telling tales: anecdotal insights into the west end house c. 1765-c. 1785

Telling Tales: Anecdotal Insights into the West End House c. 1765-c. 1785Author(s): Rachel StewartSource: Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Sixth Series, Vol. 13 (2003), pp. 319-327Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Royal Historical SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3679261 .

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Transactions of the RHS 13 (2003), pp. 319-27 ? 2003 Royal Historical Society DOI: Io.Io17/Soo8o44oio300ooo8o Printed in the United Kingdom

TELLING TALES: ANECDOTAL INSIGHTS INTO THE WEST END HOUSE c. I765-c. 1785

By Rachel Stewart

ABSTRACT. Anecdotal evidence is much beloved of architectural historians, particularly in their attempts to recreate the social context in which architectural practice took place. But there are dangers inherent in its use. Using examples relating to the West End house in the period c. 1765 to c. 1785, this paper argues that architectural historians should be wary of tacking on such evidence to corroborate what they read from built evidence; rather they should treat the body of anecdotal evidence as a source worth investigating in its own right. Only then will they unearth new readings and new understandings which elaborate and sometimes contradict received interpretations of architectural forms.

In 1777, Lady Sarah Lennox remarked of Lady Ilchester, new to London and to Grosvenor Square: 'I thought she had too much sense not to make a proper figure if she undertook to make any at all ... but I fancy a good House and good suppers will soon recover the faux pas of going to the Opera sans powder." A good West End house and the entertainment it facilitated could be an antidote to worse offences than that. The duchess of Devonshire was wary that people might think she shunned Lady Derby not because of the exposure of that lady's affair with the duke of Dorset, but simply because she no longer had at her disposal the use of the magnificent Derby House, also in Grosvenor Square, which had been expensively and prominently transformed by Robert and James Adam only a few years earlier. 'I have the greatest horror of her crime', the duchess wrote to her mother in 1778,

but her conduct has long been imprudent, and yet, I have sup'd at her house ... and now it does seem shocking to me ... that at the time all her grandeur is crush'd around her, I should entirely abandon her, as if I said, I know you was imprudent formerly, but then you had a great house and great suppers and so I came to you but now that you have nothing of all this, I will avoid you.'

'British Library, Holland House papers, Add. MS 51354, Lady Sarah Lennox to Lady Susan O'Brien, 30 Dec. 1777.

2Amanda Foreman, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (i999), 68-9.

319



320 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Women's comments, often about other women, dominate the type of anecdotal evidence that can be used to explore the town house's various functions as symbol, property and commodity, as well as home - functions that can be obscured by the aesthetic and developmental considerations that often preoccupy architectural historians, particularly in this field. Such comments as those of Sarah Lennox and the duchess of Devonshire help us not just to answer, but to pose questions often disregarded by approaches centred on the built form or its architects. What did occupants want from their houses? What did they look for when they purchased a house, or commissioned a rebuilding or refurbishment? What factors affected their decisions? What roles did town houses play for their owners, and how were they perceived by others? Anecdotal evidence is an indispensable aid in recreating the range of motives that may have governed individuals' behaviour in respect of London houses, the physical evidence of which we see in actual or documented buildings, such as Derby House. But anecdotal evidence also poses problems for the researcher, some inherent in the material itself, and some in the way it is generally used.

In Objects of Desire, Adrian Forty complains that writers very often pay only lip service to architecture's social background, if they bother at all. 'Cursory references to the social context are like the weeds and gravel around a stuffed fish in a glass case', says Forty. 'However realistic these may be, they are only furnishings, and taking them away would have little effect on our perception of the fish.'3 In practice, lip service often takes the form of anecdote used in an isolated or fragmentary way - a single apposite comment to corroborate or illustrate findings or arguments deriving principally from the buildings themselves, official or corporate papers, financial evidence or some other source. But the body of anecdotal evidence is rarely looked at on its own terms.

One consequent risk is that an individual example might be mis- leading, misunderstood or mistakenly generalised to all people for a long period of time. For example, Lawrence Stone and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone quote C6sar de Saussure's remark from the I720S that 'many noblemen live in town to economize' as evidence to support an assumption that this was, in fact, the case.4 Yet a wide study of anecdotal and other sources for the years from 1765 to 1785 offers directly contrary evidence. Many letters refer to abandoning city life for a while in order to recoup finances, a strategy verified and vindicated by financial

:Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire: Design and Society 175o-i98o (1986), 8. 4Lawrence Stone and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite? England 1540o-88o

(Oxford, 1984), 299, 350, quoting C6sar de Saussure, A Foreign View of England in the Reigns of George I and George II (1902), pp. 208-9.



TELLING TALES 321

evidence. Advertisements, too, give 'retiring to the country' as the reason for many house sales. The composite evidence for the period c. 1765-c. 1785 contradicts Stone and Stone's conclusions, raising the question of whether economising by living in London was ever a fact and, if so, whether the balance had changed in or by the i77os. Certainly de Saussure's remark cannot be generalised to the whole of the eighteenth century. Moreover, the writings of such foreign visitors to Georgian London - a favourite with architectural historians - have limited use in some contexts. They might be useful for observations about a man's life in his town house, but less so about the town house in his life. And their remarks were not always as disinterested as they might have been, as contemporaries sometimes noted.5

There is also a tendency to rely on the same, readily accessible and admittedly highly quotable sources, such as Horace Walpole, and Lady Mary Coke. Anecdotes are made unjustifiably representative by their repetition time and again for the same purposes, exacerbating a general problem with historical writing. The tacked-on, seemingly corroborative anecdote is too easily used as a means of making truisms truer. But a broader study of anecdotal evidence can sometimes give us reason to challenge received views.

Because of its casual and repeated use, the anecdote may not be studied closely enough in itself, and may lose some of its original potency. Architectural historians regularly quote Walpole's famous comment that Derby House was 'filigreed into puerility'6 because the adjective 'filigreed' seems to match the style of decoration shown in surviving images of and designs for the now demolished house. But the choice and force of the word 'puerility' is largely ignored. The Adams's client here, Lord Stanley, later Derby, was reportedly unrefined in both behaviour and understanding,7 and the combination of, or perhaps fine

I See, for example, The Town and Countiy Magazine, 4 (1772), 322, where Pierre-Jean Grosley's A Tour to London; Or, New Observations on England, and its Inhabitants is reviewed: 'Monsieur Grosley, though he seems to have divested himself as much as possible of national prejudice, still retains such a tincture of the Frenchman, that we cannot pronounce his work an impartial disquisition on the manners and genius of the English. If we add to this the mutations of taste and fashion since the time of his writing, we shall find a very imperfect idea of our present modes and polite pursuits.'

6 Horace Walpole's Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis et al. (48 vols.) (1937-83), xxxii (1965), 371, letter to Lady Ossory, 8 Aug. 1777.

7In Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (45), Amanda Foreman writes of the delight that Derby and his friends took 'in being overtly crude, as the following wager illustrates: "Ld Cholmondeley has given two guineas to Ld Derby, to receive 5oo Gs. whenever his lordship fucks a woman in a Balloon one thousand yards from Earth"'. See, also, an open 'Letter to Lord Stanley', from 'Gentlemen of Lancashire' in The Public Advertiser, 24 Oct. 1775: 'Your Youth and Inexperience, in some measure, shield you from the Severity with which your conduct would otherwise be treated; but it is necessary to give a hint to your Vanity ... Your personal Character hath hardly yet budded. I wish the Twig




line between, vulgarity and the sort of display of 'taste' seen at Derby House seems to have been at the root of Walpole's criticism, in which he linked the 'filigreed' decoration which pervaded every surface with a lack of sophistication and maturity. Thus Walpole's remark is much more than a comment on excess and excessive fineness of detail. The anecdote's connections with other comments made about similar, if less high-profile town-house interiors are also ignored. The 'puerility' of indulging in such a frivolous display was not a point of view exclusive to Walpole. Mrs Elizabeth Carter, in response to a town-house room 'adorned with the utmost profusion of expensive elegance' declared she would 'as soon be tempted to cry for a doll or a coral' as to covet the overdose of ornament she beheld.8 The fault lies not simply in the ornament, or its designer, but in the sort of person it is deemed to appeal to. The town house was particularly susceptible to associations with childish or effeminate impermanence, inconstancy, insubstantiality and intemperance, and Adam or Adam-style decoration exemplified these emasculating traits.

So, in the simple matching of remark with evidence, other subtleties may be lost. But if, rather than tacking it on, we use anecdotal evidence as a lever, we can gain new insights into subjects we sometimes believe to be adequately pinned down already. For example, we can identify and unpick the negative associations of the town house implied by Walpole and many others. Although it is too simplistic to call the country house masculine and the London house feminine, anecdotal information not only reveals but also goes some way to explaining the circle of links between women, luxury and the town house in this period.

There is abundant anecdotal evidence about the financial distress caused by purchasing or building in London." When Elizabeth Montagu claimed in 1782, on settling accounts for the building of her new house in Portman Square, that 'there is ... a wonderful charm in those words in full of all demands', she gave a hint to the modern researcher by qualifying her comment. 'I will own my taste is unfashionable', she admitted, and indeed if others concurred that 'the worst of haunted Houses ... are those haunted by Duns', they certainly did not reflect

may be so bent, that the Tree may be well inclined. 'You was pruned indeed by an able Hand, but you tell us too plainly that your Uncle is not now with you.'

'A Series of Letters between Mrs Elizabeth Carter and Miss Catherine Talbot, from the Year 174r to 177o. To lhich Are Added Letters fom Mrs Elizabeth Carter to Mrs Vese, between the Years 1763 and 1787; Published fom the Orginal Maanuscripts in the Possession ofthe Rev. Montagu Pennington, MA. JVicar of oMrthbourn, in Kent, her Nephew and Executor, ed. Montagu Pennington (4 vols.) (1809), mII, 327, Mrs Carter to Mrs Vesey, 18 Jan. 1768.

'9For more on this topic, see Rachel Stewart, 'The West End House c. 1765-c. 1785: Gamble and Forfeit', Georgian Group Journal, 13 (2002), 135-48, where some passages from this paper also appear.



TELLING TALES 323

it in their behaviour.'" 'Executions' in town houses, through which creditors tried to recoup some of their losses by targeting the debtors' house and property, were a common topic in private correspondence and no doubt town gossip. Derby was said to have had four executions in one day at Derby House," a report previously undiscovered or ignored by architectural historians, although an essential contributor to our understanding of the house's function in the dissolute peer's life.

People went to great lengths to disguise reasons for selling London houses and small wonder, as there is considerable evidence not only that people knew who was moving in or out of houses and often the sums for which they were bought and sold, but also that they freely drew their own conclusions. The duke of Manchester was rumoured to be retiring to the country and selling his house in town, and therefore supposed to be in financial distress. The duke did not care for such inferences: 'The Duke of Manchester will not now sell his house', reported Caroline Howe to Lady Spencer in 1767; 'they say he has changed his mind on hearing that everybody says he is undone'. This conclusion, erroneous or otherwise, joins other anecdotal evidence that the purchase or disposal of a town house was an indicator: on the one hand of wealth, ambition or good fortune; on the other of debt, failure or bad luck. We can note, too, in this example, how anecdote was used and abused at the time: another problem waiting to trip the researcher.

Men often cast women as the instigators of expenditure, and over- expenditure, on and in the London house, and directly responsible for moves to and within London. In 1767 Philip Francis supposed Mrs Chandler to be 'at the summit of her wishes' now that her husband had bought a house in Bruton Street, and Frederick Reynolds believed that it was his mother and aunt, 'like the compass, bent on a still farther variation to the westward', who had persuaded his father to forsake Salisbury Square for the new Adelphi.' The anecdotal evidence is rich in this respect, but it was not always wives who needed to be kept happy in a London house, or who were to blame for the consequent debt. In March 1778, Judith Milbanke reported that 'Lord Onslow had an Execution in his House last week for an hundred and sixty thousand pounds & is quite ruined.' Onslow allegedly tried to soften the blow to his wife, who 'knew nothing at all of his Debts', by explaining that the

"'British Library, Montagu correspondence, Add. MS 40663, fol. 117, Elizabeth Montagu to Mrs Robinson, 9 July [1782].

" The Noels and the Milbankes, their Letters for Twenty-Five Years, 1767-1792, ed. Malcolm Elwin (1967), 103, 18 May 1778, Sophie Curzon to Mary Noel from London.

" The Francis Letters, by Sir Philip Francis and Other Members of his Family, ed. Beata Francis and Eliza Keary, with a note on the Junius controversy by C.F. Keary (2 vols.) (1901), I, 79, Philip Francis to Alexander Mackrabie, 5 Dec. 1767; The Life and Times of Frederick Reynolds, Written by Himself (2 vols.) (1826), I, 65.




latter were 'greatly owing to his having kept two or three Women whose expenses lay very hard on him'.'3 Again, the anecdotal evidence suggests that town houses were both the cause and the target of debt, a fact corroborated by the financial evidence, giving the historian the best of both worlds: a seductively good story, tinged with exaggeration, which nevertheless proves to hold much more than a grain of truth.

Blame for overspending on luxuries in town, including the house itself, may have been projected on to women to 'safeguard' the masculinity of men. Consumption has long been characterised as feminising, and women are certainly represented in the fictional and journalistic literature of this period as possessors of irrational desires, which lead them to drive the last remnants of consumer sanity from men's minds. But the anecdotal evidence balances its own implications of women's culpability by explaining, too, why women were so closely linked with town houses. The composite picture which we get from it reveals that both being in town, and the town house itself, were immensely important to many women, particularly elderly women and widows, seeking society, medical expertise and amusement. Caroline Howe, who spent most of her time in London, declared that she was 'never without a party of some sort or other', at least during the season.'4 Many women expressed a preference for town life either in words or action. In 1785 Judith Milbanke wrote to her aunt, Mary Noel:

I only wish Mil [her husband] was as well satisfied with the country as I am ... certainly men have not half the resources to amuse themselves as we females. I do not carry the Joke so far as to say I prefer the Country, for to own the truth I should like to set out for the gay City tomorrow morning.'5

Two years later her aunt was obliged to retire from London for financial reasons, but hoped by prudent living to return in a few years to 'go off at last in a blaze like a tallow candle wrapt up in brown paper'.'6 Although not all men appreciated the attractions of the country, these women, at least, certainly seem to have preferred the town.

Women often saw a town house as a means for themselves or other women to pass many leisured hours, particularly following the death of a husband. In 1759 Lady Hervey referred to her house in town as an 'amusement (for old people must not pretend to pleasures)' and busied herself in 'altering, fitting up, and completing [the] house, which

'3Noels and Milbankes, ed. Elwin, 91, Judith Milbanke to Mary Noel, 3 Feb. 1778. '4British Library, Althorp papers, F 42, Caroline Howe to Lady Spencer, 29 Dec.

[1772]. '5Noels and Milbankes, ed. Elwin, 258, letter of 28 Jan. 1785. 6 Ibid., 317-18, Mary Noel to Judith Milbanke, 2 Feb. i787.



TELLING TALES 325

[was] no small affair'.'7 Twenty years later Sarah Lennox pitied David Garrick's widow because not only had her raison d'tre disappeared with the death of the actor and the loss of her role in his social life, but she had already done everything she could to her house: 'the spirit of her society is lost, and business she cannot have, for both her Houses in Town and Country are so compleat she has not a chair or table to amuse herself with attiring'.'8 Some widows found a London house, or the work done on it, therapeutic. The duchess of Ancaster was said to have made many alterations to her house in Berkeley Square, 'to take off from the melancholy Idea's it must naturally bring to her mind'.'9

While alterations to their houses occupied and distracted many women, for Mrs Montagu the pleasure was in the finished house, or the anticipation of it, not in its construction.20 Her new town-house project enabled her to satisfy her desire to be surrounded by pretty, tasteful things at this late point of her life. 'In so little while', she told her sister-in-law, 'I shall never see anything belonging to me that is not pretty, except when I behold myself in the looking glass."' The splendid new house was not simply a machine for entertaining, therefore, and the evidence afforded by Mrs Montagu's letters warns against viewing the town house as solely, or perhaps even primarily, fulfilling that role. Anecdote can therefore be used to temper other sorts of evidence. Mrs Montagu thought her new house had taken years off her, 'from its chearfulness, and from its admirable conveniences and comforts', which made her less afraid of growing old. 'A good Winter habitation', she wrote in 1781, 'like a good friend is a comfort in all seasons and circumstances, and most particularly felt in bad seasons, bad health, bad spirits'; while the following year she declared a 'good House' to be 'a great comfort in old age and among the few real facilities that money will procure'.22

To what extent, however, can personal remarks relating to specific instances and circumstances be used to recreate a generic 'client perspective'? In this instance there is other anecdotal evidence that a

7 Letters of Mary Lepel, Lady Hervey with a Memoir, and Illustrative Notes (1821), p. 261, Lady Hervey to Rev. Edmund Morris, 25 Sept. 1759-

'SBritish Library, Holland House papers, Add. MS 51354, Sarah Lennox to Lady Susan O'Brien, 9 Mar. 1779.

'9 Badminton, Glos., Badminton muniments, FmK 1/3/20, letter no. 15, Lady Charlotte Finch to Dowager Duchess of Beaufort, n.d.

21 See British Library, Montagu correspondence, Add. MS 40663, fol. 97, letter to Mrs Robinson, 19 Dec. [1779].

"'British Library, Montagu correspondence, Add. MS 40663, fol. 104, Mrs Montagu to Mrs Robinson, 4 Dec. [1781].

2British Library, Montagu correspondence, Add. MS 40663, fol. io4, Mrs Montagu to Mrs Robinson, I Dec. [1781]; fol. IIo, Mrs Montagu to Mrs Robinson, 17Jan. [1782]; fol. 112, Mrs Montagu to Mrs Robinson, 2 Mar. 1782.




tastefully and comfortably furnished house, primed for city life, sometimes superseded the inducements that persuaded or obliged people to take it in the first place, itself becoming the reason for being in town. For example, Lady Holland hoped that the duke of Leinster's 'pretty house in Arlington Street would tempt him to come to London' in 1768."3

Broader study of anecdotal evidence can therefore enlighten and reward the architectural historian. But there is another problem inherent in the anecdotal material itself. A shortcoming of any research that relies heavily on eighteenth-century family papers is that it tends, necessarily, to be limited to studies of the upper and perhaps upper- middle classes, whose papers have been preserved, archived and cata- logued, or published. In turn, this restriction limits the classes of house that can be studied, and findings derived from anecdotal evidence, and family papers generally, cannot therefore claim to be representative of anything beyond their own referents. Yet even though they cannot be generalised to other classes of person or house, such findings can broaden the range and detail of our understanding of attitudes towards architecture, provided that we acknowledge their limits.

Another bias often inherent in the material, as hinted earlier, is a gender bias. Anecdotal evidence draws attention to the diversity of players interested in a house, not just occupants, but visitors and other observers, but how far can we generalise from the comments of women, which dominate the sources? If the researcher relies on references to the London house in private papers, then women's letters, especially to other women, and their diaries, tend to reap greater and quicker rewards than do men's, for two reasons. First, women's correspondence in this period is almost exclusively private, even if it discusses public affairs, and concerns their own and others' domestic and personal concerns. On the other hand, although men had private correspondence, it is not always archived separately from their official correspondence, and even so is often as much concerned with public affairs as private. So, any given number of men's letters is unlikely to yield the same amount of pertinent information as the equivalent number of women's letters. This inherent bias in the sources makes the problem of generalising from the particular more acute - how representative are women's views and actions? Any insight into what men wanted from a home is often lacking altogether, or reported by women, which would not matter if we knew that attitudes to houses were not gender-specific, but makes it harder to establish if they were.

This predicament is part of the greater problem of defining and

3 Correspondence of Emily, Duchess of Leinster (173-1,814q), ed. Brian Fitzgerald (3 vols.) (Dublin, 1949-57), I, 544, Lady Holland to duchess of Leinster, 6 Oct. [1768].



TELLING TALES 327

articulating the link between anecdote and architecture. Having stepped away from the built or visual evidence and created a context for it, it is often hard to return and point to any direct correspondence between text and object. We can tell what women wanted from a house, yet we do not see too easily how it translated into specific instructions for an architect, or into built form. The anecdotal evidence is often unrelated to an identified house, or to one whose form and finish have been recorded. With the exception, therefore, of a few cases where building, client and circumstances are all well documented, it serves best in reconstructing a range of motives and situations to enhance our understanding of behaviour and reasoning in respect of the town house in this period.24

Despite the 'pastime' element evident in some women's decoration of their houses, most architectural projects are a means to an end for a client, not an end in themselves. We take houses as interesting, or not, for the history of architecture, but perhaps thereby overlook their importance in the history of their occupants or their time. It is possible, with the help of anecdotal evidence, to view houses not just as entities in themselves, with their own histories, in which successive occupants were actors, but as functional objects in the histories of those occupants. The two approaches are not mutually exclusive, but complementary. Elizabeth Montagu's letters tell us little about the architecture and finish of her London homes, but plenty about her attitude towards them. Evidence not directly related to architecture provides information about the wider context in which the town house operated. It can humanise the built evidence, setting the house or house type in the broader context of people's ongoing lives, concerns and aspirations. The difficulty of making the direct link between anecdote and architecture is no excuse for leaving our stuffed fish isolated in his glass case.

24See Colin Campbell, 'Understanding Traditional and Modem Patterns of Con- sumption in Eighteenth-Century England: A Character-Action Approach', in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (I993), 40-57 (44) for an argument that, in the absence of any specific articulation of consumer motives, the researcher can use such sources as diaries, letters and autobiographies to plot a range of potential meanings.



telling tales: anecdotal insights into the west end house c. 1765-c. 1785

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