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LEISURE AND THE USE OF DOMESTIC SPACE IN GEORGIAN LONDON*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 August 2010

BENJAMIN HELLER
BENJAMIN HELLER*
Affiliation:
Worcester College, University of Oxford
*
Worcester College, Oxford OX1 2HBbenjamin.heller@gmail.com
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Abstract

This article examines leisure in eighteenth-century London and argues that historians have exaggerated the importance of public, commercial leisure at the expense of leisure in the home. The domestic sphere was the primary scene of leisure for men and women of propertied society. In tandem with this examination of leisure I argue that our frameworks for understanding the use of domestic space fail to capture both the significance of particular rooms and the variety of uses for individual rooms. The failings of the public/private framework are well known, but scholars have thus far failed to develop successful alternatives. From diaries, letters, and inventories conclusions may be drawn about the habitual uses of space, but letters and diaries also provide evidence of how room use varied depending on time of day, activities pursued or people undertaking those activities. I present several variables that residents used to determine where and with whom different activities were taken. Meanings of spaces were contingent upon a mix of qualities constantly re-assessed by residents and guests.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 53 , Issue 3 , September 2010 , pp. 623 - 645
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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Footnotes

*

The author would like to thank Joanna Innes, Kathryn Gleadle, and the anonymous readers for this journal for helpful comments.

References

1 Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and John Plumb, The birth of a consumer society: the commercialization of eighteenth-century England (London, 1982), pp. 265–85; John Brewer, The pleasures of the imagination: English culture in the eighteenth century (London, 1997), pp. 3–122; Peter Clark, The English alehouse: a social history, 1200–1830 (London, 1983), p. 236; Marius Kwint, ‘Astley's Amphitheatre and the early circus in England, 1768–1830’ (D.Phil. thesis, Oxford, 1994); David H. Solkin, Painting for money: the visual arts and the public sphere in eighteenth-century England (New Haven, CT, and London, 1993). See also Peter Borsay, A history of leisure: the British experience since 1500 (Basingstoke, 2006), pp. 19–25.

2 For a further examination of these diaries see Benjamin Heller, ‘Leisure and pleasure in London society, 1760–1820: an agent-centred approach’ (D.Phil. thesis, Oxford, 2009), pp. 31–8.

3 James Boswell, Boswell's London journal, 1762–1763, ed. Frederick Albert Pottle (London, 1950).

4 British Library (BL), Add. MSS 25038, diary of George Macaulay, fo. 24.

5 BL, Add. MSS 25038, fos. 36–9.

6 John Tosh, ‘The old Adam and the new man: emerging themes in the history of English masculinities, 1750–1850’, in Tim Hitchcock and Michèle Cohen, eds., English masculinities, 1660–1800 (London, 1999), pp. 70–1.

7 Eleanor Gordon and Gwyneth Nair, Public lives: women, family and society in Victorian Britain (New Haven, CT, 2003), p. 118. Margaret R. Hunt, The middling sort: commerce, gender, and the family in England, 1680–1780 (Berkeley, CA, and London, 1996), pp. 29–34; Judith Lewis, S., ‘When a house is not a home: elite English women and the eighteenth-century country house’, Journal of British Studies, 48, (2009), pp. 336–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 363.

8 For instance, Thomas Bridge. The National Archives at Kew (hereafter TNA), J 90/13, diaries for 1760–4.

9 This theory has been put forth by various scholars and in different ways. G. J. Barker-Benfield, The culture of sensibility: sex and society in eighteenth-century Britain (Chicago, IL, 1992), pp. 99–101 and passim; Harvey, Karen, ‘Barbarity in a teacup? Punch, domesticity and gender in the eighteenth century’, Journal of Design History, 21, (2008), pp. 205–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 217; idem, ‘Pocket books and patriarchalism: the reproduction of patriarchy in the eighteenth-century home’ (paper delivered at the ‘Graduate seminar in history 1680–1850’, Lincoln College, Oxford, 5 Mar. 2009); Gillian Russell, Women, sociability and theatre in Georgian London (Cambridge, 2007), p. 11; John Tosh, Manliness and masculinities in nineteenth-century Britain: essays on gender, family and empire (Harlow, 2005), pp. 148–69; Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family fortunes: men and women of the English middle class 1780–1850 (London, 2002), pp. 357–96.

10 This argument has been made forcefully by Vickery, Amanda. See her ‘Golden age to separate spheres? A review of the categories and chronology of English women's history’, Historical Journal, 36, (1993), pp. 383–414CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Pred, Allan, ‘Place as historically contingent process: structuration and the time-geography of becoming places’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 74, (1984), pp. 279–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 286.

12 Jürgen Habermas, The structural transformation of the public sphere (Cambridge, MA, 1989), pp. 43–51.

13 Kerber, Linda K., ‘Separate spheres, female worlds, woman's place: the rhetoric of women's history’, Journal of American History, 75, (1988), pp. 9–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Davidoff and Hall, Family fortunes.

14 Vickery, ‘Golden age to separate spheres?’, p. 412; Joanna Innes, ‘Igirisu-shi kenkyu ni okeru koukyou-ken gainen no toujyo’ (The rise of the concept of the ‘public sphere’ in British historical writing), trans. Satomi Ohashi, in Makoto Ohno, ed., Kindai Igirisu to koukyou-ken (The public sphere in modern Britain) (Kyoto, 2009). I would like to thank Joanna Innes for allowing me to read the English-language version of this essay. Michael McKeon's investigation of domesticity, public and private, reveals ways in which public and private are counter-intuitive to the modern mind. Michael McKeon, The secret history of domesticity: public, private, and the division of knowledge (Baltimore, 2005), part I.

15 Jennifer Dawn Melville, ‘The use and organisation of domestic space in late seventeenth-century London’ (Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge, 1999).

16 McKeon, The secret history, pp. 162–268; Bold, J., ‘The design of a house for a merchant, 1724’, Architectural History, 33, (1990), pp. 75–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 76; Lawrence Stone, Road to divorce: England, 1530–1987 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 200–23; Moira Donald, ‘Tranquil havens? Critiquing the idea of home as the middle-class sanctuary’, in Inga Bryden and Janet Floyd, eds., Domestic space: reading the nineteenth-century interior (Manchester and New York, NY, 1999), p. 117.

17 Melville, ‘The use and organisation’, pp. 135–9.

18 Ibid., p. 254.

19 Vickery, Amanda, ‘An Englishman's home is his castle? Thresholds, boundaries and privacies in the eighteenth-century London house’, Past and Present, 199, (2008), pp. 147–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at pp. 153–8. The external boundaries of the working-class home continued to be important; see Martin Hewitt, ‘District visiting and the constitution of domestic space in the mid-nineteenth century’, in Bryden and Floyd, eds., Domestic space, pp. 121–41.

20 Amanda Vickery, The gentleman's daughter: women's lives in Georgian England (New Haven, CT, 1997), pp. 195–223.

21 Ibid., pp. 215–16. See also Karen Halttunen, Confidence men and painted women: a study of middle-class culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, CT, 1982), pp. 108–12.

22 Anthony Giddens, The constitution of society (Berkeley, CA, and Los Angeles, CA, 1986), pp. 118–19 and 132–3.

23 Erving Goffman, The presentation of the self in everyday life (Harmondsworth, 1972), pp. 124–5.

24 Ibid., pp. 109–40.

25 Pred, ‘Place as historically contingent process’, p. 281.

26 Vickery, ‘An Englishman's home is his castle?’, pp. 166–7 and 172–3.

27 Further biographical information on the diarists is available in Heller, ‘Leisure and pleasure’, pp. 31–8.

28 Peter Borsay, The English urban renaissance: culture and society in the provincial town, 1660–1770 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 75, 119, 123, 162, and passim; Rosemary Sweet, The English town, 1680–1840: government, society and culture (Harlow, 1999), pp. 219–66.

29 Hannah Greig, ‘Leading the fashion: the material culture of London's beau monde’, in John Styles and Amanda Vickery, eds., Gender, taste, and material culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830 (New Haven, CT, and London, 2006), pp. 293–313.

30 Michael Port, ‘Town house and country house: their interaction’, in Dana Arnold and Tim Clayton, eds., The Georgian country house: architecture, landscape and society (Stroud, 1998), pp. 132–6. See also Rachel Stewart, The town house in Georgian London (New Haven, CT, 2009), pp. 70–112.

31 Mireille Galinou, City merchants and the arts, 1670–1720 (Wetherby, 2004).

32 London, Guildhall Library (GL), MS 14951/1–2. See also the diaries of Jane Mayo, London, TNA, PROB 18/99/10.

33 Susan E. Whyman, Sociability and power in late-Stuart England: the cultural worlds of the Verneys, 1660–1720 (Oxford, 1999), pp. 91–9; Vickery, The gentleman's daughter, pp. 205–9.

34 The phrase ‘household family’ refers to all persons living under the same roof including blood kin as well as servants, lodgers, and others; Tadmor, Naomi, ‘The concept of the household-family in eighteenth-century England’, Past and Present, 151, (1996), pp. 111–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 M. Dorothy George, London life in the eighteenth century (Harmondsworth, 1976), pp. 100–6.

36 Craig Spence, London in the 1690s: a social atlas (London, 2000), pp. 90 and 103–6. Jeremy Boulton, Neighbourhood and society: a London suburb in the seventeenth century (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 185–200; Amanda Vickery, Behind closed doors: at home in Georgian England (New Haven, CT, 2009), p. 33.

37 Rachel Stewart argues that the liquidity of the London townhouse was one of its important attributes. Stewart, The town house, p. 55.

38 George, London life, pp. 102–3.

39 Leonore Davidoff, ‘The separation of home and work? Landladies and lodgers in nineteenth- and twentieth-century England’, in Sandra Burman, ed., Fit work for women (Oxford, 1979), p. 78. The legal definition of a renter was established in Tom v. Luckett (1847).

40 Melville, ‘The use and organization’, pp. 129 and 140–2.

41 For instances of landlords and ladies entering lodgings, see John Styles, ‘Lodging at the Old Bailey: lodgings and their furnishing in eighteenth-century London’, in Styles and Vickery, eds., Gender, taste, and material culture, p. 68; Vickery, ‘An Englishman's home is his castle?’ pp. 159–60.

42 These lodgers were respectable men. Boswell was the son of a Scottish laird seeking a position in the Foot Guards. Curwen was a merchant from Massachusetts who was waiting out the American Revolution in Britain. Job Knight, a native of Essex, was working as a draftsman and errand runner for a St Paul's Churchyard upholstery firm. Ware had come from the south coast of Surrey to study medicine. Boswell, London journal; Samuel Curwen, The journal of Samuel Curwen, Loyalist, ed. Andrew Oliver (2 vols. Cambridge, MA, 1972); London, Friends House Library, vol. S 485; Surrey History Centre, 1487/103. Men of propertied society often lodged, particularly between leaving home/school/university and marrying. Sharpe, Pamela and McEwan, Joanne, ‘“It buys me freedom”: genteel lodging in late-seventeenth and eighteenth-century London’, Parergon, 24, (2007), pp. 139–61Google Scholar.

43 Curwen, Journal, ii, pp. 654 and 702.

44 Boswell, London journal, p. 50.

45 Ibid., p. 256.

46 Ibid., pp. 289–90.

47 For more detailed examinations of the layouts of eighteenth-century houses see Dan Cruickshank and Neil Burton, Life in the Georgian city (London, 1990); Peter Guillery, The small house in eighteenth-century London (New Haven, CT, and London, 2004); Neil Burton and Peter Guillery, Behind the facade: London house plans, 1660–1840 (London, 2006).

48 London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), ACC/1017/0944, 16 and 17 Feb. 1757; TNA, J 90/13, 24 Nov. 1760, 18 Sept. 1785, and others.

49 Whiston Bristow, A catalogue of the genuine houshold furniture, plate, linen, china, books, antiquarian prints, andc. of Mr. Joshua Blew (London, c.1765).

50 Boswell, London journal, pp. 110–11, 116, and 183. This servant appears to have been employed by Boswell's landlord, but her services were offered to the lodger during some parts of the day.

51 Curwen, Journal, ii, p. 702.

52 Davidoff, ‘The separation of home and work?’, p. 74.

53 LMA ACC/268/2, 28 Oct. 1818.

54 Boswell, London journal, p. 95.

55 Curwen, Journal, ii, p. 733.

56 Ibid., ii, pp. 713–14.

57 Ibid., ii, p. 739.

58 TNA, J 90/12.

59 For examples of card tables in drawing rooms see Berkshire Record Office (BRO), D/ELV/E113; BRO, D/EE/E43/2; BRO, D/EE/E43/1. TNA; PROB 3/61/29.

60 The inventory reflects Bridge's lifetime of accumulation. An electrical machine, purchased four decades earlier, is stored in a ‘room over [the] drawing room’ that also contains ‘Japan figures’, coral, a camera obscura, and various outmoded or broken decorations that might have previously graced the drawing room. Bachelor-diarist Stephen Monteage's possessions were sold at auction and included ‘a harpsichord, a spinnet, and a chamber organ, two eight-day clocks, a spring table-clock, a desk and book case with looking-glass doors, a counting-house desk, sundry book-cases and presses’. ‘To be sold by auction’, Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 18 June 1767.

61 TNA, PROB 3/61/34.

62 Katherine C. Grier, Culture and comfort: parlor making and middle-class identity, 1850–1930 (Washington, DC, 1997); Thad Logan, The Victorian parlour (Cambridge and New York, NY, 2001); Deborah Cohen, Household gods: the British and their possessions (New Haven, CT, and London, 2006), p. 125.

63 Cohen, Household gods, pp. 122–44.

64 I have examined inventories that accompanied diaries and a small number of late eighteenth-century probate inventories held in The National Archives. The sample is not intended to be robust; rather, the inventories examined here offer illustrations of houses similar to those that diarists occupied.

65 BRO, D/EE/E43/1.

66 BRO, D/EE/E43/2.

67 BRO, D/ELV/E113.

68 BRO, D/EE/E43/1. A seliscope may have been a rudimentary film projector. Some French-language websites use the term to refer to a (now outmoded) toy for children; the term does not appear in either the OED or in full-text searches of Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

69 TNA, J 90/12.

70 Peter Thornton, Authentic decor: the domestic interior, 1620–1920 (London, 2000), p. 93.

71 For instance Karen Lipsedge, ‘“Enter into thy closet”: women, closet culture, and the eighteenth-century English novel’, in Styles and Vickery, eds., Gender, taste, and material culture, pp. 107–22.

72 Stone, Road to divorce, p. 211.

73 Robert Blair St George, ‘Reading spaces in eighteenth-century New England’, in Styles and Vickery, eds., Gender, taste, and material culture, pp. 90–103; McKeon, The secret history, pp. 225–8.

74 Bristow, A catalogue.

75 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng.misc.c.250; LMA, ACC/1017/0944.

76 Charles Saumarez Smith, The rise of design: design and the domestic interior in eighteenth-century England (London, 2000), p. 167. This is queried, but not sufficiently challenged, in Gordon and Nair, Public lives, pp. 124–5.

77 Vickery, Amanda, ‘His and hers: gender, consumption and household accounting in eighteenth-century England’, Past and Present supplement (2006), pp. 12–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at pp. 34–5.

78 Amanda Vickery, ‘“Neat and not too showey”: words and wallpaper in Regency England’, in Styles and Vickery, eds., Gender, taste, and material culture, pp. 217–18.

79 Ibid., p. 205.

80 Gordon and Nair, Public lives, p. 125.

81 Pred, ‘Place as historically contingent process’, pp. 279–80.

82 GL, MS 14951/3, 25 July 1818.

83 Henrietta Elizabeth Levenson Gower, Hary-O: the letters of Lady Harriet Cavendish, 1796–1809, ed. George Granville Leveson-Gower and Iris Irma Leveson-Gower Palmer (London, 1940), p. 249.

84 Curwen, Journal, II, p. 665.

85 Huntington Library, San Marino, CA (HL), Porter papers, box 38, POR 1943. See a similar occurrence in Boswell, London journal, p. 127.

86 This contrasts with the reading of card games offered in Mullin, Janet, ‘“We had carding”: hospitable card play and polite domestic sociability among the middling sort in eighteenth-century England’, Journal of Social History, 42, (2009), pp. 989–1008CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at pp. 997–8.

87 HL, HM 31201, II, 10 May 1796; HL, Porter papers, box 38, POR 1943; Hertford, Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies Library, DE/HL 16196, 28 May 1819.

88 Mary Coke, The letters and journals of Lady Mary Coke, ed. J. A. Home (4 vols., Edinburgh, 1889–96), ii, pp. 130–1.

89 A host's refusal to ‘go to’ his or her guests either due to time constraints or lack of interest also appears elsewhere. Lady Mary turned away guests and was herself turned away when she attempted to visit people. In some situations, it was deemed polite not to receive visitors if they were only undertaking a visit of duty or ceremony. See, for example, Edmund Burke, The correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. Thomas W. Copeland, Alfred Cobban, and Julian P. Boyd (10 vols., Cambridge, 1961) iii, p. 91.

90 BL, Add. MS 37732, journals of Mary Berry, fo. 58.

91 For example, GL, MS 14951/1, 9 December 1809.

92 Coke, Letters and journals, i, pp. 154 and 236–7, ii, p. 140.

93 Lewis, ‘When a house is not a home’, p. 358.

94 Boswell, London journal, passim.

95 Heller, ‘Leisure and pleasure’, pp. 128–9.

96 GL, MS 14951/1, 20 Jan. 1809.

97 Gordon and Nair, Private lives, p. 127. I am grateful to Sara Pennell for the point about cleanliness.

98 Domestic settings need not have been in houses. See Milne-Smith, Amy, ‘A flight to domesticity? Making a home in the gentlemen's clubs of London, 1880–1914’, Journal of British Studies, 45, (2006), pp. 796–818CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

99 Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places (Cambridge, MA, 1996), pp. 66–77.

100 Amanda Flather has revealed how social and gender hierarchies shaped seating plans at meals and sleeping arrangements in her Gender and space in early modern England (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 60–74.

101 Pred, ‘Place as historically contingent process’, p. 289.