Mankind in the MakingWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Philosophy
Mankind in the Making
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Social problems; Social sciences
convenience is possible after the rigid traditional requirements have
been met; it is the extreme and final reduction of the plan of a better
class house, and the very type of its owner. As one sees it in the
London suburbs devoted to clerks and shopmen, it stands back a yard or
so from the road, with a gate and a railing, and a patch, perhaps two
feet wide, of gravel between its front and the pavement. This is the
last pathetic vestige of the preliminary privacies of its original type,
the gates, the drive-up, the front lawn, the shady trees, that gave a
great impressive margin to the door. The door has a knocker (with an
appeal to realities, “ring also”) and it opens into a narrow passage,
perhaps four feet wide, which still retains the title of “hall.” Oak
staining on the woodwork and marbled paper accentuate the lordly memory.
People of this class would rather die than live in a house with a front
door, even had it a draught-stopping inner door, that gave upon the
street. Instead of an ample kitchen in which meals can be taken and one
other room in which the rest of life goes on, these two covering the
house site, the social distinction from the servant invades the house
space first by necessitating a passage to a side-door, and secondly
by cutting up the interior into a “dining-room” and a “drawing-room.”
Economy of fuel throughout the winter and economy of the best furniture
always, keeps the family in the dining-room pretty constantly, but there
you have the drawing-room as a concrete fact. Though the drawing-room is
inevitable, the family will manage without a bath-room well enough. They
may, or they may not, occasionally wash all over. There are probably
not fifty books in the house, but a daily paper comes and _Tit Bits_
or _Pearson’s Weekly,_ or, perhaps, _M.A.P.,_ _Modern Society,_ or some
such illuminant of the upper circles, and a cheap fashion paper, appear
at irregular intervals to supplement this literature.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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