Nooks and Corners / being the companion volume to 'From Kitchen to Garret'

by J. E. Panton

I envy everyone myself who has a really inherited house—a house which has absorbed the family atmosphere for centuries, that has never been passed from hand to hand and from family to family until it has no recollection of who built it or what it was built for; a house for which it is an intense and real pleasure to plan improvements, to deck as one would deck a child of one’s own, knowing that what we spent on it or did for it would benefit and please not only ourselves but those who are to come after us. Yes; hopeless Radical as I am in everything else, I am Conservative indeed in the house I would have if I could; but in these days of progress, when most people grow rich, and many only use their dwelling-place as a shelter, and don’t think of it as a home, I am constantly being pained to see retired city men and lawyers—the two classes which become really wealthy, taking over the delightful places which once owned ‘county families,’ and ruining the society round with their ostentation and the ridiculous airs only found in suburban places where ‘society’ so-called consists of ‘twopence three-farthings looking down on twopence,’ while the poor houses themselves are ruined too by utterly inappropriate furnishing and by decorations suitable only for an ordinary ‘mansion,’ furnished by giving carte blanche to some enterprising and advertising tradesman.

Should Angelina have made her first home in the family dwelling-place, she will never have to learn what moving house really means. She can allow her roots to sink as deeply as she likes into the kindly soil, and she can make it all as charming as she will, because she will know that all she does will only benefit her own; but as there are indeed few nowadays who can contemplate this (for even the absorbers of the old places round London never think of the generation behind them, and often and often cut up the land for eligible building sites, with as little compunction as one cuts up a cake at a school-feast: only taking care it shall go as far as it can), we need not dwell on this aspect of the case, but on the one that should be the motive of this chapter, namely, moving house.

If you are tolerably happy in the neighbourhood you know, pray take my advice and remain there; there are sure to be discomforts of some kind or other in any locality. I have never yet come across anyone who was perfectly satisfied with his or her belongings; certainly I have never met anyone who had not bitter complaint to make about the special locality he or she inhabited, and yet who did not ruffle up their feathers the moment any stranger found fault with it. But a neighbourhood is like a house, and requires locally knowing; and if we are for ever changing our neighbourhood, we can never feel at home anywhere.

No doubt it is an unfashionable idea nowadays, this clinging to one place; but I think, if more consideration were given to the subject, life would be much better than it is at present, for far more good can be done by those who are able to help their poorer neighbours, should they remain year after year in the same place; for they are thus enabled to know them thoroughly, to sift the deserving from the hopeless, and finally to interest themselves in such a way in the real life around them that the place in which fate has placed them is in some measure better for their having made their home there. And this cannot be done satisfactorily by mere birds of passage, who have no ‘vested interests’ in the place, and are ready to be off at a minute’s notice, just because they think a change would be nice.

And once having made up your minds that a change of house is imperative, I advise you to ponder seriously and at great length over the pros and cons of a residence in the same neighbourhood, before finally determining to plant your roots elsewhere. I think what makes a residence in the suburbs almost unendurable is this mania for change, for we no sooner begin to know people there and like them than we find they are becoming uneasy; they fancy the place is unhealthy, someone has been rude, the nicest people have not called—as if the nicest people ever did rush to call without introductions of some sort or other—and they are off impatiently before they have entered into the life of a place they condemn ruthlessly because they do not really know what it is like.

How long does it take to know a place? Well, if you are lucky enough to go there with really good introductions, I should think six months; if you know no one, and are dependent on chance, or the vicar of the parish, you may never know it at all; but, in ordinary cases, and where people have had their edges clipped by really good society, you ought to know quite as many people as you wish to in about three years.

Therefore, if you have begun your residence in the suburbs, and have a nice church, a nice doctor, and nice friends, stay there; you don’t know how deeply your roots are planted until you begin to drag them up. If you are a Londoner, on no account be persuaded by artistic accounts of country delights to leave your beloved pavements and the exquisite freedom of a town life and surroundings: and if you are born and have lived among cabbages and roses—if you love the country, and can interest yourself mildly in the continual changes that are going on around you in your neighbours’ houses and the cottages round about—remain there; and be thankful for tastes which are innocent if they are circumscribed, and often result in a far nobler life than that made up mostly from excitement and dissipation; because anyone who can and will live cheerfully in the country, making work for the labourer, and employing folk in pure air, and in decent habitations, does much more for the human race than he wots of, and should be encouraged to do so in any manner that one possibly can.

I am often being told that the country is a far cheaper place to live in than London; but I have tried both, and I know better. In the first place, in London you can do precisely what you like, and, provided your likes are not openly eccentric, no one will interfere with you. You can have ten friends or ten thousand acquaintances. You may wear one dress as long as it will hold together, and no one will doubt your capabilities of being respectable because of your shabby attire. You may get up when you like, go to bed when you like, need not give to any charity if you are not charitably disposed, need not keep a carriage, because you can at any moment hail any vehicle, and go anywhere you like; and, above all, can be so easily amused, and at so cheap a rate, that one need hardly put down ‘amusements’ in our schedule at all.

Now in the country we must have some sort of a carriage if we wish to get outside our own immediate neighbourhood and mix with our fellow-creatures; from the humble ‘four-wheel’ of the farmer’s wife, and the curate’s donkey-cart, to the landau, waggonette, or smart little victoria of the other richer folk: all must have some other means of progression than would be afforded by one’s own legs. Our incomes are common property, and, should we have two new dresses in the course of the year, are a prey for all those dear creatures who spend their time in being charitable on other folk’s money. We must have a garden, and we obtain a scant supply of worm-eaten fruit, inferior flowers, and out-of-season vegetables, at a price for which we could have obtained the very best stores of Covent Garden—for by out-of-season I don’t mean that our pears and asparagus come before their time, but considerably after the period when they have become cheap in the market in London; and, finally, we cannot be amused without half ruining ourselves by constant rushes to town, by subscribing largely to Mudie, and by taking in every newspaper we can lay our hands on if we are readers, and if we are fond of finery, by sending for constant new garments, not because we want them, but because we really want to see what is being worn. Of course rates, rents, and taxes are much less in the country; but rent in London is less than it used to be, and in unfashionable neighbourhoods is not too exorbitant; but even with the rent considered, I still maintain one can live more cheaply in London than elsewhere, and can most certainly live longer there and far more pleasantly.

So I do most strongly advise country mice to remain country mice, unless they make the change very young; and I implore town mice to cling to their pavements, for nothing short of a residence for generations in the country can teach one how to live under the microscope which is put over one the moment a stranger goes into the country to live, and nothing save being born to it could ever reconcile one to having one’s most intimate personal concerns discussed at the bar of every public house, over every shop counter, in every parlour, as they are discussed in an ordinary rural place, or to having one’s most innocent speeches repeated until one would certainly not recognise them, did they return to us after their last repetition.