Architectural Identities: Domesticity, Literature and the Victorian Middle Classes, and: Building Romanticism: Literature and Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Britain (review)

In twenty-first-century Britain, a little under twenty percent of houses are nineteenth-century or earlier. A significant proportion of the population lives in dwellings built by the Victorians or their immediate precursors, and a far higher number of Britons—indeed virtually all—inhabit Victorian spaces on a casual, almost daily basis, in schools, colleges, shops, banks, railway stations, government buildings, suburban streets, or entire town centres. Victorian literature, dominated by the novel as its most popular form and by the domestic as its prevalent subject, often works within a recognisable built environment that surrounded its first readers and continues to exist in much adapted form to the present day.

Yet the practical, cultural, and imaginative significance of this environment has been only partially examined by students of literature. Charles Dickens's London, the great industrial centres of Northern England, and the gothic gloom of sensation fiction have all of course received due attention. But until fairly recently the character and significance of domestic architecture, its spatial configurations and the disposition and actions of people within them, have been less rigorously studied. Invaluable work in the past few years, such as that by Judith Flanders on the Victorian house; Lynne Hapgood on suburbia; Annemarie Adams on architecture, women, and health; and Thad Logan on the Victorian parlour, has begun to expand our understanding of both the physical characteristics of these spaces and their rich cultural significance. The two books under review contribute interestingly to a growing body of work that examines the relationship between the architectural details of domestic space and the people, real or imagined, who lived and worked within it.

That this relationship has genuine potency is dramatically demonstrated by the Road Hill House murder, the subject of an excellent recent study by Kate Summerscale. When three-year-old Saville Kent was discovered to be absent from his bed on the morning of 30 June 1860, and his body subsequently found stuffed down a servants' privy in the garden with its throat slit, the domestic arrangements of a middle-class Victorian family were thrown open to the public gaze, and their scrutiny forged a potential path to the gallows. The press published detailed floor plans of the Kent house, and public and police together examined the relations between rooms and occupants for clues as to motive and murderer. Why did the two youngest children sleep in a room next to their parents? Did Mr. Kent steal out in the middle of the night to fornicate with their nursemaid? Why were the children from his previous marriage consigned to bedrooms on the second floor with the housemaid and cook, and what simmering resentments were caused to the adolescent son by having to use the servants' staircase next to his room? Who amongst family and servants had access to the lumber room where the laundry was sorted and so could have purloined the missing nightdress? Such questions occurred to the contemporary public, and thanks to recent work on domestic architecture may now also be prompted for modern scholars with access to the Road Hill House floor plans.

Less sensationally, but with more wide-ranging and nuanced implication, aspects of Victorian imaginative writing that had previously gone unacknowledged are now opened to understanding. Recognizing the disposition of space according to gender and function, for example, suggests a further significance to George Eliot's situating of Dorothea Brooke and Will Ladislaw's declaration of love in the Lowick library, generally a space for solitary male reading and Casaubon's particular sanctuary. George Gissing's passing comment in In the Year of Jubilee (1894) that Nancy Lord's drawing room is correctly situated on the first floor will strike a...