Vicky Holmes
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Conclusion

This book began with an army of census enumerators knocking on doors across England on the night of the 1891 census. Teetering on the thresholds, they observed over one million persons lodgings in domestic dwellings, many of those inhabited by the working class. The details they gathered on their schedules about these householders and their lodgers, however, leave us with many questions as to who, why, and how of the domestic dwelling lodging arrangement. Yet while the census enumerators remained on the front step to the working-class home, the coroners of Victorian England traversed these dwellings unhindered in their investigations, the details of which – sometimes verging on the prurient – were recorded in the many local newspapers in existence at this time. Turning to these inquest reports, I have been able to document the domestic dwelling lodging arrangement from beginning to end, and in doing so, add significantly to our understanding of household economy, gender and household dynamics, social networks, and ideas of privacy among the Victorian working class.

Long seen as the domain of widows, the inquest reports reveal that taking in lodgers was central to the economics of makeshift to a range of struggling working-class households throughout the Victorian period. Alongside widows and other female-headed households spurned or scantily supported by the Poor Law authorities, the failures of the breadwinner economy brought lodgers under the roofs of male-headed households that were unable, at certain points in the lifecycle, or – in the worst-case scenario – unwilling to support their family. However, as the inquest reports also make clear, taking in a lodger did not necessarily alleviate the male householder’s financial distress nor provide the security it should have done to the female-headed householder. Lodgers who could not or would not pay placed householders in precarious positions, and while technically there were legal routes open to householders to deal with financially troublesome lodgers, they had little authority over burdensome or uncooperative lodgers. Indeed, some male heads could find their households entirely upended when their wives ran off with the lodger.

Sexual relations between female householders and their lodgers were widely disseminated in Victorian popular culture. Certainly, the inquest reports confirm the presence of sexual relationships between lodgers and the women with whom they lodged. However, when it comes to wives, widows, and other lone women and their lodgers, the inquest reports tend to tell a different story from that portrayed in comic literature and music hall. While in some cases, the male lodger fell into the stereotype of the seducer, the cases of adultery – not just those imagined by a jealous husband – between wives and lodgers that are revealed in the inquest reports suggest that the marriage they upended had already been regretted. Regardless, the male lodger was held accountable for his sins. Meanwhile, long seen as preying upon their unsuspecting male lodgers in pursuit of a replacement for their recently departed husbands, it appears more likely to be the case that widows, such as Betty Scott, were nothing if not cautious when it came to embarking on relationships with their insistent male lodgers. Indeed, their unusual position as the head of the household granted them the power to be choosy. However, such a reversal of power dynamics in the relationship was not without tensions or tragedies. Those who did come to marry their male lodgers in haste did not necessarily find a happy ending. Furthermore, where marriage was out of the question or denied, the male lodger turned to violence to gain dominance under his paramour’s roof.

Many of the lodgers appearing in inquest reports do not conform to the stereotype of the lodger – the young, usually migrant male. While domestic dwelling lodgings provided many young men with a temporary home before marriage, they were also home to working-class men and women across the lifecycle. Indeed, even non-migrants – men and women of all ages and marital statuses – found themselves in domestic dwelling lodgings. For some, such as newlyweds and impoverished families, the move to lodgings was driven by the need for cheap housing. Overwhelmingly, however, the move into lodgings for many non-migrants and established residents was precipitated by the dismantling of their own family home caused by, in many cases, the death of a parent or the breakdown of a marriage. Furthermore, while many of the persons we encounter in the book lived just weeks, months or even several years as a lodger, continuing a trend from the eighteenth century, some men (and perhaps some women, though they do not appear in the inquest reports examined) spent the whole of their adult life living as lodgers in someone else’s home. However, we can still only speculate whether perpetual lodging occurred through choice or circumstance for these men.

Moreover, in examining the process of finding lodgings, the inquest reports also challenge the perception of the lodger as a stranger in any sense of the word. As observed by Peter Baskerville in the Canadian census, lodgers and householders were ‘familiar strangers’ – not known to each other but rather sharing a common connection. However, in turning to the inquest reports, I have shown that many lodgers and householders were entirely ‘familiar’, with lodgings sought among workmates, neighbours, friends, and even kin at little notice. Such connections between householders and their lodgers suggest that the working class neither wanted to take in nor lodge with a stranger. Indeed, the inquest reports even revealed that those who had travelled far from their native homes in search of work did not necessarily have to turn to strangers for lodgings. Locating these connections also goes a long way to understanding how householders and lodgers often lived so comfortably cheek-by-jowl.

In the daily world of the working-class domestic dwelling lodging, the lives of householders and lodgers – particularly those who boarded – were entirely entwined at the kitchen table, around the fireside, and beyond the home. Even where the householder or lodger could retreat to their own space, leisure time was often spent in each other’s company. Sociability, as well as connection, was thus a crucial component of many lodging arrangements. Indeed, to the onlooker peering through the window, the lodger was indistinguishable from others in the familial scene, both at times of cordiality and conflict. Such scenes, however, perpetuated the middle-class belief that the presence of the lodger in the working-class home signalled an absence of private family life. Yet while the working class did not adhere to nor necessarily aspire to middle-class notions of privacy, lines of separation were drawn when it came to sleeping arrangements.

As the day closed, alongside the boundary created between the outside world and the home by securing the front door, a clear delineation was drawn between householders and their lodgers. Where the lodger slept has long been a matter of speculation. Yet as the Victorian coroner’s courts made their way into these nocturnal spaces to view bodies and question witnesses, they documented extensively the sleeping arrangements therein. While they found that, where necessary, a female lodger might be squeezed into the family fold or a male lodger into the bed of the male householder, what they overwhelmingly saw and heard was that lodgers were generally crowded out of one and two-roomed dwellings. Indeed, in nearly all homes, the preferred arrangement was for lodgers to sleep separately from the family with whom they lodged. Nevertheless, accommodating lodgers still meant compromises had to be made. Families accommodating lodgers could find themselves in overcrowded sleeping quarters, while lodgers – it making more economic sense to accommodate more than one – generally shared a bedroom and, in some cases, a bed with friends and strangers.

A study of domestic dwelling lodgings also significantly contributes to our understanding of the Victorian working-class economy. As well as continuing the discussion of the failings of an economy dependent on the male breadwinner’s wage and the importance of the lodger’s contribution to the economy of makeshift in both male and female-headed households, the inquest reports also take us into the world of everyday financial exchanges among the working classes that – had it not been for the event of a death necessitating an inquest – would have otherwise gone unrecorded. Alongside providing details of the monetary exchange for bed, board, and other services, the inquest reports reveal that the lodging exchange was not always monetarily based. As Beverley Lemire’s work has shown, informal economies still played an essential role in exchanges between the working classes, particularly among women. Therefore, it is unsurprising to find in the inquest report that while men paid for their lodgings and board with cash from their weekly pay packets, women lacking financial means sought to obtain and retain lodgings by exchanging domestic services for a bed and even board. Of course, such exchanges were not entirely altruistic. While community and moral obligation played a role in such exchanges, these non-monetary exchanges were, at their core, mutually beneficial arrangements often centred around the demands of childcare and employment or, in some cases, companionship.

Eventually, however, the domestic dwelling lodging arrangement itself was served its own notice. By the early twentieth century, the lodger was no longer as ubiquitous as he or she had once been in the working-class home. Technological and societal changes in the first decades of the twentieth century meant taking in a lodger or taking up lodgings was simply no longer the necessity it had been among the Victorian working class. For those who might once have sought lodgings, improved transportation in the form of trams, buses, and bicycles enabled young people to stay at home and build up the necessary means to marry and establish a home without, as Davidoff states, spending a quarter of their wages on board and lodgings.1

Meanwhile, the bereaved, the sick, and the elderly, for whom the lodger had provided such a vital safety net, were increasingly able to turn to the State for support as its welfare provisions moved away from the tyranny of the Poor Law and the necessity of lodgers. For example, the Old Age Pension Act came into force in 1909; single persons over seventy received five shillings a week, while married couples received 7s. 6d., far outweighing the income generated by a single lodger.2 In 1911, the introduction of National Insurance provided a replacement for the lodger as the short-term safety net for those families hit by the illness of the breadwinner.3 Finally, in 1925, widows under the age of sixty-five whose husbands had paid their National Insurance contributions now received ten shillings a week in state support until eligible for an old age pension. No longer was it necessary for these bereaved women to be burdened with so many lodgers under their roof.4

A changing housing market and new housing policies saw lodgers elbowed out of the family home. As Davidoff discusses, owner-occupation burgeoned among the working classes in the early twentieth century, but ‘building societies were more attracted to houses designed for nuclear families only’, while in municipal housing, there was a coinciding clamp-down on the subletting of rooms.5 Changing ideals also left little space for a lodger. Having found themselves in the folds of the Victorian working-class family, the lodger was cast out of its all-encompassing circle as the ideal of the nuclear family took hold.6 Of course, some householders still found it necessary or prudent to accommodate a lodger. However, rather than being incorporated into the home, they now, as Lesley Hoskins and Rebecca Preston observed in their recent research, ‘slipped unostentatiously’ through the family’s kitchen on their way to the lavatory.7

But is the lodger now making a return to the home? In her book on eighteenth-century lodgers, landladies, and landlords, Williamson remarks, ‘homeowners are free to take a paying guest into their home without any regulation (other than the need to pay income tax above the tax-free allowance)’.8 To date, however, many of these paying guests have been in the form of short holiday-type lets via online companies, such as Airbnb, where there is little, if any, interaction with the owner. Yet as the housing and financial crises collide, the lodger is beginning to return to domestic dwellings, living cheek-by-jowl once again with the householder and their families. Yet there is one distinct difference between the Victorian and the modern era: lodgers are not found in England’s poorest homes, for various council and social housing policies generally prohibit their presence. Instead, lodgers – from the student to the contract worker – now live among the squeezed middle class struggling to pay their bills and mortgage.9

Notes

1 Leonore Davidoff, ‘The Separation of Home and Work? Landladies and Lodgers in Nineteenth-and Twentieth-Century England’, in Sandra Burman (ed.), Fit Work for Women (London: Croom Helm, 1979), pp. 91–3.
2 There were exceptions to the receipt of a pension: ‘Pensions were not paid to people who had continually failed to find work; who had been in prison that last ten years; who had claimed poor relief in the last two years; or who were drunkards.’ Rosemary Rees, Poverty and Public Health, 1815–1948 (Oxford: Heinemann, 2001), p. 89.
3 Rees, Poverty and Public Health, p. 91.
4 S. P. Breckinridge, ‘Widows’ and Orphans’ Pensions in Great Britain’, Social Service Review, 1:2 (1927), 249–57.
5 Davidoff, ‘The Separation of Home and Work’, pp. 91–3.
6 Davidoff, ‘The Separation of Home and Work’, pp. 91–3.
7 Lesley Hoskins and Rebecca Preston, ‘Chickens, Ducks, Rabbits, and Me Dad’s Geraniums: The Use and Meaning of Yards, Gardens and Other Outside Spaces of Urban Working-Class Homes’, in Joseph Harley, Vicky Holmes, and Laika Nevalainen (eds), The Working Class at Home, 1790–1940 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), pp. 156–9.
8 Gillian Williamson, Lodgers, Landlords and Landladies in Georgian London (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), p. 169.
9 Nick Harding, ‘Why Live-In Lodgers Are Making a Comeback’, The Telegraph online, 8 July 2023. www.telegraph.co.uk/money/property/buy-to-let/cost-of-living-crisis-lodgers-house-sharing-comeback/ (accessed 12 January 2024).
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Living with lodgers

Everyday life, household economy, and social relations in working-class Victorian England

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