If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home (32 page)

Francis Willoughby’s seventeenth-century
Book of Games
is full of bright ideas for cheaper parties, describing the rules of backgammon and ‘ticktack’ and giving instructions for playing cards, beginning with the very manufacture of the cards themselves: take ‘3 or 4 pieces of white paper pasted together and made very smooth that they may easily slip from one another, and be dealt & played. If they grow dank, they must be dried and rubbed one by one to make them slip again.’

As well as creating a lot of labour, the open fire led to a whole lost slice of life: the art of amusing yourself while warming yourself in low light levels. Indeed, there is a whole genre of caricature which might be described as ‘person caught in the undignified position of warming their naked backside against an open fire’. In such a place, at such a time, the intimate art of storytelling thrived, as did silly games like the ‘Laughing Chorus’ described in the
Young Ladies’ Treasure Book
(1880). To be played ‘round a good fire in the long winter evenings’, ‘the person in the corner by the fire says, “Ha!” and the one next to him repeats, “Ha!” and so on … No one who has not played this game can realise its mirth-provoking capacities.’

Francis Willoughby suggests simpler seventeenth-century
games suitable for firelight conditions, such as capping rhymes. He commemorates one quick-witted Mr Booker, who, when challenged to find a rhyme to ‘porringer’, came up with ‘The King had a Daughter & he gave the Prince of Orange her.’ Now, one might play such a brain game in the car, but not at home, as the modern living room is packed with other, less effortful forms of stimulation.

In the noble great chambers of houses like the Elizabethan Hardwick Hall, the parties generally remained stiff and formal, with people staying in their proper places. As we’ve already seen, though, the mid-eighteenth century saw London townhouses like Norfolk House acquire state apartments planned upon a circuit rather than a straight line and which were thrown open for processional parties. The mingling of different ranks in an informal manner became more common as the eighteenth century passed. Sitting upon chairs arranged in a perfect oval for a measured discussion, a formation central to the drawing rooms of the baroque age, fell out of fashion. ‘All the ladies sitting in a formal circle is universally the most obnoxious to conversation,’ claimed a character in a novel of 1817, ‘here I am like a bird in a circle of chalk that dare not move as much as its head or its eyes.’

So great became the drawing room’s emphasis on sociability that by the nineteenth century some visitors were bored almost senseless by the long, relentlessly chatty days common to nineteenth-century house parties. ‘This day we have been all sitting together in the drawing room going on with our various little employments,’ wrote Maria Edgeworth in 1819. These entertainments included making puppets, copying pictures and sorting ribbons, but there was the frustrated ‘Fanny in the library by her recluse philosophical self for some time – Then joining the vulgar herd in the drawing room’. Likewise, Prince Pückler-Muskau, who visited England between 1826 and 1828, found that he couldn’t even go to his own room to write a letter because it was ‘not usual, and therefore surprises and annoys
people’. And so it went on, in sociable country houses, into the twentieth century. Here’s James Lees-Milne visiting Wallington, in Northumberland:

After dinner I am worn out, and long for bed. But no. We have general knowledge questions. Lady T. puts the questions one after another with lightning rapidity … all most alarming to a tired stranger.

The art of conversation received a blow in the twentieth century. ‘The amount of time in the home has in recent years been much reduced through such innovations as the cinema, cheap travel, playing and watching games, careers for women, crèches, and so on,’ wrote F. R. S. Yorke in 1937. For those still spending the occasional evening at home, the valve radio became the new focus of the living room (
plate 30
). Now the ‘host’ of the evening’s entertainment might not even be present in the room, but presiding over an event recorded elsewhere.

The British Broadcasting Corporation was created in 1922 from a consortium of the six biggest wireless manufacturers, including Marconi and General Electric. The transmission of nightly BBC programmes provided people with a social, not a solitary, experience, as they listened with friends and family. By 1925, there were 1.5 million licence holders. The BBC published pamphlets on topics such as how to form a ‘radio circle’, or listening club; on ‘How To Conduct a Wireless Discussion Group’; and even ‘How to Listen’. ‘Listen as carefully at home as you do in a theatre or concert hall,’ its author instructed the would-be listener. ‘It is just as important to you to enjoy yourself at home as at the theatre.’

The first regular television broadcasts were made in 1932, a year in which seventy-six half-hour programmes went out. But no one was sure how many living rooms they reached. In 1933, viewers were asked: ‘The BBC is most anxious to know the number of people who are actually seeing this television programme. Will those who are looking in send a postcard marked “Z” to Broadcasting House immediately?’

And TV was much slower to catch on than radio had been. It was the Coronation of 1953 that brought the set into many living rooms, as many people bought theirs especially for the occasion. People rushed round to their neighbours’ houses (and those who had attempted to keep up with the Joneses by installing an aerial on their roofs to suggest that they too had TV were caught out). The
Radio Times
for Coronation Day devotes only a very small box to television programming, with radio programmes taking up nearly all the space. From 1952, however, the number of radio licences issued finally began to fall, while in the same year TV licences reached 1.5 million. In 1955, the launch of ITV brought adverts into people’s living rooms, and also, with the introduction in the 1960s of
Coronation Street
, working-class culture.

The television would change eating habits, bringing them firmly out of the dining room and into the living room. Sofas from the 1950s often had plastic trays clipped onto their arms to hold food or drinks, biscuit manufacturers brought out ‘television assortment’ tins, and people began to consume their ‘TV dinners’ in the front room with only forks in their hands, the knives left behind in the drawer.

The television appears to be a supremely modern device, but in fact it takes on the role of the community storyteller or minstrel. Sitting down after the day’s work to hear the news, a song sung or a story told is something we have in common with the users of a medieval great hall. Computer games are often blamed for individuals becoming isolated or withdrawn, but multiplayer games are the modern equivalent of the Victorian ‘laughing chorus’ or the rhyming games which promoted mental agility in the living rooms of the seventeenth century.

Entertaining guests is not necessarily about fun. But without the preparation, trepidation and strain we wouldn’t have the most basic social bond of all outside the family: that created by hospitality. First and foremost, it’s forged in the living room.

32 – Kissing and Courtship

‘Did you ever kiss a boy?’
‘You mean really kiss? On the lips?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ Nancy said impatiently. ‘Did you?’
‘Not really,’ I admitted.
Nancy breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Neither did I.’

Judy Blume,
Are You There God?
It’s Me, Margaret
, 1978

To kiss is not necessarily a romantic act. In medieval times, men exchanged kisses of great portent: of peace, fealty or ceremony. Likewise, a more modern monarch had his or her hand kissed incessantly by supplicants or people accepting honours, right up to the twentieth century. But everyone knew that a medieval man caught kissing a woman who was not his wife had something quite different in mind.

Living rooms from the grand medieval solar to the humble Edwardian boarding-house parlour formed the backdrops to tense but semi-public moments in a person’s life. Until the First World War, many young females were not mistresses of their own destiny but had to wait, tense and expectant, while their prospective suitors asked a father’s permission before making a proposal. Before that stage was reached, the living room was often the stage for the display of female accomplishments advertising their suitability as potential wives: singing, playing and needlework.

There have always been tales in literature of star-crossed lovers who would have married for love but were parted by fate or society. Even the much-married Henry VIII himself was on an endless, disappointing quest for the one perfect woman with whom he would achieve a blissfully happy ever after. He idolised Anne Boleyn for seven long years before he got her to commit, and was fond of telling people that ‘he loved true where he did marry’.

Having said that, though, the king was in a position to make a choice, and most other people were not. The idea that love is the best reason for marriage is quite a modern idea, and one quite specific to the Western world. Historically, in Europe and America (and even today in many cultures elsewhere) marriage usually began as a property arrangement, in its middle part was mostly about raising children, and ended up with love. John Boswell, a historian of homosexuality, notes that on the contrary, marriage in the West today is the other way around. It begins with love, moves on to children, and often ends in disputes about the ownership of property.

Until the Enlightenment, people were supposed to place religious duties above marital ones. A neighbour was worried, Mehitable Parkman told her husband in Salem, New England, in 1683, because ‘she fears I love you more than God’. Wellborn young ladies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were certainly not allowed the luxury of feelings. Like puppets in a play, they waited placidly while dynastic marriages were sewn up for them by their parents. Elizabeth Spencer, on the other hand, seems unusually proactive and mercenary in outlining her requirements to her fiancé in 1594:

I must have two footmen … I would have twenty gowns of apparel … I would have to put in my purse £2000 and £200, and so, you to pay my debts. Also I would have £6000 to buy me jewels.

Edmund Harrold, the diary-keeping wig-maker of Manchester, left only nine months between his first wife’s death and second
marriage, and began courting his third wife only three months after the second wife died. He felt obliged to marry quickly, having been advised to do so by his doctor, by a sermon he heard in church and by his consciousness of his own weaknesses: ‘It is every [Chris]tian’s duty to mortify their unruly passions and lusts to which ye are most prone. I’m now beginning to be uneasy with myself, and begin to think of women again.’ To marry was everyone’s duty, except for the aged: ‘Of all the passions the old man should avoid a foolish passion for women,’ wrote Dr Hill in
The Old Man’s Guide to Health and Longer Life
(1764).

Sometimes the occasional heiress took independent action, ran off and entered into a clandestine marriage. The brilliant and scandalous Georgian Lady Mary Wortley Montagu took matters into her own hands like this: ‘I tremble for what we are doing. Are you sure you will love me forever? Shall we never repent? I fear, and I hope.’ But that was behaviour for the back door and garden gate, by night, not the living room. Her suitor was taken for a highwayman because of his suspicious lurking about outside the house. Given Lady Mary’s tremendous and praiseworthy zest for life, it’s disappointing to report that her secret marriage did not work out well.

And yet love and emotion need not be entirely absent from our picture of upper-class drawing rooms. Even the macho James Boswell admits that a Georgian male lover may sigh, cry or whimper without shame: ‘it is peculiar to the passion of Love, that it supports with an exemption from disgrace, those weaknesses in a man which upon any other occasion would render him utterly contemptible’. Such sighing and crying, though, would be quite inappropriate after a marriage. While he might well be ‘supple enough’ to kneel and beg for a woman’s hand, a proper Englishman would bluster that he could ‘never get the muscles of [his] knees to give way afterwards’.

The nineteenth century saw love entering the equation more often, even for the highest in society: Queen Victoria famously
proposed to Prince Albert, having made her uncle (who’d proposed the union years before) wait until she was good and ready. Theirs was framed as a love match, and after Albert’s death Victoria mourned him for the rest of her life.

Society’s lower ranks had the freedom to indulge in a more companionate idea of marriage, and until the seventeenth century weddings were rather informal. They only required a fairly hazy verbal agreement between the two parties to be reached in front of witnesses, followed by sexual consummation. Civil marriage was one of the new and revolutionary practices introduced by the English Commonwealth in the seventeenth century (previously ecclesiastical law had trumped the common law concerning marital relationships). The Puritans of New England were likewise enthusiastic proponents of the idea that marriage was a contract between two people, not a sacrament, and their court records show that women, not men, were more likely to sue for divorce on the grounds of adultery, neglect and cruelty. It seems that the state was a better protector of their rights than the church had been.