The Comforts of Home in Western Europe, 1700-1900

Jon Stobart

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350092976
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Comfort, both physical and affective, is a key aspect in our conceptualization of the home as a place of emotional attachment, yet its study remains under-developed in the context of the European house. In this volume, Jon Stobart has assembled an international cast of contributors to discuss the ways in which architectural and spatial innovations coupled with the emotional assemblage of objects to create comfortable homes in early modern Europe. The book features a two-section structure focusing on the historiography of architectural and spatial innovations and material culture in the early modern home. It also includes 10 case studies which draw on specific examples, from water closets in Georgian Dublin to wallpapers in 19th-century Cambridge, to illustrate how people made use of and responded to the technological improvements and the emotional assemblage of objects which made the home comfortable. In addition, it explores the role of memory and memorialisation in the domestic space, and the extent to which home comforts could be carried about by travellers or reproduced in places far removed from the home. The Comforts of Home in Western Europe, 1700-1900 offers a fresh contribution to the study of comfort in the early modern home and will be vital reading for academics and students interested in early modern history, material culture and the history of interior architecture.

Part One

The convenient house: Architectural ideals and practicalities

1

Convenience, utility and comfort in British domestic architecture of the long eighteenth century

Dale Townshend

As scholars have often pointed out, British architects of the eighteenth century had very little to say about comfort in domestic architecture at all. To a certain extent, this was a consequence of the meanings mobilized by the term ‘comfort’ itself in the period: primarily signifying forms of moral support, spiritual solace and legal assistance, ‘comfort’ for much of the eighteenth century lacked the connotations of physical contentment, well-being and ease that the phrase ‘home comforts’ conjures up today.¹ Beyond this, and as John Archer has shown, eighteenth-century architects remained preoccupied by a number of weightier, far more abstract aesthetic concerns, including the authority of ancient Greek and Roman architecture and the desirability of emulating it in Britain; the proportions, meanings, associations, character, style and expression of a building; and the levels of creativity and ‘original genius’ that architects themselves brought to bear upon the task of architectural design.² This general disregard for the more practical considerations of physical comfort was no doubt compounded by the ways in which the period tended to conceptualize the role and identity of the architect himself. Through the emphasis that many aestheticians placed on the affiliations between architecture and the ‘Sister Arts’ of painting, sculpture, poetry and music, the architect was, first and foremost, an artist, one who was primarily concerned with the beauty and external aesthetic appeal of his designs, and one who thus tended to delegate the finer details of a building’s interiors to the attendant upholsterer and furniture designer.

And yet, a key term to emerge in architectural theories of the early-to-mid-eighteenth century was ‘convenience’, a category, we might say, that served as a form of comfort avant la lettre, or at least the closet approach upon ‘home comforts’ that architects of the period would – or indeed, given the term’s contemporary legal and moral meanings, could – make. As early as the 1690s, the lawyer-turned-architectural patron Roger North had paid considerable attention to the convenience of domestic architecture, a term that in his On Planning a Country House (c. 1696) and Cursory Notes of Building (1698) encompassed considerations of heating, light, privacy and the increasing specialization of internal rooms. Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755–6) provides some sense of the meanings with which ‘convenience’ was inflected in contemporary architectural discourse, several of which indicate that the term included within itself intimations physical ease that were more usually invoked in the phrase ‘creature comforts’: 1. Fitness and propriety; 2. Commodiousness, ease, freedom from difficulties; 3. Cause of ease; and 4. Fitness of time or place; in its adjectival form, ‘convenient’ signified ‘fit; suitable; proper; well adapted; commodious’.³ These are clearly the meanings that David Hume had drawn upon in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) when, during his discussion of the role that sympathy played in the appreciation of beauty, he illustrated his claim through an important architectural example:

A man, who shews us any house or building, takes particular care among other things to point out the convenience of the apartments, the advantages of their situation, and the little room loft in the stairs, anti-chambers and passages; and indeed ’tis evident, the chief part of the beauty consists in these particulars. The observation of convenience gives pleasure, since convenience is a beauty. But after what manner does it give pleasure? ’Tis certain our own interest is not in the least concern’d; and as this is a beauty of interest, not of form, so to speak, it must delight us merely by communication, and by our sympathizing with the proprietor of the lodging. We enter into his interest by the force of imagination, and feel the same satisfaction, that the objects naturally occasion in him.⁴

For Hume, architectural convenience, in itself, was a form of beauty, and the spectator received certain appreciation of a house’s convenient aspects through entering into a sympathetic identification with those who inhabited it.

If Hume’s account of convenience in A Treatise of Human Nature was subordinated to the larger task of describing the aesthetic workings of sympathy, ‘convenience’ would receive greater elaboration and enhanced practical application in the work of subsequent British architects. The argument in Isaac Ware’s A Complete Body of Architecture (1756), for example, turned on a distinction between what he referred to as the ‘convenience of the inhabitant’ and ‘the beauty and proportion of the fabrick’; the process of architectural design, he claimed, involved a careful negotiation of the requirements of these two somewhat opposed, even fundamentally incompatible elements.⁵ As Ware argued, neither architectural convenience nor beauty was sufficient in its own right, and the emphasis that the architect afforded each principle was to be determined by the nature and intended function of the building at hand: while the homes of tradespeople required that ‘principal attention’ be shown to ‘the article of convenience’, the house of a ‘person of fashion’ demanded heightened attention to ‘the beauty and proportional disposition of parts’.⁶ Although Ware never paused to explain precisely what convenience in the realm of domestic architecture comprised, what eventually becomes clear in A Complete Body of Archit ecture is that the term mobilized meanings similar to those employed by North, Hume and Johnson, namely the size of the rooms in any given structure; their intended purpose, utility and general fitness for use; as well as such pragmatic and utilitarian concerns as the placement of water closets, the securing of appropriate heating through the inclusion of chimneys and fireplaces, a house’s proximity to running water, the laying of adequate drains and sewers, and ways of ensuring within the home the circulation of fresh, salubrious air. Like Ware’s distinctions between internal convenience and external beauty, such claims would play themselves out in architectural thought and practice well into the nineteenth century.

Like Colen Campbell in Vitruvius Britannicus (1715–25) before him, Ware was a firm proponent of Classical example and precedent, and, together with his earlier The Four Books of Andrea Palladio’s Architecture (1738), A Complete Body of Architecture became a crucial handbook for the taste for Palladianism that so dominated eighteenth-century British architecture. While convenience thus remained, theoretically, one of Palladianism’s most important architectural principles, Edward Denison and Guang Yu Ren have pointed out that, in practice, the style ultimately rendered the exterior form of a building far more important than its internal functions. Indeed, in such country houses as Chatsworth House, Blenheim Palace, Castle Howard, Burlington House and Houghton Hall, we consistently witness the sacrificing of what we would today term the ‘domestic comforts’ of their interiors to the symmetry, proportion and elegance of their Classical exteriors.⁷ This was perhaps the inevitable consequence of Ware’s insistence that, in distinction from the concern with convenience in the houses of the working classes, ‘the beauty and proportional disposition of parts’ should predominate over internal conveniences in the grand houses of the wealthy. Of course, and as scholarship in the field has shown, country houses were by no means devoid of comfort.⁸ Nonetheless, there remains evidence of a prevailing assumption that comfort was not ordinarily to be found in such grand residences: as the Scottish writer Anne Grant put it in her popular Letters from the Mountains (1806), ‘I believe there is no danger of my ever living in a great house, and I am not sorry for it. There is such a stately absence of all comfort; every thing that unsophisticated nature delights to cling to, is put so far away; and the owner seems somehow alone in the middle of his works, like Nebuchadnezzar, saying, “Behold now this great Babylon which I have made.”’⁹

William Chambers continued in this Classicist vein in A Treatise on Civil Architecture (1759), arguing that the architect’s primary function was to design and realize ‘convenient habitations’ that furnished their inhabitants with both ‘ease of body’ and ‘vigour of mind’, here too preempting the physical and sentimental components enshrined in the notion of home comfort that we see in the novels of Jane Austen and other literary texts of the period: ‘Thus is appears that Architecture, by furnishing Men with convenient habitations, procures them that ease of body, and vigour of mind, which are necessary for inventing and improving Arts.’¹⁰ If architecture was, first and foremost, the art of securing in a building states of mental and physical convenience, it followed that its practice was ‘instrumental to the happiness of Men’ and ‘conducive to the wealth, fame, and security of kingdoms’, a point that Chambers underscored by advancing a teleological history of architecture that was driven solely by convenience’s ever-progressive requirements.¹¹ Alexander Gerard followed suit in An Essay on Taste (1759) of the same year, though substituting convenience for a notion of ‘utility’, a concept that he defined as ‘the fitness of things for answering their ends’, and an aspect of the broader category of beauty that bore particular implications for domestic architecture.¹² Gerard’s ardent defence of the principle of architectural utility was bound up in a wry critique of the unfortunate ‘inconveniences’ imposed upon a building by the architect’s over-zealous embrace of Classical regularity:

Utility, or the fitness of things for answering their ends, constitutes another species of beauty, distinct from that of figure. It is of so great importance that, though convenience is sometimes in lesser instances sacrificed to regularity, yet a degree of inconvenience generally destroys all the pleasure, which should have arisen from the symmetry and proportion of the parts.¹³

Gerard’s ideal building, then, combined elegant and regular exteriors with internal fitness and utility, a small concession to nascent notions of domestic ‘comfort’ in a tract that was otherwise preoccupied with the loftier architectural principles of novelty, sublimity, beauty, harmony, taste and judgment.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: Comfort, the home and home comforts
• Part One The convenient house: Architectural ideals and practicalities
• Part Two Home making: Objects and emotions
• Afterthoughts: The comforts of home
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright