At Home - Bill Bryson [241]
III
So that was the situation for Mr. Marsham and his century as they headed jointly toward their closing years. From the perspective of domesticity, there has never been a more interesting or eventful time. Private life was completely transformed in the nineteenth century—socially, intellectually, technologically, hygienically, sartorially, sexually, and in almost any other respect that could be made into an adverb. Mr. Marsham was born (in 1822) into a world that was still essentially medieval—a place of candlelight, medicinal leeches, travel at walking pace, news from afar that was always weeks or months old—and lived to see the introduction of one marvel after another: steamships and speeding trains, telegraphy, photography, anesthesia, indoor plumbing, gas lighting, antisepsis in medicine, refrigeration, telephones, electric lights, recorded music, cars and planes, skyscrapers, motion pictures, radio, and literally tens of thousands of tiny things more, from mass-produced bars of soap to push-along lawn mowers.
It is almost impossible to conceive just how much radical day-to-day change people were exposed to in the nineteenth century, particularly in the second half. Even something as elemental as the weekend was brand-new. The term is not recorded in English before 1879, when it appears in the magazine Notes & Queries in the sentence: “In Staffordshire, if a person leaves home at the end of his week’s work on the Saturday afternoon to spend the evening of Saturday and the following Sunday with friends at a distance, he is said to be spending his weekend at So-and-so.” Even then, clearly, it only signified Saturday afternoon and Sunday, and then only for certain people. Not until the 1890s did it become universally understood, if not yet universally enjoyed, but an entitlement to relaxation was unquestionably on its way.
The irony in all this is that just as the world was getting more agreeable for most people—more brilliantly lit, more reliably plumbed, more leisured and pampered and gaudily entertaining—it was quietly falling apart for the likes of Mr. Marsham. The agricultural crisis that began in the 1870s and ran on almost indefinitely was as palpably challenging to country parsons as it was to the wealthy landowners on whom they depended, and it was doubly difficult for those whose family wealth was tied to the land, as Mr. Marsham’s was.
By 1900, a parson’s earnings were much less than half in real terms what they had been fifty years before. Crockford’s Clerical Directory of 1903 bleakly recorded that a “considerable section” of the clergy now lived at a level of “bare subsistence.” A Reverend F. J. Bleasby, it further noted, had made 470 unsuccessful applications for a curacy, and finally, in humbling defeat, had entered a workhouse. The well-off parson was resoundingly and irremediably a thing of the past.
The rambling parsonages that had once made the life of a country clergyman commodious and agreeable were now for many just vast and leaky burdens. Many twentieth-century clergy, coming from more modest backgrounds and struggling on much reduced incomes, couldn’t afford to maintain such spacious properties. A Mrs. Lucy Burnett, wife of a country vicar in Yorkshire, plaintively explained to a church commission in 1933 just how big was the vicarage that she had to manage: “If you played a brass band in my kitchen I don’t think you could hear it in the drawing room,” she said. The responsibility for interior improvements fell to the incumbents, but increasingly they were too impoverished to effect any. “Many a parsonage has passed twenty, thirty, even fifty years without any redecoration at all,” Alan Savidge wrote in a history of parsonages in 1964.
The simplest solution for the church was to sell off the troublesome parsonages, and to build something smaller nearby. The Church of England Commissioners, the officials in charge of these disposals, were not always the most astute of businesspeople, it must be said. Anthony Jennings, in The