy her mind. To highlight that proper femininity is learned rather than natural, Miss Marjoribanks does not open with Lucilla’s triumphal assertion of her ‘Power’ but rather with a scene of her failed first attempt to take her place as the woman of the house immediately after her invalid mother’s death. When the fifteen-year-old Lucilla returns home from boarding school for her mother’s funeral, she has a sincere desire to take over management of her father’s household, but she is thwarted by her youth and by the fact that she does not have a clear sense of the processes necessary to be a subtle and effective manager. She chooses to follow ‘a programme of filial devotion resolved upon, in accordance with the best models, some days before’ (31). Because she did not have a role model in her long-ailing mother, however, the ‘best models’

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Lucilla has are novels, and her ‘programme’ is necessarily ineffective because neither she nor her father fits the moulds of the stereotypical fictional characters on whom she bases her plan. Lucilla attempts to construct her father as a distraught husband suffering under a tremendous blow, as she is quite sure grieving husbands always are in novels, and she fails in the feminine duty of comforting him because she misunderstands not only his feelings but also her place in the household. She tries to take charge in a manner that will demonstrate that she can fill her mother’s place as the woman of the house: assuming her father will not want dinner the day of the funeral because in novels grief always takes away one’s appetite, she orders a simple tea to be served in front of a cheerful fire in his library. But on a hot evening, after a full day’s work seeing patients in addition to attending his wife’s funeral, Dr Marjoribanks wants neither fire nor the feminine succour of tea, and he resents the presumptuous intrusion of feminine dainties into his private domestic space. In fact, then, her mother’s years as an invalid suggest that in trying to manage the household, Lucilla is usurping her father’s command rather than filling her mother’s shoes. The current organization of the Marjoribanks’s home spaces is stereotypical in its strict gender boundaries: the male-identified rooms on the ground floor signify work, strength, and connections to public concerns, while the female-identified rooms above imply indulgence, frailty, and a retreat into the private. The ground floor contains the dining room in which Dr Marjoribanks hosts his famous dinners, and it communicates with the night lamp and bell pull that enable the needy to summon the doctor day or night. The upstairs of the Marjoribanks house stands in distinct contrast to these public spaces. Signifying femininity specifically in the sense of feminine weakness, it is marked by the drawing-room couch on which Lucilla’s mother quietly faded away and by the childhood bedroom to which Lucilla retires at night. Dr Marjoribanks’s response to Lucilla’s comforting efforts explicitly upholds this division of space by asserting a gendered hierarchy of home occupants. Having misconstrued her father’s needs and failed to be womanly, the novel-loving Lucilla is realigned with her mother’s domestically inactive place, summarily banished upstairs to the drawing room so that the doctor can eat his substantial dinner in the cool quiet of his downstairs library (29). The doctor’s orders indicate that Lucilla is not yet in a position to control the domestic space, for banishing her reiterates the long-standing primacy of the ground floor and of professional masculinity as the locus of authority in this house whose female

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centre has for years been too ill to receive people and whose daughter was away at school. Oliphant initially presents the Marjoribanks household as organized according to idealized gendered boundaries in order to suggest that Lucilla will be working within the same limitations of propriety and custom as any woman ‘who feels that she is a Power.’ In part, this reflects precisely the problem identified in the previous chapter: despite all the idealized situations presented in architectural treatises, conduct manuals, and housekeeping guides, a system of separate spheres does not necessarily offer women power within their domestic spaces. Actual circumstances may reveal not only that women’s ‘proper’ authority might be adopted by men but also that women themselves can only have domestic power after learning (as Lucilla does) homemaking skills. In framing Lucilla’s success story in the context of her adolescent failure to manage her father’s household, Oliphant reveals that Lucilla is not an inimitable paragon of social skill who intuitively has the ability to manage both household and town to her advantage. Rather the novel demonstrates the complexity of housekeeping, suggesting that proper feminine behaviour is slowly acquired rather than natural.22 By the time Lucilla has finished her schooling and tour of Europe, she returns to Carlingford with the knowledge that ‘there was a great difference between the brilliant society of London, or of Paris, which appears in books, where women have generally the best of it, and can rule in their own right’ and her own situation (37). Having thus put aside the models in books, Lucilla embraces a more practical vision of womanhood, an alternative to the idealized figures in books who nonetheless strive to ‘have the best of it.’ Lucilla’s first step in conforming to social expectations when she returns home from boarding school after completing her education is to proclaim repeatedly that her ‘one object in life’ is ‘to be a comfort to poor papa.’ The entire community is predisposed to approve of Lucilla’s goal of comforting ‘poor papa,’ in part because her cheerful comprehension of her obligations as a single daughter of a well-respected man suggests that Lucilla has the ‘instinctive sense of comfort and propriety’ that marks a good woman (Home Truths 36). Although Lucilla’s desire may seem to set her up as a heroine in a book, in fact Oliphant distinguishes this motive from Lucilla’s earlier naive investment in idealized, fictional models of reality. Lucilla simultaneously retains the personal goal of being the social genius capable of bringing together ‘the chaotic elements of society in Carlingford’ into the harmonious social whole

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that the narrator describes as ‘one great unity’ (176). Importantly, Lucilla sees a link between the two projects of comforting her father and managing Carlingford society, understanding them as the two halves of her role as a dutiful middle-class woman. For a start, both occupations are clearly centred in the drawing room and on the architectural imperatives and privileges it conveys to feminine existence. Isabella Beeton notes in talking about ‘the onerous duties which enter into the position of the mistress of the house’ that in managing her household well, its mistress ‘is therefore a person of far more importance in a community than she usually thinks she is’ (18). Without explicitly limiting this community to her immediate household or defining it broadly as her town, Beeton’s description of a woman’s influence implies an expansive capacity. For Beeton, as for Lucilla, the role of household manager is continuous with the role of social organizer because both are based in the duty of creating a proper and welcoming home. On this principle, Lucilla links her obligations to her father and his household with her desire to insert herself into the community specifically through her mastery over her drawing room, in which she moves between her positions as the doctor’s daughter and as the social centre of Carlingford. Lucilla plans to host regular Thursday ‘Evenings’ (after-dinner gatherings), adeptly linking her father’s renowned weekly all-male dinners, to which ‘naturally, as there was no lady in the house, ladies could not be invited,’ with her own drawing-room entertainments (42). In implicitly promising to augment the tradition of excellent entertaining that has marked the doctor’s dinners, Lucilla also notably provides a plan that will include the ladies of the town. Rather than offering stately parties with complex rules of etiquette, Lucilla insists that these will be ‘Evenings’ for which no invitations will be issued. Her drawing room will be a place in which men and women will be able to socialize with each other with propriety but without undue ceremony, an important consideration given cautions such as Beeton’s that ‘parties’ are too formal to undertake on a regular basis (14–17). Recognizing that management of key domestic spaces will enable her influence, Lucilla begins by asserting her authority in a manner that reassures the household (comprised principally of her father and the cook Nancy, with other more shadowy servants) of her domestic wisdom. On the morning after her return home, Lucilla takes over her father’s customary place at the breakfast table. This position enables her to pour out the tea and coffee more easily, yet it also usurps her fa-

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ther’s custom, thus gently making him ‘aware all the same that he had abdicated, without knowing it, and that the reins of state had been smilingly withdrawn from his unconscious hands’ (50). As the language of Beeton’s Book of Household Management suggests, this is an appropriate action, for the woman of the house is understood through terms that place in her hands the ‘reins of state.’ Beeton similarly aligns the woman of the house with such ruling metaphors, explaining that ‘as with the commander of an army, or the leader of any enterprise, so it is with the mistress of a house’ (1). Although Lucilla’s father hesitates at the prospect of giving up his seat at the breakfast table where the day’s activities are planned, he recognizes that Lucilla’s act of asserting her feminine prerogative over tea and coffee is proper. In part because Lucilla does not insult her father by trying to make a similar move at the dinner table, which is his rightful domain, she is successful at breakfast. Maintaining a careful balance between being the ‘commander’ and remaining within the boundaries of her position as the daughter, Lucilla succinctly demonstrates her capacity to live up to her father’s hope that ‘if she was not a fool, and could keep to her own department, it might be rather agreeable on the whole to have a woman in the house’ (48–9). Lucilla has every intention of keeping ‘to her own department.’ Although this results in acts that come as a surprise to the order of the household, she offers to augment rather than overturn the delicate balance that already exists. Making her presence clearly felt by a strong assertion of the places she ought rightfully to occupy, she rejects the ‘little bare dimity chamber’ that had been her childhood bedroom and chooses instead for herself ‘the pleasantest of the two best bedrooms’ (53). By the close of her first morning at home, she has also appointed Nancy her ‘Prime Minister,’ at once asserting hierarchical authority over the cook (implicitly Lucilla will be Queen, as Ruskin exhorts) while also indicating that Nancy’s reputation as the best cook in Carlingford will not be challenged by any foolish assertion of the prerogative of the lady of the house to manage the kitchen space too closely (143). The role of prime minister suggests that while Nancy may be susceptible in theory to orders from Lucilla, she is generally appreciated for her own expertise and capacity to offer advice regarding meals and entertaining. Lucilla thus resists the temptation to disrupt the hierarchy of the household unnecessarily and shows she knows what parts of the household upkeep are better delegated than done herself. Given the often-reiterated maxim that ‘the mistress of a family cannot do everything,’ Lucilla’s capacity to delegate shows clearly that she understands her role as a

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middle-class woman (Home Truths 80; emphasis in original). Through these acts, Lucilla asserts that she has grown from the little daughter of the household into its mistress, and her success at winning over her father and the strong-willed cook confirm not only that she thoroughly knows ‘her own department’ but that she has a strong appreciation for how the physical spaces of the house are understood through the social prerogatives that govern relationships within them. Defining her boundaries, making spaces into places where she has authority, Lucilla also lets domestic locations dictate her actions. While not dismissing the authority of those already in her home, Lucilla clearly reorganizes to place women, not men, at the centre of this household. Having asserted her prerogatives within the family, Lucilla carefully delineates the spatial boundaries of ‘her own department’ by taking charge of the drawing room itself. As ‘the Lady’s Apartment essentially,’ the drawing room is rightfully her space to renovate (Kerr 107). Yet because a history of inactivity created her invalid mother’s drawing room as a space of quiet feminine retirement, Lucilla finds it necessary to justify her desire to redecorate the room to reflect its alternate purpose – one more appropriate to a young, healthy, and ambitious mistress – as an active place in which guests will congregate. It was a cultural commonplace that a new woman of a house had both the right and responsibility of redecorating the drawing room. In Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, for example, widowed Mr Gibson enlists a friend to help him allocate the £100 he has set aside to prepare the house for the arrival of his second wife, but he explicitly notes that the drawing room redecorating will be his wife’s prerogative and that he has ‘a little spare money for that room for her to lay out’ (150). Yet despite such indications that most men would understand this prerogative, Dr Marjoribanks reacts with indignation to Lucilla’s calm assumption that the drawing room will be redecorated according to her needs and tastes.23 Her response adroitly indicates the spatial terms of her identity: ‘You are so much downstairs in the library that you don’t feel it,’ she argues, ‘but a lady has to spend her life in the drawing room’ (65). Her father ultimately acquiesces to the redecoration on the grounds that ‘to be sure, nothing could be more faded than the curtains, and there were bits of the carpet in which the pattern was scarcely discernible’ (71). But it is notable that the practical motive of his logic differs from Lucilla’s. He recognizes that the room is shabby and that this shabbiness will be noticed now that Lucilla (unlike her mother) will have company into the drawing room regularly. By contrast, Lucilla assumes the notion

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that housekeeping guides and architectural treatises forward that each room should suit its primary occupant, and she thus justifies redecorating the room on the basis of the accepted gendering of domestic spaces. Invoking the notion that ‘a lady has to spend her life in the drawing room,’ Lucilla implies that if she has to spend her life in the drawing room, then the cultural authority for making decisions about what will happen within this space does not rest with the man whose income makes these changes or Evenings possible. Thus redecorating becomes not a whimsical project, not an end in itself, but a means to an end, for a middle-class woman’s identity depends upon her maintaining a proper drawing room. Far from committing what the author of Home Truths calls ‘the unnecessary expense and trouble of [fitting up] a room chiefly to be shut up and cared for’ (59), Lucilla insists that the expense of decorating a drawing room is necessary to a woman’s life: the room does not need to look new as much as it needs to appear as a physical extension of her person. In a matter of moments on her first night at home, Lucilla adeptly reconfigures the drawing room that has been at best uninspiring in its respectability: It was not an uncomfortable sort of big, dull, faded, respectable drawingroom; and if there had been a family in it, with recollections attached to every old ottoman and easy-chair, no doubt it would have been charming; but it was only a waste and howling wilderness to Lucilla … [Yet] in the little interval which [her father] spent over his claret, Miss Marjoribanks had succeeded in effecting another fundamental duty of woman – she had, as she herself expressed it, harmonised the rooms, by the simple method of rearranging half the chairs and covering the tables with trifles of her own – a proceeding which converted the apartment from an abstract English drawing-room of the old school into Miss Marjoribanks’s drawing-room, an individual spot of ground revealing something of the character of its mistress. (48–50)

Significantly, the process of turning an ‘abstract English drawing-room’ into ‘Miss Marjoribanks’s drawing-room’ is here represented as Lucilla’s ‘fundamental duty’ as much as is ‘amus[ing] her father.’ In fact, housekeeping guides consistently reiterate the obligation to maintain the family’s comfort specifically through the creation of an attractive place that reflects all the best qualities of the woman of the house. That not just creating a comfortable room but also individuating it is ‘funda-

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mental’ to the duties of good housekeeping may seem overstated. Yet while Lucilla’s personality is certainly part of what is reflected in her drawing-room rearrangements, the use of the word ‘character’ by the narrator suggests that it is not only personality but class, feminine morality, and the capacity for public influence that are confirmed through Lucilla’s ability to make the drawing room her own. Authors of texts on home style and furnishing support Lucilla’s assumption that such decorating is an important activity both to construct and display one’s identity. Orrinsmith’s The Drawing-Room, for example, identifies decorating as a positive way to spend one’s time because it produces a usable – and therefore valuable – commodity. She compares purposeful artistic needlework, wall stencilling, and similar processes of home decoration with the other ‘artistic’ outlets with which a woman might fill her time, concluding that beautifying one’s home is a much more worthy way to spend time than in executing ‘amateur sketches and copies which modesty fortunately saves from exhibition, and which find a suitable sarcophagus in portfolios as lasting examples of killed time’ (37). Far from standing as a ‘lasting example of killed time,’ a thoughtfully decorated drawing room is a vibrant and active place that has real uses and real reasons to be viewed with approbation.24 The simultaneous public and private nature of the drawing room is confirmed by the nearly insatiable curiosity of the entire town to see the redecoration Lucilla undertakes – at once highlighting the fact that Lucilla must prove herself to them and that her own character is understood in an architectural register with which everyone is fluent. The importance of decorative detail in establishing the connection between a woman, her duty, and the space in which she is supposed to discharge her duty is demonstrated by the steps Lucilla goes through in the process of renovating her drawing room, which figures the room as her personal apparel. She chooses the fabric for the new curtains, for example, by examining the colour against her face in one of the mirrors of the upholsterer’s shop. She has set out quite practically to find a ‘delicate pale green,’ on the grounds that it will wear as well as any other colour, that it possesses advantages of versatility and originality, and that ‘all the painters say it is the very thing for pictures’ (68). Charles Eastlake (Hints on Household Taste) and Orrinsmith in fact support Lucilla’s claim, suggesting greens or blues as the most appropriate colour schemes for a drawing room (despite fashions favouring pinks, whites, and golds), especially one that is to display fine pictures. However, Lucilla’s choice of a ‘delicious damask, softly, spiritually green’

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is additionally influenced by how well it suits her complexion. She assesses the suitability of the fabric not on the basis of its drape or weight, quality or cost, but in terms of how she looks against it as a backdrop. Although her extraordinary performance in Mr Holden’s shop leaves ‘the fashionable upholsterer of Carlingford in a state of some uncertainty whether it was curtains or dresses that Miss Marjoribanks meant to have made,’ a reader is given to understand that Lucilla is reasonable in making an effort to create a room that looks well on her (75). Her reasoning is that ‘“one can change one’s dress … as often as one likes – at least as often, you know, as one has dresses to change; but the furniture remains the same”’ (68). In this explicit link between her clothing and her drawing room, Lucilla identifies the process of creating her drawing room as one of putting on the trappings of a socially significant lady. In fact, she dresses herself in a flattering drawing room as if it were robes of state. In choosing for her drawing room a ‘difficult color’ that ‘her tawny curls and fresh complexion carried off triumphantly,’ Lucilla ensures that her own attractive presence in this place will subtly outshine that of any other woman because this is not a colour that most people can carry off (69). Her choice to design a room in which she will be the most lovely member of the company is doubly fascinating because readers have already seen that Lucilla is in fact not a woman whose appearance accords with the conventions of beauty – and while she laments this fact, she is also resigned to it. Although one might argue that her colour choice is calculated to draw attention to her unique complexion in order to downplay her large stature and unmanageable hair, she seems less interested in creating herself as a beauty than in setting up a means by which her authority will be quietly but constantly confirmed to visitors. She creates a backdrop of this ‘difficult color’ in a move psychologically calculated to position her as powerful by deploying the very ideals with which a woman is expected to concern herself, thereby expanding into an architectural decision what might otherwise be limited by the boundaries of her own person. As she blurs the line between dresses and curtains, Lucilla increases her social power, using the intense speculation about what the finished room will look like to build social suspense and thereby further the town’s collective impression that she is the most important hostess available to Carlingford. The significance of architecture in establishing the solidity of Lucilla’s character extends to all the physical details through which the place is created. In a scene that is at once comical and quite serious, Lucilla finds herself being proposed to by her awkward cousin Tom just at the

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moment when she wants to superintend the decorators of the drawing room in their hanging of the pictures. She explains to Tom: ‘It is one of my principles, you know, that things are never rightly done if the lady of the house does not pay proper attention’ (94). On these grounds, she attempts to hurry him through the proposal so that she can move on to oversee this crucial drawing-room activity, which she characterizes in all seriousness as ‘really something of importance’ to do in contrast to his offer of marriage (which she has no intention of accepting) (92). Although Tom’s hopeless effort to express his love for Lucilla in the face of her more powerful domestic concerns might seem designed to excite some sympathy for him, in fact numerous sources on domestic life support her position that she must ‘pay proper attention’ to domestic details vigilantly. The Lady’s Own Book, for example, similarly argues that ‘whatever relates to the immediate superintendence and direction of household concerns, you cannot neglect, without exposing yourself to inconvenience, which no future exertions may be able completely to remedy’ (49), while Home Truths for Home Peace insists that ‘the whole comfort and happiness of every family must depend on its mistress discharging its higher duties herself ’ (81–2). This need to ensure that things are done correctly the first time and by the mistress ‘herself’ attests to the cultural power accorded to a woman’s judgment and taste; however, Lucilla’s insistence that Tom’s proposal can wait is clearly also a parody of this dictum, for no one would literally assume that the writers of advice books consider a marriage proposal insignificant in contrast to a decorative detail. Yet, it is certainly the case that in the plan Lucilla has for herself, ‘no future exertions’ may be able completely to remedy the disaster that might be created if she attends to Tom’s proposal seriously and the decoration of her drawing room suffers as a result, for while he sees himself as eligible and offering her the position of mistress of her own house, she sees him as clumsy, foolish, and in the way of her position as mistress of her father’s house. One might draw a useful parallel to a telling scene in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871), in which much of the town is attending an estate sale. The auctioneer at the sale describes one lot as ‘a collection of trifles for the drawing-room table,’ going on to note that ‘trifles make the sum of human things – nothing more important than trifles’ (653). This sense that trifles form the substance of human life, particularly as regards ladies and their drawing rooms, operates in Eliot’s novel in precisely the same way as it does in Oliphant’s: to indicate both the substance of the cultural ideal (ladies’ concerns are confined appropriately to draw-

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ing-room trifles) and its antithesis (trifles may in fact be of substantial import in defining human existence). Pierre Bourdieu has aptly demonstrated the degree to which taste is predicated on appreciating nuances and details, particularly in terms of distinguishing one’s position in a social hierarchy. Just as the Middlemarch ladies will be judged by the ornaments on their drawing-room tables, so Lucilla understands that her neighbours will judge her based on the redecoration of her drawing room – and hence it is not unreasonable of her to be preoccupied with ensuring that her taste, rather than that of the working-class labourers doing the heavy lifting upstairs, is reflected in how the pictures are hung. Through this and other key moments, we come to see that Lucilla clearly understands several important points that Tom has yet to grasp, not least of which is that a woman might have the most power in a household when she is in the paradoxical position of being its mistress without having either a husband or children for whom she is responsible. Lucilla has repeatedly insisted that she will not marry because it is her ‘one aim in life’ to be a comfort to her father (184). In fact, however, there are obvious personal advantages in such a choice, as Mrs Woodburn (the town mimic) observes: perpetually frustrated with her own husband, Mrs Woodburn notes that ‘Lucilla did not marry because she was too comfortable, and, without any of the bother, could have everything her own way’ (373). Indeed, ‘the bother’ of family life is supplanted for Lucilla by the freedom and power that come from focusing on her own architectural identity, leading to the somewhat radical idea that the domestic sphere is ideal for women only when they can have it both ways – responsibility, influence, and power without the obligations. In this context, it becomes clear that Lucilla is in complete earnest when she blandly tells Tom that she cannot attend to his proposal because she has to attend to the workmen in the drawing room: ‘as for furniture and things, they matter a great deal, I assure you, to people’s happiness’ (92). The conventional Victorian understanding of Lucilla’s claim would be that in a world based on a notion of separate spheres, furniture matters to people’s happiness because it provides the conduit through which the woman of the house is able to discharge her obligations to create a comfortable home and extend the comforts of its middle-class status to those outside her family. Yet one cannot ignore the fact that furniture matters far more than Tom’s proposal to Lucilla’s happiness in particular, since agreeing to Tom’s proposal would at this point limit her to being the wife of a poor-but-upcoming professional

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man, while by contrast it is through ‘furniture and things’ that her creation of drawing-room space in her father’s well-established household will enable her own self-creation. In fact, the later Victorian advice books address the furnishing of homes in tremendous detail that reveals both the practical and ideological impact of such decorative questions. For example, the author of Home Truths for Home Peace presents women with means of evaluating the quality and versatility of pieces of furniture and suggests what pieces will be most adaptable to changing family circumstances, and John Walsh in his Manual of Domestic Economy devotes twenty pages to mapping out how to allocate funds for every type of necessary household furniture for a range of household budgets. J.J. Stevenson implicitly acknowledges the significance of this home space by spending substantially more time, in his treatise House Architecture, discussing the decorative interior of the drawing room than any other room of the house. Taken together, the myriad texts that address domestic interiors imply pervasive cultural interest in the processes and products of home furnishing and decoration, and they add practical information to support the ideological claims that decorating is a valuable way to spend one’s time because it provides women with purposeful work rather than simply a means to kill time. Once having decorated her drawing room, Lucilla cements her feminine authority in large part through her delicate discipline of those who occasionally struggle against the confines of drawing-room standards of behaviour, thereby illustrating that a central component of being a clever manager of any space is management of the people who occupy it. She is masterful at keeping the upper hand without sacrificing any of her feminine delicacy, demonstrating the degree to which the drawing room and the woman at the heart of it are important judges of social respectability. Indeed, a number of incidents explicitly reveal Lucilla’s ability to create a drawing room that both authorizes her feminine ideals and demonstrates her ability to consolidate power through exercising her superior sense of social niceties. Lucilla’s mastery in her own drawing room impresses others when she forwards the harmony of the social situation even at the apparent expense of her own personal interests. On one occasion, the working-class Barbara Lake (who has been invited to the Thursday Evenings because she has a wonderful contralto singing voice) is openly flirting with Mr Cavendish, whom the town has understood as Lucilla’s suitor. Lucilla’s solution is to send Cavendish to get tea with Barbara, thereby putting a stop to their indelicate

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tête-à-tête. In suggesting tea, Lucilla gently emphasizes the feminine restraint and modesty that is supposed to characterize drawing-room interactions, thereby insinuating that any true woman would disdain such displays as Barbara’s for their impropriety. Ironically, however, in refusing to stoop to any kind of ‘mean action’ in order to break off Cavendish and Barbara’s flirtation, Lucilla impresses her guests not as an ordinarily proper woman but as exceptional. The narrator tells us that the general consensus was that ‘Miss Marjoribanks proved herself capable of preferring her great work to her personal sentiments, which is generally considered next to impossible for a woman. She did what perhaps nobody else in the room was capable of doing: she sent away the gentleman who was paying attention to her, in company with the girl who was paying attention to him’ (120). That Lucilla is capable of ‘preferring her great work to her personal sentiments’ significantly calls readers’ attention to the fact that to be a truly successful figure, Lucilla must eschew the traps of feminine weakness and emotional display. In direct contrast to conduct manuals such as H.G.C.’s The English Maiden, which insists that ‘a really feeling heart’ will be a woman’s best resource, this scene explicitly shows that a ‘feeling heart’ would be the last thing that would help Lucilla maintain a social balance that keeps everyone comfortable (190). It is her own apparent lack of feeling – her lack of susceptibility to falling in love – that enables Lucilla to prevent her working-class guest from furthering the awkward scene that emphasizes their class difference. Moreover, it is significant that the women present in Lucilla’s drawing room notice this heroic act, while none of the men do. The narrator’s remark that ‘in delicate matters of social politics, one never expects to be understood by them’ suggests that the women’s response is to be favoured for its capacity to attend to the minutiae of ‘social politics’ (122). Arguing that the drawing room is the space for local politics to be put into play, the narrator at once delimits a boundary (these are not national politics that might be discussed over dinner or in men’s studies) and plants the seed for further forays into politics. Lucilla’s next step in expanding her domestic boundaries is to demonstrate how the architectural authority she has within her own physical space becomes highly portable. She again confronts the indiscretion of Barbara Lake and Mr Cavendish (whom the town now thinks may be scandalously contemplating throwing over Lucilla in favour of Barbara) in the garden one evening as she leaves the Lake’s house after tea, where Lucilla’s capacity to offer a common greeting to Cavendish so

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flusters him that he can hardly respond. Although both he and Barbara are thoroughly unable to control themselves, ‘all the time Miss Marjoribanks was looking as placid as if she had been in her own drawing room’ (273). There is perhaps little remarkable in suggesting that a wellbred woman may be able to maintain her drawing-room manners – to act ‘as if’ she were at home – no matter what situation confronts her. However, the narrative description offers the possibility that Lucilla has in effect relocated this confrontation to her drawing room, thereby establishing her position of authority to pass judgment on the propriety of Cavendish and Barbara’s actions and rendering them guilty for not behaving better in her presence. This scene takes on added significance when read in the context of Ruskin’s contemporaneous ‘Of Queen’s Gardens,’ in which he argues that middle-class women have an obligation to spread their moral influence beyond their own homes by thinking of the whole world as their ‘garden’ to cultivate. As David Sonstroem points out, ‘The woman is indeed to guard, represent, and surround herself with the sacred household virtues, but [Ruskin] goes on to emphasize that “home” is not a physical place, but a state of heart and mind, which is, therefore, perfectly portable’ (291). Lucilla’s duty in this situation is to ensure that the ‘virtues’ of respectability, which ought to mark the interactions of people who are welcomed as regular guests in her home, do not lapse just because these people have left the boundaries of her domestic space. As a ‘state of heart and mind,’ home becomes nearly synonymous with a woman’s body. Thus, in suggesting that she is always metaphorically located within her own drawing room, Lucilla is able to chastise Barbara and Cavendish for not holding themselves up to the same high standards out of doors that they would be expected to were they in Lucilla’s drawing room. Their failure to do so is understood to be partly a result of their tenuous class positions because both are social climbers. However, the fact that Barbara’s sister Rose is completely respectable in Lucilla’s drawing room and beyond clearly indicates that Cavendish and Barbara are condemnable for their failings – and that Lucilla’s own authority derives in large part from the degree to which she has constructed her own identity in tandem with that of her eminently respectable drawing room. Because Lucilla’s path to success is largely predicated on the ways she redecorates her father’s home and turns it into a social centre in Carlingford, the complex question of how to assess her as a ‘Power’ (as the narrator describes her) in part becomes one of assessing how much power might ultimately be available to a woman through home

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decoration. Thad Logan has suggested that for middle-class Victorian women, home decoration served multiple purposes: to establish the status and respectability of the household through appropriate displays of middle-class propriety, to offer women a means of aesthetic gratification and artistic expression, to give women an occupation to fill the time and vent their boredom, and to offer women a medium in which to assert their personalities. As Logan acknowledges, however, it is debatable whether we ought to read these purposes as positive or negative, as constructing or expressing femininity, as enabling or circumscribing individuality. Significantly, within the community of the novel, one is invited to think critically about the power that results from such activities: while Lucilla commands great respect in Carlingford because of her drawing-room successes, her story does not simply laud her feminine place as empowering. Harris’s description of a hostess as a ‘facilitator of other people’s interactions, rather than [the] principal actor on her social stage’ (4) hints at the more sinister interpretation of a feminine interest in drawing-room occupations presented by Dr Marjoribanks himself. He wonders longingly about what might have happened if Lucilla had been born in a position to make a professional reputation for herself: If she had been the boy instead of that young ass [her cousin Tom] … somehow it struck the Doctor more than ever how great a loss it was to society and to herself that Lucilla was not ‘the boy.’ She could have continued, and perhaps extended, the practice, whereas just now it was quite possible that she might drop down into worsted-work and tea-parties like any other single woman. (400)

The doctor’s fear that his daughter will merely ‘drop down into worsted-work and tea-parties’ caricatures the drawing room’s centrality in women’s lives while simultaneously pointing to a significant concern: to identify decorative embroidery and light entertainment like tea parties as a ‘dropping down’ is to suggest that Lucilla would fall far short of her potential if she merely occupied the drawing room as most middle-class women do. Clearly, a woman who spends her life in the drawing room might easily be doomed to creating ‘lasting examples of killed time’ by perpetually doing worsted-work with no apparent purpose. Yet while Lucilla’s social successes demonstrate that the act of decoration need not merely fill portfolios, the novel’s own position on the value of feminine decorative work seems ambivalent. As her fa-

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ther notes, there is legitimate concern that the authority Lucilla thereby gains within her community is only a fraction of the power she might have had, ‘if she had been the boy,’ given that as a woman, she requires the financial support of a man – father or husband – in order to enable her to do anything in or for ‘society.’ Ultimately, the novel insists a reader ask: does decoration afford a woman a means to access real power, or is it only a semi-satisfying occupation for a woman who, like Lucilla, has ‘so few other outlets’ (395)? To determine what degree of power a perfectly formed drawingroom identity might afford a woman, one must interrogate the rhetoric of Victorian texts that articulate that position. That Lucilla is capable of ‘preferring her great work to her personal sentiments’ seems intended to evoke the kind of capable household management that Isabella Beeton propounded so successfully in her Book of Household Management, whose opening chapter, ‘The Mistress,’ begins: As with the commander of an army, or the leader of any enterprise, so is it with the mistress of a house. Her spirit will be seen through the whole establishment … She ought always to remember that she is the first and the last, the Alpha and the Omega in the government of her establishment; and that it is by her conduct that its whole internal policy is regulated. She is, therefore, a person of far more importance in a community than she usually thinks she is … Therefore, let each mistress always remember her responsible position, never approving a mean action, nor speaking an unrefined word. (1, 18)

While Lucilla clearly has taken to heart the notion that her conduct should provide a model of refinement in word and action, one might argue that – against Beeton’s modest claim – Lucilla has a very precise sense of her importance in her community. Indeed, this sense of her own importance is exactly what has led many readers of this novel to identify its tone as ‘mock heroic.’25 Referring to the potentially petty domestic politics of the drawing room as ‘great work,’ the narrator uses similar language throughout the novel, as Lucilla is repeatedly compared (perhaps following Beeton’s lead) to a ‘great General,’ and her plans are discussed in terms of battle strategy. However, it seems to me that to label the language of Oliphant’s narrator as mock-heroic is not just to undercut the significance of Lucilla’s vision and the complexity of Oliphant’s text but also to suggest that Beeton and her vast readership did not really believe that a woman derived substantial

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power from her position at the centre of a household. Mock-heroic language uses aggrandizing terms to describe actually quite mundane events or people, and it is typically employed as a strategy whereby the narrator takes the reader into his or her confidence at the expense of the character. A narrator would employ a mock-heroic tone in order to make the point that a character such as Lucilla has undeservedly high opinions of herself: calling Lucilla a ‘General’ would simultaneously describe her sense of her own importance and indicate to readers that we should understand that she is simply a small fish with big pretensions. Yet, given that Beeton seems thoroughly sincere in her declaration that a woman is ‘the Alpha and the Omega in the government of her establishment’ and ought to be understood as comparable to ‘the commander of an army,’ I would argue that it is important to think of Oliphant’s use of these terms with some nuance. Although identifying Lucilla as a great general or statesman must carry with it the irony that she can never actually be these things, the novel does not simply mock Lucilla’s ambitions through the use of militaristic metaphors and exaggerated descriptors like ‘great work’ to describe drawing-room machinations. Indeed, relegating the masculine metaphors used to describe Lucilla to the status of mock-heroic replicates the fate often ascribed to Lucilla’s most straightforward observations of life: people invariably take as bon mots that which she intends sincerely (such as her observation that furniture and things ‘matter a great deal’ to people’s happiness). Instead, it seems more fruitful to consider that Oliphant has a clear purpose in using language that accords all the grandeur of war and national politics to a woman who apparently remains within the parameters set by people’s prejudices. If we take such metaphors seriously, they help reveal that the position Lucilla occupies as a respectable, middle-class, domestic woman in fact makes a mockery of her talents, which deserve a far wider scope than that of a carpeted drawing room. In this regard, perhaps the most interesting trope used for Lucilla is that of ‘Queen,’ and analysis of its use helps illuminate the thorny issue of tone. Lucilla’s capacity to influence social situations quickly results in her becoming widely acknowledged as ‘queen of Carlingford’ – an apparently sincere accolade that marks her as knowing her proper place and having authority vested in her by the community (184). She is so generally acknowledged as the leader of Carlingford society that when her father dies unexpectedly and she is left suddenly in a state of genteel poverty, the town is unwilling to ‘dethrone’ her:

102 Architectural Identities They lamented, it is true, the state of chaos into which everything would fall, and the dreadful loss Miss Marjoribanks would be to society … [but] as long as she remained in Grange Lane, even though retired and in crape, the constitutional monarch was still present among her subjects; and nobody could usurp her place or show that utter indifference to her regulations which some revolutionaries had dreamed of. Such an idea would have gone direct in the face of the British Constitution, and the sense of the community would have been dead against it. (420–1)

Having attained the role of ‘constitutional monarch,’ Lucilla occupies a position beyond the challenge of any member of the community, despite the fact that the community vote of confidence placed her in this position. Invoking the ‘British Constitution’ in conjunction with the ‘sense of the community’ implies that Lucilla’s authority derives both from a political sense of legitimate leadership and from a sense that it goes against the British constitution (in the physical sense of the individual body) to breech propriety and defy ‘fair play’ by kicking Lucilla while she is down.26 Nevertheless, her position is ultimately predicated in part upon her class status. The reduced financial situation her father’s death leaves her in (due to the crash of his primary bank) in fact leads many of her friends to urge her to sell her house. She declines to do so, instead making her housekeeping much more modest, partly because she recognizes that she can only retain her social power ‘as long as she remain[s] in Grange Lane’ in the very location that has helped authorize her success. Despite Lucilla’s bold efforts, however, Gail Houston and Margaret Homans both conclude that the novel ultimately undermines Lucilla’s power by labelling her a Queen of Carlingford. Houston argues that Oliphant rewrites the trope of queen famously presented in Ruskin’s ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’ by focusing the reader’s attention on ‘the material conditions of women’s lives’ rather than ‘on the spiritual power of women as metaphorical queens submissive to a priori masculine authority’ (143).27 Homans, by contrast, argues that any power available in the title Queen is diluted to nothingness by Ruskin’s call for a proliferation of domestic queens. These conflicting interpretations of the (lack of) power invoked by the image of a domestic queen are central to understanding Lucilla’s position within the novel, given the Victorian preoccupation with figuring middle-class women as queens of their domestic realms. It is undoubtedly tempting to concur that a woman in Oliphant’s position – a widow who supported an extended

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family solely on her income from writing – might find a way to challenge Ruskin’s almost certain use of the term as a palliative intended to placate middle-class women denied opportunities at real, public action. However, the means of that challenge is worth exploring in some detail. While Homans convincingly demonstrates the emptiness of the trope of Queen, due to its incessant repetition throughout the culture, I would go one step further to suggest that the term is purposefully employed by Oliphant precisely as an empty trope. Homans argues that one cannot ultimately decide what to do with the irony in this text: ‘ambiguity makes the running joke of the novel, which makes it impossible to decide whether Lucilla really thinks only about trivia or whether she is cynically manipulating the language of female domestic values … to achieve her personal ambitions’ (79). I would like to suggest that far from being mock-heroic (a term Homans employs), the novel demonstrates the irony of identifying women as domestic queens but denying them any sphere of public or political action that would enable them to utilize the qualities that term supposedly implied. The novel ultimately insists that one must decide whether Lucilla is empty-headed and obsessed with trivia or is ambitious and critical of her lot. Moreover, understanding this trope to be deployed precisely because of its emptiness illuminates how the people of Carlingford can view Lucilla as a power, while the reader simultaneously recognizes that Lucilla herself sees the relatively bankruptcy of the title Queen of Carlingford. In fact, Carlingford takes Lucilla seriously from her early moral victory over Barbara Lake and Cavendish. Throughout the novel, Lucilla adroitly manages ‘delicate matters of social politics,’ and she demonstrates the potential to be a great leader because she is able to discern the needs of her constituents (122). Thus, after nearly ten years of brilliant weekly Evenings, she comes to be uniformly considered a powerful social force and a respected social authority. Yet she laments that gender restrictions limit her ability to do more with her life. Although generally lauded as ‘queen’ of a ‘cosy empire of hospitality and kindness and talk and wit, and everything pleasant’ by the people of Carlingford, Lucilla is only somewhat satisfied by the life this insipid descriptor suggests (425). Herself implicitly critiquing the title ‘Queen,’ Lucilla recognizes that the title has enabled her influence within the community, while at the same time she remains unsatisfied by its limitations: To have the control of society in her hands was a great thing; but still the mere means, without any end, was not worth Lucilla’s while – and her

104 Architectural Identities Thursdays were almost a bore to her in her present stage of development. They occurred every week, to be sure, as usual; but the machinery was all perfect, and went on by itself, and it was not in the nature of things that such a light adjunct of existence should satisfy Lucilla … when a woman has an active mind, and still does not care for parish work, it is a little hard for her to find a ‘sphere’ … Lucilla had become conscious that her capabilities were greater than her work. She was a Power in Carlingford, and she knew it; but still there is little good in the existence of a Power unless it can be made use of for some worthy end … parish work was not much in her way, and for a woman who feels that she is a Power, there are so few other outlets. (394–5)

As Homans’s analysis of the trope might suggest, identifying her as a queen has established Lucilla as a ‘Power’ at the same time that it has limited her to a ‘light adjunct of existence’ by aligning her with every other middle-class queen and thereby circumscribing her within a domestic sphere. Although, until this point, the novel has suggested that control of one’s own place is a means to the end of controlling society, the narrator seems to be arguing here that taking the next logical step is both important and difficult for women. The ‘control of society,’ which has hitherto seemed to be Lucilla’s goal, has thus become a ‘mere means’ that serves to highlight how limited her options actually are, given that – as a middle-class ‘queen’ – she has no public scope available in which to use this control to a ‘worthy end.’ What occurs to Lucilla, and what this passage comes to defend, is that she might move from social politics into national politics by using the influence of her drawing room to help get a new member of Parliament elected for Carlingford. Notably, although the narrator argues that a woman with an ‘active mind’ might feel unduly limited by the bounds of femininity, she still invokes the idea of finding a ‘sphere’ rather than of breaking out of one. Restricted as she feels, Lucilla is careful not to reject the comfortable place offered by her class position. Her subsequent actions thus suggest that Lucilla’s story is not mock-heroic and that she might move beyond the limiting position of drawing-room queen to consider national, domestic issues of governance. Lucilla’s foray into governmental politics is impressive: she selects Mr Ashburton as the candidate who will be the next MP for Carlingford, convinces him to run, and manages his campaign so that he wins the election. Yet all the while she limits her involvement in the election to activities that might happen in her drawing room. She chooses

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the colours that will become ‘his’ (used to demonstrate support for his campaign), and makes up endless bunches of ribbons for his supporters to wear from her own stock of green and lavender silks that echo her drawing-room decor. As Elizabeth Langland notes, these ‘colors, of course, work through association, allowing him to draw upon her power in Carlingford’ – suggesting that in fact Lucilla’s political power in the town is far greater than that of the candidate whom she is promoting (167). Lucilla demonstrates this power through acts that initially seem to mark her feminine misunderstanding of the political situation. She boils his campaign platform down to the simple slogan that he is ‘the man for Carlingford’ and somewhat to his consternation convinces him to throw away his speech explaining his position on the key issues that frame the election. And in a series of conversations with the most influential men of the town, in which she claims to have understood them to promise that they will back Ashburton’s candidacy, she manages to gain crucial support for Ashburton by insinuating that no gentleman would be so duplicitous as to go back on a promise he made in a lady’s drawing room. Through her strategies, she succeeds in getting Ashburton elected despite the scepticism voiced by her father that she has created an awkward position for herself by not keeping to what he calls ‘your own place’ (357). Commenting on the fact that ‘young ladies should let these sort of things alone,’ her father argues that Lucilla’s social influence should have limits, and that extending that influence to the realm of politics is an unfeminine step beyond the boundaries of her proper place (357). Apparently to appease this potentially critical view of her involvement in the election, Lucilla repeatedly responds with, ‘I am so sorry I don’t understand politics’ when people try to engage her in speculating about the election (373). Yet as the narrator remarks, ‘What was really wanted, as Lucilla’s genius had seen at a glance, was not this or that opinion, but a good man’ (377–8). That is, Lucilla’s sense of what Ashburton should use for an election statement is precisely what the town wants to hear. Lucilla, in fact, understands politics perfectly. Certainly, her own involvement in the social life of Carlingford has been characterized by the diplomacy and flawless judgment on the subject of public taste that characterizes a good politician – so it is not surprising that she has a clear sense of what the town will want from a candidate. In fact, throughout the novel, the narrator characteristically blurs gender boundaries as if to suggest that when Carlingford wants ‘not this or that opinion, but a good man,’ Lucilla herself could, were it

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literally possible, be that man. Her leadership potential is highlighted from early in the novel, at the point when Lucilla suddenly realizes that Mr Cavendish is paying her attention, though she has little romantic interest in him: She had to consider, in the first place, her mission in Carlingford, which was more important than anything else; but though Miss Marjoribanks had vowed herself to the reorganisation of society in her native town, she had not by any means vowed that it was absolutely as Miss Marjoribanks that she was to accomplish that renovation. And then there was something in the very idea of being MP for Carlingford which moved the mind of Lucilla. It was a perfectly ideal position for a woman of her views, and seemed to offer the very field that was necessary for her ambition. (114)

One cannot help but notice that this passage grammatically implies that Lucilla would be the MP for Carlingford. In fact, the statement, ‘It was the ideal position for a woman of her views,’ refers to her position as a potential wife for Mr Cavendish, whom everyone assumes will become the MP for Carlingford when the current aged MP finally retires. In this rhetorical slippage between being and marrying the MP, readers glimpse a possibility – a sense that were things different, Lucilla would find herself in the ‘ideal position’ of holding a major political office rather than simply superintending weekly Evenings in Carlingford.28 The narrator uses a number of other means to convey the distance between Lucilla’s proper femininity and the capacities that mark her as not being fulfilled by a woman’s place. Describing Lucilla in terms associated with conventional, masculine forms of public power, the narrator uses the language of ‘genius’ or ‘young revolutionary’ (67) and masculine metaphors, such as ‘adventurous general’ and ‘accomplished warrior’ (59) or ‘king,’ to refer to Lucilla’s relationship to her growing list of ‘subjects.’ Just as the ‘strategies’ of her Thursday Evenings become clever ‘battles,’ the narrative itself reflects Lucilla’s expansion of the female sphere of the drawing room to encompass larger, public, male realms. Furthermore, her project is repeatedly linked to theories of political economy, both through her own constant explanations that her success is due to the course in political economy she studied at her boarding school and through slightly more subtle references. When Mr Cavendish, for example, praises Lucilla’s ‘statemanlike views’ and her ‘conception of politics,’ he couples that with a claim that if Lucilla can ‘make a pretty-behaved young lady out of [Barbara Lake], you will beat

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Adam Smith’ (112). Through this exchange, we are given to understand that Lucilla is updating political economy to apply it to more diverse situations.29 Her failure to raise Barbara from her class position supports the ‘natural’ class hierarchy on which Victorian theories of political economy depended, just as Lucilla’s sense of her own obligation to be the driving social force in Carlingford upholds Smith’s central tenet of political economy that if everyone in the state lives up to the obligations of his or her specific and proper place, then the state as a whole will flourish. In thus collapsing domestic and political realms, the narrator demonstrates the efficacy of Lucilla’s trajectory toward greater power and autonomy while simultaneously gesturing towards the fact that it is problematic to assume that there is a single ‘proper place’ for women. In this trajectory, I would argue that the marriage which seems to recontain Lucilla at the end of the novel is in fact her best effort at creating some ‘worthy end’ out of her social power, for she commits herself to moving out of Carlingford and into the town of Marchbank, which she claims requires reform on a scale beyond that of simply creating a social life. As the ‘first lady’ of the town, she will stand in a position to undertake charity work and social reforms that will have tangible lifestyle benefits for the working population there. Through her marriage to a wealthy and indulgent husband (her now-successful cousin Tom), who is perfectly happy to let Lucilla be the brains of the pair, she may indeed accomplish ends like those a government officer might effect through legislative reform. Implying that through her combination of class position, feminine sympathy, and social action, meaningful ends may be reached, Lucilla’s power is nevertheless qualified by the fact that her father’s death (apparently of shock over the crash of his investments) strips her of her fortune and necessitates that she marry in order to continue having any social influence. Although the marriage does not recontain her potential to challenge the boundaries of femininity, it does demonstrate that realistically her realm for active influence is limited by her gender. Although she does not exactly ‘drop down into worsted-work and tea-parties,’ she does not have the opportunity to realize the great potential she might reach if she were allowed to run for public office herself. Thus, despite the fact that the novel implies its readers should sanction Lucilla’s efforts to expand the boundaries of femininity, Lucilla herself does not seem to be ironic when she pleads with the men who insist on talking politics with her: ‘Please don’t make fun of me … as if

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anybody cared what I say about politics’ (379). This statement, far from contradicting her actions throughout the novel, sadly speaks the truth. Despite Lucilla’s influence within the town, she is ultimately ‘only’ a woman, whose voice on issues of politics matters not at all to the state. Her actions in fact match precisely Ruskin’s assessment, in ‘Of Queen’s Gardens,’ for Lucilla, as Homans notes, is ultimately relegated to a sphere of influence rather than of independent action (78). Lucilla defines herself fully by redefining the drawing-room space in active terms that capitalize on women’s social objectives, and this enables her to expand the limits of her place to a degree. Certainly her means of actively taking control of her socially sanctioned drawing room enables a level of authority beyond the restrictive interpretation often attached to the idea of being an Angel in the House. Through Lucilla, readers see that ‘when one is known’ to be a respectable middle-class woman, she can expand the boundaries of her action and authority, paradoxically by remaining quite firmly within the physical domestic boundaries a woman is supposed to occupy. Lucilla shows that a woman with a strong sense of her place may in effect take her drawing room with her wherever she goes, thereby sanctioning all of her actions. Significantly, Miss Marjoribanks implies that such moves are rather more possible than extraordinary. While Lucilla may be particularly perceptive about people’s desires, and certainly can develop her ambitions with a freedom that would not be available to women with poorer fathers or larger families requiring their attention, the narrator in fact downplays these unique aspects of Lucilla’s condition in favour of suggesting that while she might be exceptional in her talents, her practices are not utterly out of the realm of general attainability. Hence the many scenes in which we see Lucilla ‘at work’ in her drawing room reveal that she is remarkably skilled at managing her place, yet they simultaneously imply that anyone who learns from Lucilla’s efforts and is a careful observer of human nature might – in theory – achieve similar success. The reformative suggestion that derives from this architectural reading of Lucilla’s identity is that the drawing room, a woman’s place, is a space for battles – as the narrator’s repeated use of war metaphors constantly reminds us – which may include bids for power. Certainly I do not mean to suggest that Lucilla is able to break down the very real boundaries that prevented women from being able to vote, own property, or have the same professional careers as men. However, in presenting Lucilla as a role model, Miss Marjoribanks invites Victorian readers to see that even working

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within the limits of women’s legal status, a woman may expand the boundaries that she cannot break. In turn, we are forced to reconsider how we understand the limitations of occupying ‘a woman’s place.’ Creating herself carefully within the architecturally sanctioned identity provided by her drawing room, Lucilla has managed to assert the expansive nature of the boundaries of femininity without suggesting that she has forgotten the proper ideological place of women. Yet as she limits her world to this accepted feminine space, the space also comes to define and limit her within its physical boundaries. Even out of doors, the drawing room characterizes her and appropriate drawing-room concerns circumscribe the scope of her power. Lucilla herself recognizes this, as her principle of giving in to the prejudices of society clearly indicates. While Homans argues that this limitation in part derives from the diminishing power of the moniker Queen, if one looks beyond the world of the novel, Lucilla’s abilities speak louder than this trope. It is clear that her rhetoric locates her within the boundaries of feminine ideals by figuring her largely as an adviser rather than as an actor in the MP election. And while her actions and savvy suggest that far from limiting herself to ‘sweet ordering, arrangement and decision,’ she really belongs in politics herself, her future in Marchbank is only projected. In inviting us to see how politic Lucilla has always been, the narrator insinuates that there is something inherently wrong with a system that presumes that a drawing room is the only appropriate place for a woman of Lucilla’s energy. The narrative reminds us again of what she might have done ‘if she had been the boy,’ for, as the narrator observes, ‘She had come to an age at which she might have gone into Parliament herself had there been no disqualification of sex’ (394). Certainly age and sex are not the only requirements for going into Parliament, yet while Lucilla might deserve the chance to take over her father’s medical practice or go into Parliament, Oliphant highlights the fact that Lucilla’s options are limited by her gendered position: sex may not be the only requirement for public success, but it is the only one necessary to disqualify Lucilla. Moreover, this statement suggests that while the trope of middle-class queen relegates the question of women’s power to a symbolic realm (since no middle-class woman could actually be queen), the vision of a middle-class woman making forays into positions currently held by middle-class men (doctor, MP) opens up more pressing questions. Just as Oliphant demonstrates that to be a domestic queen is simply to be a figurehead of an empire whose ‘machinery …

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went on by itself,’ her novel concomitantly suggests a more pointed critique. For although Oliphant demonstrates the possibilities open to a resourceful and energetic woman, the ultimate irony of a novel that describes social events in terms that are worthy of battles as great as Waterloo should not be lost. While Lucilla partially redefines a woman’s place, she can do so, Oliphant suggests, only within the alreadyfamiliar social terms of domesticity by creating a drawing room in which she is highly active rather than merely decorative. In the explicit contrast between what Lucilla does and what she might do in other circumstances, readers are asked to critique the contradiction inherent in defining ‘power’ as successfully operating within boundaries set by others.

Earthquakes in London: Passages through One Middle-Class Home

The Domestic Interior The 1857 painting by Robert Scott Tait entitled A Chelsea Interior (figure 10) shows Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle at home in their drawing room. He wears a long smoking jacket and stands by the fire contemplating the bowl of his long white pipe; she sits, seemingly lost in thoughts of her own, behind a table piled with books and papers. A modern viewer of this painting is most likely to notice first the absolute riot of patterns that fill the room. From the geometric carpet to the flowered wallpaper to the chintz-covered sofa to the bold tablecloth, and even extending to Thomas’s dressing gown, the room is covered with patterns that harmonize in terms of colour but do little to work gracefully together to a modern sensibility. And yet this is the drawing room of which Jane was rightfully proud, having achieved its comforts largely through the labour of her own hands. She not only chose the patterns and fabrics; she sewed the couch cushions and nailed down the carpets herself. This painting offers a starting point for an in-depth look at how one couple managed to negotiate the architectural imperatives of middleclass identity not simply because it happens to feature them in a realistic and highly detailed setting that is their own home. It is interesting certainly because the details of the painting provide a glimpse of an actual domestic interior, as opposed to one created in the ideals of housekeeping guides, architectural advice books, or the fictional worlds of novels. But in addition to providing an uncommon vision of a real Victorian drawing room, this painting also offers viewers a rare glimpse of the domestic dynamics of a couple whose drawing room was a gathering

Figure 10: A Chelsea Interior, oil on canvas, Robert Scott Tait, 1857. In the Parlour at Carlyle’s House, 24 Cheyne Row, London. Reproduced courtesy of Carlyle’s House, Chelsea (The National Trust), ©NTPL/John Hammond.

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place for literary London and whose own interactions were the subject of intense curiosity in life and tremendous speculation after their deaths. Read alongside the volumes of correspondence left behind by both Jane and Thomas, this painting helps us delve into the complex lived experience of one married life and to move between the competing demands – and physical spaces – of husband and wife at home. What I find most interesting in A Chelsea Interior is the relative position of the figures themselves. Although married for over thirty years by the time this painting was undertaken, they do not appear here to be engaged with each other in any way at all. Neither looks at the other. Their lines of sight do not even cross. Her sombre black dress and the resolute placement of her chin in her hand suggest almost a refusal to look at him. And yet it is far too simple to conclude from this painting that this was a straightforward unhappy marriage. While it is plain from their correspondence that the marriage had probably more than its share of emotional difficulty, neither recent biographical studies nor the readings of the marriage produced by the Carlyles’ contemporaries have been able to show definitively whether the marriage was in the balance positive or largely dissatisfying.1 The distribution of the figures in this ‘snapshot’ of their drawing room suggests one fascinating reason why: at its core, the Carlyle relationship was one that sought to conform to Victorian conventions while simultaneously negotiating control of domestic space in ways that would seem to have been anything but conventional. Simply the fact that Thomas is packing a pipe in his wife’s drawing-room space begins to hint at the challenging of architectural boundaries that characterized their marriage and that provides, in retrospect, an excellent means of considering the implications of architectural notions of middle-class gendered identities. The marriage itself has provoked widespread speculation and has been construed in highly divergent ways at least since the death of Thomas (who survived Jane by nearly twenty years) in 1881. The huge quantity of correspondence, journals, and memoirs Jane and Thomas left behind fuelled the desire to interpret their perplexing relationship, while the public outcry over those interpretations began almost immediately after Thomas’s death, with the publication of James Anthony Froude’s editions of Thomas’s Reminiscences (1881) and Jane’s Letters and Memorials (1883). Together these volumes have been read as depicting Thomas as a domineering, exacting, difficult husband and Jane as a put-upon wife whose high-born position was forever sacrificed in keeping house for Thomas and whose intellect was stifled by his

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self-interest. Thomas’s nephew responded as quickly as possible with a counter-interpretation in his edited collection of the New Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle. (The ‘New’ in the title was something of a misnomer, as he included material from many of the same letters as had Froude, but very differently edited.) More recently, feminist scholars have taken up the cause to determine precisely how subjugated Jane actually was by her husband and his eccentricities.2 Careful consideration of interpretations of the Carlyles’ marriage, however, leads not to a definitive conclusion that one or the other side is right but rather to an observation: theirs was a relationship that played itself out in dramatic ways through their occupation of domestic space. The controversy over the Carlyles’ relationship has many complexities, most of which have been ably rehearsed by other scholars; however, one important point to note is that interpretations of the marriage have tended to be quite polarized. Margaret Oliphant – a friend of Jane’s – described Froude’s theory of the relationship as suggesting ‘that Carlyle was a sort of plowman-despot, and his wife an unwilling and resentful slave’ (‘Mrs Carlyle’ 676). Interested parties ever since have tended either to agree wholeheartedly with Froude and see Thomas as a ‘despot’ with Jane his ‘unwilling slave,’ or to take the opposite position and read Thomas as a misunderstood and brilliant man who adored his dutiful and similarly adoring wife.3 Oliphant was perhaps the most vocal contemporary to enter the fray in defence of the relationship itself – arguing that Jane was not nearly so bitter or muffled by Thomas’s greatness and that Thomas himself was a much better man, if crusty at times, than Froude made him out to be. Jane, she notes, was able to make light of almost anything, as well as to comprehend her own difficulties without over-emphasizing them, and Oliphant argues that if we were presented with a more balanced picture of the marriage, we would be able to see both Carlyles as generous and brilliant rather than simply high-strung, irritable, or put-upon.4 Oliphant characterizes the Carlyles as ‘a wonderful northern-Gothic couple, blazing off into thunder and lightening of fierce sudden wrangle, with volleys of rolling words, far too mighty for the occasion, fire and flame and the smoke of battle, and laughter ringing throughout’ (‘Mrs Carlyle’ 679) – a compelling image, surely, though one that is incredibly difficult to reconcile with the staid, detached couple Tait depicted. Against the grain of the seriousness so often highlighted in Thomas, and so clearly predominant in Tait’s painting, Oliphant’s characterization of their interactions as combustibility combined with laughter gives a reader a sense of this as a mutually volatile relation-

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ship that thrived on its own explosive nature. Perhaps most importantly, Oliphant’s juxtaposition of ‘blazing off into thunder and lightening’ with ‘laughter ringing throughout’ suggests that the marriage was ultimately not only successful but enjoyable due to the partners’ ability to be self-reflective and laugh at their own explosions. While evocative – and convincing in many respects – Oliphant’s extended discussions of the marriage often end up contradicting themselves as she variously presents the relationship as mutually satisfying (even if not a model most readers would find comfortable for themselves), as misrepresented not only by Froude, but by Thomas and Jane, and as truly detrimental to Jane. I would argue, based on considering not just others’ interpretations but also Jane’s comments on her marriage (largely contained within her voluminous correspondence), that the relationship, while certainly volatile, was both satisfying and destructive. This case study draws on the many sources that provide glimpses into the Carlyles’ lives and home in order to articulate a spatial understanding of their relationship. It is my contention that they built identities for themselves and in relation to each other through a constant redrawing of boundaries. While one might argue that most relationships require ongoing negotiation, the issue of boundaries was made literal by the Carlyles in the continuous shifting of the physical walls of their house, of their personal locations within the home, and of the hierarchy of rooms that signalled not only the progress of Thomas’s career but also their relationships to each other, to their servants, and to the world of society that entered through their front door. This case study, then, signals the value of moving through domestic spaces as a means of producing middle-class identities. It reveals the power of the Victorian middle-class home to be not just a series of spaces but a dynamic location of passageways – literal thoroughfares from drawing room to dining room, metaphoric movements between feminine pre-eminence and manly authority, consistent efforts to create fixed identities from flexible parts. In negotiating the ideological positions that play out in physical spaces, the Carlyles reveal that seeking the emotional stability of a strong sense of individual identity often requires passages through architectures of domesticity. The ‘Lion’s Wife’ Jane Welsh Carlyle was a woman who, like Lucilla Marjoribanks, may be best understood – both as an individual and in terms of her relationships to others – in the context of her drawing room. As a real woman,

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and a married one, Jane provides a fascinating comparison to Lucilla both to highlight the disparities between fiction and ‘real life’ and to point out how fiction might suggest possibilities real women could find satisfying. On one hand, Lucilla’s emphasis on the decorative and hostessing aspects of middle-class femininity elides the fact that a household with a celebrated and temperamental cook and a long-time faithful butler must certainly employ three or four other female domestics to undertake the dirty household chores. Indeed, the one brief mention of any other servant in the Marjoribanks house bolsters an idealized representation of middle-class womanhood, perpetuating the fantasy that Lucilla’s household flourishes without multiple servants, and yet she remains beyond the physical labour that goes into creating a middle-class home. Nonetheless, Lucilla’s dissatisfaction with her role does realistically emphasize the difficulties for a highly intelligent woman to find complete happiness in the quotidian challenges of housekeeping. In Jane Carlyle, one finds a representative real-life example both of the tremendous physical labour demanded of so many women to maintain a respectable home and of the boredom plaguing an intelligent woman thus situated. An examination of Jane’s life consequently reveals both the value of fiction for suggesting possibilities to women and the lived complications that make these possibilities difficult to achieve. The Carlyles lived at the same address in London for their entire married life. From 1834 until 1852 they had a somewhat uncertain lease (in the sense that it might be given up by the landlord with relatively little notice). In 1852, Jane negotiated a thirty-one-year lease that bound the landlord to them but enabled them to leave any time they chose (only Jane could have managed such a thing!), and that fixed the rent at the £35 per year that they had been paying because they also anticipated personal outlay for extensive renovations. Although they had made some big changes in the 1840s, once they were certain of retaining the house long-term, they began more major investments in it, rearranging walls and eventually adding a ‘sound-proof room’ at the top of the house for Thomas’s study. In the end, their improvements to the house took them nearly two decades. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, one of the most constantly recurring themes in reading Jane’s letters is the regular ‘earthquakings’ (as she called them) of home renovations. These were not just spring cleanings; these involved tearing down walls, changing the size of chimneys, laying new floors, padding window shutters, repainting (which meant sanding off all the old paint and varnish with pumice stones) and repapering, adding on new rooms, and reconfiguring others.

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Perhaps most notable about the many improvements undertaken at 5 Cheyne Row during the Carlyles’ occupancy is that nearly all of them were done primarily to benefit Thomas and often at the expense of Jane. This is not to say, of course, that she never had her own bedroom refurbished or never sat in the newly redecorated drawing room. However, in a managerial sense, in terms of sheer physical labour, and in a spatial sense, Jane made almost continual sacrifices in order to try to accommodate the needs and desires of her exacting husband. As we shall see, however, despite the ways in which the basic facts of spatial allocation and accommodation would seem to support the ‘despot/slave’ reading of their relationship – not least of which was Thomas’s periodic appropriation of Jane’s drawing room – Jane in fact managed in fascinating ways to construct a substantial identity for herself through these ‘earthquakings.’ In every sense of the word, Jane was the manager of all of renovation undertakings. It was she who negotiated advantageous contracts with the landlord to compensate for upcoming household improvements. By contrast, Thomas typically went out of town during these upheavals, leaving his wife to supervise what she called ‘workmen who spend three-fourths of their time in consulting how the work should be done, and in going out and in after “beer”’ (Carlyle, Letters 1: 315). Froude clearly viewed this as an unconscionable abandonment by Thomas of a man’s proper duties at home. In preparing her letters for publication, Froude added head notes of his own, such as this short one to the 1843 renovations: ‘The house in Cheyne Row requiring paint and other readjustments, Carlyle had gone on a visit to Wales, leaving his wife to endure the confusion and superintend the workmen, alone with her maid’ (1: 112). Alexander Carlyle objected strongly to Froude’s editorial notes and wrote rebuttals to many of them in his collection of Jane’s letters. On this particular note, Alexander Carlyle’s response extends to several pages in which he claims that Jane chose to stay home and preferred to have her husband away during renovations for convenience. Although he extracted from many of the same letters as did Froude, Carlyle left out many of the hilarious and inflammatory passages about how much work Jane was doing, and retained only portions in which she addresses her husband in affectionate, complimentary terms – a fact that makes very clear the degree to which the ‘truth’ of this relationship was at the mercy of biased editorship from the beginning. The question of whether Jane was unduly burdened by or truly enjoyed these renovations and her heavy responsibilities during them may be best answered by recourse to her own words. Of the 1843 earth-

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quaking, she notes: ‘Our house has for a fortnight back been a house possessed by seven devils! a painter, two carpenters, a paper-hanger, two nondescript apprentice-lads, and “a spy;” all playing the devil to the utmost of their powers; hurrying and scurrying “upstairs, downstairs, and in my lady’s chamber!” affording the liveliest image of a sacked city!’ (1: 115). Her juxtaposition of ‘seven devils’ with nursery rhyme extracts and her description of a ‘sacked city’ as a lively place to be are more than just rhetorical excellencies. Such descriptions demonstrate her linguistic precision, for in this single sentence, she conveys the humour within the chaos, and captures how precisely one may be bedevilled by those voluntarily invited into one’s home. With the entire house ‘possessed’ by devils, Jane is neither terrified nor despondent, overwhelmed nor abashed. She is over-run but not daunted and in fact seems to find their destruction as amusing as it is disorienting. Having given over her home to their ‘powers,’ she retains a healthy sense of humour that belies Froude’s long-suffering wife interpretation, even as the helplessness of being ‘possessed’ suggests that Alexander Carlyle’s expression of her preference to remain in the midst of all this is also an exaggeration. Such descriptions, moreover, add piquancy to the question of the degree of power a woman might claim through the processes of decoration. In many respects, Jane’s experiences reveal that a woman’s efforts to establish her authority though careful control of her drawing-room space are more likely to suffer through the process of renovation than otherwise. As Jane demonstrates, a woman’s authority or decorative power extends only so far as the workmen she superintends are organized. In 1852, she wrote to Thomas of one horrific day: After breakfast I fell to clearing out the front bedroom for the bricklayers, removing everything into your room. When I had just finished, a wildlooking stranger, with a paper cap, rushed up the stairs, three steps at a time, and told me he was ‘sent by Mr Morgan [the builder] to get on with the painting of Mr Carlyle’s bedroom during his absence!’ I was so taken by surprise that I did not feel at first to have any choice in the matter, and told him he must wait two hours till all that furniture was taken – somewhere … [Realizing she did have a choice, she suggested the painter start in her room instead.] I cleared myself a road into your bedroom, and fell to moving all the things of mine up there also. Certainly no lady in London did such a hard day’s work … I never went out till ten at night, when I took a turn or two on Battersea Bridge, without having my throat cut …

Passages through One Middle-Class Home 119 [After her nearly sleepless night] Mr Morgan came after breakfast, and settled to take up the floor in your bedroom at once. So to-day all the things have had to be moved out again down to my bedroom, and the painter put off. (1: 317)

The comedy of errors in communication, wryly punctuated by her offhand comment that she has managed to take a brief late-night walk ‘without having my throat cut’ highlights Jane’s ability to make light of the difficulties of managing inefficient workmen. Yet while Jane’s patience and good humour about all of this are admirable, it is nonetheless the case that her observations qualify the apparent ease with which Lucilla Marjoribanks chose fabrics and commanded workmen. It seems impossible that Lucilla ever could have felt, as Jane did, ‘so taken by surprise that I did not feel at first to have any choice in the matter.’ Similarly, the redecoration that for Lucilla is more a cause for excitement than anything else becomes for Jane a very real drudgery the likes of which ‘no lady in London’ might be expected to undertake. Jane shows herself superior to the chaos, able to laugh at it as well as superintend the work that finally moves forward, and Thomas, for his part, seems to have appreciated her efforts – at least in the abstract. His head note regarding the 1852 renovations reads: ‘My own little heroine was manager, eye, inventress, commandress, guiding head and soul of everything; and made (witness this drawing room and compare it with the original, i.e. with every other in the street) a real triumph of what without her would have been a puddle of wasteful failure. She feared no toil howsoever unfit for her, had a marked “talent in architecture” too – in fact, the universal talent of applying intellect, veracity, and courage to things gone awry for want of those qualities. My noble darling!’ (1: 314–15). Despite this lavish praise, there is something somewhat farcical in his description of her as a ‘noble darling’ and her work as being ‘guiding head and soul of everything,’ for both imply she is a manager who need never dirty her own hands. While he alludes to toil ‘unfit for her,’ this passage never explicitly mentions her physical labour, preferring instead to characterize her as a Ruskinian Queen, a Beeton General, a Patmore Angel who can make ‘a real triumph of what without her would have been a puddle of wasteful failure.’ In focusing his head note on the feminine drawing room, without mentioning Jane’s physical labour or the simultaneous renovations to other spaces, Thomas directs a reader to think of Jane as a hands-off manager whose job is to ‘keep the workmen from falling into continual mistakes,’ there-

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by sidestepping the fact that she also ‘run[s] about in the great heat, carrying my furniture in my arms from one room to another’ (1: 315). It was precisely this sort of description of Jane that Oliphant found so problematic in Thomas’s writings about his wife. Oliphant argues that he almost continually referred to Jane in affectionate, often diminutive, and stereotypically feminine terms that, while perhaps lovingly intended, are unappreciative of her sharper character and unrepresentative of her energy. Oliphant argues that ‘to many of those who loved her there must be a painful want of harmony between the woman they knew … with her swift caustic wit, her relentless insight, and potent humour – and all those gentle epithets of tenderness, and the pretty air of a domestic idol, a wife always enshrined and beautiful’ (‘Thomas Carlyle’ 486). Reading Jane’s own letters demonstrates that she is anything but an angel of fragile femininity spending her days cultivating ‘the pretty air of a domestic idol.’ Throughout discussion of the earthquakings, Jane’s actions and words defy Thomas’s interpretation of her as decorative overseer and challenge Ruskin’s notion that man ‘is eminently the doer’ (Ruskin 59). There is no question that Jane is the primary ‘doer’ in all these renovations, and it is notable that her letters resist being associated only with the work of drawing-room decoration. In defining the boundaries of their relationship – insisting on what Jane once referred to as her ‘I-ety’ – Jane writes often in implicit response to Thomas’s sense of her as ‘my own little heroine.’ Throughout all of the earthquakings, there is a recurrent emphasis on the tremendous physical labour Jane undertook. It was not just on one occasion that ‘no lady in London’ worked as she did: in addition to moving furniture and cleaning up after workmen who seemed continually to fall through the ceiling from stepping on lath as though it were beams, Jane nailed down carpets, sewed by hand covers for all the drawing-room furniture, made and covered the cushions for the new couch, and undertook all sorts of decorative projects. In 1843, she wrote: I caught a fine rheumatism in the back of my head and shoulders – in consequence of spending a whole forenoon in papering the broken parts of the plaster and all the afternoon of the same day in nailing carpets – that is a thing that Helen [the maidservant] can not do – and the hands of me are absolutely blackened and coarsified with the quantity of it I have had to transact this season … I am physically ill of the long continued discomfort and the cinderella labours in which I have had to put forth the activity of

Passages through One Middle-Class Home 121 a maid of all-work – along with the improvisation and inventive faculty of a woman of genius. The fact is I have spoiled Mr C. – I have accustomed him to have all wants supplied ‘without visible means’ until he has forgotten how much head and hands it takes to supply the common resource of a good round outlay of money. When one had not any money – it was all well – I never grudged my work – but now that we have enough to live on, it would be good sense in him to say ‘get in a carpenter to nail your carpets’ and a few other such considerate suggestions. ( I Too 121–2)

Identifying herself as ‘a woman of genius’ undertaking ‘cinderella labours,’ Jane highlights the complexity of her position. She has all the ‘improvisation and inventive faculty’ of the Ruskinian Queen Carlyle assumes she is yet has had a financial position (married to a rising writer) that has left her undertaking ‘the activity of a maid of all-work.’ This passage highlights a particular problem with the domestic associations of women: having ‘spoiled Mr C.’ with her consummate skill at managing on little, Jane has created her own dilemma of a husband who has no idea of, or willfully ignores, her excessive manual labour. ‘Physically ill’ and with hands ‘absolutely blackened and coarsified,’ Jane occupies a position that is ironically threatening to itself: her middle-class housewife’s body begins to deconstruct itself into a working-class one. Her intellectually focused husband never stops to think about how these improvements happen, nor how they are writ on her body. Indeed, his introduction to her in the first note of the Letters and Memorials reads in part (on their first setting up house): ‘In about a week (it seems to me) all was swept and garnished, fairly habitable: and continued incessantly to get itself polished, civilized, and beautified to a degree that surprised one’ (1: 1). The passive construction with which he describes Jane’s constant labour – the idea that the house manages to ‘get itself’ fixed up – has raised readers’ hackles since the 1880s and led many to conclude that he had no real appreciation for her talents. It seems not an unreasonable claim, given that nine years after her resentful comment about her husband needing to be a bit more ‘considerate’ in spending some money rather than taxing her with backbreaking work installing carpets, she is still the one who moves the furniture from room to room in order to prepare for the painters and bricklayers. Jane’s active labours – both physical and mental – to remind Thomas of her rightful position as ‘woman of genius’ rather than Cinderella met resistance not only in his idealized assumptions about her but also

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in the very walls of their home. The earthquakings routinely required her to sacrifice her spatial needs to her husband’s. It was she who had to relocate her sleeping quarters, to ‘sleep, or rather lie about, like a dog, just where I see a cleared space’ (1: 315) while the work was being done. It was she who suffered through weeks of ‘abominable’ oil-paint odours and the ‘infernal noise’ of pounding hammers, despite her predilection for headaches. Thomas left home during the chaotic periods and returned when all was put to rights, while Jane lived a displaced existence during each of these earthquakings, as the following description suggests: I have erected, with my own hands, a gipsy-tent in the garden, constructed with clothes lines, long poles, and an old brown floor cloth! under which remarkable shade I sit in an armchair at a small round table, with a hearth rug for a carpet under my feet, writing-materials, sewing-materials, and a mind superior to Fate! … Not to represent my contrivance as too perfect, I must also tell you that a strong puff of wind is apt to blow down the poles, and then the whole tent falls down on my head! (1: 115)

In this remarkable example of the portability of a woman’s drawing room, Jane’s tent stands as a testament to her strength of mind and character and her ability to compromise. Yet with drawing-room essentials transported outdoors and submitted to the curious gaze of neighbours, Jane’s precarious space, ‘erected with my own hands,’ is not simply a substitute drawing room. The ‘gipsy-tent,’ with its flimsy canvas walls and predilection for collapsing in a strong breeze, creates an apt metaphor for the permeability of Jane’s space during these periods. Nothing is hers or sacred. Whether she has workmen traipsing ‘upstairs and downstairs and in my lady’s chamber’ or curious neighbours peering over her garden walls at her odd ‘gipsy-tent’ or the tent itself collapsing regularly ‘down on my head,’ Jane during these earthquakings lives a displaced existence. Yet, ever capable of defining herself and creating spatial boundaries that reflect who she truly is, Jane retains her ‘mind superior to Fate’ and continues both her feminine sewing and her mentally engaging writing by building a new structure to house her. With carpet and worktables to simulate the drawing room, yet an air of Gypsy camp, this may in fact be the drawing room of all Jane’s iterations that best reflects her personality: it is at once ingenious, self-sufficient, and self-reflective with a large dose of irony, feminine without being bound by convention. She has a roof but no walls, a carpet but no floor,

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a drawing room because that is more proper than just residing in the garden, but a clear sense of the humour in the situation. The unconventional conventional is here housed in the outdoor-indoor space – a perfect metaphor for Jane’s capitulation and resistance to the boundaries of feminine existence. If she was physically removed from (or ‘bedevilled’ within) her own spaces during the process of renovation, Jane made much more permanent sacrifices once the renovations were complete. Consistently, it was her spaces that gave way before Thomas’s needs. The location of Thomas’s library, or working room, took precedence over everything in the house, even affording Jane only contingent access to a drawing room. When they first moved to Cheyne Row (1834), what would have been the drawing room was taken for Thomas’s study. In May 1843, he began to feel he would like to settle permanently in the house and ‘had grand plans for throwing the study and Jane’s bedroom into one large drawing room. “‘He would like,’” wrote Jane incredulously, “‘he would like,’ he says, to have a soirée now and then!! ‘once a fortnight or so’!! Is he going mad? or is it I who have been mad all this while in fancying that he disliked company – and cared nothing about ‘appearances’? … I am at my wits’ end! My bedroom turned into a drawing room – soirées once a fortnight with one maid servant? the realisation of these wild dreams is still a great way off – but I confess they appall me!”’ (qtd in Holme 64). In fact, the 1843 earthquake did not demolish Jane’s bedroom, but it is telling that Thomas felt this would be a reasonable plan, not for the purpose of giving her a larger ‘public’ space of her own but in order to satisfy his desire to circulate with brilliant friends. Throughout their marriage, the outcomes of Thomas’s efforts to overtake Jane’s drawing-room space work through the architectural boundaries of their identities in fascinating ways. In 1843, the ‘grand plans’ in fact became renovations that included removing a twentysquare-foot closet from beside the drawing-room chimney, installing more bookcases and a better fireplace grate, and refurnishing the room more in keeping with entertaining, with a pink and white wallpaper and paint combination and chintz covers on all the furniture (apparently the same decorations we see in the Tait painting). Jane did all the needlework herself. On the completion of the work, she wrote: ‘The house was approved of as much as I had flattered myself it would be – and between ourselves he would have been a monster if he had not exhibited some admiration more or less at my magnificent improvements effected at such small costs – to him. The upstairs room is now a

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really beautiful little drawing room with a sofa – easy chair – ottoman – cushions – stools – every conceivable luxury! – all covered – and all the chairs covered also – with a buff and red chintz made by my own hands!!!’ (Carlyle, I Too 118–19). Jane’s many exclamation points may be forgiven through consideration of her emphasis. She has achieved ‘a really beautiful little drawing-room’ at extensive cost to herself in terms of physical labour, mental toil, and tremendous creative contrivance. She managed, for example, to ‘purchase’ the new sofa – presumably the one her dog rests on in A Chelsea Interior – at no monetary cost to them through a combination of thrifty barter, ingenious recycling of materials already at hand, expenditure of a small gift, and extensive needlework of her own. Thomas’s ignorance of the cost to Jane of these improvements might be read in the fact that she does not say that he was particularly vocal or appreciative of her efforts. He has merely proven himself not a ‘monster’ by ‘exhibit[ing] some admiration more or less.’ And, somewhat cryptically, she notes that he has ‘approved of’ the changes as much as she had expected he would – hardly a suggestion that she expected much enthusiasm. Her low expectations are confirmed by the not-subtle hint in a letter to Thomas himself shortly before his return home, that ‘Darwin “wondered if Carlyle would give admiration enough for all my needlework, &c., &c., feared not; but he would have a vague sense of comfort from it”’ (Carlyle, Letters 1: 146). Apparently Darwin was much more of a flatterer than was her husband, for Jane’s pride in the ‘really beautiful little drawing-room’ was quickly supplanted by her reference to Thomas of the room as ‘your new library’ rather than her drawing room – and indeed the plan all along had been to renew the room largely so that Thomas would have a more conducive work space (1: 126; emphasis mine). Darwin’s worry was not completely unfounded. After six weeks of renovations (completed in August) that included Jane’s perpetual ‘cinderella labours,’ it took Thomas less than a week to declare these arrangements were incompatible with his work.5 His ‘admiration more or less’ for the ‘chair-covers, sofa-covers, window curtains, &c. &c., and all the other manifest improvements into which I had put my whole genius and industry and so little money as was hardly to be conceived!’ could not be outweighed by his preoccupation with his own writing. Jane continues: ‘For three days I think his satisfaction over the rehabilitated house lasted – on the fourth, the young lady next door took a fit of practising on her accursed pianoforte, which he had quite forgotten seemingly, and he started up disenchanted in his new library, and informed

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Heaven and Earth in a peremptory manner that “there he could neither think nor live”’ (Carlyle, I Too 66). While Jane was no doubt frustrated by the fact that it took him only three days after returning home to declared he could ‘neither think nor live’ in his new library, his ‘peremptory manner’ must also have signalled her victory: rather than rage in frustration at the lack of appreciation for her hard work, Jane is somewhat vindicated in getting her drawing room back. In an apt assertion of the Victorian gendering of home spaces, Thomas is driven from his workspace by the intrusion of a piano – a particularly fitting fate, given that he has tried to appropriate his wife’s ‘rightful,’ quintessential feminine space as his own. After all, one would expect to find a piano in a drawing room and it is only because Thomas is trying to appropriate and regender the space that the piano is intrusive. If he had chosen to remake the breakfast room or some other (smaller, downstairs) space into a library, for example, the noise might have bothered him less, since the next-door (upstairs) drawing room would not share a wall with any ground-floor room in the Carlyle house. Moreover, as the following chapter will show, such a move would have succeeded in locating him in a realm more usually associated with the man of the house. Thomas’s need for an isolated workspace having thus failed to overtake the feminine drawing room, the builders were called back. Thomas’s bedroom and the spare room were to be knocked into one larger bedroom, while his small dressing closet was to be made into a little office in the hopes of shielding him from the piano. These renovations took until November. Three days after they were finally complete, the office was too small, with no space for storage, and he wanted his big library back – so Jane undertook negotiations with the piano-playing neighbours to limit their practice hours to after lunch, and Thomas returned to take over the drawing room as his library. In 1852, as Thomas’s fame increased, and they began to see the need (and have the desire) to do more grand entertaining, another round of renovations produced an even larger drawing room by shrinking the size of fireplace and hearth and narrowing Jane’s bedroom by three feet.6 The room was still to be his library during the day but was to be a room for entertaining in the evenings ‘a kind of Drawing Room according to modern ideas’ he called it (qtd in Holme 78). Again, Jane’s sacrifice of private space – this time of her bedroom – and physical labour attest to his sense of masculine prerogative within the home. Yet despite Thomas’s spatial primacy not only in his own house but also in attempting to regulate the drawing room of his neighbours, he

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seems to have thought of the drawing room as Jane’s space. This does not come through in any of Jane’s letters or the interpretations of them by Froude, Alexander Carlyle, or Thea Holme – all of whom emphasize the space as delegated to Thomas’s work rather than Jane’s entertaining. One ought not ignore, however, Jane’s incredible efforts to create this as a feminine space: witness the colour scheme and furniture and needlework of which she is so proud, and which is a prominent feature of Tait’s painting. Moreover, no one could deny the tremendous success of the social exchange Jane created within that space. Margaret Oliphant, who was a visitor to the house, characterized the drawing room in terms that seem directly to contradict the evidence in Jane and Thomas’s own letters about whose needs dominated the space. Oliphant wrote: The first sight I had of him after his wife’s death was in her drawing-room, where while she lived he was little visible, except in the evening, to chance visitors. The pretty room, a little faded, what we call old-fashioned, in subdued colour … was in deadly good order, without any of her little arrangements of chair or table, and yet was full of her still. He was seated, not in any familiar corner, but with the forlornest unaccustomedness, in the middle of it, as if to show by harsh symbol how entirely all customs were broken for him … [the last time I saw him] I found him alone, seated in that room, which to him, as to me, was still her room, and full of suggestions of her – a place in which he was still a superfluous figure, never entirely domiciled and at home. (‘Thomas Carlyle’ 493–4; emphasis mine)

The idea that he was ‘a superfluous figure, never entirely domiciled and at home’ in this space is intriguing, given the degree to which the room had served as his study for so many years. Despite his use of the space for his work, it seems to have been read, from its inception, as a feminine space. Darwin saw that in 1843 and thus emphasized Jane’s needlework, and Oliphant, who did not know or visit the Carlyles until the 1860s, concurred. (It must be noted that by the time Oliphant knew the Carlyles, Thomas finally had a purpose-built study at the top of the house, which would explain his lack of presence in the drawing room during the day.) Though Thomas might have strived for years to mark the drawing-room space for his work, his failure to be fully satisfied with it may be best understood in the context of his own normative ideas of gender: he could not both co-opt the feminine drawing room and have it as a place for quiet repose, and there is significant evidence

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that he wanted it to serve as the latter. The disjunction between his need for a work space and his desire for all that pink paint and chintz signify is thus made abundantly clear in the intrusion of the music over his intellectual pursuits, in the need for Jane to undertake negotiations to make the situation suit his needs, and in his contradictory desire to have the room serve conventional drawing-room purposes when his day’s work was done. Eventually, Thomas had his own study at the top of the house – the ‘soundproof room’ that had been dreamed of for so long having been completed in 1852 after extensive consultations about how best to accomplish its muffling properties. Beastly hot in summer and freezing in winter, not really soundproof despite all the plans, the attic study at best seems to have provided Thomas with a barely tolerable work space in order to give Jane her drawing room back. It may be tempting to read Thomas’s insistence on having an exclusive space as arrogance, but it also demonstrates both a culturally accepted sense of men’s need for such spaces within their homes and a tacit acknowledgment of Jane’s right to claim the drawing room as a space of her own. Thus a careful reconsideration of the spatial distribution throughout the house of Thomas and Jane manages to nuance a relationship – and the identities of its individuals – in ways other interpretations cannot. In 1881, on the occasion of reviewing Thomas’s Reminiscences, Oliphant had written: Carlyle did what most men – what almost every human creature does when attended by such ministry in life as hers; accepted the service and sacrifice of all her faculties which she made to him, with, at the bottom, a real understanding and appreciation no doubt, but, on the surface, a calm case of acquiescence as if it had been the most natural thing in the world. She for her part – let us not be misunderstood in saying so – contemplated him, her great companion in life, with a certain humorous curiosity not untinged with affectionate contempt and wonder that a creature so big should be at the same time so little, such a giant and commanding genius with all the same so many babyish weaknesses for which she liked him all the better! (‘Thomas Carlyle’ 486–7)

We have already seen evidence of Thomas’s ‘calm case of acquiescence as if it had been the most natural thing in the world’ in his peremptory demands to take over, abandon, reclaim, renovate, and appropriate Jane’s drawing room, and in the idealized language with which he de-

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scribes her role in all of this as overseer as if she has no investment for herself in these renovations. Indeed, Jane saw this tendency in him and viewed him at points with ‘affectionate contempt’ and quietly set about resisting the assumptions she could not live with. Ultimately, Thomas could neither occupy her space peaceably nor identify it as his own, despite the presence of his books. Her strength of character, and her incessant needlework, perhaps assured that. Much as Oliphant points out that Thomas had an ‘understanding and appreciation’ of Jane that he may not have shown, Jane also seems to have had the same. Why do all the work to create ‘a really beautiful little drawing-room’ if the space is to be a full-time masculine study? In Jane’s comment that Thomas has ‘apparently forgotten’ the piano next door, we may find an answer – for if Thomas had forgotten, Jane shows she had not. One might infer, then, that she had some idea that Thomas would not be satisfied with all of the effort to create the drawing room into his workspace. His earthquaking impulse thus becomes her opportunity to assert some boundaries of her own. Quietly creating a place for herself, one might argue, Jane served both of their interests by creating a drawing room in which he could not work but she, finally, could. For the ‘really beautiful little drawing-room’ became the gathering place for London intellectual society, helping to consolidate Thomas’s growing reputation at the same time that it provided a place for Jane to build an ‘I-ety’ for herself. Much like Lucilla Marjoribanks, Jane’s quest to satisfy her active mind took the form of creating a pre-eminent drawing room. An incomplete list derived from reading her letters shows her socializing routinely with Charles Darwin, Arthur Hugh Clough, the Macreadys (he the foremost Shakespearean actor of the day), Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, John Stuart Mill, Italian revolutionary Guiseppe Mazzini, Geraldine Jewsbury, Margaret Oliphant, the Brownings, Charles Kingsley, John Sterling (chief leader writer for The Times), Robert Owen, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and many others. She kept company with Leigh Hunt, although his wife continually borrowed everything from silver teaspoons to brass fire fenders, and her failure to return these items eventually chilled the friendship. Jane was extraordinarily social, noting in 1844 that ‘Almost every day somebody has been here’ (Carlyle, Letters 1: 169). The brilliant wit of Jane’s letters suggests how very much fun her drawing room must have been, however modest the food and entertainment in fact was.7 In 1845, for example, Lord Jeffrey and Count D’Orsay (‘the prince of critics and the prince of dandies’ as Jane identified them) were under her roof for the same evening; her account of the

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visit brings to life not only the vivacity of the meeting but also provides great sketches of the contrasts between these men (1: 169–72). Oliphant wrote of ‘her tea-parties, her evening visitors, of the little peasweep of a maid who insisted on bringing up four teacups every evening, while Mrs Carlyle and her mother were alone in the house, with a conviction, never disappointed that “the gentlemen” would drop in to use them’ (‘Mrs Carlyle’ 676). Indeed, even in the midst of the 1852 earthquake that finally culminated in the sound-proof room, Jane held tea parties with notable company. ‘Had madly invited some people to meet a man, who, after all, couldn’t come, but will come next Tuesday instead,’ she wrote. ‘There were six of us, and we spoke four languages, and it is all to be done over again on Tuesday,’ when presumably they would again cram themselves ‘all in this end of a room’ (the half of the dining room that was habitable during the earthquaking) for the brilliant talk that seemed to follow Jane everywhere (Carlyle, Letters 1: 332). Oliphant noted that ‘[Jane’s] account of what she saw and heard and did, if it were only an encounter with a washerwoman, or a tramp, would keep half-a-dozen men of letters – the best of their time, Mill, Darwin, Forster, many more – in delighted attention’ (‘Mrs Carlyle’ 675). Her capacity not only for astute observation but for witty rejoinder and self-mockery combined to make her highly sought after as a conversational companion and hostess. Perhaps most notable about all these stories is that one rarely finds her husband mentioned: he is evidently not the object of many of these people’s visits – or at best is not the only object. While Jane’s wit seems unmistakably to have been the primary attraction of her drawing room, the opportunity to socialize with all of literary London cannot have been a minor consideration. It is clear that Jane gained as substantially from this intellectual exchange as did her guests. In a particularly telling letter from 1835, Jane wrote: ‘A little exciting talk is many times, for a person of my temperament, more advantageous to bodily health than either judicious physicking or nutritious diet and good air’ (Carlyle, Letters 1: 18–19). For Jane, the brilliance of her drawing room, the talk, the luminaries who came more for her company than her husband’s, were clearly the best remedy for the physical ailments that plagued her. She suffered from debilitating headaches, respiratory illnesses, nervous ailments, and numerous other complaints that, while perhaps being partly psychosomatic, were not simply hypochondriacal. But given the overwhelmingly unanimity with which she was sought out as a conversational partner, the delightful wit of her

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letters, and the fact that social occasions seem more to have buoyed her up than sickened her further, one must conclude that however real her illnesses seemed, the opportunity to exercise her admirable mind in conversation seems to have been the best stimulant and cure for her. She wrote of one afternoon in 1845, for example, down with a headache after being at a play till midnight: ‘I was lying on the sofa, headachey … when a cab drove up. Mr Strachey? No. Alfred Tennyson alone! Actually, by a superhuman effort of coalition he had put himself into a cab, nay, brought himself away from a dinner party, and was there to smoke and talk with me! – by myself – me! … the exertion, however, of having to provide him with tea, through my own unassisted ingenuity (Helen being gone for the evening) drove away my headache; also perhaps a little feminine vanity at having inspired such a man with the energy to take a cab on his own responsibility, and to throw himself on providence for getting away again! He stayed till eleven’ (1: 196). There is a delightfully mocking quality in her description of the great poet (not yet Poet Laureate) and the false modesty that he ‘was there to smoke and talk with me!’ Yet despite this self-deprecation, it is more than just her ‘feminine vanity’ that is buoyed by this gratifying visit. Her headache is also miraculously cured by this intellectual stimulation, confirming her own prescription of ‘a little exciting talk’ as the best cure for herself. Such moments – and there are many more throughout her letters – would clearly seem to support Thea Holme’s interpretation of Jane’s primary problem: boredom. ‘Jane had suffered for years, from the frustration of an artist who cannot find his métier. The household tasks, the feverish rearranging and redecorating of the house, the fussing over “Mr C’s” meals, were not enough to occupy her quick mind: she was often bored. She knew – and Carlyle never ceased to reiterate the same philosophy – that idleness begot misery, that her salvation, mental and spiritual, lay in work. But what work?’ (50–1). Like Lucilla Marjoribanks, Jane was a ‘genius,’ a ‘Power’ with no clear outlet for her energies. Jane seems to have responded much as Lucilla did, to the extent that Jane came to view her life in terms of the everyday heroic and to create for herself a role of social significance. Unlike with Lucilla, there is a clear note of self-mockery evident in Jane’s descriptions of launching epic battles against bed bugs, strategizing over servants, and managing her husband’s moods. Her letters are filled with riveting accounts of goings-on that one could hardly imagine finding the least bit interesting, as though she could add significance to her life by creat-

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ing compelling narratives of the quotidian moments of existence.8 Even the earthquakings that physically exhausted her were valuable for the mental stimulation they provided. Of the earthquaking that yielded the ‘soundproof room’ in 1852, she wrote: ‘For my part, I am got quite used to the disturbance, and begin to like the – what shall I say? – the excitement of it. To see something going on, and to help its going on, fulfills a great want of my nature. I have prevented so many mistakes being made, and afforded so many capital suggestions, that I begin to feel rather proud of myself, and to suspect I must have been a builder in some previous state of existence’ (Carlyle, Letters 1: 324). Her desire for ‘excitement,’ her feeling ‘a great want’ that needed filling, is gratified in her sense that she is not only useful but intellectually challenged. And when ‘the excitement’ of earthquaking and visitors was not enough of a challenge, she routinely took in ‘strays’ of all kinds – pets being only the tip of the iceberg. Between September 1844 and April 1845 alone, she housed a recovering madman, sheltered a lost toddler until its mother could be located, and offered respite to a fallen woman (Letters 1: 168– 75). If Jane made excitement for herself, proved a brilliant hostess, and made her drawing room into the draw of Chelsea, she quite specifically had to do so because of her position as Thomas Carlyle’s wife. She wrote in 1841 that ‘in my character of Lion’s Wife here I have writing enough to do … Applications from young Ladies for autographs, passionate invitations to dine, announcements of inexpressible longings to drink tea with me – all that sort of thing which as a provincial girl I should have regarded perhaps as high promotion, but which at this time of day I regard as very silly and tiresome work, fritters away my time’ (I Too 64–5). In addition to feeling she must waste quantities of time satisfying the demands of adoring fans on behalf of her husband, it is well documented that she was routinely left off important invitations issued to him because she was merely the wife of the luminary and not of importance herself. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that in addition to characterizing herself as ‘the Lion’s Wife,’ she referred sarcastically to Thomas as ‘my Man-of-Genius Husband’ (Carlyle, Letters 1: 170) – a title she gives him repeatedly – and insisted that ‘when one has married a man of genius, one must take the consequences’ (2: 132). Compounding these social slights – and the personal ones from Thomas himself, who bulldozed his way through the house seeking his perfect workspace and not really considering her needs – was the fact that Thomas was also something of a baby who needed tremendous protection. Both

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in public and in private, then, she had to indulge Thomas’s needs, and thus it was in her own best interest to locate her identity in the place that would provide her the most gratification in doing so. As Margaret Oliphant explained: ‘Mrs Carlyle was her husband’s screen and shield in these respects. The sharpness of his dyspeptic constitution and irritable temper were sheathed in her determined faculty of making the best of everything. She stood between him and the world, with a steadfast guardianship that never varied. When she was gone the veil was removed, the sacred wall of the house taken down, no private outlet left, and nothing between him and the curious gazer’ (‘Thomas Carlyle’ 496). Remarkably, Oliphant here conflates Jane with the house itself, just as conduct manuals and housekeeping guides did all women. As the ideal wife, Jane has become ‘the sacred wall of the house’ standing between Thomas and the difficulties of public existence. This conflation, while it demonstrates how fully Jane embodied the feminine domestic ideal, simultaneously raises the important issue of how problematic this ideal was even for a woman who could occupy it in creative and energetic ways. One would be hard pressed to find a more witty, economical, perceptive or creative hostess than Jane Welsh Carlyle. She was such a capable, frugal household manager that ‘Geralidine Jewsbury remarked that no one who visited the Carlyles could tell whether they were poor or rich’ (Holme 146). But she was also clearly brilliant in her own right and must have felt taken for granted in her role. As Oliphant notes: Her endless energy, vivacity, and self-control, her mastery over circumstances, and undaunted acceptance for her own part in life of that mingled office of protector and dependant, which to a woman conscious of so many powers must have been sometimes bitter if sometimes also sweet – it is perhaps beyond the power of words to set fully forth. It is a position less uncommon than people are aware of; and the usual jargon about gentle wives and feminine influences is ludicrously inapplicable in cases where the strongest of qualities and the utmost force of character are called into play. (‘Thomas Carlyle’ 488)

This is a particularly striking passage in many ways, not least of which is that Oliphant uses some of the same tropes to describe Jane’s situation that she used for Lucilla Marjoribanks’s. The notion that Jane was ‘conscious of so many powers’ without an outlet, the idea that the ‘usual jargon’ for talking about women is ‘ludicrously inapplicable’ in

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Jane’s case, suggest the extent to which Jane’s tremendously successful drawing room must also be seen as a ‘light adjunct of existence’ relative to her unrealized potential. One might as easily imagine this passage continuing in the vein of the narrator of Miss Marjoribanks, identifying Jane as a statesman or a general doing battle against Thomas’s foes in the forms of roosters and piano-practising young ladies. These are precisely the types of domestic drawing-room battles Lucilla had to fight – but they have here more apparent consequence as Jane is the woman behind a famous thinker and writer. Yet while one must take seriously the drawing-room efforts of a ‘Lion’s Wife,’ Jane’s qualified success and personal frustrations suggest the degree to which Lucilla would have been dissatisfied as wife of an MP or even ‘first lady’ of Marchbank. The largely hopeful, if somewhat circumscribed, vision of expansive drawing-room possibilities that Miss Majoribanks offers a reader is in the end challenged by the realities of Jane’s life. While Jane seems clearly to have loved her husband, she also found herself underappreciated, overworked, and frustrated by her position as ‘the Lion’s Wife.’ To remedy this frustration, she sought out excitement, making her domestic life into a series of battles even when there was no need to glorify them as such, simply to create interest in her own life. There is no question that she was a brilliant hostess and that it was through that means that she kept herself reasonably fulfilled; however, she also found it necessary to take on the traditional wifely role of creating her home as a haven while not taking herself too seriously. As Oliphant notes in 1881: ‘She showed me one day a skilful arrangement of curtains, made on some long-studied scientific principle by which ‘at last’ she had succeeded in shutting out the noises, yet letting in the air. Thus she stood between him and the world, between him and all the nameless frets and inconveniences of life, and handed on to us the record of her endurance, with a humorous turn of each incident as if these were the amusements of her life. There was always a comic possibility in them in her hands’ (‘Thomas Carlyle’ 489). In this observation, we see the conjunction of an ability to run interference for her husband against the entire world, to endure despite the endless difficulties of being the wife of a famous and somewhat tortured writer, and to turn everything to humour. But while these occupations buoyed her and kept her from the dismal depression that often threatened, ‘comic possibility’ was insufficient. In ‘shutting out the noises,’ Jane also shut herself in. Her outlet in language, her bitter mockery of the real consequences of her actions, her recognition that she made no real difference except perhaps to the

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excruciatingly slow intellectual labours of her husband, all reveal her own sense of the limitations in the Victorian architecture of femininity. In many ways, then, considering the Carlyle marriage highlights the imaginative power of the drawing room to shape and delimit women’s identities. Significantly, it also introduces the difficulties of incorporating masculinity seamlessly into the domestic sphere, for – as the next chapter will show – Thomas Carlyle was not alone in trying to negotiate an ideal workspace against the boundaries of his wife’s distinctive drawing room.

3 Accommodating Masculinity: Staging Manhood in the Dining Room

The best ornament for a dining-room is a well-cooked dinner. Mrs Loftie, Epigraph, The Dining Room

Victorian ideals of domesticity figured the home as a feminized space that could provide relief from the toil of industrial progress. Fundamentally characterized as private, the value of home lay in its associations with repose and rejuvenation as well as moral strength – all qualities inextricably connected with the woman at the heart of the household. Studies of Victorian domesticity have often inadvertently replicated the feminine-domestic/masculine-public binary by assuming that to interrogate domesticity as an ideological concept primarily requires investigation of women’s lives. As such, they have demonstrated significant ways in which the middle-class home and women’s domestic labour were vital to public life, thereby problematizing the cultural assertion that labour was exclusively a male, public, paid activity, while women’s proper (private) places at home protected them from the trials of the workaday world.1 Given that the position of wife necessitates a husband, however, it is essential to an understanding of Victorian domesticity to explore the position of the man at home. John Tosh’s A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England begins to do just that. Through in-depth examinations of the lives of several middle-class men, he argues that domestic life and the concept of the ‘family man’ were central to defining Victorian middle-class manhood. However, his social history of domestic masculinity does not consider the physical spaces within the home and thus leaves open some interesting questions. Although Tosh demonstrates that between 1830 and

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1870 middle-class masculinity depended heavily on domesticity, close reading of architectural and housekeeping documents shows this to have been a complex association, vital yet hard to uphold because so many of the qualities of domesticity seemed antithetical to ideals of masculinity.2 One might reasonably ask: given that the middle-class imagination defined the home as feminine, where exactly did the properly manly Victorian man belong at home? Indeed, the only half-joking contention of the narrator in Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Cranford is that men do not belong at home at all. In the opening paragraph of the novel, readers learn: If a married couple come to settle in the town, somehow the gentleman disappears; he is either fairly frightened to death by being the only man in the Cranford evening parties, or he is accounted for by being with his regiment, his ship, or closely engaged in business all the week in the great neighboring commercial town … In short, whatever does become of the gentlemen, they are not at Cranford. What could they do if they were there? … the ladies of Cranford are quite sufficient. ‘A man,’ as one of them observed to me once, ‘is so in the way in the house!’ (1)

Cranford is a novel bound up with the problem of asserting middleclass respectability through the litmus test of good breeding, even in the face of financial impediments that belie one’s ‘true’ family status. One marker of such breeding is a fully realized sense of separate spheres. Middle-class men, this passage suggests, belong ‘engaged in business’ or the projects of empire, on ships, in the army, or otherwise occupied with nation- and fortune-building. Women are ‘quite sufficient’ for domestic tasks, both managing homes and smoothing daily life in towns. The fact that nearly all the ladies in Cranford are either widows or spinsters – that, in short, many of them do not have the option of having a man in the house – is, of course, one of the jokes here: they find it preferable to consider that which is unattainable an encumbrance rather than a lack. Significantly, the claim that a man ‘is so in the way in the house’ simultaneously reflects a prevailing uneasiness with the compatibility of ideals of domesticity and masculinity and hints at the tensions caused by the fact that while he might be ‘in the way’ there, a husband nonetheless would of course reside in the house. As a number of recent scholars have shown, the cultural imperatives of Victorian masculinity created a sometimes-contradictory set of criteria to which men were supposed to aspire.3 On the most basic level were

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the necessary differences between the respectable middle-class professional and the respectable family man: in his public, working capacity, a man would be expected to be autonomous, while in private he was defined relationally, as a husband and father. The potential for internal contradictions between, for example, the energetic, successful businessman and the drawing-room visitor whose respectability was defined through his deference to feminine authority were ostensibly resolved by delineating the man-at-work and the domestic man as two halves of the same whole. This configuration enabled him to inhabit potentially conflicting roles without being hypocritical, since different aspects of his identity would be clearly associated with different spaces.4 Under such a model, the public, working man was understood in terms of his professionalism – a trend marked by the swelling ranks of professional societies formed in the nineteenth century, including the Royal College of Surgeons (1800), the Institute of Civil Engineers (1828), or the Royal Institute of British Architects (1837).5 The domestic man was at once separate from and predicated upon his professional half; fundamentally paternal, his domestic identity included the obvious imperatives to fatherhood and being a good husband that were enhanced in large part by the fact (as Tosh has shown) that the rise of professionalization meant the removal of work from the home space. Ideal middle-class masculinity incorporated the essential traits of self-respect, autonomy, self-control, and productive work that was neither physical labour nor too closely associated with handling money, as well as a sincerity that demonstrated that a man’s identity was ‘genuine’ rather than a performance.6 All of these qualities created a sort of tender patriarch, a man whose word was his bond, who in public could be trusted both to forward capitalist enterprise and to treat his inferiors with compassion (without letting them forget natural class hierarchies), and who could in private be a benevolent father and husband, ruling with detachment. Although the characteristics of ideal manhood may seem largely complementary rather than conflicted, it is significant that masculinity varied spatially to a degree unheard of for femininity. Within a system of ‘separate spheres,’ the paradox of defining masculinity significantly through domesticity meant that certain home spaces were coded as masculine places.7 In many respects, the proper place of a man at home was a fundamentally private one – a library or office to which he could retreat undisturbed and which implicitly confirmed his professional self-reliance while not undermining his wife’s authority over servants, children, or her drawing room. While such gender divisions offered a

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spatial means of domesticating masculinity, defining the proper place for men at home was complicated by the fact that a middle-class home was both a place for private refuge and simultaneously the locus for public displays of middle-class respectability.8 Just as proper femininity was confirmed through exhibitions of a woman’s skill in her drawing room, a display of masculinity was required to complete the picture of proper domesticity. For this reason, locating men only in the doubly private place(s) of home office or home library was an insufficient solution to an architecture of masculinity that demanded both professional and paternal qualifications. Interestingly, the domestic space most wholly given over to the problem of accommodating masculinity was one readers today might immediately assume would be associated with women: the dining room. While capitalizing on the conventions of hostessing could, as we have seen in Miss Marjoribanks’s drawing room, lead a woman to substantial influence within her own community, the supreme authority of the hostess did not extend to the dining room. In fact, the dining room was associated with masculinity in much the same way that the drawing room signified and defined femininity. In texts ranging from housekeeping guides like Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management to architectural treatises such as Robert Kerr’s The Gentleman’s House to novels, assertions of masculinity are carefully tied to male positioning within the family dining room. These visions of Victorian domestic life define the properly manly man and the respectable middle-class dining room in strikingly similar terms, and they often present men’s behaviour in their dining rooms as a means of evaluating their manhood. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1864–5), although a novel that announces its focus on women’s domestic and familial roles from its very title, engages in precisely these issues. Tracing the growth to maturity of Molly Gibson, her developing notions of proper femininity, and her relationships with her stepmother and stepsister, the novel has routinely been read in terms of its representation of feminine domesticity. Yet the primary plot line focuses not just on Molly and the women in her life; in fact, it is as substantially about masculinity as it is about femininity, for the story follows the struggles of the widowed Mr Gibson, a respected country surgeon, to raise his teenage daughter. Deeply concerned with the relationship between professionalism and masculinity, the novel explores how Victorian manliness – inflected with class position and career as much as ‘birth’ or ‘breeding’ – was importantly bound to notions of domesticity. Offering a picture of the conflicted

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position of a man at the centre of a feminized domestic realm, Gibson’s efforts to reconcile his nurturing parental role with his desire to assert his middle-class professional position are a fascinating representation of the complexities of staging Victorian masculinity.9 Taken together with architectural documents, Gaskell’s novel and the example of Linley Sambourne’s Kensington home create a rich field through which to explore the architectural and social implications of the gendered dining room and, more broadly, the relationship between masculinity and domesticity.10 For Linley Sambourne, the prominent Punch cartoonist, the contradictions and tensions I have been identifying do not seem to have posed particular problems. By all accounts, he was an ideal family man. Shirley Nicholson notes in her book on the Sambourne house and their married life: ‘Several of Linley’s friends have left on record his skill with little children – how he had an inexhaustible store of jokes and games for their amusement, and a natural sympathy with their joys and sorrows’ (40).11 He also seems to have been consummate as a professional – turning out wonderful regular work, entertaining his colleagues well, becoming highly respected and well-recognized socially and professionally. Yet despite the fact that he can be characterized as an unqualified success in many ways, a closer investigation of his domestic life reveals the degree to which architectural imperatives shaped middle-class masculinity, and the ways in which men’s identities were both complemented and complicated by their relationships to the domestic sphere. For while the proper dining room confirmed masculine respectability, in fact the space was not as easily gendered as was the drawing room. Although explicitly coded and understood as a masculine space, the well-planned dining room could not necessarily ensure proper manliness, for much of the onus for creating this masculine place lay with the woman of the house. The paradox of this fact is central to understanding masculinity in the context of domesticity, for in the public arena manliness was particularly valued for having been achieved through constant effort. That is, while the Victorian middle classes conceptualized femininity as the ‘natural’ manifestation of being female, Herbert Sussman has shown that manliness was distinctly unnatural, a quality demanding self-control, vigilant monitoring of one’s sexuality, and careful training. Proper masculinity, in short, was something that had to be worked for, earned, and carefully maintained.12 In the private sphere, however, this emphasis on effort had to be elided, for it was largely women who undertook the work of creating a respectable middle-class home. Hence, when Mrs

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Loftie opens her book on creating the ideal dining room (part of Macmillan’s Art at Home series) with the aphorism that ‘the best ornament for a dining room is a well-cooked dinner,’ the self-apparent nature of this claim begs the question: what exactly did it take to achieve something so seemingly banal as a good dinner? Such a dinner depended on having a good cook, of course, which was predicated on having a good household manager in the wife who would hire and superintend the cook, as well as having a good provider in the husband who would finance these endeavours. As she elides the matrix of work, privacy, and domestic economy required to produce the ‘ornament’ of a ‘wellcooked dinner’ in a Victorian middle-class dining room, Loftie more importantly sidesteps the fact that ‘a well-cooked dinner’ carried deep cultural import for the man of the house. It enabled others to gauge his success on the basis of a generous table and brilliant dinner parties. And it tacitly credited to his manhood that which was quietly managed through the efforts of his wife. It is to the dining room that we must turn, then, to analyse the tensions inherent in producing a domestic display of masculinity that depended heavily on a man choosing well in his wife and then prudently refraining from interfering in what were properly her departments within the home. Creating a Place of ‘Masculine Importance’ The move of business out of the home and into public offices meant that by the 1830s, middle-class men rarely worked from home during the day (doctors and clergymen with home-based offices were the obvious exception).13 The inadvertent consequence of this move was that men might be rendered ‘outsiders’ in the feminized domestic space, even while the cultural idea of a man’s home as his castle asserted his domestic presence, and countless advice texts for women advocated treating husbands with great deference at home. The writer of Home Truths for Home Peace (1851) cautions women that far beyond drawing-room or spare-room, and important above almost every other arrangement in your establishment, is the consecration of one room to the especial use of the master of the house … A sound and a lovely policy is that which secures to a husband, in his own family, certain privileges and comforts that he can never find elsewhere … A room to himself – a home within his home – is such a privilege, and few sacrifices are too great, if they may procure it for him; few advantages are great enough, if

Staging Manhood in the Dining Room 141 they must take it from him; it will keep him from clubs and card parties abroad, or from being ‘always about’ at home; it will prove a sanctuary from the numerous petty domestic troubles and annoyances that, as few men can comprehend or tolerate, it is much better they should not see. (67)

Implying that women are generally aware of how intrusive and troublesome it can be to have a man ‘“always about” at home,’ this writer at once suggests that a man ought to be under the moral influence of home (rather than at ‘clubs and card parties abroad’) and that he requires the segregated ‘sanctuary’ of ‘a home within his home.’ Describing as a ‘sound and lovely policy’ the creation of private spaces within the already-private home, the author of this advice book seems to see nothing out of the ordinary in making the leap from constructing domesticity as a place of privilege and comfort to asserting that the domestic world should in fact as carefully contain masculinity within its walls as we typically understand femininity to have been contained. Yet, the notion that ‘numerous petty domestic troubles and annoyances’ would burden a man also indicates the difficulty of living up to this ‘lovely policy.’ Just as the author disparages a home offering so little comfort to its patriarch that he is always leaving it for his club or other ‘masculine’ places, so s/he tacitly admits a man’s presence might hinder the goings-on of the household. Thus, reading between the lines here suggests that really the most ‘lovely policy’ is to understand that both men and women will benefit from the seclusion of masculinity from domesticity and of domesticity from the man of the house. Paradoxically, then, locating a man’s proper place at home might most succinctly mean creating a space in which he is enabled to escape domesticity. Considering the common layout of the Victorian middle-class home illustrates how gendered spaces carved out a place for the man at home. Compare the ground-floor plan of figure 11 (Wheeler) with that in Walsh’s house (figure 3) or the plan by Robert Kerr (figure 12). Although the overall footprint of the houses differs greatly in size, the plans are remarkably similar in both their distribution of space and the size of the dining room. Based on the numbers given on the plans, and assuming the plans are drawn to scale, the exterior dimensions (footprints) of the houses are approximately: 22′ wide × 60′ deep (Wheeler); 28′ wide × 47′ deep (Walsh); 35′ wide × 75′ deep (Kerr, not including the terrace or stable block). Although Kerr’s plan is nearly twice the size of the others, the dining rooms in the three houses are strikingly more similar in size than are the overall footprints of the homes; they are also

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much larger than any other room on the ground floor. At 22′ wide × 23′ deep (Wheeler); 20′ wide × 16′6″ deep (Walsh); 30′ wide × 20′ deep (Kerr), the stately dimensions of these dining rooms signal the importance of the space for confirming a family’s class position and adding perhaps subconsciously to the sense of male priority. With the chairs not in use for a particular meal pushed against the wall, several feet of clearance around the table on all sides to accommodate servants’ passage, and additional room for the sideboard and fireplace(s), the ideal room would have to be constructed on nearly ‘massive’ principles. To allow the dining room to attain its necessary scope, architects such as Richard Brown suggested that in a modest house, one might narrow the passageways or morning room (significantly, the only ground-floor spaces not automatically coded masculine). The exact dimensions of this rectangular room would be chosen according to the largest number of people one might normally be expected to accommodate at dinner parties. Architectural treatises generally seem to consider something around 18′ × 21′ convenient for family uses.14 Such a room could accommodate about sixteen guests comfortably, an important factor to consider given that ladies never dined ‘out’ except at a friend’s house. It was not easy, however, for a modest middle-class budget to stretch to produce a dining room that would accommodate so many people. The pathetic and comic nature of overreaching in trying to give return dinners is drawn to perfection in W.M. Thackeray’s ‘A Little Dinner at Timmins’s,’ originally published in Punch from May to July 1848. Poor Rosa Timmins faces a series of crises – from her own cook being unable to feed the crowd she has invited to the extra servants hired for the occasion leaving baskets of dirty dishes on the stairs for the after-dinner guests to trip over – because she insists on a dinner party much too large for their house. At one point, the dour head waiter hired for the occasion points out to Rosa Timmins and her mother that they have absurdly over-reached by inviting twenty local dignitaries to the dinner. ‘“We can’t hold more than heighteen,”’ at the table, he announces, ‘“and then each person's helbows will be into his neighbor’s cheer … Look and see, ladies,” he said, inducting them into the dining-room: “there’s the room, there’s the table laid for heighteen, and I defy you to squeege in more.”’ Although the fun in the story lies in mocking the Timminses’ failing pretensions, as with all good satire, there is a serious point at its root. The Timminses give an ‘ostentatious’ party that, the narrator tells us repeatedly, is ‘quite beyond their means’ and completely offends all of their actual friends by passing them over in favour of

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Figure 11: ‘Ground Floor,’ Gervase Wheeler, The Choice of a Dwelling, p. 143.

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Figure 12: ‘Ground Floor (dining room &c),’ Robert Kerr, The Gentleman’s House, plate 44, ‘Design for a Row of London Houses.’

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inviting people with titles; the comedy of errors that ensues highlights the uncomfortable truth that it is difficult to resist equating excess with comfort or lavishness with respectability. Where the Timminses are unable to negotiate between their social aspirations, obligations, and the modesty of their housekeeping, the hospitality offered by Linley Sambourne and his wife in their Kensington home offers a positive counter-example. It may seem to a modern reader both feasible and logical to give several smaller dinner parties in order to invite in turn all the people whom one would like to host, yet the Sambournes recognized the need for a periodic larger party to give stature to their social position. The Sambourne dining table was octagonal, but Nicholson notes that ‘eight was too small a number of guests for an important dinner [so] Linley had a removable false top made for the table so that twelve people could sit down in comfort’ (124). In the notion that one would periodically be required to host an ‘important dinner’ lies the key to the Timminses’ failure. Intent on getting to know the peerage and other local figures of social importance, the Timminses focus so single-mindedly on trying to create an ‘important dinner’ that creating an expensive display takes precedence over any consideration for their guests’ comfort or happiness. In setting a table at which ‘each person's helbows will be into his neighbor’s cheer,’ they fail signally to offer true hospitality to their guests because they are hoping that the simple fact of having titled people at their dinner party – no matter how they have to be wedged into the far-too-small dining room – will give them standing. Sambourne and his wife, by contrast, really did move in somewhat exclusive circles; but as a young couple whose family connections were greater than their actual fortune, their ‘own entertaining remained on a fairly modest scale,’ Nicholson writes, and ‘the hospitality they dispensed fell very far short of that which they received’ (123). Interestingly, the Sambourne example proves not just that the Timminses are misguided in their pretensions but that in fact precisely the opposite strategy would be far more successful. While the Sambournes attended extravagant balls and parties at the homes of their wealthier (even titled) friends, those same people were gracious about attending the modest and intimate dinners that were all the Sambournes could give in return. Certainly, Linley’s professional reputation made him increasingly famous, and his fame – no doubt in conjunction with the renowned liveliness of both his and Marion’s presence at a party – made them desirable guests. Yet the fact that they were not tremendously wealthy was inconsequential given that they were amusing, and, more

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importantly, that they had the common sense to give unpretentious return entertainments: even their occasional ‘important dinners’ are on a smaller scale than the absurd Timminses attempt. While the role of the dining room is in many respects, then, like that of the drawing room in confirming the social position of the family, the primacy of the dining room on the ground floor also strongly confirms the association of dining with manhood. In a general sense, the ground floor of a house in town was gendered masculine, a fact perhaps explained by the proximity of its rooms with the commerce of the street, as women were not expected to require such easy and regular passage into the world beyond the home. Yet while compartmentalizing the middle-class home rendered the drawing room the unquestioned seat of female prerogative, there was no single male counterpart to this room. The dining room served as his locale for entertaining, the place in which domestic masculinity was on display through a man’s choice of wines and the generosity of his meals. In the study and/or library, a man would undertake correspondence, receive morning visitors if he worked from home, deal with tradesmen or business associates, and perhaps spend long evenings smoking with friends.15 Yet this apparent separation of rooms for business from those for pleasure was not rigid: men smoked with friends in the study, and the dining room served as both the locus of male hospitality and, according to architect Robert Kerr, was also ‘always subject to be used during the morning as a waiting-room for the gentleman’s visitors’ (98). In associating the dining room with men’s business endeavours, as well as domestic concerns, the space itself was clearly understood to be aligned with male prerogatives. Moreover, the study, ostensibly a workspace, was in fact a particularly private place; one finds injunctions in books of all types warning women not to enter, let alone clean, the study without explicit permission. Indeed, many architects recommended interconnecting the dining room, study, and library, ‘for greater privacy and quiet’ (Webster 19) and, implicitly, to make concrete the intersection of their purposes.16 In theory, then, the interconnected nature of ground-floor spaces allowed a man or his guests to move freely in and out of his private rooms and library, simultaneously discouraging the presence of women and helping identify the more ‘public’ dining room as a masculine place. While Kerr notes that ‘the ladies are not exactly excluded’ from ground-floor rooms, the ideal architecture of these places would do little to encourage their inclusion either (116). Reinforcing cultural hierarchies of

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power primarily, as Daphne Spain argues, through controlling access to knowledge, architects signified that the collected knowledge housed in the library was the province of men.17 Wheeler’s and Richardson’s ground-floor plans show a ‘fire proof safe’ or ‘strong room’ accessible only through the library, emphasizing the fact that married women, as femme covert, were not legally capable of making a contract and thus would presumably have no need for a document repository. Bookshelves in women’s bedrooms, schoolrooms, and the drawing room rendered it unnecessary for the ladies of the house to require the library regularly. And architectural directions for a ‘separate external approach, so as not necessarily to use the main hall for access’ to a man’s study or library imply that men had a right of private entry to domestic places that signify knowledge (Wheeler 217). Notably, none of the plans shown here manage to provide this separate entrance, indicating the disjunction between architectural ideals and the practicalities of designing in a relatively modest space. While the library and study are perhaps the most obviously masculine spaces in the home, they are of less interest here precisely because of their relative privacy. The dining room, as a space designed not just for family eating but also for displays of domestic competence through the medium of the dinner party, is a particularly fruitful space in which to explore some of the more subtle ways that the architecture of domesticity reinforced masculine prerogative. Linking the respectability of the family with the figure whose finances make that respectability possible, a wide range of advice texts equally imply that the dining room is the proper location to showcase men’s monetary contributions to the family’s class status, as opposed to the drawing room, in which a woman’s moral and social contributions are most prominent. The decor of the ground floor consequently was designed to emphasize masculine authority. A presumably fictionalized, somewhat didactic conversation about household furnishings, published in Macmillans, speaks in favour of ‘a fine sideboard, covered with costly plate, because it looks substantial … a good dining-table, surrounded with comfortable chairs, because it looks hospitable … It is right, no doubt, for ladies to have elegance in their drawing-rooms, but that is beyond my province. A man’s study or place of business should always be orderly and wellarranged, but it need not be elegant’ (Hamerton 140). In arguing that the ‘elegance’ of the upper floor may be opposed to the practicality of the lower, and rhetorically slipping between dining room and rooms for business, Hamerton indicates that the gender-based prerogatives

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that mark the ground floor should be carried through in their decoration. The example provided by Dickens’s first house with his young wife Catherine demonstrates precisely this preference. Though the establishment was certainly very modest by comparison to his later homes, the house at 48 Doughty Street (currently, the Dickens House Museum) featured a heavy oak sideboard in the dining room, while the drawing-room furniture was rosewood and cane and the woodwork was painted a pale lilac.18 In fact, Charles Eastlake, J.J. Stevenson, and Gervase Wheeler echo this assumption, perhaps most succinctly captured by Kerr’s description of the ideal dining room: The Style of finish, both for the apartment itself and for the furniture, is always somewhat massive and simple; on the principle, perhaps of conformity with the substantial pretensions of both English character and English fare. It need not be sombre or dull, or indeed devoid of cheerfulness in any way; but so far as forms, colours, and arrangements can produce such a result, the whole appearance of the room ought to be that of masculine importance. (94)

Emphasizing the ‘masculine importance’ that should be achieved through the use of particular decor, Kerr’s language reiterates the sense of privilege that accompanies male primacy in the dining room. In consequence of this insistence on masculine ‘importance’ rather than feminine ‘elegance,’ Victorian dining rooms were almost invariably decorated darkly. Despite cautions against being too ‘sombre or dull,’ decoration of the dining room showed distinct preference for dark colours, heavily carved furniture, sombre decoration, and heavy drapery, as the way to create a ‘masculine’ atmosphere.19 Charles Eastlake’s influential 1868 Hints on Household Taste complains that ‘we leave a solid, gloomy, and often cumbersome class of furniture below, to find a flimsy and extravagant one above’ (75). He is not alone in criticizing the often-dismal interiors that were produced by relying on heavy crimson or green flocked papers and darkly carpeted floors. Gervase Wheeler complained in 1871 that ‘the present taste inclines too much to heavy drapery and to deep and gloomy colours’ (211). Yet despite such opinions against the gloom often created by the preference for dark, ‘solid’ dining-room decor, these authors do not challenge the notion that a dining room should be marked by furniture and hangings that imply the solid respectability of the man of the family.20 Thomas Morris asserts that the dining room should preserve its right

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‘to be grave, rich and stately, in short architectural’ (161). As the contrast between ‘architecture’ and ‘building’ was understood to indicate a distinction between an admirable, artistic edifice and a mere shelter, Morris here implies that one of the functions of the middle-class dining room is to assert a level of propriety that is backed by impressive financial means. He fits the room with an oak or marble ‘massive chimney piece’ and a grate ‘of heavier proportions than for other rooms’ (165). Heavy proportions stand metonymically for the solidity of the family of which the man is the head, on the principle that a ‘proper Dining room is a spacious and always comparatively stately apartment,’ one that studiously avoids any furniture that might ‘give the apartment the character of a Parlour’ (Kerr 91, 94). The desire to resist any hint of femininity, as signified by the rejection of the dining room’s association with a parlour, is particularly fascinating given the dining room’s use as both a stately site for public display of paterfamilial prowess and as a private space devoted to family sustenance. These principles of dining-room decoration are most easily made evident through comparison of a dining-room chimney-piece (figure 13) with the corresponding illustration of the chimney corner for the drawing room taken from the same text (figure 8). While the Garrett sisters’ Suggestions for House Decoration seems to have generally endorsed Eastlake’s aesthetic principles, there is no question that their illustration of a dining room – even in an etching – clearly carries a darker and more subdued tone than does their drawing room. Where the drawing-room fireplace is adorned with a soft, fringed cloth that masks its square lines, the corresponding dining-room chimney-piece is framed with marble that emphasises its series of hard corners. The ponderous clock, minimal mantle decorations, and straight lines of the dining room’s design contrast sharply with the softer, more inviting look created by drawingroom chairs placed at odd angles and pictures grouped in clusters that encourage closer examination. Indeed, even the winding flowers on the dining-room wallpaper are minimized by the more prominent grid on which they lie. The formal symmetry of this room, in which a matched pair of fire irons carefully flank the fireplace, and the vertical lines of the carved mantle create neat right angles with the edges of the hearth rug, creates precisely the ‘stately’ feel Kerr advocates. There is no chance, in short, that one might mistake this room for a feminine ‘Parlour.’ The character of the room having been established, texts written specifically with a female reader in mind are less invested in enumerating the ‘public’ functions of the dining room and instead spend consid-

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Figure 13: ‘Dining-Room Chimney-Piece,’ from Rhoda and Agnes Garrett, Suggestions for House Decoration, facing p. 46.

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erable time on daily questions of how to feed a family economically. Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management and J.H. Walsh’s Manual of Domestic Economy concur that an income of £500 a year is the minimum for being able to afford a full-time cook. Thus attending to the dining room meant being involved in the kitchen as well, including (for many women) overseeing preparation and doing some of the cooking. While Mrs Beeton devotes fifty pages to providing menus for dinner parties with different numbers of guests at various times of year, her chapter on dining also outlines family dinners that maximize resources through judicious and creative preparations of leftovers. Other texts aimed at women emphasize pre-dinner work rather than the dinner-time entertaining, suggesting through their focus on decoration and domestic economy that the act of entertaining one’s dinner guests is largely the role of the man of the house. Taken together with the other information she provides, Beeton’s note that ‘it is [a wife’s] duty to make her guests feel happy, comfortable, and quite at their ease’ implies that making guests feel ‘comfortable’ is primarily a factor of how well a woman has planned ahead of time (12). As the minutiae of dining preparation assume a tremendous level of significance, women’s work in the dining room reveals the interconnected nature of femininity and masculinity within the home. Although women’s domestic labour has been widely examined in terms of their power within the household, there has been little attention to how women’s focus on domestic details was to produce a foundation conducive to a man’s successful performance of his masculinity.21 As Mrs Loftie explains, however, even the apparently trivial choice of a carving knife and fork, if properly considered, may help prevent a shy man from being overly embarrassed while carving the joint (93). In the Sambourne house, for example, Linley’s professional reputation was one salient factor in securing their social circle; however, Marion’s role was hardly insubstantial and underscores the degree to which a woman’s work was vital in creating a manly reputation for her husband. She came from a very wealthy family, and in the early years of their marriage her background certainly helped confirm Linley as an up-and-coming man to be taken seriously socially. Beyond being an advantageous connection for Linley, however, the marriage also created precisely the team that was necessary for maximum respectability, as the process of giving dinners reveals. ‘These larger dinners were very special occasions, needing a lot of thought and only taking place a few times in the year,’ Shirley Nicholson notes; ‘Linley drew a seating plan

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in his diary each time, listing the wines, and made comments on the guests and the carefully chosen menu’ (124). The menus themselves were Marion’s design (and did not change much even as the Sambourne’s social stature and income grew), and she took on the majority of responsibilities for giving these dinners. Unlike Rosa Timmins, who does not understand the menu she selects and cannot keep the servants in order during the preparation phases, Marion Sambourne understood her tasks thoroughly and carefully orchestrated every aspect of preparing the dinner parties they gave. From Marion’s diaries, it is clear that she arranged the invitation lists, set the menu, and did the shopping for all the special, fancy ingredients for dinner parties. ‘Providing the wine was Linley’s department’ (Nicholson 71). She also would have hired serving staff and superintended cooking and other preparatory tasks.22 The work of the cook and the parlourmaid would have been prodigious given that the Sambournes gave six or more ‘important’ dinner parties in just a few months of the year, several particularly in June as they spent a lot of time out of London during the summer. Marion’s work lay precisely on the public-private boundary that the dining room facilitated. Indeed, we are given to understand that the Timminses’ successful alienation of most of their friends and failure to make a good impression on their social superiors is due both to Rosa’s shortcomings and her husband’s capitulation to them. In reciting the litany of the financial and social disgraces that have resulted from the dinner party, the narrator notes that ‘all these accumulated miseries fall upon the unfortunate wretch because he was good-natured, and his wife would have a Little Dinner.’ Timmins clearly pays the price in his career and social circles for giving in to the urgings of a woman who has social pretensions but no clear sense of duty. By contrast, Nicholson notes, Marion Sambourne knew that her ‘first duty as a wife was to keep on friendly terms with all [Linley’s] colleagues’ (56). She aided Linley as a professional man by enabling him to entertain colleagues like John Tenniel in ways that would put her husband in the best light, confirming his status as a family man while simultaneously forwarding his career interests.23 Interestingly, while advice texts similarly explain the value of women’s labour for consolidating their husband’s positions, they rarely imply that women should be credited with authority in the dining room; it takes a writer in Punch to argue this point. ‘The British Matron’ argues: ‘You ought to have other things to attend to, and the dinners ought to be left to us to manage, as they used to be in the good old times, when

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men were men, and did great things … Dinner is a Lady’s business … she manages the food of the house … While I am a Lady I will be the Head of the Table’ (131). The notion that the lady of the house has ‘business’ in the dining room, which corresponds to the ‘great things’ men might do when occupied with their world of work outside the home, creates a suggestive parallel between women’s and men’s labour, particularly given the associations of masculinity with dining. Despite the letter’s location in Punch, the writer’s signature as a representative of British married women in conjunction with her claim that ‘While I am a Lady I will be the Head of the Table’ asserts women’s right to be recognized for all the work they do to prepare the dining room. Against claims like that of Kerr that ‘the whole appearance of the [dining] room ought to be that of masculine importance’ (94), the British Matron resists the purposeful silences in texts like Beeton’s and Loftie’s. In not mentioning dinner parties or dinner conversation, and devoting only a small portion of one paragraph in her final pages to wine, Loftie, for example, has focused instead on the material presumed to be more of interest to women readers (127). Reading such texts side by side with those written for male audiences signals a clear division of labour, whereby women’s jobs and concerns are pre-dinner preparation, while men are responsible in the moment of dining. While women’s daily work to create a proper dining experience, to uphold the masculine requirements of the dining room through a decor reflecting their husbands’ good taste, and to manage the domestic economy in such a manner that a man was able to demonstrate that he could provide amply for his family is the sole focus of women’s advice books, texts aimed at male readers tend to talk about processes of preparing the dining room and dinner in the passive voice, essentially erasing the woman of the house. In these books, meals get ordered, rooms are decorated tastefully, and plate is polished, with nearly universal omission of any mention of who is doing the ordering or on whose taste the decorations rely. This is especially notable because these same texts do not consistently elide women or their household management efforts. That is, such texts are generally as explicit about marking both women’s work and feminine prerogative in the drawing room as they are implicit about overlooking women’s work in the dining room. Instead, articles that discuss male responsibilities in the dining room focus largely on the merits of a dining room on the basis of its manly decor, supply of good wine, and conversation topics, particularly the merits or faults of ‘talking shop,’ thereby largely overlooking the pres-

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ence of women, who would be expected to take little wine and have only passing remarks to make about the professions. A man’s responsibility in the dining room, it seems, was chiefly to keep the party going. As ‘A Most Reluctant Diner Out’ notes, ‘It is the business of the host, or of the “Master of the Revels” – and there is always such a man in any company – to determine what shall be the topics of conversation, and to keep the company to those topics. A skilful person will take care that there shall not be too much time and attention given to any one topic, and that it shall vary according as men or women are present’ (560). While he expresses concerns about the shyness of ‘man or woman, youth or girl’ as though the company is quite mixed, he explains good conversation in terms of what ‘most men’ prefer, as if to indicate that male prerogative should shape the course of the evening. The power of conversation to indicate propriety was generally tied to the practice of accessing polite commonplace phrases, as demonstrated by the careful attention writers like Isabella Beeton paid to enumerating specific language for properly responding to an invitation. However, one’s topic and tone provided a much more precise barometer of gender and class position to the canny auditor. Franklin Blake in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) provides perhaps the most vivid example of a young man whose lack of proper British masculinity is explicitly tied to his tendency to lapse into foreign modes of talking. Puzzling out whether Blake’s German, French, Italian, or British side happens to be ‘uppermost’ at any given moment, the long-time family servant Betteredge aligns weakness, indecision, folly, obtuseness, and many other negative qualities with the foreign conversational manners, while styles of speech that mark Blake as being resolute, forthright, practical, and honourable are all taken as indications that his ‘original English foundation’ is showing through (67). In terms of conversation specifically around the dinner table, a Punch instalment (31 January 1863) of ‘The Naggletons’ (the couple whose daily household events were regularly presented in cartoons and dialogues as representative of the habits or follies of middle-class life) supports the notion that it is neither a woman’s job nor proper for her to step in and change the subject when men are talking: Mrs Naggleton criticizes her husband for the conversation that was going on, saying, ‘good taste ought to have made you restrain such talk at your own table’ (43). That she could not ‘restrain such talk’ herself, nor even identify herself with the table, signals the cultural assumption that men were the primary figures at the dinner table. In fact, the Reluctant Diner Out

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complains of the problem of being ‘detained an unconscionable time by a very brilliant hostess not being willing to leave the dinner-table,’ observing that ‘One great point in dinner-giving is, that the hostess should know when to move after diner. Most clever women stay too long. They delight in good talk, and in the good talk of clever men; but they forget that festivity, to be successful, should be rapid’ (562). In arguing that ‘most clever women stay too long’ at dinner, he implies that women ought not be too involved in the dinner-table conversation. Notably, in his formulation women delight ‘in the good talk of clever men’ but do not necessarily participate themselves. Certainly in the Sambourne house, Linley seems to have had the final say in what constituted appropriate dinner-party conversation. Nicholson notes that ‘Linley did not like his wife to air her views on modern novels too trenchantly’ (63). This may have been because Marion liked to read sensation fiction and other popular ‘light’ writers. Linley does not appear to have been particularly prudish about his wife’s reading choices (he himself socialized with Mrs Henry Wood, author of the sensation-fiction sensation East Lynne, at a party), but he did apparently have a sense of the decorum appropriate at his table. Nicholson comments on an intriguing entry in Marion’s diary: ‘“Lin gave me lecture on self-opinion, must try to correct this,” wrote Marion humbly after a dinner party at which lady writers had been discussed’ (63). It is unclear, however, whether the offence lay in the particular writers who were lauded, or whether his traditional sense of gender separation bristled at too enthusiastic praise of women as authors more generally. In either case, however, Marion seems to have been too outspoken in having an opinion, whatever the opinion was, and to have accepted the notion that it was right for her husband to suggest a moderation of such expressions at their own table. Given the amount of work Marion herself did in preparation for dinner parties, it seems astonishing that she would be so contrite after such a discussion. However, the customary gender divisions that characterized the Sambourne relationship would certainly indicate such deference on her part to her husband’s notion of what constitutes appropriate dinner-party talk. Despite the British Matron’s claim that ‘dinner is a Lady’s business’ to orchestrate, it is hard to dispute that a space decorated to suggest ‘masculine importance,’ in which men reigned as primary actors, and from which ladies must retire after dinner in order to leave the men to their wine and conversation, would be reiterated as a place of ‘masculine importance.’ For in a culture in which it was considered impolite to discuss

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the food one was eating and a man gained a reputation for maintaining a generous table, fine wine, an excellent cook, and liberal after-dinner cigars and conversation, women had no formally acknowledged basis for authority in the dining room despite all the work they did to create it.24 Indeed, this seems indicative of a more general masculinist tendency to elide acknowledgment of women’s labour in creating the domestic environment. Thad Logan comments on Thomas Carlyle’s remarkable observation that only a few days after moving to 5 Cheyne Row with his wife Jane, ‘all was swept and garnished, fairly habitable; and continued incessantly to get itself polished, civilized, and beautified’ by observing that ‘Carlyle’s use of the passive voice here might suggest how such feminine practices came to be seen as so natural and so familiar that the agency of individual women tended almost to disappear from masculine view’ (‘Decorating Domestic Space’ 209). Carlyle’s comments cannot necessarily be taken as representative. However, as his sense of his own prerogative in renovating the house demonstrated, the simultaneous emphasis on feminine morality and character and on the stateliness that resulted from male financial contributions to domesticity furthered an image of home as built upon a masculine foundation. The foundation, however, was not necessarily synonymous with the structure itself. While it might seem that the middle-class home easily accommodated – even prized – masculinity, in fact, this was a contentious point. Although home ownership consolidated manhood, and the whole ground floor might ideally be gendered masculine, a man’s spatial primacy was always subject to compromise in the sense that wives moved conspicuously through these ground-floor spaces and had tremendous authority not only in decorating them but in superintending their use throughout the day while their husbands were out at work. It was the lucky middle-class man who had a room to himself that no one disturbed, as Thomas Carlyle’s endless quest for a conducive workspace indicated.25 Although more financially comfortable than Carlyle, even Linley Sambourne had to carve out a workspace for himself in his wife’s drawing room by adding on a bay window to contain his art studio. An artist’s rendering of Sambourne at work in his drawing-room studio, originally published in the 1888 Kensington Picturesque and Historical (see figure 14), reveals its attractiveness while eliding its potential lack of privacy.26 As one example in the chapter on ‘Modern Kensington,’ the specific mention of Sambourne’s house and the valuable stained glass of his studio at once identifies him as a noteworthy professional and social figure and reveals that even when a

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Figure 14: Linley Sambourne at work in his drawing-room studio, from Kensington Picturesque and Historical, p. 251.

husband’s work at home would seem to necessitate a separate study or library, in fact this was not a space that many families might regularly afford. While the dining room was culturally identified as a solution to the problem of locating masculinity in a generally feminized domestic realm, then, this solution in fact highlighted the tenuous nature of a man’s domestic prerogatives with the practical facts of the movement of bodies through these spaces. Mirroring the culturally desired private-public split in which women’s work is concealed in a private sphere while men’s capitalist endeavours produce visible, consumable results, the dining room was designed to enable a man to display his ability to entertain handsomely and thus to confirm his capacity to be a good provider, socially adept host, and ideal middle-class husband. Even its very existence as a room in which food was consumed helped align the dining room with the male prerogative, since women were generally expected to eat modestly in an effort to disassociate themselves from processes that were

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obviously bodily.27 Yet as a site identified with the prerogatives of the man of the house but maintained by his wife, the dining room also raised questions of the boundaries of authority within domestic space because this room required a man to sacrifice full autonomy by relying on his wife’s domestic economy. Hence, the dining room did not merely locate a contest for authority between men and women, but instead staged the difficulties of integrating manliness into the domestic sphere. The promise that the dining room offered – a locale for a man to display his manliness without having to do anything – thus paradoxically also undermined his masculinity by putting him in a position where he could not act entirely on his own behalf. Ultimately, then, the space designated to ameliorate the tension between masculinity and domesticity in fact staged the difficulties of integrating manliness into the domestic sphere by highlighting contradictions within middle-class ideals of manliness. Inhabiting the Architectural Ideal: Masculinity in the Dining Room In Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, the dining room serves to highlight the contradictions within ideals of manliness and the complexities of maintaining a delicate balance between professional and paternal roles. In the tension between Mr Gibson’s undisputed authority as a medical man and his periodic difficulties asserting his authority within his home lies an excellent example of the challenge of giving equal weight to all the ideals of manly behaviour. As the domestic place in which his masculinity would be most expected to be evident, the dining room of Gibson’s house plays an important role in his efforts to define his own middle-class manhood. Ultimately, the professional and paternal, both located in the dining room, are shown to be simultaneously intersecting and at odds. Analysing Gibson’s failures and successes – in terms of the extent to which the novel suggests that he should be taken as a role model – illustrates how the dining room of the home worked to accommodate masculinity as well as how men themselves must be active in defining their own manhoods. In the opening of the novel, Mr Gibson is a widower gentleman, not very wealthy, and generally somewhat self-conscious. Sixteen years into his career as a medical man in Hollingford, early resistance to his taking over the practice of the town’s elderly and acclaimed former doctor have disappeared. Gibson’s ‘very genteel appearance’ and ‘rep-

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utation as a clever surgeon’ are so widely known that he is regularly approached by young apprentice hopefuls eager for the ‘prestige of having been a pupil of Gibson of Hollingford’ (28, 31). Although his social status as a country surgeon with apprentices could be more tenuous than that of an MD, in fact everyone lauds his ‘professional skill’ (29). He is a man who can respectably be invited to dinner at The Towers (home of Lord and Lady Cumnor) due to his unimpeachable manners, intelligence, and elegantly slim build, which seems to everyone obviously to indicate distinguished parentage. While Lady Cumnor has long had a generous but condescending policy of inviting to dinner ‘those who were distinguished for science and learning, without regard to rank,’ the narrator notes that ‘somehow things had changed since Mr Gibson had become “the doctor” par excellence at Hollingford’ for ‘he was always welcome to the grandest circle of visitors in the house’ without any sense on the Cumnors’ part that they were looking beneath themselves in inviting him (36–7). Initially, his social obligation to dine at The Towers strikes Gibson as a tedious ‘form to be gone through in the way of his profession without any idea of social gratification’ (37). However, once dining there brings him in contact with an intellectual community, he becomes markedly more comfortable – a sign of the power of the dining room to create a male community. Although Gibson has never enjoyed ‘all the fuss and ceremony of luncheon with my lady,’ he comes to be really grateful for dinner invitations once Lord Hollingford (the Cumnors’ eldest son) comes home and uses the dining room as a place in which to amass ‘the leaders of the scientific world’ (36–7). Gibson not only appreciates the work of these able minds; he also finds that ‘partly in receiving, partly in giving out information and accurate thought, a new zest was added to his life’ (37).28 Dining is an activity particularly suited to this kind of interaction because of its emphasis on good conversation between men, as opposed to luncheon or drawing-room entertainments that are more social than intellectual in nature. In confirming Jennifer Panek’s argument that intellect was a salient marker of masculinity, these dinners also suggest how very much the dining room served as a place in which men could foster important connections based on that intellect. While the scientific interests Gibson shares with the Cumnors’ eldest son and his companions enable him to keep up his end of the conversation admirably at The Towers, Gibson’s relationship to the pupils whom he takes in as medical apprentices reveals his shortcomings in terms of his ability to negotiate between professional and domestic po-

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sitions. He, for example, finds it difficult to make conversation with his resident male pupils at the table and is not quite sure how to handle their dining-room behaviour. His good intentions do not make up for his awkward manners and stilted efforts at conversation, and ‘something within him made him wince, as if his duties were not rightly performed, when, as the cloth was drawn,’ the two pupils routinely jumped up from the table as if to escape from him (31). That he can merely ‘wince’ at their speedy retreat from his presence but is incapable of retaining these young men for some after-dinner professional conversation implies his inability to fulfil one expected role of the man of the house. It further highlights the fact that his pupils are not of the upper middle class, for if they were, they would likely be at medical school obtaining MDs rather than working as apprentices; thus it is Gibson’s job as a professional both to teach them medicine and to refine their middle-class values and behaviours. In this way, the novel itself reveals the degree to which respectability, professionalism, and middle-class status, while intertwined, were not identical and required purposeful integration. Although these are not peers whom he is obliged to entertain, ‘the annoyance he felt at this dull sense of imperfectly fulfilled duties’ signifies that this inability to fraternize, and to help boys grow into their own manhood, is a recognizable shortcoming in Gibson (31). It cannot be ignored that his pupils are relatively young and not necessarily brilliant, so Gibson’s inability to talk with them stems also from their own shortcomings as conversationalists; nonetheless, his obligation is to provide them a good model and try to raise the tone, which he refuses to exert himself to do. Thus we can see that he has ‘imperfectly fulfilled duties’ both as a professional and as a representative of middle-class manhood. Given that he knows his medical teachings are unquestionable (the most prominent families in the county call on him for medical advice), his discomfort would seem to stem from his sense that he is revealing an incapacity to display middle-class masculinity at the nexus of its professional and domestic aspects. There are plentiful, fascinating literary examples of the extremes to which failures over the dining table signal failures of proper masculinity. In Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Arthur Huntington repeatedly takes advantage of his position of master of his dining table to try to ‘make a man’ of his son. Determined ‘not to have “the little fellow moped to death between an old nurse and a cursed fool of a mother,”’ Arthur takes his son on his knee at the table and teaches the four-year-old to drink wine, swear, and curse his mother if she tries to

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stop the father’s alcoholic behaviour from building a warped vision of manliness for their son (335). Arthur’s excessive sense of the prerogatives afforded him by the dining room results in dinners so horrifying that even his guests try to escape into the moral sanctuary of his wife’s drawing room. While this represents an extreme scenario, even much more sedate fictions turn on the connections between a man’s dinner table and his public reputation. Rosamund and Tertius Lydgate assume, in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871), that they should outfit their dining room with plate, china, and silver that they cannot really afford in order to create a proper display of their class position. She thinks that ‘good housekeeping consisted simply in ordering the best of everything’ and he tolerates her dinner parties on the grounds that ‘sociability seemed a necessary party of professional prudence, and the entertainment must be suitable’ (634). The narrator gives a reader to understand that his notion that ‘if things were done at all, they must be done properly’ and his sense that hosting dinners is vital to forwarding his career are both correct in theory; at the same time, she critiques his utter misunderstanding of scale and his inability to see that modest means do not necessarily undermine respectability. Ultimately his domestic folly leads to serious negative repercussions for his professional career. These two examples help demonstrate why Gibson’s failures over his own dinner table are so problematic. While Gibson is predisposed to view dinner as an opportunity for modelling masculinity, his sense of ‘imperfectly filled duties’ makes it painfully clear that he is unwilling or unable to treat dinner as more than a necessary meal. In essence, he needs to find a middle ground between the overbearing authority Arthur Huntingdon insists is his right in the dining room and the utter inability to take practical steps towards managing his own dining space that marks the inaction of Tertius Lydgate. Gibson’s assumption that meals at home are merely sustenance rather than social opportunity finds contrast even within the world of the novel when his daughter Molly visits the country home of Squire Hamley and his wife. She feels the Hamley rituals to be staid and tedious by comparison to the rushed and awkward dinners she is used to, which are characterized by ‘crowded chairs and tables, the hurry of eating, the quick unformal [sic] manner in which everybody seemed to finish their meal as fast as possible, and to return to the work they had left’ (67). In Molly’s longing for the familiar ‘hurry of eating,’ a reader can see that, like Lydgate, Gibson is unable to successfully integrate his professional and domestic lives.

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Interestingly, Gibson’s inability to display a masculine mastery of conversation at his own dining table does not ultimately result in a condemnation of him as a bad example of middle-class manhood; rather, it highlights that one important function of dining is to confirm the link between ideals of masculinity and marriage. Thus, while conversation itself might be predicated on intellectual connections forged between men who are truly gentlemen, there are obviously also domestic rather than only professional issues at stake in dining. In fact, his eleven-year widowhood is blamed for a number of shortcomings in his dining room. For example, when as a widower he angers his cook, she takes it out on him by refusing to attend to her duties thoroughly, providing an example of the notion that cooks ‘have grown to be our tyrants, and brook no interference in their peculiar domain … we are all at the mercy of those underground harpies, who must be bribed into good behaviour, and are most jealous of their prerogative’ (‘Dinner Question’ 170). Although Gibson is far too well-bred to refer to his cook as an ‘underground harpie,’ the idea that cooks may have almost tyrannical power is upheld when he brings home Lord Hollingford unexpectedly one day and can barely get the cook to produce anything for them to eat. The narrator notes: ‘At last dinner was ready, but the poor host saw the want of nicety – almost the want of cleanliness, in all its accompaniments – dingy plate, dull-looking glass, a tablecloth that, if not absolutely dirty, was anything but fresh in its splashed and rumpled condition’ (103). Significantly, Gibson attributes this failure to his marital status, apologizing to Hollingford in these terms: ‘You see a man like me – a widower – with a daughter who cannot always be at home – has not the regulated household which would enable me to command the small portions of time I can spend there’ (103). In longing for the ‘regulated household’ that he does not have the time to regulate, Gibson indicates that it requires a wife to produce the kind of household regulation that would enable a man ‘to command’ when he arrives at home. The journals of Marion Sambourne clearly indicate, for example, her efforts to fulfil obligations to entertain Linley’s Punch colleagues and to give return dinners to their increasingly wealthy circle of acquaintances, and the fact that Linley was nonetheless publicly credited with the success of these dinners. In this light, Gibson’s failure to serve anything tidy and clean to his guest stands for a larger problem in his life: without a woman to organize his household, he cannot properly fulfil his social obligations. Moreover, although it is not a lack of his manliness that produces such bad dining experience, the fact that his

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dining room is an ill-kempt place characterized by ‘the hurry of eating, the quick unformal manner in which everybody seemed to finish their meal as fast as possible, and to return to the work they had left’ is taken as a sign that he has not fulfilled the domestic obligations of manhood by remarrying (67). Gibson’s problems consequently indicate how the dining room locates one problem of manhood in the home: it necessitates a woman to create appropriate displays of masculinity, and the dining room serves as both stage for and index of a man’s shortcomings, even when he alone is not responsible for them. In an attempt to better care for his daughter and his household, Gibson resolves to remarry; however, his problems continue despite his efforts. In preparation for his remarriage, he asks the Miss Brownings, lifelong friends of his first wife, to help him refurbish the house for his new bride. Redecorating the dining room is a key part of this premarital effort, since Gibson is careful to set aside the money for later drawingroom improvements to be done by the new Mrs Gibson as her rightful place. The reader is given a vision of both the old and new versions of the dining room. It once had ‘faint grey’ walls, ‘which harmonized well enough with the deep crimson of the moreen curtains,’ but when the Miss Brownings have finished redoing the room, it is deemed ‘very bright and pretty’ rather than solid and substantial looking (155). They have chosen for the walls ‘a pink salmon-colour of a very glowing hue,’ and the curtains are ‘of that pale sea-green just coming into fashion’ (156). In their efforts to be fashionable, however, they have forgotten the dictum that such a room ought to be masculine, and they have created it in colours that would be much more appropriate for a drawing room. Indeed, even young Molly Gibson knows that the new scheme is inappropriate, and although she is too polite to say anything, she ‘could only hope that the green and brown drugget would tone down the brightness and prettiness’ (156) and perhaps make it more fitting to reflect the professional respectability of the man of the house. Gibson intends his marriage to Hyacinth Kirkpatrick (the Cumnors’ former governess) to solve problems like these of decorating and managing the dining room to support rather than challenge his masculine identity. Yet the redecorating undertaken in preparation for that marriage presages the problems he has in retaining proper authority once he brings his new wife home. If his prior difficulties in the dining room seemed to signal the need of a wife, the presence of that wife creates other problems for asserting his masculinity, for in taking on her rightful management prerogatives she seems to leave him unmanned rather

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than supported. Hyacinth’s efforts in the dining room complicate Gibson’s display of his masculinity by demonstrating the slippage between his responsibility ‘to command’ this place and his proper dependence upon her capacity to direct meal preparation. In fact, then, taking on the domestic role of husband, although an important step in defining his middle-class masculinity, as John Tosh points out, also creates more explicit tests of Gibson’s capacity to live up to masculine ideals. Part of Gibson’s problem lies in his dependence upon the success (or not) of his new wife as a domestic woman. She is keenly aware that this will be the case, and from her first arrival in the house, she is extremely anxious in her efforts to establish publicly that the Gibsons are a middle-class family. ‘It was rather awkward,’ she thought, ‘to be carrying hot, savoury-smelling dishes from the kitchen to the dining room at the very time when high-born ladies, with noses of aristocratic refinement, might be calling’ because if such ladies were to smell food throughout the house, it might imply that Hyacinth is unable to ensure that food itself is kept in its proper place at home (183). As Janice Carlisle argues in Common Scents, there was a near-obsession with smells of all kinds in the Victorian period. In novels, ‘characters are known by the odors that are associated with them: their scents provide olfactory evidence of the food that they eat, the work that they do, the clothes that they wear, and the homes in which they live’ (4).29 That the visceral sense of smell defines one’s home in an instant may seem overstated, but Hyacinth’s anxieties are bolstered by architectural directions. Gervase Wheeler notes that in the design of a domestic floor plan the dining room should be situated so as to ‘prevent either the necessity of crossing the hall with dishes, or the exposure of the domestic economy to the guests’ (210).30 Concealing the ‘domestic economy’ from guests requires a home in which cooking and eating occur in separate rooms – a marker of status unavailable in a working-class cottage, for example. If the degree to which food odours invade domestic spaces stands in inverse proportion to one’s wealth and class position, then the pervasive smell of ‘hot, savoury’ foods crossing thresholds into domestic spaces in which they do not belong – spaces such as halls, which are explicitly not marked for eating – becomes a metonym for falling short of an ideal middle-class position. Many architects addressed this problem by creating a serving room, which had a separate door to the dining room and communicated with the kitchen by means of dumb waiter or exclusive stairs. The plan by Gervase Wheeler (figure 11) shows precisely this arrangement, which

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C.J. Richardson and Robert Kerr also advocate. However, having separate rooms did not necessarily result in utter separation of the processes. The author of the 1846 ‘How to Build a House and Live in It’ condemns as an example of poor house design one in which ‘you know the man’s whole household arrangements in a minute … you know that dinner is preparing … and such a smell comes up the kitchen stairs, that were you at the cook’s elbow you could not be more in the thick of it’ (no 1, 760). Indeed, architectural efforts to build serving rooms, passages, and stairs exclusive to the kitchen, and other barriers to the conduction of food smells, even in modest houses, indicates precisely how difficult it could be to manage distancing the family from the labour associated with being ‘at the cook’s elbow.’ The proper relationship of a middle-class woman to her cook was far more complex than the disparaging comments about being located ‘at the cook’s elbow’ would suggest. In fact, while Hyacinth has properly internalized some aspects of controlling the domestic space, she misses the mark in other assumptions about etiquette and household management in ways that ultimately reflect upon her husband. In an effort to avail herself of every sign of her position, she sets domestic policies that inadvertently reveal her inexperience as a wife in a middle-class household. As the narrator explains, ‘It was one of Hyacinth’s fancies – one which Molly chafed against – to have every ceremonial gone through in the same stately manner for two as for twenty’ in order to train the servants to understand ‘what is required in the daily life of every family of position’ (523–4). Hoping to display that they are a ‘family of position,’ Hyacinth institutes a series of dining-related rules designed to mediate such moments as when she trips over a basket of dishes in the hall or when her husband’s pupils do not treat matters of dining with due seriousness (as they have never been shown how to do by Gibson himself). Highly conscious of the boundaries of domestic spaces – perhaps even more so because as a governess, she was never treated as if she were comfortably middle class – the new Mrs Gibson criticizes Molly for trying to get her father some lunch on the grounds that she does not ‘like your going into the kitchen’ and thereby lowering herself to associate with the servants (207). While Hyacinth shows proper concern in her desire to avoid the indelicacy of having dirty dishes and food smells strewn about the house, her pretentious effort to preserve her stepdaughter’s delicacy stifles an admirable impulse on Molly’s part. In fact, housekeeping texts regularly recommended that middle-class women spend time in their kitchens, even if they have

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enough servants to do all the kitchen labour, to ensure efficiency and keep connected to the preparation of their family’s food. Advice texts argue that ‘a lady should have complete superintendence over every department of her household … Even in the culinary department the lady … should be mistress of the kitchen’ (Baines 19; emphasis in original). The Eight Hundred a Year Man similarly argues that women should ‘not regard it as lowering to their dignity, to take a look at what is going on in their kitchen’ for in some parts of the world, ‘it is the custom for ladies even of considerable fortune to devote a portion of the day to culinary preparations’ (‘Dinner Question’ 167–8). In the context of such admonitions, it becomes clear that Hyacinth is not really ‘a lady,’ for she is unable to ascertain the correct boundary between preventing the kitchen from intruding on the rest of the house and being willing to oversee its workings. Moreover, the narrator’s tone throughout these incidents clearly indicates that Hyacinth’s misplaced sense of ‘dignity’ reveals that she falls short as a middle-class lady. Given that Gibson has married her in part to help him establish the boundaries of his own middle-class masculinity, it is perhaps not surprising that her refusal to condescend to active control over the kitchen impacts her husband’s capacity to assert his manliness. Choices Hyacinth perceives as demonstrating middle-class refinement in fact reveal her indelicate prejudices about hierarchy – prejudices that affect her husband by forcing him to choose between professional and domestic ideals rather than working to accommodate them together. Gibson thus finds that negotiating his masculinity is further complicated rather than relieved by his wife’s detailed attention to the family dining habits. A doctor who has little troubled himself about his food before this, he is accustomed to eating a hearty dinner at midday to sustain him on his rounds of patients. His wife, on the other hand, craves the middle-class sophistication of dinner at 6 p.m., and thus she proposes to remedy ‘all these distressing grievances’ by switching the household schedule to accommodate ‘a late dinner’ (184).31 This involves substantial reorganizing, including sending lunch to the surgery for the pupils and having ‘a few elegant cold trifles’ prepared for herself and Molly. Glossing over her husband’s need for a filling midday meal to offset his long working hours, Hyacinth offers to have ‘some little dainty ready’ for him when he returns from morning rounds, thinking that this will appease him for the change in dinner hour. He resists this change in the name of fashion, which prioritizes her desire for symbols of class status over his professional duties. Yet when he asserts that he wants merely a simple

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but substantial lunch of bread and cheese, he is relegated to eating it in the kitchen because his wife declares that she ‘cannot allow cheese to come beyond the kitchen’ due to the smell it will produce through the house (184). The problem of displaying class position is highlighted in this stand-off: a professional man should not in theory be as hungry at midday as a man who labours physically for a living, but the surgeon’s need to travel long distances as he makes his round of patients puts him in an awkward position of needing something substantial to eat rather than a ‘little dainty’ luncheon. Furthermore, his use of home as a base for his professional life adds to this complication, for a hungry officebased professional man could always seek out a substantial lunch at his club or, in a smaller town, at the local inn, without interfering with his wife’s ‘dainty’ luncheon. As the above examples begin to show, this novel operates in relation to masculinity in some ways much like a housekeeping guide for women. Just as housekeeping guides describe ideals and spatial boundaries that real women might push, so this book helps delimit the boundaries of masculine identity by signalling the complexity of constructing middle-class manhood. Through Gibson, it becomes clear that men must work continually to negotiate the nexus of domestic management and professionalization. Thus, he becomes a kind of role model for the upwardly professional man. His solution to the lunch question, for example, demonstrates his progress from the beginning of the novel to a point where he is able to balance professional and domestic realms. He is unaffected enough to propose a practical solution to the dilemma, and eating something substantial in the kitchen nicely balances his autonomy as a professional man with discrete acquiescence to Hyacinth’s desire for the display of his position that precludes bringing smelly foods into the house at midday. His wife, on the other hand, is able to think about the issue only in terms of a class-based performance of propriety, and she couches her change in routine – which privileges the rules of etiquette over any practical considerations – in a judgmental exclamation, ‘Really, Mr Gibson, it is astonishing to compare your appearances and manners with your tastes. You look such a gentleman’ (184). Although she is intent on demeaning his ‘tastes,’ a reader is given to understand that it is her pretension rather than his ‘appearances and manners’ that is at stake. It is significant that while his wife invokes the middle-class notion of taste as inherent in her critique of his literal ‘tastes’ in food, a reader can see that his gentlemanly tastes are properly developed, while her sense of

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his taste is simply pretension. Gibson does not seem less of a gentleman for preferring to take less bother over his food while his patients are waiting; rather, he seems considerate both to them and to the cook who will have to make special efforts over his meals. Furthermore, in proposing what the narrative implies is a practical and proper solution, he demonstrates that he is able to maintain his masculine integrity despite complex challenges posed by his domestic life. His non-confrontational solution thus shows him to be a perfect gentleman, as well as revealing that he is learning to display his manhood within the matrix of domestic and professional concerns. Gibson increasingly finds himself at the mercy of his wife in ways that indicate the difficulty of maintaining the careful balance he skilfully negotiates over the luncheon issue. When his long-time cook quits in protest over Hyacinth’s changes in household routine, Gibson quietly accepts her resignation, even though as a consequence he is forced to eat badly prepared food at inconvenient times. Furthermore, he does not allow himself to complain about his wife’s overstepping her boundaries in upsetting rather than managing the household routines: He had made up his mind before his marriage to yield in trifles, and be firm in greater things. But the differences of opinion about trifles arose every day, and were perhaps more annoying than if they had related to things of more consequence … [His wife] never found out how he was worried by all the small daily concessions which he made to her will or her whims. He never allowed himself to put any regret into shape, even in his own mind; he repeatedly reminded himself of his wife’s good qualities, and comforted himself by thinking they should work together better as time rolled on. (185)

In thus choosing to identify substantial changes in household routine as ‘small daily concessions’ to his wife’s desires, Gibson comes across as an exemplar of patience. Although he admits to annoyance and worry, and even perhaps repressed regret, Gibson seems to have chosen to allow her free reign in household details and to submerge daily annoyances with repeated reminders of ‘his wife’s good qualities.’ Certainly, it is possible to read this passage as Gibson trying to convince himself that it is acceptable to concede; however, the fact remains that he makes a carefully articulated choice rather than simply succumbing to circumstance. Thus I would argue that this passage suggests admirable self-control on Gibson’s part rather than forsaken autonomy

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as he distinguishes between ‘trifles’ and ‘larger things’ of importance. Such moments highlight not just that he is put upon but that the novel participates in the assumption that achieving ideal manhood is not a matter of demonstrating ‘natural’ middle-class sensibility but instead requires constant effort and maintenance. While Gibson struggles to live up to the sometimes contradictory ideals of manliness, he is presented as a positive model of manhood because he works to seek a middle ground by choice rather than abdicating authority or respectability. That all sorts of compromises are necessitated by competing claims on manhood thus reveals both the limits of a private architecture and the need for manhood on display to show continuous effort. Throughout the rest of the novel, Gibson’s willingness ‘to yield in trifles’ does not prevent him from responding strongly to domestic transgressions that more dangerously threaten his respectable masculinity and the domestic realms over which he supposedly has some authority. Furthermore, he draws on the imperatives built into domestic architecture to lend gravity and authority to necessary confrontations. When he finds that his daughter’s reputation is being compromised by malicious gossip, he specifically chooses the dining room as the location for a conversation in which he questions Molly about the truth behind this gossip, thereby confirming his paternal authority to question her about her private actions (542). Similarly, the dining room offers him support in adhering to his resolution ‘to yield in trifles, and be firm in greater things,’ when he must confront his wife over that fact that she has been acting in ways that compromise his professional, medical position. Mrs Gibson had encouraged her daughter Cynthia’s suitor, Roger Hamley, ever since she eavesdropped on one of her husband’s medical consultations and thought she learned that Roger might reasonably inherit the family estate since his older brother had a life-threatening heart problem. When she cannot resist intimating her suspicions to her husband one evening after dinner, Gibson questions where she got her information with a ‘sudden sternness of voice and manner’ that shocks her (399). Throughout the long discussion that ensues, Gibson is repeatedly described as using a ‘voice of command, such as she had never yet heard from her husband’ (399). His stern, commanding voice, so unlike his usual mild demeanour, is the primary indication that he possesses reserves of personal strength that he has hitherto chosen not to exercise. The dining-room setting of this confrontation adds a note of masculine prerogative to his critiques of his wife: she is, in some sense, trespassing on his domestic turf by trying to manipulate family for-

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tunes based on her exploitation of the proximity of this space to his surgery. That he draws on these reserves in the dining room suggests that the place helps authorize his position of command as he moves through a complex series of leading questions and careful explanations in order to impress upon her the serious repercussions of this crime of eavesdropping. Interestingly, the crime itself reveals the permeability of domestic boundaries. Hyacinth has overheard this information because she happened to be retrieving supplies for the cook out of the storeroom that is adjacent to the dining room in which her husband was discussing this case with another doctor. Thus the very place that Hyacinth belongs as manager of a meticulous house is one that enables her to penetrate the privacy of her husband’s medical conversations, for, as we saw above, numerous architectural writers indicate that the dining room might reasonably be expected to serve as an extension of a man’s place of business. Perhaps recognizing that he cannot alter the household architecture that locates professional and domestic spaces side by side, and even requires that the domestic dining room do double duty as a room for professional consultations, Gibson is less concerned about his wife’s having overheard his medical conversations than about the fact that she may have ‘trade[d] on that knowledge’ because, as he explains, ‘it would be the most dishonourable thing possible for me to betray secrets which I learn in the exercise of my profession’ (402). Invoking the honour and professionalism that have characterized his previous medical consultations, while adding the authority that comes from sitting currently at ‘his’ dining table, Gibson simultaneously chastises his wife and reminds readers that a proper gentleman can distinguish between what happens within his own home and how those things affect what happens beyond his immediate family circle. He clearly knows that in the house of a modest, middle-class surgeon, the dining room must be a flexible space: it may be the location of ‘dainty’ luncheons for the ladies of the family, but it also must be understood as a professional sanctuary when it is marked by his medical presence. Nonetheless, while the space may be a masculine one, and the occupations within it sanctioned by professional authority, it is not a private study or otherwise sequestered lair that is divorced from the rest of the household. As such, it is imperative that, above all things, his reputation not be sacrificed by the actions of a wife who neglects the masculine prerogatives that should characterize the dining room. Even more significantly, the fact that such transgression might be enabled by the domestic architecture rather than

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prohibited by it reveals the extent to which a man’s domestic authority is tenuously connected to other aspects of his masculinity even to the point of contradicting them. This late incident shows clearly how Gibson develops over the course of the novel from a man who finds himself overly self-conscious in conversation at dinner to one who nuances masculine authority on the basis of both class and gender, specifically by learning how best to take charge of the spaces that are nominally his to command within the home. This conversation becomes doubly significant because Gibson demonstrates how he has begun to master the potential contradictions inherent in the Victorian architecture of middle-class masculinity. He offers a genuine display of his displeasure while yet avoiding an unseemly performance of a ‘wronged husband.’ He does not cause a scene, raise his voice, or make comments that are designed merely to be hurtful. He manages to remain sternly seriousness without lapsing into either cruelty or histrionics; instead of the drama of spectacle, he controls his temper and explains carefully to his wife why her actions are morally problematic from a professional point of view, citing a physician’s obligations to his patient as paramount considerations. In addition, he demonstrates consciousness of the advantages of self-control in terms of enabling one to retain a position of moral authority in an argument, responding to her observation that she thought he might lose his temper at some point in the conversation with the observation that ‘“It would have been of no use!”’ (405). By this late point in the novel, he possesses all the important traits of a true gentleman in a moment of crisis, showing how far he has come in his self-positioning as a middle-class man. In an effort to ensure that nothing further may compromise the masculinity that he tries so hard to preserve in his professional and personal dealings with people, he notes to himself that ‘for the future I must look out of my doors, and double-lock the approaches … it remains with me to prevent [a] recurrence as far as I can for the future’ (403). Recognizing that ‘it remains with me’ to ensure that other potential breeches of the masculine code of conduct do not occur demonstrates not only that Gibson has grown more capable of asserting self-reliant manliness over the course of the novel; it also shows how a man might reconcile autonomy, self-control, and a display of his position so that he will be understood as a successful example of middle-class masculinity and reveal how his own dining room both authorizes these behaviours and shapes his understanding of them.

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Gibson’s progress shows how architectural authority empowers manhood at the same time that it reveals how difficult it might be to sustain that power within a domestic setting. It is further significant that his difficulties are those of any man negotiating between his own prerogatives and the work (or lack thereof) of his wife. While Gibson periodically acquiesces to his wife and is even compromised by her, his position by the end of the novel suggests that to struggle with ideals of middle-class masculinity is not necessarily to be a failure, as long as one honestly strives to negotiate a balance of those ideals. Rather than blindly asserting his authority or inflexibly insisting that his dining room ought to be run according to his preferences, Gibson demonstrates that a good Victorian man should have both strong principles for his behaviour and the judgment to ascertain how to be flexible within his domestic place. Gibson sacrifices some of his authority in the dining room, largely because he is more interested in his intellectual and medical pursuits than he is in entertaining over his table. Yet at crucial points, he is able to draw on the power of the space to avoid more serious breaches of his manly integrity. Overturning a more modern assumption that the Victorian dining room was largely a space controlled by the prerogatives of hostesses, such a reading demonstrates that while particular places within the home may authorize certain types of behaviour, ultimately individual men had to interpret that authority in ways that were acceptable within the context of both domestic expectations and cultural norms. A useful comparison to this fictional example comes in the efforts of both Thomas Carlyle and Linley Sambourne to appropriate their wives’ drawing rooms as workspaces. As we have seen, Carlyle’s efforts to write in the drawing room – effectively turning it into a study, complete with the installation of bookshelves – were never very successful. He was plagued by noise from beyond the walls of his home, most particularly by the piano next door, and he ended up moving his workspace throughout the house on multiple occasions, in an effort to create the quiet of a secluded library. Sambourne, on the other hand, was more successful in his use of the drawing room as an artist’s studio. He chose to devote a deep window alcove to the purpose, having a large stained glass window installed, as well as a special system for lighting his drawing board. Several important factors seem to have contributed to his success in contrast to Carlyle’s failure. Sambourne did not demand absolute silence and did not demand exclusivity in the space; in essence, his creation of a work environment acknowledged that he was using

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‘borrowed’ space. Far from insisting on his own prerogative (as Carlyle had), Sambourne simply curtained off his alcove, so that it could be hidden from view in the evenings, when the drawing room served as the primary reception room for his wife. Moreover, the Sambourne house – larger than that of the Carlyles – had a morning room on the ground floor that served as Marion’s daytime reception room. This arrangement enabled Linley an ‘office’ at home while still giving his wife a socially appropriate space of her own during the day, and it helped him avoid the conflict between his professional needs and his domestic role as a good husband. Interestingly, despite its location on the ground floor, the Sambourne morning room seems never to have been considered as a possible study for Linley. This arrangement had apparently been motivated largely by practical and financial considerations. Early in their marriage, as the Sambournes were living a relatively modest lifestyle, the morning room was an appropriate size for the number of guests Marion saw weekly, while also being an easier (because much smaller) space to heat. This example indicates the flexible nature of the domestic interior, for both Linley and Marion were able to assert their needs and occupy properly gendered places, even while rearranging the typical domestic architectural boundaries to suit their particular requirements. When their circle of acquaintances grew more prestigious and larger, however, Marion both needed and could afford to occupy a larger space for regular entertaining. Hence, their original arrangement ultimately had to be abandoned when the number of daytime callers (often as many as fourteen) made it completely impractical for Marion to continue hostessing in the small morning room (Nicholson 142). It is not clear what happened to Linley’s work schedule when Marion reclaimed her rightful place in the drawing room as a permanent fixture. Nicholson notes that by the 1890s, Marion had moved her ‘At Homes’ into the drawing room, but it was not until their daughter Maud was married in 1899 that renovations enabled all of Linley’s professional paraphernalia to be moved into a newly fitted-out upstairs office, in what had been the old night nursery (172–3).32 One can hardly imagine Linley diligently at work at his drawings, hidden behind a curtain while his wife served tea to guests. However, given that Punch’s weekly format typically resulted in him working hard over the weekend and taking a break in the early part of the week, it is possible that the Sambourne marriage might have borne another compromise in the form of Marion being ‘At Home’ to visitors on days that Linley was unlikely to be working on drawings, so

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that both of them could use portions of the drawing room at very different times and for their own purposes. It is useful to consider the Sambourne house as an example of the difficulty of negotiating between multiple identity roles and the need for men to work continuously to maintain their manliness. Linley’s working from home was significantly against the model of professionalism that was the norm by the 1870s, where business was largely removed from home. Artists might have been a general exception to this norm, with home studios; however, Linley’s studio demonstrates the difficulty of maintaining a professional/domestic split in more than just its location within the home. Rather than modelling his home studio on the masculine office or library – which doctors and clergymen relied upon, and which for them would have been located on the ground floor, often with a separate entrance – Linley’s choice to locate his art studio in his wife’s drawing room seems periodically to have felt like an intrusion to his wife, in part because it rendered him a continuous presence in the home. As Nicholson notes, ‘Linley loved pottering about re-arranging his possessions, a trait which exasperated his wife who never came to terms with what she considered his time-wasting activities’ (128). What Nicholson identifies as ‘time-wasting activities,’ however, may be more accurately understood in light of the comment in Home Truths for Home Peace that it can be endlessly annoying to have men ‘“always about” at home’ (67). Yet while Linley’s ‘pottering’ may have created some tensions, the Sambourne relationship was clearly a successful one. Marion’s frustrations seem to have been sporadic, and even the problem of her needing to reclaim her drawing room for daytime as well as evening use seems to have been handled in such a way as to maintain domestic harmony. In Sambourne, then, we find an example of a man actively working to fit his professional and domestic lives together in the only way that made real sense for his family, modifying arrangements as needed. His success as a professional relied upon his amassing tremendous quantities of photographs, which he took and developed and on which he relied for all of his cartoons and drawings. (The Sambourne House archives contain nearly 15,000 photographs still surviving.) In addition to his large drawing table, special lighting arrangements, and drawing supplies, his work took him throughout the home and into the garden as he set up photographs to use as models for his drawings. Yet he managed, apparently, to segregate these workspaces from the spaces that would demonstrate his success as a family man. Known equally as

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a doting father and for his successful and frequent ‘“Gentlemen only” dinners’ (Nicholson 125), Linley seems to have maintained both aspects of his manliness specifically by establishing boundaries demarcating his professional labour from his family life. All of these examples, then, reveal the complex role of the domestic architecture in influencing how Victorian men defined and displayed their masculinity. While gender norms might be built into the walls of a home, through spaces designed to segregate household occupants, it was not possible for the architecture alone to manage their identities. It was also necessary for the occupants themselves to respond appropriately to the cultural codes that inflected these spaces. Domestic architecture thus became both the means and the end, the description and the prescription for behaviour, by offering a measure of who was respectable or worthy. Yet at the same time, the walls of the dining room or male study did not create static boundaries but rather admitted the flexibility necessary for personal negotiations of identity. In an absolute sense, Gibson might be seen as a weak man for giving in to his wife’s insistence about meal schedules; yet in a practical sense, it is this very moment of ‘weakness’ that reveals his ability to reconcile potentially conflicting ideals of masculinity into a respectable identity for himself. Similarly, Linley Sambourne defied convention by locating his office in his wife’s drawing room; but his careful closeting of this space so that it did not intrude on her drawing-room prerogatives, and the cooperative ways in which both Linley and Marion were able to redraw the architectural boundaries in order to confirm the boundaries of their individual responsibilities and identities, are indeed a model of the dynamic possibilities of domestic architectures. By the same token, Sambourne’s experiences demonstrate that although the Victorian dining room – and by extension any domestic place – may have had more than one acceptable use, it was culturally important for there to be agreement about the meanings ascribed to a given place at a particular time. In order to define a man’s place within the domestic sphere, the dining room required the potential to serve at one moment exclusively as a bastion of masculine, professional prerogative, while at another it upheld successful masculinity by functioning as a marker of a family’s class position. Examining Victorian depictions of the dining room thus exposes a particularly interesting consequence of building a manly identity into domestic architecture. In the very same way that masculinity required constant work and maintenance, so the dining room and other spaces associated with male domesticity

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were open to constant redefinition. Unlike the drawing room, which was culturally presumed to be a more stable space, the dining room – and to a lesser extent the male office – were architectural structures that had built into them the requisite for flexibility, acknowledging both the possibility for architecture to shape identity and the power of individuals to draw on built boundaries to redraw the limits of their own social positions.

4 Boundaries in Flux: The Liminal Spaces of Middle-Class Femininity

‘Shall I tell you what a lady is? A lady is a woman who wears a silk gown, and has a sense of her own importance.’ Wilkie Collins, No Name

As the previous chapters have shown, the spaces of the Victorian middle-class home not only helped identify their occupants; occupants of those spaces also used cultural norms attached to those spaces as a means of creating an identity for themselves or locating themselves within a family, a social network, or domestic ideology more broadly. However, in offering visions of how a woman might identify herself as properly middle-class by locating herself primarily in the drawing room, or how the dining room might engage cultural questions of ideal manhood, Victorian texts rely on the fact that these places held relatively stable associations for their middle-class occupants. That is, the pervasive alliance of proper femininity with the drawing room and proper masculinity with the dining room set boundaries beyond which experiments with identity could not move. Even within the more complex matrix of associations in the dining room, the space itself and the identity it was supposed to uphold were considered stable and – more importantly – clearly knowable. There were spaces in the Victorian home, however, that were not so fundamentally connected to a single identity and that therefore offered spatial possibilities for complicating the hierarchies of gender- and class-based identities. Within the liminal spaces of the middle-class home – staircases, halls, and corridors – it was more difficult to control interactions among members of the household. Although many of these spaces were designed to facilitate the

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segregation of women from men and family from servants, these spaces also significantly connected disparate locations within the home. It is this position as simultaneous separators and connectors that renders these spaces thresholds, permeable boundaries that in their very design facilitate movement as much as prevent it. These liminal spaces enabled occupants of the home not merely to move from one place to another but to highlight potential slippage between ostensibly fixed identities. Thus, for example, while the distinction between middle-class employers and the servants who worked for the family might seem obvious, in fact domestic architecture highlighted how servants (who were overwhelmingly female in all but the wealthiest of homes) could be linked to the mistress of the house (who managed domestic servants) in ways that might destabilized these boundaries while ostensibly emphasizing them. In a house with two sets of stairs – a main staircase for family and guests and a back stairs for servants – only one extended down to the kitchen. As a consequence, middle-class women would have to use the ‘servant’ staircase to supervise the goings-on in their kitchens. Servants, likewise, would use back stairs to answer a drawing-room summons. In these and other ways, connective spaces linked servants to the mistress of the house, bracketing together women’s work rather than facilitating class divisions. This problem of clearly distinguishing those who were middle class from those who were not, when considering the occupants of a single home, was most obviously an issue in the case of the Victorian governess – a figure whose position was explicitly that of paid labourer within the home but whose qualification for the task was ideally that she had grown up as a privileged daughter in a middle-class household. While the in-between status of the governess was no secret within the culture, examining her position specifically through a reading of Jane Eyre demonstrates the degree to which the governess not only was herself a liminal figure but opened up the uncomfortable possibility that all middle-class women were similarly vulnerable to a less stable identity. Focusing on how the liminal spaces within the middle-class Victorian home reveal the tenuousness of middle-class womanhood, Wilkie Collins’s No Name (1862) provides an even more powerful example of the unstable boundaries of middle-class femininity. The protagonist of No Name, Magdalen Vanstone, lives as a privileged middle-class daughter until she suddenly finds herself orphaned and penniless. Her unconventional methods of trying to regain her ‘rightful’ place involve fascinating experiments with her identity. Following the trends of sensation

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fiction – a genre emerging in the 1860s – No Name highlights the fact that middle-class women were at the financial mercy of men and of a legal system that did not always offer sufficient protection. As sensation fiction, its plot is necessarily filled with events that may seem excessive; however, it is particularly interesting as a study of middle-class femininity because Magdalen’s relationships to the domestic spaces she occupies demonstrate the potential liminality of all middle-class women’s positions and interrogate the notion that middle-class femininity is natural rather than culturally constructed. Victorians often defined middle-class women in opposition to women who were embodied through their physical labour or sexuality, relying on such comparisons to confirm the superior class position and morality of the middle classes. Yet, as scholars have shown, the distance between many women who worked (whether as servants, governesses, shop girls, actresses, prostitutes, or factory hands) and middle-class women who managed workers (in the form of the servants they employed) was often much smaller than Victorians found socially comfortable.1 This closeness is evident in the presence of servants and governesses in the middle-class home, in the often-articulated need to protect the reputation of marriageable daughters, and in the assumption that interaction between fallen women and middle-class girls would inevitably be harmful to the impressionable morality of the middle-class girl. Representations of working women in fiction, conduct manuals, and periodicals aimed at a middle-class audience suggest that lack of financial resources and family connections (constructed as birth and breeding) prevented working women from being capable of delicacy in thought, speech, action, sensibility, or physicality. Working women are described in these texts as having ‘coarse’ hands and figures as a result of their manual labour and ‘coarse’ accents and manners as a result of being brought up among ‘low’ people. By contrast, middle-class women are described in terms of their ‘delicate’ taste, constitution, handwriting, manners, and voices. Where middle-class women were expected to be shocked by sexual innuendo, working-class women were expected to incite such innuendo – even to ask for it – through their very physical presences and less scrupulous morals. Furthermore, the rhetorical efforts to differentiate middle-class women from their working counterparts were often accompanied by architectural efforts to contain these groups of women in different places. One thinks, for example, of Charles Dickens’s ‘Home for Homeless Women,’ of the workhouses to which unwed and/or impoverished mothers were often banished, and

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of attempts to effect rigid separation of servants’ spaces from family spaces within the middle-class home. Yet, the very figures from whom middle-class women were most anxious to distance themselves were often those who possessed attributes disturbingly close to those of genteel middle-class womanhood. That is, governesses and fallen woman created considerably more anxiety than did working-class women generally. For, excepting servants, working-class women were typically physically distant from the daily path of middle-class women, who might only encounter their poorer sisters through home charity visits or other purposeful meetings that confirmed class difference. By contrast, governesses and fallen women might easily themselves have once been proper middle-class daughters. Thus any association between them carried the possibility of ‘taint’ at the same time that it highlighted the fragility of middle-class privilege. Of course it was necessary for a governess to be in constant close proximity to her charges, a difficulty that was resolved by forcing upon her an association with the children of the house that precluded her taking her meals or socializing with the family. Thus, the governess was located in the liminal spaces between class positions as well as between the status of adult and child within a middle-class home. Investigating the slippage between the middle-class woman and her supposed foils thus demonstrates that Victorian middle-class women in fact occupied a position with much less stable boundaries than generally acknowledged. In examining these unstable boundaries, I look particularly at Victorian rhetorical and architectural efforts to segregate and hierarchize domestic spaces and at how those efforts break down in the liminal spaces of the home. These texts offer hints for establishing definite boundaries between middle-class women and their servants, a task at which many homes were reasonably successful. However, with the more obviously liminal women in Victorian culture – most notably, governesses – texts are far less able to maintain similar boundaries. A brief reading of Jane Eyre helps demonstrate how the culture’s most liminal women complicated efforts to establish a stable identity even for respectable middle-class women. No Name is a particularly fruitful novel to consider in some detail in these terms because it explores the circumstances that produced governesses, the cultural problems created by the necessary failure of a certain proportion of respectable middle-class men in order to provide governesses for the rest of the middle classes, and what happened if a woman resisted that fate. The protagonist of this novel, Magdalen Van-

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stone, occupies a range of ‘feminine’ places that reveal the complex fluidity of the middle-class woman’s position due to her dependence on proper manhood in both professional and domestic terms. The degree to which her gendered identity is compromised, enhanced, or challenged through her relationships to liminal domestic spaces challenges contemporary responses that criticized Victorian sensation fiction for its ‘unrealistic’ heroines, instead revealing that these heroines illuminate the problems of real middle-class women. Nancy Duncan has argued that ‘not all space is clearly private or public. Space is thus subject to various territorializing and deterritorializing processes whereby local control is fixed, claimed, challenged, forfeited, and privatized’ (129). The notion of ‘territorializing’ is especially useful for understanding the liminal position of middle-class women as represented by Magdalen Vanstone. Pushed out of the spaces normally occupied by middle-class women, the well-bred Magdalen nonetheless finds that her identity is understood through the places she occupies. In an effort to re-establish her identity as a respectable middle-class girl worthy of the cultural privileges and legal protections that attend that position, Magdalen undertakes to territorialize – to reclaim as her own – the spaces she has been denied. In the process, she demonstrates both the fragility of middle-class femininity and the limits on power available to one who is willing to explore beyond (rather than carefully work within, as Lucilla Marjoribanks does) the proper domestic places of women. Resisting Liminal Spaces in Designing the Middle-Class Home Staircases, halls, and corridors – the thoroughfares of a home – were designed to privilege the Victorian middle-class family by serving as boundaries between family places and those assigned to others who might be present in the house. The distinction between corridor and hall in a British home is evident in figure 15, a thoroughfare plan for a large house. Figure 15 shows both an ‘Entrance Hall,’ a grand, centralized space through which visitors to the home will pass, and a ‘S[ervants’] Hall,’ the room in which the servants would take meals and rest by the fire when not working. As a general rule, a hall is a large open space off of which open a number of rooms and/or passageways. In the family portion of the house, it might contain furniture for small groups of conversation, occasionally a billiard table, and often its own fireplace for heating. In the servants’ area, it conveniently provided a central distribution point for all the channels leading to their various work locations.

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The central hall in a home generally contained the main staircase; hence, it is often referred to as the staircase hall – although its size may vary greatly. The stair hall in figure 12, for example, is clearly too modest to contain more than a bench or pair of chairs for conversation, while the ‘Cortile’ that faces the ‘Principle Staircase’ in figure 15 could accommodate much more furniture and be used as a reception room quite easily. A corridor, by contrast, is what Americans would call a hall: a long, relatively narrow passageway whose only purpose is to move people and goods from one portion of a house to another. As these plans suggest, halls and corridors were carefully designed to account for the common paths of the various household occupants – largely to avoid undesirable crossings of those paths. Staircases additionally helped segregate the members of a household: even the smaller homes whose plans we have seen had two staircases, one for family and one for servants. Unlike the older mode of designing homes in which rooms opened into one another, the floorplan based on a thoroughfare system regulated the movement of people throughout the entire house. The drawing room, dining room, bedrooms, and other spaces were made private, marked as family spaces, precisely because thoroughfares enabled one to restrict servants’ access to these rooms without inhibiting their passage between the places in which they were working. To curtail potential interactions between family and servants, stairways and corridors were designated for specific uses and not equally accessible to all members of the household at all times. Far from being created as purposefully liminal spaces, stairs and corridors attempted to provide architectural confirmation of the hierarchical relationships between servants and family members. Yet thoroughfares also linked the family rooms to the servants’ portion of the house to facilitate daily tasks. As spaces that both divided and linked locations throughout the house, thoroughfares were thus unavoidably flexible rather than fixed boundaries. Moreover, these architectural features significantly parallel the function of the female characters in novels who define the boundaries of acceptable middle-class womanhood. Physical boundaries governing entrance into spaces are understood by geographers as helping to define the ideological ‘perimeters of the categories we make in order to codify and confront the worlds we create’ (Ardener 1). Physical domestic constructions can thus be productively linked to Victorian constructs of womanhood in the sense that they aimed to (re)produce boundaries valued for their ability to delimit the ‘perimeters’ of identity categories. As we have seen in previous chapters, within a middle-class home,

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Figure 15: ‘Thoroughfare Plan,’ Robert Kerr, The Gentleman’s House, plate 52, ‘Thoroughfare plan for house shown in plate 21,’ facing p. 470.

places were understood largely through their authorized occupants, and the reigning prerogative remained fixed, even as members of the household moved throughout the space over the course of the day. The thoroughfares of the house were structurally designed to facilitate movement without disrupting this fixity. As Robert Kerr explains in his 1871 The Gentleman’s House:

184 Architectural Identities The Corridors and Passages of a house, as we have said before, are the Skeleton of its Plan; because the relations of the rooms to each other are in fact the relation of their doors; and accordingly, every one can call to mind instances where these Thoroughfares and this relation of doors are so contrived that one appears to understand their system instinctively, and others, on the contrary, where one is always at a loss. (155; emphasis in original)

Notably, the thoroughfares of a home are likened to an organic construct (the skeleton) that is also a standardized system. While recourse to such a ‘system’ is partly a simple expedient to avoid confusion in finding one’s way through the house, it also helps systematize interactions that keep members of the household in their proper places. That this policing of the hierarchical relationship of the home’s occupants is presented as following ‘instinctively’ from the architectural system indicates that cultural expectations normalize the ideal plans for household interactions, which should become internalized by any responsible member of a middle-class household. Ideologically, then, all middle-class families were presumed to have similar needs. As architect J.J. Stevenson expressed it: a ‘combination of isolation of the several rooms with unity in the whole house is a necessity of modern planning which did not exist in former times, when the advantage of being alone was little appreciated’ (114). Segregation via thoroughfares enabled the occupants of the ‘modern’ home to possess the primary ‘advantage of being alone,’ an advantage that most importantly differentiated them both spatially and ideologically from one another. As architectural historian Robin Evans has explained, relying on carefully planned thoroughfares to control the interaction of various members of the household led to the ‘key distinctions between route and destination that would henceforth pervade domestic planning’ (273). For example, Victorian architect Richard Brown notes that it is important to ‘avoid long passages in a private house as much as possible, for they have many objections, and perhaps none is greater than that of exposing the family as they cross from one room to another’ (205). One might assume that long passages are to be avoided in order to minimize the risk of family members encountering the working-class occupants of the home, or that such passages are undesirable because they facilitate the servants having extended views of the family and thus gaining undue access to the middle-class lifestyle. Although Brown does not elaborate on ‘exposing the family,’ one significant danger is that

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the family might be associated with the passageway itself. Indeed, his comments seem most clearly to reflect class-based anxieties of differentiation: the servants who worked in the house were largely associated with routes through it, while the family associated itself with specific destinations. Directions such as Brown’s imply that the physical activity of moving through domestic space has the potential to become either metaphor or means for moving between identities. In fact, despite architects’ emphasis on a ‘naturalized’ system of house planning, the language in which texts describe how thoroughfares manage the flow of traffic through the house suggests some anxiety that these boundary spaces could not be completely controlled. For a start, it was only in very large houses that occupants could almost completely avoid having any common passageways, as the discussion below of figure 15 shows. Certainly, architects designed homes with the question of controlling boundaries in mind, relying on the principles of ‘directness and shortness of route; readiness of intercommunication between the Thoroughfares themselves where desirable, and the reverse where not so’ (Kerr 156). However, the choice to separate ‘route and destination’ created logistical problems for house planning. The widespread assumption, expressed primly by Gervase Wheeler, that ‘the kitchen and scullery should never assert their nearness through the nose’ would appear to indicate a preference for cooking smells to remain sealed in the kitchen – but it also indicates a desire for careful segregation of the home’s occupants (88). Yet it was difficult to achieve a convenient passage between basement kitchen and ground-floor dining room without, for example, crossing the stair hall and thereby allowing food odours to escape into the upper reaches of the house. Some architects solved this problem by installing a dumbwaiter from the kitchen to the dining room’s serving pantry; others created a series of staircases, corridors, and/or anterooms to segregate the noise and smells of servants’ work from the family.2 Similarly, to reduce the flexibility of domestic passageways, architects often treated them as nearly rooms, even identifying them with specific members of the household. Kerr notes, for example, that a ‘gentleman’s stair’ offers young men with dirty boots and odd hours of coming and going a means of entering, exiting, and moving about the house without inconveniencing the ladies (176). Figure 15 shows a plan for a large house, in which the thoroughfares not only separate servants’ quarters from family living areas but also segregate men from women. While the scope of this plan is utterly impracticable and absurdly expensive for an average

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middle-class family, far more modest houses operated on the identical principle. Even a relatively small house, such as Dickens’s first married abode (with only two rooms per floor) had two staircases. One might argue, then, that in addition to the presence of at least one servant, a family’s middle-class status would be marked by the presence of a minimum of two staircases. Servants avoided the ‘Principal Staircase’ in the process of doing their work. Instead, they carried water, coals, chamber pots, and cleaning supplies up and down the ‘Back Stair,’ which communicated down to the kitchen regions and up to the bedrooms.3 ‘Even in moderate-sized houses a separate servants’ stair is desirable, as it keeps the chief stairs and thoroughfares clean by relieving them of rougher traffic,’ notes Stevenson (123). In addition to cleanliness, back stairs saved exertion by providing the most direct route from the source of the supplies to their destination; however, it also importantly differentiated staircases used for working purposes from those used by the family. Thomas Webster notes, ‘The back staircase … should be more concealed, being chiefly intended for the servants’ (18). Unlike the open main staircase, the ‘back staircase’ was much smaller (see figure 15) and ‘more concealed’ to help reduce the visibility of domestic labour. This concealment of the labour that kept a middle-class house going was partially aesthetic: it was more pleasant for family members not to encounter a servant carrying a chamber pot that needed emptying as they moved through the house. It is undeniably true, however, that the presence of back stairs also helped facilitate the spectacle of middle-class status by distancing the family physically from the servants and locating domestic labour in the least visible spaces of the home. Corridors operated on the same principle as stairs. A series of parallel and perpendicular axes in figure 15 disperse the rooms in blocks that cut down the number of domestic passageways any given person might need to frequent. A ‘Private Corridor’ for use by the family emphasizes class distinctions, while division of servants’ thoroughfares into a ‘Women’s Corridor’ and a ‘Men’s Corridor’ confirms the division of domestic labour in a way that mirrors the gendered division of the family: female domestics are responsible for the cooking, cleaning, and household chores, while the men take charge of aspects of the home that require commerce with the outside world. Hence the ‘Women’s Corridor’ communicates with the ‘Kitchen Entrance,’ and the ‘Women’s Stair’ leads to the bedrooms female servants were responsible for maintaining. The home’s exterior ‘Luggage Entrance’ connects via the ‘But-

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ler’s Corridor’ into the ‘Men’s Corridor,’ linking the provinces of male servants (plate rooms, serving access to the dining room, and the rooms containing coals, wine cellar, and brewing apparatus) with the dining room, library, and billiard room. Furthermore, thoroughfares maintain hierarchies not only between family and servants, but also within the family and among the servants. A separate ‘Nursery Entrance’ and ‘Nursery Stair’ allows children to come and go anytime without regard for noise or dirt that might otherwise disturb the household adults. Along similar lines, to indicate their superior status, Housekeeper and Butler each get specific spaces in their names, whereas menservants and housemaids share bedrooms and corridors. Obviously, this plan is for a very large establishment situated on land sufficient for sprawl and backed by the financial resources to accommodate a scale impossible for an average middle-class home in town. While figure 15 is useful for illustrating the extent to which principles of segregation might be taken, figure 16 shows how these same principles would be carried out in much more modest houses. Separate staircases for family and servants are maintained, and the centralized staircase is prominent and gracefully turned, while the servants’ stairs are narrower and tucked out of the way. The corridors, however, are so short as to be almost non-existent, and it seems clear that they must be common to the use of all the members of the household. It would be impossible to avoid family and servants crossing one another’s paths here, given that the two sets of stairs open onto a common landing – although, significantly, in a home of this size there would be no male servants present, making such segregation somewhat less of an issue. A number of advice books concur with Isabella Beeton in observing that a male servant would only be hired if one employed five or more servants, a position which required an income of £1000 per year.4 Most middle-class families thus would have had only female servants. More typical of middle-class homes, then, the more modest plan offers clear visual representation of how thoroughfares simultaneously control and threaten the hierarchy of the household. Despite architectural limitations on absolute boundaries, texts that describe the relationship between servants and employers exhort middle-class readers to treat servants respectfully as people, making it potentially even more difficult to assert a ‘natural’ difference between servants and their mistresses. J.H. Walsh, F.R.C.S., in his Manual of Domestic Economy (1856), argues that servants owe deference to employers; yet he somewhat equivocally admits at the beginning of his chapter

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Figure 16: ‘Plan of First Floor,’ Gervase Wheeler, The Choice of a Dwelling, p. 166.

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on servants that ‘“service is no inheritance” … No one, I believe, will deny the truth of this assertion, and I suspect few of us would like to be placed in a position to judge for ourselves; for however comfortable a servant may be made, still there is the constant subjection to the caprices of a fellow-being’ (216). Thus while advocating hierarchies of deference, his sense that employers should seriously imagine being ‘placed in a position’ to know a servant’s lifestyle implies a common humanity and suggests that a kind of sympathy should exist between these two groups. H.G.C., the writer of The English Maiden: Her Moral and Domestic Duties (1842), similarly encourages readers to remember that servants should ‘receiv[e] a respectful and generous treatment from the young females of the family. They are endowed with the same nature, body, and mind, as ourselves’ (84). Despite this text’s effort to link the bodies of servants to those of their employers, it pointedly also identifies servants and family as occupying ‘their several spheres’ rather than really placing them in the same space (199–200). Sarah Ellis likewise cautions that a wife would do well to ‘remember that the bodily exercise necessary for carrying on household labour during the day, requires a greater interval of rest than such occupations as are generally carried on in the drawing-room’ (Wives 220). In asking women to treat their servants as human beings, to feed them well and allow them adequate rest, Ellis argues that this group of household occupants does not have less significant needs than the family it serves. However, she makes this claim in the same breath that she asserts the difference between women employed in ‘household labour’ and those who spend their time relatively idly in the drawing room. Although myriad sources invoke the need for sympathy for servants, this very sympathy is predicated on a crucial difference: it is the distance between the lady in the drawing room and her labouring servant below stairs that enables such sympathy.5 At the same time, rhetorical efforts to differentiate servants from employers often collapsed in on themselves due to their insistence on sympathy and parallel domestic concerns. Thomas Webster’s Encyclopaedia of Domestic Economy (1844), for example, articulates a servant’s proper place in terms of qualities that would appeal to the middle classes. He highlights the essential qualities of integrity, sobriety, cleanliness, and general propriety in manner and dress, together with the knowledge of the duties of their respective departments of household business which, on being hired, they professed … [T]he housekeeper should possess the observation and vigi-

190 Architectural Identities lance of an active mistress of a family. Her eye should never be withdrawn from the circle of her duties … maintaining over the subordinate actors in it a strict but not severe superintendence. Those whom she has to direct, and to keep to a regular discharge of duty, are like children, requiring a firm mind to govern them … Great neatness, and even a gentlemanly appearance, is expected at all times in the upper servants. (324, 327; emphasis in original)

The fact that servants not only need to be clean and sober but to possess some of the identical qualities of ‘an active mistress of a family’ or a ‘gentlemanly appearance’ indicates how slippery are the definitions of particular identities. In this brief example, women who are traditionally opposed – the lady in the drawing room and the servant in the kitchen – overlap in their capacity for ‘observation and vigilance’ and their ability to ‘govern.’ Such characterizations inadvertently reveal the complexities of differentiating between servants and employers. And while it may seem no one was likely to mistake one for the other, such descriptions suggest that the difficulty of establishing impenetrable boundaries within the middle-class home was manifest in the walls of the house as much as in the bodies of its occupants. As evidence, one need only recall Jane Carlyle, whose hands were ‘absolutely blackened and coarsified’ from carrying loads of furniture up and down stairs, serving as a ‘maid of all-work’ during one of the many renovation periods at 5 Cheyne Row (I Too 121). Although Jane’s coarse hands would not render her literally indistinguishable from her servant, it is ironic that the very architecture designed to confirm her privilege becomes the scene of instability: Jane’s middle-class sensibility is troubled by physical markers of working-class femininity acquired as she labours to renovate the very space (her drawing room) that should confirm her gentility. Thus it becomes clear that the domestic architecture designed to distinguish these obviously distinct women in fact contributes to the difficulty of preserving class privilege when one is not excessively wealthy. Furthermore, the fact that it was not always desirable to effect complete separation of women from their servants implies a more dangerous flexibility of identity boundaries. As the following discussion of No Name demonstrates, a complex female character like Magdalen Vanstone provides the means to interrogate the class-based spatial and ideological separation of women. Magdalen Vanstone is most often associated with liminal spaces, and this association quite purposefully in-

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vites sympathy for her displaced position. While architectural treatises and housekeeping guides attempt to downplay the liminal nature of the spaces that connect servants and families, Magdalen demonstrates that even the protected middle-class woman (who supposedly need never locate herself primarily in these liminal spaces) is sometimes unable to avoid association with the spaces that help dissolve the boundaries between identities. As a character who by birth belongs in a middle-class home, Magdalen’s loss of that proper place is particularly disturbing not only because she represents the fragility of middle-class identity but also because she refuses to accept her lot and challenges notions of femininity. Melynda Huskey argues that ‘the frightening, dangerous thing about … sensation novels generally, is that they blur boundaries that ought to remain fixed, and permit characters to pass from one moral region to another without the proper documentation’ (5). Notably, contemporary reviews of No Name, and of sensation fiction more generally, debated the morality of such books in terms of the social positions of their heroines. While some writers praised the depictions of these novels’ protagonists as realistically complex, many reviewers were highly critical of the ways in which these characters implied connections between working women and respectable middle-class women. Huskey’s interest in how boundaries are both necessary and flexible, in how women operate within physical and ideological boundaries but also challenge them, is a useful means of conceptualizing the function of protagonists such as Magdalen – for the nature of liminal spaces as boundary lands enables figures to move easily between places. For this reason, the sensation fiction heroine is more threatening to the stability of middle-class female identity than is the obviously ‘fallen’ woman at the margins of a text, for the latter is conveniently associated with spaces that confirm her distance from respectable women. Ironically, were Magdalen irredeemable, she would be a more ‘acceptable’ character in the sense that she would pose less of a threat to ideals of middle-class fixity. However, her removal from a middle-class woman’s proper spaces (she is exiled from her childhood home, for example) highlights the very threat a more complete removal might contain: Magdalen’s association largely with liminal spaces such as passageways signifies her own passages across moral, spiritual, educational, and class boundaries. Thereby blurring the boundaries of middle-class femininity in the process, heroines like Magdalen suggest the potential instability of middle-class womanhood.

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Architectures of Liminal Femininity In order to clarify how Magdalen’s position interrogates the liminal nature of middle-class femininity, it is useful to examine briefly the culture’s most obviously liminal woman, the governess. Arguably the only character Victorians were willing to discuss seriously in terms of her liminal place, the governess was the exception to the rule that morality, money, or family created neat, class-based categories of women. Although fallen women were offered sympathy by the enlightened few, this engendered little confusion, for the moral code dictated that a lapse in female chastity – regardless of the cause – meant a forfeit of one’s middle-class status. The governess, on the other hand, had had no similar lapse, and generally had been raised as a middle-class daughter, making her differentiation from the middle-class woman more complicated. Although the most recent scholarship on Jane Eyre has considered it in post-colonial terms, examining Victorian critical responses to this novel demonstrates the degree to which discussions of the liminal nature of governesses stand for the more radical suggestion that all middle-class women have an identity that is tenuous and dependent. Victorian responses to Jane Eyre demonstrate that the question of the governess’s proper place was circulating in the culture. The uncomfortably liminal status of these figures had its roots in the fact that many governesses were women whose parents faced sudden financial ruin or whose fathers were younger sons whose respectable professions (like the clergy) left them without a fortune to settle on their daughters. Elizabeth Rigby’s 1847 review of Vanity Fair and Jane Eyre together with the recent report of the Governesses Benevolent Institution explains that ‘the real definition of a governess, in the English sense, is a being who is our equal in birth, manners, and education, but our inferior in worldly wealth … There is no other class which so cruelly requires its members to be, in birth, mind, and manners, above their station, in order to fit them for their station’ (176–7). ‘Equal’ but ‘inferior,’ ‘above their station’ and yet ‘fit’ for it, governesses are here clearly acknowledged to be caught between class positions in a way that makes it difficult to know precisely how they ought to be identified. Throughout Jane Eyre, Jane is described in terms that at once connect her to middle-class women and distance her from them, revealing clearly the liminal position of the governess whose work requires her to be a well-bred middle-class woman but to accept her status as hired help. Jane’s position of moral superiority, capacity to solace Rochester, and righteous indignation

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over her treatment at the hands of the Reeds and the Brocklehursts all mark her middle-class sensibility. Yet the requirement that the governess have the ‘birth, mind, and manners’ of a delicate middle-class woman despite her lack of financial resources created a troubling position for her within the middle-class home of her employers.6 Because, as Mary Poovey points out, the governess was paid to do work equivalent to that of a wife in educating and nurturing children, ‘the very figure who should have defended the naturalness of separate spheres threatened to collapse the difference between them’ (Uneven Developments 127). In Jane Eyre, this collapse is actualized in the fact that Jane is first paid to do the work of raising Rochester’s ward (implicitly, his child) but later becomes his wife. In response to this threat of collapse, people were all too likely to assume an attitude of superiority over governesses, implying that to be ‘inferior in worldly wealth’ created a personal inferiority in the governess herself. At one point at Thornfield, for example, Jane is forced to listen to a scathing conversation intended to reinforce the distance between anyone in her position and women who grew up under the tutelage of governesses. Insisting on the ‘incompetency and caprice’ of the ‘class’ (governesses), Rochester’s female visitors indicate that there is no possibility a governess is their ‘equal’ (178). Yet they purposefully disregard the fact that many governesses grew up in the same ‘class’ as their eventual employers. As Rigby points out when discussing governesses generally, this is really a false distance: ‘If [a governess] sits at table she does not shock you – if she opens her mouth she does not distress you – her appearance and manners are likely to be as good as your own – her education rather better; there is nothing upon the face of the thing to stamp her as having been called to a different state of life from that in which it has pleased God to place you; and therefore the distinction has to be kept up by a fictitious barrier which presses with cruel weight upon the mental strength or constitutional vanity of a woman’ (177). On one hand, she here makes a common (and convenient for the middle classes) argument that social stratification is God’s will and thus to lament one’s place is to question God. (Indeed, Rigby calls Jane Eyre a ‘fundamentally anti-Christian composition’ apparently precisely because Jane bridles against her lot.) On the other hand, the straightforward way in which Rigby labels this ‘distinction’ a ‘fictitious barrier’ clearly acknowledges that women construct differences between themselves and the governesses they employ. Yet rather than see Rigby as hypocritical or inconsistent, one should note that her language does not

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clarify whether the ‘cruel weight’ of this barrier depresses those who are governesses or presses upon those who have charged themselves with maintaining the barrier. One might conclude, then, that to insist upon such a barrier – which in fact creates liminal women – may be detrimental to all women. In terms of Jane, however, Rigby seems to lose her moral high ground because she simultaneously admits that a governess’s position is nearly untenable and treats Jane with condescension – thereby implicitly fostering this sense of distance even as she explicitly denounces it. She writes in the review of the novel that ‘We acknowledge [Jane’s] firmness – we respect her determination – we feel for her struggles; but, for all that, and setting aside higher considerations, the impression she leaves on our minds is that of a decidedly vulgar-minded woman – one whom we should not care for as an acquaintance, whom we should not seek as a friend, whom we should not desire for a relation, and whom we should scrupulously avoid for a governess’ (174). The accusations that Jane is ‘uncongenial’ and ‘decidedly vulgar-minded’ rely on clichés used to distinguish working-class women from middle-class ones. To insist that despite Jane’s middle-class behaviour and education, she is a ‘vulgar-minded woman,’ not worthy of friendship and incapable of being a blood relation, implies that she is ‘really’ a working-class woman when in fact her middle-class parentage assures that by birth she is necessarily not ‘vulgar.’ Thus Rigby attempts to create distance between the middle-class reader and Jane-as-governess without apparently contradicting her advocacy on behalf of governesses generally. Specifically suggesting that Jane is unrepresentative of governesses because she does not embody the docility advocated in women’s conduct manuals, Rigby uses Jane to imply that governesses who are dissatisfied with their lot are not really deserving of sympathy. The problem with this, however, is that it presumes that the middle-class woman who has lost her status should be satisfied with her fallen state; moreover, because the notion of satisfaction implies that a proper place has been achieved, this argumentative sleight of hand recalls the religious justifications Rigby earlier invokes to identify the problem of Jane’s malcontent. This review of Jane Eyre is representative of Victorian discomfort with the ‘fictitious’ nature of the distance between middle-class women and governesses, which threatens the boundaries of middle-class female identity.7 Many reviewers similarly identify Jane as a liminal figure. Not only is she caught between being a paid employee and an attrac-

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tive potential wife, she is alternately characterized in terms that blur the lines of her femininity. The Dublin Review, for example, lauds Jane’s ‘perfect propriety’ and ‘feminine’ behaviour as well as her (manly) ‘untrammelled freedom of thought and action’ (212, 219).8 Reviewers who decried her behaviour often did so in terms that suggested that both Jane and her author were not properly feminine. In defending Jane against the general criticism that her ‘morality is questionable,’ other reviews more overtly show what Rigby only implies; namely, that Jane belongs nowhere in particular (Dublin Review 210). Significantly, this impression in the minds of reviewers is heightened by Jane’s relationship to spaces within Thornfield and by the ways she is aligned with Bertha Mason Rochester. Jane’s identification with the liminal spaces of the home – which begins on the very first page of the novel when a reader meets her ensconced in a window seat that is peripheral to the family drawing room – is perhaps most marked during her time in Mr Rochester’s house. When Jane first comes to Thornfield, she is momentarily warmed by the coziness of her little bedroom as opposed to the massive and dark stair hall and gallery (96). Yet she quickly becomes more comfortable roaming the passageways of the house than being confined to any particular room within it. She appears to be in her element when, to assist in the crisis when Richard Mason is attacked by his still-concealed sister, Jane is commanded to run around in passageways ‘velvet shod,’ fetching things (216). Noiseless and tactful, Jane is the perfect assistant, yet she needs something more challenging than mere obedience in her life. In confessing her fondness for sneaking to the parapet of the house, Jane positions herself between the limitless sky and the home that limits her to a position of service. It is in such threshold spaces within Thornfield that she feels most ‘at home.’ In the often-cited moment on the rooftop, Jane articulates a ‘long[ing] for a power of vision which might overpass that limit … desir[ing] more of practical experience than I possessed’ (108). Despite her own knowledge that such longing will hardly be understood by those who would call her fortunate in finding a position in which she is generally treated well as a governess, she explains that ‘the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes. Then my sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third story, backwards and forwards, safe in the silence and solitude of the spot’ (108). Locating herself on the roof or in the abandoned ‘corridor of the third story,’ she finds relief from her feeling of being displaced within the house and misplaced within the strictures of Victorian femi-

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ninity. Jane explicitly links these two positions in order to assert that women often are not as ‘satisfied with tranquility’ as they are expected to be (108). Yet notably her ‘sole relief’ is not a freedom, since she is only able to pace, confined, ‘backwards and forwards.’ When she argues that women ‘suffer from too rigid a constraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer,’ Jane’s pacing spatially confirms her sense that women feel ‘constraint’ and ‘stagnation.’ Moreover, her call for ‘exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts’ indicates that a physical sense of women’s confinement contributes to restricting her sense of self (108). Her own liminal condition thus invites a reader to extrapolate from the problems governesses face to ponder whether all middle-class women are similarly trapped. Hence, we can rewrite our understanding of this novel by productively linking nineteenth-century concerns about governesses and the religion/morality of Jane with the more explicitly feminist, recent readings of the novel – for the agenda underlying the Victorian criticism seems precisely to be discomfort with the general lot of women that Jane voices. That is, while Mary Poovey (for example) argues that Jane’s problems are personalized, psychologized, and made partly a function of her family, rendering them individual rather than representative, I would argue that Jane is figured as a representative governess through her inability to express openly her frustration at her condition of dependence. Jane’s longing for a ‘power of vision’ explicitly ‘resist[s] the limits of social enclosure, longing for connection and space’ in the form of a home of her own (Monahan 605). If social scripts limited the middleclass woman to proper places, then Jane’s quest for a satisfying space to occupy introduces the possibility that middle-class women might be as dissatisfied as governesses with the restrictions placed upon them. In particular, the connections between Jane and Bertha Mason Rochester emphasize that even marginalized women are not so easily contained by the rooms and identities constructed for them within the middle-class home. Significantly many of the liminal spaces of Thornfield in which Jane finds her ‘sole relief’ are the same locations that are associated with Bertha even before a reader (or Jane) knows who Bertha is. Bertha has been famously read as a demonic double for Jane who expresses all the anger that Jane represses and stands for the ‘psychic split between the lady who submits to male dicta and the lunatic who rebels’ (Gilbert and Gubar 86). Such a reading assumes that Jane demonstrates proper Victorian womanhood in her self-restraint, responsibility, and capacity to enable morality and logic to prevail over passion,

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while Bertha’s passion, rebellion, and rage represent the underside of that propriety. But if we think of Bertha not as expressing the rage Jane represses but as a woman whose life, like Jane’s, suggests difficulties middle-class women generally might face, startling parallels between ‘the lunatic’ and ‘the lady’ emerge.9 Not merely opposites, Jane and Bertha are similarly liminal women whose physical positions within the house confirm their likeness. In ideological terms, the governess and the madwoman are both on the fringes of middle-class femininity, not clearly middle-class women yet not completely separable from middle-class women either.10 Moreover, Victorian architects describe the corridor spaces in which Jane and Bertha are so often found in terms that further the slippage between governesses, madwomen, and middle-class women. Remarkably, J.J. Stevenson, in making a case for the inclusion of a gallery or long, wide passageway in a house, claims that such a corridor ‘gives an air of freedom and cheerfulness, makes an admirable promenade in wet weather, and is consequently generally adopted as the basis of the plan of lunatic asylums, in which these characteristics are of great importance’ (115). In his apparently casual connection between domestic architecture and the architecture of ‘lunatic asylums,’ Stevenson asserts that ‘an air of freedom’ and a place to exercise are significant requirements of both the inmates of asylums and the occupants of homes. Thereby providing a link between the frustrated pacing that expresses Jane’s sense of the confines of Victorian femininity with the animalistic running ‘backwards and forwards’ of Bertha at the end of her attic room (300), Stevenson’s characterization of the purpose of the expansive corridor strikingly implies that all middle-class women may have need for a place in which to gain the illusion of freedom through the process of promenading up and down the corridor. Bertha’s own history, and her movements through Thornfield, further suggest that she must be understood on a continuum with middleclass women. Raised in a position of privilege, with the sense that by birth and breeding she had the right to certain protections from men, including being treated as a lady, Bertha Mason began life much like many a middle-class girl. Her subsequent madness and confinement to the attic regions of Thornfield thus highlight her liminal position. Married to a husband who resists thinking of her as his wife, located in the wing housing the once grand, now ruined bedrooms of the house, physically remote yet not wholly replaced by a new mistress of the house, Bertha is a figure whose ‘real’ identity is difficult to establish.

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Before Jane knows who she is, Bertha appears as a ‘spectre’ in the middle of the night, existing according to Rochester only in a realm that is ‘half dream, half reality’ (290–1). Like Jane, she is found roaming the corridors at night on ghostly quiet feet. As with Jane, it is difficult to discern whether Bertha’s birthright to middle-class protection is forfeited once she is no longer in her father’s care. Adding to the complexity of Bertha’s case is the fact that her madness is described as a kind of birthright too, a hereditary disorder that may or may not supersede her hereditary right to be cared for as a respectable middle-class woman. Thus Bertha, even in her position of colonized Other, in fact provides a more overt critique of the position of middle-class women than does Jane. Since Bertha has spent much of her life knowing the comforts of middle-class femininity in a way Jane never has, Bertha’s loss of those comforts does more to critique the fragility of middle-class women’s positions than does Jane’s uneasy identification with the comfort and privilege of a middle-class woman: uneasy because, while she ‘deserves’ such a position by virtue of her birth, in fact she has never occupied this place, and she simultaneously implies that such a place is indeed too restrictive for women. It is important to note, however, that although Jane and Bertha together imply a criticism against the confines of middle-class womanhood, neither occupies a position that makes this critique as forceful as it might be. An orphan since her very early childhood, Jane has never known a protected middle-class feminine place for herself; thus she is more fully able to critique the position of the governess in Victorian culture than she is able to suggest that middle-class women generally are too confined. Though she rails against the lot of women (particularly in the famous parapet scene where she voices her anger over women being denied both feeling and intellect), her anger at the lot of middle-class women generally has been made much more explicit by twentieth-century critics than it was by nineteenth-century readers. The latter seemed to find Jane reprehensible for her religious and moral lapses of contentment over her individual lot but did not indicate an – even implicit – concern that Jane is thereby expressing some larger social critique. Similarly Bertha, in succumbing to the family madness, becomes so distanced from the middle-class feminine ideals of modest, quiet demeanour and gentle disposition that it was easier for a Victorian reader of the novel to dismiss her as subhuman than to see her as representing the logical extreme of being forced to depend totally on the goodwill of men to protect one’s interest. Although the horror of

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Rochester’s denial of her existence may create sympathy and suggest that ‘mad’ women need to be better cared for, Bertha’s liminal position is not easily extended to include all middle-class women since Bertha herself is explicitly not representative of middle-class womanhood, even if one disagrees with Rochester’s description of her or does not fully believe his version of the story. One important focus of Jane Eyre is to recuperate marginalized women by speaking on their behalf and arguing that they should not be ostracized by middle-class women. William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853), and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) similarly addressed the social question of the relationship between middle-class women and specific ‘Others’ against whom they were often opposed (namely governesses and fallen women). Like Jane Eyre, they also rely on sympathy to get middle-class women to imagine the possibility that they themselves might suffer the same fate as these heroines. Yet like the sympathy Sarah Ellis requested from the lady in the drawing room for the servant below stairs, this sympathy is predicated on a crucial sense of difference. A middle-class reader’s sympathy for Jane, for example, requires that the reader imagine being in Jane’s position precisely because the reader is not in Jane’s position. Thus the capacity for identification of the middle-class reader with the governess is limited by a simultaneous emphasis on the difference between them. This distinction is magnified by the fact that a reader is introduced to protagonists of these novels as dependents and charity cases who explicitly do not enjoy a middle-class lifestyle regardless of their apparently middle-class sensibilities; hence, their liminal places at best encourage readers to consider that their governesses are not so easily differentiated from themselves. No Name’s Magdalen Vanstone, on the other hand, is a dependent in the same way a middle-class reader would be, for she is a well-caredfor middle-class daughter. Thus where the previous examples expose the troubling similarities between liminal women and the comfortable middle classes, Magdalen’s story goes further to suggest that the identity of the middle-class woman is tenuous and potentially as liminal as that of the women against whom she typically identifies herself. Located on the boundaries of middle-class respectability, Magdalen Vanstone raises the question of how to define the middle-class woman by suggesting that she has no simple or obvious opposites. Given that, as Joan Perkin has observed, the Victorian ‘middle classes guarded their hierarchical boundaries very carefully,’ it is especially interesting to ex-

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amine the spatial implications that are always present in the concept of boundaries (234). Located within the spaces of the home that are not easily aligned with a single, specific person, Magdalen is physically placed in a way that emphasizes the instability of ‘hierarchical boundaries’ even within the supposedly safely contained domestic realm. As the following discussion of No Name will show, the Victorian sensation fiction heroine exposes the fragile position of the middle-class woman who is protected to the point of ignorance. Wilkie Collins’s Magdalen Vanstone offers a much stronger critique than does Jane Eyre that all middle-class women are in a similarly liminal position. Initially presented in that most stable of positions, the gentleman’s daughter, eighteen-year-old Magdalen Vanstone quickly loses this identity, her family name, and all her property through the combination of her father’s shady past and his ignorance about the legal protections offered children who are technically illegitimate.11 Having been married as a very young man to a woman whom he quickly repudiated (but continued to support financially), Andrew Vanstone did not understand that the legal consequence of marrying the mother of his children (once his first wife had finally died) was not to legitimate those children but effectively to disinherit them. Because he did not make a new will specifically naming them as his heirs, a necessity given that any marriage in the period nullified a will made prior to it, he died intestate. Thus when Magdalen and her older sister Norah are suddenly orphaned and discover that they are technically illegitimate, they are unable to exercise any legal claim to their parents’ intestate fortune, and they must begin to provide for themselves. Not surprisingly, Norah does exactly what a respectable girl in reduced circumstances ought to do: she seeks a position as a governess for the children of a ‘good’ family. Quietly accepting her change of circumstance, she works with dignity despite the fact that she is looked down upon by people who once would have considered themselves her peers. That Miss Garth, who faithfully served as governess for both Norah and Magdalen, plays a significant role throughout the novel continuously reminds readers that Norah was once privileged to have her own governess, though she is now treated as inferior because of her need to work in that very capacity herself. Yet as Jane Eyre, its reviews, the formation of the Governesses’ Benevolent Institution, and other public discussions show, the question of the governess problem had occupied the public mind long before No Name came out. This suggests that Collins introduces Norah in the novel primarily to remind

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readers of the unsatisfactory – but only respectable – course of action for the once-privileged girl in reduced circumstances. Indeed, Norah’s fairly peripheral role in the novel offers nothing new by way of comment on the governess problem and in fact hardly even addresses the sorrows of the governess. Rather, Norah’s ‘good’ model of self-sacrifice and stoic acceptance of her plight draws the reader into a familiar story of female suffering at the hands of male financial woe, predominantly to make explicit that Magdalen’s course of action offers an alternative (albeit a somewhat sensational one) to becoming a governess. With Norah’s choices as a foil, Magdalen’s efforts to regain the family fortune through a series of deceptions practised on the more distant relatives who have inherited her father’s money are even more obviously not respectable or reasonable options for other similarly situated girls. Yet far from serving to endorse uncritically the governess ‘solution,’ the very fact that Magdalen’s alternative efforts are neither particularly attractive nor ultimately successful refocuses attention to the position of governesses as part of a larger critique of the vulnerable position of middle-class women generally.12 Magdalen’s actions highlight the frustrating passivity that attends the acceptable choices for a modest woman, thereby suggesting that while her own somewhat sensational course of action might not be the choice of most young women in her position, the alternative of becoming a governess is barely preferable for its respectability. That no solution emerges to the Vanstone sisters’ problem that is both respectable and active on their parts suggests a need for systemic change in defining the boundaries of middle-class womanhood if they are to occupy a place that is not simply contingent on their relationships to men. Victorian critics of No Name found most problematic the fact that Magdalen acts in a way that is unbecoming to a respectable middleclass girl. Just as critics condemned Jane Eyre on the grounds of her character not being respectable or feminine enough, critics of sensation fiction complain that the characters are unrealistic and ‘unnatural,’ that they ‘have no representatives in the living world’ (‘Novels and Novelists’ 185). Margaret Oliphant claims, in one of her several reviews of sensation fiction in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, that the heroines of sensation fiction are a ‘misrepresentation’ of how ‘young women of good blood and good training feel’ (‘Novels’ [1867] 260). Her impression that writers of sensation fiction are attempting to represent ‘young women of good blood and good training’ in fact gets at the heart of her critique, for she links the ‘imperfect and confused morality’ of sensa-

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tion fiction explicitly to its problematic characters (‘Novels’ [1863] 170). For Oliphant, the central problem with the characters in such novels lay in the fact that the female protagonists of sensation fiction typically present to the world of the novel an exterior that seems thoroughly middle-class while in fact acting in ways that defy social expectations, custom, and even the law. They appear to be ‘young women of good blood and good training’ yet turn out to be ‘personages … with whom you would certainly permit yourself or your family to associate only in print’ (‘Novels’ [1863] 170). Liminal women, caught in the spaces between identities, sensation fiction heroines are more unfit to associate with respectable readers than are the servants who walk openly in the routes between respectable domestic places. Sensation heroines – whose outward appearance seems to fulfil all the culture’s ideals of femininity – shocked other reviewers besides Oliphant by exploiting feminine stereotypes to satisfy their own desires, thereby raising the question of whether the boundaries of middle-class femininity were as firmly drawn as the culture desired. This problem of representation helps explain an apparent disagreement in reviewers’ positions on sensation fiction. Some, such as Henry Mansel, argue that sensation fiction is disagreeable because its plots ‘abound in incident’ while simultaneously the ‘scene be laid in our own days and among the people we are in the habit of meeting’ (486, 489). On the other hand, Oliphant’s claim that sensation fiction is filled with ‘personages, male and female, with whom you would certainly permit yourself or your family to associate only in print,’ accords with the North British Review’s assertion that reading these books is akin to ‘holding converse with monstrosities’ (‘Novels and Novelists’ 183). While the notion that these might be ‘people we are in the habit of meeting’ seems to contradict the criticism that sensation fiction heroines are ‘monstrosities’ or people whom one would only be willing to meet ‘in print,’ I would argue that these reviewers in fact agree. The problematic thing about sensation fiction is that characters whose actions mark them as reprehensible are able to present themselves as respectable people. The primary concern lies in the fact that sensation fiction characters demonstrate that it is possible to appear to be one thing and ‘really’ be another, that it is possible to belong in one place and yet effortlessly occupy another. Objecting that such characters are ‘unnatural’ is thus an effort to contain these transgressive and liminal women by asserting that to be capable of such duplicity goes against an essential quality of the Victorian woman, her ‘natural’ femininity.

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In dismissing Magdalen’s actions and those of other sensation fiction heroines as unnatural, such reviews suggest that the situations these women face are also unrealistic. When he or she argues that ‘there never was a young lady like Magdalen,’ the reviewer in the North British Review seems to be implying that there never was a situation in which a young lady would have cause to act in this way (‘Novels and Novelists’ 185). Whether or not duplicitous middle-class women are realistic figures, there is no doubt that the solutions to their problems adopted in fiction (arson, bigamy, murder, false identities) were neither realistic nor common. Yet while real women may be unlikely to adopt these solutions, it does not necessarily follow that they would never face the problems of sensation fiction heroines. Indeed, there is a feeling of overreaching in the many efforts to create distance between sensational novels and the possible truths to which they come uncomfortably close. In particular, reviewers objected to normalizing a girl who practises ‘endless deceptions’ of which a middle-class girl should be incapable. Oliphant, for example, is indignant that ‘The Magdalen of “No Name” does not go astray after the usual fashion of erring maidens in romance. Her pollution is decorous, and justified by law; and after all her endless deceptions and horrible marriage, it seems quite right to the author that she should be restored to society, and have a good husband and a happy home’ (‘Novels’ [1863] 170). The description of ‘decorous’ and legally justified ‘pollution’ hints at the problem of writing Magdalen off as entirely unrealistic even as Oliphant’s desire to establish that Magdalen’s choices are unrealistic sidesteps the question of whether a ‘young lady’ might in fact find herself in a predicament similar to Magdalen’s. One can assume that Oliphant was not ignorant of the fact that financial circumstances such as the Vanstone sisters face had pushed more than one young lady into the margins of respectability. Furthermore, Collins’s careful positioning of these two sisters highlights that their legal and financial vulnerability is not an individualized punishment for wrong – as it might be possible to interpret this outcome were it to befall a single character – but is a generalizable state of middle-class womanhood: the space of the protected daughter is merely one threshold away from financial ruin and legal wanderings between identity categories. In an effort to explore how middle-class women’s places are completely dependent on the men whose finances care for them, Collins writes a heroine whose quest to (re)establish her identity is tied to her need to gain access to domestic spaces and attain some authority within them. Having been identified shortly after her parents’ deaths

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as ‘Nobody’s Child,’ Magdalen is simultaneously deprived of a place in which to live. Subsequently, she experiments by taking on a number of different identities, acting the roles of various characters in order to gain access to the homes of the relatives who have ‘stolen’ the Vanstone sisters’ fortune. Despite the fact that being an actress raises implications that she may be or become a fallen woman, Magdalen turns her liminal position into a benefit; that is, she assumes that it is her prerogative as a liminal figure to occupy any position she chooses rather than that it is her fate to have no place to occupy at all. As a lady’s companion, a modest niece, a devoted wife, and an efficient parlour maid, Magdalen locates herself in a wide range of identities open to Victorian women of varying circumstances. Significantly, her actions do not mark her as merely a ‘fortune hunter,’ for the fortune she seeks encompasses much more than the money she and Norah have lost to greedy relatives. It also includes her childhood sense of security, her legitimacy, her name, and the property – the home – in which she grew up. Thus for her to get her fortune back symbolizes a return to a position of legitimacy, a middle-class way of life that is both publicly and privately recognized as proper. Throughout the novel, Collins links Magdalen’s quest to reclaim her identity with her quest for a space to occupy. A straightforward example of this comes when Magdalen, understanding the importance of domestic spaces for locating one’s identity, specifically asks her cousin Wragge to rent a house for them that ‘must be perfectly respectable’ (261). Moreover, Magdalen’s sense that a respectable house establishes one’s name is corroborated by the other characters, for whom identities and spaces are noticeably interwoven. In fact, the prevailing assumption in the world of the novel is that the place to which one is legitimately connected defines one’s character associatively: all respectable people come from somewhere specific, and respectable locations only shelter respectable people. Characters are invariably introduced as Mr or Miss so-and-so of such-and-such-a-place. It is the Vanstones of Combe-Raven who have lost their fortune. In their scheme to get Noel Vanstone to propose to Magdalen, she and her distant relatives the Wragges take on the identity of The Bygraves of North Shingles. And it is to Admiral Bartram of St-Crux-on-the-Marsh that Magdalen wants to hire herself out as a servant. This sense of place, enhanced by having homes with names of their own rather than just coming from a house in a named town, is supported by countless architectural texts that associate the ‘character’ of a house with the character of its inhab-

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itants, presuming that the house will be an accurate reflection of class position and propriety. Because Magdalen begins in a place that would seem to be supremely secure as the pampered daughter of a well-off man, the fact that she loses that place suggests that all middle-class women occupy a similarly tenuous position. Even when she is no longer an innocent girl protected by the law, her parents, or her male champions, the world of the novel passes judgment on her for not retaining the obligatory character and qualities of a middle-class woman despite the fact that she has neither the incentive nor the means to maintain her protected status. When she initially launches a ‘Dramatic Entertainment’ through which to raise money to support herself and her investigations, she naively thinks that the fact of her purity will prevail over the widespread association of actresses to prostitutes. Yet she is so far unable to avoid what Miss Garth points out, namely that hers ‘is a suspicious way of life to all respectable people,’ that a number of peripheral characters doubt the respectability of even Norah simply because she is related to Magdalen (254). Indeed, Norah gets fired from one governess position when her employers discover that her sister is an actress, and Norah herself assumes her beau will be unable to marry her because he will take reasonable moral exception to her sister’s profession.13 Magdalen’s brief professional career, however, is merely incidental to the scandalous nature of her efforts. Although public actresses were morally suspect, it is a far bigger problem for a reader of the novel that the privileged Magdalen is able to take on a series of private roles so convincingly. The Victorian assumption that there was an immutable correspondence between one’s outward appearance and one’s birth and breeding is thoroughly troubled by Magdalen’s adoption of disguises and her infiltration of a series of respectable domestic situations in a variety of disparate characters. Victorian reviewers, like the characters in the novel, were highly critical of Magdalen’s methods – though careful reading of these comments suggests that the biggest problem she thereby reveals is that middle-class women are not ‘naturally’ moral, sincere, transparent, or even located in a small series of sanctioned homes (father’s, husband’s, brother’s). Victorian critics argued that Magdalen should not be seen as a sympathetic character because she acts in ways that are not ‘naturally’ feminine and not proper for a middle-class woman. Juliet Blair has more recently shown that the actress bridges public and private spheres in a way that no other figure can, since her job is to ‘bring the naturally

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secluded private inter-personal sphere of women in the home into the light of public scrutiny’ (205). Arguing that acting highlights the split between public and private through the self-conscious performance of private lives on public stages, Blair provides a useful means of understanding reviewers’ criticisms of Magdalen. Although a reader never sees Magdalen acting in the paid ‘Dramatic Entertainment,’ much of the novel focuses on her acting in a wide range of female roles that make public – through the medium of the novel itself – a range of psychological truths about female experience. In fact, Magdalen occupies the very positions against which she might once have defined herself, paradoxically implying that the middle-class woman facing reduced circumstances may only be able to (re)access privileges of her middleclass breeding by adopting strategies and locating herself in spaces that mark her as less than middle-class. From the moment of the reader’s first introduction to Magdalen in the novel, her relationship to physical, domestic space is the central means of revealing her character, as if to set readers up for the spatial consequences and implications of her later moves to regain control over her middle-class position. As the somewhat spoiled daughter of the Vanstone house, Magdalen has all the prerogatives of a woman in a privileged place, and she uses her position to authorize her free movement all over the house: The hall-clock struck the adjourned breakfast-hour. When the minutehand had recorded the lapse of five minutes more, a door banged in the bedroom regions – a clear young voice was heard singing blithely – light rapid footsteps pattered on the upper stairs, descended with a jump to the landing, and pattered again, faster than ever, down the lower flight. In another moment, the youngest of Mr Vanstone’s two daughters … dashed into view on the dingy old oaken stairs, with the suddenness of a flash of light; and clearing the last three steps into the hall at a jump, presented herself breathless in the breakfast-room, to make the family circle complete. (7–8)

This description of a well-bred girl who takes ‘a head-long course down the house stairs’ suggests that Magdalen finds freedom through occupying a completely protected position (9). The only remonstrance she receives for her unladylike dash and jump down several flights of stairs is her governess’s comment, ‘Late again!’ (9). No mention is made of the banging door, the pattering, jumping feet, the blithely singing

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voice, yet to a Victorian audience all of these details would be significant. Only a young lady most confident in her position of privilege – and one a little headstrong even then – would break norms of etiquette to the extent of dashing and jumping in the house. Thus Magdalen’s relationship to her physical space, that she may break its rules of propriety with little fear of censure, marks her confidence in the stability of her position. In fact, she exercises remarkable freedom throughout the house, interrupting her father in his study and wandering in the lawns unchaperoned for hours. For a Victorian audience, her complete freedom of access to any space in the house would be remarkable, since, for example, a man’s study was considered his private lair, and a girl’s exercise even on the grounds of her own home was not strictly proper if taken alone.14 Magdalen’s boldness and spatial freedom in part explain reviewers’ reactions to her as being unlike ‘real’ girls – for despite the ways in which the assumption is problematic, these reviews clearly assume that ‘real’ girls are as modest, quiet, and passive as the ideals described in conduct manuals. Although Magdalen begins by challenging the spatial restrictions placed on middle-class femininity, once she is actually left without a place (or name), she begins to modify her behaviour. While the daughter of Andrew Vanstone had the luxury to challenge restrictive notions of the space that she was authorized to occupy, her position as ‘Nobody’s Child’ initially appears to limit her freedom of movement through space. With no family name or family home to identify her, others can only understand her identity through the places she chooses to occupy. Thus she begins more carefully to calculate where and how she moves and to acquire mannerisms more suited to protect her in her liminal position than would her previous jump and dash. Her first guise is to act as a lady’s companion to the wife of a distant cousin; as Mrs Wragge’s ‘niece’ on a visit to London, the Magdalen whom a reader sees in Vauxhall Walk is highly conscious of wanting her behaviour to attract no attention. She places herself in this position with the Wragges for the convenience it offers her to leave their household under cover, as it were, in order to search for important information regarding the disposal of her fortune. Periodically, for example, she dons the role and costume of her old governess, Miss Garth, in order to get information out of Noel Vanstone (who has inherited the Vanstone sisters’ fortune). In such guises, Magdalen struggles to limit her movements within the boundaries of these identities because such limitations are so unfamiliar to her.

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Magdalen’s difficulty increases not because she takes on multiple roles but because she comes to see herself occupying three distinct positions which do not all place her in the same relationship to domestic physical spaces. First, she feels she is rightfully a respectable middle-class girl who ought to be able to act and move as she always has, with command over space and freedom of calculated disregard for the boundaries of feminine behaviour. Second, she recognizes that as ‘Nobody’s Child’ she must behave more modestly (move more quietly and be grateful for whatever domestic space she’s given to occupy) in order to prove that she is well bred and deserves to be treated as respectable despite her illegitimacy. Third, she adopts a series of identities for herself that often have different requirements again. When she impersonates Miss Garth in order to gain entrance into a home to which Magdalen would otherwise be denied, for example, she has to maintain a certain deferential relationship that signifies her supposed position as hired help. Throughout this interview with Noel Vanstone and his housekeeper Mrs Lecount, the moments at which Magdalen loses her self-control are in fact moments at which she breaks out of character – acting more like the wilful daughter of a wealthy man than like the grateful and modest employee of his house. The complicated nature of Magdalen’s multiply identified position is made especially clear when she comes back from her efforts at deceiving Lecount and Vanstone in their Vauxhall Walk house. She is able to maintain her subtle movement as long as the identity she has taken on is not challenged. On returning home in her Miss Garth disguise, she ‘glide[s] along the passage’ until she realizes that she is about to be discovered by Mrs Wragge (245). As soon as it seems possible that her disguise may be penetrated, her decorous movement ceases: she ‘pushed’ past the woman and ‘ran into her own room; tore off her cloak, bonnet and wig; and threw them down out of sight’ in a motion that Mrs Wragge describes as ‘scuttling’ (245–6). Magdalen’s ‘scuttling’ movement through the passageway to the safety of her own room marks her as a fugitive, while her destination implies a certain stability. Recalling the distinction Victorian architects made between route and destination, we can see how clearly this scene illustrates her liminal state: she is not exclusively a middle-class girl with a room to herself or simply a figure in the ‘no name’ position of scuttling through the passageway (e.g., a servant or other dependent). Neither one nor the other, and yet both simultaneously, Magdalen’s scuttling figure is significantly identified by Mrs Wragge as a ‘ghost.’ Although mentally extremely child-

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like, Mrs Wragge is here particularly accurate in her assessment, for Magdalen, ghost-like, is caught between two worlds. Magdalen tells Mrs Wragge that ‘one appearance (according to all the laws and regulations of ghosts) meant nothing, unless it was immediately followed by two more,’ a reassurance she offers on the grounds that she knows that she will never don this costume again. Yet the image of Magdalen as a ghostly spectre of a middle-class woman (reminiscent of Bertha Mason Rochester, who haunts the corridors of Thornfield) is one that recurs at several points in the novel to signify her loss of identity, her position as a displaced person, and her non-status socially (247). Mrs Wragge’s literalist perspective, in which she assumes that things are best defined on the basis of their appearances, raises the problem of interpretation for it invites readers to note the lack of correspondence between Magdalen’s outward and inward selves. Affirming that Magdalen is an unstable figure, and one whose appearance may not concur with the position she feels she ought to occupy, this moment on the stairs significantly continues the association of Magdalen with liminal spaces while simultaneously beginning to indicate that such spaces emphasize rather than contradict her position in the world. For Magdalen herself, the moment on the stairs highlights the danger of her liminal position and serves as the catalyst for greater self-control of behaviour. When she later approaches Noel Vanstone and his faithful Lecount in the character of Susan Bygrave (the Wragges’ niece) in order to try to get Vanstone to marry her, her behaviour has changed so markedly that even Captain Wragge notices that ‘her voice was softer and more equable, her eyes were steadier, her step was slower than of old’ (267). These details may be signs of her maturity or signs of the trouble that is weighing on her mind, but they are also clearly signs of a changing relationship to the places she inhabits. No longer a privileged daughter (though she is playing one), she no longer feels authorized to dash and jump in the house. With steady eyes and a slower step, Magdalen is becoming more calculating in her movements, as more and more depends on her maintaining her tenuous command over the spaces she occupies. If Magdalen found it hard to reconcile her movements with her multiple sense of her identity in Vauxhall Walk, she becomes increasingly fragmented as Susan Bygrave. Her position as Susan is ostensibly familiar and comfortable, in the sense that she occupies a place as a middle-class girl cared for by her respectable relatives. Moreover, far from being associated primarily with liminal spaces, she meets with

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Vanstone in both his parlour and hers, retires to her own bedroom, and has discussions over breakfast like any young lady. However, the discomfort she feels in these positions is striking: Magdalen knows she does not ‘belong’ in these innocent occupations or in these capacities because they mask the fact of her illegitimacy, her loss of name and property, and her position as something of a social outcast. The reminder that she is in fact the ‘ghost’ seen on the stairs comes back in descriptions of her ‘shadowy presence,’ ‘noiseless’ movements that include ‘gliding into the obscurity of the room, like a ghost,’ and her preference for sitting ‘in the darkest part of the room’ (342–3). Although Magdalen finds Noel personally repellent and is reluctant to marry him, her stubborn desire to regain what she feels rightfully belongs to herself and her sister overrides these personal objections. As the successful culmination of her marriage plan draws closer, she becomes more traditionally attractive because her health and force of personality slowly fade in the face of her sinking realization of the personal sacrifice she will make. While Collins does not belabour this point, the correlation between her dwindling spirit and her increasing beauty clearly invites a reader to consider the troubling relationship between cultural notions of beauty and the imperative for female self-sacrifice. Interestingly, although she succeeds in getting Noel Vanstone to marry her – a normalization that might move her out of her liminal position – this marriage in fact confirms her position as a woman who is dependent upon a system that ultimately she cannot control and who is thus trapped in a space between legal identities. She has used the very fact of her orphaned state and lack of fortune (cloaked in the identity of Miss Susan Bygrave) to trick Noel Vanstone into proposing to her. Admitting her tenuously dependent position, she also hides it by creating a new identity around the fact of her dependence. On one hand, she feels she deserves the Vanstone fortune – not least of which includes the recovery of legitimate rights to her surname – that she will inherit as Noel’s wife. Yet she also feels caught between this internal sense and the external behaviour that marks her as completely changed from the days when she was protected as her father’s daughter, Magdalen Vanstone. While she is pleased that ‘Nobody’s Child had become Somebody’s Wife,’ both identities (child and wife) require the protection of a man and do not define her as an independent entity (484). This is a problem for her independent spirit, and it is a problem in the Victorian world of the novel because it suggests that a woman’s only legitimate options depend upon men for security and protection. Furthermore,

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although she regains the rights to her name with this marriage, she cannot claim these rights by signing herself as ‘Magdalen Vanstone’ until after her husband’s death, since she has married him as ‘Susan’ (480). Thus even the marriage that ought to have restored her to what she feels is her rightful name and place does not fully do so, instead leaving her in the liminal position of having married in defiance of the law and, soon after, being widowed before her identity can be firmly established.15 If Magdalen’s identification as ‘Somebody’s Wife’ is uneasily dependent upon Noel’s fortune and his not knowing the truth of her background, it also positions him as hardly a man. Despite her financial dependence and slowly decreasing capacity to take successful action, Magdalen has shown herself by this point in the novel to be capable of taking decisive steps in a manner that Victorian critics decried as unfeminine. Compounding this, Magdalen has married a man who looks and acts startlingly girlish. The first moment at which a reader sees Noel, for example, he is dressed in a ‘white dressing-gown, many sizes too large for him, with a nosegay of violets drawn neatly through the button-hole over his breast … His complexion was as delicate as a young girl’s, his eyes were of the lightest blue … He had a plate of strawberries on his lap, with a napkin under them to preserve the purity of his white dressing-gown’ (228). Both explicitly and implicitly coded as a girl, from his pure, ‘white dressing-gown’ and his ‘nosegay’ to his ‘delicate’ complexion and way of eating a ‘plate of strawberries,’ Noel is tended by his housekeeper in a way that very nearly emasculates him completely. In marrying an un-manned man, Magdalen thus calls attention to the problematic disparity in the law that leaves women in a liminal position such as hers. Namely, women are forcibly dependent upon men’s money despite the fact that they may have perfect strength of will to act, while men are allowed to inherit on the assumption that they have the wherewithal to manage finances, yet they may in fact be terribly ‘feminine’ in their inability to handle money. Although throughout their courtship and brief marriage Noel shows himself to be petulant and indecisive, he dies having taken action to deny his wife access to any of the family homes by disinheriting her, thereby disabling her access to spaces in which she might have exerted authority under the name of Vanstone. With this new failure to recover a place and name for herself, Magdalen becomes more desperate, and she moves further away from any spatial associations that would mark her as middle-class. Lewis Horne observes that ‘through noting the

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figure Magdalen becomes and the place in which she becomes it, the reader can trace her moral decline, witnessing it through what is, in a way, a series of transformations’ (284). My emphasis on the ‘place in which she becomes’ each new identity reinterprets Magadalen’s position as more than simply succumbing to ‘moral decline.’ Her declining hope and narrowing options produce a series of failures to be securely located within a domestic realm in which she has legitimate authority; the spatial configurations that mark her descent from middle-class status thereby demonstrate that all middle-class women occupy similarly tenuous positions. While it might be unrealistic to think any single woman would have the incredible bad luck to lose her ‘rightful’ place in the many ways Magdalen does – as orphan, illegitimate child, unprovided-for daughter, disinherited wife, fired servant, and so on – it is significant that over the course of her admittedly extraordinary narrative, Magdalen occupies nearly all of the positions in which any middle-class woman might inadvertently find herself ‘ruined’ through no fault of her own. (The notable exception is the lack of a sexual fall.) It is precisely the lack of realism for which Victorian critics condemned the novel, then, that creates Magdalen as a sort of Everywoman character. Magdalen’s next plan, when her marriage to Noel fails to produce the access to her fortune that she hoped for, is to get her servant Louisa (the one originally provided to her when she became Noel’s wife) to help her prepare to apply for the position of parlour maid in the home of the relative who now controls the Vanstone sisters’ lost fortune. In exchange, Magdalen will give Louisa money to pay her passage to Australia so that she can marry the man who has fathered her child and start a life with him. This plan significantly marks the kind of ‘moral decline’ that Horne suggests, for Magdalen herself insists to Louisa: ‘Whatever distinctions there might once have been between us, are now at an end. I am a lonely woman thrown helpless on my own resources, without rank or place in the world’ (495). Given Louisa’s position as an unwed mother, Magdalen’s claim that there are no longer any ‘distinctions’ between them furthers the association that her name immediately conjures between Magdalen and fallen women, perhaps implicitly indicating that she has prostituted herself in marrying Noel Vanstone for the sake of the fortune (although it is unclear whether the marriage was consummated). The fact that Magdalen bore no love for her husband, while Louisa loves the father of her own child very deeply, creates a striking reversal of Victorian judgment: the widowed woman is understood to be morally questionable while the mother who has been pre-

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vented from marrying her child’s father seems morally upstanding for remaining faithful to him anyway. As Magdalen’s continued association with the image of the ghost suggests, she remains caught between her sense of what ought to be (her continued status as a cherished Vanstone daughter) and what is (her condition of no name with its concomitant lack of place). The fact that Magdalen prefers to have the conversation in which she makes the proposal to Louisa in the dark, yet insists that she speaks ‘on equal terms’ with Louisa, and ends up calling herself ‘degraded’ in comparison to Lousia’s love match, creates for the reader a picture of a woman who indeed belongs nowhere (495–7). She is a widow who has regained her childhood surname under false pretences that might raise questions of her legitimate claim to that name; she has no money or friends on whom to rely, yet her servant still assumes a hierarchy for their relations that requires a ‘distinction’ between them. While Louisa insists on thinking of Magdalen as her ‘mistress,’ Magdalen claims that to barter advice on being a servant for safe emigration passage is a simple expedient of ‘serving each other’ (498). Yet this notable alteration of the notion of being ‘in service’ – which up till now has meant to be an employed servant – is complicated. While Magdalen identifies herself as working mutually ‘in service’ with Louisa, she notes almost immediately on being hired in the Bartram household that it is somewhat strange for her to be to be on ‘familiar terms with a woman in Mrs Atwood’s situation’ which is that of housekeeper (499). This indecision on her part recalls injunctions made by Ellis and Webster to treat one’s servants as equally human and yet retain the upper hand in ruling them, suggesting that perhaps part of Magdalen’s inability to explain whether she is or is not Lousia’s equal stems from mixed cultural messages about the relationship between women of various classes that she has gotten while growing up.16 Magdalen’s indecision is further couched in terms that suggest the cultural basis for her consternation when she explicitly insists on the constructed nature of middle-class femininity. On the grounds that she cannot possibly cross certain class boundaries, Louisa hesitates to help train Magdalen to be a servant and then to carry the plot further by pretending to be Magdalen’s previous employer in order to provide a good reference to her prospective employer. Magdalen responds by claiming that identity is largely a matter of fully occupying the role one chooses. She assuages Louisa’s hesitation by arguing that Louisa will have no trouble learning to ‘be’ a lady in this little drama. ‘Shall I tell you what

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a lady is?’ Magdalen asks Louisa. ‘A lady is a woman who wears a silk gown, and has a sense of her own importance’ (503). Having once herself worn silk gowns, quite assured of ‘her own importance,’ Magdalen is understandably unable to decide whether she is or is not an equal of women of the serving class. Yet she is nevertheless determined to do her best to ‘become’ one of them by passing herself off as a qualified parlour maid in Admiral Bartram’s house in order to snoop for clues about his inheriting ‘her’ fortune. (She is in search of the specific language of the codicil to Noel Vanstone’s will, which has disinherited her, and she hopes that by locating it she may find some loophole for regaining her fortune.) Thus while outwardly Horne’s assessment of Magdalen’s gradual ‘moral decline’ would seem to be accurate in the sense that the places she occupies become more and more degraded as she drops in status, in fact Magdalen’s understanding of her own identity remains consistently liminal. When she becomes a servant – having successfully adopted the identity of her own former lady’s maid – in the home of Admiral Bartram, Magdalen’s identity continues to be understood by others through the very specific places she is expected to occupy, although she herself feels that these places are not where she rightfully belongs. Others’ fixed sense of her proper place, given that she has been hired as a parlour maid, is established on her first day in Admiral Bartram’s house, when she is given the tour of the premises and introduced ‘first to the pantry, and next to the linen-room; installing her, with all due formality, in her own domestic dominions’ (512). Having ‘her own domestic domains’ identified for her only in terms of work spaces, Magdalen finds that despite Admiral Bartram’s order that she see all the rooms of the house, she is never invited to leave the passageways. While she is allowed to look into all the rooms, the expectation is that as an under-servant, her rightful place is within the routes that signal the movement of labour throughout the house, while the rooms that are destinations are hers to enter only if she has been summoned into them (517–19). Her consistent location in the passageways on her tour of the house confirms her identity to other members of the household by suggesting deference to her servant status, while at the same time it reveals to readers her liminal position. Despite this careful spatial designation of Magdalen’s identity and the fact that Magdalen does her work ‘with an ever-present remembrance of herself and her place,’ her fellow servants find it impossible to ‘shak[e] the vague conviction which possessed them all alike, that the new comer was not one of

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themselves’ (523). Not ‘really’ a servant but needing to earn a living for herself, Magdalen is almost unidentifiable at the Admiral’s house. On her first evening there, she is described as looking more beautiful in her ‘evening costume of a servant’ than she would in a lady’s silk evening gown (511). Hearkening back to her own claim that a lady is ‘a woman who wears a silk gown, and has a sense of her own importance,’ the narrator highlights Magdalen’s location between identities (503). She has been displaced from her cultural position to command respect and admiration by wearing a silk dress in a drawing room, yet her beauty and modesty exceed the position of servant and somehow make a cotton dress appear like a silk gown. The discomfort Magdalen feels in her liminal place is perhaps clearest when she roams Admiral Bartram’s house at night in an effort to discover the ‘Secret Trust.’ As Louisa the parlour maid, she is able to gain access into a house that would otherwise be closed to her; yet paradoxically, her disguise is the very thing that prevents her from easily discovering the truth about her fortune. She cannot explore the house looking for clues, since as a parlour maid, she has no authority to be in any of the rooms that might contain such important documents. Yet she thinks of herself as a respectable daughter of the family who should have the right to move through the house as she pleases. At once emboldened by her sense of who she ‘really’ is and confined by her ostensible identity as Louisa, she takes the only course that seems logical to her: midnight explorations. Although spatially Magdalen keeps to her place during working hours, at night she attempts to authorize herself freedom of access to the house that recalls her position of privilege growing up. On her late-night forays, she collapses her previous identity as a privileged middle-class girl with her current efforts to embody a servant, thereby highlighting the struggle between her internal sense of prerogative and the external identity she has claimed for herself. In a scene that is a striking rewriting of the reader’s introduction to Magdalen, her initial independence and free access to her entire domestic space take on particular resonance in the context of her quest to recover her fortune. The legacy of her earlier domestic liberty is that she capitalizes on her position by interpreting her liminality as a sign that she is authorized to occupy any place she should choose. If she belongs nowhere in particular, she reasons, then she might as well move anywhere she likes across and between multiple identities at will. Thus she convinces herself that she has the right to access the very places explicitly denied her through her lost inheritance. Her first late-night

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foray through Admiral Bartram’s house clearly parallels the opening scene in which readers meet Magdalen: If she waited in her room until half-past eleven, she would wait long enough. At that time, she stole out on to the staircase, with the keys in her pocket, and the candle in her hand … The stone passage was a solitude … Magdalen retraced her steps along the passage, and descended to the first floor. Passing the doors nearest to her, she tried the library first. On the staircase, and in the corridors, she had felt her heart throbbing fast with an unutterable fear – but a sense of security returned to her when she found herself within the four walls of the room, and when she had closed the door on the ghostly quiet outside … [she spends some time looking there] She went back to her room; seeing nothing but her own gliding shadow; hearing nothing but her own stealthy footfall in the midnight stillness of the house. (541–2)

In search of the truth, Magdalen’s trip from bedroom floor to living rooms evokes her earlier existence while simultaneously foregrounding the loss of that identity. Instead of the noisy descent of a girl late for breakfast, here readers find that the only time Magdalen will dare to journey down the staircase is in the ‘ghostly quiet’ of midnight. The girl who once moved ‘with the suddenness of a flash of light’ now must carry a candle to light her way. The feet that once moved lightly and rapidly, pattering along passageways and jumping onto landings, have been transformed into ones whose ‘stealthy footfalls’ transport a ‘gliding shadow’ through the house. Silent and unauthorized, Magdalen’s movements through the house are no longer fuelled by ‘warm young blood tingling in her veins’ (9) but by a ‘heart throbbing fast with an unutterable fear.’ A ghost-like ‘gliding shadow,’ Magdalen is again associated with an otherworldly spirit that haunts the house on its unfinished business. In a telling contrast to her introductory dash down the stairs, Magdalen now feels uncomfortable and insecure in the passageways and on the stairs whose ‘ghostly quiet’ highlights her liminal status. Of all the places she moves through – including Admiral Bartram’s library – none are as likely to require a parlour maid’s presence as the halls and stairways. These thoroughfares, in fact, are used by all members of the household, so that she might have some plausible excuse for being in them, even at midnight. Yet the passageways uncomfortably remind her of the liminal nature of her own identity. In them she cannot help

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but notice how differently she is behaving from the self she (and readers) remembers jumping and dashing down the stairs. It is this disjuncture, it seems to me, that creates the ‘unutterable fear’ that makes her heart throb – a fear that she may find herself forever in the place of No Name, unable to claim her identity or ‘proper’ domestic place, and doomed to a life as a ‘gliding shadow’ of her former self. Indeed, at this moment, she most resembles the shadowy, suspect servants of Victorian fiction – the Roseanna Spearmans and Phoebe Markses – whose silence is assumed to hide a deviousness largely by virtue of their free access to routes through homes and their subsequent association with lower standards of morality.17 That she considers herself to be rightfully deserving of the fortune that she has lost is highlighted by the contrast between her fear in the passageways and the ‘sense of security’ that returns to her once she shuts herself in the library. Ironically, this is one of the places in the house she should feel least welcome, since, as we have seen, the library is both the personal place of the man of the house and one that no servant would ever enter without an explicit summons. Yet it is the place that makes her most comfortable on her night journey. Perhaps this is because the likelihood of her being discovered decreases once she is enclosed within the library rather than prowling around passageways where others might also be. Yet her security also stems from the fact that once in the library, she begins to assert herself not as Lousia the trespassing parlour maid (whom she feels herself to be in the halls) but as Magdalen the dispossessed daughter who has the right to discover the truth. She begins, in short, to act in ways that reject the multiple identities she has had to assume and to take on the single identity that she feels is ‘truly’ hers. She recognizes, of course, that she is not simply the middle-class girl she would like to be: unable to roam freely in the broad light of day as she once did, Magdalen in fact loses her situation in Admiral Bartram’s house because she gets caught on one of her midnight excursions. From her self-appointed introduction to the Bartram house to her midnight explorations, Magdalen, in her (un)authorized tour of spaces in this home, crosses the boundaries of what others deem her proper domestic space. Notably, however, her time in Admiral Bartram’s house clarifies the relationship between domestic space and her own sense of her identity. Before her financial misfortunes force Magdalen to recognize the degree to which liminal spaces might call into question the stability of her identity, she is perfectly able to assert her position as

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a protected daughter within the home, even in the passageways and staircases that might connect her to other less-desirable female positions. However, once she in fact occupies a number of these positions, she finds herself less able to assert a stable identity and more uncomfortable with the problems that such liminal spaces pose for questioning who she ‘really’ is. It is noteworthy that despite all of Magdalen’s efforts, she ultimately fails in her quest. At the end of the novel, she is normalized as a wife whose broken health and personal safety have been resuscitated by the man who eventually marries her. She and Norah end up regaining their fortunes through a combination of luck, coincidence, and mercy – all factors beyond their control – that result in them marrying the men who control these fortunes. Yet this truly unsatisfying ending is, I would argue, both purposeful and necessary. Despite the concerns of contemporary reviewers of No Name, the novel attempts not to provide a model for female behaviour but rather to critique a system that demands certain ideals from women in exchange for their supposed protection. As Norah’s outcome makes clear, taking the morally respectable path requires remaining passive about defining one’s position in the culture or establishing one’s right to a name. On the other hand, Magdalen does not provide a model of behaviour either, since she – although incredibly resourceful – ultimately fails to take any action that succeeds in regaining their family fortune and name. As an actress, multiply married, who becomes for a time a servant, loses her health and strength completely and yet recovers through the goodwill of strangers, she attempts solutions to her problem that are impractical, far-fetched, and not at all respectable. In many ways, it is clear why critics deplored characters like Magdalen. However, the novel does not actually try to offer a ‘real’ solution or alternative to becoming a governess; instead, it critiques the fact that in the face of injustice, the only recourse a proper middle-class woman has is luck and the goodwill of men. At least one contemporary reviewer did recognize this purpose of the novel: Henry Mansel admits that ‘“No Name” is principally a protest against the law which determines the social position of illegitimate children’ (495). Yet the novel, through Magdalen, does more than just protest the position of illegitimate children. Through the sheer implausibility of the events that finally restore their fortune to the Vanstone sisters, Collins suggests the problematically relative nature of the middle-class feminine ideal. Predicated on the fortunes of the men who provide for them, Victorian middle-class women’s identities, this story suggests, were as unstable as the markets that determined those fortunes.

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Examining the movements of Norah and Magdalen Vanstone, particularly in comparison to those of Jane Eyre and of Bertha Mason Rochester, demonstrates that the privileges of Victorian middle-class womanhood came with both a price and a caveat. In exchange for financial and spiritual ease, there were costs of boredom and restrictions on one’s movement through space. Moreover, just as ease was predicated on protection by men and the law, once a woman moved beyond that sphere of protection, her own middle-class femininity became difficult to claim. Deirdre David characterizes No Name as ‘showing a woman’s struggle for survival as she is both exiled from and enclosed within patriarchal structures,’ and indeed this vision of these women’s situations might be pushed even further (34). The architecture of patriarchy that could protect such women is the very thing that also created problems for them. Women once housed by a protective father or husband were quickly unable to identify themselves as respectable once the domestic spaces of middle-class femininity were taken away. As all of these characters show, it makes no difference whether a woman loses access to these protected spaces through any fault of her own or whether she is able to (re)assert control over her ‘rightful’ middle-class domestic spaces with any degree of effectiveness. As a woman moves beyond the drawing room of her home, her association with the liminal spaces of non-identity, with the passageways through a home rather than the destination rooms that would mark her as properly middleclass, becomes a primary means of compromising or even denying her identity. One cannot ignore that while the label of ‘Nobody’s Children’ denies Magdalen and Norah their identities, far stronger denial takes place in Jane Eyre when Bertha Mason Rochester is relegated to ‘haunting’ Thornfield as a ‘ghost’ because her very existence is denied by her husband. In both cases, however, this denial is notable for its restriction of women’s movements within the houses in which they ought to be allowed perfect freedom. Once denied access to protected spaces or relegated to liminal ones, both Jane Eyre and No Name suggest that taking control over the spaces one occupies might begin to offset that denial. Mary Poovey notes that Elizabeth Rigby’s review of Jane Eyre turns on the disturbing notion that ‘the governess’s plight could be any middle-class woman’s fate … the price of all middle-class women’s dependence on men’ (Uneven Developments 132). Read in the light of any middle-class woman potentially suffering the same fate due to her ‘dependence on men,’ these novels open up the question of what ought to be a middle-class woman’s proper place. Although none of these women single-handedly suc-

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ceeds in restoring herself to her culturally defined rightful place, all of their efforts imply a systemic need to re-evaluate the places of middleclass women. This in turn suggests what might have made reviewers so uncomfortable with No Name, even if they did not fully recognize the source of their own discomfort. Together these novels critique the dependent position of women specifically by demonstrating the degree to which Victorian femininity is embodied through domestic spatial limitations. While they are unable to provide concrete solutions to this complex situation, such novels propose that challenging the physical boundaries of women’s places might lead to more stable, less contingent identities.

5 Fictions of Family Life: Building Class Position in the Nursery

The Unconsidered Trifle of six or ten years who was once merely regarded as either comic, adorable, fantastic, tiresome or intolerable has – it has finally been remarked – as many mental processes as oneself. – France Hodgson Burnett, The One I Knew the Best of All

It is a commonplace that childhood was central to the cultural imagination in the Victorian period, that children were idealized and adored. Indeed, many historians have argued that the nineteenth century in England saw a great shift from thinking of children as miniature adults to identifying childhood as a separate, vulnerable, precious time of life during which the child needed and deserved doting care and thorough protection.1 In looking back on this shift, scholars tend to think of the Victorian middle-class child as omnipresent. For there were cultural tendencies to revere childhood, an explosion of literature explicitly for children, multiple legal efforts aimed at protecting children, and popular interest in the proliferation of children in Victorian literature.2 Indeed, a wave of scholarship has focused sustained attention on the scores of child characters in fiction.3 And yet, despite the desire to see the protected middle-class child as the model for the age, there is a remarkable dearth of Victorian fiction containing examples of good, middle-class children in stable, middle-class homes. Orphans, one encounters aplenty. Children who are rightfully middle-class but woefully wronged by parental error, one finds in abundance bravely making their way back to their rightful cultural places. Street-smart waifs, honourable working-class souls, children who struggle to grow up in conditions of horrific poverty, pastoral rural children, and even

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the adult-child oddity like Jenny Wren, the Dolls’ Dressmaker in Our Mutual Friend (1864–5) … all of these types of children abound. But if the middle-class child was the ideological standard against which all of these children might be measured, and the middle-class family and home were designed to nurture that child, why is it so difficult to locate representations of that child in fiction? The path to an answer begins with the fact that despite what we now generally describe as the Victorian ‘cult of the child,’ the Victorian middle-class home in many ways did not have children at its centre. The nursery suite was tucked away at the top of the house, and the children themselves typically stayed in those rooms except when appearing at prescribed times, carefully groomed, and on ‘best behaviour’ downstairs. Hence a curious paradox: the idea of childhood nearly obsessed the culture, while at the same time actual children might be practically invisible in a middle-class home. The middle classes – the very people whose ideals of family and propriety were most influential in reshaping the cultural value of childhood – were for the first time separating children from adults within the home as common practice. Although Judith Flanders has argued that a relatively small proportion of middleclass families would have had the resources to achieve such absolute architectural separation, it is nonetheless significant that the vision of a self-contained nursery suite was reiterated to such an extent in the advice literature as to make this – almost more than any other household feature – seem a given rather than an aspiration.4 It is tempting to describe the cultural desirability of this practice as obviously linked to the notion of protectionism: put children in a separate, sequestered, private space as a means of protecting them from the dangers of the outside world. But careful examination of how the nursery space was structured, as well as how children and childhood were represented in fiction and autobiography, reveals that this was not merely about cultivating childhood. It is impossible to analyse Victorian childhood without looking at least briefly at representations of parenthood. Although considering women in their drawing rooms lends itself to assessing the more ‘public’ of their domestic duties – entertaining as well as reiterating the family’s respectable privacy – women’s maternal obligations were defined repeatedly as their greatest accomplishments (to a far greater degree but in much the same vein as ideal masculinity included the imperative to become paterfamilias). The legacy of the Victorian emphasis on family as a defining element of middle-class respectability, in

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conjunction with the separation between public and private, is a modern vision of the nineteenth-century family gathered around a glowing hearth, protected in its light and warmth from all the world outdoors. This powerful image of a moment of familial idealism is captured in pictures like Sir John Everett Millais’s Peace Concluded (see cover and figure 17). Holding a newspaper whose headline announces the end of the Crimean War, the father appears to be a wounded soldier safely returned home. (The daughter on the right is holding a war medal, and he is wearing the dressing gown bespeaking a recovering invalid. The animals in his lap stand for the four nations involved in the combat: the lion is, of course, Britain; the turkey is the Ottoman Empire, the rooster is France, and the bear is Russia.) He is seated within the arms of his wife, whose full, pure white sleeves suggest the circle of protection that domesticity offers. The daughter on the left emphasizes the link between national peace and familial domestic harmony by holding a small toy dove bearing an olive branch just under the clasped hands of her parents – all elements posed to draw attention to the prominent wedding ring on the wife’s finger. But while the scene of domestic bliss is furthered by the husband’s humility – head bowed in thanks for the war’s end – his wife’s expression is curiously blank, as is that of the older daughter. Although the implicit message is that just as the family has been reunited so may the country begin to heal, the mother’s bland, almost resigned expression hints at an exhaustion with her position of protector. Moreover, the positive message of the painting (the power of domesticity to triumph over adversity) is predicated on the assumption that such family gatherings are the norm. Yet the facts that the children are dressed in their very best clothes (velvet, sheer sleeves, silk sashes), that a family group reading aloud would much more likely feature the latest Dickens instalment than a newspaper, and that the scene looks more stiffly posed than convivial all indicate that this is a far from ‘average’ moment. In reality, just as middle-class children spent the majority of their time in the nursery, many middle-class parents spent the bulk of their time in activities other than childrearing. Thus just as the news of war’s end is a unique moment, so might we conclude that what at first seems to be an idyllic family scene is in fact a fiction of family life created out of the set of ideals that privileged childhood and decreed that parenthood confirmed middle-class respectability. This is not to suggest that Victorian parents did not dote on children, worry about their well-being, and carefully provide for them; nor is it meant to imply that children did not love or respect their par-

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Image Not Available

Figure 17: Peace Concluded, oil on canvas, by Sir John Everett Millais, 1856. Reproduced courtesy of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The Putnam Dana McMillan Fund.

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ents. Rather, it is to draw attention to the highly constructed nature of many visions of Victorian family relations. And it is to point out the important fact that although the parent-child relationship was central to confirming middle-class status, this relationship was predicated on important distances as well as connections. In emotional terms, such distance is indicated in frequent discussions of Victorian fathers as authoritative, benevolent, and detached in their parenting. In physical terms, it is clear that many mothers paid a visit to the nursery once a day and that their participation in nursery meals (most commonly tea) was greeted as a great treat by the children.5 In short, physical proximity between middle-class adults and children was ideally the exception rather than the norm, and this very distance served to enhance the respect of children for their parents. Only ‘best behaviour’ was rewarded by the loving parental presence; ill-behaved children were banished to the nursery while siblings partook of the treat of parental affection downstairs. In shaping the relationship between parents and children, physical distance created a hierarchy of respect and enabled parental doting without creating spoiled children. The spoiled children in fiction, for example, are nearly always those who are continually petted by their mamas rather than offered affection in small doses mitigated by the less-fawning atmosphere of the nursery. The most well-known examples might be the dreadful Reed children in Jane Eyre (1847) or the beastly families Agnes cares for in Agnes Grey (1847), but there are many others throughout Victorian children’s stories.6 The implication is that parents produce well-adjusted children only when parental adoration is the equivalent of heavy desserts – meted out in small doses on special occasions, as punctuation to the wholesome and plain fare of everyday. In the world of the nursery, children lived by rules that were rarely relaxed, negotiated turf battles among themselves, and generally had a protected space in which to model the sorts of interactions that they would face as adults. In the nursery, children had the perfect environment in which to learn how to be properly middle-class and to adore (and wish to emulate) their parents – for Nurse doled out the punishments for all but the most serious of infractions, while papa and mama offered the rewards. The nursery system thus created parameters for the relationship between parents and children while at the same time giving children a sense of how to interact with one another. Gender relations, entertaining company (children would invite friends to nursery teas, for example), and other models of adult actions could be practised

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until perfected in this space that was at once removed from prying eyes and yet always under the watchful eye of Nurse. While this sounds like an ideal sort of training ground, the nursery also functioned architecturally to contain Victorian children until they were sufficiently schooled in the ways of silk frocks, tea, and conversation to emerge as proper little representatives of their parents. From the standpoint of class, the nursery was invaluable for its ability to preserve the illusion that middle-class sensibility was innate rather than learned. It is my contention that we do not find many examples of ‘average’ middle-class children in books written for adults because to represent such children realistically would also necessitate representation of their mistakes and their processes of learning to be properly middleclass.7 That is, the presence of a child whose character was still forming, whose behaviour was unpredictable, whose language, manners, and tastes were immature would draw attention to the very thing that the Victorian middle classes most wanted to avoid highlighting: the constructedness of middle-class identity itself. For this reason, child characters learning to build properly middle-class selves are as effectively secluded in children’s literature as their real child counterparts were secluded in actual nurseries. Thus one might trace the Victorian explosion of literature for children to two parallel impulses: to entertain and to contain the developing middle-class child. Juxtaposing architectural sources, children’s books, and autobiographies against one another, this chapter complicates the notion of the Victorian cult of the child by demonstrating that cultural anxieties about constructing middle-class identity played out in often ambivalent responses to the figure of the middle-class child. Building the Ideal Nursery At the nexus of architecture, literature, and advice books, the nursery space demonstrates that the ideals to which the middle classes subscribed were in fact often harder to live up to than otherwise. Although family life was deemed vital to constructions of both femininity and masculinity, Isabella Beeton states matter-of-factly that ‘every woman is not gifted with the same physical ability for the harassing duties of a mother … [some are] compelled to trust to adventitious aid’ (Book of Household Management [1861] 478). Having in a single sentence dispelled the fundamental notion that the middle-class Victorian woman was naturally predisposed to mothering, Beeton presents this point as

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though it is an obvious fact on which it is utterly unnecessary to make further comment. Instead, she turns immediately to discussing the jobs of those who provide this ‘adventitious aid.’ Perhaps most remarkable about this observation is that it is not presented as a prerequisite for having children; that is, her claim clearly indicates that one might have children while still lacking the ‘physical ability for the harassing duties of a mother.’ With this as a preamble, Beeton’s chapter ‘Management of the Nursery’ enumerates the distribution of power therein. While it might seem obvious that nursemaids reign in the nursery, Beeton is explicit about the fact that there are many households ‘where the nurse has the entire charge of the nursery, and the mother is too much occupied to do more than pay a daily visit to it’ (1014). In quick succession, then, Beeton has challenged several important Victorian ideals about the wife and mother: first, that a middle-class woman would be naturally good at mothering skills; second, that as the moral centre of the household the woman would have primary responsibility for the children (in fact, she may be ‘too much occupied’ to do so); and third, that children (like husbands) would derive substantial benefit from the presence of an ideal mother-wife at the centre of their homes. One could reasonably wonder how substantial a mother’s moral influence could be in households in which the children see their mother only during her brief ‘daily visit’ to the nursery. Furthermore, Beeton makes clear that despite the Victorian tendency to disembody the middle-class woman through the trope of Angel, mothering is in many ways a physical rather than simply spiritual or moral pursuit, as anyone who has spent long days tending small children would certainly attest. And she is not unwilling to admit that far from being a state of bliss, the tasks of mothering are often ‘harassing.’ Beeton’s comments contain a level of practicality and realism that is unmatched in many advice texts that describe the position of the children within the middle-class home. Where Beeton unflinchingly notes that, despite the ideology of ‘natural’ femininity, some women are not naturally motherly and thus require much specific detail on childrearing, other texts reduce the process of parenting to her observation that the nursery ‘is an establishment kept apart from the rest of the family’ (1013). This principle is so ubiquitous that its reiteration often stands as a substitute for actual attention to the needs of children. Architect Robert Kerr enumerates the order of importance in which one ought to consider sleeping rooms within a home, asserting that ‘The Chief Guests’ Chambers in a manner take precedence, with the rooms of the

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head of the family; those of the less formal guests and the rest of the family come next; then the accommodation of the subordinates; and lastly, the Nurseries’ (137). His discussion makes clear that he considers nursery rooms sufficient if they are less convenient, spacious, or wellsituated in terms of outdoor access even than the rooms of the family employees such as governess, tutor, or lady’s maid. His logic implies that these paid ‘subordinates,’ as adults, must be treated with a respect not generally accorded to children. C.J. Richardson, similarly, offers numerous floor plans and details regarding the arrangement of homes, yet he makes merely incidental references to children’s needs and provides no plan that explicitly includes nurseries. He only notes that ‘The attic plan [of the double suburban villa] contains three large rooms for servants, and the tower room was to be used as a smoking room, or a play room for the children,’ thereby locating children on the periphery of the household as a kind of afterthought (Picturesque Designs 161). Richardson and Kerr are not solitary examples. Richard Brown’s Domestic Architecture (1852) contains copious details on the distribution, proportion, decoration, and architectural design of particular household rooms; even less publicly visible spaces such as bedrooms, kitchens, and all manner of ‘offices’ and servants’ quarters get specific mention. Yet his book would seem to imply that consideration of children is not essential to understanding the middle-class home, for he never mentions them or their nursery spaces. Many other architectural texts offer similarly cursory glances at children’s spaces or ignore them altogether. Thus while children obviously existed in middle-class homes, the marginalized position in which many writers place them at once challenges the idea of the child as central to the middle-class household and indicates the general trend of neither-seen-nor-heard that characterizes many Victorian discussions of children at home. Certainly, some writers were concerned about the children within the nursery, rather than simply locating them ‘apart from the rest of the family.’ Archibald MacLaren’s two-part article in Macmillan’s Magazine, ‘Management of the Nursery’ (1862), explicitly addresses the need to consider carefully the location of the segregated nursery department in terms of its effect on the children: ‘Oh, any place is good enough for a nursery! Any room is good enough for children to play in!’ Mothers are still heard to speak thus: when they do so it augurs ill for the health of the little ones. There is no place good enough for a nursery while a better is to be found. Pass the ground floor, and then

Building Class Position in the Nursery 229 select the largest, the loftiest, the best ventilated and the best lighted room in the house – the room with the largest windows, and commanding the cheeriest prospect – and make that the nursery. I have seen nurseries as dark and as close as a prison-cell; selected avowedly because they were so ‘out of the way.’ (Part I 514)

Insisting that children need healthy spaces, large enough for romping play and chosen on the basis of their positive qualities rather than because they were far from the rest of the home, MacLaren both highlights the need for the children to be ‘out of the way’ and entreats parents to consider the long-term health of their children as a direct consequence of the nursery’s qualities. MacLaren’s concern that not enough serious attention is given to the needs of children is obviously borne out by observations such as Kerr’s that all other spaces in the home take precedence over the nursery. While Kerr’s list of priorities and MacLaren’s observation that far too many people are of the opinion that ‘any room is good enough for children to play in’ may bespeak the norm, there were some efforts to offer specific details of the ideal nursery. J.J. Stevenson, in his influential book House Architecture (1880), clearly has children’s best interests in mind when he explains that the nursery space should be ‘large; and it should also be light, airy, and cheerful; and it is most important that it should have a sunny exposure. A view of scenery is of little importance; children will find a farmyard, where they can see cocks and hens and pigeons, or even the rubbing down of the horses, much more interesting’ (72). Indeed, ‘light, airy, and cheerful’ are often repeated as descriptors of the ideal nursery retreat, particularly conjoined with images of children occupying a space that has many windows, plenty of room for running and playing, and minimal furniture to interfere with their activities. ‘Children love to make a litter, and to be able to get at their possessions without much trouble,’ Cassell’s Household Guide (1869–71) notes; therefore, ‘Cupboard doors are better off their hinges’ (110). The more thoughtful writers recognize that nursery elements conducive to childhood happiness and health include not just the room itself but also its convenient access to the outdoors as well as an adjoining larder/ scullery for easy preparation of children’s food and washrooms for bathing. Precisely this arrangement is visible in the ‘Fourth Floor’ plan Robert Kerr provides as part of his complete set of plans for a London townhouse (see figure 18). The day and night nurseries are adjoined by a scullery for food preparation and a private bathroom for the children.

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Notably, the day nursery, in which the noisiest of children’s time would be spent, is not only located on a storey far vertically removed from the more public reception rooms of the home; it is also separated from the staircase that might carry noise downstairs by a long passageway and a large empty area space covered over with a skylight. Although many design books suggest that it is most desirable for children to travel up and down back stairs – perhaps even using their own entrance – to get to the garden playground for their daily exercise, Kerr’s plan demonstrates that while most middle-class homes would not have the luxury of such space, it would still be possible to render children nearly invisible to the rest of the household within their large and private spaces. Clearly even Kerr’s plan is of a scale beyond the means of many members of the middle classes, so it is offered here as a model of the important principles to which architects and homemakers were committed, even when their resources allowed only for more modest designs. Such directions are predicated on the notion that one cannot be too careful in providing for the comforts and well-being of children, apparently supporting the image of the Victorian ‘cult of the child.’ As such, they may seem to counteract, or even contradict, the fears that not enough people gave serious consideration to the situation of children in their nurseries. However, their internally inconsistent attitude towards children leads at best to some confusion. Kerr, on one hand, prioritizes the nursery last of all the sleeping spaces within the home; nevertheless, he claims, ‘The Day Nursery ought to have all the characteristics of a cheerful Sitting-room, even at the risk of displacing some equally important apartment’ (145). And while his insistence on cheerfulness and convenience do seem genuine, his chapter on the nursery focuses on maintaining propriety in an elegant house rather than on what will be good for children. Certainly, concrete details for the design and use of the space are more suggestive of a culture that cherished its children than are terse mentions of the nursery that begin and end with the separation principle. Yet while both types of discussion insist – albeit in different ways – on the value of children, neither offers much of a hint as to how they are integrated into (rather than merely separated from) the household. One explanation of this is that the separation of children from the rest of the family was an importantly emotional as well as physical fact. Perhaps the most succinct statement of the principle that guided the design of the Victorian nursery comes in Stevenson’s chapter ‘The Family Living Rooms,’ which devotes one section to the nursery. He gives specific

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Figure 18: ‘Fourth Floor (Nurseries & Servants’ Rooms),’ Robert Kerr, The Gentleman’s House, plate 44, ‘Design for a Row of London Houses.’

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directions for creating a suite of rooms that accommodate all aspects of daily life, including eating, bathing, sleeping, and playing. While his details imply that he is highly concerned about children’s needs, he also notes with somewhat uncharacteristic candour that ‘the nursery department should be shut off from the rest of the house; for however interesting children may be, there are times when our appreciation of them is increased by their absence’ (70). While not everyone seems to have subscribed to his notion that children are most enjoyable as an absent presence, this discussion of the ‘nursery department’ indicates a certain ambivalence about children that in many ways appears to be the norm despite the fact that such outright admission of this ambivalence is rare.8 While sources uniformly concur that a nursery should be a ‘little establishment as independent of the rest of the household as possible,’ few go to Stevenson’s extreme of suggesting that such independence increases the desirability of children (Cassell’s 111). Yet even discussions of nursery planning that focus on the welfare of the child occupants within the space sidestep the important question of why children ought to occupy a space ‘as independent of the rest of the household as possible.’ This is notable largely because these same books offer explicit advice about why it is desirable for men to have a retreat within their own homes, for example. In eschewing parallel commentary on why the separation of children was desirable for parents, these books ostensibly confirm the emotional relationship between parents and children, conceived as a sense of obligation on the one hand and dependence on the other. Yet lurking under even the most elaborate discussions of nursery details is an implicit admission: one must be terribly careful about how one situates and fits out the nursery because once it is completed and the children are installed there, it might be quite easy to forget their needs because they are so far out of sight. Thus the fact that all these authors insist that the nursery, above all, must be ‘shut off from the rest of the house’ suggests a degree of invisibility that is worth interrogating. Quite unlike their working-class counterparts who occupied the same limited domestic spaces as their parents and who had tasks ensuring the home ran smoothly, middleclass children had few (or no) household obligations and were protected from work, from adults, and from corrupting forces (such as working-class children) through careful containment in the nursery.9 I do not mean to suggest, of course, that children were born, initially nursed, and then disappeared wholly from their parents’ presence un-

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til they were adolescents. However, children in an ideal middle-class home appeared outside the nursery only in specific, carefully controlled ways. Until they were school age, these children were expected to take all of their meals and baths in the day nursery, to be dressed by its fire, and to play within its confines unless weather permitted outdoor play. Obviously, such a lifestyle would require the presence of at least one live-in nanny or nurse to supervise the children and take care of their daily needs.10 Children slept in the adjacent night nursery. It was common for children under school age to be carefully dressed up to join the older members of the family for dessert; with company, they might make a short visit to the drawing room before bed. Slightly older children would eat meals at the dining table only when there was no company in the house, and not even then until they had sufficient patience and table manners to sit through the entire meal without assistance. On days when no visitors were expected, children might have a bit more freedom, depending on how busy mother was with other tasks. In many cases, however, after-dinner storytimes or evening family gatherings around the drawing-room fire might be the only hour of the day when children and parents mingled freely in the same domestic space. Rather than simple adoration of their children, then, the Victorian middle classes had a deeply ambivalent perception of childhood. At once vital to defining the middle-class house as a home, yet difficult to integrate into that well-regulated household because they were noisy, messy, and not good at self-control, children presented a dilemma to the middle classes. The Victorian nursery staged that dilemma, and representations of the nursery in fiction and autobiography provide an intriguing glimpse not just into conceptions of childhood but also into the role of children in forwarding the architecture of middle-class identity. Reading the Nursery in Children’s Fiction Children’s fiction provides a particularly useful perspective of the dynamics of the nursery both because so many of the scenes of childhood are set within this space and because of the shift towards stories in which children were not condescended to but treated as growing intellects. The Victorian child had moved on from ‘horrible little books containing memoirs of dreadful children who died early of complicated diseases, whose lingering developments they enlivened by giving unlimited

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moral advice and instruction to their parents and immediate relatives’ (Burnett The One I Knew 111). Instead of these ‘horrible little books’ containing overt morals that were the staple of earlier generations, there were by mid-century fairy stories and realistic tales of nursery life.11 In such books, the routines of nursery days are depicted in matter-offact terms, even to the point that some narrator-characters will note in asides to readers that it is not worth the trouble of relating details with which everyone is so intimately familiar.12 As Frances Hodgson Burnett (now best known as the author of Little Lord Fauntleroy [1886] and The Secret Garden [1911]) points out in her autobiography, The One I Knew the Best of All, ‘The perfectly normal child knew what happened in its own nursery and the nurseries of its cousins and juvenile friends’ (111). Born in 1849, Burnett might be seen as representing the nursery days of ‘the perfectly normal child’ to the extent that she romped with her brothers under the watchful eye of her nurse and was not expected to have particularly intellectual interests. As she put it, ‘In those days, I think, the Children’s Century had not begun. Children were not regarded as embryo intellects, whose growth it is the pleasure and duty of intelligent maturity to foster and protect. Morals and manners were attended to, desperate efforts were made to conquer their natural disinclination to wash their hands and faces, it was a time-honored custom to tell them to “make less noise,” and I think everybody knelt down in his night-gown and said his prayers every night and morning’ (110–11). And yet, when her early attempts at authorship showed some promise, her mother was willing to revise her expectations and take Burnett seriously as an ‘embryo intellect.’ As Burnett’s story shows, then, this nascent stage of ‘the Children’s Century’ is of particular interest for its negotiation between visions of children as creatures whose intellect must be nurtured and as ones who must be carefully trained in ‘morals and manners.’ The architecture of the nursery worked ideologically to provide both freedom and restriction, creating an ideal training ground in which children’s mistakes could become productive learning moments. Locating the privilege of middle-class childhood in a space that also served to contain the inevitable commotion of young children away from the prying eyes of the rest of the household, the nursery staged the middleclass desire to balance the indulgence of ‘natural’ tendencies with the need to learn self-control. Hence, discussions of the appropriate nursery often begin with a focus on the physical and emotional impact of nursery design. For example, Cassell’s Household Guide notes that

Building Class Position in the Nursery 235 the aspect of the day-nursery should be light, airy, and, if attainable, exposed to the south. It is impossible to over-estimate the worth of this situation in the attempt to rear children in full health and buoyancy of spirit. The ruddy bloom of a well-trained child betokens something more than a sound constitution – it indicates a joyous temperament and keen enjoyment of life. Children immured in gloomy apartments never wear this look. In all save their clothing, they are liable to resemble the ill-fed population of crowded cities, whose playground is the nearest gutter. (110)

This connection of light and air to the ‘sound constitution’ and ‘joyous temperament’ of a child clearly demonstrates the degree to which enjoyment of one’s time within the nursery space was taken as a predictor of how healthy a child would be. The advice goes on explicitly to mention that ‘Doctors agree that the best place for children is the upper part of a house, where the air circulates more freely, and the odours of the basement are less penetrating’ (Cassell’s 110). Invoking the consensus of ‘Doctors’ in the same breath as contrasting the ‘joyous temperament and keen enjoyment of life’ of a middle-class child with the gloomy filth of the child ‘whose playground is the nearest gutter,’ this text highlights the degree to which privilege can produce both health and happiness. In removing children to the ‘upper part of the house,’ Cassell’s implicitly suggests that ‘enjoyment of life’ is vital to the healthy growth of the middle-class child, while that same ‘enjoyment’ is apparently inaccessible for poorer children. Happiness is thus identified as a class privilege that depends upon occupying a carefully created private space. It is significant, however, that such enjoyment is also evidenced by the ‘ruddy bloom of the well-trained child,’ for the notion of training was as important to the conception of the Victorian nursery as the notion of protection. Cassell’s thus articulates an important conjunction between good health and good behaviour, as if to suggest that a child ‘well-trained’ is inevitably one who is happy and healthy – and that a child will best achieve these goals through careful construction of the space of middle-class privilege: the nursery. If, as we have seen, architectural treatises focused on building spaces that would produce healthy and happy children, children’s fiction often reveals a second vital role of the nursery: to provide a space in which children could make mistakes on their way to learning important self-control. There are countless stories of ill-behaved children whose nursery crimes led them to ‘infant’ heartaches, repentance, and – in the end – a greater sense of responsibility and propriety. The heavy-

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handed moral tales of Maria Edgeworth, for example, were no longer the common model of fiction for children by mid-century.13 Yet despite critical assumptions that didactic fiction gave way by the 1830s to more entertaining, light-hearted works such as fairy tales, even apparently less didactic works encode important ideals of middle-class identity through careful lessons the protagonists learn. Lessons on the Golden Rule ‘do unto others,’ injunctions not to be too proud or snobbish, and tales valuing individual resourcefulness were additionally inflected with class and gender identities.14 Indeed, because the lessons themselves were presented not through overt morals but as implicit conclusions children should draw for themselves from reading, it becomes clearer how children largely removed from the daily workings of the middle-class home were nonetheless trained in its ideological imperatives through an emphasis on intellectual development. One story that manages to get across the ‘do unto others’ moral without preachiness is Juliana Horatia Ewing’s The Land of Lost Toys (1869), in which young Sam breaks a large portion of his twin sister Dot’s toys in staging the Lisbon earthquake. He is most interested in creating a realistic spectacle of the great crash, thoughtfully arranging the buildings, dolls, and animals to approximate a town by putting the larger things in the front and the smaller at the back to invoke perspective. He narrates the earthquake with historical detail: sound effects suggesting the early rumblings culminate in Sam opening a chasm in the earth (separating the wooden boards which form his table) so that everything goes crashing through the gap, thereby ruining Dot’s dolls’ house and smashing the tea set, the ‘German farm,’ and a good many other breakables. Up until this point, Dot’s general response to her brother’s misadventures (which include things such as routinely scalping her dolls) is ‘I don’t care’ – not that she does not care, but that she clearly already recognizes the feminine imperative to mollify the man in her life, and she does not want him to feel overly guilty about the havoc he wreaks. This is a response that the narrator identifies as ‘Dot’s bane and antidote’ for ‘In the strength of Don’t care, and her love for Sam, Dot bore much and long … There are, however, as we have said, limits to everything. An earthquake celebrated with the whole contents of the toy cupboard is not to be borne’ (151–2). Dot’s horror on the occasion of the earthquake, which seems to ruin nearly all of her toys in one fell swoop, is reflected in her breaking out in an uncharacteristic display of grief at her loss. Although no one within the story coaches Dot to bear Sam’s transgressions gracefully, and although Sam feels terrible when he sees Dot

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lamenting the scale of the present damage, the narrative implies that Dot’s long-suffering self-sacrifice is the correct response for the sister to have to the brother. Despite the fact that the narrator initially comments that the axiom that ‘boys will be boys’ can only be taken so far, several factors indicate that readers are supposed to applaud Dot’s previously tolerant responses. Perhaps most notable is that Sam’s punishment on this occasion is cut short by Dot interceding on his behalf. Sam is to be confined to the ‘back nursery’ (probably the night nursery) all day, and the narrator comments: ‘All things considered, it was certainly most proper that the much-injured Dot should be dressed out in her best, and have access to dessert, the dining-room, and Aunt Penelope, whilst Sam was kept upstairs’ (156). This treat for Dot, to mingle with the grown-ups beyond the nursery, is explicitly linked to her good behaviour, making it very clear that self-control and a proper sense of how she ought to act are the only things that will get Dot out of the nursery. Yet Dot intercedes to get Sam released to enjoy Aunt Penelope’s company too. The very model of self-abnegation, Dot then continues to make sacrifices for him despite his being the one in the wrong. In the library awaiting a story from Aunt Penelope, Sam complains of the tickly horse-hair chairs. Dot tells him to ‘put your pocket handkerchief under [your legs], as I do’ and then gives him her hanky and goes without one for herself when he insists that his own hanky only accommodates one of his legs (157). This selfless action is not commented upon by either the narrator or Aunt Penelope, but the very lack of comment implies that this was the correct thing for Dot to do, for it seems to occur to no one to insist that Sam ought really to be making sacrifices for Dot at this point rather than the reverse. The story Aunt Penelope tells, ‘The Land of Lost Toys,’ is clearly designed to teach Sam a lesson, though it is more pleasant and fairy-talelike than explicitly didactic. Aunt Penelope, a self-professed ‘old maid’ who loves toys and has a weakness for making presents to longing children in village toy shops, relates her own adventure visiting this Land, the mechanism of the story being that she gains access through a hollow at the base of a tree, in a manner that makes it unclear whether she – or a reader – is supposed to believe she thinks this really happened or that she dreamed the whole thing. In the Land of Lost Toys, anything that has been broken or lost by children comes to have a happy time with others like it. The precedence and importance a toy has in this fairy land is conditional upon how long it was loved and played with. Not only able to talk but to feel and to moralize as well, the personified toys

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drive home the notion of treating one’s possessions well through their particular brand of justice. As the beetle who introduces Aunt Penelope to the place explains: ‘The toys think that they are ill-treated, and not taken care of by children in general. And there is some truth in it. Toys come down here by scores that have been broken the first day. And they are all quite resolved that if any of their old masters or mistresses come this way they shall be punished.’ ‘How will they be punished?’ [Aunt Penelope] inquired. ‘Exactly as they did to their toys, their toys will do to them. All is perfectly fair and regular.’ (170)

Through this story of a land where toys get to do unto their old masters and mistresses what was done unto them, Sam comes to see that he has been thoughtless and cruel with Dot’s things. His revelation comes in part from the fact that Aunt Penelope, when confronted by the long-forgotten toys of her childhood, recalls her own childhood transgressions against her possessions. Significantly, there is no explicit moralizing, no discussion of Sam’s actions by Aunt Penelope once her narrative is complete. Thus treated as old enough to derive his own lesson from the tale, Sam seems to take a sort of comfort in the fact that he is not alone in having treated toys badly, even as he resolves to improve his behaviours hereafter. The next day, he sets up a ‘shop’ to repair all the dolls and toys he destroyed, as well as making a clear plan for how to mend his ways: ‘Into that [box] we shall put all the toys that are quite spoiled and cannot possibly be mended. It is to be called the Hospital for Incurables … For the future,’ he presently resumed, ‘when I want a doll to scalp or behead, I shall apply to the Hospital for Incurables, and the same with any other toy that I want to destroy. And you will see, my dear Dot, that I shall be quite a blessing to the nursery; for I shall attend the dolls gratis, and keep all the furniture in repair.’ (182)

While Sam’s lesson is certainly sugar-coated in the sense that it appears through the vehicle of a particular treat that he was to be denied – namely the company and attention of a beloved Aunt – the most remarkable thing about Ewing’s story is what it does not seek to correct in Sam. Sam seems quite genuine in his remorse for having broken the toys and disrupted the nursery, and there is evidence that his vow to do

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better is long-lived, for the narrator ends by revealing that he is given a set of carpenter’s tools for his birthday months after this incident, as a reward for his constant efforts at repair work. He may have become ‘a blessing to the nursery’ in this regard, yet nowhere within this story does anyone suggest that if toys might rightfully resent being scalped, dunked, broken, and earthquaked at will, then sisters might even more rightfully deserve the decency and respect that would keep one from destroying their toys along with one’s own. That is, the moral of Aunt Penelope’s story is quite clearly aimed at valuing one’s possessions rather than at being kind to one’s sister. The ‘do unto others’ that Sam comes away with is that he should treat his toys with as much care as he would like to be treated. However, the relationship between Sam and Dot – where she constantly makes small sacrifices in order that he may remain at once dominant and cared for – is reinforced rather than challenged by this narrative. This particular nursery fiction inculcates middle-class gender norms by demonstrating that Sam need not sacrifice his masculine privileges but must simply be gallant about exercising them. He no longer coerces Dot to give up her toys to his destruction or chides her for not complying with his plans, but he is presented as quite reasonable in his assumption that there will continue to be a supply of dolls for him to scalp. These twins, then, are anything but equal: Dot learns the value of feminine attendance to male prerogative, while Sam comes to see that he should aspire to a form of manliness that is based on entitlement mediated by compassion. One might reasonably wonder why it matters that this story is set in the nursery. In ideological terms, these lessons must be confined to the nursery because the very fact that they must be learned at all contradicts Victorian assertions that middle-class sensibilities are natural. Specifically, the displeasure that Dot strives to conceal in her brave ‘I don’t care’ hints that ideal feminine self-abnegation is not innate but practised. Similarly, while masculinity was presumed to require effort, the self-control that Sam must master reveals that exhibiting true manliness depends in part on the goodwill of one’s female companions. The nursery, then, offers a space in which children could internalize and learn how to display the gendered identities that were so vital to a conception of the middle-class ideal. Indeed, the location functioned in much the same way as children’s fiction: although Aunt Penelope’s tale within a tale has no explicit moral, it creates a space of possibility wherein child readers must draw their own conclusions. While trusting to children’s intelligence, stories with no explicit moral simultaneous-

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ly protect the notion that middle-class identity is ‘natural’ by relying on a private narrative space – one that presumes an ‘in’ knowledge of nursery life and an audience limited to nursery occupants and their mamas. In a move parallel to how housekeeping guides fragmented middle-class women into a series of duties, the explosion in children’s fiction and the concomitant growth of the nursery ideal at once privileges childhood and helps mask – through a principle of separation – the extensive learning that must go into being properly middle-class. In many cases, children’s stories explicitly address questions of appropriate behaviour in terms of class position. Brenda’s (Mrs Georgiana Castle Smith) Victoria-Bess (1879) centres on a spoiled little girl named Angela who learns absolutely nothing in the story; but in the tradition of Victorian doll stories, the snobbish doll who is the narrator has a terrible comeuppance. Sharon Marcus notes that ‘literary dolls embodied the standards applied to girls and women,’ and indeed this extremely popular sub-genre of children’s fiction contains characters who exemplify the lessons in femininity that middle-class girls needed most (154).15 Angela scorns to allow what she calls the ‘dirty little street girls’ even to look at her beautiful doll as she drives past in the carriage, and the doll (Victoria-Bess) initially approves whole-heartedly of Angela’s class-proud stance (37). Victoria-Bess is suitably impressed by Angela’s rich clothing, her carriage, her haughty airs to her nurse, and the luxury in which she lives. It seems only right to the doll that Angela should insist that the servants call the doll ‘Miss Victoria-Bess,’ set her a place for dessert in the dining room, and procure her a lavish bed complete with silk, satin, and brocade trimmings. Angela’s behaviour throughout the story makes a reader cringe repeatedly, for she is selfish, conceited, and decidedly condescending. Her parents go to Paris for three months (a departure that apparently gives neither them nor Angela the slightest pause, as she seems quite used to being emotionally ignored and then attended to with rich gifts instead). On the eve of their departure, Angela tells her mother that she needs ‘some more dresses and bonnets for Victoria-Bess. She’ll want a lot more this winter; and I like to be able to tell Cousin Katie and the rest that her things were made in Paris’ (44). Despite the imperious tone of this command, which has none of the politeness of a request, her mother replies: ‘Quite right, Angela. You have proper notions, my child … There are no dressmakers like the Paris ones’ (44). In this short exchange, it becomes clear that the mother enjoys spoiling the child, and that Angela has become accustomed to having her way about eve-

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rything to the point that she liberally gives orders even to her parents. The Parisian wardrobe does not appear for Victoria-Bess, however, for although her parents spend a whole day shopping in Paris, they cannot find anything appropriate for the doll who had been the hit of the Christmas party season the year before. The fit Angela pitches, calling her parents selfish and mean, is ameliorated by the presentation of a mechanical duck that walks, quacks, and lays eggs. This toy completely usurps Victoria-Bess’s place in Angela’s heart in part through its novelty and in part due to the fact that on one of its walks across the room, it knocks over the chair on which Victoria-Bess is sitting and the resulting fall breaks her nose and leaves the back of her head all ‘cracky.’ While one might imagine that the moral of the story would be one for Angela, in which she realizes how unattractive is vanity, in fact, she ends the story unchanged in the slightest. Her horrible behaviour to her Cousin Katie, a poor relation who can only afford a rag doll, demonstrates that she is learning nothing in her nursery about being a good hostess or about the modesty and generosity of a ‘really feeling heart’ that is supposed to be an innate quality of a truly middle-class lady (H.G.C., The English Maiden 190). Angela lacks any kind of tact or grace and has clearly invited her cousin for tea only for the purpose of showing off how much more expensive are her own possessions. Indeed, the invitation even has passive-aggressive wording, as Angela requests Katie bring her doll to tea so that they can compare them to see which is the prettiest. It is clear that she knows full well that whatever doll Katie got for Christmas will seem shabby by comparison to the waxen beauty of Victoria-Bess and her magnificent wardrobe, and her insistence on talking about how much their relative dolls cost and what they came with when Katie is at tea shows both bad manners and a cruel desire to flaunt her superior wealth over her unfortunate cousin. In many ways, this story functions more as a warning against certain behaviours than as a model of learning propriety. For while Sam and Dot in The Land of Lost Toys both come to realizations about gender roles and class values, Angela in fact does not learn humility, charity, kindness, or compassion towards those who are less fortunate than she is. What she does not learn, however, readers are taught through the medium of Victoria-Bess. Angela’s selfish, rude, and haughty behaviour is clearly paralleled in the attitudes with which Victoria-Bess opens the story: ‘I thought that Angela had only done what was right in removing me – the beautiful Victoria-Bess! – from the vulgar gaze of street children’ (38). The magnificent Victoria-Bess ends up with a

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broken nose, a cracked head, and a faded dress, and is given as a charity doll to a child amputee in a hospital for sick children. The ability of this child to love Victoria-Bess despite her compromised looks pushes her to humility, and her realization implicates Angela for her failings: ‘I thought [Angela] a most lovely little object, for in those days I only looked at outward appearances, and grand clothes would have made anybody lovely in my eyes; I did not see what I know now to have been the case, that she wore the peevish expression of a thoroughly spoilt child, and that therefore she was not really lovely at all’ (26). The failure of outward expense to correspond to inner value thus becomes an important theme for this story, in which the poor children and old toys are the most faithful, honest, loving and generous. Despite – indeed, because of – the excess in which she lives, Angela is unable to assess accurately the worth of anything. A fascinating lesson in the value of more modest possessions for teaching humility and appreciation, this story decries the showy excesses presumed common of the nouveau riche. Angela’s relationship to her nursery space provides specific warnings against over-indulgence. Unlike Sam and Dot, who spend the majority of their time in the nursery and thus are able to derive substantial lessons from its simultaneously nurturing and controlling atmosphere, Angela is alternately abandoned and fawned over by her parents, who take extended trips without her and then spoil her upon their return. Angela thus has very little of the benefit of nursery discipline, for she is never given to understand that interaction with her parents and throughout the house is a privilege she must earn through good behaviour and capitulation to cultural norms. The very fact that she is able to construct her nursery as a place of privilege without the corresponding imperatives for training emphasizes her parents’ failure to use the space properly. One cannot imagine, for example, that Sam and Dot would ever have been allowed to invite a friend to tea primarily for the purpose of establishing their superiority over her. And yet far from being managed by her nursery atmosphere, Angela seems to have complete autonomy within this space to act as she chooses – even to the extent of condescending to her guests. The conclusion one must draw from comparing these two stories, then, is that proper usage of the nursery space is essential to the production of proper middle-class children, for those who are allowed too much freedom beyond the nursery space inevitably do not internalize the limits of self-control necessary to respectable middle-class existence.

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In addition to using the nursery setting to convey norms of middleclass identity, there are tales that make explicit the usefulness of nursery lessons for shaping behaviour in the world beyond. In Mrs Molesworth’s The Adventures of Herr Baby (1881), for example, the eponymous main character, though only four years old, begins to consolidate his middle-class identity even before he can talk properly. Over the course of the story, readers encounter ‘Baby’ and his older brother and sisters predominantly in the nursery. However, after he accidentally breaks his mother’s prized Venetian glass vase, he manages single-handedly to replace it with a very similar one from a little antiques shop. Baby’s noteworthy excursions beyond the nursery’s confining walls are explicit efforts to take the lessons he has learned – in honesty, respect for others’ possessions, and the need to offer a masculine protection to his widowed mother – and deploy them in the outer world. In this way, The Adventures of Herr Baby provides not only a vision of the value of resourcefulness particularly as a quality imperative to British manhood but also highlights the structural role of the nursery in forming children specifically to enable them to move beyond its protective space. In their conjunction of class- and gender-based ideological imperatives, children’s stories thus add a useful layer to the representations of the nursery in architectural treatises and housekeeping guides that focus primarily on convenience for parents and pleasure and health for children. While the stories themselves are entertaining and stylistically designed to engage child readers in the enjoyable process of reading about children like themselves, they nonetheless have important lessons to teach. Even many ‘fairy stories’ contained similar morals wrapped up within the worlds of fantasy. In J.H. Ewing’s ‘Amelia and the Dwarfs’ (1870) for example, the selfish Amelia must spend time in an underground land of dwarfs until she learns meekness and forgiveness, improves at sewing and domestic tasks, and begins to show appreciation for others. Similarly, the petulant Flora learns to become a better hostess and to ‘be obliging and good-humored under slight annoyances’ through recognizing the negative examples of a series of horrid children she encounters in Christina Rossetti’s Speaking Likenesses (1874) (49). The trajectory towards greater imaginative realms indicates a stronger trust that children will decipher morals for themselves through their ability to discern which fictional characters are good role models and which are not. Thus we might see children’s fiction relying on the architectural principles of nursery design by implying that this space needs to be a particularly pleasant place in order to make it

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more conducive to learning. Just as happiness is linked to comfort, and health is a marker of middle-class privilege, so then is comfort linked to a greater ability to learn the necessary parameters of middle-class behaviour and standards. The flip side of this usage of the nursery space as training ground is that it must also be understood as a conscious closeting away of the learning process of Victorian children. The vision of ‘normal’ middleclass children emerging from such an analysis is not that of a pervasive public celebration of childhood but rather of a figure carefully contained within the literature and spaces of its own nurseries. The desire to prevent the outside world from seeing the child as a work-in-progress thus seems as strong as the more explicitly announced desire to protect and cherish the child, particularly given that the middle classes were keen to assert that proper sensibility was innate rather than learned. As such, the nursery space itself was subject to a kind of liminal status, containing anyone who did not fit into conventional categories of middle-class identity. J.J. Stevenson writes: ‘The day-nursery can scarcely be too large. It is a sort of common hall where children and nurses live and take their meals together … The nurse may see a friend at times; and female visitors of a certain class, such as old family dependants, who could neither be sent down among the servants nor received in the drawing-room, can here feel at their ease, and meet the members of the family on common ground’ (71–2). Significantly, the children of the family fall into the same category as ‘old family dependants’ who could not respectably be received in the drawing room. Neither belongs among the servants or among the family in the drawing room, and it is the liminal nature of this identity – and the cultural motives for thus positioning children – that is so provocative. Victorian children were between identity categories, neither fully installed in the middle-class home with all the rights and privileges of the adults of the family, nor completely removed from the middle-class family or its privileged spaces. This liminal identity is remarkable in large part because it is one that was assumed to be transitional. That is, middle-class women in reduced circumstance (such as Magdalen Vanstone) were not expected necessarily to be able to get beyond those conditions, but rather were tutored to accept their situations with quiet dignity. Middle-class children, on the other hand, were of necessity expected to grow out of their liminal positions: they were expected to become respectable members of the middle classes simply by virtue of growing up.

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In sequestering children away from the public gaze of visitors to the home except under very carefully controlled circumstances, in (perhaps unconsciously) keeping developing middle-class children out of the pages of fiction for adults, in creating an enclosed nursery space that parallels the narrative space of children’s literature, the Victorian middle classes thus constructed a narrative of childhood whereby its offspring naturally matured into adults who, above all, were capable of self-control. Creating a space in which to nurture their bodies and protect them from the corrupting forces of the outside world thus served not only to build the now-commonplace understanding of the Victorian child as a cherished object; it also created the capacity to sustain the image of middle-class propriety as something naturally occurring in any child of middle-class parents. The one genre of writing about childhood that complicates this vision of segregated childhood is autobiography – for it is there that childhood is purposefully on display for public consumption. As the following discussion demonstrates, however, even within the relative freedom of life writing, there were hesitations in the name of modesty about depicting childhood in its quotidian detail, as well as strong impulses to create narratives of childhood that upheld middle-class norms. Autobiography: Narrating the Child, Building the Self At first glance, the genre of autobiography seems to offer interesting possibilities for representing Victorian childhood because it focuses on individual rather than implicitly representative lives. Neither a creature who needs to learn some manners before being allowed out into company, nor merely a shadowy presence confined to the nursery and emerging for special treats on holidays, the child in autobiography would seem to be the likeliest candidate for unmediated expressions of nursery life. In practice, however, narrating the story of the self could bring to the forefront the very anxieties about the constructed nature of identity that fiction and architecture tried to resist. Although recent trends in autobiography studies consider women’s and men’s life writing in separate categories, Victorian writers were uniformly deeply concerned about presenting themselves as respectably middle-class. For the purposes of this inquiry, I have found the more salient distinction to be between works written as private documents and those composed with an eye towards publication, for the middle-class imperative to modesty raised vexed questions of whether

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self-representation by definition went against middle-class values.16 Many writers were reticent about revealing personal information and questioned how their lives would be valued by a reading public – for in some sense, to present oneself as either exemplary, exceptional, or representative was equally indecorous. These anxieties seem to have produced an autobiographical tendency to eschew general attention to nursery days in favour of representing a carefully controlled image of a particular child. Such representation, in turn, would forward the image of the adult in ways designed not only to demonstrate how he or she achieved success but also to confirm middle-class propriety. In large part, this was achieved by offering a vision of childhood that upheld the sense that one was born, not made, middle-class. In autobiography, controlling children as a means of controlling perceptions of middle-class privilege did not manifest in the physical sequestration of the child in the nursery space; and by definition the genre broke the literary relegation of middle-class children to the pages of children’s fiction. Yet Victorian autobiographies offer another model of careful containment by relying on generic conventions of the narrative of development to emphasize the ‘nature’ of the child. This is particularly true, ironically, in stories that focus on the nurture of the child. That is, while the most common representation of childhood in published Victorian autobiographies seems to be a snapshot of school days, the point of such representations is nearly always that the child’s natural predispositions triumphed within (or more often despite) the educational model imposed. As if to suggest that the most salient qualities of the child – which include its proper class position – can neither be taught nor untaught, autobiographical narratives of childhood draw attention to supposedly innate capacities specifically to create a narrative of successful adulthood. A common approach to autobiography in the period is to construct a narrative of an exceptional individual. One merit of this approach, from the standpoint of class, is that to present one’s story as revealing the process of becoming extraordinary rather than becoming ‘normal’ enables an author to leave unchallenged the fiction that ‘normality’ just happens. By and large stories of exceptional lives, Victorian autobiographies thus adeptly sidestep anxiety about constructing middle-class selves by suggesting that ‘normal’ middle-class sensibility is inborn, and that only creating an adult who is somehow beyond the category of average is something that takes work. Focusing on the growth of a long-ago child into a now-well-known adult further alleviates anxi-

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eties that might otherwise attend representations of childhood, for if one has chosen to read the life story of someone famous, one already knows the ending. There is no question that the child, no matter how complex, unruly, or formed against certain social moulds, has already grown up into a respectable citizen – else there would be no interest in publishing the autobiography in the first place. The anxiety that might be produced by the presence of middle-class children in fiction (that one cannot be sure how they will turn out and thus one is particularly aware of their process of becoming properly middle-class) is mediated by the ability of autobiography to focus attention on the individual qualities that combined to produce an eminent Victorian. One of the most commonly occurring tropes in these autobiographies is an emphasis on the child-self as having been exceptionally miserable. As if to suggest that despite their adult successes, they do not claim perfection for themselves, many autobiographers ‘view childhood as predominantly a time of dissatisfaction and unhappiness. Even those whose childhoods were relatively happy … often remembered themselves as solitary and self-sufficient, without many close companions’ (Sanders 68). Although Valerie Sanders claims this is a particular characteristic of women’s autobiographies, in fact a survey of the most prominent autobiographies of the period indicates the equal prevalence of this quality in the life writings of men.17 Anthony Trollope, for example, wrote of the poverty of his school days: ‘I had no friend to whom I could pour out my sorrows. I was big, and awkward, and ugly, and, I have no doubt, sulked about in a most unattractive manner. Of course I was ill-dressed and dirty. But ah! how well I remember all the agonies of my young heart; how I considered whether I should always be alone; whether I could not find my way up to the top of that college tower, and from thence put an end to everything?’ Indeed, for every woman’s story of neglect – such as Harriet Martineau’s harrowing tale of being almost starved to death until it was discovered when she was three months old that her wet nurse was nearly dry of milk – it seems there is a story of a boy who felt ‘big, and awkward, and ugly,’ and so lonely as to entertain thoughts of suicide. The net result of reading claim after claim like these is that, as Sanders notes, ‘What had appeared to be a uniquely unhappy experience gradually emerged as commonplace and familiar’ (69). The consistency of the unhappy childhood narrative suggests one of several things. One might be tempted to conclude, first, that Victorian childhoods were rather more miserable than otherwise, although such generalizations

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on the basis of a relatively small sampling of stories may be unsound. A related possibility, given that these are often stories of ‘exceptional’ children, is that these childhoods were miserable because the children, for one reason or another, did not fit the model of the ‘average’ happy child. A perhaps more interesting conclusion is that the cultural imperative to cherish childhood created the impression that childhood was a golden time, leading individuals whose childhoods were unhappy to feel even more keenly the sense of deprivation of their middle-class cultural ‘right’ to a privileged time. Even where, as ‘with Darwin, there is no myth of the miserable, deprived child’ (Machann 103), modesty apparently suggested that other shortcomings of one’s childhood need to be highlighted. Thus, another common theme among well-known Victorian autobiographies is that the writer was not particularly bright as a child. Charles Darwin recalls, ‘I have been told that I was much slower in learning than my younger sister Catherine, and I believe that I was in many ways a naughty boy’ (26). Harriet Martineau, similarly, seems completely to have internalized ‘the family impression of my abilities, – that I was a dull, unobservant, slow, awkward child’ (17). As a means of setting up the future adult for intellectual success, while retaining a modicum of seemly modesty, the ‘dull’ child is typically one who nonetheless offers a glimmer of the future self in its ‘natural’ tendencies. Hence despite being, by his own account, a general academic dullard, Charles Darwin had a predisposition to be a naturalist from his very early youth. ‘By the time I went to this day-school my taste for natural history, and more especially for collecting, was well developed,’ he writes. ‘I tried to make out the names of plants, and collected all sorts of things, shells, seals, franks, coins, and minerals. The passion for collecting which leads a man to be a systematic naturalist, a virtuoso, or a miser, was very strong in me, and was clearly innate, as none of my sisters or brother ever had this taste’ (26). Identifying as ‘clearly innate’ his ‘passion for collecting,’ Darwin suggests that the skills to become ‘a systematic naturalist’ might equally have turned him into a Scrooge-like ‘miser,’ thereby at once intimating that the essential qualities of the adult are already present in the child, while also recognizing the need for those qualities to be channelled in appropriate directions. In many ways, then, the story of the exceptional child can be seen to confirm middle-class notions of normality, for just as the child might have individual hurdles to overcome, these representations suggest he or she also clearly had a ‘natural’ sense of his or her proper place. In-

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deed, Sanders argues that one of the appealing things about reading stories of the ‘solitary, alienated, or exceptional’ child is the fact that one is thereby invited to marvel at the difference ‘between one child’s extraordinarily good or bad fortune and the more humdrum normality of another’s middling experience’ (Sanders 52–3). In this balance between the ‘extraordinary’ and ‘normality’ one finds both the motive for writing and the ability to contain the image of the Victorian child within terms that were culturally comfortable. The desire for the life stories of exceptional people still to conform to certain class expectations is borne out by Clinton Machann’s study of Victorian autobiography, in which he demonstrates a pervasive concern throughout the period that the confessional quality of the genre ‘autobiography’ inherently contradicted standards of middle-class modesty. Machann does not identify this as a concern about being perceived as egotistical; the writers of what he identifies as the Victorian autobiographies (Mill, Newman, Ruskin, Trollope, and so on) seem convinced that their life stories will interest the public. Instead, they are concerned about discretion: the autobiographical genre implies making public much personal information that ought to remain private. Machann’s interest in individual struggles over the generic imperatives of autobiography is meant to suggest that the mainstream, male autobiographies that are largely the referent for Victorian studies of the genre did not uncomplicatedly set a standard against which women wrote.18 Yet while it is interesting that men (as has been well documented of women) struggled with questions of modesty versus self-promotion in their life writing, a perhaps more pointed conclusion to draw from their struggles is that the solution had less to do with whether or not to publish an autobiography and more to do with what elements were deemed acceptable to include. The impulse of class-based modesty about self-promotion coincided in autobiography with the desire to preserve childhood as a protected and hence somewhat mysterious realm. In choosing to write the self, then, most authors offered only cursory, or very specifically focused, glimpses of their childhoods. The urge to retain decorous privacy often resulted in precisely the same limitations on access to children that the nursery space provided: at carefully controlled moments, prescribed by certain narratives of propriety, the children of autobiography are let out of the nursery and into the home via the page of the life story. Hence, one finds that Victorian autobiographies are not typically stories of intimate and personal selves, no matter how plaintively in-

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dividuals may recall their childhoods. Rather, these are stories of the formation of public, often professional, selves – whether literary, philosophical, or scientific. These books skip over the mundane aspects of childhood and nursery days altogether, focusing instead on the greatest impediments and strongest influences that helped the authors become the women and men they are today. For this reason, only anecdotes from childhood that lend themselves to creating a narrative of a budding writer or predestined naturalist, for example, are deemed worth telling. While Darwin offers multiple vignettes of his predilection for egg collection and his ability to discern even at an early age the need for careful preservation of the majority of the nest while still scientifically pursuing such specimens, nothing in his story provides a vision of a particular ‘average’ day or even offers to summarize the elements representative of his childhood. Thus, although we might think of autobiographies as intensely personal and private stories, in many ways Victorian autobiographies seem to have eschewed private life and personal detail in favour of creating a particular narrative trajectory to their stories. Harriet Martineau, for example, explains that her purpose in writing is to offer a document to compensate for the fact that she is refusing to allow her letters to be published. Just as Martineau provides a story for public consumption that elides personal details, so Anthony Trollope avoids the personal in favour of explicating his role as a literary figure. Indeed, Machann calls Trollope’s autobiography ‘the history of his publications,’ rather than a life story (72). In these and many other texts, nursery days and nursery concerns are eclipsed by a unified narrative of personal development where the individual becomes a successful professional by nurturing the most salient qualities of the child. In many cases, this controlling narrative begins with the child’s formal education, perhaps not surprisingly given that these are largely the stories of professional people. Everything John Stuart Mill tells readers about his first fourteen years of life, for example, is filtered through the lens of the system of education his father had devised for him; this focus on his precocious and demanding education (he took on Greek at age three, Latin, classics, and arithmetic at similarly tender ages) and on his relationship to his father thereby becomes his means of explaining his philosophical set of mind. Anthony Trollope’s focus on his development as a literary individual similarly starts with his earliest school days (he was sent to Harrow at the age of seven), despite the fact that his title suggests that this is his history from his birth onwards. Although unlike Darwin

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or Trollope, Annie Besant seems to have found her education positive and rewarding, and unlike Mill, she found it pleasant, Besant’s choice also to focus on her schooling similarly enables her to sidestep more personal issues.19 Although avoiding intimate details, the revelation of which might have been considered immodest, lends itself to presenting a child’s preferences as presaging an illustrious career, men’s autobiographies of the period are much more uniform in their focus on career than are women’s. Where men’s autobiographies strike an explicit note of modesty to counteract the accusation of vanity as their primary motive for the writing, they nonetheless frame their stories as narratives of becoming exceptional, with all of their modesty reserved for ensuring discretion within this highly personal genre. Valerie Sanders argues that, by contrast, women’s autobiography (rare before the final decades of the nineteenth century) ‘often dwindles into chatty reminiscences of old friends and extracts from their correspondence’ (2). She claims that women’s modesty forbade focusing on themselves at great length; hence, they published Recollections or Reminiscences of their lives, as these titles imply a focus on others rather than on the one who does the recalling (6).20 While Linda Peterson’s enumeration of the multiple Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography suggests that it is hard to generalize about Victorian women’s autobiography, there are two primary means by which Victorian women avoided the indelicacy of self-revelation: they penned domestic tales, explicitly not for public consumption, through the medium of letters and journals; or they published accounts of their lives as representative rather than exceptional.21 Sanders argues that women’s autobiographies contain much more detailed visions of childhood than do texts by men because ‘whereas hostile readers might criticize a woman for overstressing her professional commitments, they would see nothing wrong in her studying the problems of childhood’ (54). Yet while it may be the case that women’s texts include more sustained attention to the conditions of childhood, most often this attention comes in the form of descriptions of formal schooling, the very topic taken up in men’s works (albeit more cursorily treated there). In fact, in all Victorian autobiography, there is a general reticence to represent childhood in its quotidian and messy detail. Explicit claims of modesty and implicit desires to create a coherent narrative jointly require excising material that does not fit the trajectory towards a particular kind of adult life. I would like to suggest, however, that the deeper issue at stake here

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is the difficulty of publicizing a figure whose very desirability lay in its essential privacy, whose innocence depended upon its protected and thus shadowy existence. It was particularly difficult for the Victorians even to write about their own childhoods not only because of the confluence of genre-based concerns and anxieties about exposing the constructed nature of middle-class position, but also because of the deeper problem of confronting the constructed nature of the self. That is, within a genre that demanded a carefully constructed narrative trajectory of the self, the process of developing the story line – of making purposeful choices about what to exclude or include – substituted for the more difficult process of examining the ideological development of the self. In the choice between building a self or building a story, the latter was more appealing, given that the underlying moral of the story could be that the self is stable and knowable, that it emerges as a coherent adult naturally from the qualities of the child, and that construction is a matter for language but not for identity. The notion that language has no bearing on identity, that the self is not built but simply made in biological terms with a ‘natural’ immutable core has of course been countered by post-structuralist arguments about identity.22 Yet for these Victorian writers, the possibility of writing the self presumes that one may reasonably reflect on past events and come to some conclusions about their meanings. Their purposeful focus not on constructing childhood but on constructing a narrative of it thus helps explain why the nursery rarely appears in most of these autobiographies. Given the multiple ways in which autobiographers, despite the potential of their medium for reflecting on Victorian childhood, tended to elide nursery days, it is particularly fruitful to examine an autobiography that remodels the imperatives that seem to guide most authors’ texts. A story located predominantly in the nursery, focusing largely on the ability of language to construct a sense of self, eager to present a child at once unique and representative, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The One I Knew the Best of All (1893) is a fascinating vision of the contained child and of the effects of the parameters of the nursery on a developing consciousness. Like many women autobiographers, Burnett focuses her story on her childhood. At the same time, like many men, she sets herself up as a child who clearly foreshadows the career woman she will become, for there are numerous anecdotes that show her to be a budding author. Indeed, she purposefully blends these two elements to reveal herself as a developing individual. Although the overall trajectory of the story is to show her as a child destined to become a

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writer – early on, she describes hers as ‘a life founded and formed upon books’ (24) – Burnett lumps herself together with all the other ‘perfectly normal’ middle-class children who knew exactly what happened in the nurseries of their own relatives and friends because their lives were predictably similar (111). Her suggestion that hers is a representative story, and her inclusion of myriad details of nursery life in combination with telling anecdotes of her personal development as a writer, result in a unique autobiography that reveals life writing’s potential to highlight the emotional truths of Victorian childhood. Although, as a writer of fiction for children, Burnett was long accustomed to presenting realistic and sympathetic child protagonists to whom a middle-class child reader could relate, she tacitly acknowledges that these are not the sort of portrayals one would generally find in autobiographies. She frames her life story in the context of an end-ofcentury enlightenment, noting in her Foreword that ‘The Unconsidered Trifle of six or ten years who was once merely regarded as either comic, adorable, fantastic, tiresome or intolerable has – it has finally been remarked – as many mental processes as oneself.’23 The assertion that it is ‘finally’ possible to present of the tale of a developing middle-class consciousness because adults have at last understood that children are capable of complex thought is both a barb and a convenient excuse. On the one hand, her fiction for children rejected the flat child characters she decried and instead explored their intricate ‘mental processes’ – clearly demonstrating that at least some adults had long understood the child mind. On the other hand, the fact that such characters were conveniently contained in fictions aimed at children enabled any adult who so desired to sequester children in the absent nursery realm of ‘The Unconsidered Trifle.’ While thus justifying her variance from the genre’s norms, Burnett quite purposefully also engages many of the apologetic tropes common to autobiography. For modesty’s sake, she identifies hers as a representative tale: ‘I should feel a serious delicacy in presenting to the world a sketch so autobiographical as this,’ she writes, ‘if I did not feel myself absolved from any charge of the bad taste of personality by the fact that I believe I might fairly entitle it ‘The Story of any Child with an Imagination … After all, it was not myself about whom I was being diffuse, but a little unit of whose parallels there are tens of thousands’ (xi–xii). Avoiding ‘the bad taste of personality’ by showing that she is like ‘tens of thousands’ of other children, Burnett indicates her intention to remain within the boundaries of ‘feminine’ autobiography. Yet only a few

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pages later, she announces her affiliation with the ‘masculine’ autobiographies of literary luminaries: ‘What I can remember most clearly and feel most seriously is one thing above all: it is that I have no memory of any time so early in her life that she was not a distinct little individual’ (3). The curious grammatical shift, in which ‘I have no memory’ of what ‘she’ did is a significant strategy in this text: Burnett purposefully distances herself from the ‘bad taste’ of being too personal by casting herself as a narrator of the life story of a ‘little unit’ who is not grammatically identified as herself. Thus, throughout the text, she refers to her child self with the generic name of ‘the Small Person.’ Her conjunction of masculine and feminine autobiographical tropes includes fashioning a formation-of-a-writer narrative (a ‘masculine’ focus on career) at the same time that she offers a more sustained picture of her youth (as a ‘feminine’ text might). Where an author like Darwin used carefully selected childhood anecdotes to indicate his adult propensities, Burnett shows her trajectory towards successful authorship through an extended portrait of her childhood that reveals the quality of her mind. In much the same way that Darwin seems to have been predestined to be a naturalist or Mill a social philosopher, Burnett sets herself up to have been a teller of tales from her earliest moments. ‘While the two little sisters of the Small Person arranged their doll’s houses prettily and had tea-parties out of miniature cups and saucers, and visited each other’s corners of the nursery, in her corner the Small Person entertained herself with wildly thrilling histories, which she related to herself in an undertone, while she acted them with the assistance of her Doll’ (53). The ‘wildly thrilling histories’ she told herself in part sprang from her imagination, as inventions based on generic conventions she has assumed, and in part were the enacted versions of novels she had read. At one point, for example, her mother is shocked to discover her at the foot of the stairs, wielding her brother’s toy riding whip and muttering over her black gutta-percha doll who is lashed to the banister; it is only years later that Burnett manages to clarify that she had been playing Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In a fascinating conjunction of appropriate playthings and the sometimes shocking ways in which she played with these toys, Burnett shows herself to be highly conscious from very early childhood both of the expectations of Victorian girlhood and of the internal drive to attain what she refers to as ‘the Story.’ Thus, while all of her play centred on her Doll, Burnett is quite candid about the fact that the Doll itself held absolutely no interest for her as a surrogate baby figure to be nurtured

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(as it did for her sisters). In fact, she rejected proper little girl toys: ‘It is not in the least likely she did not own dolls before she owned books, but it is certain that until literature assisted imagination and gave them character, they seemed only things stuffed with sawdust and made no special impression’ (44). But once she discovered literature, she came to regard her toy as ‘not a Doll, but a Heroine’ (50). For Burnett, the small world of the nursery was the perfect place in which to develop her narrative talents. She did find herself inclined to hide while whispering her stories (under the tablecloth of the nursery’s table, for example) because her brothers and sisters made fun of her proclivity for talking to herself. And yet, the space itself was conducive to her development specifically because it was private from outsiders – and no matter how much her siblings might tease her, they would defend her to the hilt beyond the walls of the nursery. ‘It was a wonderful world,’ she writes, ‘– so full of story and adventure and romance. One did not need trunks and railroads; one could go to Central America, to Central Africa – to Central Anywhere – on the arm of the Nursery Sofa – on the wings of the Green Arm Chair – under the cover of the Sitting Room Table’ (68). Her ability to locate herself in ‘Central Anywhere’ through the medium of the nursery itself speaks not only to her imaginative power but also to the tremendous freedom built into the walls of the nursery. Within its protective environment, a child could explore her own desires and expand her talents without threatening her own middle-class gendered identity because her adventures were carefully concealed within the space in which experimentation was supposed to lead ultimately to one’s conforming to propriety. In fact, throughout the autobiography, Burnett offers multiple examples of how a child comes to internalize the ideological lessons of proper middle-class life. Mortified about having purchased a snack from a local village girl ‘on trust,’ for example, Burnett turns to her brother for help in paying her debt (40). While the child Burnett sees nothing uncommon in asking her brother essentially to rescue her from her financial confusion by taking over the transaction, the adult Burnett observes: ‘She had two brothers older than herself, and so to be revered, as representing experience and the powerful mind of masculinity. (Being an English little girl she knew the vast superiority of the Male.)’ (40). Such moments not only reinforce norms of feminine helplessness; they also suggest precisely how nursery ‘laws’ would teach a girl like Dot to offer her brother sympathy when he is punished for destroying her toys.

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The English nursery of mid-century, as Burnett describes it, not only created substantial gender- and class-based parameters within which to define one’s identity; it also resulted in tremendous naivety that necessarily comes from leading such a sheltered life.24 As she explains, ‘English children [are] brought up in a simple English nursery in the most primitively conventional way. Such a life is not conducive to a spirit of boldness and enterprise’ (296). So far from being ‘conducive to a spirit of boldness and enterprise,’ Burnett’s nursery in fact works against even her natural talents. When she discovers a treasure trove of stories to read, and makes the first step towards her future as an author, she does not claim the beginnings of her professional trajectory (as, say, Darwin does). Instead, she ends this chapter with the stern reprimand she received about locating her actions within the propriety appropriate to her class position. Sparkling with enthusiasm, the child Burnett comes to lunch to be met with the following: ‘The governess looked at her with the cold eye of dignity and displeasure. “You have a book,” she said. “Put it down. You are not allowed to read at table. It is very rude”’ (128). It does not seem possible that concerns over rudeness might completely squelch her enthusiasm; however, that Burnett chooses these as the last lines of this chapter is telling. Eschewing any interpretive comments of her own, Burnett implies that she will succeed as an author either despite her upbringing – which values manners over intellectual promise – or within it in ways that demonstrate her to be capable of both literary greatness and staunch middle-class sensibility. Indeed, despite being a self-described ‘story maniac’ whose hunger for literature she compares to ‘being conquered by a craving for drink or opium,’ Burnett internalized the presumed relationship between little girls and literature, and concluded early on that writing stories really might be a ‘ridiculous thing for a little girl to do’ (113, 212). Nonetheless, she could not resist putting pen to paper from a very early age. She relates in much detail her first attempts to compose something literary, and while she reflects candidly on the childishness of these efforts, she simultaneously uses these incidents to make clear that she has both talent and focus. Interestingly, her development as a writer of some merit is qualified by the fact that her mother treats Burnett as though her undertakings are normal rather than exceptional. As Burnett explains: ‘She never discouraged or made the Small Person feel her efforts silly and pretentious, but her gentle praise gave no undue importance to them, and seemed somehow to make them quite natural and innocent child developments. They were not things to be vain about, only things

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to enjoy in one’s own very young way’ (232). The emphasis on her extreme youth, her lack of vanity, and her sense that her writing deserves ‘no undue importance’ is a significant departure from the typical pose in the career-based autobiographical tale, which aims to highlight the importance of the youthful foray into the arena that will prove professionally rewarding. Instead, she suggests that even as she moves from these initial efforts through a maturation process as a writer, she nevertheless falls accidentally into becoming a published author. While her stories become more sophisticated, and she begins to develop an individual style, she nonetheless insists that ‘never for an instant had it occurred to the Small Person that they were worth publishing. That would have seemed to her a height of presumption quite grotesque’ (289). Continuing to identify herself by the childish moniker the ‘Small Person’ even after her stories are accepted for publication, Burnett preserves the decorum of a Victorian girl by implying that her ‘presumption’ in thinking that others might consider her stories ‘worth publishing’ is born out of financial necessity rather than immodesty. She makes clear that it is only when the family reaches dire circumstances that she is emboldened by a Letters to the Editor exchange in a periodical, which indicates that even young hopefuls may submit unsolicited manuscripts for consideration. Thus, while her talents are clearly natural, her fall into a career is depicted as a fortuitous accident derived from desperate measures taken to help her widowed mother make ends meet. Tellingly, Burnett’s tremendous popular success as an author is made very little of in this autobiography, which ends with the acceptance of her first story by an American magazine. Rather than telling the tale of her career development, then, she offers her readers a vision of how she grew to the point of being able to accomplish publishable-quality writing. (One might contrast this, for example, with Trollope’s autobiography, which contains an inverse proportion of these elements; he offers only a few glimpses of his childhood to set the stage for a much more thorough discussion of his authorial career and publishing history.) Moreover, the language and location of Burnett’s story make explicitly clear that she would have been unable to produce anything like her most successful work had she not had the kind of upbringing she got in a mid-century English nursery. That space nurtured her and protected her, at the same time that it moulded her development. It provided a safe space for experimentation while also carefully imparting ‘the vast superiority of the Male’ and other lessons vital to middle-class sensi-

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bility. One conclusion a forward-thinking reader might draw is that Burnett’s writerly success depended on these nursery lessons as much for what she would resist as for what she would internalize. Perhaps not surprisingly, the child protagonists in her novels often struggle mightily with the restrictions placed upon them because of class- and gender-based circumstances, and yet their struggles are predicated on deep familiarity with nursery culture. Their protests seem necessarily to be the production of a consciousness trained in a space designed to formulate a specific ideological position and yet providing the freedom to imagine other possibilities. Definitions of formal autobiography typically consider that one important element of the genre is the distance of hindsight. That is, ‘true’ autobiography does not include letters, journals, travel narratives, or other forms of ‘life writing’ that are immediate rather than filtered through retrospection. This, of course, has serious gender-based consequences for what is allowed to count as autobiography, as Machann freely admits, and yet he claims that such retrospection is vital because it yields ‘emphasis on interpretation rather than plot’ (5). While one might argue that it is possible to be reflective even about moments that have just occurred, many scholars of autobiography contend that the genre is defined by its capacity to interrogate the meaning of events rather than simply relating a series of incidents. Burnett’s story offers an interesting play on this imperative. A hybrid text, it is part interpretive in its focus on the development of a writerly consciousness and narrative skills, part plot-driven in its revelation of the logistical and emotional difficulties of getting a first story accepted for publication. The textual delight in small incidents of childhood that reveal the child’s perspective seem straight out of her children’s fiction, while the overall narrative of a girl who makes a success of herself in her family’s hour of need despite her self-conscious beginnings reads much like a Bildungsroman written for an adult audience. Perhaps most crucially, this hybrid text relies on a manufactured doubt. Burnett tells her story as if the ending were not obvious, despite the fact that both she and a reader know it will end with a successful novelist. And that pretence of doubt, that focus on an unfolding plot, highlights both the value and the paradox of the Victorian nursery. It is a space designed to foster the growth of children into strong members of the middle classes, to impart values, to teach, and to nurture. It is the space designed to have perhaps the most impact on the development of individual identity, and yet it is one that must be largely sequestered

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from public scrutiny in order to ensure that this development can occur. It is a space that lauds experimentation at the same time that it insists on conformity as the price of moving beyond its confining walls. And, ultimately, as Burnett’s text shows, it is a space that can only be narrated through access to multiple modes and the imperfect trope of creating a fictional separate self: it is a space that can only be conjured up by a Small Person because it is the space of memory.

Coda: Remodelling the Architecture of Identity

If I had a library like yours, all undisturbed for hours, how I would write! Mrs Chapone’s letters should be nothing to mine! I would outdo Rasselas in fiction. But you see every body comes to me perpetually. Elizabeth Gaskell (letter 384)

We have hitherto examined a range of Victorian representations of domesticity that at once purport to reflect norms of middle-class existence and yet stand at a distance from the reality of Victorian daily life. This distance is largely a matter of generic conventions. Novels may approach realism but nevertheless are not bound by it, as the fictional worlds they create are ultimately uninhabitable by readers. As we have seen, even autobiographies are typically constructed on a narrative premise that is invested in details that build a particular picture of the development of a writer’s life; thus writers often choose to leave out elements of daily existence that might add a stronger sense of ‘accuracy’ to the quotidian but would disrupt the progress of the particular narrative at stake. Similarly, whether eminently practical or fashionably idealistic, books that offer advice to middle-class Victorian homeowners are by nature somewhat removed from the practice of everyday life. Although encyclopedias of domestic information purport to offer the middle-class man or woman all the details necessary to maintain a perfect home, in their very excess of detail they become statements of middle-class ideals rather than of middle-class facts of life. Opening any one of housekeeping texts from the 1860s to any given page, one might find sound medical advice, good summer dinner recipes, or useful tips for inspecting a home’s drainage system. Yet taking these books

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collectively, or even looking at a single volume in its entirety, provides not a vision of what Victorian middle-class domesticity was like, but of what it wanted to be like. Nineteenth-century precursors to Martha Stewart Living or House Beautiful, these texts offer readers a glimpse of perfection, simultaneously – if inadvertently – implying that no single home or family could accomplish all of these details. Certainly ideals, and by extension ideologies, work by presenting absolute standards of behaviour towards which one continuously strives to reach. Part of what perpetuates powerful ideologies is the fact that when they are internalized as normative, people understand themselves as always approaching but never reaching the ideals on which the ideology is based. Hence, the Victorian motivation for continuing to behave with propriety in a drawing room or to decorate one’s home in a particular manner is that these events only have accumulated meaning: without reiterating one’s middle-class status on a daily basis, one ceases to have established one’s middle-class identity. On one hand, then, Victorian texts provide readers with a normative sense of their own identities, suggesting how the middle classes ought to conceptualize themselves through domestic spaces. At the same time that codes of behaviour and assumptions about identity were architecturally confirmed, however, people themselves responded to domestic ideology in ways that suggested that middle-class ideals were not unquestioningly internalized. Fictional characters like Magdalen Vanstone or Lucilla Marjoribanks demonstrate that dissatisfaction with the ideological categories of middle-class womanhood may in fact be counteracted by actively managing the places one occupies. Conversely, relying on architectural support for one’s identity – using cultural assumptions about the dining room to bolster one’s tentative male authority, for example – may enable action despite an individual tendency away from ideals of middle-class manliness. Moreover, that characters in fiction pose such challenges to this system of identification hints that real people might raise similar challenges – not because the characters are necessarily ‘realistic’ but because the authors who conceived of them obviously conceived of the critiques these characters level against gendered domestic ideals. Even where the examples provided by fictional characters are limited by elements of impracticality, the idealized flexible boundaries they suggest must be considered just as powerful as the idealized fixed boundaries espoused by other sorts of texts on domesticity. The limitations of fiction, advice texts, and even autobiographies in

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presenting worlds so highly constructed as to be necessarily unrealistic (to a greater or lesser degree) may be counteracted, perhaps, by personal writings that were not intended for public consumption, in which the uncensored self appears on the page. To the degree that any writing may be said to be free from the problems of representation, life writings that are not intended for publication may be the most authentic in terms of providing access to what middle-class life was ‘really’ like, if only because writing not designed for public consumption is least likely to be biased by a self-conscious censorship in the name of cultural norms. Jane Welsh Carlyle had very clear ideas about the differences between the ideas, stories, and ways of telling that might appear in print and those that one would choose not to tell were the medium to be made public. She articulates her principles most explicitly in regards to her initial encounter with Margaret Oliphant, who first met the Carlyles when she was researching her biography of Edward Irving and sought out the Carlyles for details of Irving’s early life. Oliphant left her first meeting an instant close friend of Jane’s, Jane having apparently confided the truth of her long-ago relationship with Irving (they desired to marry, but his long-standing engagement to another woman could not be broken). Although the Irving incident long pre-dated her relationship with Thomas Carlyle, Jane quickly dispatched a note to Oliphant after the visit, lamenting, ‘what a distracted mess I had made of the business in hand, you were seeking information about Edward Irving to put in a book, and almost everything I told you about him was “between woman and woman” under seven seals of secrecy’ (qtd in Trela ‘Jane Welsh Carlyle and Margaret Oliphant’ 34; emphasis in original). When pressed for more information of a printable sort, Jane replied to Oliphant: ‘If you were here – beside me – I dare say I might give you some of the details you want. Your questions would suggest them – or they would suggest themselves in the natural course of conversation. But to write them down – to order – all in a row – with “the reciprocity all on one side,” – the idea of “to be printed” lowering over me – oh my Dear! I can’t indeed! The Thought makes me like to scream! – and makes me tingle from head to foot!’ (qtd in Trela, ‘Margaret Oliphant’s “bravest words”’156; emphasis in original). That Jane feels ready ‘to scream’ at the mere idea that she might be quoted in print certainly seems somewhat melodramatic. But her strident efforts to make clear that Oliphant is under no circumstances to publish any of the information to which she has been privy highlights Jane’s sense that a respectable middle-

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class woman would reveal nothing of an intimate nature in public, no matter how long ago or benign the events themselves might be. Her inability even to imagine how to provide such details is particularly curious coming from a woman who is otherwise eloquent, incredibly observant, and gifted with her pen – often on topics that rely specifically on her candid observations of human frailty, including her own. Yet one ought not forget that everything Jane wrote was intended for the eyes of a limited, known recipient of a letter, and thus even the slight hysteria that tints this passage bespeaks a not-unreasonable desire to maintain her public decorum. For Jane, it is only the private voice that is the genuine one. She cherishes ‘the natural course of conversation’ which she manages with such wit and brilliance, and she fears that to speak on the record, as it were, would jeopardize her freedom to speak with ultimate candour in private venues – whether those spaces be the pages of her letters and journals or the conversational groups she created in her own drawing room. Jane’s anxieties indicate that private correspondence opens up a space of forthrightness, which in turn suggestively implies that journals and letters may provide the best sources for assessing how the ideals expressed in more public forums might play themselves out in real people’s lives. Jane’s personal sense of the value of private correspondence for getting at the truths of people’s lives is evident in one exchange she had with long-time friend Geraldine Jewsbury.1 In 1856, beset with yet another servant problem, Jane was given advice by Jewsbury. In a letter to a mutual friend, Jane then wrote: Geraldine with the best intentions is no help. She is unpractical, like all women of genius! She was so pleased with your letter! ‘My dear,’ she said to me, ‘how is it that women who don’t write books write always so much nicer letters than those who do?’ I told her it was, I supposed, because they did not write in the ‘Valley of the shadow’ of their future biographer, but wrote what they had to say frankly and naturally.’ (Letters, 2:57)

The idea that women who were not famous could write more freely, express themselves better, precisely because they did not have to worry about their words coming back to haunt them in published form someday is intriguing for its strong sense of the value of privacy above all else in characterizing the middle-class woman. Certainly it is the case that the work of posterity is more likely to preserve the letters of women who did ‘write books,’ simply due to their fame. Although Jane

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Welsh Carlyle’s letters were preserved because her famous husband thought them worthy, for the most part the private writings currently available come from the archives of women who were themselves luminaries. Jane’s objections about the questionable authenticity of such letters (that they may involve self-censorship in consideration of a nameless ‘future biographer’ who might encounter them) duly noted, it is nevertheless valuable to look at the voluminous and vivid letters of Elizabeth Gaskell, particularly in the context of the architecture of middle-class identity. Elizabeth Gaskell wrote her novels in the midst of raising four daughters and assisting her Unitarian minister husband in his work on behalf of their congregation in Manchester. While her novels have received renewed scholarly interest and are becoming widely used in college classrooms, the nearly one thousand letters of hers that have survived provide a more immediate glimpse of Gaskell’s sense of her position as a woman. Precisely because they are – as she routinely laments – hurried, less polished documents, written in snatches of time between countless other tasks, these letters show us Gaskell not as a bastion of the social problem novel but as a work in progress. Indeed, Anita C. Wilson notes that Gaskell’s early diaries (of the life of her young daughters) and subsequently her letters provide a vision of her ‘emerging roles as new mother and apprentice writer [that] are mutually illuminating,’ as the two aspects of her identity can be seen to develop in tandem (67). It is particularly interesting that Gaskell herself notes that she did not allow herself to write fiction when her children were young ‘because I should have become too much absorbed in my fictitious people to attend to my real ones’ (qtd in Wilson 75). Unable to occupy the position of author and young mother simultaneously, Gaskell nonetheless wrote constantly in private forms. Spanning thirty-three years of her life, her collected letters begin in 1832, just before her marriage to William Gaskell, and end only with her sudden death in 1865. Illustrating the complex relationships a woman writer might have to her domestic places and her feminine identity, Gaskell’s letters draw together the threads of the present study by providing a vivid example of the architecture of one female writing life. In 1850, the Gaskell family moved to a stately home on Plymouth Grove Road in Manchester – a house with seven bedrooms, three large reception rooms, and a substantial yard that eventually required them keeping a staff of five servants, including a cook, gardener, and maids. They brought with them from their previous home their long-time as-

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sistant Ann Hearn, who had joined them initially as a nurserymaid when Gaskell’s oldest children were babies and who remained with the family for fifty years. Gaskell wrote to her good friend Eliza (‘Tottie’) Fox about the upcoming change: And we’ve got a house. Yes! We really have. And if I had neither conscience nor prudence I should be delighted, for it certainly is a beauty … is [it] right to spend so much ourselves on so purely selfish a thing as a house is, while so many are wanting – thats [sic] the haunting thought to me; at least to one of my ‘Mes,’ for I have a great number, and that’s the plague. One of my mes is, I do believe, a true Christian – (only people call her socialist and communist), another of my mes is a wife and mother, and highly delighted at the delight of everyone else in the house, Meta and William most especially who are in full extasy [sic]. Now that’s my ‘social’ self I suppose. Then again I’ve another self with a full taste for beauty and convenience whh [sic] is pleased on its own account. How am I to reconcile all these warring members? I try to drown myself (my first self,) by saying it’s Wm who is to decide on all these things, and his feeling it right ought to be my rule, And so it is – only that does not quite do. Well! I must try and make the house give as much pleasure to others as I can and make it as little a selfish thing as I can. … Yes that discovery of one’s exact work in the world in the puzzle: I never meant to say it was not. I long (weakly) for the old times where right and wrong did not seem such complicated matters; and I am sometimes coward enough to wish that we were back in the darkness where obedience was the only seen duty of women. Only even then I don’t believe William would ever have commanded me. I can understand your nervous headache so well, having just worried myself into a similar state … Thats [sic] a rough notion of our house; only it’s a very puzzling one to draw.’ (letter 69)

Although in more formal letters, she is conventional about relying on paragraph breaks, Gaskell’s personal letters tend to be chatty and flit from one topic to the next, often containing giant paragraphs of newsy tidbits. Nonetheless, the fact that this letter is one long single paragraph is remarkable, given how she frames the topics. While it is typical for her to dart conversationally through her writing, she normally acknowledges the hodgepodge with phrases that indicate she is looking to catch up the reader on all the latest family news, or responding to a series of short questions in a received letter, or writing in a hurry. Here, by contrast, all of the seemingly disparate information is purposefully

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bookended by mentions of the new house. In the ellipses above, I have excised portions that mention the health of her children, the summer plans of their circle of mutual friends, who has visited recently, the news of their neighbours, the musical progress of her daughter Marianne, and where Tottie will sleep when she sees the new house. I find it telling that in puzzling over how best to provide a ‘rough notion of our house,’ Gaskell writes a paragraph that itself contains all that will be contained within their new home: as if the space on the page mirrors the space of their new home, she frames within the mentions of the house her news of friends and family, social engagements, and her anxiety over defining the proper role for herself given that women are no longer simply obedient to their husbands’ whims. The puzzle of finding ‘one’s exact work in the world,’ as previous chapters have hinted, may result in a fragmented sense of self as easily as a coherent one. In this one-paragraph letter, we have a clear representation of how the multiple ‘Mes’ of Gaskell’s life coalesce to constitute her home; yet as she juggles being wife and mother, social butterfly and Christian, lover of all things comfortable and philanthropic assistant in her Unitarian minister husband’s work, she is plagued by the difficulty of reconciling what often seem to be conflicting impulses. A study of Gaskell’s letters, particular in reference to her home, thus proves particularly fruitful for revealing how real women might respond to the ideals and principles voiced by the advice texts and fiction we have already considered. Once established in her Plymouth Grove house, the Mes of Gaskell’s life became more rather than less complicated, as her position as an author grew. The letters written from this, her penultimate, home to friends, her publisher, her children, her extended family, and acquaintances who requested advice reveal a Gaskell intimately involved with myriad details – domestic, professional, and social. In them, the house and its rooms come alive with significance. She keeps her important papers, relating to both work contracts and the management of her servants, locked in the dining room, implying that her work is as significant as a man’s might be assumed to be, since she accesses ‘masculine’ spaces for this purpose (see letter 567). Yet her writing is done in the drawing room, the expected locus of her ‘feminine’ influence, as well as the space that authorizes others to interrupt her on behalf of their own needs. Gaskell’s relationship to her domestic spaces, as expressed in her letters, builds a portrait of her version of middle-class femininity and usefully nuances the disjunction between domestic ideals and their quotidian realities that this study has hitherto enumerated. Fur-

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thermore, looking specifically at letters from the period of time when she was engaged in the process of locating, fitting up, and moving into, a house in the country as a surprise for her husband, vividly demonstrates how a woman might remodel Victorian ideals of domesticity in order to find practical solutions to her housing concerns. One remarkable thread that carries through Gaskell’s letters is that ‘the interruptions of home life are never ending’ (letter 308). Despite the fact that her family and friends are aware of her efforts and successes as a writer, and that the family relies on the income from her book sales for many of their daily expenses, Gaskell finds that her position as woman of the house is often expected to take precedence over her work. In October 1852, while composing Ruth, for example, she worked in her usual location at the drawing-room table, subject to the beck and call of anyone who sought her. Although it is not surprising that Gaskell, having no separate room of her own, would find numerous interruptions to her writing, the passion with which she decries them is noteworthy. After visitors, dinners, concerts, and work at the school have all ‘smashed into Ruth in grand style,’ Gaskell confesses that ‘I was sorry, very sorry to give it up my heart being so full of it, in a way which I can’t bring back. That’s that’ (letter 137). Dismally adding, ‘I have not much hope of her now this year, now I’ve been frightened off my nest again,’ Gaskell conflates her position as the mistress of the house with her position as ‘mother’ of the text she is creating (letter 137). Identifying losing her writing momentum as being ‘frightened off my nest again,’ Gaskell’s play on the space she occupies purposefully conflates her domestic and professional responsibilities. Within her drawing room, she might be said to be on her ‘nest’ in the sense that it is the central location at which her significance to the household is most obvious. At the same time, her language clearly suggests that to be ‘frightened off my nest’ is to have to move away from the work she is hatching, not away from the drawing-room space that signifies her feminine capacity to nurture family and friends alike with all the attentiveness of a nesting bird. In challenging the principle that a woman should appreciate ‘the dignity and privilege of being thus wanted and called upon continually,’ Gaskell indicates clearly that it was not only men who had to struggle to negotiate gendered ideals to accommodate professional labour in creating a coherent self at home (Home Truths 84; emphasis in original). Although Gaskell voices objections to having her work so fragmented by her domestic duties, other letters make clear that she also relished those duties, revealing the degree to which the relationship between

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domesticity and paid work was a complex factor in understanding her own identity. Her letters contain the minutiae of everyday life that reveal as much a sense of pride in her growing daughters, for example, as a strong personal drive to write good fiction. Indeed, even her expressions of frustration make clear that her writing is not merely marginalized by these domestic details but also contains them. In a literal sense, she often contains – within the middle of sentences about her novels – brief exclamatory asides about disruptions in her work. Her letters contain such conversational asides as, ‘Oh! I have so much to say, – not of anything particular but quantities of bits and crumbs, and people will come from the N & S, & E & W, wanting to speak to me this morning’ (letter 384; emphasis in original). The idea that ‘people will come’ no matter what she does reiterates precisely the concept expressed in housekeeping guides that women should make themselves always accessible to anyone who needs them. Yet her visible annoyance, made evident in her use of underlining, confirms how untenable this ideal is for a middle-class woman with any personal ambitions. Nonetheless, one cannot help but notice that while her frustration indicates the importance she places on her writing, her letter refers to the work she would rather be doing as ‘quantities of bits and crumbs,’ thereby enacting in a single sentence the tenuous position she occupies, caught between the need for time and space of her own and the desire to retain an appropriate feminine (modest) place at the centre of her household. Her efforts to set boundaries – both for herself and for those who call on her – in order to accommodate the various imperatives of her life leads to letters that fascinatingly re-enact the interruptions she faces. For the active form of letter composition – in which letters may be started, put down in favour of personal interaction that is pressing, and then taken up again, and in which sentences themselves may be subject to asides that record these interruptions in the moment – thus recreates for readers the dynamics of Gaskell’s own efforts to reconcile a feminine drawing-room space with her professional needs. Of the many passages in which Gaskell offers graphic visions of how domestic interruptions ceaselessly pull her away from her writing, perhaps none is more telling in terms of the architecture of middle-class identities than the 1857 letter to her very good friend Charles Eliot Norton: If I had a library like yours, all undisturbed for hours, how I would write! Mrs Chapone’s letters should be nothing to mine! I would outdo Rasselas

Remodelling the Architecture of Identity 269 in fiction. But you see every body comes to me perpetually. Now in this hour since breakfast I have had to decide on the following important questions. Boiled beef – how long to boil? What perennials will do in Manchester smoke, & what colours our garden wants? Length of skirt for a gown? Salary of a nursery governess, & stipulations for a certain quantity of time to be left for herself. – Read letters on the state of Indian army – lent me by a very agreeable neighbour & return them, with a proper note, & as many wise remarks as would come in a hurry. Settle 20 questions of dress for the girls, who are going out for the day; & want to look nice & yet not spoil their gowns with the mud &c &c – See a lady about an MS story of hers, & give her disheartening but very good advice. Arrange about selling two poor cows for one good one, – see purchasers, & show myself up to cattle questions, keep, & prices, – and it’s not ½ past 10 yet! (letter 384)

Her link between ‘a library like yours’ and time that is ‘all undisturbed for hours’ expresses a deep longing not to reject the multiple roles of mother, wife, household manager, and good neighbour, but to be able to legitimate her work as a writer by seeking the privacy to pursue it. The need for domestic space explicitly tied to a need for privacy is, as we have seen, a privilege most typically presumed to belong to the man of a house. The library to which Norton retreats to do his writing in many ways precisely replicates the ideals explained in home advice books: it is quiet, secluded, and entered by invitation. It is a place for contemplation, a place in which he clearly will not be disturbed by ‘20 questions of dress for the girls.’ While Gaskell’s situation reveals that it is not necessarily only the man of the house who might require such a retreat in order to accomplish his daily work, however, her expression sidesteps the question of whether, if she did have such a library, she would in fact be less interrupted. While men were provided with precisely this ‘home within his home’ through the presence of a study, library, or smoking room, women were presumed to find it a ‘dignity and privilege’ to be ‘thus wanted and called upon continually’ (Home Truths 67, 84). Given the highly masculine association of libraries, it seems just as likely that even were the Plymouth Grove house possessed of a library reserved for her use (her minister husband did have his own study), Gaskell might find herself similarly beset by ‘boiled beef … perennials … nursery governess … the state of the Indian army … 20 questions of dress … [and] selling two poor cows for one good one’ simply by virtue of the conventions that rendered a woman’s spaces open and accessible in the middle-class home.

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Certainly, such passages raise serious questions about the distribution of domestic spaces and their implications for individual work and identity. Gaskell found herself routinely pulled in so many directions, in fact, that her health often broke down. It is overly simplistic to argue that if only she had had a room of her own, she might have lived a longer and happier life. Whether or not her health might have broken down more slowly under her multiple pressures, were the professional ones allowed to assume a spatial significance concomitant with their financial importance to the family, is simply a topic for speculation. However, it is clear that the interruptions Gaskell faced precisely because she was forced to undertake professional labour in a space culturally coded as accessible because of its femininity resulted in her repeatedly losing sight of the development of her work ‘in a way which I can’t bring back’ (letter 137). The situation of nineteenth-century women writers who were forced to compose in the drawing room is, of course, one example that Virginia Woolf raises in her 1927 lecture A Room of One’s Own, although she refers specifically to Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë in this context. Gaskell’s letters, written from the thick of that busy drawing room, provide a more vivid example to support Woolf’s theoretical claims because, unlike Austen or Brontë, Gaskell was both wife and mother and therefore subject to the competing pressures of multiple identities of which Austen and Brontë merely had glimpses. Gaskell’s example demonstrates the value of considering the implications of architecture on identity, for her own fragmentation is writ large in the tensions between desperately needing a private domestic space in which to work and yet occupying a cultural place as wife and mother that might perpetually prevent her from ever being able to find time to escape into that place, even if it existed. As the weight of architectural and cultural imperatives coalesces in Gaskell’s occupation of domestic spaces, it becomes clear that the material conditions of her existence render the only wholly controllable spaces available to her to be those on the page. Within her fiction, as she notes, she could escape her reality to the extent that she consciously chooses between ‘my fictitious people’ and ‘my real ones.’ In her candid letters, she further complicates any vision of middle-class femininity as easily bound to specific notions of domesticity. While Gaskell longed to be more man-like in her occupation of domestic spaces, in order to give substantial acknowledgment to her professional work, it is also the case that her very thorough understanding of the workings of her own home might be seen by some of her con-

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temporaries to extend beyond the traditional boundaries of women’s proper places. Through her letters, one gets a clear sense that she was thoroughly competent in all aspects of making a home, from designing servants’ clothes (letter 567) to shopping for new carpets (letter 576) to curing the smells of bad drains (letter 585). Although indelicate questions of drains are supposed by architectural treatises to be the province of male homeowners, her husband clearly has no ability to solve this problem. Gaskell, though she is away from home when the drains begin to act up, writes a long letter to her daughter Meta in October 1865, half of which is devoted to trying to explain why it is that their house in Plymouth Road has such a terrible smell to it. Gaskell is quite knowledgeable about how the drains work, offering a theory to explain the smell that sets out the relationship between the pipes from the WC and the pipes that are supposed to carry water to the kitchen tap but currently fail to do so. Although her theory is technical and her advice about solving the problem is highly practical, she nevertheless notes that ‘one does not expect to write about drains from Dieppe, does one?’ (letter 585). Gaskell, however, is not one to limit herself within expected boundaries in enacting her roles as wife, mother, or author. While feminine ideals would assume she neither could nor should handle such a problem, the fact remains that her family needs her to solve it. And so she does. Gaskell’s competent management of every aspect of domesticity at Plymouth Grove, from cows to dresses to drains, became especially useful when she undertook the process of looking for a new home in the country, which she planned to purchase completely on her own out of her earnings from her writing, as a surprise retirement home for her husband. The irony is palpable: she would never be able to buy the house without her writing, yet the very domestic abilities that enable her successfully to create a second home are those that constantly threaten to derail her writing. In fact, the process of acquiring this house and keeping up with domestic preparations in two homes at once – while simultaneously keeping the fact of the country home, called ‘The Lawn,’ a secret from her husband – very nearly prevented Gaskell from working at all on the novel that was supposed to finance the purchase. Having saved £600 from her previous work and sold copyright of North and South for another £100, she slowly compiled the money ‘for the purchase of the (impossible) house’ (letter 557). Since she was to get £2000 for Wives and Daughters, which was in serialization from 1864 to 1865, she was able to get an advance from her publisher to secure The Lawn.

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Yet the process of house hunting, inspecting, repairing, and furnishing brought on constant worry about her deadlines and her health. Asking anxiously about Cornhill magazine’s schedule for instalments of Wives and Daughters, she wanted to know ‘by what day of the month must you have the next month’s MSS, in case I am driven very hard?’ (letter 550). Indeed, the multiple demands on her time did drive her very hard, and she found herself so tired and ill throughout the process of writing Wives and Daughters that she took refuge with a friend in Paris for some respite. Although, in April 1865, her health broke down completely in Paris under the strain of it all, she did not for a moment consider giving up her plan to acquire a house of her own. While it seems clear from her letters that the conflicting demands of fitting up a household and writing a novel were the nearly direct cause of her illness, she fixed on the domestic goal and refused to surrender it for the sake of either her health or her writing. One gets the sense that purchasing a house and creating a home space entirely on her own might have stood for Gaskell as a means to prove her ability to integrate her professional and domestic selves, and thereby free her from the feeling that her writing was compromised by her feminine domestic abilities. Indeed her longing sigh, ‘Oh for a house in the country,’ carries with it all the cultural implications of the ultimate professional and domestic success that would enable such a retirement (letter 565). It is not insignificant that Gaskell’s dual objectives turned on her production of a novel about a middle-class man’s quest to locate himself properly in the matrix of professional and domestic contexts. Gaskell lived in the interstices between authorship and motherhood, wifely domesticity and professional pressures. Her negotiation of these demands indicates the value of reconceptualizing Victorian middle-class identity as architectural, for it is only by understanding the gendered imperatives of particular spaces and the centrality of domesticity to defining class position that we can fully appreciate the identity that she built for herself. Gaskell’s capacity to produce highly successful novels in the midst of her drawing-room obligations is embodied in her new house. Having purchased The Lawn in late summer, by the end of October 1865, Gaskell was writing the final instalments of Wives and Daughters as she finalized every aspect of this domestic space. Her letters discuss painting and woodwork repairs and negotiations to have the carpets fitted. Yet – going far beyond work typically undertaken by the woman of the house – they are also filled with decisions about the tenant who will rent the furnished home until Gaskell is able to pay off the lease. She

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negotiated the contract with the tenant, working out the rent through consideration of the value of the house (£210 per year) as well as the income from the attached land. She knew perfectly the saleable value of the hay produced on her land: made by nine or ten women in three days, the hay would bring £6/10s per ton; the nine tons annually produced would thus yield £55/6s minus about £5 for the labour of the women. With a head for business, she thus weighed the relative merits of the tenant’s rental offer (which Gaskell thought too low) against the fact that this single woman was said to be reliable and the rent seemed assured. Although it occurred to her to ask male advice on what rent would be fair, this is the only point at which Gaskell sought assistance beyond that of her own daughters, signalling quite clearly that women are fully competent to undertake domestic preparations that go far beyond the scope described in advice literature as women’s roles. Throughout the process, she and her daughters did everything themselves: inspecting potential houses (letter 572); communicating with agents to get listings; talking to the valuers about the furniture (letter 573); measuring, choosing, ordering, and paying for of all the household contents (letter 576); overseeing the painting and work of the charwoman (letter 588); arranging the financing; planning the garden; and supervising the installation of everything. After she arrived in late October to oversee finishing touches on The Lawn, Gaskell’s visit was tragically cut short by a sudden heart attack on 12 November 1865. But by the day of Gaskell’s death, the entire house was in order, and her husband still did not even know it existed. These elements of Gaskell’s life offer a significant revision to the domesticity described in advice books, particularly in terms of the division of labour within an ideal middle-class home. Although such books indicate that men ought to deal with dirty things like drains while women choose curtain colours with upholsterers, Gaskell demonstrates that women are not only capable of doing both but may do so by expanding, rather than existing outside of, the boundaries of acceptable femininity. Gaskell’s dual capacities to earn the money to finance this project and to attend to myriad domestic details in a way that even Beeton would approve might seem to hint that she was an exceptional woman. While this is certainly true, it is also true that her daughters were equally capable, assisting her throughout the ostensibly masculine processes of purchasing and fitting out the house – a fact that urges a remodelling of previous understandings of the ideal of a gendered division of labour within a household.

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Moreover, that Gaskell’s purpose is to surprise her husband, and that everyone agrees to go along with her, including the businessmen who do her inspections, for example, implies that a well-respected woman had power beyond the letter of the law. Although in 1865 she legally did not have the right to make contracts in her own name or even to retain her own earnings if her husband chose to claim them, Gaskell demonstrates that a woman with some financial means and a lot of initiative may create a home space for herself without dependence upon men, despite her legal status as femme covert.2 In a letter to Norton on 8 September 1865, Gaskell triumphantly challenges the cultural assumptions that a wife must depend upon her husband to make a place for her: And then I did a terribly grand thing! and a secret thing too! only you are in America and can’t tell. I bought a house and 4 acres of land in Hampshire, – near Alton, – for Mr Gaskell to retire to & for a home for my unmarried daughters. That’s to say I had not money enough to pay the whole 2,600 £; but my publisher (Smith & Elder) advanced the 1,000 £ on an ‘equitable mortgage.’ And I hope to pay him off by degrees. Mr Gaskell is not to know till then, unless his health breaks down before … Till then it is a secret from Mr Gaskell. When I have got it free we plan many ways of telling him of the pretty home awaiting him. (letter 583)

Her sense that it is ‘terribly grand’ to keep such a secret from her husband carries an unmistakable tone of glee, yet her pride in thus moving beyond the usual boundaries of a woman’s place seems warranted. That her purpose was to provide for her husband and children certainly redraws the architecture of Victorian femininity, for Gaskell relied on the proceeds of her own professional labour not only to make her family comfortable in the present but to leave a legacy for them, including an inheritance for her daughters (she had no sons who survived even into adolescence). Notably, although Gaskell’s financial success was a direct result of her professional career as a writer, she must be seen as remodelling rather than wholeheartedly rejecting Victorian feminine ideals. Long accustomed to engaging with matters of the kitchen, the children’s clothes, and other such domestic minutiae, Gaskell never intended to elide her capacity to fulfil her expected roles, even as she occasionally lamented that it was difficult to reconcile being a wife and mother with being a professional writer. It is significant that Gaskell’s efforts to

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build her identity as an equally successful maternal figure and author were simultaneously ongoing and in a tension that could not be fully resolved. Tellingly, in the same moment that Gaskell writes about doing the ‘final shopping’ for fitting out The Lawn, apparently maintaining her feminine obligation to create an appropriate home interior, she also asks disturbingly prescient questions about how her will should be phrased to ensure that this newly purchased house will go to her unmarried daughters before her married ones, and to take care that they are provided for even after her death (letter 581). While she did ultimately succeed in seeing this home creation through every step of the process, with the exception of presenting it to her husband, her own efforts to reconcile her career with her domestic obligations ended, perhaps not surprisingly, with the completion of preparations of The Lawn taking its toll on Wives and Daughters. While the house was finished down to every detail, her last novel remained without its final chapters. Though many ‘serious’ writers would have completed a novel at least a few weeks ahead of the serialization schedule, Gaskell’s work on The Lawn enabled her only to keep up (barely) with the publishing calendar. Thus, her final instalment was never written, and Wives and Daughters ends as abruptly and shockingly as her own life – with a set of ‘Concluding Remarks’ by Frederick Greenwood, then editor of Cornhill. Greenwood wrote, in part, ‘if the work is not quite complete, little remains to be added to it, and that little has been distinctly reflected into our minds. We know that Roger Hamley will marry Molly, and that is what we are most concerned about. Indeed, there was little else to tell’ (683). Although he goes on to identify what ‘would have’ happened based on plans of Gaskell’s to which he was apparently privy, his two scant paragraphs provide a closure that is wholly dissatisfying, for they disrupt Gaskell’s prose just at the point of final anticipation. While Greenwood is correct that the hero and heroine seem clearly destined for each other, the ending to a great novel is often less about plot than about how the situation is deftly managed, and the loss of Gaskell’s narrative voice is a tremendous let-down for a reader. One thing that is particularly interestingly about these ‘Concluding Remarks,’ however, is that Greenwood spends far more time on the question of Gaskell’s career and professional eminence than on the novel that these remarks ostensibly conclude. He writes: ‘There is not so much to regret, then, so far as this novel is concerned; indeed, the regrets of those who knew her are less for the loss of the novelist than

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of the woman – one of the kindest and wisest of her time. But yet, for her own sake as a novelist alone, her untimely death is a matter for deep regret. It is clear in this novel of Wives and Daughters, in the exquisite little story that preceded it, Cousin Phillis, and in Sylvia’s Lovers, that Mrs Gaskell had within these five years started upon a new career with all the freshness of youth, and with a mind which seemed to have put off its clay and to have been born again’ (685). That Greenwood distinguishes the novelist from the woman is perhaps not surprising, given Gaskell’s own constant struggles to reconcile these various roles she occupied. Although Greenwood identifies her latest works as ‘among the finest of our time,’ it is a matter for pure speculation alone whether Gaskell would have continued in this vein of her ‘new career’ to produce other masterpieces (686). Nevertheless, it is suggestive that the perception of her having finally come into her own professionally is concomitant with a death precipitated by exhaustion from her dual set of obligations. As if to suggest that there is no place in which a woman may exist as both professional and domestic creature simultaneously without destroying herself in the process, we meet the final irony of Gaskell’s life. While her years of effort to reconcile the professional and domestic aspects of herself into a unified whole that did not sacrifice her femininity may have exhausted her unto death, the obituary of sorts that ends Wives and Daughters concludes with praise that suggests she ultimately succeeded: It is unnecessary to demonstrate to those who know what is and what is not true literature that Mrs Gaskell was gifted with some of the choicest faculties bestowed upon mankind; that these grew into greater strength and ripened into greater beauty in the decline of her days; and that she has gifted us with some of the truest, purest works of fiction in the language. And she was herself what her works show her to have been – a wise, good woman. (686)

Despite this high praise for her ability to be both a ‘gifted’ writer and ‘a wise, good woman,’ Gaskell’s death clearly foregrounds the physical, bodily limitations of trying to be breadwinner, the centre of the domestic hearth, and the one who constructs the home space. Considering her relationship to the domestic architecture within which she lived and worked revises our understanding of Gaskell, in the sense that scholarship on her tends to elide the tensions between her dual roles by focus-

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ing on her either as a writer or as a mother without considering how those roles affected each other. Within the context of the architectural imperatives and opportunities that Gaskell negotiated, however, lies a deeper understanding of the pressures, challenges, and details of daily life faced by members of the Victorian middle classes. Gaskell’s story is compelling for the glimpse it offers modern readers of how Victorian domestic norms may play out in practice and for the reminder it puts forward of the limitations of cultural norms in building individual identities. While I would not argue that Elizabeth Gaskell (let alone the majority of Victorian women) simply rejected the architecture of femininity as untenable, her need to remodel the boundaries of these ideals creates an intriguing vision of the complexities of middle-class identity. Much recuperative historical work has focused on the ways in which nineteenth-century women’s abilities were not in fact limited to the spaces that advice manuals identified as their proper spheres. Gaskell’s work to locate and create a household as a surprise for her husband adds weight to the feminist understanding that women were not strictly bounded by Victorian ideals of femininity and domesticity. As the architecture of Gaskell’s own home and personal life demonstrates, however, the process of creating an ideal home might require a woman both to uphold ideals of feminine accomplishment and to move beyond them – and to try to envision a space that could bring together multiple ‘Mes’ into a single, coherent identity. While initially one might lament on Gaskell’s behalf that she never got the chance to enjoy the product of her labours, dying as she did before her husband even knew The Lawn existed, much less was able to retire to it, it is important to recognize that her efforts themselves are as significant as any results she produced. Although calling her outcome a success is qualified by the exhaustion that certainly precipitated her untimely death, Gaskell’s life is instructive in revealing how a woman might not only carve out a place for herself that accommodated her needs but also pass on such skills to the next generation. Actively resisting the notion that her daughters should become weak or merely decorative women, she routinely assessed their strengths and weaknesses and gave them numerous opportunities to think for themselves. Her efforts to make them well-rounded women were bolstered by the role model she provided of energetic femininity and a womanhood built upon the notion of action rather than simple dependence.3 Renovating the architecture of middle-class gender categories, Gaskell’s life demonstrates how women might become respectable profes-

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sionals while still supporting rather than undermining the efforts of their husbands. Although William Gaskell’s career as a minister meant providing succour for others, he was nonetheless as solaced by his wife as he was materially aided in his work by her income. Far from embodying a relationship in which gender roles were simply reversed, the Gaskell marriage engages with the complexities of retaining a strongly gendered sense of self while also striving to expand the boundaries of one’s proper place at points that seem too restrictive. Ultimately, then, Gaskell’s life – while only one of many possible examples – highlights the dynamic quality of domestic space and of the identities built into its walls. Neither completely rigid nor wholly flexible, the architecture of the Victorian middle-class home provided a location bespeaking stability at the same time that it enabled individual members of the middle classes constantly to re-imagine themselves in an effort to create a satisfying place within their world.

Notes

Introduction: The Architecture of Identity 1 This attention to ideological issues begins with the groundbreaking work by Lenore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes (1987). Subsequent notable studies include Mary Poovey’s Uneven Developments (1988), Elizabeth Langland’s Nobody’s Angels (1995), Monica Cohen’s Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel (1998), and John Tosh’s A Man’s Place (1999). 2 Judith Flanders’s Inside the Victorian Home describes in a wealth of detail the contents of and daily life in Victorian homes; its introduction contains useful statistics on the increase in home building throughout the period. 3 Bedford Park is now a historically listed area, fairly expensive and highly desirable for all the reasons that made it attractive at its inception: meandering streets planned around existing mature trees, houses of varying designs that avoid a cookie-cutter appearance to the suburb, proximity to rail lines enabling an easy commute into the city, a town centre that makes it not merely a bedroom community but actually a suburban village enclave. At the time it was built, however, its homes were considered modest (two or three storeys with no basement kitchens, roughly 1500–2500 square feet). Their relatively small yet purposefully modern and aesthetically pleasing designs included some homes purpose-built with artists’ studios, and the community quickly became an appealing magnet for writers, actors, and up-and-coming professionals. For more information on its development, see T. Affleck Greeves’s heavily illustrated history, Bedford Park: The First Garden Suburb, as well as discussion of the importance of the community in terms of the history of British home design in Hermann Muthesius’s seminal The English House (especially pages 132–40). 4 A helpful table in the opening chapter of Isabella Beeton’s best-selling Book

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Notes to pages 11–25 of Household Management (1861) lays out the servants one might expect to have at a range of income levels, from five servants at an income of £1,000 a year (cook, upper housemaid, nursemaid, under housemaid, and a man servant) to one full-time servant at an income of £150–200 (a maid-of-allwork plus occasional extra help). See Figure 1 for more details. Chapter 3 of Davidoff and Hall’s Family Fortunes traces the development of domestic ideology in terms of its reliance on cultural constructions of womanhood and offers a useful overview of how these terms are interrelated through attribution of ideal ‘feminine’ qualities to the function of the home in a system of separate spheres. Some studies on domesticity briefly use the architecture of the home to inform their investigations of aspects of Victorian identity, such as Elizabeth Langland’s Nobody’s Angels, which investigates domestic class and gender relationships. In a working-class context, Joanna Bourke’s ‘Housewifery in Working-Class England’ examines the complex definitions of ‘housewife’ in terms of work within and outside the home. The most recent studies along this paradigm include John Tosh’s A Man’s Place, Thad Logan’s The Victorian Parlour, and Domestic Space, a collection of essays edited by Inga Bryden and Janet Floyd. Scholars who use this premise as a starting point for philosophical, sociological, historical, or literary critical investigations, and whose work informs my investigation are: Nancy Armstrong, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Karen Halttunen, Elizabeth Langland, Mary Poovey, and John Tosh. The work of Susan Kent exemplifies this early position, while Doreen Massey and Gillian Rose suggest the latter. See also Shirley Ardener and Daphne Spain for discussion of the reciprocal influences of the design and use of space and of how places both reflect and shape behaviour. John Agnew and James Duncan, in The Power of Place: Bringing Together the Geographical and Sociological Imaginations, argue that it is significant to bring together economic and social factors of everyday life that shape one’s identification with the places one inhabits (2). Sarah Ellis, in her chapter ‘Domestic Management’ in Wives of England (1843), warns explicitly against favouring items that are ostentatious at the expense of the real comfort one’s home should provide to guests. She identifies the height of ‘good taste’ as a focus on the ‘simple and appropriate’ rather than on ‘costly ornaments’ (177). See also Richard Brown, Mrs Orrinsmith, Sir George Gilbert Scott, and Gervase Wheeler for numerous discourses on moderating ornamentation with usefulness. For a detailed overview of changes in Victorian architectural style and

Notes to pages 26–30 281 taste in interior decoration, decade by decade, see Ralph Dutton’s The Victorian Home. With the exception of some disturbingly sexist remarks about Victorian domestic life, he is extremely informative on many major architects and movements (e.g., Arts and Crafts) and provides numerous illustrations of homes and furnishings. 1 Domestic Boundaries: The Character of Middle-Class Architecture 1 See, for example, Beeton’s table of servant wages and employment (figure 1), Walsh’s many pages devoted to detailing the household furnishings one ought to purchase at four different income points in this range, and a section in the opening of Cassell’s Household Guide, ‘Income and Management.’ 2 Other useful sources on income distribution are Charles Booth’s meticulous late nineteenth-century mapping of London and its suburbs by income level, and scholarly sources including: Davidoff and Hall’s chapter on ‘Economic Structure and Opportunity’ in Family Fortunes, K. Theodore Hoppen’s incredibly detailed Mid-Victorian Generation, and W.D. Rubenstein’s Wealth and Inequality in Britain, as well as articles on economic history by Lee Soltow and Phyllis Deane. Some important economic studies, most notably that by Lindert and Williamson, have focused not just on income levels but on calculations of the inequality of income distribution and have made efforts to revise earlier data to account for family size and other factors. Taking these studies together reveals that incomplete data from the nineteenth century further complicate the process of establishing with precision who and how many were financially within the range ‘middle classes.’ 3 See John Tosh’s A Man’s Place for historical overview of the how the conception of home changed with increasing industrialization. 4 All quotations taken from the Oxford English Dictionary online, 2nd ed., 1989; hence the lack of page numbers. 5 Certainly, Ruskin was not the first to articulate a system of separate spheres. As Davidoff and Hall have shown, there were explicit discussions of this model at least as early as Hannah More’s 1807 novel Coelebs in Search of a Wife (169ff). However, Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies (1865), in which ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’ was published with its companion texts ‘Of King’s Treasuries,’ has become the standard reference for articulation of Victorian gender binaries. 6 Since Kate Millet’s scathing 1970 attack on Ruskin (in Victorian Studies), feminist scholars have generally taken issue with his unsupported premise of natural gender distinctions. Still, there have been a number of scholars

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Notes to pages 31–6 interested in recuperating Ruskin from those who would vilify this lecture as a feeble attempt to offer women a symbolic crown and title (queen of the domestic realm) to obfuscate the refusal to grant them legal entity or cultural agency. For alternative readings of Ruskin see Sharon A. Weltman’s Ruskin’s Mythic Queen and Dinah Birch’s ‘Ruskin’s Womanly Mind.’ I distinguish conduct manuals from housekeeping guides by virtue of their content rather than their titles. Conduct manuals derive from eighteenth-century books on feminine character, focus primarily on women’s behaviour and temperament, and were the precursors to etiquette guides that emerged in the late 1860s. Housekeeping guides offer practical advice on managing a household and assume a woman’s proper character can be taken for granted. Langland makes a significant distinction between all of these books and the eighteenth-century conduct books, which ‘were aimed at individual behavior’ rather than ‘the construction and consolidation of a social group’ as were their nineteenth-century counterparts (27). Poovey’s Uneven Developments particularly addresses the questions of how class differences were often translated into moral differences and of how that morality relied upon the separation of domestic from public spheres. This conduct manual is signed ‘H.G.C.,’ and the author avoids any suggestions of his or her gender throughout the text. To give a servant a character was to write or attest verbally to his or her working competence, morality, trustworthiness, and integrity. Similarly, a middle-class woman’s character encompassed her morality, sexual purity, breeding (her family’s gentility), and intellectual and behavioural efforts to live up to middle-class standards of feminine propriety. See Henry Arrowsmith’s The House Decorator and Painter’s Guide, Sir George Gilbert Scott’s Remarks on Secular and Domestic Architecture, Present and Future, and the anonymous ‘How to Build a House and Live in It.’ This use of character obtains throughout the century and can also be found in Kerr, Richardson, Stevenson, and Wheeler, as well as in books written specifically to guide decoration, such as Mrs Orrinsmith’s The Drawing-Room: Its Decoration and Furniture, Mrs Loftie’s The Dining Room, and Charles Eastlake’s Hints on Household Taste. Although Karen Halttunen’s Confidence Men and Painted Women focuses on nineteenth-century America, it is especially useful for her discussions of how the concept of character is used to judge new acquaintances. A recent vein in architectural criticism has explored at length the notion of the house as a body, making parallels to the human constitution in the service of theorizing the physical domestic structure as well as cultural representations of it. However, this notion of the correspondence between

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home and human body is not new, as the appearance of texts such as Healthy Homes: A Guide to the Proper Regulation of Building, Streets, Drains, and Sewers (1849), Healthy Homes and How to Make Them (1854), and How to Make a House Healthy and Comfortable (1873) suggests. See Annmarie Adams’s Architecture in the Family Way for discussion of Victorian tropes of the proper house as a healthy body and the manipulation of the house’s health as a means of controlling the health of the occupants by creating a boundary against outside contaminants, diseases both physical and social. One thinks of the assumption that actresses, as public women, were necessarily fallen women. See Judith Blair’s ‘Private Parts in Public Places: The Case of Actresses.’ Sally Mitchell’s The Fallen Angel: Chastity, Class and Women’s Reading and Helena Michie’s The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women’s Bodies both take up the question of interpreting the public female body as ‘fallen.’ See Annmarie Adams (especially pages 57ff) for more on architectural notions of domestic character. Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic was perhaps the first work to discuss the significance of houses in Jane Eyre, a premise scholars now often assume, although the tendency is to read them as having general symbolic significance without considering the particulars of these domestic spaces. See Sir George Gilbert Scott, one of the foremost architects in England, as well as the authors of ‘The Present State of Architecture’ and ‘How to Build a House and Live in It,’ all of which maintain a similar historical focus. The corridor first appeared in the early eighteenth century, but it was not the standard design until the nineteenth century for domestic buildings. See architectural historian Robin Evans for information and theoretical interpretation of this shift in design. For discussion of domesticity as vital to defining Victorian manhood, see especially John Tosh’s A Man’s Place. Loudon’s book, despite a title that to a modern reader seems suggestive of a focus on rural contexts, in fact allocates a third of its discussion to gracious middle-class homes, known as ‘villas,’ which were often located in suburbs as well as smaller towns and could be detached (single-family) or semi-detached (duplex) houses. See ‘How to …’ no. I, Brown’s Domestic Architecture, and ‘The Present State’ on questions of use versus ornament, which continued throughout the century. Similar warnings appear in Ellis’s Wives of England, Beeton’s Book of Household Management, and Home Truths. Conduct manuals and housekeeping guides referred to the crowned glory

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Notes to pages 44–6 of womanhood as the position of wife or mother, and they often used the word ‘Queen’ to describe the woman at home. For discussion of the use of the trope of Queen to describe middle-class women see Langland’s chapter ‘England’s Domestic Queen and Her Queenly Domestic Other’ in Nobody’s Angels, Adrienne Munich’s Queen Victoria’s Secrets, and Margaret Homans’s ‘Queen Victoria’s Widowhood and the Making of Victorian Queens.’ See Ruskin’s ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’ for the famous distinction he makes between men as the ‘doers’ and women as ‘arrangers’ of things (59). Langland argues that women derived substantial power from their management of servants. As Mrs Fairfax explains, she is pleased at the prospect of Jane Eyre’s company at Thornfield, as she has been surrounded by ‘only servants, and one can’t converse with them on terms of equality: one must keep them at due distance for fear of losing one’s authority’ (95). An important qualifier to Langland’s argument, the implied fragility of ‘authority’ here suggests that women’s power was at best relative. See Nancy Duncan (131), Judith Rowbotham (45ff), and Daphne Spain (113ff) for further discussion of the prevailing notion of men as the head of the household despite the woman’s position as manager of the domestic sphere. See Sally Mitchell’s Daily Life in Victorian England for discussion of shifting class distribution throughout the nineteenth century. She notes specifically that the middle classes ‘made up about 15 percent of the population in 1837 and perhaps 25 percent in 1901’ (20). Joan Perkin and Judith Rowbotham highlight the problem of ‘newly affluent women’ who are uncertain of middle-class domestic standards (Perkin 246). While Perkin credits Ellis with addressing their needs, it is more accurate to note that Ellis raises issues but offers no practical instruction. According to the 1861 census, the total population of England was approximately 20 million. As Troy Bassett and Christina Walter point out in ‘Booksellers and Bestsellers,’ sales figures of Victorian books are extremely difficult to calculate, due to a lack of consistent data or any compilation or analysis of what data do exist. However, for comparison’s sake, one might consider that based on extrapolation of figures from Chapman and Hall (Dickens’s publishers), all of Dickens’s novels combined sold roughly 80,000 copies annually in the 1860s. Unlike many conduct manuals, housekeeping guides are rarely anonymous. Rather, they are identified with a specific author whose credentials for writing are explicitly mentioned or aligned with a particular publishing house that claims responsibility for verifying the accuracy of the information presented.

Notes to pages 47–52 285 29 Books with titles claiming to be ‘guides’ or ‘encyclopedias’ of ‘housekeeping’ seem to have been uncommon before the 1860s. 30 While Victorianists now tend to think of Beeton as the quintessential source for defining middle-class housewifery, it is important to note that her book contained nearly a thousand pages of recipes and directions pertaining to food, and that her popular legacy by the end of the nineteenth century was to associate her name specifically with cookery rather than with housekeeping more generally. 31 See especially pages 352 and 365 in Webster. Walsh offers a similar table. Walsh, The Practical Housewife, and The Household Encyclopaedia, devote whole chapters to such issues. There are also entire books written specifically on the relationships of masters/mistresses and servants, including Hints to Domestic Servants (1854), Rights and Duties of Servants and Masters (1857), and The Domestic Service Guide (1865). 32 Calculations are based on two tables from the 1871 Census. The Preliminary Report, Section V Urban and Rural Populations, focuses on population distribution and gives total population in 1851 as 17,927,609; in 1861 as 20,066,224; in 1871 as 22,704,108. The General Report, Section III Occupations of the People, provides the following table: Number of Domestic Servants (so returned) at Five Censuses Census Years 1831 1841 1851 1861 1871

Males 104,730 ? 124,595 134,443 152,971

Females 560,979 765,165 783,543 976,931 1,225,014

The return of Male Servants [is omitted] for 1841 as it was evidently made upon a principle different from that which was adopted at each of the other Censuses. 33 On £100 per year, one could hardly afford a full-time servant or maintain a family in middle-class style; however, this was often considered the minimally sufficient income on which an unmarried middle-class man or woman might maintain him/herself without losing class position. 34 While both Cohen (Professional Domesticity) and Langland argue that women’s authority is hierarchically confirmed through their management of servants, Guest offers an alternative interpretation, arguing that Beeton presents a servant-mistress continuum (rather than a simple hierarchy) in

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Notes to pages 53–68 which mistresses guide their servants in the practice of domestic economy based on theoretical principles. All of these books went through multiple editions and remained in print for several decades. Feminist geographers are especially interested in how distributing individuals within spaces and limiting access to spaces circumscribe identities. For discussions of these principles in terms of geography theory, see Gillian Rose’s Feminism and Geography. For discussions that present case studies in a range of contexts, see Nancy Duncan’s edited collection of essays by prominent geographers, Body Space. See the introduction to Flanders’s Inside the Victorian Home for useful discussion of the middle-class favour for terraced homes and the homogeneity of pattern even despite a wide range of sizes. See Davidoff and Hall in particular for historical context on this conflict between women’s domestic power and their cultural subordination. In Power/Knowledge, Foucault’s assessment of power suggests how it might work to women’s benefit as well as detriment to give them a domestic frame of reference while simultaneously denying them certain kinds of agency. His model of power within limitations is useful for understanding why women might challenge some of the rules that define a middle-class femininity without challenging the desirability of retaining a domestic boundary. See also Beetham for fascinating discussion of how Beeton’s book itself gained authority from its ability to organize and map a vast array of material into a manageable format that created the standard for recipe books to this day.

2 Redesigning Femininity: Expanding the Limits of the Drawing Room 1 Judith Flanders’s chapter on the drawing room argues that the primary function of the space and its furnishings was to shape and confirm the family’s morality. 2 Two recent studies examine aspects of this issue: Thad Logan’s The Victorian Parlour and Susan K. Harris’s The Cultural Work of the Late NineteenthCentury Hostess. Neither substantially explores the role of the physical space in creating an identity for a middle-class woman. 3 Logan’s The Victorian Parlour provides a particularly good discussion of how a woman’s space for retreat within the home was also a place for display of class position. 4 Stories of pipes stashed throughout the garden walls abound. See Oli-

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phant’s ‘Thomas Carlyle’ and D.J. Trela’s ‘Margaret Oliphant’s “bravest words yet spoken”’ for further discussion of his smoking habits. Sally Mitchell’s Daily Life in Victorian England provides an overview of the formalities of calling procedures. J.H. Walsh’s 1856 Manual of Domestic Economy contains a chapter entitled ‘Social Duties of the Heads of Families,’ with a long section explaining the proper timing, duration, dress for, and other details of calling etiquette. The finer points of this etiquette changed, as do all fashions, and are explained in guides such as The Lady’s Own Book (1859) and Etiquette, Politeness, and Good Breeding (1870). While Richard Brown mentions that the drawing room in a town house was ‘generally on the first floor’ (what North Americans would call the second floor), few texts find it necessary to specify this location explicitly, as it was a simple commonplace (204). See also Kerr (458–60) and ‘How to Build a House … no. 1’ (760). Perusal of dozens of floor plans and sketches in RIBA as well as architectural treatises makes obvious the ubiquity of this arrangement. See, for example, Wheeler’s explanation that the drawing room ‘should be light, cheerful, and elegant’ (215); Webster’s claim that ‘the style of the whole should be lively and cheerful’ (8); Orrinsmith’s ‘general impression that all drawing rooms should be light and cheerful’ (27) and her insistence that the wallpaper ought to be ‘calm yet cheerful’ (12). H.G.C., Ellis, and Beeton all provide examples of the necessarily ‘cheerful’ disposition of women throughout their texts, as does the author of Home Truths for Home Peace, who argues that a woman’s ‘instinctive’ character ‘causes the meanest things beneath its influence, to look cheerful and agreeable’ (36). Orrinsmith’s book was part of Macmillan’s series Art at Home, which also contained Mrs Loftie’s The Dining Room, a book entitled The Bedroom and the Boudoir, as well as the Garrett sisters’ Suggestions for House Decoration. Published in the 1870s, this series provided decorating and furniture suggestions and gave hints on appropriate behaviour. Reviewers criticized Orrinsmith for ‘being very late in the field’ and providing ‘no latest development of fine taste’ (The Academy 251). Precisely because reviewers found these books to be somewhat passé, they provide a particularly useful vision of myriad well-established domestic details. For additional discussions of drawing-room comfort, see also Orrinsmith (81ff), Stevenson (59), and Home Truths for Home Peace (56ff). According to Orrinsmith, ‘no carpet should entirely cover a floor’ because one that is removable is more easily and thoroughly cleaned (51). Considering the state of pollution in towns, when heat relied upon coal fires and unpaved roads carried horse traffic, such cleaning would have been a ma-

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Notes to pages 76–80 jor factor. Similar consideration is given all fabric hangings in many advice manuals, such as Walsh’s Manual of Domestic Economy and Beeton’s Book of Household Management. Webster explains in great detail the variety of fabrics and quality available in common floor coverings. Dickens was fond of floral designs in his own home, as well as in those of his fictional characters (Harris and Parker 131). See Lochnan, Schoenherr, and Silver’s Earthly Paradise for details and photographs of the evolution of Morris and Company designs. Orrinsmith’s book offers a number of wallpaper samples, which all appear to be Morris and Co. designs or attempts to copy their style. See also Walsh, who provides detailed information, room by room, on exactly what pieces of furniture are necessary for a household on four distinct budgets, ranging from £100 to £1000 per year. For a complete list of the contents, as represented by this inventory, see David Parker’s ‘The Reconstruction of Dickens’s Drawing-Room’ (13–14). While the somewhat stereotyped vision of a Victorian drawing room as cluttered and overly patterned seems contradicted by the elegantly simple interior views of the drawing room shown in figure 8, clutter was sometimes impossible to avoid. Nonetheless, clutter should not necessarily be equated with over-decoration, since a drawing room might be quite stuffed with furniture and still potentially be in good taste. Oliphant’s critics have traditionally condemned her work as politically conservative, anti-feminist, and so ‘wholesome’ as to be tedious, a longestablished characterization based on a few of Oliphant’s early Blackwood’s articles arguing against women’s enfranchisement and on self-deprecating comments within her journals. Elizabeth Langland’s chapter on Oliphant in Nobody’s Angels seems to have initiated critical recognition that labelling Oliphant anti-feminist is overly simplistic. Scholars such as Linda Peterson, Margarete Rubik, R.C. Terry, D.J. Trela, and Merryn Williams present readings of how Oliphant’s complex heroines often challenge Victorian ideals of femininity. For representative discussions of the modest, dependent woman, see H.G.C.’s The English Maiden (1842), Home Truths for Home Peace (1851), The Lady’s Own Book (1859), and The Etiquette of Courtship and Matrimony (1865). Interestingly, sensation fiction heroines are often depicted in such stereotypes of femininity. Lucy Audley, perhaps the most infamous of these heroines, appears physically small and delicate, cunning, and acts only with regard to immediate consequences. Lucilla’s candour, her moments of self-sacrifice for the greater good, her boldness, and her sheer physical size provide a direct contrast to heroines like Lucy Audley who mask devious action under apparently fragile femininity.

Notes to pages 80–90 289 16 Other recent critics who posit that Miss Marjoribanks offers a protest cloaked in conventionality are Rubik, Terry, Trela, and Williams. 17 Interestingly, Gail Houston argues that Queen Victoria in fact consolidated her power precisely by emphasizing her domestic life: by prolonging the image of herself as a grieving widow, she created her authority as a ‘powerful, matriarchal sovereign’ (149). 18 In Victorian terms, the notion that one was performing rather than ‘actually’ middle-class is taken to mean employing trickery to claim a status to which one was not entitled by birth or breeding. This should not be confused with modern theoretical assumptions that all identity is a matter of performance. See Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble generally on the issue of gendered identity as performance, and Langland’s Nobody’s Angels for more specific discussion of how Lucilla can be understood to be performing the role of an ideal middle-class woman. 19 Logan suggests women undertook home decoration in the absence of other occupations but does not address how household management yielded other forms of authority, such as class-based power over their servants. Langland’s Nobody’s Angels highlights the sanctioned power middle-class women derived from their responsibility for maintaining high moral standards among men and for managing social interactions integral to the perpetuation of the middle-class ideology. 20 Novelists themselves have long attempted to exert social power to effect political change: nineteenth-century ‘social problem novels’ aimed at raising social consciousness about issues such as the plight of industrial workers (e.g., Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil) were highly visible. Miss Marjoribanks stands out among these novels in its effort to provide a model of a domestic process one might undertake for political ends. 21 Texts such as The Practical Housewife (1855, produced by the ‘Editors of the “Family Friend”’), Walsh’s Manual of Domestic Economy (1857), and Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861) break down the duties of a woman according to their location in the home and time of day, in order to better help her see how to accomplish all of them before the hours when she might be ‘At Home’ to visitors, so that she will be at leisure whenever she is not alone with her servants in the house. 22 For further discussion of this effort in terms of Isabella Beeton’s famous book, see Kristen Guest, who argues that ‘Beeton thus uses the analogy with professional enterprise to posit difference as the natural outcome of self-improvement and ability, rather than of received social privilege’ (13). 23 Conduct manuals and housekeeping guides offer women quantities of advice on decorating a drawing room economically and tastefully. Cassell’s

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Notes to pages 91–113 Household Guide, for example, not only suggests appropriate furniture but gives women options for how to rejuvenate second-hand pieces to make them fresh and attractive. Logan’s book offers a detailed analysis of how such decorative processes were seen to confirm a woman’s position as a competent household manager. Cohen, Homans, and Schaub are among the most recent to use this term to describe the novel; however, it occurs with great frequency throughout the body of scholarship on Miss Marjoribanks. Cohen offers a nuanced discussion of the ironic elements of the novel that helps complicate the idea of ‘mock-heroic’ by considering the novel a ‘case stud[y] of the relationship between genre construction and cultural moment’ (‘Maximizing Oliphant’ 102). This language offers another example in support of Mary Poovey’s argument in Making a Social Body that the practices of individuals were central to creating the collective concerns and tastes that came to be understood as social norms. Houston argues more specifically that Oliphant succeeds at critiquing the notion of queenliness by offering the figure of the artist as an alternative avenue to feminine power. I find this claim not fully convincing, for she puts forth a minor character (Rose Lake) as the novel’s model of positive femininity at the expense of extended analysis of Lucilla. In 1869, the passage of the Municipal and Corporations Elections Act gave women the right to vote for and become members of school boards, women’s first access to elected public office. The first women gained this office within a year, suggesting that the public was ready for the presence of women in political office. As Judith Newton demonstrates in ‘Ministers of the Interior,’ political economy was being ‘domesticated’ from the 1840s onwards. She particularly notes how conduct manuals and housekeeping guides employ both masculine and feminine rhetoric to highlight ‘the constructed nature of femininity, the instability of gender categories’ (42).

Earthquakes in London: Passages through One Middle-Class Home 1 Recent scholarly visions of their relationship include Phyllis Rose’s chapter in Parallel Lives, two articles by D.J. Trela that are primarily focused on analysing Margaret Oliphant’s view of the marriage, several essays in Sorensen and Tarr, eds, The Carlyles at Home and Abroad, and the recent biography Thomas and Jane Carlyle: Portrait of a Marriage by Rosemary Ashton.

Notes to pages 114–36 291 2 In particular, D.J. Trela has offered some interesting analysis of this marriage, arguing that Jane was in many ways happy with the traditional nature of their relationship even though she was at moments frustrated by her husband. 3 Froude is largely responsible for the despot/slave scenario, though these are not his words but an interpretation of how he represented the relationship through his editorial choices. The general furore surrounding the publication of Reminiscences and Letters and Memorials suggests the degree to which public opinion on the couple was strongly polarized. 4 Interestingly, while Oliphant at points seems to try to strike a middleground between these poles, she has most recently been read as wholeheartedly defending their relationship as loving and as claiming that their portrayal by Froude was wilfully misrepresentative. Note the three important Oliphant articles, ‘Thomas Carlyle’ and ‘Jane Welsh Carlyle’ and ‘The Ethics of Biography,’ as well as the recent articles by Trela offering readings of these. No other scholar has done such extensive reading not only of the published Oliphant material but also of her letters and other archival materials documenting her relationship with the Carlyles. 5 Holme provides an excellent discussion of the initial redoing of the drawing room to create it as his study and drawing room together, which Jane undertook for those six weeks in 1843 when Carlyle was away (65–70). 6 Holme gives a particularly good account of these renovations (78–80). 7 Elizabeth Lambert notes, for example, that Jane was known for her economy in entertaining: ‘Visitors were given tea and a few biscuits, no expensive fruits or sweets’ (250). 8 For examples of Jane’s epic bedbug battles see her 1843 account of fighting them in the maid’s bed (Letters 1: 139) and her 1856 tale of how the shortcomings of her servant Ann led to terrible bugs (2: 55). 3 Accommodating Masculinity: Staging Manhood in the Dining Room 1 See Elizabeth Langland, Monica Cohen, and Mary Poovey in, respectively, Nobody’s Angels, Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel, and Uneven Developments for discussion of the question of labour in the middle-class home. 2 For brief but useful discussions of how masculinity is at odds with domesticity, see James Eli Adams and Jennifer Panek; on its reliance on domesticity, see Herbert Sussman and John Tosh. 3 There has been vibrant interest in masculinity within Victorian studies recently. See important work by James Eli Adams, David Castronovo, Martin

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Notes to pages 137–9 Danahay, Annette Federico, David Gilmore, Herbert Sussman, and John Tosh. Tosh’s work is the only one to focus explicitly on the domestic man; however, because no studies are predicated on examining domestic spaces, none engages fully with the domestic implications of such fragmentation of male identity. There were scores of professional societies formed in the nineteenth century, in addition to older societies that restructured and/or received their formal charters. Tosh’s A Man’s Place discusses the growth of professionalism (see especially pages 11–12). Although some aspects of manliness evolved over time, these qualities were the most stable. Annette Federico’s work is especially useful for tracing the movement of masculine ideals, as she examines the shift from a focus on the intellectual (exemplified by Carlyle’s Man of Letters) to the physical (exemplified by Kingsley’s notion of muscular Christianity). Tosh suggests this paradox was not a particular problem, arguing that the ‘heyday of masculine domesticity’ was 1830s–60s, when England was at peace, making it was easier to reconcile the vision of a domestic man as there was no need for heroism or soldiership; ‘from the 1870s, the view was increasingly heard that domesticity was unglamorous, unfulfilling and – ultimately – unmasculine’ (A Man’s Place 3). See particularly Chase and Levenson’s The Spectacle of Intimacy. Scholarly work on this novel has almost exclusively focused on issues of femininity and the female characters from which the novel takes its title. Jennifer Panek’s ‘Constructions of Masculinity in Adam Bede and Wives and Daughters’ is the notable exception. Focusing not on physical spaces but on ‘the domestic problems that result from defining a man’s place as primarily within the intellectual sphere’ (128), she examines how the Victorian emphasis on manly intellect enables Gaskell to show that masculinity should be based in part upon the relationship of men to their domestic places. Considering Gibson only momentarily, Panek focuses primarily on the Hamley brothers’ participation in the marriage market. Elevations and basic floor plans of this home, as well as numerous photographs of the rooms as they have been preserved, are available on the Linley Sambourne House webpage, which is maintained by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, at http://www.rbkc.gov.uk/linleysambournehouse/. Nicholson’s book is a wonderful resource, since the Sambourne letters and papers are not published, and her research was based on the tremendous archive Linley and Marion left behind. There are moments, however,

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where she draws conclusions that run counter to Victorian norms, as when she argues, ‘It is fairly safe to assume that it was Linley rather than Marion who decided on the style of decoration for their new house. At thirty years old he knew what he liked, and his young wife would have been full of admiration for his knowledge and taste’ (23). Although Marion would have been just as likely to have strong opinions about their home decoration, Nicholson’s occasional stretches do not invalidate this generally valuable resource. This premium placed on boys having to work to become manly may help explain why contradictions in ideals of femininity were not widely acknowledged, whereas competing definitions of manliness were proposed and debated in public forums. Adams, Banerjee, Danahay, and Federico similarly explore the value placed on men working to attain manhood, although none makes the explicit comparison with constructions of femininity that Sussman does. See Tosh for further discussion of home offices (A Man’s Place 17). See J.J. Stevenson (55–6) for discussion of these figures, and Gervase Wheeler, C.J. Richardson, Robert Kerr, and Richard Brown for similar assessments. Kerr, Stevenson, and Webster all confirm the seclusion of a man in his study. The study is the only room that Tosh mentions specifically in A Man’s Place, and he does so only to confirm this cultural assumption that it was a place for male retirement from the domestic scene. One thinks of Mr Jarndyce’s periodic escapes to his ‘Growlery’ in Bleak House as a prime example of the need for men to exit the domestic scene. Architects Gervase Wheeler and J.J. Stevenson similarly advocate connecting dining room to library. The drawing room and dining room were advised never to open into one another, a dictum implicitly related to the respective feminine and masculine gendering of these spaces (see Richard Brown, passim, and Wheeler 217). Jennifer Panek convincingly argues for the centrality of intellect in defining manhood at mid-century. See David Parker’s article ‘The Reconstruction of Dickens’s’ DrawingRoom’ as well as Kevin Harris and Parker’s ‘The Dickens House, London’ for thorough discussion of the details of Dickens’s interiors. The former article identifies ‘red leather and pink paint’ (12) as the predominant shades of the colour scheme, based on evidence from the reconstruction efforts; the latter has revised these colours to ‘lilac paint’ and ‘plum-colored hide,’ presumably based on continued research rather than an error in reporting (132).

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19 Eastlake describes the library in similar terms, valuing ‘strong and solid’ furniture and eschewing the flowers and frills and fussy decorations of upstairs as ‘out of place’ in a setting for serious study (127). Similar directions can be found in many architect’s directions for outfitting studies, smoking rooms, and libraries. 20 As ‘elegant’ and ‘extravagant’ are used in most books to indicate the fashionable, flimsy, and costly articles to which many women are supposed to be attracted, such authors attempt to convince readers that ‘sensible,’ ‘useful,’ ‘well-made,’ and ‘unobtrusive’ pieces are preferable in all rooms. 21 See especially Cohen, Langland, Newton, and Davidoff and Hall for discussions of the authority women derived from their domestic labours. 22 See Beeton, Walsh, Webster, and The Practical Housewife on these duties. Although a strict system of reciprocity dictated that ‘return dinners’ must be given to those whom one has visited, and a husband might choose to invite business associates home for an impromptu dinner, it was generally accepted that a woman’s notion of who would make complementary dinner guests was superior. The letters between Marion Sambourne and a range of guests invited to their home clearly indicate that she was the primary planner of dinner parties hosted by the Sambournes. 23 Tenniel, perhaps best known as the original illustrator of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, was ‘first cartoon’ at Punch while Linley was second. 24 It seems obvious that Dr Marjoribanks, for example, would get the credit for his dinner parties as a widower; however, when his daughter Lucilla returns home from school, recognition does not pass to her for the dinners that precede her Evenings, despite the fact that she has taken over the ordering of food and management of guests. 25 See Home Truths for Home Peace on the care women must exercise in cleaning (or not) their husbands’ personal spaces, even to the extent of not moving any of their papers or allowing the standard of cleanliness to be different in the study than in any other room in the house (68ff). 26 Accompanied by hundreds of illustrations by William Luker, this book discusses the development of Kensington into an important London suburb. 27 Helena Michie discusses in detail the cultural tendency not to represent women in any way that suggests their connection to bodily functions – hence never showing them eating in fiction – and the cultural ideals that supported this inhibited connection between women and food. 28 Peterson notes that such invitations and conversations would have been impossible a generation earlier, for it was ‘only in the early nineteenth century, in the wake of John Hunter’s remarkable achievements in comparative anatomy and pathology, did surgeons begin to enjoy the prospects

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of a reputation as men of science, and, by implication, perhaps, as men of learning’ (10). Carlisle’s work is a fascinating study of the values that Victorians attached to a plethora of smells and of how scents shaped their common understanding of their world. See also Richard Brown (178), Stevenson, Webster, and Kerr for nearly identical expressions of this idea, which is found in virtually any discussion of what makes a good home. The article ‘Dinner Real and Reputed’ in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1839) identifies dinner as ‘the principal meal of the day,’ whether it is the noon meal of a working person or the evening meal of a gentleman (820). Linley’s office in many ways is reminiscent of Carlyle’s dream of a ‘soundproof’ room at the top of the house. Unlike Carlyle’s reality of an attic study at the mercy of temperature extremes and neighbouring roosters, however, Linley’s office appears to have been an ideal workspace for the final years of his career.

4 Boundaries in Flux: The Liminal Spaces of Middle-Class Femininity 1 See Elizabeth Langland’s Nobody’s Angels on the relationship between women and their servants, Mary Poovey’s chapter ‘The Anathemized Race: The Governess and Jane Eyre’ in Uneven Developments on the uncomfortably liminal role of governesses, and Sally Mitchell’s The Fallen Angel on how fallen women were contiguous with the middle-class women who were their supposed opposites. 2 The country house standard to which middle-class homes in town were often compared explains this preoccupation. The space available to a country home enabled an entirely separate kitchen block, suggesting that the prohibition on cooking smells filtering throughout town houses is an attempt to aspire to the luxuries of the country within the more confined quarters of town. Architectural treatises refer in idyllic terms to the superiority of country over town homes. See Hermann Muthesius and Mark Girouard for analyses of this ideal. 3 The presence of two ‘Back’ staircases on the plan in figure 13 might indicate a gender separation for servants or might merely be a matter of convenient design in creating a balanced central staircase. 4 Servants were generally hired in this order: housemaid, nurserymaid, cook, scullery maid, butler. 5 There were guide books written for servants that paralleled housekeeping guides written for middle-class women. Ranging from Hints to Domestic

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Notes to pages 190–207 Servants written by ‘A Butler in a Gentleman’s Family’ to his ‘fellow servants’ (1854), to The Rights, Duties, and Relations of Domestic Servants, Their Masters and Mistresses written by a lawyer ‘with the earnest hope of improving the social relation between Domestic Servants and their Employers’ (Baylis, Preface), these books offered servants advice about how best to accomplish their work or save money. Interestingly, they more fully uphold the class distinctions on which they are predicated than do books for a middle-class audience. On this difficulty, see especially Poovey’s chapter ‘The Anathemized Race’ in Uneven Developments. Nina Nichols notes ‘a formidable combination of strengths and weaknesses as a governess: that is, an emotional child, a chronological adolescent, and a surrogate mother’ (194). Other reviews that offer appraisals of Jane’s liminal position include: W.F. Rae’s ‘Noteworthy Novels,’ The North British Review 11 (May–August 1849); ‘Jane Eyre and Shirley,’ The Dublin Review 55 (March 1850). See also Rae’s ‘Noteworthy Novels’ (482). Post-colonial readings of Bertha and her relationship to Jane are similarly predicated on the self-other continuum, although they do not consider these relationships in spatial terms. See particularly Gayatri Spivak’s ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.’ For a particularly thorough history of madness and femininity see Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830– 1980. Deirdre David briefly discusses Magdalen’s fate as a direct result of her losing the protections that once defined her identity. Lillian Nayder offers extended discussion of this in legal terms, arguing, ‘In effect [Collins’s] treatment of the illegitimacy of Norah and Magdalen and the “cruel law” governing it serves as a displaced critique of English marriage law and the disinherited condition of English wives’ (88). Although the situation of fallen women is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is obvious that Magdalen’s name raises by association the plight of fallen women as well. For further reading, Gaskell’s novel Ruth contains a particularly sustained example of how the architecture of Victorian femininity resulted in liminal physical positions for fallen middle-class girls/ women as well. See Juliet Blair for further discussion of the implied sexuality of actresses. Sally Mitchell’s Daily Life in Victorian England explains the etiquette of chaperones, noting that they were necessary even at home if there was any chance of an unmarried girl encountering a single young man (as there clearly is with Magdalen and her neighbour Frank) (155–7).

Notes to pages 208–21 297 15 A man at this period could marry under a false name without invalidating the marriage, provided he had no criminal intentions in concealing his true name from his bride. It thus seems likely that Magdalen’s having married Noel under a false name would not necessarily invalidate the marriage; her intention to thereby gain access to the Vanstone fortune would have been so limited by her legal status as a married woman that one would be hard pressed to claim criminal intent on her part. See the notes to the Oxford edition of Collins’s The Law and the Lady for further discussion of the legal issues at stake in marriage under a false name. 16 Although Ellis and Webster both address this question, neither comes to any satisfactory conclusion. Ellis argues, ‘It is too frequently considered that servants are a class of persons merely subject to our authority. Could we regard them more as placed under our influence, we should take a wider and more enlightened view of our own responsibilities with regard to them’ (Wives 217). Because the concept of a woman’s ‘influence’ was widely understood to explain her responsibility to her family and peers, Ellis here indicates moving away from strict hierarchies in treating one’s servants. 17 Roseanna Spearman is the much-maligned servant wrongfully suspected of stealing the diamond in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868); Phoebe Marks, personal maid to the title character in M.E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1861–2), takes advantage of her access to her lady’s boudoir to discover a secret about her past and then blackmail her with it throughout much of the novel. Both characters, like so many other servants in Victorian fiction, stand for the larger fear of servants acting as spies or worse within the middle-class home. See Brian McCusky’s ‘The Kitchen Police’ and Anthea Trodd’s Domestic Crime and the Victorian Novel for further discussion of the tensions inherent in having live-in servants within one’s home. 5 Fictions of Family Life: Building Class Position in the Nursery 1 Sustained attention to evolving cultural conceptions of childhood began with Philipe Ariès’s Centuries of Childhood (1962). Sara Thornton provides an excellent overview of substantial subsequent research, examining the shift in constructions of childhood and discussing the Victorian ‘idea of the child’ as an attractive focus for the cultural desire for ‘reinvention of self’ (123). For thorough discussion of the pre-Romantic vision of childhood and the role of Rousseau and other Romantic writers in changing this conception, as well as of the early scholarship that helped construct this

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Notes to pages 221–5 timeline of visions of childhood, see Robert Newsom’s ‘Fictions of Childhood.’ For explanation of the creation of the modern child, with emphasis on the ideological imperatives that conceived of it as essentially innocent, see James R. Kincaid’s ‘Dickens and the Construction of the Child.’ Most scholarship today takes as a given ‘the attempt to separate the child’s from the adult’s world in Victorian times’ (Banerjee, ‘Ambivalence’ 481). Linda A. Pollack’s Foreword to the volume Picturing Children (Marilyn R. Brown, ed.) usefully complicates the common shorthand that the Victorians ‘invented’ childhood by demonstrating that while parents in earlier centuries had equally valued children, prior to the Victorian period discussions of children focused primarily on economic concerns rather than on the categorical time of childhood. The footnotes to Marilyn R. Brown’s Introduction to the same volume provide a wealth of resources for a wide variety of interpretations of childhood as a cultural construct. Protections for children included Factory Acts regulating child labour, several of which, passed from 1819 to 1878, became increasingly restrictive about setting minimum ages for labourers in various industries as well as maximum work hours per day and per week; the Infant Custody Bill (1839) granting mothers rights to custody of children under age seven in cases of separation or divorce; the Children’s Employment Commission (1842), which studied and reported on the conditions and prevalence of child labour; the Coal Mines Act (1843), which prevented the hiring of boys under the age of ten (or women) for work underground; and a series of Education Acts that provided educational access and, in 1876, made attendance compulsory. Books on Victorian childhood that include analyses of literature include Brown, ed., Picturing Childhood: Constructions of Childhood between Rousseau and Freud; Laura Berry’s The Child, the State, and the Victorian Novel; Lesnik-Obserstein, ed., Children in Culture: Approaches to Childhood; and Hilton, Styles, and Watson, eds, Opening the Nursery Door: Reading, Writing and Childhood 1600–1900. See also James Kincaid’s Child-Loving on cultural ideas about Victorian children. See Flanders’s excellent chapter ‘The Nursery’ for detailed descriptions of childcare practices, childhood diseases, and Victorian ideas about parenting. These generalizations about gendered parenting roles, as well as about the relative rarity of having a maternal visit to the nursery, are drawn from discussions of childrearing in books such as Beeton’s Book of Household Management as well as the comments of countless children in numerous children’s stories who are apparently endlessly grateful when one or both parents visit the nursery in the course of a day.

Notes to pages 225–34 299 6 Mary Summers argues that Agnes Grey, in particular, is purposefully ‘targeted at anyone involved in the education or rearing of children’ and critiques the imperative to abide by nursery law without considering its ideological bases (86). It also, more obviously, critiques over-indulgent parenting that produced spoiled, selfish children. 7 It is, particularly in the Victorian period, sometimes difficult to define what was considered an adults’ book, as plenty of ‘adult’ novels – such as those by Charles Dickens – might be read aloud to the entire family. For simplicity’s sake, I am identifying as ‘adult books’ any works of fiction not written explicitly for children. 8 Advice books that discuss the nursery in detail range from architectural sources such as Robert Kerr’s The Gentleman’s House; or How to Plan English Residences from the Parsonage to the Palace (1864; so influential that Stevenson responds directly to Kerr in his text) and Gervase Wheeler’s The Choice of a Dwelling (1871), to housekeeping guides such as Beeton’s 1861 standard and J.H. Walsh’s 1856 A Manual of Domestic Economy, Suited to Families Spending from £100 to £1000 a Year. 9 As Linda Pollock notes in the foreword to Picturing Children, ‘It took a long time to eradicate child labour, and to gain acceptance for the idea that the children of the poor were entitled to the same type of childhood enjoyed by the middle and upper classes’ (Ed. Marilyn Brown xvii). 10 Beeton’s Book of Household Management, for example, notes that anyone who could afford more than one servant would hire a maid-of-all-work first and a nursemaid second (at an income of just £300 per year or more) (16). 11 Carolyn Sigler offers a useful overview of the shift in children’s literature from predominantly didactic to largely entertaining fictions. Current scholarship tends to place the work of Maria Edgeworth in the didactic camp. Although for children who had been accustomed to the even drier religiously based texts for children, Edgeworth’s overtly moral stories of actual children might have been something of a relief, it is certainly the case that writers in the generation after Edgeworth offered far more creative and engaging stories that did not end with a paragraph labelled ‘Moral.’ While Sigler notes that Lewis Carroll’s Alice books are ‘invariably cited’ as the catalyst of the change from didactic to entertaining, other books in this transition period appeared before the 1865 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Sigler’s discussion is particularly useful for complicating the commonplace understanding of the development of predominantly male-authored fantasy literature with attention to the work of female writers. 12 Catherine Sinclair’s The Holiday House (1839) was one of the earliest popular stories written with the primary goal of entertaining rather than teach-

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Notes to pages 235–47 ing children. Other notables include: R.H. Horne’s Memoirs of a London Doll, Edward Lear’s A Book of Nonsense, and the translation of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales into English (all 1846). In addition to realistic nursery tales, nonsense, and fairy stories, there were also tremendously popular adventure stories, such as Captain (Frederick) Marryat’s The Children of the New Forest (1847), and school stories like Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857). By the time Lewis Carroll’s Alice books appeared (1865, 1871), there was a rich and diverse field of literature for children. Melrose and Gardner specifically discuss the various ways in which skilful storytelling and the presence of fairies nonetheless still often produced ‘what is essentially a very moral tale’ (153). While Victorian children’s stories vary widely in terms of realism and the degree to which their didacticism is overt or subtle, I have chosen to focus on more realistic works for children, as these are most in keeping with the other texts that inform this project. This is not to suggest that fantasy literature for children does not contain interesting or pointed information on Victorian childhood, only that it is advisable to narrow the field given that the generic qualities of fantasy literature add further layers of complexity to such analysis. For excellent discussions of the role of fantasy literature in reflecting or developing a vision of the nineteenth-century child, see work by Edith Honig, Anita Moss, and Michael Mendelson. Other Victorian doll stories include: The Well-Bred Doll (1853) by David Bogue, Memoirs of a Doll; Written by Herself; A New Year’s Gift (1854) by Mrs Besset, Aunt Sally’s Life (1862) by Margaret Gatty, Dolly’s Story Book: Her Travels in Doll-Land All over the World (1889), and Racketty-Packetty House (1907) by Frances Hodgson Burnett. For further discussion of the genre, see especially chapter 3 of Marcus’s Between Women. My Coda considers how some of these more private documents help nuance our understanding of representations of the architecture of middle-class identity. Linda H. Peterson’s Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography reads against each other a wide range of autobiographical writings, from purposefully published life stories to fictionalized accounts of personal lives to texts originally penned as private documents. See also Valerie Sanders’s extremely useful The Private Lives of Victorian Women for attention to these more private autobiographical documents. Anita C. Wilson offers a particularly interesting observation that many of the surviving representations of Victorian childhood are ‘memoirs of adults who had been mistreated as children’ (72), and while my own work would suggest that there are plenty of extant memoirs of a less abusive nature, her point that it is worthwhile to be cautious about identifying the tendency towards stern parenting as normative is well taken.

Notes to pages 248–56 301 18 Machann is not alone in choosing to focus on writings by men as ‘real’ autobiographies, preferring to group writings by women – largely composed of autobiographical documents such as journals, letters, and other personal texts – in another category, on the grounds that they are life writings that were not intended for publication. Although he is careful to acknowledge that these are important documents to study for many reasons, he argues that they cannot properly be dubbed autobiographies. See Valerie Sanders for discussion of the argument that for too long these male autobiographies have been referred to as the ‘standard’ against which women wrote. 19 Besant’s autobiography is particularly interesting in that the education she describes is strikingly unconventional in its emphasis on learning through curiosity and enjoyment rather than rote memorization, in its egalitarian nature (the girls learned the same foreign languages as the boys; boys had to learn to sew equally with the girls), and in its gentle, creative methods of teaching. 20 Sanders identifies key differences between men’s and women’s autobiographies in terms of content and tone on pages 46–7. See Machann on men’s anxieties about the discretion of publicizing private life details. 21 There are, of course, exceptions of women’s autobiographies that do not fit these two models. Harriet Martineau, for example, believed that because of her ‘remarkable’ life, she had a ‘duty’ and ‘obligation’ to publish her life story (1). 22 I find it somewhat anachronistic to apply a post-structuralist critique of the impossibility of a coherent self to a culture, and a set of texts, that presumed it was possible to have a stable self, though I recognize that there are reasonable arguments for how and why one might reassess Victorian assumptions through this lens. Nonetheless, I am more interested in how the Victorians represent themselves than in whether it is completely accurate or theoretically possible to define a single unified self. 23 This autobiography was originally published in instalments from January to June 1893 in Scribner’s Magazine. The Preface was included at the head of these instalments and was dated May 1892. The first book edition was issued by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1893. Fascinating illustrations appeared when the autobiography came out in book form, but these were not part of the original serialized edition. 24 While several of Burnett’s stories suggest that children brought up in a nursery are perhaps too carefully guarded from the more unseemly aspects of adult character, Annie Besant makes much more explicit arguments about the dangers of nursery isolation, particularly for girls, in her discussion of how girls are under-educated in the ways of the world.

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Notes to pages 257–78 Besant’s story talks around the details of her disastrous marriage but very explicitly indicates that it is a severe disservice to girls not to warn them appropriately about the potentially unscrupulous and/or abusive qualities within some men. Burnett’s story contains no such dire warnings and is much gentler in simply drawing attention to the foolish self-consciousness that results from such over-protection.

Coda: Remodelling the Architecture of Identity 1 Jane herself referred to Jewsbury as her best friend, although recent scholarship has investigated the nature of this relationship more critically. See in particular Ian Campbell’s ‘Geraldine Jewsbury: Jane Welsh Carlyle’s “Best Friend”?’ as well as briefer mentions of the relationship in articles by D.J. Trela. 2 Although the 1857 Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act gave women some property rights, this act was specifically aimed at deserted wives (though its protections might be extended to those otherwise separated from their husbands). This act provided for women to have the right to retain under their control personal earned income, savings, and investments, although physical marital property – apart from the personal property of the woman herself – was still the property of the husband. It was not until the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882 was passed that married women finally had full rights to buy, sell, and own property and make the relevant contracts without necessitating her husband’s signature. For Victorian perspectives on the state of British property rights, see Barbara Bodichon, A Brief Summary in Plain Language of the Most Important Laws of England Concerning Women, a fairly matter-of-fact outline of women’s legal position, first published in 1854 and in its third edition by 1869, and Caroline Norton’s ‘Letter to the Queen.’ Published in London in 1855, Norton’s extended narrative combines her personal story with other examples to highlight the untenable situation of women who were separated from their abusive husbands; this pamphlet was instrumental in convincing Parliament to pass the 1857 Act. For recent scholarship on women’s property rights see books by Amy Louise Erickson, Mary Lyndon Shanley, and Susan Staves. 3 Robin Colby’s essay is especially useful in discussing Gaskell as a forwardthinking mother and providing details of Gaskell’s careful education of her daughters.

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Index

actresses, challenging public/private binary, 205–6 Adams, Annmarie, 14 Adams, James Eli, 30, 291n3, 293n12 Admiral Bartram, in No Name, 214–16 Adventures of Herr Baby, The (Molesworth), 243 advice manuals, 96, 152–3; on drawing rooms, 70, 76; on ideals of middle-class life, 80, 226–33, 260–1; on women’s duties, 165–6, 273. See also conduct manuals; housekeeping guides Agnes Grey (Brontë), 225, 299n6 air: getting into drawing rooms, 71– 4; nurseries’ need for, 229, 235 alcohol: banned from drawing room, 67–8, 77; men’s consumption of, 67, 155 ‘Amelia and the Dwarfs’ (Ewing), 243 Angel in the House, 11, 33, 62–3 architects, 185; decorators vs, 42–3; laymen and, 52–3 architectural features, 74–6, 182 architectural guides, 10, 17, 21–2, 295n2; becoming more practi-

cal, 45–6, 53–4; on character in middle-class homes, 31–2, 36–8, 40, 45–6; on dining rooms, 138, 142; on drawing rooms, 69–70; homeowners as laymen in, 52–4; ignoring nurseries, 228–9; on maintaining hierarchies, 43, 55; on men’s role in creating home, 38, 54, 61; taste not defined in, 39–42; written for men, 31, 42 architectural histories, 13 architecture: building vs, 41, 149; empowering masculinity, 172, 175; enforcing women’s class differences, 179–80; as fine art, 38–9; of homes compared with asylums, 197; intellectualization of, 40–1; keeping children out of centre of house, 222; separation of professional from domestic space, 170–1; shaping identity, 176; women’s involvement in, 93–4 Architecture in the Family Way (Adams), 14, 282–3n13 aristocracy, as derelict, 9 Arthur Huntington, in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, 160–1

322

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artistry, in home decoration, 92, 99 Ashburton, in Miss Marjoribanks, 104–5 Aurora Leigh (Browining), 199 authority: in dining room, 155–8, 160, 163–4, 172; in drawing room, 67, 82, 90–1, 99–101; of Gibson in Wives and Daughters, 158, 162–4; over home decoration, 90–1, 93, 98–9, 118–19; over household management, 65, 168–9, 289n19; importance of hostess role, 99–101, 138; influence vs, 64, 108; from management of servants, 284n24, 285–6n34; men’s differing interpretations of, 172–3; men’s domestic, 86–7, 88–9, 169, 171–2; men’s incomplete, in dining room, 157–8, 160, 162–4; men’s professional, 169–70; social, 82–3, 96, 102–4; from social position, 80–2, 95–6, 212; spaces defining, 61, 82–3, 90, 108; for space uses, 216–18; women’s domestic, 90–1, 109–10, 118–19, 137, 140, 289n19; women’s limited, 65–6, 99–101, 103–4, 107, 109–10, 152–3 autobiographies, 258, 301n19; childhood and class position in, 24, 245–59; childhood as miserable in, 247–8, 300n17; childhood shortchanged in, 249–51, 252; development of respectability in, 246–7; of exceptional lives, 246, 249, 301n21; gender differences in, 249, 251, 253–4, 257, 301nn18, 20; information on use of spaces in, 21; lack of details of daily life of middle class in, 260; nurseries in, 233; purposes in writing, 249–50, 258; of repre-

sentative lives, 251, 253; women avoiding immodesty in, 251, 253; women’s, 300n16 balconies, off drawing rooms, 74 Barbara Lake, in Miss Marjoribanks, 96–8, 103, 106–7 Bardwell, William, 53 basements, compartmentalization in, 57–60, 58–9 bathroom, for nurseries, 229–30 Baxter, Dudley, 27 Bedford Park, 3–5, 279n3 bedrooms, 182; hierarchy of, 227–8; renovations of Carlyles’, 118–19, 125 Beetham, Margaret, 47–8 Beeton, Isabella, 8, 17, 70; on character, 46–7; on dining room as masculine, 67, 138; on entertaining, 20, 50–2, 100–1, 154; expertise in food, 50–2, 285n30; focus on practical information in conduct guides, 45–6; on motherhood, 226–7; on servants, 48–9, 151, 187; training housewives, 47–8, 50; on women’s influence, 65, 88–9; on women’s roles, 61 behaviour: children’s, 222, 225, 235, 240, 242; in children’s literature, 240–2; class differences in, 32, 160, 240; constrained by spaces, 16–17, 21, 61, 67, 77–9; controlling for middle-class respectability, 77, 96–8, 171; dining room, 138, 160; middleclass, 18–19, 167–8, 206–7; modifying to match identity, 16, 207–9 Bertha Mason Rochester, in Jane Eyre, 23, 35, 38, 81, 198; as ghost, 209, 219; Jane Eyre and, 195–7

Index Besant, Annie, 251, 301n19, 301–2n24 birth and breeding, 8, 136, 179, 205–6 Blair, Juliet, 205–6 body: coarsened by work, 120–1, 190; functions not discussed, 294n27; house as, 282–3n13; physical presence and, 80 Book of Household Management. See Beeton, Isabella Booth, Charles, 27 boredom, of middle-class women, 116, 128, 130, 219 Bourdieu, Pierre, 16, 95 Brontë, Anne, 160–1 Brontë, Charlotte, 23, 35. See also Jane Eyre Brown, Richard, 38–9, 71, 142, 184–5, 228, 280n11 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 199 Burnett, Frances Hodgson: autobiography of, 252–3, 258; characters in stories of, 258; love of stories, 254–6; on nursery life, 234, 254–5, 301n24 Burnett, John, 27 Burns, Robert Scott, 38 business, 273; dining room associated with, 146, 159, 170. See also profession; professionalism Carlisle, Janice, 164 Carlyle, Alexander, 114, 117 Carlyle, Jane and Thomas: in A Chelsea Interior, 111–14, 112, 124; drawing room of, 77, 125–7, 291n5; entertaining by, 128–9; marriage of, 22, 113–15, 127, 290n1, 291nn2, 3, 4; renovations to home of, 116–18, 291n5

323

Carlyle, Jane Welsh, 131, 263; death of, 126; domesticity of, 84, 132; drawing room of, 74, 115–17; entertaining by, 74, 128–30, 291n7; husband’s infringement on spaces of, 123–5; husband’s lack of appreciation for work by, 121, 124; ill-health of, 129–30; indulging husband, 125, 131–2; limitations of femininity of, 132–3; managing renovations, 117–18, 190; marriage of, 113–15, 127; personality of, 132–3; physical labour in renovations, 118–21, 190; stories told for publication or not, 262–3 Carlyle, Thomas: infringement on wife’s spaces, 123–8, 172–3; lack of appreciation for wife’s work, 121, 124, 156; leaving Jane to manage renovations, 117–20, 122; personality of, 131–2; regendering wife’s drawing room, 125–8; trying to regulate neighbours’ drawing rooms, 125–7; workspace for, 126– 7, 133, 156, 295n32 Cassell’s Household Guide: Being a Complete Encyclopedia of Domestic and Social Economy, 46, 50, 289–90n22; on nursery design, 229, 234–5 Castle Smith, Georgiana (Brenda), 240–1 Cavendish, in Miss Marjoribanks, 96–8, 103, 106 ceilings, in drawing rooms, 74 central hall, 182 character, 282n10; architectural guides on, 38, 40; in dining-room conversation, 154–5; formation of, 256–7; of good servants, 189–90;

324

Index

guidebooks and, 45–7; home protecting and policing, 36–8; ideal feminine, 97, 196–7, 207; as innate, 246, 248; Jane Carlyle’s, 117–19, 128–30, 132; middle-class, 32, 240– 2; in middle-class homes, 31–2, 36–7, 40; of middle-class homes, 32–3, 36; revealed through taste and style, 38, 70–1, 95; sensation fiction heroines’ questioned, 201–3; women’s, 44–5, 85, 87; women’s and home’s conflated, 37, 69–70, 287n7 chastity, effects of loss, 192. See also fallen women Chelsea Interior, A (Tait), 111–14, 112, 124 childhood, 233; in autobiographical writings, 245–6; class differences in, 299n9; evolution of concept, 297–8n1; happiness as class privilege in, 235; miserable, in autobiographies, 247–8, 300n17; as protected, 249, 255–6; shortchanged in autobiographies, 249–52 childrearing, 242; importance of, 24, 223; models for, 222–6; staff for, 226–7, 233, 244, 299n10 children, 180, 221; autobiographies portraying as miserable, 247–8; brought up for middle-class roles, 33, 240; between categories of identity, 244; as characters in stories, 221–2, 253, 258; contained in nursery, 62, 223, 232–3, 246, 252; effects of nursery space on, 228–9, 234–5; Gaskell providing for, 274–5; intellectual development of, 233–4, 236, 238; kept away from other family and guests,

187, 229–30, 244–5; learning selfcontrol, 234–6, 242; legitimate and illegitimate, 200, 208, 218, 296n11; not integrated into household, 24, 227–9, 230–2; not seen to learn middle-class identity, 226, 244–5; protection of, 36–7, 298n2; relations with parents, 223–5, 232, 240– 2, 256–7; spoiled, 240–2, 299n6; toys and games of, 254–5; work and, 232, 298n2. See also nursery children’s books, 21, 221, 253, 299n7; Burnett’s love of, 254–6; evolution of, 235–6, 299n11, 299–300n12; goals of, 226, 240, 243; middle-class identity in, 236–9, 243; morality in, 240–2, 243; nursery in, 24, 233–45 chimney-piece. See fireplaces The Choice of a Dwelling: A Practical Handbook of Useful Information. See Wheeler, Gervase class, 121; definitions of, 7–9; and gender in identity, 10, 28; homes displaying, 28, 142; restrictions based on, 258; separation of, 179– 80, 190–1, 193. See also middle class class differences, 12, 282n8; in childhood, 235, 299n9; in dining-room conversation, 154; in guidebooks for servants, 295–6n5; in identities available to women, 212; in identity through routes vs destinations, 185, 208; in women’s physicality, 179–80 class hierarchies: boundaries of spaces in, 18, 199–200; in children’s literature, 240–2; collapse of, 212–13; desire to maintain, 26, 137; in dining room, 154, 160; governesses’ ambiguous position in,

Index 178, 192–4, 200–1; language used to maintain, 194; liminal spaces in maintaining, 182, 184, 186–7; maintained through management of spaces, 17, 36, 55; managing in drawing-room interactions, 96–8, 106–7; relations of women in, 199, 212–14; spaces complicating, 177 class identity, instability of, 23, 27–8, 213–15 class mobility, as threat, 26 class status. See social position Cohen, Monica, 12, 279n1 Collins, Wilkie: The Moonstone, 154, 297n17. See also No Name colonialism, in cultural movement, 26 colours, 92, 105, 111, 293n18; to show masculinity and respectability, 148–9, 163 comfort, 95; in drawing-room design, 70, 76–7, 91; in true hospitality, 145, 151, 280n11 Common Scents (Carlisle), 164 community, development of, 4–5 conduct manuals, 35, 194; on character of middle-class homes, 31–2, 39–40; on drawing-room decoration, 289–90n22; etiquette books vs, 32–3; housekeeping guides vs, 46, 282n7, 284n28; information omitted from, 39–40, 44; on morality and homes, 33–4, 38; practical information in, 44–6. See also advice manuals; housekeeping guides conservatories, 74 conversation: awkwardness in, 159–60; controlling, as male prerogative, 154–5, 162; dining room, 153–4

325

cook: influence of, 162; women’s relations with, 165–6, 168 correspondence: Carlyles’, 113–14, 117–18; Elizabeth Gaskell’s, 264–6, 268–9; Jane Carlyle’s, 130–1, 263; true pictures of middle-class life in, 263–4 corridors: common, 185, 187; halls vs, 181–2; liminal women using, 197, 208–9; in maintaining separate spaces, 39, 60; separating people and tasks by, 185–7. See also liminal spaces Cranford (Gaskell), 64–5, 136 cult of the child, 221–2, 226, 230 Cumnors, Lord and Lady, in Wives and Daughters, 159 Cynthia Kirkpatrick, in Wives and Daughters, 50 Darwin, Charles, 124, 248, 250 Daughters of England: Their Society, Character, and Responsibilities (Ellis), 33 David, Deirdre, 219 Davidoff, Lenore, 12–13, 280n5 de Certeau, Michel, 16 decoration. See home decoration decorative arts, as display of good taste, 14, 19, 66–7 decorators, vs architects, 42–3 delicacy: in decoration of drawing room, 67; discipline with, 96–7; efforts to maintain women’s, 165; in social politics, 103; working women thought to be incapable of, 179 diaries, Gaskell’s, 264 Dickens, Charles, 29, 284n27; drawing room of, 74, 77, 288n10; house

326

Index

of, 148, 186, 293n18; Our Mutual Friend by, 33–4, 37, 42, 71 dining room: associated with men’s business, 146, 170; breakfast vs dinners in, 89; children joining family in, 233; chimney-piece in, 149, 150; confirming social position, 7, 139, 145–7; decoration of, 147–9, 163; dinner-party arrangements of, 50–2, 51; failures of masculinity in, 160–1, 163; as family space, 182; flexibility of use, 175–6; floor plans for, 56, 141, 143–4, 164–5; gender roles in, 79, 152–4, 266; male community in, 67, 159; masculinity in, 22–3, 138–40, 153, 157–8, 163, 169–70, 175, 177; men’s authority in, 157–8, 160, 163–4, 172; men’s responsibilities in, 146, 153–5; relation to other rooms, 146, 293n16; separation of kitchen from, 164–5, 167, 185; similarity in floor plans, 141; size of, 142; tensions over meal schedules in, 166–8; women withdrawing from, 67, 155 Domestic Architecture: Containing a History of the Science and the Principles of Designing. See Brown, Richard domestic writings, women’s, 251, 261–2 domesticity: attitude vs skills in, 36; boundaries in, 31; in definition of middle class, 8, 27–8; equated with femininity, 11–13, 29–30, 50, 62–3; Gaskell assuming both gender roles in, 270–3; Gaskell balancing with career, 266–76; ideals of, 5, 132, 137–8, 260–1; infringing on

work space, 169–70; integrated with professionalism in men’s identity, 161, 166–8, 173–5; man’s place in, 22–3, 40–1, 54, 141, 175; masculinity and, 137–9, 292n7; masculinity dependent on wife’s, 136, 151, 157–8, 162–4; men’s authority in, 169, 171; moral obligations of, 33–5; as natural, 11–12, 85; professionalization of, 47, 52; public/private binary and, 12, 135, 223; signs of inexperience in, 165– 6; sources of information on, 21–2, 45–6, 260–1; tensions in, 24, 166–8; women limited to, 61, 85, 109–10 drawing room, 182; Carlyle regendering wife’s, 125–8; centrality of, 68–9, 96; in creation of identity, 115–17, 123–4; decoration of, 66–7, 74–6, 75, 82, 90–4, 111, 112, 123–4, 288n13; decoration and design advice for, 70, 289–90n22; designs for, 71–4; etiquette in, 67–8, 77–9; as feminine space, 22, 62, 125–7, 177; floor plans for, 56, 72–3; functions of, 68, 74, 76, 266–70, 286n1; furniture for, 76–7; Jane Carlyle creating tent for, 122–3; Jane Carlyle’s skill in entertaining in, 128–30, 132–3; as limited sphere for women, 81–2, 99–101, 108; location of, 287n6, 293n16; managing people as well as space in, 96–8, 106–7; men’s infringements on, 123–8, 156, 157, 172–4; public and private roles in, 64–6, 88; renovations of, 118–19, 163, 291n5; Sambournes sharing, 173–4; size of, 71, 74; women’s accomplishments displayed in, 63, 69, 123–4; women’s authority

Index through managing, 77, 82, 90–1, 118–19; as women’s domain, 90, 127; women’s identity expressed in, 91–2, 94–5, 287n7; women’s influence through, 104–6, 108 Drawing-Room, The (Orrinsmith), 70, 92 Dr Marjoribanks, in Miss Marjoribanks, 294n24; death, 101–2, 107; on power of women, 99–100, 105 dumbwaiters, 185 duties, women’s, 289n21; in drawing room, 62, 68; duty vs, 47; motherhood in, 222, 226–7 Eastlake, Charles, 71, 76, 92, 148 economy, centralization of: in cultural movement, 26; Gaskell’s rejection of dependence in, 271, 274–5; increasing prosperity, 7; Magdalen trying to regain fortune, 212–15; women’s dependence in, 179, 196, 200, 210–11 economy, domestic, 201; advice on furniture purchases, 77, 96, 281n2, 288n11; concealing limitations of, 64–5, 164–5; definitions of, 50; difficulty of getting large enough dining room, 142–5; entertaining and, 145, 153, 291n7; governesses as victims of, 192–3, 200–1; guides on living within income, 49–50, 77, 281n2; illegitimate children in, 218; menus showing frugality, 52, 151; respectability vs excess in, 161; servants’ wages in, 48–9, 151; women’s creativity thriftiness in, 124, 131–2; women’s dependence, 179, 218–19, 302n2; women’s vulnerability in, 200–1, 203, 205,

327

207–8; women’s work in, 120–1, 123–4 Edgeworth, Maria, 236, 299n11 education: in autobiographies, 246, 250–1, 301n19; children’s literature for, 299–300n12 Edward Rochester, in Jane Eyre, 34–5, 198–9 Elements of Architectural Criticism for the Use of Students, Amateurs, and Reviewers (Gwilt), 38 Eliot, George, 94–5, 161 Ellis, Sarah Stickney, 50; books by, 33, 45; focus on morals, 35, 45; on taste, 70, 280n11; on treatment of servants, 189, 199, 297n16; on women staying home, 36–7. See also titles of books written Encyclopedia of Architecture Historical, Theoretical, and Practical, An (Gwilt), 38–9 Encyclopedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture (Loudon), 41 Encyclopedia of Domestic Economy, An. See Webster, Thomas English House, The (Muthesius), 13 English Maiden, Her Moral and Domestic Duties, The (H.G.C.), 32–6; on treatment of servants, 189; on women’s character, 44–5, 97 entertaining: appropriate to social position, 7–8, 142–6, 161; Carlyles’, 125–6, 128–9, 132–3, 291n7; at dinner parties, 50–2, 142, 151–2; drawing room to accommodate, 71, 76– 7, 90–1; etiquette in, 142–5, 287n5; gender roles in, 151–4, 294n22; homes for, 7–8, 19–20; importance of hostess role, 63–4, 93, 99–101, 138; limited power for women

328

Index

from, 84, 99–101, 103–4; Lucilla’s goals in, 87–8, 106; men’s role in, 67, 123, 146, 153–4, 172; men’s status from, 162–3; reciprocity in, 142–5, 294n22; Sambournes’, 151, 173–5; women’s competence in, 64–6, 96–8, 126; women’s influence from, 82, 84, 96–8, 103–6, 132–3 entrance hall, 181 etiquette, 165; calling procedures for guests, 287n5; in drawing room, 67–8, 77–9; for middle-class girls, 206–7 etiquette books, vs conduct manuals, 32–3 Evans, Robin, 184, 283n18 Ewing, Juliana Horatia, 236–9, 243 fallen women, 179–80, 191–2, 212, 283n14, 296n12 family: boundaries of space of, 181–2, 184–5; children’s separation from, 60, 187, 227, 229–32; as distraction from creation of own identity, 95–6; fiction not picturing middle class, 221–2; governesses’ separation from, 180; keeping household work away from, 164– 5, 185–6; relations with servants, 187–90; servants’ separation from, 55, 60, 181–2; vulnerability of, 32, 36–7, 222–3; women’s moral obligations to, 33 Family Fortunes (Davidoff and Hall), 12–13, 280n5 family man: importance of role as, 135–6, 152, 222–3; masculinity and, 138–9; Sambourne as ideal, 139, 152 femininity: accessibility and, 268,

270; accommodation vs expansion of boundaries of, 81–3, 122–3, 290n27; blurring boundaries of, 178–9, 194–5, 202; children learning, 236–7, 239–40, 277; as confining, 61, 79–80, 120, 132–3, 198, 220; development of, 138, 254–5; domesticity and, 31, 85, 99; domesticity equated with, 11–13, 29–30, 50, 62–3; drawing room displaying, 69–70, 77–9, 125–7; expanding boundaries of, 82, 107–9, 122–3, 191, 206–7, 273, 276–7; fragility of, 181, 218–19; ideals of, 32, 71, 196–7; as natural, 139, 202, 205–6, 227; as natural vs constructed, 84–5, 179, 213, 290n29; passivity of, 211, 218; as problematic, 218–19; resistance to passivity of, 201, 271, 274, 277; of sensation fiction heroines, 201, 288n15; subversion/containment model in, 81–3; women limited by, 104, 106, 195–6. See also gender roles Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Rose), 15 fiction. See novels Fields, Annie Adams, 63 fireplaces: in dining room, 149, 150; in drawing room, 74–6, 75; in halls, 181 Flanders, Judith, 6, 14, 279n2 floor coverings, 74–6, 287–8n9 floor plans, 10; children’s separation in, 229–32, 231; dining rooms in, 56, 141, 143–4, 164–5; for drawing rooms, 56, 72–3; goals in, 164–5, 185; ground floor, 188; showing spaces divided by gender, 141, 143–4; as source of information on

Index domesticity, 21; thoroughfare systems in, 181–7, 183, 188 floral patterns, in drawing rooms, 76, 288n10 food: Beeton’s expertise in, 285n30; cooking and eating to be in separate spaces, 164–5, 167; women’s relation to, 294n27 Fox, Eliza (‘Tottie’), 265 Franklin Blake, in The Moonstone, 154 Froude, James Anthony, 113–14, 117, 291n3 furniture, 288n11, 294n20; diningroom, 145, 147; drawing-room, 74, 76–7, 78, 124, 289–90n22; in halls, 181–2; importance of, 95–6; nursery, 229 Garrett, Rhoda and Agnes, 75, 149, 150 Gaskell, Elizabeth: assuming both gender roles, 270–3; as author, 266–7, 276; balancing domesticity with career, 266–76; buying second house, 264–6, 271–3; correspondence of, 24, 264–6, 268–9; Cranford by, 64–5, 136; death of, 273, 275–6; extending boundaries of femininity, 276–7; Ruth by, 199, 267. See also Wives and Daughters gender, 163, 258, 290n29; class vs, 8, 10, 28; public/private binary based on, 29–30; resistance to women’s passivity, 201, 271, 274, 277; of servants, 188–7; spaces and, 15–16, 85, 141, 143–4, 146; women’s dependence, 147, 198, 203, 205, 210–11, 218–19; women’s passivity, 211, 218; women’s property rights, 147, 272–5, 302n2; women withdrawing

329

from men’s unsuitable conduct, 67, 155 gender differences, 15, 28, 64; in attention to social politics, 97; in authority vs influence, 44–5, 64, 108; in autobiographies, 249, 251, 253–4, 257, 301nn18, 20; in guides to creating homes, 15, 17, 21–2, 31; limited power for women, 85, 99– 101, 103–4, 109; in masculinity as earned but femininity as natural, 139; in need for private space, 43, 127, 137, 140–1; Ruskin on, 281n6, 284n23; in sources of power, 83–4; in types of work, 12, 84, 188–7; war metaphors for social management and, 99–101, 106 gendered identity, 15, 23; in definition of middle class, 14, 32; expectations of girls, 254–5 gender hierarchy, 5, 17, 89; in architectural guides, 43; boundaries of spaces in, 18, 86–7; in dining-room conversation, 154–5; floor plans to maintain, 184, 185, 186–7; influence vs authority in, 44–5; library as men’s space reinforcing, 146–7; limits to women’s domestic authority, 54, 60–1, 86–8; men’s efforts to claim work space, 156–7; in space use, 43, 55, 117, 123, 127–8, 177; wife as husband’s supporter in, 131–3 gender relations, 89, 171; changes in, 265–6; children learning in nursery, 225–6, 236–7, 239; in drawing room, 67–8; female self-sacrifice in, 236–7, 239; over household management, 168–9; learning in nursery, 255–7; within marriage,

330

Index

113–15, 120–2; men’s authority in, 140–1, 169–70, 172; space use in, 127–8, 133, 172–5; tensions in, 133, 166–8 gender roles, 138; blurring of, 40–1; controlling conversation as male prerogative, 154–5; in creating home, 24, 41–2, 54; in dining room, 153–4; in division of labour, 31, 271; emptiness of women’s, 22, 85, 132–3, 256; in entertaining, 151–2, 294n22; experimenting with, 203– 6; Gaskell assuming both, 270–5; in home decoration, 42–3, 292–3n11; middle-class vs Other, 206; moral obligation to fulfil, 32–3, 152; separate spheres in definition of middle-class homes, 11; stretching, not rejecting, 84, 87–8, 106, 274–5; women’s place and, 61, 78–80, 82; women’s united in drawing room, 68. See also femininity; masculinity The Gentleman’s House; Or, How to Plan English Residences (Kerr), 10– 11, 53, 138; on drawing room, 68, 72; floor plans in, 72, 144, 183 geographies, of identity, 13 ghosts, liminal women as, 208–10, 213, 216, 219 Gibson, in Wives and Daughters, 158; awkwardness of, 159–60; failures of masculinity of, 160–2, 166–7; on masculinity and domesticity, 138–9, 166–8; masculinity of, 166–72, 175 Gladstone, Mary, 63 governesses: ambiguous position of, 178, 192–5; home vs place of employment for, 34–5; as liminal, 23, 192; produced by failure of

middle-class men, 180, 200–1; raised in middle class, 192–4, 200; as threat to middle-class women, 179–80, 199 The Grammar of Ornament (Jones), 38 Greenaway, Kate, 3 Greenwood, Frederick, 275–6 ground floor, 174; decoration of, 147– 8; floor plans of, 188; as masculine space, 125, 141, 146 Guest, Kristen, 47, 61, 285–6n34 guests, 181, 287n5; children kept away from family and, 229–30, 233, 244–5. See also entertaining Gwilt, Joseph, 38–9 Hall, Catherine, 12–13, 280n5 halls, 181–2. See also liminal spaces Hamerton, Philip Gilbert, 147–8 Harris, Kevin, 293n18 Harris, Susan K., 63–4, 81, 83 healthy home movement, 14, 282– 3n13 Healthy Homes and How to Make Them (Bardwell), 53, 282–3n13 Hearn, Ann, 264–5 H.G.C. See The English Maiden, Her Moral and Domestic Duties Hints on Household Taste. See Eastlake, Charles Hints on Husband Catching, or A Manual for Marriageable Misses (anonymous), 33 Hollingford, Lord, in Wives and Daughters, 159, 162 Homans, Margaret, 81, 102–4, 108, 283–4n22, 290n25 home building, 279n2; architecture vs, 41, 149; books on, 21, 31; boom in, 5

Index home decoration, 96, 294n19; authority through, 98–9; of dining rooms, 147–9, 153, 163; to display taste and character, 14, 70–1, 92–3, 95, 99–100; of drawing rooms, 70, 74– 6, 75, 111, 112, 288n13, 289–90n22; functions for women, 99; Gaskell in charge of, 272–3, 275; gender roles in, 42–3, 292–3n11; guides to, 282n11, 289–90n22; as women’s occupation, 96, 289n19 home design, 39, 60; of drawing room, 68–74; men’s role in, 38, 46; values only implied in, 39–40 Home Truths for Home Peace, or ‘Muddle’ Defeated, 33, 36, 43, 91, 96; on gender relations, 140–1; on importance of hands-on management, 94 homes, middle-class: character in, 36–8, 44–5; character of, 32–3, 36, 39; connotations of, 28–9, 98; creation of, 17, 24, 30, 41–2, 46, 61, 84; destruction of, 37–8; as feminized space, 54, 135; flexibility and stability combined in, 278; gender relations in, 30, 46, 140–1; gender roles in, 24, 54, 84, 271, 273; houses vs, 5–6, 9; idealization of, 17, 24, 28–9; marking social position, 9, 16, 28, 31; men as peripheral in, 136, 174; men’s role in creating, 41–2, 61; moral influence of, 33–5, 36–8, 141; place of employment vs, 34–5; public life vs, 29–30; public/ private binary in, 19–20, 41, 138; separate spheres in, 11–12, 18; sources of information on, 10, 17; women as centre of, 33, 44–5, 54, 90; as women’s sphere, 36–7 Horne, Lewis, 211–12

331

hospitality, 20, 145. See also entertaining House Architecture (Stevenson), 53, 68, 96, 229 House for the Suburbs, Socially and Architecturally Sketched, A (Morris), 53 household: appropriate relations within, 40, 48, 184; authority in, 21, 65, 84; children not integrated in, 24, 228–32; compartmentalization of, 39, 57, 164–5, 182, 184; gender roles in, 31, 35; hierarchies within, 19–20; liminal spaces both separating and connecting members of, 177–8; maintaining hierarchies in, 36, 55–7, 89, 179–80, 184 The Household Encyclopaedia, 47, 50, 285n31 household management, 44–6, 57; authority over, 140, 162–3, 168–9; delegating work vs hands-on, 89–90, 121, 151–2; drawing room displaying competence in, 64–6, 69; emptiness of role, 116, 130, 132– 3; to ensure masculinity of dining room, 140, 153, 162–3; failures in, 63, 165–6; importance of, 47–8, 94, 164; lack of acknowledgment of women’s work in, 156, 162–3; men’s dependence on women for, 162–3; of smells, 164–5, 185; supervising workers in, 117–20, 131; training in, 47–8, 87; women’s power from, 87–9; women’s relations with servants in, 89–90, 151–2, 165–6, 168 Household Management, Book of. See Beeton, Isabella housekeeping guides, 10, 17, 31, 285n29; advising women to be ac-

332

Index

cessible, 268, 270; advising women to spend time in kitchen, 165–6; conduct manuals vs, 46, 282n7, 284n28; in creation of middle class, 28, 49–50, 260–1; on dining-room decoration, 149–51; on drawingroom decoration, 66–7, 91–2, 289–90n22; as ideals of middleclass life, 28, 69, 260–1; on limits to women’s domestic authority, 60–1; on management of spaces, 21–2, 55; menus in, 50–2, 51; moving to practical information instead of character issues, 45–7; on servants, 48–9, 187–9; on womanhood, 35, 69 houses, 13, 283n16; as body, 282– 3n13; books on building, 21, 31 (see also architectural guides); in definitions of class, 9–10, 102, 204; Gaskells’, 264–6, 271–2; homes vs, 5–6, 9; names and characters of, 204–5; owning vs renting, 6, 116–17; public life vs, 12, 140; types in Bedford Park, 4; women’s identity dependent on, 62–3, 102, 132, 207 Houston, Gail, 102, 289n17 Huskey, Melynda, 191 Hyacinth Kirkpatrick Gibson, in Wives and Daughters, 163–6, 169– 70 identity, 24, 137, 174, 301n22; balancing career with domesticity in, 161, 166–7, 173–5, 266–75; behaviour vs, 16, 207–9; boundaries of, 21–2, 176–7; children between categories of, 244; class vs gender, 10, 17; as constructed, 20–1, 252; creation of, 77–9, 82, 84–5, 95–6, 115, 167, 252– 3; dependence on drawing room,

77–9, 91–2; effects of marriage on woman’s, 210–12, 218; envisioned in ideal homes, 18; experimenting with, 203–5, 207–8; geographies of, 13; home decoration as expression of, 91–3, 99; instability of, 27–8, 178, 191, 208–10, 215–17; of liminal women, 23, 191–2, 208–9; loss of, 180, 219; servants’, 189–90, 214; social position in, 178–9; sources of information on women’s, 262–4; space creating boundaries of, 21–2, 55, 79–80, 176; space use and, 24–5, 216–18; through routes vs destinations, 185, 208; women limited by, 195–6, 212; women’s, 61, 79–80, 178, 181; women’s based on domesticity, 11–12, 207; women’s multifaceted, 265–70, 276–7. See also class identity; gendered identity; middle-class identity identity politics, space in, 13 income, 147; in definition of middle class, 7, 8–9, 26–7; Gaskell buying second house with, 271–2; as man’s contribution to home, 156; middle-class ideals and, 11, 32; needed for marriage, 7; servants and, 48–9, 151, 187, 285n33. See also economy, domestic industrialization, 26 Inexpressible Privacy: The Interior Life of Antebelleum American Literature (Shamir), 14 Inside the Victorian Home (Flanders), 14, 279n2 intellect, 293n17; in autobiographies, 248, 250–1; children’s, 233–4, 236, 238, 253 Irving, Edward, 262

Index Jane Eyre (Brontë), 23, 219, 225, 283n16; contemporary reviews of, 192–5, 198; governess’ social position in, 178, 192–3; on tenuousness of women’s middle-class identity, 192, 196–9 Jane Eyre, in Jane Eyre: associated with liminal spaces, 195–6; Bertha seen as demonic double for, 196–7; moral influence of, 34–5; morality and femininity questioned, 195, 198; social position of, 192–5 Jewsbury, Geraldine, 132, 263 jobs. See professions; work Jones, Owen, 38 Kensington Picturesque and Historical, 156, 157 Kerr, Robert, 10–11, 17; on children’s space, 227–30, 231; on dining room, 141–2, 144, 146, 153, 165; on drawing room, 69–71, 72, 76; on thoroughfares, 183, 183–4; on values in good design, 19, 60. See also The Gentleman’s House; Or, How to Plan English Residences kitchen, 89; compartmentalization in, 57–60; efforts to contain food odours in, 164–5, 167, 185, 295n2; women overseeing, 50, 165–6 knowledge, in men’s domain, 147, 159 Lady Cumnor, in Wives and Daughters, 50 The Lady’s Own Book: An Intellectual, Moral, and Physical Monitor (anonymous), 33, 94 The Land of Lost Toys (Ewing), 236–9, 241

333

Langland, Elizabeth, 80–2, 282n7; on authority from managing household, 84, 284n24; on women’s power, 105, 289n19. See also Nobody’s Angels Layton, W.T., 48 leisure, women’s, 64–6, 289n21 Letters and Memorials (J. Carlyle), 113, 121, 291n3 library, 217, 293n16; Carlyles’, 124–8; characteristics of, 266–9, 294n19. See also study lifts, 58, 71 light: getting into drawing rooms, 71–4; nurseries’ need for, 229, 235 liminal spaces: as boundaries, 181; class hierarchies and, 177, 180, 182, 199–200, 214; gender hierarchies and, 23, 177; liminal women using, 180–1, 191, 195–8, 215–17; nurseries as, 244; separating and connecting, 177–8, 183–5 liminal women, 23; ambiguous identity of, 197, 208–9; created by artificial barriers, 193–4; as ghosts, 208–10, 213, 216, 219; governesses as, 192–4; in sensation fiction, 23, 201–2 Linley Sambourne House, 145, 151–2, 156, 157, 172–5, 292n10 literacy, women’s, 63 ‘Little Dinner at Timmins’s, A’ (Thackeray), 142–5, 152 Living Space in Fact and Fiction (Tristram), 13–14 Loftie, Mrs, 139–40, 151, 153 Logan, Thad, 83, 156; on home decoration, 99, 289n19; The Victorian Parlour by, 14, 69

334

Index

London: Bedford Park as first suburb of, 3–4; mapped by income, 27 Loudon, J.C., 41, 283n20 Louisa, in No Name, 212–13 Lowther Lodge, 3 Lucilla, in Miss Marjoribanks, 22, 288n15; containment of, 81–2, 99–101, 107–8; creation of identity by, 77–9, 84–5; emptiness of power of, 79–82, 99–102, 103–6; expanding women’s sphere, 79–81, 82–3, 88–9, 106–9; goals of, 87–8, 106; in governmental politics, 104–9; home decorating by, 90–4; household management by, 89–90; importance of drawing room to, 77–9; increasing authority of, 77–9, 88–9, 98–9, 101–2; Jane Carlyle compared to, 115–16, 132–3; learning social conventions, 85–7; marriage of, 80–1, 93–6, 107; as model, rather than exception, 108–9; performing middle-class role, 289n18; relationship with father, 80, 86–9; skill in managing people as well as space, 77–9, 96–8, 294n24 Machann, Clinton, 249–50, 258, 301n18 MacLaren, Archibald, 228–9 madwomen, as liminal, 23 Magdalen Vanstone, in No Name, 23; called unnatural, 202–3; declining morality of, 211–12; learning to be servant, 212–15; in liminal spaces, 180–1, 190–1; loss of middle-class status, 181, 200, 296n11; marriage of, 204, 209–10, 218; middle-class identity of, 199–200; taking on different identities, 207–8; trying to

regain fortune, 212–17; unstable identity of, 178–9, 203–4, 208–11; use of space, 206–7 ‘Management of the Nursery’ (MacLaren), 228–9 Mansel, Henry, 218 A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England. See Tosh, John Manual of Domestic Economy (Walsh), 46, 54–5, 56, 287–8n9, 299n8; assuming readers’ middle-class taste, 70–1; on gendered spaces, 141–2; on hospitality, 287n5, 289n21, 294n22; on living within income, 49–50, 96, 151; on relationship between servants and employers, 187–9, 285n31 Marcus, Sharon, 240 marriage, 7, 297n15; Carlyles’, 113– 15, 121–2, 127, 290n1, 291nn2, 3, 4; domesticity dependent on, 46, 162; effects of, 81, 107, 218; effects on woman’s identity, 80–1, 93–6, 107, 204, 209–12; Gaskells’, 278; legitimacy through, 35, 200; as obligation of manhood, 163, 166; Rochester manipulating, 37–8, 198–9; salary needed for, 7; Sambournes’ harmonious, 173–4; social position through, 94, 106, 151; as woman’s role, 33, 36 Martineau, Harriet, 247–8, 301n21 masculinity, 243; architecture empowering, 172, 175; contradictions inherent in, 136–9, 169, 171–2, 175; dependence on wife’s domesticity, 136, 151, 162–3, 164; development of, 139–40, 168–9, 292n6, 293n12; in the dining room, 22–3, 138–40,

Index 153, 157–8, 160–1, 169–70; in dining-room decoration, 148, 163; distortions of, 160–1; domesticity accommodating, 22–3, 133, 175; domesticity and, 54, 61, 137–9, 292n7; entertaining and, 161–3; failures of, 154, 160–4, 166–7, 211; of gentleman, 171; ground floor as, 86–7; intellect as marker of, 159, 293n17; maintenance of, 139, 158, 174; marriage as obligation of, 163, 166; prerogatives of, 154–5, 162, 236–7, 239; prioritized in space use, 43, 45; professionalism and, 138–9. See also gender roles meals, 225, 229, 295n31 menus: for dinner parties, 151; in household guides, 50–2, 51 Michie, Helena, 283n14, 294n27 middle class: blurred boundaries of, 31, 180, 191, 197, 199; daily life of, 260–2; definition of, 6–9, 26–7, 41–2, 281n2, 285n33; definitions of, 14, 214; drawing-room etiquette of, 78–9; genuine vs performance of, 18–19, 28, 40–2, 289n18; governesses’ ambiguous position in, 178; governesses from men’s failure in, 180, 200–1; governesses raised in, 192–4, 200; growth of, 26–7, 45; happiness as privilege of, 248; houses of, 9–10; idealization of, 33, 65; instructions on domesticity of, 45–6, 49–50; middle classes vs, 8–9; population in, 27, 284n25; professionalization of, 41; servants of, 27, 48; women pushed out of, 181, 191–2, 203 middle-class identity: autobiography presenting, 245; children learning,

335

225–6, 239–40, 255–9; in children’s literature, 236–7, 243; construction of, 24, 226, 252, 284n26; efforts to reclaim, 181, 203–4, 206, 211–12, 221; as innate vs learned, 28, 45–6, 71, 226, 239–40, 244–6, 248–9; loss of, 179–80, 191–2, 198, 212, 296n11; maintaining, 20, 25, 31, 261; sources of, 8, 136, 179, 205–6; tensions in, 20, 70, 261; tenuousness of, 181, 192, 199–200, 203–5, 218–19 Middlemarch (Eliot), 94–5, 161 Mill, John Stuart, 250 Millais, John Everett, 223, 224 Miss Garth, in No Name, 200, 207 Miss Marjoribanks (Oliphant), 22, 83; drawing room in creation of identity in, 77–9; gender hierarchies in, 86–7; as mock heroic, 100–1, 103, 290n25; social conventions in, 78–80, 85, 87–9. See also Lucilla, in Miss Marjoribanks Mitchell, Sally, 7, 283n14, 284n25, 287n5, 295n1, 296n14 mock heroic, Miss Marjoribanks as, 100–1, 103, 290n25 Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life (Rosner), 14 modesty, in autobiographies, 245–6, 248–9, 251, 253, 257 Molesworth, Mrs, 243 Molly Gibson, in Wives and Daughters, 161, 165, 169 Moonstone, The (Collins), 154, 297n17 moral influence and obligations, 12, 34; of domesticity, 35, 141; expanding boundaries of, 96–8; mothers’, 227; women’s, 33, 77 morality, 286n1; in children’s litera-

336

Index

ture, 233–4, 236–9, 240–3, 299n11; class differences and, 38, 282n8; of domesticity, 34, 38; loss of, 195, 205, 211–12; man’s, 38; protection of, 36, 179; in sensation fiction, 191, 201–2; women’s, 34, 38, 212–13 morning room, Sambournes’, 173 Morris, Thomas, 53, 148–9 motherhood, 35; Gaskell’s, 266–8; not natural predisposition, 226–7 Mothers of England: Their Influence and Responsibilities (Ellis), 33 Mrs Wragge, in No Name, 207–9 Muthesius, Hermann, 4, 13 neighbourhoods, mapped by income, 27 New Letters and Memorials (J. Carlyle), 114 Newton, Judith, 290n29 Nicholson, Shirley, 292–3n11; on Linley Sambourne, 139, 174; on Sambournes’ entertaining, 145, 152, 155, 173 Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture (Langland), 12, 279n1, 280n6, 283–4n22, 288n14, 289nn18, 19, 291n1, 295n1 Noel Vanstone, in No Name, 207, 209–12 noise: children’s, 187, 230; servants’, 185–6 No Name (Collins), 23; criticisms of, 201–2, 212; reviews of, 205–6, 218–20; as sensation fiction, 181, 191, 201–2; unstable boundaries of femininity in, 178–9. See also Magdalen Vanstone

Norah Vanstone, in No Name, 200–1, 205, 218 North and South (Gaskell), 271–2 Norton, Charles Eliot, 268–9 novels, 21, 260–1, 284n27, 289n20, 299n7; children in, 221–2, 225; female characters in, 182, 218–20; Gaskell’s, 264, 275–6; gender roles in, 138, 167; home as morally redemptive in, 33–5; as model for social roles, 85–7; nurseries in, 226, 233; sensation fiction, 181, 191, 201–2, 218, 288n15; servants in, 217, 297n17. See also children’s books; specific titles nursery, 23–4; children contained in, 232–3, 246, 252; in children’s literature, 233–45; children staying in, 62, 223; effects of upbringing in, 244, 255, 258, 301–2n24; in floor plans, 231; goals in design of, 226–33, 234, 243–4; learning gender relations in, 255–6; life shortchanged in autobiographies, 249–50, 252; as liminal spaces, 222, 244; low priority of space for, 227– 9; middle-class identity learned in, 225–6, 235–6, 239–40, 244, 255–6, 258; training in, 242–4 ‘Of King’s Treasuries’ (Ruskin), 30 ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’ (Ruskin), 29–30, 98 Oliphant, Margaret, 288n14; on Carlyles’ marriage, 114–15, 120, 127, 291n4; on heroines of sensation fiction, 201, 203; heroines’ struggle against conventions of femininity, 79–81; Jane Carlyle and, 129, 132, 262–3; on limited power for

Index women, 109–10, 290n27; social position of, 102–3. See also Miss Marjoribanks One I Knew the Best of All, The (Burnett), 234, 252–9 Ornamental Drawing and Architectural Design (Burns), 38 ornamentation, middle-class taste in, 42, 71 Orrinsmith, Mrs, 70, 82, 92, 287n8 ostentation: avoiding, 39, 67, 70, 280n11; ornamentation vs, 42 Our Mutual Friend (Dickens), 33–4, 37, 42, 71 outdoors, nursery access to, 229–30 ownership, of houses, 6 Panek, Jennifer, 159, 292n9, 293n17 parenthood, 222–6, 298n5, 299n6 parents, children’s relations with, 223–5, 232, 240–2, 256–7 Parker, David, 293n18 parlour, and dining room, 149 passageways. See corridors; liminal spaces Peace Concluded (Millais), 223, 224 Perkin, Joan, 199–200 Peterson, Linda, 251 physicality, class differences in, 179–80 physical presence, 80, 206–7 Picturesque Designs for Mansions, Villas, and Lodges (Richardson), 53, 58, 228 place: of servants, 214; spaces vs, 15; women creating for selves, 22–3 political economy, 106–7 politics: social, 97; women’s involvement in, 82, 104–5, 107–9, 290n28; women’s suitability for, 85, 105–6

337

Poovey, Mary, 29, 193, 196, 219, 279n1, 280n8, 282n8, 290n26, 291n1, 295n1, 296n6 possessions, 16, 18–19, 240–2 power: social vs political, 83–4; women’s, 83–4, 286n39, 289n19, 290n27. See also authority Practical Housewife, The (Editors of ‘The Family Friend’), 47, 285n31, 289n21, 294n22 privacy, 20, 39, 146–7, 170, 222, 249, 252; middle-class women valuing, 262–4, 269–70 private space: desire for, 184, 266–70; for family, 182; men’s, 138, 293n15, 294n25; men thought to need, 43, 127, 137, 140–1 Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel (Cohen), 12 professionalism, 174; integrated with domesticity, 160, 161, 166–8, 173–5, 266–75; in manhood, 137, 158–9, 169–70 professionalization, of domesticity, 47, 52 professions/jobs: in definition of middle class, 7–9, 27; effects of nursery life on, 256–7; foreshadowed in autobiographies, 249–53, 256–7; Gaskell as author, 264, 266–9; gender limiting choices of, 109–10, 256; increasing specialization in, 41; Sambourne’s success in, 174; sharing domestic space, 169–70; wife’s not undermining husband’s, 277–8. See also work progress, within middle class, 6, 10 property rights, women’s, 147, 272–5, 302n2 prosperity, 7, 32–3

338

Index

prostitutes, 205. See also fallen women public life: character and, 32, 85; drawing room as women’s, 64–6; home as antidote to, 11–12, 29; home as refuge from, 12, 29–30; keeping men out of the house, 54, 136, 140 public/private binary, 84; autobiographies in, 249–51; blurring of, 40–1, 181, 205–6; boundaries of, 45, 152, 181; drawing room as both, 64, 88, 92; gender differences in, 29–30; gender roles in, 54, 135, 137; within homes, 19–20, 86–7; in stories told for publication or not, 262–3; tenuousness of, 12–13, 29, 44; women limited by, 104, 106. See also separate spheres Punch, on middle-class follies, 154–5 ‘Queens,’ middle-class, 81, 101–2, 281n6, 283–4n22; as empty trope, 103–4, 109–10 religion, 12–13, 194 Reminiscences (T. Carlyle), 113, 291n3 renovations: Carlyles’, 116–22, 125, 131, 156; gender roles in, 156, 163; Jane Carlyle handling, 118–21, 127–8 rental homes, 6, 116–17 respectability: development of, 246–7; dining room displaying, 139, 148–9, 154–5, 160–1; drawing room displaying, 63, 66, 69, 82; drawing-room etiquette and, 78–9, 96–8; efforts to maintain after loss of income, 200–1; entertaining and, 151–2; excess vs, 145–6, 161; family

in, 222–3; genuine vs performed, 80–1; home decoration and, 82, 99, 148–9; house and, 138, 204; lack of, 202, 205; loss of, 152, 160–1, 219; masculine, 139, 169, 171; professionalism and, 160, 170; sources of, 71, 136, 147, 164 Richardson, C.J., 53, 165; floor plans by, 58, 147, 228 Rigby, Elizabeth, 192–4, 219 Room of One’s Own, A (Woolf), 270 Rosa, in ‘A Little Dinner at Timmins’s,’ 142–5, 152 Rosamund and Tertius Lydgate, in Middlemarch, 161 Rose, Gillian, 15, 43 Rosner, Victoria, 14 row houses, design issues of, 74 Royal Geographic Society, 3 Royal Institute of British Architects, 3, 41 rural villages, Bedford Park mimicking, 4 Ruskin, John, 5, 281n5; on gender differences, 44, 64, 281n6, 284n23; ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’ by, 29–30, 98; on women as social/domestic ‘Queens,’ 102–3; on women’s influence, 44, 98 Ruth (Gaskell), 199, 267 Sambourne, Linley, 7, 139, 295n32; entertaining and, 67, 145, 155, 162–3; making workspace in wife’s drawing room, 156, 157, 172–4 Sambourne, Marion, 67, 145, 152, 155 Sambournes, 155, 292–3n11; entertaining by, 145–6, 151, 173–5, 294n22; social position of, 145–6, 151

Index Sanders, Valerie, 247–9, 251, 301n20 School of Art, in Bedford Park, 4–6 school rooms, children staying in, 62 scullery, for nursery meals, 229 separate spheres, 21–2, 281n5; difficulty maintaining, 12–13, 44, 187–90; governesses as threat to, 192–5, 199; justification for, 12–13; sources of power in, 83–4, 87. See also public/private binary separation, via domestic design, 55–7, 56; children’s, 222, 230–2; corridors in, 39, 60, 182, 186–7; in dining room vs drawing room, 67–8; in domestic ideal, 11–12, 29, 136; liminal spaces in, 177–8, 181– 2; in parent-child relations, 223–5; servants and employers, 187–90; thoroughfare systems in, 181–7, 183, 188; women limited by, 87, 103–9 servants, 23, 60, 116; authority from management of, 65, 284n24, 285–6n34, 289n19; boundaries with employers, 189–90; for child care, 233, 244; in definition of middle class, 6–7, 27, 285n33; efforts to keep noise and smell of work from family, 185–6; family’s relations with, 40, 48, 187–9, 297n17; gender of, 186–7; governesses’ status as, 192–5; hierarchy within, 187; hiring order for, 151, 295n4, 299n10; increasing number of, 48, 285n32; men taught terminology of workers, 53–4; mistresses’ relations with, 152, 165–6, 178–9, 212–14, 284n24, 285–6n34; separation from family, 39, 55, 60, 179–82; spaces for, 39, 214, 228, 231; sympathy

339

for, 189, 199; training for, 212–14, 295n4; treatment of, 189, 285n31, 297n16; vulnerability of, 36–7; wage tables for, 48–9, 49, 279–80n4 servants hall, 181 serving pantries, dumbwaiters to, 185 Shamir, Milette, 14 Sharp, Joanne P., 13 Shaw, Richard Norman, 3–4 Sigler, Carolyn, 299n11 siting, of homes, 40 smells: efforts to contain food odours, 185, 295n2; Victorian obsession with, 164–5, 167 Smith, Adam, 106–7 social conventions: capitulation to, 77–80, 85; learned vs natural, 85–7, 240; subversion vs accommodation of, 80–1, 89, 93 social hierarchies: in dinner invitations, 159; governesses as threat to, 192–4. See also class hierarchies; gender hierarchies social politics, 97, 100, 103–4 social position, 16, 160, 181, 208; authority from, 80–2, 84, 95–6; Carlyles’, 121; constraints of, 85–6, 196; conventions associated with, 77–80; deliberate pursuit of, 94; dining room confirming, 146, 147, 175; displaying, 93, 95, 99, 166–8; effects of Dr Marjoribanks on Lucilla’s, 101–2, 107; entertaining appropriate to, 145–6; expansion of, 82–3; governesses and, 192–5; in identity, 178–9; loss of, 178–9, 191; Oliphant’s, 102–3; Sambournes’, 151; through marriage, 106–7, 131, 151. See also class

340

Index

‘social problem’ novels, 289n20 space use, 208, 266; flexibility in, 173–4, 177; identity and, 216–18; middle-class girls’, 206–7; negotiations of, 22, 125–7, 156; unauthorized, 216–18 spaces, 181, 289n21; boundaries of, 16, 18, 28, 31, 86–7; control of, 21, 84, 87–9; defining authority, 61, 82–3, 90, 108; divided by gender, 125, 139, 141, 143–4; gender hierarchies in, 121–2, 127–8; home expanding beyond physical, 98; identity and, 13, 21–2, 24–5, 204; liminal spaces both separating and connecting disparate, 177–8; low priority of children’s, 227–9; in maintaining hierarchies, 55, 90, 177; management to contain smells, 164–5; managing people in, 96–8; manipulation of, 81–2; place vs, 15; reciprocity of physical and social constructions, 15–16; restrictions in, 17, 219–20; separation of, 39, 164–5, 233; women infringing on men’s, 169–70; women’s place in, 61, 78–80. See also private space Spain, Daphne, 17, 146–7 staircases, 55; family vs servant, 55, 182, 186–7; main and back, 71, 178, 182, 230, 295n3. See also liminal spaces standards, architectural, in Bedford Park, 5 Stevenson, J.J., 148, 184, 197; on drawing room, 68, 96; on nurseries, 229–32. See also House Architecture study, 146, 294n25, 295n32; Carlyle’s, 126–7, 131, 172–3; families unable

to afford, 156–7; as men’s space, 146–7, 293n15. See also library suburb, Bedford Park as first, 3–4 subversion/containment model, 81–3 Suggestions for House Decoration (Garretts), 75 Susan Bygrave, in No Name, 209–12 Sussman, Herbert, 139, 291n2, 291– 2n3, 293n12 Tait, Robert Scott, A Chelsea Interior by, 111–14, 112 taste, 14, 38, 84; architectural guides on, 38–9; in decoration of drawing room, 66–7, 70–1, 94–5; in definitions of class, 8, 41–2; displaying class position, 70–1, 167–8; expense not synonymous with, 42, 280n11; middle-class, 18–19, 31–2, 38–9, 71; not defined, 41–2 Tenant of Wildfell Hall, The (Brontë), 160–1 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 128, 130 territorializing, 181 Thackeray, W.M., 142–5, 199 Timmins, in ‘A Little Dinner at Timmins’s,’ 152 tobacco, limited to men’s space, 67–8, 77, 146 Tom, in Miss Marjoribanks, 93–6, 107 Tosh, John, 13, 54, 135–6, 292n7 town centre of Bedford Park, 4–5 Trela, D.J., 286–7n4, 288n14, 289n16, 290n1, 291nn2, 4, 302n1 Tristram, Philippa, 13–14 Trollope, Anthony, 247, 250 true womanhood, cult of, 33, 35 Uneven Developments (Poovey), 282n8. See also Poovey, Mary

Index values, 34, 137; in home design, 19, 38–40; middle-class, 28, 31–2 Vanity Fair (Thackeray), 199 Victoria, Queen, 289n17 Victoria-Bess (Castle Smith), 240–1 Victorian Parlour, The (Logan), 14, 69 wall coverings, in drawing rooms, 76, 288n10 Walsh, James H.: dining room in floor plans by, 141–2; furniture recommendations by, 96, 288n11; home design by, 55–7, 56; on living within income, 49–50. See also Manual of Domestic Economy Ward, A.W., 29 wealthy, definition of, 27 Webster, Thomas, 48, 186; assuming readers’ middle-class taste, 70–1; on drawing-room furniture, 78; on good servants, 189–90 well-to-do, definition of, 27 Wheeler, Gervase, 53; on dining room, 141–2, 143, 148; on drawing room, 70, 73; goals in designs, 164–5, 185; on ground floor, 59, 143, 147, 188 Wigley, Mark, 15

341

Wilson, Anita C., 264, 300n17 windows, 74, 229 wine, men supplying, 153–4 Wives and Daughters (Gaskell), 23, 50, 90, 138, 271–3; dining room in, 158–72; masculinity in, 167, 292n9; unfinished, 275–6. See also Gibson, in Wives and Daughters Wives of England: Their Relative Duties, Domestic Influence, and Social Obligations (Ellis), 33, 35, 280n11 Women of England: Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits (Ellis), 33 Woolf, Virginia, 270 work, 293n12; children and, 232, 298n2; class differences in, 12, 179; gender differences in, 12, 64, 84; home decorating as women’s, 96, 99, 289n19; physical, 116, 118–21, 190; servants’, 181–2, 185–6; women’s, 179, 205; women’s not acknowledged, 153, 156, 162–3. See also professions/jobs working class, as vulgar, 9 workspace, 214, 295n32; Gaskell coveting, 266–70; men’s efforts to claim, 156–7, 157, 172–4; sharing domestic space, 169–70