"Every family is a little state, an empire within itself, bound together by the most endearing emotions, and governed by its patriarchal head, with whose prerogative no power on earth has a right to interfere." To these words written by the American clergyman Herman Humphrey in 1840, the vast majority of his prosperous middle-class readers in both the United States and Europe no doubt nodded in silent assent, for no other group in history, before or since, has so clearly defined and so strenuously dedicated itself to the ideals of family life. The cult of home—the family's private universe, and a place, as Humphrey implied, wholly separate from the outside world of work—had become almost a religious institution. "A private shelter to cover two hearts dearer to each other than all in the world; high walls to exclude the profane eyes of every human being; seclusion enough for the children to feel that mother is a holy and peculiar name—this is home," wrote a contributor to a ladies' magazine in 1856. "This is the true nature of home," echoed the English writer and art critic John Ruskin in 1865: "It is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division."
The physical features of this temple of family life varied according to the income of the patriarchal head, but it is not difficult to reconstruct a representative setting that Humphrey and Ruskin would have recognized and approved of. All families with any claim to respectability maintained a ground-floor front room for the reception of visitors and for important family occasions to which a degree of formality was appropriate. The furnishing of this drawing room, or parlor, reflected its status as a household shrine.
In this illustration from The Art and Craft of Homemaking, a manual of advice for housewives without servants published in England in 1913, a wife stands framed in a welcoming glow of light to greet the returning breadwinner. The trim garden and generous size of the dwelling are typical of the new housing being built at the time on the outskirts of industrial cities, to which men traveled to work by public transport. For the families that lived in such houses, enjoying the benefits of urban facilities but removed from the noise and dirt of city centers, suburbia was already becoming as much a way of life and state of mind as a physical location.
In mid-nineteenth-century London, a visitor would be ushered into the drawing room by a maid dressed in black with white apron and cap. Left alone while waiting to be received, the visitor might note rich crimson wallpaper, a luxurious vermilion carpet and velvet curtains, and sumptuously upholstered, plush-covered armchairs arranged about the room. The large, leatherbound book that lay upon a massive table of carved mahogany was more likely to be the family photograph album than the more traditional Bible. Great glass-fronted bookcases and a little rosewood writing desk punctuated the walls. The household's impressive collection of silver plates, salvers, and tureens would be displayed on a massive sideboard. Like the great gilt mirror set above the fireplace, the lacquered Japanese fans arranged on either side of it, the brass-headed fire irons in the hearth, the framed family photographs that crowded the walls, and the host of decorative snuffboxes, china statuettes, and other ornaments that thronged every available surface, the family silver would be polished to perfection. Every object in the room would shine in the shimmering light that cascaded from a candlelit crystal chandelier hanging from the ornate plasterwork ceiling and caught the vibrant red glow of a coal fire that crackled companionably
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