How we love our homes: we make them cosy and secure, protected from the outside world, defended by locks, bolts and burglar alarms. But we haven’t always had our own private dwellings, and under the invasive influence of the internet, home, as we’ve come to understand it, may well soon be a thing of the past.
In early medieval times, a home was often just a basic tenement, a shelter shared with cattle, owned by an employer. As prosperity spread, so a sense of the private developed. Common areas subdivided into individual ones; pieces of furniture (chests, bookcases, beds, wardrobes) marked areas for particular activities and specific people.
At the same time, a sense of home as a place of refuge started to take hold. In 1760 William Pitt declared: ‘The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the force of the Crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake, the wind may blow through it. The rain may enter. The storms may enter. But the king of England may not enter.’
We now expect our homes to keep us warm, resist fire, provide us with a place to wash and store food. We relax at home, shake off our work personas and re-establish our identities. For Fanny in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, her room was her ‘nest of comforts’ where she could calm herself and air her geraniums. In Great Expectations, Mr Jaggers’s clerk Wemmick explains his routine: ‘When I go into the office, I leave the Castle behind me, and when I come into the Castle, I leave the office behind me.’
But does anyone now really leave the office behind them? In the age of the world wide web, is a house really the sanctuary it once was? A family might sit together but mentally they’re apart: each member on their phone; parents still mentally at work, the children still arguing with school friends.
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