So, as most of you probably know, my undergraduate thesis was about fireplaces - addressing the question of their place in the American household after their utility had been overthrown by stoves and central heating. Well, I read a LOT of periodicals, mostly women's magazines, from between 1870-1930 while doing my research. A few bits of fireplace related advice were repeated from decade to decade, and stick in my mind. In a waiting room yesterday, I picked up a recent issue of Woman's Day (it was that or Texas Living) and idly flipped through it. Then I stopped turning pages and started laughing. Loudly. People stared. There, in the middle of the page was the same bit of fireplace advice I'd seen at least three or four times in women's magazines from 1870 to around the turn of the century - putting a large bouquet of fresh flowers on the hearth brings cheer to a room and helps disguise the gaping black hole of the unused fire box. Well then. The hearth as a decorative object is causing the same problems even now.
On a related note, I am reading Ian Ker's biography of GKC and was pleased to find this series of quotations from GKC's Autobiography (which I have not read) dealing with the Victorian approach to hearth and home: "This was 'the first generation that ever asked its children to worship the hearth without the altar'. It made no difference, claimed Chesterton, whether these Victorians 'went to church at eleven o'clock...or were reverently agnostic or latitudinarian, as was much of my own circle'. These Victorians were the first people 'for whom there were no household gods, but only furniture' (Ker, 6). Chesterton may have been talking about the English, but much of this feeling jumped the pond and shaped American life as well.
It is nice to feel that both time and wisdom are on one's side.
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