The Making of Home

The 500-year story of how our houses became homes

Judith Flanders

• Editore: Atlantic Books
• Anno: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781782393788
• Argomento: Ciencias sociales
• Categoria: Sociología

The idea that 'home' is a special place, a separate place, a place where we can be our true selves, is so obvious to us today that we barely pause to think about it.

But, as Judith Flanders shows in this revealing book, 'home' is a relatively new concept. When in 1900 Dorothy assured the citizens of Oz that 'There is no place like home', she was expressing a view that was a culmination of 300 years of economic, physical and emotional change.

In The Making of Home, Flanders traces the evolution of the house across northern Europe and America from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century, and paints a striking picture of how the homes we know today differ from homes through history.

The transformation of houses into homes, she argues, was not a private matter, but an essential ingredient in the rise of capitalism and the birth of the Industrial Revolution. Without 'home', the modern world as we know it would not exist, and as Flanders charts the development of ordinary household objects - from cutlery, chairs and curtains, to fitted kitchens, plumbing and windows - she also peels back the myths that surround some of our most basic assumptions, including our entire notion of what it is that makes a family.

As full of fascinating detail as her previous bestsellers, The Making of Home is also a book teeming with original and provocative ideas.

Contents

	Acknowledgements
	Illustrations
	Home Thoughts: An Introduction
PART ONE
1.	The Family Way
2.	A Room of One’s Own
3.	Home and the World
4.	Home Furnishings
5.	Building Myths
PART TWO
6.	Hearth and Home
7.	The Home Network
	Coda: Not at Home
	Notes
	Bibliography
	Index

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to those who have helped me navigate the idioms of home in various European languages: Ana-Maria Astier, Ilona Chavasse, Martijn David, Béla Dekany, Marta Frankowska-Stelmach, Tobias Hoheisel, Alice James, Donna Leon, Zoltán Matyas, Ravi Mirchandani, Jussi Mononen, Jan Morris, Ekin Oklap, Sofi Oksanen, Jasper Rees, Lise Sand, Ewa Sipta, George Szirtes, Fergal Tobin, Aksel Tollåli, Jorunn Veiteberg, Hanna Weibye, Michael Wells, Shaun Whiteside and Frank Wynne. Thanks to the wonders of social media, some of these people were unaware of the ultimate destination of their information. For their disinterested good nature, I thank them twice.

Gerard van Vuuren translated several essays from Dutch for me, and I thank him for his scrupulous care.

I would also like to thank Rodney Bolt, Cathy Lennon, Laura Mason, Ninette Perahia and Bee Wilson; Gabrielle Allen, of Guy’s and St Thomas’ Charitable Foundation; Katie George, of the Salters’ Company; Charlotte Louise Murray, of the University of Reading; Emily Watts, house steward at Knole; and Mandy Williams and Hannah Fleming, of the Geffrye Museum. Peter Kristiansen, curator at Rosenborg Slot/De Danske Kongers Kronologiske Samling, not only responded to a stranger’s email promptly and courteously, but gave me additional insights into the painting in question. I am most grateful to him.

As always, the members of the Victoria mailbase fielded my seemingly random queries with good temper and, even more usefully, deep expertise. My thanks in particular for specific responses are owed to Helena Brigman, Lisa Cepluch, Amy D’Antonio, David Latané, Mary Millar, Peter Orford, Malcolm Shifrin, Nancy Strickland, Elizabeth Williamson and Guy Woolnough and, as always, Patrick Leary, list-master extraordinaire. Twitter has brought me another range of experts, and I thank all those who assisted.

At Atlantic Books, Ravi Mirchandani edited this book with rigour and enthusiasm, and in so doing improved it beyond measure. I am also grateful to Karen Duffy, Richard Evans, Lauren Finger, Lucy Howkins, Toby Mundy, James Nightingale, Bunmi Oke, James Roxburgh, Chris Shamwana, Tamsin Shelton and Margaret Stead. My agent, Bill Hamilton, is stalwart, and beyond thanks. George Lucas has supplied US support, and to him I am most grateful.

Despite the efforts of all these good people to keep me on the straight and narrow, errors and omissions will inevitably have crept in. For these, as always, I am solely responsible.

Illustrations

FIRST SECTION

1.	View Down a Corridor by Samuel van Hoogstraten, 1662 (Dyrham Park, Avon, UK / National Trust Photographic Library / Johan Hammond / The Bridgeman Art Library)
2.	Interior with a Woman at a Clavichord by Emanuel de Witte, c. 1665 (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands / De Agostini Picture Library / The Bridgeman Art Library)
3.	Woman Reading a Letter by Gabriel Metsu, c. 1664–66 (National Gallery of Ireland)
4.	Petronella Dunois’ dollshouse, c. 1675–1700 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)
5.	At the Linen Closet by Pieter de Hooch, 1663 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)
6.	Children of King Charles I by Anthony Van Dyck, c. 1637 (Getty Images)
7.	Mr and Mrs Atherton by Arthur Devis, c. 1743 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool)
8.	Arnolfini Wedding Portrait by Jan van Eyck, 1434 (Getty Images)
9.	Claud and Peggy by David Allan, 1780s (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)
10.	Saint Barbara from the right wing of the Werl Altarpiece by Robert Campin, 1438 (Prado, Madrid, Spain / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library)
11.	Centre panel of the Merode Altarpiece by Robert Campin, c. 1427–32 (© Francis G. Mayer / Corbis)
12.	Steward at Rosenborg Castle by Wolfgang Heimbach, 1653 (Royal Danish Collections)
13.	The Artist in his Studio by Richard Morton Paye, 1783 (National Trust Images / John Hammond)
14.	A Smoking Party by William Bendz, 1828 (NY Carlsberg Glypotek, Copenhagen / Ole Haupt)
15.	Mrs Duffin’s Dining-room at York by Mary Ellen Best, 19th century (Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library)

SECOND SECTION

16.	Staple Inn, High Holborn, London, prior to restoration in 1886, c. 1860–86 (English Heritage)
17.	Staple Inn, High Holborn, London, c. 1937 (Getty Images)
18.	The log cabin in which President Abraham Lincoln was said to have been born, Hodgensville, Kentucky. From a stereoscopic photograph taken in 1910 (Getty Images)
19.	Charles Francis Annesley Voysey’s design for a house for C. Turner Esq. in Frinton-on-Sea, 1908 (© Stapleton Collection / Corbis)
20.	A Peasant Family at Meal-time by Jan Steen, c. 1665 (Print Collector / Getty Images)
21.	Saying Grace by Joseph van Aken c. 1720 (© Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford)
22.	The Proposition by Judith Leyster, 1631 (The Hague, Mauritshuis)
23.	Drawing of a betty lamp by Maurice Van Felix for the Index of American Design, c. 1943 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC)
24.	John Middleton with His Family in His Drawing-room by unknown artist, c. 1796 (Heritage Images / Getty Images)
25.	Dining-room of Dr Whitridge’s as it was in the Winter of 1814–15 by Joseph S. Russell, 1814–15 (Courtesy of the New Bedford Whaling Museum)
26.	Scene in a gaming house from A Rake’s Progress by William Hogarth, 1733 (© Historical Picture Archive / Corbis)
27.	The Elegant Reader by Georg Friedrich Kersting, 1812 (Klassik Stiftung Weimar)
28.	A woman doing laundry in a tenement building, Chicago, Illinois, c. 1910 (Getty Images)
29.	Illustration of a Beecher kitchen from The American Woman’s Home by Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1869.
30.	Reconstruction of a Frankfurt kitchen in the MAK Vienna (Christos Vittoratos)
31.	Mr and Mrs Hill by Arthur Devis, c. 1750–51 (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)
32.	A family gather round the television for an evening’s entertainment, 1957 (Getty Images)

The Making of Home

Home Thoughts:
An Introduction

In 1900, a young girl in a strange land was asked by a resident why she wasn’t content to remain in their ‘beautiful country’, but instead longed to return to ‘the dry, grey’ place she came from. She was astonished. She wanted to return there, she said simply, because ‘There is no place like home.’ The girl was, of course, Dorothy in Oz, and only someone like the Scarecrow, famed for his lack of brains, would ask something so self-evident. To Dorothy’s creator, L. Frank Baum, writing at the end of the nineteenth century, it was a commonplace that home did not have to be beautiful, or luxurious, to be the place one wanted to be.

Two centuries earlier, in 1719, another novel, now known simply as Robinson Crusoe, was first published. The full title of Daniel Defoe’s book was not merely the name of his main character; instead it enticed readers with promises of adventure, exotic locales, violent death and more: The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates. The book was a staggering success, going through thirty-seven printings in its first eight months. Over the following century it was translated, adapted for the stage and rewritten for children; there were sequels; there was even a puppet show. Altogether, there were over seven hundred retellings of this story, in almost every form of entertainment.

Defoe’s novel is more than simply a rollicking tale of shipwrecks and pirates, however. It has a deserved place in the literary pantheon, not merely for the quality of its writing, but also as the first true novel in English, and among the first in any European language. It should have another place, too, among historians, for it is the first book to treat the details of ordinary domestic life as though they were as gripping as a disaster at sea or the discovery of a fabled new land. Even in the title, Crusoe is presented as not just a mariner. He is Robinson Crusoe of York – a man with a home, a place where he belongs. Once he is shipwrecked, long passages in the novel dwell on the arrangements he makes to provide himself with the necessities of daily life: clothes, a razor, cutlery, even writing materials. On the island, Crusoe’s cave receives similar attention; its cooking, eating, sleeping and storage areas are described, as is his next ‘house’, which is a move upmarket for him – this one is large enough to contain the sleeping and living areas under one roof. Then, ‘to enjoy the Comforts I had in the World’, the castaway builds furniture, and as a good householder he puts up shelves to keep his possessions tidy: ‘everything in … their Places’. When, after two decades, another ship is wrecked on his island, he is thrilled to find, not weapons (he doesn’t bother to take the muskets he comes across), or marine equipment to help him sail away, but a kettle, a pot ‘to make chocolate’, a fire shovel and tongs, ‘which I wanted extremely’. (He also acquires that ultimate accessory for his fireside, a dog, which he finds starving on board.) This novel, ostensibly one of ‘Surprizing Adventures’, and of a man who for twenty-eight years has no home, is nevertheless awash with notions of domesticity. Time and again Crusoe uses the word ‘home’. It is how he refers to his ‘little tent’, and in the first chapter alone the word is repeated a dozen times; over the course of the novel it appears more than sixty times, recurring like a steady heartbeat.

Home, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is ‘A dwelling place; a person’s house or abode; the fixed residence of a family or household; the seat of domestic life and interests’. But more than that, while a house is the physical structure, a home is ‘The place where one lives or was brought up, with reference to the feelings of belonging, comfort, etc., associated with it’. It is a state of being as well as the place where one lives or one’s place of origin. The word itself is ancient, most likely pre-dating modern European languages and originating in an Indo-European root, kei, meaning lying down, or a bed or couch, or something dear: even then, both a place and an attitude. The first known written use of the distinction between house and home in English appeared in a poem of 1275, which mentions separately a man’s ‘lond & his hus & his hom’ [land and his house and his home].

To speakers of English, or the Germanic and Scandinavian languages, or the Finno-Ugric group – the languages of northwestern Europe, from Hungary to Finland and Scandinavia, the German-speaking lands, and then descending to the Netherlands and across the Channel to the British Isles – to these peoples, the differences between home and house are obvious. They are two related but distinct ...