BOOKS
Top and left, labour and leisure, with evidence of the former more apparent in some homes than others
IfWalls Could Talk, by LucyWorsley.
Faber and Faber, £20 THOSE who know Lucy – and we do, as her first job was with the SPABMills Section – were not surprised to see her volunteering for all sorts of indignities during her television series, on which this book is based. Now the distinguished Chief
Curator of Historic Royal Palaces, DrWorsley was prepared to endure all sorts of personal humiliations to illustrate how our ancestors used their buildings for everyday life. Her Intimate History of the Home looks in turn at bedrooms, bathrooms, living rooms and kitchens from medieval times onwards. This is primarily a book about
people and how they lived, but with plenty of information on the use and development of the buildings themselves. The pleasure comes in reading
104 Cornerstone, Vol 32, No 3 2011
washing machine was produced as early as 1677; and in Georgian towns ash from coal fires was stored in the cellar until the twice-yearly visit of the “dustman”. Covering some of the same
all sorts of snippets of social and personal history from attitudes to servants to the problems of dealing with “night soil” before flushing lavatories. We learn of the 12th-century
monk who wrote An Apology for Beards, arguing that matted and greasy hair indicated inner cleanliness; that a design for a
ground as Bill Bryson’s best-selling At Home, but in a distinctive way, DrWorsley writes entertainingly of household appliances, of the taxing of wallpaper in 1712, and Theodore Mander’sArts and Crafts house atWightwickManor.We learn that, in the absence of refrigerators, it was common practice for Victorian cooks to put charcoal in with tainted meat to reduce its putrid smell. Bedrooms, which in the 16th
and 17th centuries were often centres of social activity, became more private, particularly when the introduction of corridors meant that you didn’t have to travel through one room to get to another. When people today criticise families for eating in front of the
television, DrWorsley says, they echo complaints in the 14th- century Vision of Piers Plowman that the lord and lady absented themselves from the common meal. This became possible thanks to the introduction of the solar, a room apart from the great hall. Contrary to popular belief, food
was generally served hot in the great houses, even though kitchens were normally some distance from dining rooms. Efforts were made insulate serving dishes and “vigorous, fleet-footed footmen would have run with the dinner along the curved corridors of Georgian Kedleston”. Today, kitchens tend to be
centre of home life, but in the past it wasn’t just the fear of fire that kept them remote. It was the dread of their smell. The book has a number of good
quality colour photographs, as well as some rather smudgy black and white ones, as part of the text.
PhilipVenning
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