Cantor - Privacy In England 1600-1900

/ THE

SOCIAL HISTORY OF PRIVACY IN ENGLAND 1600-1900/ by

NORMAN F. CANTOR, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 1

A REPORT SUBMITTED TO THE ASSOCIATION OF THE BAR OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK, Special Committee on Science and Law

Confidential -- For Private Circulation Only January 28) 1964

THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF PRIVACY IN ENGLAND 1600-1900

The immortal Miguel de Cervantes might be suspected of having out-victorianed the Victorians in his statement that a "private sin is not so prejudicial in this world as a public indecency,

It

were it not for the

fact that more than a hundred years passed between Cervantes' death and Victoria's accession to the throne. In Cervantes' time, as in Victoria's, it was not very easy to commit a private sin in England.

Indeed it was

not easy to find privacy for any purpose at all.

At

first glance, progress toward privacy should have been made after 1600 with the introduction of new styles of building.

However, alongside the architectural encourage-

ment of privacy, new English social practices grew up and often circumvented the best-laid plans of individualists. This encouragement and discouragement of privacy may be seen through a study of personal life in England, in its various aspects, between 1600 and 1900 A. D. The most obvious shift, the architectural one, was in the movement away from the "hall-house ll of earlier times.

Until the Tudor period,. daily life had centered

about a large hall occupied by the family and servant alike.

This dining-room-cum-living-room served as a place

to entertain and also to sleep.

One end or a balcony room

would act as the family's sleeping quarters, while the floor of the hall served the servants.

A similar arrange-

ment on a simpler scale served the poorer classes.

Life

revolved around the hall, though as the years passed, various smaller chambers came to serve a variety of purposes. The gentry found, however, during the Tudor years, that "smaller and warmer rooms, each assigned to a special use, ... were ... infinitely more desirable than the draughty 1

glories of the great hall. privacy began.

Thus, the movement toward

II

Servants were now segregated from the

family to a greater extent

and not only ate separately

but also slept apart from it.

I1Maids slept in the attics

... , and grooms and footmen in a separate bothy or over the stables.

Rooms and even beds were shared by two or 2

three 11 servant s.

While greater privacy was thus made

possible by the subdivision of the house, it was still restricted by the sharing of chambers.

Servants might

sleep on trundle-beds; the family itself was more elaborately equipped.

Who can forget Will Shakespeare's

"second-best bed?" The seventeenth century family used beds of varying quality; the best bed, of course, was to be found in the master bedroom.

Other, less elaborate beds

were kept in other bedrooms and even in parlors, where

2

they added to the sparse seating arrangements for receiving guests.

Thanks to a fear of night air, and possibly

also to an instinct for privacy, these beds were elaborately curtained.

As Christina Hole put it, man pre-

ferred "whenever possible ... to sleep in a Bort of private inner chamber, solidly canopied overhead and completely surrounded by tightly drawn curtains which were sometimes 3 pinned together at night for additional security." But how did the couple get into bed in the first place?

It

seems appropriate to examine some of the marriage customs of the seventeenth century at this point, for practices connection with this most intimate of human relationships reveal much about the attitUde toward privacy. The English had a reputation in Europe for their lustiness, but their practicality was no less in evidence in their marriage negotiations.

Samuel Pepys, who did

not always seem to regard his own marriage vows with the highest of respect, was every inch the practical man when it came to the question of his brother's marriage.

Thus

he commented (on October 21, 1662) on the negotiations with Mrs. Butler for her daughter:

"She tells me that

her daughter's portion is but t4oo, at which I am more troubled than before;

11

while the bride's negotiators

objected to the small house offered. Pepys met Mrs. Butler again:

--

3

On the next day,

"I find she will give but

£400 and no more, and is not willing to that, without a jointure, which she expects, and I will not grant for the portion.

I find her a very discreet sober woman, and her

daughter, I understand and believe, is a good lady; and if portions did agree, though she finds fault with Tom's house and his bad imperfection in his speech, I believe we should agree in other matters. , .11

As Christina Hole

commented, lithe children of the poor might marry for love,., .but with the gentry it was far otherwise."

A

girl had to have a dowry, or b9 IIcondemned to perpetual spinsterhood, or to a marriage below her station .. , spite of the troubles of the

tim~s

In

II

and the cold business-

like eye of the contracting parties' representatives, however, many of these marriages tlblossomed into loving and 4 and close-knit partnerships that endured unshaken,. , I I In these marriages for estates, the bride and groom might be as young as 12 and 14 respectively.

In

such cases, the spouses would return to their family homes for several years "until in their late teens they were considered old enough to begin their married life together,

II

If however the couple were old enough, it

would be brought to bed with appropriate ceremonies by the bridal party, and given a posset to drink before being left alone at last.

Since the honeymoon was spent

at the home of the bride's, and then the groom's family,

4

and much of it was devoted to receiving guests, not much privacy could be obtained.

Appearances, rather than feel-

ings, were of key importance.

Sanitation was also an area

in which little privacy was available--or desired.

Unlike

the earlier times, when the manuscripts reflecting daily life featured "cheerful bathing scenes," the manuscripts of Stuart days indicated that" Seventeenth century people was in their own rooms, and not mUCh."

There were no

bathroomsj "for everyday purposes the ewer and baSin sufficed.

No one then dreamt of anything so revolution-

ary as a daily bath ... 11

It was possible to bathe oneself

at a public bath, as Pepys snldely noted:

"My wife busy

in going with her woman to the hothouse to bathe herself, after her long being within doors in the dirt, so that she now pretends to a resolution of being hereafter very 6 clean. How long it will hold I can guess." As there were no private baths, so there were no toilets.

In the manner of babies today, seventeenth

century people made to with commodes (chairs with pots attached) or with Simple chamberpots, which were kept in the bedrooms and emptied into the nearest convenient street or stream.

Unlike the medi,eval houses, with their built-

in privies, seventeenth century homes left much to be desired in this respect.

If they had privies at all,

they were in some out of the way corner, such as the

5

'r -

cellar; medieval homes of some size had them placed at corners on living floors, with drains of a sort.

Even

smaller medieval homes had outdoor privies a bit removed from the house.

7

Given the condition of the great un-

washed, it is not to be wondered at that coffee houses gained such swift and widespread acceptance after the introduction, around 1650, of chocolate, coffee, and tea. These homes away from home smelled good, and offered both companionship and a chance to be away from one's wife. Just as two very different sides of seventeenth century life were painted by the diarists John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys, very different aspects of eighteenth century life are to be found in the work of Henry Fielding and Jane Austen.

Both Tom Jones and Pride and Prejudice reveal

much about eighteenth century marriage and home life, and therefore about privacy. G. M. Trevelyan made the point that "No less real, if more rare, than boorish Squire Western was the learned country gentleman ...

II

but added that most well-

real, if more rare, than boorish Squire Western was the learned country gentleman ...

II

but added that most well-

to-do gentry of the early eighteenth century were anxious about their account books, their daughters' marriages, their sons' debts and professions; attend-' ing to their own estates and to the county ~usiness on the bench of magistrates, as well as to their hounds and horsesj devoted to their gardens and their ponds a little more than to their books; living, as we should expect, a wholesome ~nd useful life, half public, half private ...

Even the half of their lives that was supposedly private however was rather public in its nature. As is the preceding century, marriages in the eighteenth century were often arranged with an eye to the size of , the bid being made rather than to romance. the attempt might be

to force a daughter into

ma~e

Thus marriage~

as Squire Western tried to force Sophia, or a sister, such as Squire Allworthy's, might be disposed of in marriage primarily on the basis of expectations: the captain, ever since his arrival, at least from the moment his brother had proposed the match to. him, long before he had discovered any flattering symptoms in Miss Bridget, had been greatly enamoured; that is to say, of Mr. Allworthy's house and gardens~ and of his lands, tenements, and hereditamentsj of all which the captain was so passionately fond, that he would most probably have contracted marriage with them, had he been obliged to have taken the witch of Endor into the bargain ... 9 Eliza Bennet's friend, Charlotte, went into marriage with the ridiculous Mr. Collins on the same basis: In as short a time as Mr. Collin's long speeches would allow, everything was settled between them to the satisfaction of bothj and as they entered the house he earnestly entreated her to name ,the day that was to make him the happiest of men; ... The stupidity with which he was favored by nature must guard his courtship from any charm that could make a woman wish for its continuancej and Miss Lucas, who accepted him solely from the pure and disinterested desire of an establishment, cared not how soon that establishment were gained ... 10 It must be admitted that Miss Austen described some love matches that did work out--that of Elizabeth

7

--------..--------------------~h,

and Darcy, or of Bingley and Jane, for example-- but noted somewhat sarcastically the worldly view that such a marriage was really a mesalliance.

As Mr. Darcy put

it, "Could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connections?--to congratulate myself on the hope of relations, whose condition in lire is so decidedly beneath my own?" (P. 211)

In spite of the conditions

of marriage, however, couples apparently got along with each other.

Certainly, they found some privacy for them-

selves in the ever more compartmentalized houses, for they had many children. As many as 20 or 25 children might be born to a married pair, though not nearly so many would survive. Queen Anne herself bore an enormous number of children] only to have all of them die before she did.

On lower

social levels, where homes were far smaller than those , .. ,

of the Queen or the very well-to-do, there was great

~

,

~

overcrowding.

It was not, howe'fer, only the very poor

who suffered in this way; Lady Townshend once commented of someone's home that it was "just such a house as a parson1s, where the children lie at the foot of the bed,

II

nAIl classes in England then were very prolific, 11

as one author put it succinctly. At this time, in the cities, there were two kinds of prolific households: those of the well-to-do

8

II

merchant, and of the impoverished worker.

In

London~

"the merchant prince and the shopkeeper slept, each with his family, over his place of business--servants and prentices in the garrets, and porters and messengers packed away anywhere in cellars and warehouse, privy out in the back.

If

with a

However, in this London of cheap

gin, there also lived "dockers and unskilled casual labour ... under the most filthy condltions of overcrowding, without sanitation, police or doctors, and far beyond the range of philanthropy, education and religion.

II

The work of Hogarth, perhaps more than anything else, makes the misery clear.

In his "Oln Lane,

11

the pawn-

brokerls has a handsome doorway and is in an excellent state of repair, it carries on a flourishing buSiness, where men and women are pawning their tools and household goods ... we see a drunken populace in the last stages of emaciation and disease; a corpse is being coffined ... a suicide can be seen hanging from a beam ...

II

All of

this is contrasted with "Beer Street ll and its robust 12 prosperity. In between the London of gin and the estate of a Mr. Darcy, is to be found the not yet depopulated village.

Rather like a flock of Miss Marples, the

villagers were fascinated by the "daily human drama t!

9

i

of their own village, with its poaching affrays and smuggling adventures, its feuds and loves, its ghosts and suicides, its quarrels of miller and innkeeper, of parson and squire."

13

In short, just such a village as that in

which the truth was "universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife," or in which Tom Jones made love to Molly Seagrim once too often.

A love of drinking, gambling and

wenching characterized much of eighteenth century country society, as the magnificent movie based on Tom Jones makes clear so joyfully.

The Industrial Revolution, the

evangelical movement, and a small woman named Victoria, were however to have a devastating effect upon the free and easy--and unprivate--way of life. Between John' \-lesley and Queen Victoria, lustiness didn't have much of a chance.

Worse, a veneer of

respectability was slapped on a SOCiety which was decidedly not pure all the way through.

liThe growing 'respectabi11ty'

of the well-to-do classes ... diminlshed the numbers and position of the more fortunate 'kept mistresses,' who had played such a considerable part in Eighteenth century society.

But for that very reason the demand was in-

creased for the common prostitute who could be viSited in secret,

II

and so a

II

grea t army" of them grew, Oliver

Twist's Nancy among them.

Of course, prostitution was no

III

new thing, but its extent and the attitude toward it in Victorian England were significant. This was the era of the shift from "licence or gaiety to hypocrisy or to virtue,"

From cheerful parish

religion, the move was made back to family prayers, and that horror, the English Sunday, was introduced.

From

wenching, the move was made to the inhibited puritanical sexual code--double standard and all--still with us.

And

with it all, the cursed hypocrisy which clothed piano legs, bowdlerized the classics, and trafficked in Tlyoung girls 14

for home and foreign sale.

II

The house the Victorian

family lived in, its size and education, its servants, and the gay life of its young blades, reflected one side of the coin; the life and conditions of the newly industrialized poor reflected the other.

In order to obtain an

'~

idea of the status of privacy in this period, we must explore both sides, both Englands. liThe typical Englishman of the nineteenth century is the solid citizenll as one author put it.

He worked in

the heart of London, but lived in "the most class-conscious house" yet seen.

respects very like the New York City brownstones of the same period.

!

His home was new, narrow, tall--in some

The servants, relegated below stairs to

work, became "quite literally the lower classes. the cooking and so forth was done in the cellar.

11

II

All of On the

[

II ~

ground floor, respectability began; the family dining room in front, and the study at the rear set the tone.

One

flight up, there was "the drawing-room, the best room in the building, the sacred shrine of the Lady of the House, the gilded cage of her daughters."

On the next floor,

were the master bedroom in the front and another bedroom. Upstairs, three and four floors up, the children (and servants) were assigned space cut off from the respectable adult life of the house. to be heard.

The children were definitely not

The servants were tlhuddled together in small

bedrooms ... in primitive discomfort and with complete lack of privacy.

15

II

Presumably the parents of the family had

enough privacy, for full nurseries were the fashion through the century; the Queen had set the example.

It

was only in the l890's that parents faced with school-fees to pay and a position to maintain began to limit the size of their families.

Perhaps the greater availability of

birth control information toward the end of the century

,j

.j I;

had something to do with this. In the other England of Disraeli's IItwo Englands ll , however, families were large with far less space and money.

The new jerry-built housing for the factory

workers was miserable.

The "pioneers of

t

progress

t

saved ,I

space by crowding families into single rooms or ... underground into cellars ... providing no drains--or, worse still,

12

by providing drains that oozed into the water supply."

.,

It

was only the shock of the cholera epidemics in 1832 and 1848 that IIscared society into the tardy beginnings of sanitary self-defenc=,

II

Edwin Chadwick, the pioneer in this

field, noted that "more filth, more physical suffering and moral disorder ll were IIfound among the cellar pop\.llations of the working people of Liverpool, Manchester or Leeds and in large portions" of London than in England's worst 16 prisons. It was inevitable that the children of such homes should grow up with the knowledge of debauchery, with little if any sense of privacy, and certainly no opportunity for enjoying it.

Unlike the Alice who might be

told stories of a Wonderland, the London slum child grew up with degradation as his companion.

Dicken's depiction

of Oliver Twist's companions in Londonls underworld was not so exaggerated as might be thought.

There were at

least two Englands, then in Victorian times; though there had always been two

nations~

the contract between

the two in the nineteenth century was appalling.

In

addition to the obvious differences in food, education, and the like,_ the amount of privacy that an individual could attain was governed by his social condition. In England, through the three centuries between 1600 and 1900, architecture developed so that more privacy was possible, but thanks to the growth of the population,

r .j ~, J

1

13

the industrial development, and the shift in social patterns, men enjoyed little privacy,

Only those who could afford it

could hope for privacy, and not always get it even then. Thus, on the purely personal--as distinct from the legal-level, true privacy was still lacking in England at a very recent time.

It was only when enough homes were built

by the county councils in the later years of the nineteenth century that the masses of Englishmen were enabled to have some real degree of privacy.

However, the growth of real

privacy depended as much on a change in patterns of living as upon the number of rooms available.

It is not surpris-

ing that a concept of privacy was so long in developing.

I

~

•f i,l

~

I

14

Notes 1

Christina :io1e, The English Housewife in the Seventeenth Century (London: Chatto and Windus, 1953), pp. 25-26.

2

Hole, pp. 26 and 40.

3

Hole, pp. 38-39.

4

Hole, pp. 8, 9, 14; The Diary of Samuel Pepys, . ed. G. Gregory Smith (London: Macmillan and Co., 1929).

5

Hole, pp. 3,4,13,23; John Ashton, Social Life in,the Reign of ~een Anne ... (London: Chatto and Windus, 1897), pp. 33-34.

6

Hole, p. 41; Pepysl entry for Feb. 21, 1665; Dorothy Hartley and Margaret M. Elliot, Life and Work of the Peo Ie of En land ... The Seventeenth Century New York & London: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1929), p. 71.

7

Hole, pp. 42-43.

8

G. M. Trevelyan, Illustrated En lish Social Histo Vol. Three: The Eighteenth Century London, etc.: Longmans, Green and Co., 1951, p. 15.

9

Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (New York: Random House, n.d.), p. 32.

10

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (New York: Pocket Books, 1956), p. 135.

11

Rosamond Bayne-Powell, The English Child in the Eighteenth Century (London: John Murray, 1939), pp. 7, 32.

12

Trevelyan, pp. 39, 44, and R. C. Wright 's notes on p. 174.

13

Tr~velyan,

p. 25.

,

14

James Laver, Victorian Vista (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1955), p. 11; Trevelyan, Vol. IV, p. 26; Ideas and Beliefs of the Victorians (London: Sylvan Press, 1949), see especially comments by Beales and Glover, pp. 354, 356 ~ 362, 363.

15

Laver, pp. 27-28, 31.

16

Laver, pp. 66-67.

j,

I

,

I

J f ij

t

2

l

~.'

Also consulted: E. S. de Beer, ed. The Diary of John Evelyn. Oxford University Press, 1959.

:

London, etc.:

R. W. King. England from Wordsworth to Dickens. Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1929.

New York:

Marjorie and C.H.B. Quennell. A History of Everyday Things in England ... 1733 1851. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1934.

~

I I :1t i~

Peter Quennell. Victorian Panorama ... New York: Charles . Scribner's Sons, 1937. Gladys S. Thomson. Life in a Noble Household, 1641-1700. London: Jonathan Cape, 1937. H. D. Traill, ed. Social England, Vols. IV, V, VI. York; G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1903-4.

New

G. M. Trevelyan. England under Queen Anne, The Peace and the Protestant Succession .. London, etc.: Longmans, Green and Co., 1934. G. M. Young. edition.

Victorian En land: Portrait of an A e. 2nd London: Oxford University Press, 195 .

iI i

!

'I I'III I