The history of the home – with the spittoons put back in

In 1978, a family of Russian ‘Old Believers’ living in a supposedly uninhabited part of the Siberian taiga were discovered by a team of geologists. They had fled Stalinist persecution, and for half a century had lived in isolation in a ‘low, soot-blackened log kennel’ with a floor made of potato peelings and crushed nutshells, one tiny window, a fire, a single rushlight, and one item of furniture — an axe-hewn table. Five adults lived without sanitation in a space seven steps long and five steps wide.

The geologists were horrified. What they failed to notice, Judith Flanders points out in her thought-provoking examination of the evolution of ‘home’, is that

what they were seeing were not conditions of unimaginable harshness, but the ordinary living conditions of their own history. And ours. A world where every aspect of life was lived in sight of others, where privacy was not only not desired, but almost unknown.