Module 9

Outline of Module 9

1. The Victorian house and garden

2. Houses and gardens in Victorian Guelph

3. Researching a house or other building in Guelph

4. Suggested research topics

5. Assigned reading

6. Discussion questions

1. The Victorian house and garden.

a. the North American ideal.

While Europe, and especially Britain, provided the epitome of taste and style, North Americans wanted more living space than was the norm in Europe. The ideal became the single-family, detached house, privately owned, set in a spacious lot, far removed from the dirty, dangerous, crowded central city. This ideal was promoted by a succession of writers, artists, educators and businessmen. A notable example was Andrew Jackson Downing, a landscape gardener from the Hudson River Valley of New York whose books were widely read, including his The Architecture of Country Houses (1856). Downing's ideal was essentially rural; morality and virtue were country characteristics and much of this literature stressed the rural or perhaps suburban settings as the best locations for the good life.

Figure 1: Downing's "Rural Gothic Villa". Source: Downing, Architecture of Country Houses, p. 321.

The best assessment of this movement is Gwendolyn Wright's Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (1981). Wright discusses the "cult of domesticity," which gave meaning to the symbolism of the idea of the home. She isolates the concept of "privatism" as central - the home as the symbol of successful private enterprise, and the symbol of family privacy, a safe haven protecting women and children from the dangers of a wicked city, and a place of repose for the man after a hard day in the strenuous world of city business.[1]

b. housing construction.

To what extent were these ideals realized? Obviously there were great differences in the results based on class, ethnic background and race, and location. According to a major study, however, Michael Doucet and John Weaver, Housing the North American City (1991), the later Victorian period was a "golden age" in which the North American "common man" could achieve this ideal to a greater extent than was possible elsewhere. The degree of home ownership in Hamilton is cited as an example. This increased from 26% in 1861, to 35% in 1891, and 51% in 1911 (based on the assessment rolls). What made this possible was the conjunction of several factors: the cultural context outlined above, the relatively cheap cost of suburban land, a new mortgage system that allowed for longer periods of payments, and technological changes such as the invention of the balloon frame house and the prefabrications of housing components.[2]

c. housing design.

Although Victorian rhetoric emphasized individualism, there was actually a great deal of cultural uniformity. For example, there was really no basic difference between the design of the mansion and that of the modest cottage of the worker. The cottage tended to be a scaled -down version of the more grandiose houses. A great many pattern books tended to standardize design tastes, and popular books and magazines presented models of how to live in these new homes. Women appear to have had more influence on interior design than in previous generations, demanding the best new technologies and improvements, especially in the kitchen.[3]

The potential influence of the home on a family's behaviour - for good or evil - was extended to the design itself. This meant that design was thought to have moral connotations. To Downing, the Gothic best expressed a family's Christian virtues, the Italianate expressed elegance in artistic taste, and so on. But most importantly, a home expressed the owner's individuality even if the designs came from popular pattern books and were widely repeated in cities and suburbs.

For guidance in the field of house design, some of the sources mentioned in the previous module are also useful here. Among the best studies of house design are Virginia and Lee McAlester, A Field Guide to American Houses (1984), and Alan Gowans, The Comfortable House, North American Suburban Architecture, 1890 - 1930 (1987), which includes a good summary of the Victorian era. Small town house design is covered in Margaret Cuthbertson, American House Designs: An Index to Popular and Trade Periodicals, 1850-1915 (1994), who shows that design was as much a story of a consumer commodity as it was of a fine art.[4]

d. landscape and garden.

The Victorian ideal seems to have been an overgrown yard paralleling the busy interior. It was a romantic age that celebrated the natural and the unspoiled, but in reality denuded the landscape without much regard for existing plants and trees. Victorian houses now have picturesque settings, surrounded by abundant plantings, but photos of most streets during the Victorian era shows houses looked awkward and almost naked, without any foliage to be seen.

Two gardening styles competed for favour in the Western world. One was the 18th century notion of a formal arrangement of plants and flowers in rigid lines, circles, and patterns. A newer approach was the "natural" garden, usually associated with the "English cottage" garden.

Gardening history is a well developed subdiscipline, but it has not yet been incorporated into urban history in the way that the history of parks has become central to our understanding of cities. For gardening history, a good place to start is Tom Carter, The Victorian Garden (1984). For Canada the only source is Edwina von Baeyer, Rhetoric and Roses, A History of Canadian Gardening (1984), which outlines some of the basic trends and relates them to larger changes in Canadian society.[5]

e. Urban parks

The planning of parks was closely related to both urban and garden design. Public parks supported by municipal governments date from the 1840s in Britain and the 1850s in the United States and Canada. Some useful books on the American parks movement include Galen Cranz, The Politics of Park Design: A History of Urban Parks in America(1982), and Roy Rosenzweig and E. Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park(1992).Many of the early parks in major Canadian cities stemmed from the transfer of federal lands (used for military purposes) to local government. Neighbourhood parks were generally not established until the turn of the century. For a good beginning to the Canadian story, see J.R.Wright, Urban Parks in Ontario, Part Two: The Public Park Movement, 1860-1914(1984).

2. Houses and gardens in Victorian Guelph.

a. the ideal.

There is little information available specifically on what Guelphites thought, but there is no reason to suppose that they did not fit into the North American pattern. The introductory paragraphs of the Mercury's "Building Operations" reports occasionally include comments about the changing nature of the home, outside and in.

The extent of suburbanization during the Victorian era has not yet been studied, except as one aspect of Debra Nash-Chambers' work cited in the previous module. Assessment rolls and city directories are basic sources here, as are a succession of maps. For example, the direction of expansion can be traced very accurately by comparing T.W.Cooper's map of 1862 (reprinted by the Guelph Civic Museum), with the Guelph "Bird's Eye View" of 1872 (also reprinted), and Cooper's 1877 map in the Clerk's Office at Guelph City Hall. All show each building in the town quite accurately.

b. housing construction.

The "Building Operations" reports are filled with data on this theme, but they have not yet been compiled and analyzed. General impressions from reading through them, and from other sources, suggest that a significant portion of houses were self-built, that is, they were built with the help of family and friends, not by a contractor. On the other hand, there seem to be a very large number of houses designed by architects who also supervised the construction. There has not been comparable work on other places that would allow us to know whether this was unusual. It does seem to correspond to the findings of Nash-Chambers concerning the predominately middle class nature of Guelph, with few very rich or very poor. For example, Nash-Chambers found that the percentage of householders who owned their own homes between 1861 and 1881 was a high constant of 62%, far higher than the figures reported by Doucet and Weaver on Hamilton. Both used assessment roll data.[6] This would also explain why there are no really gigantic mansions in Guelph of the kind that still grace older streets in Toronto, Hamilton, and London, nor were there any real slums, areas with a high concentration of very poor housing.

c. design.

There has been a good deal of local pride in Guelph's architectural history, and Gordon Couling's work, cited in the previous module, is an example.

From my own work in this area, several generalizations are possible at this point.

First, there was little difference in the designs used for the mansion or the cottage, although the decorative features of the larger houses was much more elaborate.
Figure 2: "Yankee Cottage", built by William Kennedy in 1847 on Arthur Street. This is a good example of the widespread use of the "Ontario Cottage" style throughout this period. This was a one-storey, symmetrical box with a hipped roof. The style appeared most often on a working family's house, but also was used in some large houses. Hundreds of houses of this style were built well into the 20th century. Source: G.A. Stelter, 1986
Second, the classical styles typical of early Guelph persisted well into the later Victorian era, when more flamboyant Romantic Revival styles were the fashion elsewhere.

Figure 3: A Matthew Bell house, about 1870, on Albert Street. This was designed in the Renaissance Revival style, and was still basically a classical, symmetrically shaped house, with a projecting frontispiece. Source: G.A. Stelter, 1986

Figure 4: An "Ontario" house from the 1860s on Edinburgh Road. The orientation is still classical in inspiration, but the central gable has become more "gothic" or pointed. This house represents literally thousands of rural houses in Southern Ontario, hence the term "Ontario house" is appropriate. Source: G.A. Stelter, 1992
Third, the predominant use of stone until the 1870s gave a more restrained look to styles that were very exuberant when built in wood, such as the Queen Anne.

Figure 5: George Sleeman's house, on Waterloo Avenue.This Queen Anne, built in stone in 1891, was the most expensive house built in Guelph up to that time. It has fallen on less respectable uses today as "The Manor", a strip club. Source: G.A. Stelter

d. gardens and landscaping.

There has been no work done on the history of gardening in Guelph, or in any other Canadian community for that matter. Researchers in this area would have to go beyond the traditional kinds of sources, and turn to collections of photographs, for example, of 19th century houses in the Guelph Public Library, the Civic Museum, and the University Archives. Was there any difference in the styles of gardens in the mansions and the cottage? Some houses are fairly well documented in this regard.

Figure 6: The Sleeman house. This house was photographed from various angles, and some of these photographs are deposited in the Sleeman Collection of the University Archives. These indicate a very formal approach,with a manicured lawn, plantings in vases, and formal fountains and ponds.

Source: Sleeman Collection, University Archives.

Figure 7: Tyrcathlen. A formal approach is also evident in some of the views of the grounds of Tyrcathlen (Ker Cavan). The 1872 "Bird's Eye View" of Guelph shows a large circular planting behind the house. And the photograph here of the front of the grounds, taken about 1870, shows a large circular garden set in the huge front lawn. Source: Guelph Public Library.

3. Researching a house or other building in Guelph.

Article 4

4. Suggested research topics.

a. the suburban house - a study of the houses of a new neighbourhood.
b. the history of a house and its early families.
c. construction materials: stone, wood, brick.
d. the architecturally designed house: how does it compare to those from pattern books?
e. Victorian garden styles.

5. Assigned reading

Deryck Holdsworth, "House and Home in Vancouver: Images of West Coast Urbanism, 1886-1929", in The Canadian City, chp. 8.

Gilbert Stelter, "The Carpenter\Architect and the Ontario Townscape: John Hall, Jr., of Guelph," Historic Guelph, vol. 30 (September, 1991), pp. 4-21.

6. Discussion questions

How does early Vancouver compare with other Canadian cities as far as the price of houses and the rate of ownership?
What meanings did Vancouver residents ascribe to the English Tudor and the California Bungalow styles?
What were the most essential factors involved in achieving home ownership in the Victorian era?
What did practical architects like John Hall contribute to the Ontario townscape?
To what extent was the Italianate style the epitome of taste in Victorian Guelph?

Students are reminded that they can e-mail questions on any aspect of the course, directly to Professor Stelter