A Woman's Space Is in the Home: Architecture, Privacy, and Melodrama in Pamela and Gaslight

Modern Urban Domestic Design

Imagine a Georgian terrace house (Figure 1). Standing at a height of no more than four stories, joined by party walls to replicated versions of itself, constructed primarily of the red brick indigenous to Georgian London, with sash-windows made of crown glass¹ in recessed frames of varying sizes from largest on the bottom floor to smallest on the top, a parapet-roof tiled with English slate, a rather unembellished door of English oak surrounded by an arching porch of double columns marking the entranceway, and black wrought iron fence enclosing its external space to signify where its boundaries end and its neighbor's begin, the Georgian terrace house defines the outward appearance of London's domestic space.² Following the Great Fire of 1666 and the adoption of the Act for the Rebuilding of the City, the design and construction of eighteenth-century London housing complied with laws which in effect standardized building height, structural thickness, size of timber for floors and roofs, and the positioning of the ground floor

Figure 1.

Figure 2.

Figure 3.

on the street level.³ Four kinds of Georgian terrace houses, distinguishable in terms of square footage, number of stories, and placement within the city, spread throughout London and other English cities, not only in response to the new housing regulations but as the most cost-effective way to house a dense city population (Figure 2). John Summerson, the historian of eighteenth-century English architecture, comments that while some aristocrats had their palaces and criminals their "rookeries," "earls to artisans had their narrow slices of building, now called for no good reason, 'terrace-houses' " (44). Referring to this spatial arrangement as the British "vertical living idiom," Summerson notes that the French and others of the continent resisted it, keeping the horizontal structuring of their living space (45).

Indeed, a home designed around a central hall creates its home-quality, its feeling of home, in the presence of a space for easy communal gathering. The house which works from a horizontal plan rejects both the presence of a stairway as the binding force around which rooms gather and the mystery which accompanies spaces located a flight of stairs away. A quality of openness and availability evolves from the extension outward of interconnecting horizontal space.

In the Georgian terrace row, ongoing like the street from which it rises, the continuity of the wall forms a sense of connection while, when gathered in a square, it encloses space like an "elongated courtyard"⁴(Figure 3). What Robert Gutman defines as the "domesticity" of the Georgian terrace (250) comes from the sense of security it evokes in the human scale of its symmetrical walls that wrap around a square. Whereas the continuity of the street sets one spatially in a scene of movement forwards, isolating one who is propelled down its course by its resistance to the interactions made possible by pause, the square stills that movement by structuring a space where it is brought to rest, as a domain where one lives and sleeps.⁵ Yet while the Georgian terrace rows make a domestic space within an urban setting, England's most elegant streets, were grouped in a rectangle to form a square —Royal Crescent, Grosvenor Square, Percy Circus, Windsor Terrace, Grafton Street, Bedford Row, work as a whole to "look like a grand mansion, even a palace, not just a row of identical homes" (Quiney 79).

The Georgian terrace brings to light the transformation from the sprawling size and openness, which marked the former architecture of the great-hall plan of the landed gentry, to the sweeping adoption of the eighteenth-century innovative middle class space contained in separate yet attached quarters —the first instances of modern urban domestic design. Jürgen Habermas, drawing on G. M. Trevelyan's work, writes that the conversion of the British gentry toward...