6
Superior Apartments in a Quiet Home
As the Euston Square mystery was unfolding, readers of The Times were still running their fingers down the closely printed classified advertisements in search of lodgings close to the centre of town very similar to the establishment run by the Bastendorffs. ‘Board and residence (first class) close to Kensington Gardens,’ stated one such advertisement on 16 May 1879. ‘A private sitting room with bedroom adjoining on the first floor is now vacant. Queen’s Road, Bayswater.’
Meanwhile, in nearby Princes Square, lodgings were described as being two minutes from the Metropolitan Railway; there was also on offer an ‘excellent table’ (or food) and perhaps more valuably, ‘select society’. References were naturally required.
For those with slightly more modest means, the attractions were framed slightly differently. In Westbourne Park, a mile or so away from Kensington Gardens, there was on offer ‘a most comfortable home’, perhaps suited to ‘one or two ladies’. It boasted a ‘large pleasant front room’ and ‘cheerful society’, as opposed to ‘select’. The terms were ‘moderate’.
The increasingly cosmopolitan nature of the city was reflected through these advertisements as well. ‘’Board and residence wanted by a young foreigner,’ declared one notice, ‘with a superior English family, with young and cheerful society.’ Elsewhere, a home was sought ‘for a young French gentleman in a good English family where he can acquire the language’.
Some residences advertised ‘table d’hote’. Some made a feature of the fact they offered ‘late dinner’. Some made mention of bathrooms; others cheerfully highlighted their pianos. There was a deliberate emphasis upon gentility; not least because across the years, such a way of living had gathered a reputation for racketiness and transgression.
Boarding houses had been the subjects of one of Charles Dickens’ first satires written for the Monthly Magazine in 1834. ‘Boz’ took a sardonic look at the house run by Mrs Tibbs in Great Coram Street, in the east of Bloomsbury, and the class-conscious manoeuvring of the landlady, her daughters and their gentleman tenants.
Other writers for weekly journals enjoyed exploring the possibilities of social and sexual awkwardness that these houses offered. A frequently reported anecdote in gossip columns involved the arrival at a boarding house of a young gentleman, seeking lodgings as he established himself in the great city. The landlady of the house, in these stories, was swift to dance attendance and indulgence on such young men, making sure they had excellent food and good drink at the dinner table: the reason being that these landladies were determined to pair their daughters off with these eligible catches. And, indeed, in several such sketches, reported mirthfully in London papers as un-bylined urban news, the gentlemen concerned found themselves entrapped, being told by the landladies that their hands in marriage had been offered, and that if they attempted to withdraw, all sorts of horrid legal consequences would follow.
Yet sometimes it worked the other way around. In 1874, the young Vincent Van Gogh found a room in a lodging house in Lambeth run by the landlady Ursula Loyer. He was very happy there; working by day in the centre of the town, spending spare hours tending the back garden in Hackford Road. But Van Gogh fell for his landlady’s daughter Eugenie: the young woman was already answered for, and Van Gogh took the news badly, suggesting in letters that he did not like living in houses with ‘secrets’; only some time later was he was able to restore his friendship with his erstwhile landlords.
Also prevalent in anecdotal accounts of boarding house life was the trope of the predatory widow; the lady of a certain age reduced after the death of a husband to taking furnished lodgings and then keeping a keen eye out for new arrivals such as prosperous and peripatetic salesmen who might serve as new husbands. Male widowers sometimes featured in such stories too.
And these sketches struck at the very heart of the nature of the boarding house; in the early and mid-Victorian years, with an expanding middle class, there was a concomitant rising sense that the ideal home should be a detached sanctuary: a place where one family dwelled under one roof, in domestic stability, sheltered in every sense from the chaos of the world. Rising middle-class affluence brought a rising taste for privacy. The boarding house, by contrast, introduced a measure of enforced proximity with strangers; total privacy was a practical impossibility.
This was also a distinctly continental way of living; in Paris, for example, apartments and shared stairwells were the norm; even by 1879, this still seemed something of a novelty in Britain. There were humorous essays concerning such modern nuisances as living in an apartment with a young family occupying the rooms above, the children stomping ceaselessly throughout the day.
‘There is no way in the world,’ wrote William Makepeace Thackery, ‘by which a man … can be placed on family terms and sudden intimacy with those who up to yesterday were perfect strangers.’ He also noted that ‘there is a certain element of romance and history about a boarding house which is attractive in one way but ought to be suspicious in another’.1
But elsewhere, the author of Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome, found rich inspiration in this particular style of domesticity. As a young man, he had sought to escape a career as a clerk by becoming a success in the theatre; and this necessitated living in a series of north London boarding houses. Because of the irregularity of his hours – and his frequent return home in the small hours – the landladies were required to be quite understanding.
And such homes clearly made a deep impression on him, for they became recurring leitmotifs in his fiction. In his turn-of-the-century novel Paul Kelver, Jerome’s young protagonist recalled the delicate economics of these arrangements. ‘My first lodging was an attic in a square the other side of Blackfriars Bridge. The rent of the room, if I remember rightly, was three shillings a week with cooking, half a crown without. I purchased a methylated spirit stove with kettle and frying pan, and took it without.’2
And it was in the nature of such houses that unexpected intimacy could be sparked; occasionally with the darkest consequences. In one house in fashionable Bayswater, in 1858, Dr Thomas Smethurst lodged with his wife. Dr Smethurst, 54, was a feted pioneer of hydrotherapy; he administered what became known as the water cure to various well-to-do patients in the Chilterns. Back in Bayswater, he enjoyed the sociability of this elegant and tasteful boarding house; the easy evening conversations with other residents in that drawing room before the landlady had the dinner served.
Into this house arrived a single woman called Isabella Banks, 43, who joined the other residents in that drawing room each evening. Isabella and Dr Smethurst fell for one another very swiftly. It is not difficult to envisage the furtive nights that followed; Mrs Smethurst perhaps feigning sleep as her husband crept from their rooms.
But the relationship was too intense to be sustained and the landlady of the house soon became aware of the affair. The landlady demanded that Isabella Banks leave; she did so and Dr Smethurst left with her. They set up home in Richmond upon Thames and might never have been heard of again were it not for Isabella Banks dying suddenly and Dr Smethurst standing accused of her murder.
He was accused of poisoning her to get rid of a baby; as it transpired, the evidence was tainted. His lover had died of an infection. But what gave the story extra resonance, on top of the tragedy of Isabella’s death, was the way that it had begun in the better sort of boarding house; adultery and promiscuity were more usually associated with the lower sorts of establishments to be found in the poorer districts.
In George Gissing’s The Nether World, published in 1889, but set ten years previously, there is a vivid account of a boarding house in Clerkenwell (not very far away from the more handsome houses of Euston Square). Here, the house is dilapidated; the landlady and her daughter confining themselves to the downstairs and their lodgers upstairs. At the start of the novel, we are led to believe that there is one female lodger in the first-floor front room; but finally, as we are led up the stairs, the door opens to reveal a harassed young mother with three young children, a teenaged daughter and a father who is out of work.
Food is taken in that one room; upon his return from job-hunting, the father is offered a piece of cold steak, some bread, and tea using the tea leaves from that morning.3
In the grander houses of Bloomsbury, the catering was daintier: at the same time, there was obviously no obligation to dine with one’s fellow residents. You could arrange to have your supper brought to your room. In many houses, the residents would sometimes purchase their own ingredients – pies, chops, wine – and arrange for the maid-of-all-work to heat the food in the kitchen before bringing it all upstairs on a tray.
The other attraction of boarding houses – both to younger aspirant people, and also to those older residents who had known more affluent days – was that the better properties were furnished to give every impression of a fine middle-class home.
Even by the 1870s, the fashion for darker wallpaper was still prevalent: deep rich greens, lustrous dark reds. The reason was not just aesthetic. Gaslight and oil-light were, over time, injurious to such paper; their fumes would gradually stain any lighter shades. The greens and the reds masked the depredations.
The heavy furnishing and the heavy curtains and carpets also had the effect of insulation, both physical and psychological; a shield against the cold and the commotion from the outside world. In the centre of London, the horse-drawn traffic was now so dense that the streets seemed alive even into the depths of the night. But there was not only the sense in these houses of swaddling oneself from noise; there was also an element of feeling safe. The fullness of the furnished rooms – the padded leather of the seats, the deep velvets, the ironed linen of the sheets, the polished wood, the china ornaments, the glass of the gas lamps – conveyed a sense that its occupants were cosily hidden and protected from the world by many layers. But this idea of protection could be an illusion.