Wardrobe

The Victorian Age is named after Queen Victoria and covers the period of time that she reigned – 1837 to 1901.  Our house was built in 1869, smack dab in the middle of that period and there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that it is a Victorian – right down to the closets.  Or lack thereof.

In the twenty-first century, we not only take closets for granted, they are one of the things that potential home buyers check out.  “Enough closet space” seems to be right up there with running water and ample electrical outlets.  Our house would never pass the closet test, even though several have been added in recent generations.

Originally, and even as recently as my son Charlie’s childhood, this 11-room house had only two closets.  Four upstairs bedrooms but only two closets.  That’s not to say that there wasn’t wardrobe and cupboard space.  But there weren’t closets for hanging clothes – not the sort of closets we think of today.  Presumably, Victorians simply did not have very much clothing and what they had could be folded and kept in a chest or free-standing cabinet.  Built-in closets were generally used for other sorts of storage and, in earlier times, extras and nonessentials weren’t part of the equation.

Original Closet

The closet in our upstairs North Bedroom, the only original closet now remaining, measures 16 inches deep and 79 inches wide.  It is fitted with two 15-inch clothes rods and several clothes hooks, all of which I imagine were later additions.  For my entire life it has been the repository for my two uncles’ golf clubs in one corner and their baseball bats in another.  It is adequate for the needs of guests but I’m not sure if it would do for a continuous occupant.

The only other closet original to the house was transformed by my folks into a commodious linen closet at the east end of the upstairs hallway.  It had been the only closet in the “master bedroom” – long and narrow with hooks along the sides, I think.  In the process of converting it, they found a number of “treasures” way in the back.  Among them was my Uncle Albert’s fire engine, presumably tucked there in 1904, the year he died at age 5.

Albert’s Fire Engine – circa 1905

The south end of the master bedroom was made into a huge closet to accommodate my mother’s clothes.  (Not only was she a fashion maven, she never threw anything away and was known   for incorporating clothes from her youth into the outfits of her golden years.) It is now mostly empty – just a few costumes from Nyel and my days in community theater.  Other closets in the house include a small room upstairs that was once a cistern and a “new” 1970s addition to the old parlor now the downstairs bedroom.  Downstairs linens are kept in the wardrobe which once held excess seasonal clothing according to information gleaned from Medora’s diaries.

Linen Closet

So, there you have it.  There was no water closet – the outhouse sufficed.  Presumably there were few if any skeletons in the meager spaces provided and no one ever “came out” of any of these closets – at least not that we know of.  Of course, information and feelings about such things were not hanging out for everyone to know about – not like these days when even storage facilities and cyberspace don’t provide security enough for our worldly goods, let alone our personal information.  Maybe the Victorians were actually ahead of the curve, as they say.