Book Review: The Making of Home by Judith Flanders

The Making of Home: The 500 Year Story of How Our Houses Became Our Homes by Judith Flanders

Judith Flanders backed into writing nonfiction histories of how normal people lived because she started out by writing a biography of four Victorian sisters (the McDonalds as told in A Circle of Sisters) who married extremely well. They married ‘up’ and ended up being related to or knowing all kinds of people whose names you’ve heard of such as Rudyard Kipling and Edward Burne-Jones.

But while researching the background of A Circle of Sisters, Ms. Flanders discovered she wanted to know everything about how the McDonald sisters lived in their daily life and so, as she learned more and more and more, she wrote about what she’d learned. Several books later, she got around to writing The Making of Home.

Ms. Flanders is prolific, remarkably so considering the immense amount of research she has to wade through in order to write her own books. Merely reading the complete oeuvre of Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope must have taken months. The notetaking and research inspired by Dickens and Trollope’s mentions of everyday life must have added another year to her endeavors.

I’m having to watch my spelling; Ms. Flanders is British and so she doesn’t always spell her words correctly for this side of the pond. I’m noticing added ‘o’s and ‘u’s and ‘re’ instead of ‘er’ as I write this review. It’s her influence, I’m sure.

The Making of Home is, as the subtitle says, a discussion of how in certain regions of Europe, the world slowly changed and ‘house’ changed slowly into ‘home’ along the way. They don’t have the same meaning. Any realtor will tell you that you sell a ‘home’ and buy a ‘house’. The reasoning is that you sell with emotion; luring in buyers who envision the fabulous new life they’ll have if only they buy your house. Yet a savvy buyer shops strictly on the basis of meeting needs within an affordable budget, close to work, good school district, safe neighborhood, etc. etc. Savvy buyers don’t let their emotions run away with them and fall madly in love with their perfect dream house, pay far too much, and then wind up in bankruptcy court when the dream house is revealed to be a nightmare. Savvy buyers transform the logical house into the emotional home.

This is a fascinating book, loaded with tidbits such as the evolution of curtains and drapes and how what you see in the reenactment museum has little to do with reality. As a rule, museums have far too much stuff laying around in their displays. It’s also a lovely exploration of how fad-driven we are as a species, how desperate to ape our betters and how, the minute working-class people can afford plain muslin curtains, the rich move onto heavy brocade draperies layered over lace panels layered over window shades and all heavily trimmed with yards upon yards of sumptuous gimp and tassels. All that folderol costs far too much for normal people and you have to have a fulltime maid to keep up with the maintenance. This is why, despite what you see in decorating magazines, real people never let their draperies and tablecloths puddle on the floor. One encounter with a dirty toddler, a long-haired dog, or a sharp-clawed cat and the romantic appearance vanishes into tedious housekeeping.

This is also why most people who clean their own kitchens do not stick with open shelving and hanging pots and pans like a restaurant would use. Restaurants have nightly cleaning crews to scrub all those greasy pans and they use them every day. How often do you use your fish poacher? Using an object once a year and having to scrub it clean prior to cooking with it encourages closed cupboards.

What reenactment museums and movies get wrong, over and over, is they show how rich people live. When you dutifully plow through hundreds of years of wills and tax records, as Ms. Flanders did, you discover that normal people didn’t regularly own chairs until the 17th century. They were too poor. The man of the house got a stool and everyone else in the family ate standing up. Eventually, everyone got a stool or shared a bench and the head of the house got a chair. Chairs cost money and when what little money a family had was spent almost entirely on housing and food and some scraps of clothing, accumulating furniture and décor was low priority.

She devotes a lot of space to Dutch painters of interiors, making the point that those paintings which resemble the insides of real homes, are nothing of the kind. They’re studio portraits that tell a story and frequently, that story is lost on a modern audience. That stray, loose shoe on the floor? That man in the shadowy corner? Evidence of adultery. She notes that one of the great advantages to a researcher today with 16th and 17th century Dutch interior paintings is you can now easily study image after image after image on your computer without traveling the world. When you do, you start seeing themes over and over along with the identical carpet in a dozen different paintings. The painter owned the carpet, not the supposed patron of the painting. You would never know that fact if you didn’t see the painter’s entire life’s oeuvre on display; one painting after the other in the order in which they were painted.

What does a home have to do with late marriage? With nuclear families? With the now-happily married couple earning money for several years prior to their marriage? Everything, as it turns out.

This was a fascinating book, but not as fascinating as it should have been.

I do have quibbles, which is why I only give The Making of Home three-and-one-half stars instead of say, five. It’s got a lot of full color plates but it really needed more illustrations. There are so many, many instances in the text where an object, house, or region is referred to and there’s no picture.

I like pictures. A picture is worth a thousand words. This extra art doesn’t have to be full-color plates either. Period black and white line drawings would have been appropriate. A map or two would have been nice since I don’t remember exactly where the Netherlands lay in relationship to England or how close together every part of Europe actually is.

My other issue was organization. This is a very readable book yet I couldn’t always follow Ms. Flanders’ logic. The text isn’t arranged by time periods or regions or technological developments. It’s more stream of consciousness which, while fluid, isn’t the best system if you want to use her book to help your research. The chapters are very long and meandering. Again, interesting but not always useful.

Luckily, The Making of Home has got plenty of footnotes and an extensive bibliography and an index. You have some hope of finding what you’re looking for if you’re using this book to research your Victorian murder mystery or that romance set in the Netherlands in 1605. After reading it, you’ll be able to look with more discernment at what the museum diorama is trying to tell you and how it might be wrong. Most people were poor and they didn’t own houses crammed with stuff. Even rich people didn’t own that much stuff, although they certainly owned more than their servants and peasants.

Ms. Flanders wants you to understand that people back then thought differently and lived differently than we do today. She doesn’t judge them for living differently and thinking differently than we do today which is nice. The past is not just a different country. It’s a different world.

Should you read The Making of Home? If you are at all interested in history and how people lived in their daily lives, absolutely. If you write about any of her time periods (16th to early 20th centuries), it’s a good tool and her extensive bibliography will lead you to an entire world of background material you didn’t know existed.

If you would like to learn more about Ms. Flanders and her other, eminently readable books, visit her website.