Where it all started: an 1884 advertisement for a house for a sale that described the house as having both a drawing room and a sitting room. Image: Press 22/11/1884: 5.
There are some fairly standard tropes about drawing rooms and parlours in the Victorian world: they were the best room in the house, reserved for entertaining visitors, rarely entered by family and stuffed full of things, with drawing rooms in posh houses and parlours for everyone else. These tropes are all true to varying degrees. But if that’s drawing rooms and parlours, where on earth do sitting rooms fit in the mix? Until coming across an 1880s house sale notice, I didn’t even know they were a thing in the 19th century (I’d assumed a 20th century date for the sitting room), but the Oxford English Dictionary tells me that the term has been around since 1763 (OED n.d.). So, where did they fit into the picture?
First, a fun and somewhat random fact: house sale/rental notices in Christchurch/Lyttelton mention sitting rooms years before parlours or drawing rooms are mentioned. June 1851 is the first year a sitting room is mentioned in a house sale/rental advertisement in Christchurch newspapers (Lyttelton Times 14/6/1851: 8). It’s 1855 for a drawing room and 1857 for a parlour (Lyttelton Times 14/11/1855: 3, 2/5/1857: 3). I’ve no idea why this would be the case, but could it be that houses with parlours/drawing rooms changed hands in other ways, through word of mouth, rather than requiring a newspaper advertisement – because Christchurch was a small town and the sorts of people who could afford a house with a parlour or drawing room all knew each other? It’s pretty hard to tell if this was the case from the available information, but my research indicates that houses with a parlour or drawing room were almost certainly ‘better’ than houses with a sitting room.
You see, it turns out sitting rooms were associated with boarding. That is, the practice of renting a room (or rooms) to live in, typically because you weren’t in a position to rent an entire house or flat. A boarder might live in a private family’s house (thus providing extra income for that family), or they might live in a larger boarding house establishment, such as the Cambridge Boarding House or Green’s Boarding House (Lyttelton Times 12/7/1879: 8, 10/1/1885: 8). Boarders were typically single men, but I also came across instances of married couples and a family with two young children seeking boarding situations (Lyttelton Times 17/6/1881: 1, 30/10/1897: 1). The latter, in particular, seemed to speak to a precarious (and unfortunate) financial position. Perhaps the most intriguing example of a boarder, though, was a businesswoman with a young daughter, and with a “daily maid” who looked after the daughter (Press 17/11/1897: 1).
This 1897 advertisement placed by a woman seeking a boarding situation for herself and her young daughter hints at the complexities and realities of being a single working mother in Christchurch in the late 19th century. Image: Press 17/11/1897: 1.
While in many instances, I’m sure it was possible for a boarder just to rent a bedroom (no doubt a cheaper option), the examples I came across were necessarily where there was also a sitting room available. By no means were all the sitting rooms mentioned associated with boarding situations, and parlours were mentioned in some boarding advertisements, but this was less common (Press 4/11/1872: 1). However, I didn’t come across a single instance of a drawing room being offered to potential boarders, or being sought by a boarder. That is, boarders did not have drawing rooms.
Outside of boarding situations, houses that were listed as having sitting rooms or parlours were indistinguishable (in the advertisements, at least). In addition to a sitting room or parlour, these houses typically had bedrooms and a kitchen. Occasionally, a dining room or bathroom might be mentioned, but these weren’t common. Houses with drawing rooms, however, were quite different. If you had a drawing room, it was almost completely certain that you also had a dining room. Chances are you may also have had an entrance hall, a morning or breakfast room, a dressing room, a servants’ room, a library, a study and/or a conservatory. That is, unsurprisingly, houses with drawing rooms were big houses, with lots of rooms and much greater separation of space by function than houses with just a sitting room or parlour.
Another thing. Houses with drawing rooms might also have a sitting room. Or two. The former wasn’t common, but it was also by no means unusual. And it was more common than having a drawing room and a parlour, or a parlour and sitting room (which was definitely unusual). In these cases, with a drawing room and a sitting room, I suspect that the sitting room was used as an informal room, for the family, and the drawing room was kept for entertaining guests.
The 1881 sale notice for Middleton, a house with a parlour and not one, but two, sitting rooms. Image: Lyttelton Times 27/4/1881: 8.
There were some other notable features about houses with drawing rooms. Unlike sale advertisements for houses with sitting rooms or parlours, when houses with drawing rooms were sold, the name of the owner or occupant was usually mentioned, indicating that that person’s identity was an important part of the marketing strategy – and confirming the role of social status in the housing market. If that person was male, they were usually an “Esq.” (i.e. esquire, a somewhat ambiguous and loosely applied marker of social status). Further, if the occupants of such houses disposed of their household furniture at the time of the sale (due to their death, departure from Christchurch or the more intriguing, so-and-so is “giving up housekeeping” e.g. Press 24/9/1892: 10), fulsome lists of the items for sale were published in the newspaper. This was not the case for houses with either sitting rooms or parlours, which might have a more generic advertisement that mentioned that the household furniture was for sale, but without going into specific details.
The array of furniture, etc, from the drawing room that H. P. Lance sold when he sold Ilam House in 1864. Note, in particular, the number and types of chairs. Image: Press 23/4/1864: 5.
These household inventories are, of course, fascinating. They reveal that drawing rooms contained a plethora of different chairs and tables, along with things like a whatnot, a Canterbury and/or a chiffonier, a pier glass and, frequently, some type of clock and a musical instrument (usually a piano). They always had a fender and fire irons (i.e. the room had a fireplace), a carpet and hearthrug and the curtains and associated fittings (poles, etc) were always sold. Sometimes there were bookcases and books listed, and pictures of different types were usually mentioned, along with ornaments. So, yes, a room stuffed full of things.
What’s interesting in all of this is that you (or the real estate agent) could presumably choose how to name the rooms listed in the advertisement for the sale of your house, and yet there are very clear differences in how the different names were used, and those differences are linked to class/social status. While I’m sure there were examples of sale notices embellishing the description of the house, the patterns I observed indicate that this was rare and that most people followed the norm. Which in turn suggests that most people were accepting of these class/social status differences, whether because they simply didn’t care about them or because they didn’t see them as worth fighting against or, some would no doubt argue, because people were so strongly shackled by the class system and kept in their place by it. Class boundaries in New Zealand in the 19th century were far more permeable than in England at the same time, however, and thus this last seems both unlikely and lacking in nuance (although it may well have been true for some colonial settlers). Thus, what started as a simple exploration of sitting rooms in Victorian Christchurch has provided insight into one of the myriad and subtle ways in which class and social status shaped people’s lives in that era, as well as demonstrating just how pervasive class norms were. Really, I should have known when I started looking at things like drawing rooms and parlours that class would come into it!
Katharine Watson
References
Lyttelton Times. [online] Available at: https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/
Oxford English Dictionary, n.d. “sitting room (n.), sense 1.a,” July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/6617967976.
Press. Available at: https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/
Banner image: [The drawing room at Elmwood, Christchurch]. Ranfurly family: Collection. Ref: PA1-f-195-48. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. /records/22675867