The history of leisure and pleasure in the eighteenth century has largely been written as one of commercialization and public places. Historians have examined an array of commercial spaces of entertainment outside the home, most notably museums, theatres, concerts, coffee houses, pleasure gardens, and tea houses. Over the course of the eighteenth century, such places became more numerous and diverse. The ‘commercialization of leisure’, as this process has been dubbed, has been the primary narrative for analysing leisure in late Stuart and Georgian England.Footnote 1
These novel spaces have rightly attracted attention: they were spaces that drew both patrons and comment in the eighteenth century. The emphasis historians have placed on these venues has, however, often obscured the importance of people's homes. The domestic sphere appealed to people as they decided how to occupy their leisure time. It was not the inferior alternative to public spaces. Diaries reveal that, by the 1760s, the home was an essential space for recreation for both genders of propertied person.Footnote 2 People at all levels of propertied society visited or received visitors almost every day of the year. By contrast, few were likely to set foot in a public space for recreation every day. Domestic recreation was a daily occurrence, even for clubbable types like James Boswell, and the appeal of domestic sociability was tremendous.Footnote 3 George Macaulay, for example, was a City of London alderman with a young family who divided his time between London and Bedford. During one visit to the capital, he explicitly stated a desire for the family setting when discussing a dinner for Alderman Curtis given by two of Macaulay's clubs, ‘the united Clubs of The Johns and The Rustics’. Macaulay ‘prefered a more domestic dinner with [his friends] Mr [&] Mrs Parkinson in the Boro’.Footnote 4 When his wife accompanied him to London Macaulay chose to dine at home en famille practically every day.Footnote 5
At the same time as historians have exaggerated the importance of public recreation, they have also misunderstood who used the home as a space for recreation. Whilst women were closely linked with the home and housekeeping, the relative under-representation of men in historians' analyses of domestic space is problematic. A nineteenth century marked by a cult of domesticity contrasts with an eighteenth-century when men spent their time in the company of other men at clubs and in taverns and coffee houses. John Tosh states that passing time in the company of other men was ‘the traditional leisure occupation of men at all levels of society’.Footnote 6 This view has been challenged from a nineteenth-century perspective, but also by eighteenth-century historians. Most men spent significant parts of their lives within homes.Footnote 7 While men did spend more time in coffee houses, taverns, or steakhouses than women, most of their leisure time was not spent engaged in homosocial recreation in public. Even unmarried merchants spent evenings at home entertaining male friends (and often their wives), rather than at the pub or coffee house.Footnote 8 The frequency and nature of domestic recreation differed by gender, age, and socio-economic status, but claims of a shift in behaviour between the 1760s and the 1820s receive little support when lifestyle routines are compared quantitatively across the period.Footnote 9
Throughout this article I use ‘leisure’, ‘amusement’, and ‘recreation’ interchangeably in a stylistic choice that diverges from eighteenth-century practice. In the eighteenth century, ‘amusement’ and ‘recreation’ had very similar meanings. ‘Leisure’ denoted an opportunity to do something, but not necessarily a pleasurable activity. In Georgian England, ‘leisure’ was a category of time that included amusement or recreation, but it also covered unpaid duties and obligations. ‘Recreation’ or ‘amusement’ referred to activities freely undertaken for enjoyment and which form the focus of this study. Enjoyment and pleasure are subjective feelings, so there can be no conclusive list of activities that count as ‘recreations’. Nonetheless, people generally expressed pleasure when they were involved in domestic sociability, card games, listening to music, attending parties and some types of reading, writing and needlework.
This article uses records of such domestic sociability and recreation as a basis for exploring domestic space and its uses, by upper- and middle-class Londoners of both sexes. Terming domestic space ‘private’ and regarding it as a distinctly feminine sphere have previously both been recognized as inadequate – judgements this article endorses – since homes were evidently permeated by all sorts of visitors, on business and pleasure.Footnote 10 I suggest that the private-residence-based leisure activity of upper and middle class Londoners should be understood not as either public or private, but more neutrally as ‘domestic’. The evidence presented here points to a new framework for thinking about rooms in a house and how access was determined for different people in various situations. In what follows, I suggest how an analytical framework might be developed that can better employ insights into how access to space was determined by examining ways in which hosts evaluated visitors based on class differences, gender roles, life stage or marital status, and intimacy.
My analysis is based on a sample of forty-five diaries written by men and women living in London between 1760 and 1820. Diaries have been selected that have daily entries and which provide some sense of those with whom the diarist interacted and in what activities they participated. Though diaries were undoubtedly literary constructions that might be used to record aspirations, rather than actual activities in everyday life, comparing diaries with letters, court cases, and other accounts of daily practice suggests that the evidence presented here reflects usual, quotidian activities. The diaries accurately capture attitudes towards spaces even if they do not record events as they actually happened. Focusing on individuals' experiences allows us to see how lifestyles typical of large numbers of people were shaped by factors such as type of residence, age, and gender. By looking at the complex ways in which factors combine in individual lives, we can investigate how decisions about spatial use were made.Footnote 11 Working with a large sample allows for several detailed examples to be juxtaposed to understand their common features and the ways of thinking that shaped uses of space.
Space has primarily been examined as something to be categorized as public or private. In Habermas's formulation, the authentic public sphere was wholly occupied by men and contrasted with the private, intimate, bourgeois family where men, women, and children interacted.Footnote 12 At the same time, gender historians independently came to analyse the ‘separates spheres’ ideology that existed in literature produced in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This literature was particularly associated with the middle class and drew sharp distinctions between the home as a space for moral and emotional life and the outside world where rational activity and market forces were most important.Footnote 13 Eighteenth-century uses of terms like ‘public’ or ‘private’ are, however, slippery. Scholars have demonstrated that the concepts of public and private were relational, rather than absolute, and the characteristic flexibility of the public/private dichotomy has allowed historians to deploy it to address many issues in most areas of eighteenth-century life.Footnote 14 But this flexibility has also led historians to try to force the terminology to do too much. Whilst some discussions have focused on eighteenth-century perceptions, use by historians does not always correlate with eighteenth-century uses. Scholars have invoked public and private to discuss types of institutions based on what historians take to be broad patterns of use (for instance, the public gardens, theatres, and coffee houses as contrasted with private houses). At the same time, the public and private distinction is used to analyse spaces within institutions, paying attention to more or less public spaces within homes.Footnote 15 When analysing spaces within institutions, public or private-ness has been taken to be an attribute of the space.Footnote 16
More detailed analysis of room use has suggested a need for different approaches to the use of domestic space. Jennifer Melville has analysed the relative privacy of rooms by investigating how people moved through houses, but she also defined the house as entirely private on the grounds that hospitality was always by invitation.Footnote 17 Hence everything within the home was private, but some spaces were more private than others. Melville hints at the weakness of the public/private paradigm: the terminology is relational and confusing and the uses of space fluid.Footnote 18
My approach to household space grows out of Amanda Vickery's recent work on boundaries and the issue of control. For Vickery, historians should not focus on how space happened to be used at any given moment, but should rather investigate who had the power to determine access to space. In this context, the external boundaries of a building were particularly significant, partly because, in shared houses, external boundaries were the most easily policed thresholds.Footnote 19 Yet Vickery's approach does not probe how decisions about restricting access were made. Since an individual either had control over a boundary or not, we are left with a limited understanding of what people did with power to control spaces.
Vickery gave a partial answer to this question in earlier work where she examined the use of domestic space through the concepts of civility and vulgarity.Footnote 20 In her examination of visitors to the home of Elizabeth Shackleton, a member of the Lancashire gentry, Vickery demonstrates that the extent to which rooms or areas welcomed outsiders depended on the visitors' identities and whether they behaved in a civil manner. In this formulation, rooms lay on a continuum between public and private. Yet the evidence in Shackleton's diaries on the ‘civility’ and ‘vulgarity’ of her visitors provides only the most general outline of how domestic spaces were used. Mrs Shackleton's parlour would have been the first port of call for many visitors to the house. When they entered, guests implicitly agreed to behave appropriately. Bad behaviour from servants was more acceptable in the servants' hall than in the parlour. But apart from the boundary between areas where Shackleton spent her time and spaces reserved for servants and service, we do not get a sense of whether different behaviours were expected in different areas of the home or whether people who behaved well and were from respectable backgrounds would have had access to other areas of the house.Footnote 21 Greater specificity about the habitual uses of interior spaces of Shackleton's home, combined with more detail about how the use of space varied between occasions, would have illuminated the effects of ‘civility’ and ‘vulgarity’ more precisely.
When we consider how hosts evaluated whether to provide access to specific spaces or not, we can begin to distinguish between relatively fixed, enduring attributes of spaces and what changed from one day or hour to the next. Furthermore, diaries and letters recording hosts' behaviours should make us responsive to gendered uses of space and other long-standing assumptions, and to employ terms that are descriptive and operate independently of gendered or other assumptions. Despite scholars' attempts to break an insufficiently nuanced connection of ‘domestic’ with ‘private’ or ‘feminine’ that emerged from investigations of the home as a space of production and labour, the home still carries gendered connotations impeding analysis and short-circuiting a need for separate investigation.
My approach to space primarily builds on the work of Anthony Giddens and Allan Pred. Anthony Giddens has outlined a concept of time-geography to demonstrate the ways in which spaces generate significance.Footnote 22 Giddens offers two notions that underlie time-geography: locales (the use of space to provide the settings for interaction) and presence availability (the capacity for different people to be in the same locale at the same time). The opportunities for people to be in the same place at the same time (or ‘co-presence’) result in ‘the zoning of time-space in relation to routinized social practices’ or ‘regionalization’. The significance of rooms changes depending on location, but their importance also changes through time. Thus different areas of the home have habitual uses or significance, but the presence of specific people or objects can temporarily change the significance of such spaces. The significance of locations within the home is created by a combination of time of day, activities undertaken, objects present, and identities of people involved. Any framework for understanding space must include this flexibility in the uses of space, something that Erving Goffman's idea of front stage/back stage lacks. Goffman suggests a fairly rigid division between front and back regions, which was perhaps a feature of twentieth-century American homes, but is less applicable to Georgian London.Footnote 23 Goffman's incorporation of knowledgeable human actors does, however, complement Giddens' work. Goffman treats human agents as intelligent and conscious users of space who respond to their surroundings by shaping their modes of self-presentation.Footnote 24 What Goffman's understanding of human actors lacks is an account of how actors become knowledgeable.
Building on Giddens's work, Pred argues that we must add socialization to the equation to show how spaces gained the habitual uses that Giddens and Goffman take for granted. Pred demonstrates that human behaviours result from past activity. Human actions result from past activity and shape future behaviour simultaneously.Footnote 25 People are knowledgeable actors who shape their surroundings as they are shaped by those surroundings. This article explores the ways that socialization shaped behaviour, but also how actors were flexible in their uses of space. By combining the theories of modern sociologists, we can create more adequate tools for understanding eighteenth-century life than any single theory on its own. People worked within their understandings of propriety, the nature of individual relationships, and conceptions of social status to attribute significance to spaces; we cannot assume that spaces determined users and uses. We can see users of space adapting and changing the ways they employed their spaces over time and learning expectations for behaviour in different areas of the home.
After introducing the diarists who provide the source material for this study, I explore the nature and extent of the domestic space available to these diarists. This space varied considerably, both in terms of scale (assessed here as the number of rooms) and in terms of diarists' control over such space. People had different levels of opportunity to distinguish between spaces to which they did, and did not, admit outsiders and to accord those areas' specialized uses. Even the smallest homes occupied by diarists exhibit differentiation in spaces. Different uses of those rooms are revealed by furnishings and by activities that commonly occurred in them. Engaging in a thematic examination of the ways decisions about access were made for sociable and leisure uses, I demonstrate that although rooms might habitually be used in particular ways, their use and significance were also determined by contingent circumstances. Since the use of space was often determined by someone's physical condition or the spaces that were available at that moment, the meanings of spaces were shifting and contingent.
I
The most important factor that determined how Londoners used domestic space – and the one that shapes responses to the others – is the arrangement people made for their accommodation. Vickery has begun to assess the impact of types of accommodation on privacy by examining how people in different situations could exert control over areas within their homes. In particular, Vickery has drawn attention to differences between lodgers and householders. For the working Londoner lodging in a house, interior thresholds were extremely permeable.Footnote 26 The landlady generally crossed them at will, though lodgers' reactions remain unclear. The sample of diarists includes both householders and lodgers and offers insights into ways access was controlled.
The diarists whose records of daily life provide much of the evidence for this study were primarily drawn from London's wealthiest and most socially important families.Footnote 27 They range from the nobility to a relatively affluent upholsterer. Due to accidents of record survival, most diaries come from either wealthy merchants, members of the lesser gentry, or noble women, whose residences extended from the area around St. Paul's Churchyard in the City westwards to Hyde Park. Most diarists considered here lived south of Oxford Street and north of the Thames, though some, such as merchant Thomas Bridge or Elizabeth Tyrrell (wife of a high-ranking member of the Corporation of the City of London), divided their time between houses in the City and on the periphery.
Historians have begun to look at the capital's distinctive housing market, but work on the London town house has not yet examined their use in sufficient detail.Footnote 28 For seasonal residents of London's west end, domestic space in the metropolis functioned as a space for displaying awareness of fashion.Footnote 29 In his comparison of town and country houses, Michael Port found that people spent more on furnishing town houses than on country houses and that the country house provided provisions for the town house.Footnote 30 For seasonal residents, the London town house provided a backdrop for showing off fashion and hosting ability in ways that their other residences did not. Yet the behaviours of London's permanent residents show that their homes were also spaces of sociability and display.Footnote 31 London played a special role in the culture of Georgian Britain, but patterns of spatial use for permanent residents would probably have been familiar to residents of other urban settings.
The diarists fall into three basic lifestyle groups. In this case, lifestyle is defined as frequency of hosting, visiting, and trips to different sorts of commercial spaces, such as the theatres, the opera, taverns, and coffee houses. The first encompasses those adhering to a ‘west-end’ lifestyle which was primarily practised by the gentry and nobility resident in the west end of town, characterized by high rates of visiting, particularly for women, and high levels of attendance at theatres, the opera, Ranelagh, and elite men's clubs such as Brooks's. Most clubs apart, these were spaces used by women who were more frequent visitors and hostesses than men; these activities provided alternatives to men's clubbing and attendance at parliament. Women's visiting and men's clubbing were often homosocial activities, but heterosociability was a daily experience.
Next are adherents of the ‘merchant-professional’ lifestyle, typical of residents of the City or those who worked in the City. Such people visited and attended public spaces relatively less often, except for coffee houses and taverns, which were more prominent for men in this group than in the former. The wives of men who followed such a lifestyle behaved in something closer to the lifestyle of the former ‘west-end’ group, though they visited ‘public places’ less frequently and spent less money on them than the gentry and nobility. Elizabeth Tyrrell, for example, went for walks and rides in the fashionable west-end parks and took her children to the theatre and opera.Footnote 32 Merchants' wives appear to have visited family and friends while men visited people to whom they were connected by business. Household obligations were clearly a prominent part of their daily lives, but these women were certainly not tied to the home.
Finally, there was an all-male, clubbable lifestyle, which was less common than the other two among diarists and probably among society at large, though historians have hitherto seen it as typical of male activity. The clubbable patterns could be pursued by men of all ages from propertied or middling backgrounds, married or unmarried. Unsurprisingly, clubbable diarists reveal a high rate of club attendance. None seems to have been intensively engaged in domestic activity, though all received visitors and visited others' homes. Whilst enjoying club life, none made frequent appearances at theatres and since adherents to this lifestyle tended to occupy clubs, coffee houses, and taverns, there is no female equivalent.
Turning to domestic space, although use of the home differed between adherents of ‘west-end’ and ‘merchant-professional’ lifestyles, the two groups shared many domestic activities. For both, visiting was a key pursuit.Footnote 33 Visits might involve only sociable conversation, but could often include consumption of hot drinks or alcohol. Card games were also a significant domestic activity, as was needlework for women. All these activities were conducted both in the company of visitors and with the household family only, by both hosts and guests.Footnote 34 Indeed, there are few activities pursued in the home with only the household family present that did not frequently occur in the presence of visitors. Equally, pastimes engaged in with extra-household company were often undertaken solely by the residents. The home was not simply a space where a family could retreat from the wearying world; rather, the domestic sphere was the site of a set of activities and behaviours shared across many different houses.
Three general categories of housing arrangement cut across the lifestyle groups: ownership, renting, and lodging. There is a clear distinction between owner-occupiers (referred to below simply as ‘owners’) and renters/lodgers: the person in possession of a freehold or leasehold controlled both access to the house and the condition of the property. Only around a third of diarists in the sample owned their London home, despite mostly falling in the upper 5 per cent of the population in terms of wealth and status. The overall proportion of Londoners who owned their property is unclear, but is assumed to have been small. Dorothy George asserts that people rented, but provides no evidence to support the argument.Footnote 35 More recently, Craig Spence has suggested that few owned their homes in the 1690s and that many houses were owned by small-scale, local landlords who lived off the rents of a handful of homes.Footnote 36 It is unlikely that this situation would have been different in the eighteenth century for the gentry and aristocracy.Footnote 37 Most owners in this sample were merchants who owned houses in semi-rural villages and commuted to the City.
Even without owning property, someone who rented had unfettered access to all spaces within the house or portion rented. Like an individual who owned property where they resided, renters were classified as ‘householders’.Footnote 38 A renter generally governed the external doors of a property and maintained ‘general control and dominion over the whole house’.Footnote 39 Lodgers, by contrast, paid for use of a bedroom and, in some instances, other rooms in the property. The lodgers' space was neither entirely their own, nor completely someone else's.Footnote 40 In the case of members of the group examined in this study, the landlord/landlady did not invade the bedroom or parlour that a lodger occupied without the lodger's permission.Footnote 41 At the same time, there do not appear to have been firm rules for the balance of the control of space in a house between landlord/landlady and lodger(s).
In contrast to space at the disposal of most of the diarists who were householders (or the wife or child of a householder), the space allotted to lodger-diarists was minimal. For the lodgers in the sample, James Boswell, Samuel Curwen, Job Knight, and James Ware, personal space was limited to one or two rooms.Footnote 42 Living in just one room, Samuel Curwen used his space as both a bedroom and a sitting room. Curwen described his room in a property in Furnival's Inn Court in Holborn as ‘conveniently large’, even though it offered less space than his previous situation where he had been able to use the dining room and lower front parlour for keeping company.Footnote 43 Operating in a less restricted setting, Boswell had a sitting room in addition to his bedroom and also the ground floor parlour for his sole use in the mornings.Footnote 44
The difference between a renter and a lodger was therefore crucial when it came to controlling access to domestic space. A lodger was in the home of another and had to behave according to expectations of the landlord or landlady. Boswell's diary provides good examples of how his use of the house was circumscribed by his landlord's rules. In one instance, Boswell returned home too late at night and was locked out, meaning that he was forced to sleep elsewhere and return the next day.Footnote 45 More dramatically, Boswell decided to move from his rooms in Downing Street after a confrontation with his landlord, following Boswell's decision to entertain friends late one night in a room that he was only supposed to use in the morning.Footnote 46 While he considered the landlord's behaviour a great affront, Boswell had violated terms agreed when he had moved in.
Among propertied society, people who owned or rented an entire house could be relatively specialized in their use of individual rooms. A basic outline of the sort of house inhabited by most of the diarists sampled here includes three or four floors plus a cellar and a garret.Footnote 47 The master, mistress, and family occupied the middle three or four floors with the top and bottom of the house occupied primarily with servants' quarters, kitchens, and storage. The ground floor was the most likely space for keeping company. Many houses still had shops at the front of the ground floor. Rooms above a shop might be rented out, but could also house the shopkeeper and his/her family. None of the diarists examined kept a shop, though some worked in their house (John Eliot) or in adjacent counting houses (Thomas Bridge).Footnote 48 The front ground floor room was therefore probably a parlour or dining room. The fore rooms of the house on the lower floors were most commonly used for hospitality. Some houses (e.g. Bridge's house in Bread Street in the City) retained a semi-antiquated layout that placed the dining room at the front of the first floor above the ground, but this was not usually the case in newer homes.
II
Diaries and letters reveal habitual differentiations of space and patterns of use that suggest how access within homes was controlled by lodgers and householders. Householders could set aside rooms for different uses, but rooms could be used for different activities at different times. For lodgers, patterns of use reveal that all domestic space was differentiated temporally (i.e. using it in different ways at different times) rather than geographically. The domestic sphere was an intensely sociable space for propertied diarists no matter how many rooms they controlled.
Small spaces clearly provided less opportunity to give rooms specialized uses. Nevertheless, inventories of lodgings and accommodations with just two or three rooms suggest a division in use between a bedroom, where little daily activity occurred outside of sleeping, and a second room where entertaining, dining, reading, and other activities occurred. The inventory of Joshua Blew's rooms in Inner Temple thus reflects a preference for spending time in the ‘dining room’, as labelled in his case, rather than the bedroom or kitchen.Footnote 49 The kitchen contained five chairs, perhaps reflecting its use for informal dining or storage. The bedroom contained only a bed and blankets, but his closet contained a chest of drawers, a mirror, a writing desk, and a table. Blew's closet seemingly served as a space for business. Meanwhile his dining room contained eight chairs, a card table, a pillar and claw table, a tea board, and tea chest. The room was decorated with six pictures of ‘sea weeds’, twenty-two ‘India pictures’, four casts in plaster of Paris, and a pair of pictures of Julius Caesar and Domitian. The austerity of the bedroom and closet in comparison with the dining room suggests a strong preference for keeping company in the decorated dining area.
Even when they controlled less space than Blew, lodgers used their facilities to welcome guests. Boswell had companions George Dempster and Andrew Erskine to visit regularly and guests called to see him in bed or in his sitting room when he was confined with venereal disease in February 1763. There would have been no space for large dinners, but Boswell commonly hosted breakfasts, prepared by his landlord's servant.Footnote 50 The amount of equipment necessary to assemble breakfasts or suppers, meals consisting of cold meat, bread, and cheese, was minimal. Samuel Curwen celebrated the fact that his room in Furnival's Inn Court included furniture ‘to dress’ breakfast and supper and make tea, as well as ‘necessaries of table’ when he chose to dine at home.Footnote 51 Fireplaces could easily be fitted with a kettle for boiling water for hot drinks and any flat surface could be used to prepare and serve breakfast or supper.Footnote 52 Charles de Coetlogon bought a kettle specifically for his bedroom on 28 October 1818.Footnote 53 Boswell and Curwen were limited in the hospitality they could offer, but there was still space for peers to come for a simple meal or conversation. Nevertheless, a good relationship with landlords or landladies was essential if hosting was to be frequent or extensive.
When at home, but outside their rooms, the lodger-diarists were often joined by their landlady or landlord. While Boswell loathed spending evenings with a landlord whom he found tedious and suspected would taint his reputation, there was little choice if he wanted to spend an evening at home in the sitting room. High society it was not, but Boswell's evenings with his landlords, the Terries, were seemingly merry. On 18 December 1762, Boswell drank tea and sat a whole evening writing in a room with them, before they ate supper, had a glass of punch, read Pope, and sang a song.Footnote 54 Curwen also enjoyed lively evenings with his landlady and other lodgers at both his residences. Evenings generally involved conversation and card games; Curwen left his lodgings in Castle Street after spending too many evenings listening to the excessively passionate diatribes of a fellow lodger.Footnote 55 In his residence at Furnival's Inn Court, Curwen became sufficiently friendly with the landlady and her daughter to be repeatedly invited to spend evenings in their rooms. He returned the favour by inviting them into his room for cards and conversation.Footnote 56 His diary suggests that time spent together was not always welcome, particularly since the landlady's ‘shocking ignorance of whist’ made her a tedious partner for cards.Footnote 57 Thus lodgers used both their own space to host friends and the common spaces of the house to interact with guests and others living in the property. Despite their resourcefulness, lodgers brought fewer people into their homes than renters or owners. Even when lodgers did host visitors on a regular basis, they were limited to particular types of hospitality by a lack of space and equipment.
Unlike lodgers who controlled their space, but had to be flexible in its use, householders could differentiate their rooms to a greater degree. The diarists examined lived in houses with at least one room devoted to entertainment and some had several. A large, formal parlour for less familiar guests or larger gatherings was often complemented by a smaller parlour for day-to-day living and where more intimate connections might be received. In Thomas Bridge's case, by 1804 he had a ‘small breakfast parlour’, a dining room, and a drawing room.Footnote 58 The presence of a drawing room sometimes denoted a slightly more upscale residence, but not exclusively. The Georgian parlour was both a social space and a living space for the household family. Card tables, musical instruments, tea tables, and game boards lived in parlours and drawing rooms.
Bridge's drawing room appears to have been equipped for entertaining and other inventories reveal a similar arrangement.Footnote 59 Among the items in Bridge's parlour were a harpsichord, a pair of card tables, and two tea trays, alongside items that could attract visitors' interest: a fossil on the mantle piece and sixteen pictures. The thirteen chairs found in the room would have accommodated a large party and suggest that the room was substantial.Footnote 60 Other parlours show similar diversity of recreational goods, which sometimes demonstrated a scientific bent.Footnote 61 The large number of objects is reminiscent of crowded parlours more commonly associated with the Victorian middle class, rather than the supposedly bare interiors of the Georgian era.Footnote 62 The parlour or drawing room has been recognized as a carefully decorated space in the eighteenth-century home, but it was also a focus for collections and objects to generate discussion. Even if literature on interior design did not acknowledge the importance of decorations for demonstrating individual identity as it would in the Victorian period, unique collections were on display to demonstrate residents' taste and originality.Footnote 63
Besides a main room for entertaining, inventories reveal recreational goods in most other rooms, suggesting that activities were diffused throughout the house, or that rooms used for entertaining lacked sufficient storage.Footnote 64 No front/back differentiation is apparent in the distribution of recreational goods. One inventory lists card tables in the servants' quarters and in a dressing room, though the dressing room did not have any chairs.Footnote 65 More conventionally, houses in Queen Square and Bruton Street, Berkeley Square, contained recreational objects in the back parlour; in Bruton Street, the back parlour contained a harpsichord.Footnote 66 There was also a ‘back drawing room’ with a table for the card game ‘loo’ and a pair of card tables. The back parlour in Queen Square may have been a gentleman's room, as it contained bookshelves, a desk, a fishing rod, pistols, and walking sticks in addition to a card table.Footnote 67 A similar function may have been served by the ‘study’ in William Beauchamp's house in Tottenham, which contained a backgammon board, a fishing rod, and a ‘seliscope’.Footnote 68 Libraries containing rocking chairs and closets with squirrel- and bird-cages suggest that recreational objects could be kept and used almost anywhere. This diffusion of goods through the house reveals an interior landscape providing numerous different spaces for recreation.
In most houses, the dining room was the most important space for social recreation after the drawing room/parlour. Unlike the multipurpose drawing room/parlour where diverse objects could be found, items in the dining room generally related to food consumption. Thomas Bridge's dining room contained a pair of bird-cages, but other items were cutlery, chairs, and tables.Footnote 69 The room was more elaborately decorated than bedrooms or the service areas of the house; it contained a carpet, curtains, a bureau and bookcase, sideboards, and a pier glass. Decoration was important for such an essential sociable space, for amidst eating, drinking, and chatting, the primary activities in the room focused on the tables.
By the second half of the eighteenth century, it was more common for upper floors to be taken up entirely by bedrooms, dressing rooms, and closets. Uses of these rooms have been seen as distinctive of the eighteenth century. Bedrooms were no longer commonly used for receiving visitors, except for women who were lying-in after childbirth and who would only have received female guests.Footnote 70 Men and women might allow certain others into bedrooms during periods of illness, though not everyone would have been received when the host was unwell. The function of the closet in early modern and eighteenth-century England has recently attracted considerable attention, particularly from literary critics.Footnote 71 Closets served an impressive variety of functions, but have come to represent a need for solitary space. Closets attached to master bedrooms became available for the master's or mistress's use in the eighteenth century as the practice of having servants sleep in the closet adjacent to their master declined and bell pulls increased in popularity.Footnote 72 Robert St George has argued that the closet was a preparatory space used for business, meditation, and even bathing.Footnote 73 The inventory of Joshua Blew's rooms in Inner Temple (c. 1765) supports the suggestion that closets could be used for reading and letter writing, as well as accounting or other business activities.Footnote 74 John Eliot and Jacob Hagen may have been in their closets working on their accounts when they spent mornings ‘writing.’Footnote 75 In contrast with closets, which seem to have been widespread in houses of propertied society, dressing rooms were found only in houses of the gentry and nobility and may have been used for intimate guests, as well as for dressing and physical preparation. Bedroom, dressing room, and closet were generally reserved for the exclusive use of the family for sleeping, dressing, bathing, reflecting, reading, or writing.
III
Historians have primarily attempted to incorporate gender into understandings of domestic space by seeking to differentiate particular rooms as masculine or feminine. Advice literature suggested that ‘male’ rooms, particularly the dining room, ought to be decorated in sombre fashion, while ‘female’ rooms such as the kitchen or drawing room should be decorated differently.Footnote 76 The gendering of rooms was partly a matter of decorative style, intended to reflect use. Control reflected the gendered connotations of different rooms: rooms where men or women were supposed to have greater autonomy were expected to have designs that reflected that difference.
Vickery's research has developed this differentiation by investigating who controlled spending on different elements of the home.Footnote 77 Though account books rarely offer evidence of who decorated a particular room, they show that men paid for major renovation projects, whilst both men and women paid for upholstery work. Elsewhere, however, Vickery has noted that orders for wallpaper – the wall treatment used in almost every room of the house – never refer to gendered uses of rooms to indicate decorative schemes.Footnote 78 Domestic space was crucial for both men and women and they had complementary and often overlapping duties within the home.Footnote 79 A diachronic approach to understanding the gendered use of rooms may be more productive as spaces that were dominated, for instance, by women in the morning might have accommodated mixed-sex groups in the evening, or all-male parties for supper.Footnote 80
Diaries point to the importance of propriety in shaping access to, and use of, locations within the home. In particular, the value of propriety is clearest in interactions between members of the opposite sex. Mixed gender sociability required close attention as to who was being received where. From a young age, children became aware of where they ought to go and the necessary formalities to preserve propriety when interacting with the opposite sex. Though they might be instructed by parents, children practised and internalized an appreciation of the significance of space at an early age.Footnote 81 The young Elizabeth Tyrrell (daughter of the city remembrancer and the other diarist Elizabeth Tyrrell) visited a female friend with her sister, Ann, and brother, Richard, in July 1818. When they arrived
the servant told us she was ill in bed of a sore throat and we sent up to know if she could see us and she said that she could we therefore went up but left Richard down stairs till we had asked her if she admitted gentlemen and as Mrs James [the patient's mother] said that [her daughter] had not seen any yet but that Richard might come up he came up.Footnote 82
Elizabeth's unpunctuated and breathless style almost certainly gives the scene a more frantic air than in reality.
As people grew older, the excessive formality shown by the young Tyrrells evolved into an unspoken awareness of the boundaries set by personal familiarity. A letter from Harriet Cavendish to Lady Georgiana Morpeth in November 1807 shows the polite, but forceful, reaction engendered by an oblivious male. She wrote
I really do not know what to do about William [Ponsonby], as he certainly dangles after me (I think this phrase very expressive) more than ever, yet so childishly that I cannot see any way of stopping it without an appearance of affectation and Prudery. Yesterday just as I was going to dress he rushed upstairs to my room. I, without stopping to say I was glad to see him, took hold of his arm and rushed down as quick back to the drawing room, eager to get out of the region of Ladies' Maids and to avoid the impropriety of receiving Mr. William Ponsonby.Footnote 83
While Harriet did not wish to appear impolite and overly concerned with etiquette, she also recognized that receiving Ponsonby upstairs suggested a level of intimacy she wished to avoid.
Gendered understandings of propriety clearly helped to determine access and shaped how people exerted control over their spaces. A man and a woman might be more or less alone in the drawing room of a house, but their interaction assumed different meanings when it occurred in the bedroom, dressing room, or closet. When space was limited, however, informal, mixed-gender sociability might occur in spaces that were private, intimate spaces at other times.
IV
The final issue discussed here incorporates many of the implications of interactions examined in discussions of the preceding sections: demonstrations of intimacy. Habitual differentiation of space in larger houses resulted in rooms being associated with different levels of intimacy. Some spaces implied intimacy in any house, while in some homes residents might create more idiosyncratic meanings for spaces through varying patterns of co-presence. Visitors with particularly close ties to their host might expect to be taken into more strictly controlled areas of the home. With a greater selection of rooms in which to host people came a greater responsibility to satisfy guests' expectations. Areas of the home for the reception of guests became charged with significance. Where a guest was entertained might inadvertently reveal the host's or hostess's opinion of him/her. Samuel Curwen reported that he ‘took in ill part’ the failure of his ‘young Townsman W. C.’ to invite him from the front parlour into the ‘common sitting parlour’.Footnote 84 Curwen and W. C. remained in the most accessible space in the house, which was an area Curwen may have associated with the reception of tradesmen or respectable strangers. Curwen believed that his status and connection to W. C. dictated that they should have proceeded to a more interior space. Admitting someone into a house did not demonstrate the same bond as admitting them into an inner parlour.
Furnishings shaped how spaces were experienced. Furniture might deprive people of opportunities for intimacy or demonstrate social distance as well. Activity at parties often focused on card tables to the exclusion of non-players. At a ‘stupid’ party in May 1812 where the only activities were three card tables, the sole person left for Jane Porter to converse with was deaf. Having to shout to make herself heard, ‘every word [Jane] said to him acted like an electric shock upon the card players, making them start, and look up, as if aroused from sleep’.Footnote 85 The design of card tables effectively excluded non-players from conversation.Footnote 86 Not being at one of the tables meant a party guest was excluded from part of the fun. Indeed, they could also be ‘written out’ of accounts of the party as letter writers and commentators used the number of tables at a gathering to describe the size of the party, rather than specifying the number of people.Footnote 87
In large houses, the areas for hosting might be numerous and their significance finely graded and constantly changing. On a visit to her sister, Lady Dalkeith, in September 1766, Lady Mary Coke arrived as her sister was meeting with Lord Townshend upstairs. As a result Lady Mary remained below.Footnote 88 While Mary waited for her sister to become available, a Mr Barlow arrived. In response, Mary ‘went to him’ by moving from the more exclusive room where she waited to a room Lady Dalkeith used for hosting casual guests.Footnote 89 After talking with Mr Barlow, Lady Mary went upstairs to talk to Lady Dalkeith and Lord Townshend. This incident reveals various levels of access within the house. Most restricted was the room where Lady Dalkeith was having her meeting. Outside that space, Lady Mary waited in an intermediate room while others were brought into the most accessible room.
During times of illness or urgency, rooms might be employed in atypical ways that reveal intimacy. When she was ill, Mary Berry sometimes spent entire days in her bedroom, taking meals there when necessary. During those periods, visitors from outside the household could be seen in the bedroom when necessary. These might be male or female confidants, but included some of Berry's closest connections. In December 1807, Berry fell ill and allowed Prince Esterhazy to sit with her in her ‘own room’, and before he left, they were joined by Lady Henrietta Cavendish.Footnote 90 Similarly, during a period of illness Elizabeth Tyrrell, wife of the city remembrancer, remained in her dressing room during the day where she was joined by her children.Footnote 91 For these women, the desire for the company of their peers or children shaped their decisions about who to allow into their bedrooms.
Men and women appear to have made slightly different use of rooms. For instance, women seem to have hosted in their bedrooms more often than men. This pattern is evident for women young and old, married or unmarried, living with families or only with servants. There is insufficient evidence to draw conclusions about the use of closets, kitchens, or libraries as gendered spaces, but the lack of evidence suggests that these rooms were not intensively used for hosting and may have seen similar patterns of use when they were used. Though there were no female lodgers in this sample, Samuel Curwen's comments about spending the evening in his landlady's room suggests that women with limited space acted in similar ways to men who had only one or two rooms.
Interactions with close friends and family reveal one type of intimacy, but other sorts of connections might require guests to be welcomed into secluded spaces. Intimate friends or relatives were in a separate category from legal advisers or tradespeople who might design or furnish closets, bedrooms, and other spaces not normally used for receiving guests. For example, Mary Coke declared that she had little time and was thus obliged to see people in her dressing room rather than in her parlour or some other reception room.Footnote 92 People shown into her room varied from her sisters to government officials who assisted in family matters, such as Robert Ord, lord chief baron of the Exchequer, who helped sort out her mother's estate in May 1767. Furthermore, a diarist might be obliged to receive a visitor who was not a close confidante in an intimate setting, because that visitor was intimate with another member of the household. As Lewis demonstrates in her study of aristocratic women's homes, a wife might find that it was her husband's closest friends and relatives that she was expected to welcome.Footnote 93 The access Elizabeth Tyrrell provided to friends of her children suggests another sort of intimacy expected of an adult woman.
V
This article has examined diaries to enhance our understanding of the leisure activities of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century upper- and middle-class Londoners. It has stressed that the sociable domestic sphere played an important and daily role in the lives of propertied residents of that city. Historians have unjustly neglected this role in favour of attention to public spaces. Domestic recreation was not peculiar to the mercantile or middling classes, indeed merchants were to be found in public spaces – usually for eating or drinking – more often than denizens of the west end. In this sample of diarists, however, the gentry spent more time at theatres and the opera than merchants. Polite society had time to fill as well as money to spend, but the fact that non-domestic spaces of diversion were used by polite society should not obscure the frequency of domestic recreation and the enjoyment it provided. Even for worldly young men who mixed in polite circles of elite society, domestic recreation, particularly in the homes of superiors, was a normal feature of life. An invitation to the home of a social superior suggested that one had been accepted into elite society. People at the bottom of the social ladder were expected to accept such invitations. Boswell relished his close relationship with the earl of Eglinton and the access to the duke's home and hospitality it offered.Footnote 94 Boswell was able to treat Eglinton's residence as his own, coming for food, company, and sleep.
Diversions set in the home attracted some, such as the young Boswell, because they cost far less than public pleasures, but the home was selected not simply for its exclusivity and low cost. In some circumstances, the domestic sphere could prove even more expensive than going out. Gambling debts incurred by some members of the beau monde, such as those for Earl Spencer, rendered the cost of a subscription to the opera trivial.Footnote 95 Furthermore, food and drink had to be paid for and servants were generally required to prepare and serve food and drink when hosting. For people whose behaviours were most heavily circumscribed by ideas of propriety, the domestic sphere provided recreational space that could be carefully controlled. Yet the power of religious stricture or conduct literature does not sufficiently explain behaviour revealed in the diaries, particularly for the frequency of sociability and the eagerness with which people engaged in it. Domestic recreation was not just an expedient for people with nowhere better to go; private houses provided a social sphere with a greater significance in the eighteenth century than historians have recognized.
Though it is mistaken to suggest that the domestic sphere was a female sphere from which the eighteenth-century man was excluded or sought to flee, women were more often found in a home (their own or someone else's) than men. The prevalence of domestic recreation for gentry women may partly reflect their relatively abundant free time and lack of other venues. Walks in the parks took place daily during good weather and many gentry and noble women regularly went to the theatre and opera during the season. Many women were like the Tyrrells who recorded shopping, but even after these activities and all the daily housework, time remained to be occupied with visiting, reading, sewing, or drinking tea, both at home and in the homes of others.Footnote 96
To illuminate these patterns more fully, and in the hope that this exercise might prove of larger interest, I have suggested that access is a way of analysing space and its uses that incorporates different criteria through which decisions were made. Public and private remain important terms which retain power to illuminate features of past life, but they are being asked to do too much analytical work. To achieve a more nuanced understanding of the meanings and uses of space, we need to distinguish different levels of analysis and also ensure that our descriptive vocabulary does not smuggle in assumptions which have not been empirically substantiated.
This investigation of domestic amusement has revealed the topography of the domestic interior and the ways decisions were made about what activities to pursue, where to engage in those activities, and which people to include. Householders and lodgers constantly weighed up a variety of considerations including how much space they had available; the status, gender, and life stage of companions; and the nature of the relationship. All these factors were constantly in play, though the degree of concern for each varied depending on the situation. Clearly other factors not clearly highlighted by the diarists – for instance the physical characteristics of rooms such as light or cleanliness – would also have been a consideration.Footnote 97
Even as people recognized that spaces were differentiated, they were aware that the meaning of space could be a contingent feature. A space for hosting might be transformed into a space for privacy and vice versa and this variability was especially prominent in domestic settings with limited space. The anatomy of space in lodgings meant that spaces varied between offering room for sociability and opportunities for solitude. Unlike larger homes where non-residents might be kept in particular areas of the house if desired, a lodger had to admit any visitors to intimate spaces. The frequency with which visitors entered particular rooms varied – access to a closet or bedroom was shaped by different concerns than access to the parlour – but no impregnable sanctuaries existed in Londoners' homes. Furthermore, it is productive to see people's own homes as akin to spaces in the homes of others. Similar activities and types of behaviour were common to all domestic settings.Footnote 98 An individual's own home was a place of special significance, but the ease with which people moved to the domestic spaces of friends and family reveals not, as some historians have suggested, an obsession with keeping outsiders out, but rather with welcoming the right sorts of people in.
The meanings of spaces examined in this article were produced by a combination of individuals' behaviours, the physical characteristics of the spaces, and individuals' previous experiences.Footnote 99 The meanings of spaces evolved constantly. We have encountered James Boswell and Samuel Curwen who came to find their residences or areas of their lodgings uninhabitable. These lodgers do not seem to have seen their uses of space as practices of resistance to the behaviours of landlords or fellow lodgers, though Boswell's landlord may have seen the situation differently.
The amount of space people had at their disposal has been the primary way that power and control have been assessed in this article. Asymmetries in the source materials limit how effectively we can examine and compare power over domestic space at this historical distance. The three lifestyles (west end, merchant/professional, and clubbable) present similar evidence of power over domestic space. Differences in types of housing cut across the three lifestyles and create more meaningful groupings in terms of power over domestic space. In homes, men appear to have maintained greater power than their wives, though male lodgers were subject to the authority of their landladies. Curwen's diary suggests that landladies who lived alone, or with a female relative, may have had access to similar amounts of space as their lodgers and were perhaps more willing to bend to a lodger's demands than a landlord or married landlady. Sadly, no diaries of female lodgers in this period have come to light to allow the experiences of male and female lodgers to be compared. Similar to gender, lifestage was less important that the type of housing one obtained. When living together, adult men exercised greater authority than younger men and mothers dominated their daughters. How a widow and her son might have negotiated access to space remains unclear. The elderly may have seen a decline in their power, but evidence to test that suggestion is lacking. Except with reference to parties, we are left without a good sense of how spatial hierarchies worked in particular rooms.Footnote 100 My analysis suggests that economic power was crucial to control over spaces, but the effects of other power relations on uses of space are less clear. This is a less emphatic conclusion than that of Allan Pred who asserted that significance of space ‘cannot be understood unless the prevailing power relations at the core of local social structure are identified’.Footnote 101
Though diarists lived in homes that allowed some differentiation of space – and patterns of differentiated use and meaning can be established – we should be cautious about ascribing social meaning to spaces themselves. Meaning was also constructed moment by moment, based on circumstances and context. Once people moved past the front door into the house, they negotiated their way to a proper location within the household and evaluated their host's provisions for entertaining. Certainly, homes and their residents were most often judged by their reception spaces and the ability of those spaces to accommodate guests comfortably, yet the display areas of the house were not the only areas visible to non-residents. Access was determined by the resident's affection for the visitor and the guest's status and behaviour. Boundaries dividing areas of the home for receiving guests from spaces where only residents might go were more permeable than scholars have recognized. A temporal dimension needs to be added to our conceptualization of space to enable us to appreciate variations in the ways specific spaces were used and to refine our understanding of how propriety affected daily behaviours. This temporal dimension includes not just changes from one day to the next, but changes over one's lifetime as status changed through the lifecycle and as people learned and spatial practices evolved. Georgian society had many rules, but they were rules that could be negotiated. People determined the significance of spaces in the course of everyday life, be they crowded ballrooms or intimate dressing rooms.
