Keeping a Regency House Clean

Falling down the research rabbit hole is far easier than one might expect when writing historical fiction. There are so many little things that we know about modern life that were very different in Jane Austen’s day. All of those require research in some form or another. Take for example house cleaning.

While my husband definitely didn’t marry me for my housekeeping skills, I am pretty certain about the basics of the process. The carpets need cleaning; I grab the vacuum cleaner, and occasionally the bottle of carpet stain remover. I read the directions on said bottle and go to town. The broom and mop are applied to the hard floors, usually with the addition of a specialty floor cleaning product, unless I’m really energetic and make my own with the gallon of vinegar under the sink. General purpose cleaning gets a spray of vinegar and dish detergent mixed with water. I could go on, but you get the picture.

Trouble is, that when you start going back a couple of hundred years, you lose many of those products and options. Certainly the vacuum is out of the question. Specialty cleaning products are off the table, too. Vinegar is still around, which is quite a relief I’ll tell you, but even soap had to be home made for the most part. What is one to do when one’s main character–Lydia in this case–is forced to clean house like a maid, in a girl’s school specially set up for young gentlewomen who have allowed themselves to be compromised.

Hit the research books of course. Cookbooks and housekeeping manuals offer a great deal of insight into the nuts and bolts of house cleaning during the early 1800’s. One of the things that struck me immediately upon seeing how they cleaned was the amount of time and energy spent dealing with dust. Between the vacuum cleaner and the dust grabbing air filters on the AC, we have dust, but isn’t not (usually) a major concern. A swipe with a dust cloth and we’re pretty well done with it. At the turn of the nineteenth century though, the fight against dust was rather all consuming.

The problem was rather two fold. First, heat and light came from burning things in the home. That creates soot, effectively dust.  When coal was burned for heat, that created another source of dust. In industrial areas and cities, large quantities of burning coal polluted the air, with–you guessed it–coal dust and soot. So, essentially the stuff was everywhere and in everything.

To clean a room like a parlor with both hard floor and carpet, the process could get pretty complex. All the small, moveable furniture would be moved to the middle of the room. the hearth-rug would be rolled up and taken outside to be beaten. Then, in order to minimize the amount of soiling kicked up dust might cause, curtains were pinned up and cloths were put over the upholstered furniture. It would never have occured to me that there would be enough dust about to soil the furnishings in the process of cleaning.

After that, the floors would be sprinkled with wet, used tea leaves. The leaves would help trap the dust when the floor was swept, so that it could be swept up into dust shovels and removed from the house instead just tossed into the air to settle back onto the room.  Afterwards, every article in the room would them be wiped with a soft cloth, duster, or dusting brush before being set into its proper place.

And this was to be done EVERY DAY!

I don’t really want to fess up how often such things get done around my home. But we’ll just say it is NOT every day. Yikes.

carpet stand

Three to four times a year,  a more thorough cleaning was done. Among other things, this mean taking up the carpets which had been nailed down. Naturally this required everything in the room to be moved and the curtains to be taken down or wrapped up in cloths to keep them clean.  Just think for a moment how much dust and dirt taking up the carpets would have kicked up. I’m sneezing just thinking about it.

carpet beaters

Once removed from a room, what did one do with a carpet? To start with, it was hung up over a pole, tree branch, or heavy duty line and beaten. Using a strong smooth stick or a carpet beater, the carpet was beaten twice, once on the wrong side and once on the right side until no more dust and dirt came out of it. Then it was wiped down with a clean, damp flannel cloth and left to dry.

But wait, there’s more. If the carpet had stains–and let’s be realistic, what are the chances it didn’t?–then additional measures had to be taken.  Potatoes were grated into water and the liquid was sponged over faded or grease stained parts of the carpet. Supposedly this removed the grease spots and brightened the colors. To remove heavier stains, the carpet would be place on grass or a clean floor, brushed thoroughly, then scoured with a mix of gall (the contents of a bull’s gallbladder) and soapy water and dried with clean linen, then left to dry.

I don’t know about you, but all this makes me look at my cleaning closet just a little differently.

In case you’re wondering what all this research looked like in the final produce, you can find in The Trouble to Check Her.