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ABSTRACT
The article discusses the London boarding house as setting and trope, in film, on stage and in literature, during the silent period. It identifies recurrent character types – notably, parsimonious and resentful landladies, resourceful skivvies and residents, both temporary and permanent, who are down on their luck and down at heel. Significantly, the boarding house recurrently displays a particular mise-en-scène. Films covered include Patricia Brent, Spinster (1919), Tilly of Bloomsbury (1921), Not for Sale (1924), Underground (1928), Daydreams (1928), The Vagabond Queen (1929) and A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929). Patrick Hamilton, this article suggests, is the pre-eminent figure in boarding house literature, from Craven House (1926) to Slaves of Solitude (1947). It also discusses returns to this London territory produced retrospectively and subsequent treatments of boarding house material, reinforcing an already established pattern.
Acknowledgements
Work on this article was supported by a Paul Mellon Centre Publication Grant.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. As a drama student, Dodie Smith, an émigré from Manchester, resided at the Three Arts Club, Marylebone Road, reserved for actresses, musicians and dancers (Grove Citation1996, 32). Subsequently, the young Scot, Muriel Spark, found herself at the Helena Club, Lancaster Gate, founded by a daughter of Queen Victoria for ‘Ladies from Good Families of Modest Means who are Obliged to Pursue an Occupation’ – the source for her ‘May of Teck Club’ in her 1963 novella The Girls of Slender Means in which love and money were ‘the vital themes in all the dormitories’ (Spark Citation1963, 27, Citation1992, 143). Thereafter, she moved to a Kensington Church Street rooming house ‘with a small single-bed room, a gas ring and a wash basin’, ‘largely the scene of my novel Loitering With Intent’ (Spark Citation1992, 193). J. B. Priestley conveyed a similar Hampstead establishment in his 1930 novel Angel Pavement: ‘the Burpenfield Club […] was one of the residential clubs or hostels provided for girls who came from good middle-class homes in the country but were compelled, by economic conditions still artfully adjusted to suit the male, to live in London as cheaply as possible’ (Priestley Citation[1930] 1969, 216). The Y.W.C.A. (founded 1855) commissioned Sir Edwin Lutyens to design its Central Club, Great Russell Street, in 1928. The housing historian Alison Ravetz notes that ‘the special needs of single working women […] were recognised by early housing reformers and religious bodies, […] and the hostels for young women workers in industrialists’ model villages’. The needs arose from the fact that, historically, women had no legal or financial identity outside family and marriage (Ravetz and Turkington Citation1995, 44).
2. For supportative commentary on horsehair, mahogany and wax fruit as salient features of the Victorian domestic interior circa 1850, see Cohen (Citation2006, 184–185, 187); for the symbolism of the Brussels carpet, see Briggs Citation2003, 196–198.
3. For a memoir of a comparable journey from care home to service, see Wheway (Citation1984).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Amy Sargeant
Amy Sargeant has written extensively on British cinema of the silent and sound periods. She has co-edited, with Claire Monk, British Historical Cinema: History, Heritage and the Costume Film (Routledge, 2002) and is author of British Cinema: a critical history (BFI, 2005) and The Servant (BFI, 2011 and 2020).