Charlotte Moore

The history of the home – with the spittoons put back in

A review of The Making of the Home, by Judith Flanders, and Common People, by Alison Light. Both books are absorbing but it’s Light’s history of subsistence living that I’ll want to read twice

In 1978, a family of Russian ‘Old Believers’ living in a supposedly uninhabited part of the Siberian taiga were discovered by a team of geologists. They had fled Stalinist persecution, and for half a century had lived in isolation in a ‘low, soot-blackened log kennel’ with a floor made of potato peelings and crushed nutshells, one tiny window, a fire, a single rushlight, and one item of furniture — an axe-hewn table. Five adults lived without sanitation in a space seven steps long and five steps wide.

The geologists were horrified. What they failed to notice, Judith Flanders points out in her thought-provoking examination of the evolution of ‘home’, is that

what they were seeing were not conditions of unimaginable harshness, but the ordinary living conditions of their own history. And ours. A world where every aspect of life was lived in sight of others, where privacy was not only not desired, but almost unknown.

Both Flanders and Alison Light make intelligent and largely successful attempts at mental time travel, taking their readers with them. Flanders’s The Making of Home intends, she says, to ‘make invisible patterns visible’. She considers how political, economic, religious and social changes shaped our requirements of ‘home’, and, more interestingly, how technologies — advances in heating, lighting, furniture-making — changed our behavioural, even our moral priorities.

She encourages us to rethink the ‘evidence’ we have about past lives. Paintings and novels, for instance, are selective, and use domestic details for symbolic or aesthetic effect; they are not reliable witnesses. Where in those calm, tile-floored 17th- century interior paintings can we see a ‘spitting-sheet’ — fabric attached to the wall behind a spittoon to protect valuable wall-hangings or pictures from splashback? It’s rare enough to see the spittoon itself.

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