English Country House Research Articles

Annabel Ricketts. The English Country House Chapel: Building a Protestant Tradition. Reading: Spire Books, 2007. Pp. 348. $90.00 (cloth).

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The History and Mystery of a Victorian Crime

The History and Mystery of a Victorian Crime Cushing Strout (bio) The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective, by Kate Summerscale (Walker and Company, 2008. 360 pages. $24.95) At the end of her story Kate Summerscale is jolted by being reminded that the juvenile victim, whose throat was [End Page xii] slit and whose body was shoved down a privy, had once lived: “In unravelling the story of his murder I had forgotten him.” The purpose of all investigations, whether real or fictional, she concludes, is “to remove us from the presence of death”; perhaps they do, especially in light-hearted detective stories like Dorothy Sayers’s The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. Yet a writer or a policeman can pay serious respect to death, as Summerscale does, by taking close account of how and why foul play was done. This history of a horrific murder in an English country house (Road Hill) in 1860 is much more than that. It is also a story about the origins of the modern police department and its special branch of detectives, as well as a linking of these events with their literary offspring in the popular form of the detective story as written by Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, and M. E. Braddon. Kate Summerscale organizes her richly documented story of the murder with a novelist’s feeling for suspense and drama. She is in a way a detective herself, working on the case as the detective Jonathan Whicher did. When she speculates, she does so not as a novelist but instead as he might have done. All her characters and events are documented and are never invented. Her unraveling of the case with its many turns leaves some uncertainties because an inconclusive ending is appropriate to reality’s complex contingent events, just as closure is appropriate to the fictional form. Whicher incarnates both the positive image of the detective and, when he appears to fail, the negative image of the prying destroyer of privacy, who takes the roof off the country house to expose its hidden corruption and evil. (As Summerscale points out in one of her many interesting asides, to detect derives from the French verb to unroof.) There was even a mystery about Whicher himself because there is no official record of the deaths of his wife and son. The subtitle refers to the “undoing of a great detective,” and Punch caricatured him as “Inspector Watcher of the ‘Defective Police.’” Yet in his unpopular theory of the crime he rightly predicted that only a confession by a particular stepchild would reveal what really happened, and later he cogently argued that the perpetrator must have had an accomplice. Whicher was also abused for his work in one of the most famous court battles of the nineteenth century, involving the claimant to the Tichborne estates; yet Whicher in the end exposed him as an impostor. Whicher was a gardener’s son, and Sergeant Cuff in Collins’s The Moonstone derived from the same background. Cuff began his life in his father’s rose garden, and he hoped to end it trying his hand at growing roses. Whicher, when he retired, lived out Cuff’s plan; and Collins in his novel drew on many other elements of the Road Hill murder. Summerscale recognizes that Collins’s policeman figures in the birth of “a new kind of book.” His full-length detective story appeared in 1868, nineteen years before Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet. Detective stories are closely connected to true-crime studies because, as Summerscale points out, “the real business of detection was the invention of a plot.” It has its own dangers because the detective “might get lost [End Page xiii] in the tangle of the past, mired in the mess he had dug up.” So Whicher’s problem is also hers because tracking the details and the possible suspects can be overwhelming for the detective, the historian, and the reader: “Everyone seems guilty because everyone has something to hide.” For most of them, however, the secret is not murder, and “this is the trick on which detective fiction turns.” Like...

Women’s Pockets and the Construction of Privacy in the Long Eighteenth Century

1 On eighteenth-century women’s increasing responsibility for run ning the household, see Eve Tavor Bannet, The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). Much has been made of the “birth of privacy” in the eighteenth-century interior: see, for example, Lawrence Stone, Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (1977; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), esp. 149–80; and Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House, a Social and Architectural History (London, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978). Yet, privacy was a privilege enjoyed by few, and recent historiography has insisted on the lack of privacy of the more modest classes: see Tim Meldrum, “Domestic Service, Privacy, and the Eigtheenth-Century Metropolitan House Hold,” Urban History 26, no. 1 (1999): 27-39. There was not merely a social but also a gender discrepancy regarding privacy. On gender and spatial control in the eighteenth-century domestic interior, see Tita Chico, Designing Women: The Dressing Room in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Culture (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2005). 2 The cost of having a separate room or a locked writing desk made those luxuries inaccessible to most women. Chico stresses that the dressing room was only a feature of elite houses. She also points out that female spaces in the domestic interior, unlike men’s, were never strictly private (46–77). Primary sources substantiate her analysis. For instance, courtier Charlotte Papendiek, assistant keeper of Queen Charlotte’s wardrobe, although a member of the elite, had no room of her own. She wrote in her journal in 1783: “The dressing room upstairs I arranged for Mr Papendiek’s own use ... so that here he could practise [his music] undisturbed ... and receive his friends and feel quite independent. I established myself, with my little all, in our bedroom, placing Women’s Pockets and the Construction of Privacy in the Long Eighteenth Century

Some Northern European Comparisons for Scottish Renaissance Tall-Houses

The traditional comparison for the Scottish tall-house has been the English country house, based on their apparent proximity. However, the ‘two opposing perceptions of the sixteenth-century noble country house are the English versus the European. The former holds that the English manor house ‘marked the security of English life’; whereas the European deployed a warlike language of crenellations, turrets and tourelles’. Scotland followed the European model, while England developed a unique, mostly symmetrical, low-slung, glazed, indefensible country house. The stark difference between the architecture of these two neighbours, and in particular, the difference between the Scottish Renaissance tall-house and the English country house, has thrown into light the fact that some European traditions of architecture have long been overlooked. The lack of an accepted definition of northern European Renaissance architecture has stranded the isolated Scottish contribution. Instead of historians finding a link between Scottish and continental architecture, they turned to the unflattering conventional view that Scotland's architecture was a vernacular hang-over of the Middle Ages which lasted well into the seventeenth century.

Imperialism, Class, and the English Country House in Howards End and Rebecca

Imperialism, Class, and the English Country House in Howards End and Rebecca

The Treatment of Background in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day

Literary criticism has long established the fact that the meaning of a text, in particular in the case of discursive genres such as the novel, depends largely on the writer’s ability to exploit the common frames of reference he shares with the average reader so as to build up a credible world which can give the illusion of existing on its own beyond the surface of the written page. This aspect is all the more important where Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day is concerned as the novel’s signification would appear to rest almost entirely on the considerable gap tacitly assumed to exist between the “real” world so abundantly visible to the implied reader and the idealised and ultimately misguided vision of reality entertained by the main protagonist, the butler Stevens. In this article I will seek to show to what extent this implicit reliance on a consensual view of recent history enables the author to present an illusion of reality resting on a number of carefully selected, yet highly allusive, historical references. In contrast, the text’s meticulous and largely underestimated recreation of Stevens’s habitat via the life and history of the English country house appears to disappear somewhat paradoxically into insignificance. By riding the tide of the post-war onslaught on “grand narratives”, many of which – as indicated by Edward Said’s “contrapuntal” reading of Jane Austen – were predicated on the invisibility of historical forces, Ishiguro can uncover the illusive nature of Stevens’s anachronistic worldview by an unashamed use of the codes of literary realism, while at the same time placing his novel, with minimal recourse to literary experimentation, within the framework of postmodernism.

Is There a Museum in the House? Historic Houses as a Species of Museum

The historic house museum exemplifies the enormous power of the museum idea to make specimens out of the material world. In fact, houses are an old museum form, very numerous and globally spread. This paper surveys the diverse inspirations of the species, its peculiar expressions, and its formative/deformative relationship to the English country house, via case studies in the UK, the US, and Australia. The paper identifies a characteristic museology that has developed to manage the conditions of house museums and suggests that the contemporary practice of heritage management derives an important strand of its direction from the traditions of house museology. Lastly, it considers the challenge, ‘who wants house museums?’

Geopolitics and the Sight of the Nation: Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September

Geopolitics and the Sight of the Nation: Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September

'The Lovely Wreckage of the Past': Virginia Woolf and the English Country House

Journal Article ‘The Lovely Wreckage of the Past’: Virginia Woolf and the English Country House Get access Leena Kore Schröder Leena Kore Schröder The University of Nottingham Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar English: Journal of the English Association, Volume 55, Issue 213, Autumn 2006, Pages 255–280, https://doi.org/10.1093/english/55.213.255 Published: 01 October 2006

Sense of Loss, Belonging, and Storytelling: An Anglo-Indian Narrator in The Borrowers

Mary Norton’s The Borrowers has a complicated narrative framework, through which the story of the small people, the Borrowers, is told. Once we find that the embedded story is carefully set at the turn of the nineteenth century, parallels with Burnett’s The Secret Garden are recognized, in which a lonely Anglo-Indian child experiences some mysterious happenings in an old English country house. Sharing the cultural ambiguity and the sense of loss, both the Garden’s Mary and The Borrowers’ Boy tell stories. Comparing the two works, I will explore the specific cultural meaning of the life of an Anglo-Indian child, and how it relates to the theme of The Borrowers.

Conan Doyle's Incorporation of Revenge Drama: "The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge" and "The Adventure of the Red Circle"

Conan Doyle's Incorporation of Revenge Drama: "The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge" and "The Adventure of the Red Circle" Mary Frances Williams San Mateo, California TWO OF THE STORIES in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's His Last Bow (1917), "The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge" and "The Adventure of the Red Circle," are very similar in structure and themes. Both were initially published in the Strand Magazine in two parts and both seem to break naturally in the middle into two nearly separate tales because of their narrative structure and the form of their first publication. Both stories also consist of two very different tales that are not quite joined together. This double style is deliberate on the part of the author since he used the technique similarly in both tales. If "Wisteria Lodge" begins with a very solid and respectable British citizen consulting Sherlock Holmes about a murder at an English manor house, it transforms itself from what appears to be a straightforward English country house murder mystery into a very strange tale of Latin American dictators, foreign cultures, brutality, conspiracy, and revenge killing. And if "The Red Circle" at first deludes the reader into thinking that it will be a Gothic horror story since it commences with a respectable landlady, Mrs. Warren , consulting Holmes about the strange pacing and secrecy of her invisible Bloomsbury lodger, it surprisingly and suddenly reveals itself instead to be a gruesome tale of Mafia (or Carbonari) criminality, flight, murder, and revenge. In both stories, Conan Doyle takes delight in pulling back a veneer of English respectability and normalcy and in revealing, lurking beneath, the passions and turmoil not only of southern Europeans and Central Americans, but also of English revenge drama. He draws upon the dramatic and literary conventions and the essential themes of English Renaissance and Jacobean revenge drama, and just as he changes the plots and atmospheres of each tale from the English to the exotic, so he 418 WILLIAMS : CONAN DOYLE transforms his genre from the mere detective tale to revenge drama. In the same way Webster is said to have used a "confusion of convention and realism" in his dramas, a mixture of "unrealistic conventions with psychological-realistic representation,"1 so Conan Doyle mixes together the many artificial topoi of revenge tragedy with a more traditional , ordinary Edwardian setting and the straightforward realism of the detective story. In this way, he accomplishes what some critics have never acknowledged: he does not write tales that are merely popular mystery stories but rather ones that are serious literature—skillfully constructed, intertextual prose dramas. It is possible that a renewed interest in the performance of revenge drama at the turn of the century prompted Conan Doyle to look at the genre when he was writing "Wisteria Lodge" (1908) and "The Red Circle " (1911). John Webster's The Duchess ofMalfi (1613) was revived in 1892 by William Poel and was performed a number of times thereafter.2 The Revenger's Tragedy (1607?) by an unknown playwright was revived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries;3 and Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore was revived in Paris in 1894.4 In any case a traditional education in Shakespeare may have led Conan Doyle to consult published texts of revenge plays. "The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge" "Wisteria Lodge" was first published in the Strand Magazine in two parts, September and October 1908, and in Collier's Weekly in August 1908, and republished in His Last Bow in 1917.6 It seems to be a straightforward mystery tale and the reader only gradually becomes aware (although forewarned at the very beginning by Sherlock Holmes 's remark that the story is '"grotesque"'6) that what seems to be an English manor house mystery is instead something much more sinister and violent. Conan Doyle draws upon the conventions of Jacobean and Renaissance revenge tragedy, and he signals this both by commenting that his tale has "'some underlying suggestion of the tragic and the terrible'"1 and by revealing that the country house at which the villain resides is "Jacobean"8—indications of the direction that his story will take. A number of references to revenge...

The Development of the Kitchen in the English Country House

The purpose of this paper is to identify, over a period of 500 years of English history, the architectural development of the kitchen in the English country house. Seven periods of architectural design; Medieval, Elizabethan, Restoration, Palladian, Neo-Classical, Gothic and Picturesque, are included in this study. Each period has been assigned an appropriate English country house beginning with Bodiam Castle in 1315 and ending with Cragside House in 1884. The review of each house includes, where appropriate, a discussion of the role of the kitchen in the overall architectural design of the house, period design influences on the determination of the kitchen location and architectural changes in the kitchen that are a reflection of social change occurring during the specified period. Architectural periods and houses are presented in the following order: •Period I Medieval: Bodiam Castle, 1385 and Knole House, 1456 •Period II Elizabethan: Hardwick Hall, 1597 •Period III Restoration: Belton House, 1684 •Period IV Palladian: Holkham Hall, 1734 •Period V Neo-Classical: Kedelston Hall, 1763 •Period VI Gothic: Ashridge, 1808-1817 •Period VII Picturesque: Cragside House, 1864-1870

The Country House: Technology and Society

English country houses and their estates often contain the physical remains of technological innovations which have survived because of the lack of subsequent modernisation. These have has great potential in helping to understand social change and development because of the major role of such estates played in rural society until the First World War, but there has been no national quantification of this archaeological resource This paper suggests some of the research questions that a comprehensive study of country house technology could illuminate, including the social use of space and changing interactions between the social groups who inhabited that space. It is suggested that understanding the technological inertia displayed on many estates might help to explain the motivations of those who were at the forefront of innovation.

Creating Paradise: The Building of the English Country House, 1660-1880. By Richard Wilson and Alan Mackley (London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2000. xix plus 428pp. 25)

Creating Paradise: The Building of the English Country House, 1660-1880. By Richard Wilson and Alan Mackley (London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2000. xix plus 428pp. 25)

Space, Status and Gender in English Topographical Paintings c. 1660-c. 1740

The topographical paintings of English country houses which appeared in considerable numbers in the second half of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries have provided architectural historians with valuable evidence of architectural schemes and gardens. John Harris's catalogues and commentaries on these paintings have been of great importance for both architectural and social historians. Rarely, however, is much attention paid to the human figues who people the paintings and who provide an insight into the ways in which the spaces delineated were used and, in particular, the occupation of the space in and around the country house by people of different classes and sexes. They show how access to the house was organized and the kinds of activity that took place in the vicinity of the house as an extension of the life of the house, rather than as part of the agricultural enterprise that supported the house and its occupants. Like Dutch genre scenes, the paintings celebrate domestic peace and prosperity; but, like human portraiture, these portraits of houses depict the subject in its best light and hint at the patrons' aspirations, the figures contributing as much to the image of the patron's possessions as the building itself. These painting perform the essentially practical function of showing the house for the patron's descendants, possibly asserting ownership, but at the same time representing the an ideally harmonious life and the peaceful prosperity of the owners. The myth created is a modest one, of homely pursuits and submissive servants, a myth which could not be represented without the figures. This combination of realism and idealism has confused critics, allowing such contradictory views as those of Stephen Daniels, who sees the agricultural backgrounds as representations of prudent estate management. In contrast, John Barrell argues that, in the decades after the Restoration, paintings of houses and landscape in England are characterized by their disregard for agricultural productivity. Both critics, however, read the paintings as accurate representations of the rural life beyond the house.

The English Country House Library: An Architectural History

Beginning with Henry VIII's little study, the architectural history of the private library is examined. In the eighteenth century, the library often appears as a counterpoint to the chapel, a more popular choice than awarding a central position to the library, though the latter is found in a number of instances. The influence of Gothic commences in the eighteenth century. Library rooms become more sociable and are often used to display portraits and sculpture. In Victorian times, the library was often a family living room.

:Creating Paradise: The Building of the English Country House, 1660-1880

Building or rebuilding their houses was one of the main concerns of the English nobility and gentry, some might say their greatest achievement. This is the first book to look at the building of country houses as a whole. Creating Paradise shows why owners embarked on building programmes, often following the Grand Tour or excursions around other houses in England; where they looked for architectural inspiration and assistance; and how the building was actually done. It deals not only with great houses, including Holkham and Castle Howard, but also the diversity of smaller ones such as Felbrigg and Dyrham, and shows the cost not only of building but of decorating and furnishing houses and of making their gardens. Creating Paradise is an important and original contribution to its subject and a highly readable account of the attitude of the English ruling class to its most important possession.

Book reviews

Books Reviewed:Great Britain And IrelandNicholas Brooks, Anglo–Saxon myths: state and church, 400–1066Nicholas Brooks, Communities and warfare, 700–1400J. Bothwell, P. J. P. Goldberg, and W. M. Ormrod, ((eds.)), The problem of labour in fourteenth–century EnglandRobert Tittler, Townspeople and nation: English urban experiences, 1540–1640L. A. Botelho, (ed.), Churchwardens’ accounts of Cratfield, 1640–1660Christopher Chalklin, The rise of the English town, 1650–1850J. M. Beattie, Policing and punishment in London, 1660–1750Richard Wilson and Alan Mackley, Creating paradise: the building of the English country house, 1660–1880M. E. Turner, J. V. Beckett, and B. Afton, Farm production in England, 1700–1914John E. Archer, Social unrest and popular protest in England, 1780–1840Stanley Chapman, (ed.), The autobiography of David Whitehead of Rawtenstall, 1790–1865Ian Inkster, Colin Griffin, Jeff Hill, and Judith Rowbotham, ((eds.)), The golden age: essays in British social and economic history, 1850–1870K. D. M. Snell and Paul S. Ell, Rival Jerusalems: the geography of Victorian religionWilliam Kenefick, ‘Rebellious and contrary’: the Glasgow dockers, c. 1853 to c. 1932F. M. L. Thompson, Gentrification and the enterprise culture: Britain, 1780–1980Alan Booth, The British economy in the twentieth centuryRichard Whiting, The Labour Party and taxation: party identity and political purpose in twentieth–century BritainDuncan Tanner, Pat Thane, and Nick Tiratsoo, (eds.), Labour’s first centuryAsa Briggs, Michael Young: social entrepreneurDavid Kynaston, The City of London, IV: A club no more, 1945–2000Zofia Archibald, John Davies, Vincent Gabrielsen, and G. J. Oliver, (eds.), Hellenistic economiesMichael Wintle, An economic and social history of the Netherlands, 1800–1920: demographic, economic and social transitionBernd Widdig, Culture and inflation in Weimar GermanyS. R. Epstein, (ed.), Town and country in Europe, 1300–1800Peter Scholliers, (ed.), Food, drink and identity: cooking, eating and drinking in Europe since the middle agesRobert Fox and Anna Guagnini, Laboratories, workshops, and sites: concepts and practices of research in industrial Europe, 1800–1914E. Damsgaard Hansen, European economic history: from mercantilism to Maastricht and beyondThabit A. J. Abdullah, Merchants, mamluks, and murder: the political economy of trade in eighteenth–century BasraRussell R. Menard, Migrants, servants and slaves: unfree labor in colonial British AmericaMary B. Rose, Firms, networks and business values: the British and American cotton industries since 1750Andrew Godley, Jewish immigrant entrepreneurship in New York and London, 1880–1914: enterprise and cultureDonna J. Rilling, Making houses: crafting capitalismBrian Kelly, Race, class, and power in the Alabama coalfields, 1908–21Margaret B.W. Graham and Alec T. Shuldiner, Corning and the craft of innovationDavis Dyer and Daniel Gross, The generations of Corning: the life and times of a global corporationStanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman, (eds.), The Cambridge economic history of the United States, III: the twentieth centuryStan J. Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis, Winners, losers and Microsoft: competition and antitrust in high technologySteven Tolliday, (ed.), The economic development of modern Japan, 1868–1945: from Meiji restoration to the Second World WarAlice Bullard, Exile to paradise: savagery and civilization in Paris and the South Pacific, 1790–1900Peter Redfield, Space in the tropics: from convicts to rockets in French GuianaRobert Conlon and John Perkins, Wheels and deals: the automotive industry in twentieth–century AustraliaJames C. Riley, Rising life expectancy: a global historyPeter N. Stearns, Consumerism in world history: the global transformation of desireAngela Redish, Bimetallism: an economic and historical analysisTed Wilson, Battles for the standard: bimetallism and the spread of the gold standard in the nineteenth centuryHoward Temperley, (ed.), After slavery: emancipation and its discontentsChris Wrigley, (ed.), The First World War and the international economyAndrew Britton, Monetary regimes of the twentieth century

Creating Paradise: The Building of the English Country House, 1660-1880

Creating Paradise: The Building of the English Country House, 1660-1880

COUNTRY HOUSE LIFE Creating paradise: the building of the English country house, 1660–1880. By Richard Wilson and Alan Mackley. London: Hambledon, 2000. Pp. xx+428. ISBN 1-85285-252-6. £25. The polite tourist: four centuries of country house visiting. By Adrian Tinniswood. London: The National Trust, 1998. Pp. 224. ISBN 0 7078 0224 5. £24.99. Country house pastimes. By Oliver Garnett. London: The

It is nearly a quarter of a century since the publication in 1978 of Mark Girouard's magnificent study, Life in the English country house. The book appeared at what we can now recognize to have been an important moment for the stately homes of England. After the years of post-war austerity, the growth in private car ownership had begun to make the countryside increasingly accessible. Many of the weekend journeys spawned by this new affluence were to country houses, a trend speeded up by the exposure several high profile houses enjoyed as period settings for television dramas. Brideshead revisited in 1981 was the pioneer, set as it was in the grounds of Castle Howard. In many respects it has never been bettered, but it has certainly been followed, to the extent that hardly a great house has failed to attract a film crew and some have been visited repeatedly. Nor has this new exposure been confined to the cinema and television. The private mansions from which the working classes were traditionally excluded have opened their doors to paying customers, and their shops to anyone with cash and credit cards.