A Room of His Own: A Literary-Cultural Study of Victorian Clubland

Introduction: The Man in the Club Window

 &Introduction The Man in the Club Window He guards the woman from all this; within his house as ruled by her. —John Ruskin, “Of Queens’ Gardens” Aman’s home is his castle—or is it not? The nineteenthcentury architect Robert Kerr seemed to think it was in his brash tribute The Gentleman’s House (1864). This far-from-timid volume aims to establish the pedigree of the English gentleman’s house, tracing through a wide historic scope its patrimony “from the Hall of the Saxon Thane to the Mansion of the modern Gentleman” (2). Executing his mission to provide middle-class patrons with the houses they deserve, Kerr produced a volume explosive with a pride and authorial earnestness that make his prose positively galvanic. As Kerr educates his middle-class readers on the prescribed architecture of their dream house, a certain appetency fuels his writing: all styles, all period details are available to Kerr’s middle-class home builder. “You can have Classical . . . you can have Elizabethan in equal variety; Renaissance ditto; or . . . Mediaeval in any one of many periods and many phases” (341). Such architectural excess transformed Bear Wood, Kerr’s model middle-class domicile, into assuming such grand expansiveness that it remained forever the text’s fantastical ideal never to be built. Yet hidden behind this spirit of inclusivity lies an anxiety, a less-than-generous urgency to exclude when necessary. Of course, readers have long pointed out Kerr’s exclusions based on class: in The Gentleman’s House, modest homes do not interest him, and his career would prove that working-class living conditions never captured his professional attention for long. However, within the welcoming space of Victorian bourgeois existence in Bear Wood, as conjured by Kerr’s words and drawings, a room of his own  & also stand firm divisions based on gender.1 For example, the dining room is the exclusive preserve of the patriarch conducting business in the morning, and for their leisure time, men of the house can turn to the library and the billiard room. This allocation of space requires a separate arena for female socializing, provided by the morning room or the drawing room. Kerr is also attentive to the need for spatial configurations and boundaries that separate male and female servants—through the clever use of staircases, doorways, and passages. Yet the gendered division of space is nowhere more evident than in Kerr’s description of three particular spaces within the ideal bourgeois home: “the Gentleman’s-Room,” “the Smoking-Room,” and “the Gentleman’s Odd Room.” Here there seems to reside a dire sense that, despite all confidence concerning a gentleman’s entitlement, a man must have a room of his own. Why? A practical justification for these distinct spaces, these retreats, is the gentlemanly habit of smoking. As the spokesman for the new profession of architecture, Kerr was rightly concerned with the domestic problem of odor, with rooms that produce noxious smells and the need for adequate ventilation. In defense of the smoking room, Kerr writes, “The pitiable resources to which some gentlemen are driven, even in their own houses, in order to be able to enjoy the pestiferous luxury of a cigar have given rise to the occasional introduction of an apartment specially dedicated to the use of Tobacco. . . . [A] retreat is provided altogether apart where the dolce far niente in this particular shape may solely and undisturbedly reign” (129). He adds, “[I]f the Smoking-room be situated on an upper floor it may even be well to have a small special stair to it.” However, smoking cannot entirely justify these spaces where men can “undisturbedly reign,” for smoking is not the sole activity reserved for these rooms, as Kerr goes on to describe. The “Gentleman’s-Room,” or business room, “in its most proper and characteristic form . . . is the private room of the gentleman, in which he conducts his affairs” (121). Kerr is emphatic that family space with its accompanying demands and distractions not interfere with this room; it must be protected from family matters.2 About the “Odd Room,” Kerr explains that “[i]n the country more especially, the young gentlemen of the house may find themselves very much at a loss sometimes for an informal place in ‘which to do as they like’” (130). He goes on to list not only cigars but also foils, dumbbells, a lathe, and collections both mineralogical and botanical as possible provisions in the room. In describing these three rooms...