Victorian Interiors Social and Cultural Influences on Victorian Interior Design

AVic­tor­i­an house was arranged like a mom-and-pop retail shop with the display area up front and family quarters and service areas at the rear. The public areas of the home — the parlors and drawing rooms — showcased the family's prestige and social status. They were intended to awe and impress visitors with the wealth, refinement, and good taste of the householder.

Behind the public face of the house was the family's living area. This was where daily household activities took place, and opulent display and decoration tended to get in the way.

Although today's designers treat the family spaces with all the elaboration of public rooms, these areas, especially in middle-class homes, were much less ornate, although usually comfortable and attractive, even homey, but rarely opulent.

Service areas were the least elaborate of all — typically plain and very functional. These included the kitchen, larders, laundry, and servants' quarters (if there were servants).

Here, the essential maintenance functions of the household took place, out of sight of both the public and family areas, in plain-as-day rooms, devoid of any but the most essential comforts, and sometimes not even those.

Social and Cultural Influences on Victorian Style

The comfort, convenience, and decoration of Vic­tor­i­an houses were greatly influenced by what was possible, and the Vic­tor­i­an Era was a period of rapidly expanding possibilities largely propelled by the Industrial Revolution between 1860 and 1910.

At the beginning of the period, America was an agrarian society with very limited surplus wealth consistent with a largely subsistence econ­o­my.

By 1914, the country was an urban industrial goliath, already the largest economy in the world (although no one knew it at the time), with a gross domestic product nearly four times what it had been a mere half-century prior.

Increasing industrialization did not mean merely more wealth, it also meant an abundance of material goods that directly impacted how homes were designed, built, furnished, and decorated; and how the family lived its daily life.

But forces other than industrialization also had a dramatic influence on domestic life and directed how resources were spent. Chief among these was the increasing emphasis on privacy, orderliness, sanitation, and hygiene.

Cleanliness became "next to Godliness" only in the late Vic­tor­ian era as a practical offshoot of the invention of indoor sanitary bathrooms.

Orderliness with "a place for everything, and everything in its place" was a pervasive theme of the Vic­tor­ian Era from beginning to end, providing the impetus for all manner of useful inventions, devices, and processes promoting good order and efficiency in daily living.

Both of these social themes predated the Victorian period.

Cleanliness was widely popularized in the 18th century as a moral and spiritual duty,through the writings of figures like the English reformist and moral philosopher, John Wesley.

Public figures in Colonial America, including Benjamin ranklin, considered it an essential virtue, defined in his list of thirteen rules for the development of a good character as, "Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, clothes, or habitation".

Ordliness, likewise, was emphasized during the 17th-century Reformation and the 18th-century Enlightenment. Franklin also included "Order" as one of his essential virtues, that he reduced to a maxim: "Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time".

Personal Privacy

The emphasis on personal privacy, however, seems to have its genesis in the Vic­tor­ian Era. It was a central theme of period design, and had a massive influence on the Vic­tor­ian interior landscape.

There was no such thing as an "open" house plan in Vic­tor­ian times. While public rooms were often spacious, family rooms were not. Small rooms were more practical. Heating was by burning wood or coal in fireplaces or stoves. It was much less work to heat a small room than a large one.

Before natural gas heating, a house usually had one coal stove for cooking and several more for heating other rooms. Tending the stoves was women's work, and it was a backbreaking chore.

A study in 1899 by Bos­ton's School of House­keep­ing found that just tending a coal stove required a minimum of an hour each day per stove.^[1] Cooking and heating commonly involved carrying up to 50 lbs. of coal and removing 30 lbs. of ashes. Four tons of coal were needed to heat an eight-room house in a typical year.

Before the Vic­tor­i­an Age, privacy was hard to come by.

Separate rooms for sleeping were uncommon. Beds were usually pallets brought out every evening and placed by the fireplace for sleeping.

In well-to-do houses, only parents might have a separate sleeping room. But by the 1880s, it had become common for everyone in middle-class families to have their own bedroom, or, at the very least, a personal corner of a bedroom shared with a sibling.

Most bedrooms were just large enough for a bed with some hooks on the wall for clothing. There might be space for a small sitting area with dressers, armoires, and even a small desk. Still tiny by modern standards, and often oddly shaped, bedrooms were becoming personal retreats that, with a closed door, afforded an unheard-of degree of privacy.

But even this level of privacy was often not enough. Folding screens in corners concealed the acts of dressing and undressing, and beds were often fitted into alcoves for visual separation from the rest of the room.

Single Use Rooms

The Vic­tor­i­an Age was also the period in which single-use rooms became the norm in Amer­i­can homes.

In prior periods, houses were generally small with just a few rooms. Most rooms had multiple uses. During the day, a room could be a combination gathering room, dining room, and kitchen; at night, a dormitory. The kitchen fireplace was often the only source of heat in the house, so cozying up to the fireplace kept the occupants warm at night.

In many cultures, this is still the dominant arrangement. Rooms in traditional Japanese houses, for example, are designed with multiple uses in mind.

But during the Vic­tor­i­an Age, houses began to be planned with rooms dedicated to a single purpose.

Bedrooms were bedrooms and identified as such in house plans. They had no other function. Dining rooms were for eating, and when no dining was going on, they would be empty.

Dedicated kitchens became common. The combination kitchen-dining-gathering room disappeared, (at least until the 1970s, when "farm kitchens" that re-combined meal preparation and informal dining began to reappear in plans for contemporary Amer­i­can houses).

Single uses allowed rooms to be furnished and decorated to facilitate the purpose to which they were intended.

Dining rooms, furnished for dining, contained tables, chairs, and storage/serving furniture. Bedrooms began to be furnished with permanent raised beds, an innovation that placed the bed out of the drafts typical in period homes, and away from most creepy crawlies.

The houses of wealthier citizens often had dedicated rooms not common in middle-class homes: game rooms, for example, furnished for board and card games, and even a billiard room — although billiards was considered a bit risqué in the Vic­tor­ian Age.

Nurseries were common, initially attached to the parents' bedroom but later a separate room furnished for the needs of the infant of the household, of which there would usually be several in succession.

Sanitation and Health

But as influential as privacy and single-use rooms were to the design, building, furnishing, and decoration of Vic­tor­ian houses, sanitation was even more important.

Health issues were the dominant preoccupation of the Vic­tor­ian Age; in no small part because the fledgling sciences of hygiene and sanitation had, for the first time in history, given humanity a fighting chance against the mortal diseases that had ravaged mankind since the dawn of time.

The Germ Theory of Disease

The era saw fundamental advances in understanding disease and its transmittal with the development and validation of germ theory. This better understanding led to the "hygiene movement", which continued for most of four decades, for better hygiene and sanitation.

The early 1800s saw frequent outbreaks of epidemics: the familiar typhus and typhoid fever, but also new and even more frightening diseases imported from Asia: influenza and Asiatic Cholera.

Cholera pandemics erupted in 1817, 1826, 1846, 1865, 1881, and 1902, each lasting several years. No one understood how these diseases arose or how to control them.

Just as deadly, and even more widespread, were common infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, diphtheria, measles, meningitis, Whooping cough, and rubella.

During the Amer­i­can Civil War, two-thirds of all deaths, 660,000 soldiers on both sides, were from infectious disease and dietary deficiencies. An Amer­i­can soldier was more likely to die of diphtheria than he was from being injured in battle.

Sickness had long been thought to be caused by unhealthy air or miasma. But in 1854, an English physician, John Snow, traced the source of a cholera outbreak in London to a single contaminated public water well.

Later investigators such as Frenchman Louis Pasteur and British surgeon Sir Joseph Lister theorized that microscopic particles, which they called "germs," were the means by which disease was transmitted.

They were later able to identify these germs as bacteria, and even to view them under the high-powered microscopes that were becoming available.

Even before researchers had developed much in the way of proof of this new theory of disease, it had become widely publicized in popular journals and largely accepted by the English and North Amer­i­can publics.

Epidemiologists began to figure out how diseases were communicated, and massive sanitation measures followed.

Major efforts to clean up Amer­i­can cities and install safe water and sewer systems were soon underway — so quickly, in fact, that most Amer­i­can cities and towns had sanitary sewer systems and treated water by 1920.

The size and scope of this effort can hardly be appreciated by us today. But imagine rebuilding the entire Interstate Highway system — twice — using absolutely no federal funds. Improvements were financed by cities and towns using bond offerings or special assessments.

Private stock companies built the systems in some localities. The enormous capital investment was paid off through flat monthly or quarterly fees charged to connect to the sanitary water system.

Initially, there were no water meters, so usage was unregulated, which led to enormous waste. The Boston area, for example, used four times more treated freshwater per person in 1900 than it does today. Water meters soon became common everywhere.

Vaccines

In 1759, at the behest of his friend Benjamin Franklin, English physician William Heberden wrote a pamphlet describing the process of smallpox vaccination with "Plain instructions by Which Any Person May Be Able to Perform the Operation."

In 1777, Gem. George Wash­ing­ton ordered the inoculation of every member of the Continental Army. Vaccination at the time meant infecting the patient with the smallpox virus and hoping he or she survived the resulting disease.

Many didn't. And, while the Continental Army, thus immunized, was forever free of the scourge of smallpox, the human cost was horrendous.

In 1798, an English country doctor, Edward Jenner (1749-1823), demonstrated that vaccination with cowpox, a less virulent relative of smallpox, was a safe and equally effective way to prevent the deadlier disease.

Jenner's results were initially ignored, even after he published a pamphlet describing his methods, until they were replicated by noted London physician Henry Cline, after which word of his discovery spread rapidly.

By 1813, the belief in the effectiveness of smallpox vaccination was so firmly established in the United States that Congress created a National Vaccine Agency (now the National Vaccine Program Office of Health and Human Services) to promote vaccination and ordered the Post Office to deliver smallpox vaccine anywhere in the United States postage-free.

The ensuing worldwide search for safe and effective vaccines produced few results for most of a century, primarily because most diseases are not conveniently paired with a milder analog that could become the basis of a vaccine.

It was not until 1879 that Louis Pasteur, while experimenting with Cholera, discovered that exposing the Cholera bacillus (V. cholera) to air weakened it to the point where inoculated patients developed only mild symptoms, that the search for vaccines accelerated.

Over the next century, the often deadly childhood diseases: diphtheria, hepatitis, measles, meningitis, whooping cough (pertussis), polio, and rubella, gradually succumbed to the discovery of effective vaccines.

Mas­sa­chu­setts passed the first law mandating the vaccination of all school children against smallpox in 1885. West Virginia was the last state to enact similar legislation in 1980.

Other nations also required mminimum vacinations.

Germany enacted a compulsory universal smallpox vaccination law in 1874, not just for school children but for everyone. Deaths from smallpox declined precipitously. In 1897, in a population of 54 million Germans, there were just five dealths fro smallpox.

Comprehensive efforts to control epidemics in the U.S. were very successful. The last major cholera outbreak in the continental U.S. was in 1910, and the last influenza pandemic in 1918-1920.

But the birth and rapid spread of COVID-19 in 2020 proved we are not yet near conquering epidemics. And, undoubtedly, there are more yet to come.

But we are making progress.

The last of the crippling infectious childhood diseases, Polio, was conquered by a vaccine in 1952 and, according to the World Health Organization, has been just about eliminated.

Smallpox, the disease that had killed millions of people since it first appeared in Egypt 12,000 years ago, was officially declared eradicated in 1977 after an intense campaign of worldwide vaccinations by the World Health Orgranization of the United Nations. It is the first, and so far the only, infectious disease removed from the planet by the efforts of man.

The "Captain of Death"

The deadliest killer of all, however, is still far from vanquished, and a drug-resistant strain is on the rise again in the U.S. after more than a century of suppression.

Tuberculosis, which appeared over 6,000 years ago in Africa, is estimated to have been the cause of death of fully one-quarter of all the humans who have ever lived. It eluded an effective vaccine until 1921 and adequate treatment until 1943.

It was long thought to be hereditary and not shown to be infectious until 1865, when a French military surgeon, Jean-Antoine Villemin, demonstrated the transmission of the disease in rabbits.

The bacillus that caused the disease was finally isolated and identified by German physician Robert Heinrich Herman Koch, who presented his findings on March 24, 1882, to the Berlin Physiological Society. (March 24 is now World Tuberculosis Day).

In 1890, Koch developed tuberculin, used to diagnose tuberculosis in patients who have not yet shown symptoms. Koch received the Nobel Prize for his discoveries in 1905. Tuberculin is still being used today alongside more recently developed, and more accurate, blood tests.

In Vic­tor­i­an America and right up until the middle of the 20th century, the "treatment" for tuberculosis was isolation in sanataria — facilities that offered rest and improved nutrition as well as fresh air and sunshine, all thought to improve the life expectancy of those infected with the disease.

The first sanitarium in North America, Mountain Sanitarium, was opened in Ashe­ville, North Ca­rol­ina, by Jo­seph Gleits­man in 1875. Room, board, and treatments cost $1,517.00 per month in today's inflated dollars.

Ed­ward Liv­ing­ston Tru­deau's Adir­on­dack Cot­tage San­i­tar­ium at Sar­a­nac Lake, New York, followed in 1884.

The arid climate of the Amer­i­can Southwest was thought to be beneficial to tuberculosis sufferers. Health seekers migrated to the Amer­i­can West in the latter half of the 19th century, right up to World War II.

Dentist, gambler, and gunfighter, John Henry "Doc" Holliday, was one of the more famous individuals who moved West (in late 1872 or 1873) hoping the drier climate would alleviate his symptoms. He died of the disease in 1887 at age 36.

Local officials in cities such as Phoenix and Los Angeles, interested in promoting urban growth, capitalized on this phenomenon by aggressively advertising the recuperative powers of the climate in the southwest desert and southern California.

Public health measures that included the isolation of those infected with the disease, improved hygiene and sanitation practices, and the eradication of bo­vine tuberculosis (M. Bo­vis ), resulted in a steady decline in the rates of infection in the last years of the Vic­tor­ian era.

But serious inroads against the disease had to await the discovery of streptomycin, the first effective treatment, by a graduate student, Al­bert Schatz, at Rut­gers Uni­ver­sity in 1943. How­ever, the last tuberculosis sanitarium, the A. G. Hol­ley Hos­pi­tal in Lan­tana, Flor­i­da, did not close until 2012.

Personal Hygiene

What we now consider common-sense personal hygiene measures for preventing communicable diseases were the subject of widespread, persistent public health campaigns: Bath frequently, wash your clothes, clean your teeth every day, wash your hands before eating, don't share drinking glasses or cups.

Almost all of these were novel notions in 1860, but by 1890 were almost universally accepted as part of the daily fabric of life.

For this, we can thank the Vic­tor­i­ans, who actively fought to eliminate the bad habits and practices that promoted disease and invented most of the products we today associate with personal hygiene.

Toilet Paper

The Vic­tor­i­ans did not invent paper. Its invention is traditionally attributed to Cai Lun (or Ts'ai Lun), a court official of the Han dynasty in third-century China.

The first modern paper machine was also not a Vic­tor­i­an creation. It was invented by Louis-Nicolas Robert in France in 1799. Henry Fourdrinier patented an improved version in Britain in 1806.

But commercially produced toilet paper is Vic­tor­i­an. Joseph Cayetty (or Cayetti) is credited with the invention of "Medicated Paper for the Water-Closet," in 1857 which he advertised as the "Greatest Necessity of the Age".

The paper was sold in packs of 500 sheets rather than in rolls. It was originally marketed as a medical product to treat hemorrhoids. Each sheet was impregnated with "soothing" aloe.

Early toilet paper was what we now call "hard paper", shiny and not very absorbent. It was often imprinted on each sheet with the name of the manufacturer or helpful hints such as "Now wash your hands."^[2]

"Soft" toilet paper was introduced slowly, starting in 1942 with the invention of the two-ply roll by St. Andrews Paper Mill in England, but hard paper persisted on grocery shelves as the less expensive alternative right up to the 1960s when Amer­i­cans finally decided to give preference to their bottoms over their budget.

Toilet paper in rolls was the creation of the Scott Paper Company, which introduced it in 1890. It was not perforated, however. Perforations did not arrive until 1897, first marketed by the Albany Perforated Wrapping Paper Company.

The paper did not become "splinter-free" until 1935. A new process of making the paper introduced by the Northern Tissue Company eliminated the bits of wood left in the paper. It is still on grocery shelves today as Quilted Northern^®, and still splinter-free.

Dental Hygiene

Vic­tor­i­an public health campaigns vigorously promoted once daily toothbrushing, but despite almost universal exhortations, regular toothbrushing did not become a national habit until well into the 20th century.

Vic­tor­i­ans helped it along, however, by inventing toothpaste and figuring out how to produce affordable toothbrushes.

The Toothbrush

Tooth-cleaning utensils in some form or another have been around since the dawn of history. "Chew sticks" prepared from twigs and roots by chewing one end until it shredded into fibers, were used by ancient civilizations like the Babylonians and Egyptians for teeth cleaning and are still used by many cultures in the modern world. Studies have shown that used correctly they can be very effective

The first bristle toothbrush was invented in China around 1498 and had migrated to Europe along the Silk Road by the final decades of the 17th century.

They were expensive, hand-made, luxury items, before their mass production by Englishman William Addis of Clerkenwald, England, who invented the modern tooth­brush while in Newgate Prison for causing a riot.

On his release around 1780, he founded the Addis company, fam­ily-owned until 1996. It is still in the business of making tooth­brushes and other hygiene products in the U.K. as Wisdom Toothbrushes, Ltd.

The first U.S. patent for a tooth­brush was issued in 1857 to Dr. Hi­ram Ni­chols Wads­worth, a graduate of the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery, the first dental school in the world.

A number of Amer­i­can companies began making tooth­brushes, including the Flor­ence Man­u­fact­ur­ing Com­pany of North­amp­ton, Mas­sa­chu­setts, manufacturer of the Pro-phy-lac-tic tooth­brush.

Its handles were made of a synthetic thermoplastic derived from shellac called Flor­ence Com­pound rather than the bone or wood used by other manufacturers. Plastic was considered more sanitary.

Natural boar bristles were not replaced by DuPont's more sanitary nylon bristles (Dr. West's Miracle Tuft brush) until 1938, to the lasting gratitude of boars everywhere.

In a Lemelson-MIT survey from 2003 that asked participants to rank the importance of modern inventions, including the automobile, computer, telephone, and microwave, Americans identified the tooth­brush as the number one invention they could not live without.

Dentifrice

Dentifrice, originally homemade from a variety of ingredients, some pretty disgusting, was sold commercially as toothpowder in a tin by J.W. Lyon in 1866, by 1873, Colgate was manufacturing toothpaste sold in a jar. People generally used a damp toothbrush or a small spoon to scoop the paste from the jar, a practice that encouraged the spread of germs among household members. Toothpowder was generally considered more sanitary and was the preferred form of dentifrice until the 1920s.

The collapsible toothpaste tube did not appear until 1889, introduced by Johnson & Johnson for its Zonweiss toothpaste: it's first consumer product. It bought the tubes, originally used to hold artists' oil paints, from Consolidated Fruit Jar Manufacturing Company of Brunswick, New Jersey.

Commercial Bathing Soap

Soap has an ancient history. It was first made around 2800 B.C.E. by the Babylonians, who discovered the basic method of making soap from animal fats boiled with ashes in water.

Prior to the Vic­tor­i­an age, it was a home-based product, made in small quantities. It was effective but ifteb harsh and not very pleasant.

When Americans bathed once or twice a year, its deficiencies could be tolerated. But the Vic­tor­i­an Age saw the beginning of regular weekly bathing. A better soap was needed.

The call was answered by Amer­i­can industry soon after Mi­chel Eu­gène Chev­reul, a French chemist investigating the properties of fatty acids, figured out the chemical constituents of soap.

Another Frenchman, Nich­o­las Le­Blanc, discovered how to make soda ash (a principal ingredient in making soap) inexpensively and in mass quantities from table salt, for which he was awarded a prize by the French Academy of Sciences.

A process developed by Bel­gi­an chemist, Er­nest Gas­ton Sol­vay in 1861 was faster, easier, and cheaper than the Le­Blanc method. It used salt brine and lime­stone as the key ingredients and was quickly adopted by the soap industry. The basic process is still in use today.

The first Amer­i­can industrial-scale soap company was established in 1806 by Wil­li­am Col­gate. Col­gate & Comp­any, in New York, was able to produce 45,000 lbs. of soap in one batch.

Benjamin Bab­bitt began selling Bab­bitt's Best Soap in individual bars in 1851. Soap had previously been packaged as a powder. He generated interest in his brand by giving away samples in grocery stores and rallies, one of the early uses of a marketing technique that is now nearly universal.

Babbitt was also an inventor, holding over 100 U. S. patents, and a machinist. He designed and built most of the machinery used in his soap factory.

Wil­liam Proc­ter and James Gam­ble formed Proc­ter and Gam­ble to manufacture soap and candles in 1837.

During the Amer­i­can Ci­vil War, the company contracted with the Un­ion Ar­my to supply soap. Un­ion soldiers from every part of the country became familiar with the company's soap and were a ready market for the products after the war.

In 1879, the company launched the world's first "floating bar soap" by a simple process of mixing air into their soap formula.

The resulting Ivory soap was enormously popular. It was promoted as "gentle enough to use on clothing, floors, dishes, and skin", but its use as laundry and floor soap was dwarfed by its popularity as a bathing soap. Since it floated, it did not disappear in the bathwater like other soaps. It was also very profitable since one of its key ingredients, air, cost the company absolutely nothing.

Its popularity continues, but has declined somewhat since the 1970s when showers began to replace tub bathing.

Its tagline since 1881, "99⁴⁴/_100% pure", a registered U.S. trademark, is utter nonsense, but it sold a lot of soap.

By 1870, soapmaking was one of America's fastest-growing industries. Most of the household brands common today were introduced by 1900, including Le­ver Bros. (Life­buoy - 1895), and B.J. John­son Soap Com­pa­ny (Palvmo­live - 1898). Pa­lmo­live is the world's best-selling soap.

Colgate started making soap in 1806 and by 1900 was manufacturing over 3,000 different soaps, perfumes, and dentifrices.

Cash­mere Bou­quet, introduced by Col­gate in 1872, was the first scented toilet soap. (B.J. John­son and Col­gate have now merged into Col­gate-Pal­mo­live.)

"You Cannot Expect to Rate if you Ex­pec­to­rate."

Odious personal habits were attacked vigorously and persistently by health departments using popular media, public service advertisements on billboards and seemingly ubiquitous posters.

Men were discouraged from spitting in public — an unattractive and unsanitary by-product of the widespread use of chewing tobacco.

Tobacco in chewing form slowly gave way to the less excoriated (for the time being) cigar and cigarette.

Spitoons (or more politely "cuspidors"), in every bar, theater, restaurant, railroad carriage, and hotel lobby in 1880, had all but disappeared by 1920.

Ordinances outlawed spitting in the streets and on the floors of shops, theaters, taverns, and other public gathering spots.

The fact that tubercle bacilli could survive in spit for an entire day convinced many Vic­tor­ian ladies to stop wearing their long, trailing dresses into town for fear they might pick up sputum and drag tuberculosis into their homes.

Newspapers, posters, tram car ads, and bulletin boards carried warnings against "the filthy habit." The act very quickly moved from common to "indecent" in the minds of most Vic­tor­i­ans.

Good Housekeeping

Hygiene in the home was a major theme of Vic­tor­i­an society. The search for better hygiene transformed Vic­tor­i­an homes, leading to materials that were more sanitary and easier to clean and appliances to reduce the drudgery of keeping the house spotless.

Dust, Deadly Dust

Dust was the mortal enemy of every Vic­tor­ian homemaker.

It was widely castigated in popular magazine articles and health department circulars as a carrier of disease germs.

Dr. Livingston Howe, in his widely read How to Prevent Sickness: A Handbook of Health, wrote:

"Particles of dust have been likened to chariots on which germs ride, being carried in this way from place to place. It is known to be a fact that a considerable part of the dust on floors, sidewalks, and streets is composed of germs, not all living, to be sure but many of them alive and simply waiting to be planted in favorable soil in order to multiply and produce disease. Such soil is found in the noses, throats, and mouths of people."

There was plenty of dust.

Wood and coal were the principal heating and industrial fuel and they produced clouds of soot and smoke.

The primary means of travel was by horse-drawn conveyance, and horses produced large amounts of waste, which, when dry, turned into a fine powder that traveled with every breeze and permeated everything.

New York City alone had a population of 180,000 horses by 1890, depositing about 3.4 million pounds of manure every single day, along with 40,000 gallons of urine.

Vacant lots in Amer­i­can cities were often piled high in horse manure. The piles could reach the height of a six-story building.

The problem was not just limited to the resulting odor and persuasiveness of powdered horse dung in the air. Dead, injured, or sick horses were often abandoned on city streets. In 1890, New York removed 15,000 of them.

The giant piles of manure were preferred breeding grounds for flies.

Clouds of flies hatched in New York's manure piles, by some estimates, three billion flies per day. The flies were potent disease carriers, believed responsible for outbreaks of typhoid, cholera, dysentery, salmonella, anthrax, and tuberculosis. (All of which was true.)

The horse was such a serious health and sanitation crisis in major cities that the problem of what to do about the beleaguered animal dominated the world's first international urban planning conference held in New York in 1898.

The conference was a failure, however. It declared itself unable to devise a workable solution and disbanded early.

One of the most persuasive arguments in favor of the gasoline-powered automobile was that it was much more sanitary and would eliminate horse dung in urban areas, thereby vastly improving air quality and the overall health of America's cities.

Add to all this the pervasive factory smoke that cloaked Vic­tor­ian cities, and there was plenty of dust, smoke, soot, and haze to go around.

Today, we would call it smog, and if you had it, the EPA would quickly come calling. But in the late 19th century, it was taken for granted as the normal order of an industrial society, the price society paid for the benefits of mass production.

Few cities had zoning laws, and it was common to locate a smoke-billowing factory in a residential area, and worker housing was often built just outside the factory yard.

Live plants in pots were kept in windows. They were thought to trap some of the dust coming in from outside. Muslin was often draped across window openings for the same purpose. On very smoggy days, the muslin was kept damp.

Insect screens became common window accessories, not just to bar insects but to trap large chunks of soot and dirt.

Although wire screening was advertised as early as 1823, it did not begin to replace horsehair and cheesecloth screens until after the Civil War, when the painted screen that resisted rust was developed by Gil­bert and Ben­nett Man­u­fac­turving Co. of Redding, Con­nec­ti­cut.

By the end of the century, the largest manufacturer was E. T. Bur­rowes & Co. of Port­land, Maine, which advertised its wares by listing the prominent citizens who had installed its screens, including the likes of Tho­mas Ed­i­son, George West­ing­house, P. T. Bar­num, and Gro­ver Cleve­land.

Window screens not only made homes more comfortable but, by effectively keeping mosquitoes out of the house, contributed significantly to the end of insect-borne diseases such as malaria and yellow fever in the Uni­ted States by the 1950s.

Combatting dust in the Vic­tor­ian home was an unending battle.

Dusting and sometimes waxing of furnishings became a daily or near-daily ritual. Rugs were swept several times a week, often with the new sweepers introduced by companies like the Bis­sell Car­pet Sweep­er Com­pa­ny.

The pa­tented Bis­sell sweeper kept the dust raised by sweeping contained within the body of the sweeper rather than spreading through the air only to settle back on the carpet later.

It was a huge boon to Vic­tor­ian housekeeping, surpassed only by the "electric suction sweeper", patented by James Spang­ler in 1908.

Spangler was unable to find the capital needed to manufacture the device and sold the patent to Will­iam Hen­ry Hoo­ver. It became the basis of The Hoo­ver Company.

Hoover is now owned by Hong Kong-based Tech­tro­nic In­dus­tries and manufactured in China.

Rug-beathing was an "all hands" operation.

The men and older boys of the household moved the furniture, rolled up the rugs, carried them outside, and hung them on a line.

Women, girls, and young boys did the beating, raising clouds of dust.

The men and boys then rolled the rugs back up, returned them to the room from which they came, and repositioned all the furniture.

The process generally took one or two days.

Unfortunately, in the perpetual war against dust, dust has won. It can be suppressed, but it cannot be vanquished. It remains the triumphant scourge of good housekeeping even today.

The vacuum cleaner has given the modern homemaker a powerful new weapon with which to do battle in the permanent guerrilla war against the insidious nuisance, but it is still a daily or near-daily skirmish to suppress household dust.

As late as 1927, home economist and director of the Good House­keeping Ins­ti­tute, Kath­arine A. Fi­sher, devoted several columns in Good House­keep­ing Mag­a­zine to managing household dust, including instructions for daily dusting and sweeping.

You can still read some of the original Fis­her columns written for Good House­keep­ing at the online library maintained by Pur­due Uni­ver­sity. Particularly interesting are the multiple columns on "Cook­ery", "House­hold En­gi­neer­ing", and "Dust­less Sweep­ing". It is astounding how much of her 1920s common sense applies today.

Sanitary Surfaces

The push for better sanitation and hygiene began to influence house design and furnishing early in the Vic­tor­ian Era. Easily cleaned sanitary surfaces became an increasingly important part of the fabric of the home as the years progressed, particularly in kitchens and bathrooms.

Carpets or bare wood floors in kitchens and bathrooms were replaced with a new material, "oilcloth" (which eventually evolved into the longer-wearing linoleum), which was seamless, easily washed, and considered very hygienic.

Outside of kitchens and baths, carpets were often supplanted by "floorcloths": a painted canvas that was decorative but washable. Where wood floors were retained, they were painted, varnished, or oiled to protect them against germs and make cleaning easier.

The tops of working tables, the Vic­tor­ian equivalent of countertops, were covered in zinc sheeting or por­celain­ized steel, as were drainboards next to kitchen sinks.

Wallpaper or bare plaster walls in kitchens and baths gave way to ceramic tile and washable enamel paints.

".... Can Be Used as a Bathing Tub"

Bathroom fixtures became much more sanitary after the invention in 1882 by Scot­tish-born Da­vid Dun­bar Buick of a method for permanently coating cast-iron with vitreous enamel.

Plumb­ing fixture makers adopted the new process almost immediately.

As soon as the very next summer, John Michael Kohler, an Austrian immigrant and the proud new owner of the She­boy­gan Un­ion Iron & Steel Found­ry, tried Buick's method on a cast-iron livestock watering trough.

The resulting coating was so tough and durable that he featured the product as the centerpiece of his next product catalog, with a small footnote that read: "When furnished with legs, can be used as a bathing tub."

As a livestock watering trough, it never really caught on, but as a "bathing tub", it helped turn Koh­ler Plumb­ing into an Amer­i­can industrial empire.

Standard San­i­tary Man­u­fact­ur­ing Com­pa­ny (later Amer­i­can Stand­ard)^)[3] also experimented with vitreous en­a­mel and, by the 1880s, had developed a technique for coating steel bathtubs evenly by using a device that rotated the tub as the material was applied.

Fixtures of wood with copper, tin, or zinc linings quickly gave way to less elaborately decorated but much more sanitary enamel and porcelain fixtures offered by Kohler and Standard.

At the time of Standard's publication of its pamphlet, The Evolution of the Bath Room, in 1912, comparing the modern sanitary bathroom to the wood and tin bathroom of 30 years prior, the company was able to truthfully claim that "The bathroom of today is infinitely more cleanly, durable and efficient."

Sanitary Window Treatments

Heavy drapes, known to harbor dust and thought to shelter germs, were replaced by lighter window treatments and blinds or roller shades made of oiled or waxed cloth.

Venetian blinds were patented in England by Go­win Knight in 1760, and they had already been installed in Phil­adel­phia's St. Pe­ter's church in time for the Con­sti­tu­ti­on­al Con­ven­tion in 1787.

But before the machine age, blinds were labor-intensive and expensive. The In­dus­tri­al Re­vo­lu­tion and mass production made them affordable to middle-class homeowners. By the late Vic­tor­ian Age, they were becoming widely used in even modest homes.

Roller shades, however, were much more popular and more widely used.

The first window shades, invented in the early 1700s in Scot­land, were pull-up rather than pull-down and not spring-operated. When the shades were opened, they lay in folds on the windowsill. Closing the shades meant raising them on cord guides to cover the window.

The modern spring-operated roller shade was patented by an Amer­i­can, Ste­wart Hart­shorn, in 1864. It was a vast improvement over an earlier design invented by Harshorn's brother and uncle, patented in 1855.

The Ste­wart Hart­shorn Com­pany became the largest manufacturer of roller shades in the U.S. by the turn of the 20th century.

Victorian roller shades were often highly decorated with printed designs, including landscapes, and became a part of the room's decor.

Companies such as W. and J Laugh­ton of Win­sted, Con­nec­ti­cut, advertised "Ele­gant patterns of window Shades of our own painting. Shades painted to order and trimming furnished." Hart­shorn published decorating guides, instructing homemakers and decorators on how to incorporate window shades into interior decoration.

Domestic Order, Organization, and Efficiency

The search for order and domestic efficiency became something of an obsession during the Vic­tor­ian Era. Although the expression "A place for everything, and everything in its place" was coined by Ben Frank­lin long before anyone had heard of Queen Vic­tor­ia, it could well have been the motto of the Vic­tor­ian period.

Keeping an ordered and orderly household was the objective of every housewife, extolled by women's and family magazines in articles next to advertisements for products designed to make cooking and housecleaning more efficient and household duties less laborious.

Nearly every part of a Victorin interior felt the influences of the drive for organization and order: from improved kitchen workspaces to emerging closets to ice doors cut into the side of the house for efficient ice deliveries right into the back of the icebox.

The Time-Clock Society

The Vic­tor­ian Era saw the beginning of our modern timed society.

In the nation's largely agrarian past, time was approximate. Most people did not own clocks, and if they did, the likelihood that they were accurate was very small.

Getting things done on time was not especially important. Cows were milked in the early morning, but if the milking took place at 5:35 rather than precisely at 5:00, it made little difference to the cows.

But with industrialization came the need to be on time.

Hundreds of factory workers needed to get to work at the same time, which gave rise to the invention in 1847 of that horrid little device: the alarm clock.

Everyone needed to know what time it was, not just locally but cont­in­ent-wide.

The railroad system had to accurately schedule trains over large stretches of the country. U.S. and Ca­na­di­an railroads joined together to create the first North Amer­i­can time zones in 1883.

It was not until 1918 that the perpetually tardy U.S. Con­gress finally got around to creating official Stan­dard Time zones.

Employee time, paid for by the hour, had to be used productively in order for a company to stay competitive and profitable.

The efficient use of worker time had become a national obsession by the 1880s, leading to the rise of the "time and motion study" and principles of Sci­en­tif­ic Man­age­ment pioneered by Fred­er­ick Wins­low Tay­lor with Frank and Lil­lian Gil­breth.

Taylor became one of the intellectual leaders of the Ef­fi­cien­cy Move­ment that dominated industrial management theory in the late Vic­tor­ian Age and into the early part of the 20th century.

The Gil­breths added psychology to Tay­lor's purely mechanical measurement methods and studied the work habits and environments of manufacturing and clerical employees in all kinds of industries to find ways to increase their output by making their work easier, faster, and more efficient.

Improving Household Management

In 1841, Cath­er­ine Es­ther Bee­cher (1800-1878) — the sister of Har­riet Bee­cher Stowe of Un­cle Tom's Ca­bin fame — published A Trea­tise on Do­mes­tic Econ­o­my (for the Use of Young La­dies at Home and at School) — generally considered the first home economics textbook — and devoted the next 40 years to promoting education for women. She founded the West­ern Fe­male In­st­i­tute in 1832 in Cin­cin­na­ti and the Amer­i­can Wo­man's Ed­u­ca­tion­al As­so­ci­a­tion in 1852.

The study of home economics began to be added to the curricula of colleges and universities by the middle of the 19th century.

The great land-grant colleges of the Midwest, created by the Mor­rill Act of 1862, saw the need to educate farm wives about the domestic sciences necessary for efficient farm household management.

Universities in Il­li­nois, Io­wa, Kan­sas, Mich­i­gan, Min­ne­so­ta, and Ne­bras­ka led the way in offering courses for women.

Graduates of these programs under the leadership of El­len Swal­low Rich­ards, an Amer­i­can chem­ist and the first woman admitted to the Mas­sa­chu­setts In­sti­tute of Tech­no­lo­gy (MIT), were instrumental in creating the home economics movement.

In 1909, the movement was formally organized by the formation of the Amer­i­can Home Eco­no­mics As­so­cia­tion (now the Amer­i­can Asso­cia­tion of Fam­ily and Con­sum­er Sciences).

Richard's 1887 book, Home San­i­ta­tion: A Man­ual for House­keep­ers, influenced housekeeping practices for the next 50 years.

Meal preparation was the most important part of Vic­tor­ian household management. More time was spent on preparing and cleaning up after meals than on any other household chore.

In consequence, most Vic­tor­ian home economics and management guides were really cookbooks with ideas for the efficient supervision and organization of the household sandwiched in between re­ci­pes.

The bible of household management during most of the Vic­tor­ian era, Is­a­bel­la Bee­ton's Book of House­hold Man­age­ment, ^[4] published in England in 1861, was primarily a cookbook, despite professing to be a "guide of reliable information about every aspect of running a house for the middle-classes".

The original edition devoted just 23 of its over 900 pages to household management. The 2751 entries, nontheless, included tips on how to deal with servants' pay and children's health, and above all, offered a wealth of cooking advice, instructions, and recipes.

It sold 60,000 copies in its first year and two million copies by 1868.

Mrs. Beeton died in 1865, but the book lived on, steadily increasing in length through additions by its editors. In the 1906 edition, it exceeded 2,000 pages (not including advertising, of which the book contained a generous amount).

The book is still in print and still being edited and revised. ^[5] The current edition barely resembles any Handbook published during Mrs. Beeton's lifetime.

It was only at the very end of the period when principles of industrial design and ergonomics, and especially time and motion studies, were applied to household tasks that any real progress in domestic organization and efficiency was made.

While the groundwork for this revolution was laid during the Vic­tor­ian period, it did not bear fruit until after World War I, when the Vic­tor­ian period had already passed into history.

Decorating the Vic­tor­ian Home

Victorian decoration was greatly influenced by the social philosophy of the age. Most of the brilliant early designers of the era were also moral philosophers and social and political reformers who saw their life's work as improving the lot of fellow citizens by making their surroundings more refined and beautiful, thereby encouraging a more refined and genteel human nature.

These ideas were not new to the Victorians. By some accounts, they pre-dated the Ren­ais­sance of the 15th century. But, in an era in which resources were scarce and social needs many, there needed to be some moral justification for using scarce resources for mere decoration …

Footnotes:

Rev. 11/14/25