Victorian Separate Bedrooms Are a Myth. The Second Room Had Another Name

The evidence comes from five books of house plans written between 1833 and 1904, the valuation of Charles Darwin’s house made after his death in 1882, two studies of Victorian household inventories, and seven editions of the best-selling advice book for wives. Sums of money are converted once, by one method, explained in note 1.¹

What did Victorian architects put beside the marriage bed?

A dressing room. Robert Kerr, a founding fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, published The Gentleman’s House in 1865, and for the rest of the century architects planned country houses from it. On page 131 he sets out “the most usual kind of Bedroom, namely, one for a married couple with a Dressing-room attached for the gentleman.”²

Kerr then builds a ladder of rank. A couple “with the least possible degree of fastidiousness” can make do with the bedroom alone. Next comes one dressing room, “the universal standard plan,” by which “the gentleman’s toilet is taken out of the lady’s way, she retaining the Bed-room.” Two dressing rooms mark “a point of very considerable advance in dignity,” and a self-contained suite “carries forward the establishment to the first rank.” A bed appears on one rung only: “In a gentleman’s room of superior class there will be a small bedstead in one corner.”²

Queen Victoria described the third rung in her journal on her wedding night, February 10, 1840: “the 3 little blue rooms are his; then the next little one his dressing room; then our Bedroom, then my Dressing room.” Of the night itself she wrote that they both went to bed, “(of course in one bed).”³

Why did they build a second room at all?

For convenience, illness and fuel. Kerr gives three reasons: it moves the husband’s dressing out of his wife’s way, it “admits also of the attendance of servants,” and “every Bedroom must be considered not merely as a sleeping-room but as occasionally a sick-room.” J. J. Stevenson, writing fifteen years later, added a fourth, that it saved lighting a second fire. None of the four concerns the marriage.⁴

The same holds across seventy years of these books, from J. C. Loudon in 1833 to Hermann Muthesius in 1904. Not one prescribes two bedrooms for a couple, and in no passage where they set out how a husband and wife should sleep do the words “twin bed”, “two bedsteads”, “single beds” or even “double bed” appear.⁵

What changes is the bed in the second room. Loudon’s dressing room of 1833 has “a sofa, which could be made into a bed.” Kerr in 1865 allows a small bedstead at superior class only. By 1874, in his book on smaller country houses, there is “space for a narrow bedstead in the corner behind the door” as standard. Stevenson in 1880 says only that “Space for a small bed also is often useful.” Over forty years the second bed moved down the scale of wealth, and the shared bed stayed where it was.⁵

What did a dressing room cost, and who could afford one?

The room was cheap; the house around it was not. Kerr priced a scale of houses at the back of his book, doubling the budget at each step, and listed the rooms on each.⁶

Between £5,000 and £10,000 the bedrooms rise from nine to fourteen while the dressing rooms stay at three. What appears instead is “5 Rooms Family Suite with Boudoir,” 700 square feet. Below £10,000, more money bought more dressing rooms; at £10,000 it bought a suite.⁶

An eight-foot-square dressing room cost about £31 to build at Kerr’s rates, about £4,000 ($5,100) today. The expense lay in running it, because Kerr was firm: “Every Dressing-room, without exception, ought to have a fireplace.” Each one meant a second grate to lay, a second scuttle of coal to carry up and a second set of slops to carry down.⁶

Mrs Beeton’s richest reader in 1861 had £1,000 a year, about £126,000 ($161,000) today, and kept five servants. That household stood on the bottom rung of Kerr’s scale.⁷ The statistician Dudley Baxter, counting from the census and the tax returns in 1868, found only 57,300 people in the United Kingdom with £1,000 a year or more (about £121,000, or $155,000, today), 0.42 percent of everyone with an income.⁸ At the other end, the 1891 census found 11.23 percent of the population of England and Wales living more than two to a room.⁹

Even among those who could afford it, the bed was rare. Lesley Hoskins studied 337 inventories from 1841 to 1881 that name their rooms. Dressing rooms appeared in 11 percent of them, and of the 47 dressing rooms whose contents could be identified, 13 percent held a bedstead. That works out, very roughly, at one household in fifty or sixty. Jane Hamlett’s study of 80 middle-class inventories found dressing rooms in 30 percent and a bed in about a fifth of those. In neither sample did the dressing room usually have a bed in it.¹⁰

Does a man’s name on a bedroom door mean he slept alone?

No. On May 9, 1882, the valuer William Banting walked through Down House in Kent, three weeks after Charles Darwin’s death, and listed the first floor in the order he went: “No 1 Dr Darwin’s Room · No 2 Ladysmaid’s Room · No 3 Nursery · No 4 Mr Darwin’s Room & Dressing Closet · No 5 Dressing Room.”¹¹

Inside “Mr Darwin’s Room” he found a “6ft Mahogany 4 post bedstead & lined chintz furniture, 2 Hair mattresses, Wool d°, Feather bolster & pillow, 3 Blankets, Marseilles quilt.” English Heritage identifies it as the bedroom Charles and Emma Darwin shared, and the room in which he died. A name on a door shows who owned the room, not who slept in it.¹¹

The paperwork has a second limit. A valuation made to settle an estate lists only the dead person’s goods. In this one, “Mrs Darwin’s Sitting Room” has no contents listed at all, because Emma was alive. No Victorian valuation of this kind can prove that his room had a bed and hers did not.¹²

Next door, No 5, the dressing room, held a bed but had no fireplace. By Kerr’s rule that made it a defective dressing room, which argues against reading it as a purpose-built second bedroom.¹¹

Who kept the second room running?

Servants, and the dressing room came first. Mrs Beeton’s lady’s maid cleaned and tidied until “the dressing-room is ready for the mistress when she thinks proper to appear.” Only then: “The dressing-room thoroughly in order, the same thing is to be done in the bedroom.” The valet’s day began by checking “that the fire is lighted and burns cheerfully,” and in winter dressing-room fires were to be lit an hour before the family went up.¹³

In 1857 a housemaid in such a household earned 10 to 16 guineas a year (a guinea was £1 1s, and a shilling, written s, was a twentieth of a pound), about £1,350 to £2,150 ($1,700 to $2,800) today.¹⁴

The servants’ rooms are in the same Down House valuation. The men’s room in the attic had one window, no fireplace, two bedsteads and bedding for three. Darwin’s granddaughter Gwen Raverat saw it as a child: “Once I received a shock on seeing the men’s room, a long dark attic, with a board floor, and three beds, and hardly anything else at all. Here John the coachman, and Price the butler, and the footman all slept together. It did not seem very comfortable, I thought, though it was very clean.”¹⁵ Kerr did ask for a fireplace in every servant’s room, “for use in case of illness if no more.” At Down House the men had none.¹⁶

Further down the scale, Loudon’s book of 1833 printed cottages for married ploughmen in the Carse of Gowrie, in Scotland: 22 feet by 14, seven feet high, a clay floor, and box beds built into the wall of the room the family also cooked in.¹⁷

Did Victorian doctors tell couples to sleep apart?

One did, for medical reasons. First, a correction. A widely shared video quotes Kerr, in 1864, saying that master and mistress should have separate apartments “except among the half civilized or poor.” The sentence is not in his first edition of 1864 or his second of 1865, nor in the 1972 facsimile of his third edition of 1871, and the phrase returns nothing across the whole HathiTrust library.¹⁸

The doctor was Pye Henry Chavasse, a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, whose Advice to a Wife had 190,000 copies in print by 1889. In the 1864 edition one paragraph, set in capitals, tells a woman prone to miscarry that she “MUST HAVE A SEPARATE SLEEPING APARTMENT.” By the 1882 edition there are four separate-bed passages. One, for a mother whose periods have returned while she is nursing, reads: “she ought to have a separate bed; otherwise she will, in all probability, conceive.” That is advice on spacing children, in the best-selling book of its kind. The 1864 edition already stated the medical fact behind it but drew no advice from it.¹⁹

The danger was real. From 1850 to the mid-1930s, between four and five women died in England and Wales for every thousand births, and the rate barely moved.²⁰

The other famous medical argument came later and had nothing to do with marriage. Benjamin Ward Richardson’s Household Health of 1886, first serialized in 1880 and 1881, opens a section titled “The Single Bed” by “protesting against the double bed,” citing “emanations from the breath.” He argued for separate beds, not rooms, and the words married, spouse and wedded never appear in the book. His examples are schoolchildren, and children put to bed with a grandparent for warmth. Chavasse had been telling wives to sleep apart for sixteen years before Richardson’s articles appeared.²¹

Where did the separate-bedrooms story come from?

Probably from America. In 1871 a Philadelphia doctor, George Napheys, wrote: “In this country it is customary for married persons to sleep in the same bed. In Europe, in the higher classes, they nearly always occupy separate rooms.” He was describing a class he had not observed, and Queen Victoria’s journal had contradicted him thirty-one years before.²²

Twin beds came late. The Yorkshire Herald noted in November 1892 that “The twin-bed seems to have come to stay,” and Heal’s of London first advertised brass twin bedsteads, sold by the pair, in 1895. They never took over. The historian Hilary Hinds finds “never to have been a majority of twin-bedded marriages,” and a furniture-trade estimate of 1950 still had three double beds sold for every two singles.²³

Hermann Muthesius, a German attaché in London from 1896 to 1903, wrote the most careful foreign account of the English house. In 1904 he recorded that in England “the double bed is still thoroughly customary for the married couple’s bedroom,” and worked out a rule from it: since the wife slept on her husband’s left, the bed should stand with its left half against the window wall.²⁴

Marie Stopes, the best-known campaigner for birth control of her day, looked back in 1935 and wanted the arrangement returned: “a marriage bed, large, square and comfortable, attended by a single bed either in the same room or in a nearby dressing-room for one or other of the partners when either desires solitude.”²⁵ That is Kerr’s plan of 1865.

For the few who had one, the second room was not where a wife was sent. It was a room you kept for the weeks when illness or a coming child made one bed impossible, and in most houses it held a washstand and a wardrobe and nowhere to sleep. If it had been yours, would you have put a bed in it? The question is open in the comments under the film on YouTube.

Sources and notes