May 10, 2008...8:46 pm
Geff Geffty-Geffrye
Hope y’all appreciate the Izzard reference. Has anyone seen him recently? Is he still funny? I still heart him lots but Bill Bailey has been my comedy hero for some time now, especially after I managed to persuade his agent to get him to do this.
Anyway! I was going to say a little bit about the Geffrye Museum on Kingsland Road. I went on the bank holiday, through deserted Liverpool St station.
The Geffrye is a museum of - bear with me - middle-class living rooms from 1600 to the present day. The really odd thing is that it is set out in a row of pretty 18thC almshouses, so you go along from house to house looking at these fake rooms, with fake bay windows and doors. It feels a bit like a film set.
It was fun having a look around, but the whole thing was a bit unsubstantial. There simply wasn’t enough stuff to create a picture of rooms people would actually have lived in. A few details had been added, like a tea set laid out, or a half-finished letter, but the overall impression was of complete sterility. And that’s fine in some ways, it just seemed that elsewhere the museum has worked really hard to encourage visitors to relate to the way people lived in these periods, with samples of furnishings and finishes that you could touch, for example. I know it is a totally different endeavour, but I couldn’t help comparing it to Dennis Severs’ astonishing house on Folgate St.
Although respect to the Geffrye for including a bit about gender and the Victorian house - as men from the middle classes increasingly went out to work rather than living above their shop, workshop or counting house, the home became a newly ‘feminised’ place. The domestic female ideal was often figured as the ‘angel of the house’, famously murdered by Virginia Woolf in 1913. Here’s some more info about the changing ideals of womanhood in Victorian Britain, in case you’re interested in that sort of thang.
Leave a Reply