Victorian Drawing Rooms – Private Refuges from Public Life

With more people today working from home, it’s interesting to note that, thanks to the Industrial Revolution, the Victorian era marks the separation of the workplace from the domestic sphere.

In Dickens’ Great Expectations, the law clerk Wemmick  says, “The office is one thing, and private life is another. When I go into the office, I leave the Castle [his home] behind me, and when I come into the Castle,  I leave the office behind me.”

Ah, the Industrial Revolution! Who would have guessed that those “dark satanic mills” of Byron’s poem would have revolutionized every aspect of the way people lived, down to the very style of their houses?

Before the Industrial Revolution, many middle- and lower-class people had previously earned money by working on piece-work at home. But with the rise of industry, workers began to perform their work in the factory or the shop – separate from their living spaces.

Furthermore, the mass production of goods allowed the middle classes to finally have access to cheaper versions of the items that had previously only been accessible to the wealthy. All sorts of decorative items were available – rugs, furniture, wallpaper and artwork – which could be easily acquired and used to display the interests and personality of the residents. Therefore, a plain, unadorned home was considered a sign of bad taste. Victorian homes boasted as much décor as possible.

Life in the public world began to move faster, with telegraphs and trains and machinery of all kinds speeding up the pace of business. Workers, meaning men, had to move faster too, as competition demanded more speed, more efficiency, and more aggression.  Not only were homes now places of adornment and personal display, but they were also pools of domestic tranquility, as people sought to create in their homes a kind of stasis, a permanent refuge in which to slow down and rest.

But even in a private refuge, there must be a place for “the World” to enter, and that place was the drawing room, which was the central formal room in which the mistress of the house entertained visitors. Since homes reflected their owner’s status in life, it was extremely important that the drawing room was neither too modest (which would show a carelessness or lack of self-respect in the homeowners) nor too over-decorated. Sharp-eyed critics of the time were quick to deplore a scenario in which a lowly clerk would be expected to make himself at home in a room fit for the richest of bankers.

As Judith Flanders says in Inside the Victorian Home, “Extravagance was immoral, thrift was moral; the greatest good was knowing one’s place and living up to it precisely.”

This requirement to be exactly who you seemed to be might also have been a reaction to the increasing levels of social mobility – in ages past, everyone knew everyone else’s families, what role they played in the life of the community, and what their status was. But now that a train ride to the city might allow a person to shed their old identity and assume a new one, it became urgently important to have ways of knowing who one was dealing with.

The danger of accepting a person at face value is one of the central issues in Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now.  In that novel, the fabulously wealthy financier Augustus Melmotte arrives suddenly in London from the Continent, and many of the penniless English aristocrats of the day are dazzled by his display. They take him at his word, and welcome him into their homes even though they know very little about him.

Sadly, however, it turns out that he’s not the man they think he is—and the trusting aristocrats and bankers of London fall victim to his wiles. Of course, they are just as much to blame, since it is their greed that leads them to accept him without checking out his history.

Therefore, even though new technologies, new systems and new ideas were cropping up every day, most Victorian people instinctively reacted negatively to new things, especially with respect to the home and private life. John Ruskin, one of the foremost art critics and taste-makers of the day, reviewed Holman Hunt’s painting The Awakening Conscience, which showed a kept woman in her lavishly decorated room, by saying that everything in the picture showed a “terrible lustre” of “fatal newness.” The woman is suddenly realizing the error of her ways and that error is visible, to Victorian eyes, in all the new things that she has surrounded herself with.

Contrariwise, things that were old, handed down, or slightly shabby represented the homeowner’s connection with the past, and therefore were virtuous. In the drawing room, the excess of memorabilia, souvenirs and decorations were meant to be a visual representation of the family’s connection with the past and stability.

From another angle, Victorians were beginning to appreciate the art and design of different cultures, notably the Japanese. One of the main influences came from artist James MacNeill Whistler introducing Japanese art and design ideas to pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rosetti, who adopted the ideas whole-heartedly. But of course, the craze for all things Japanese caught on in other ways, too, and by the 1880s, no Victorian parlor could be found without at least one Japanese fan mounted upon the wall.

And so the Victorian drawing room contained elements of both old and new, both domestic and foreign, and both cozy and formal. It was the public room of the house, where visitors could be entertained, but it was also the first step into the private domain of domestic tranquility—Victorian style.

By William Holman Hunt – eAEe8oI1HIMufA at Google Cultural Institute, zoom level maximum Tate Images Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13454424