At Home - Bill Bryson [88]
Thanks to Evelyn’s support, Gibbons became very successful, but most of his wealth actually came from running a workshop that produced statuary and other stonework. It was Gibbons, it appears, who came up with the idea of depicting British heroes as Roman statesmen, in togas and sandals, and this made his work in stone extremely fashionable. Though he is now widely thought of as the greatest woodcarver in modern times, he was not especially famous for it in his own lifetime. For Blenheim Palace, Gibbons produced £4,000 worth of decorative stonework but only £36 worth of wood carving. Part of the reason his wood carvings are so valued today is that there aren’t very many of them.
* Although he is little read now, Walpole was immensely popular in his day for his histories and romances. He was a particularly adept coiner of words. The Oxford English Dictionary credits him with no fewer than 233 coinages. Many, like gloomth, greenth, fluctuable, and betweenity, didn’t take, but a great many others did. Among the terms he invented or otherwise brought into English are airsickness, anteroom, bask, beefy, boulevard, café, cause célèbre, caricature, fairy tale, falsetto, frisson, impresario, malaria, mudbath, nuance, serendipity, somber, souvenir, and, as mentioned a few pages back, comfortable in its modern sense.
• CHAPTER VIII •
THE DINING ROOM
I
By the time Mr. Marsham came to build his house, it would have been unthinkable for a man of his position not to have a formal dining room in which to entertain. But just how formal and how spacious and whether situated at the front of the house or the back are matters that would have required some reflection, since dining rooms were still novel enough that their dimensions and situation could not be assumed. In the end, as we have seen, Mr. Marsham decided to eliminate the proposed servants’ hall and give himself a thirty-foot-long dining room—big enough to accommodate eighteen or twenty guests, a very large number for a country parson. Even if he entertained frequently, as would seem to be indicated, it must have been a lonely room on the nights he dined alone. At least the view across to the churchyard was a pleasant one.
We know almost nothing about how Mr. Marsham used this room, not simply because we know so little about Mr. Marsham but also because we know surprisingly little about certain aspects of dining rooms themselves. In the middle of the table was likely to have stood an object of costly elegance known as an epergne (pronounced “ay-pairn”), consisting of dishes connected by ornamental branches, each dish containing a selection of fruits or nuts. For a century or so, no table of discernment was without its epergne, but why it was called an epergne no one remotely knows. The word doesn’t exist in French. It just seems to have popped into being from nowhere.
Around the epergne on Mr. Marsham’s table are likely to have been cruet stands—elegant little racks, usually of silver, holding condiments—and these, too, have a mystery. Traditional cruet stands came with two glass bottles with stoppers, for oil and vinegar, and three matching casters—that is, bottles with perforated tops for sprinkling (or casting) flavorings onto food. Two of the casters contained salt and pepper, but what went into the third caster is unknown. It is generally presumed to have been dried mustard, but that is really because no one can think of anything