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Introduction: Lodgers in rural and urban Europe in the past

Few scholars have explored the roots and history of the domesticity ideology like Leonore Davidoff. She has pinpointed the change to the nineteenth century, when the middle classes adopted the view that being in control of a whole house or flat is socially desirable. Simultaneously the middle classes perceived the tendency among the working classes to keep lodgers as leading to moral and hygienic degradation. Davidoff has reminded us, however, that in the eighteenth century it was common even among the wealthy to live in only a couple of rooms, together with kin, servants and apprentices.1 Others have presented evidence that the desire for privacy was not particularly pronounced in urban pre-industrial Europe. On the contrary, it was far from unusual for family members and servants not only to share a room but also a bed; the whole idea of a separate bedroom was often not an issue. The question of physical proximity was not only linked to a less fearful attitude to the body than that of the Victorian era, but also to the fact that no strict boundary between kin and servants was necessarily present. For example, Samuel Pepys engaged his own sister as a servant, as well as some more distant family members. Similarly, studies of families in rural areas of eighteenth-century Europe have revealed that the boundary between kin and servants could be blurred as, for example, co-residing brothers-in-law registered as farmhands in the Baltic area.2 In the field of household studies of the 1960s and 1970s classification systems were developed inserting unsurmountable barriers between the married couple, close biological kin and persons whose kinship could not be immediately determined. Members of the latter group were seen as of such little consequence that their existence was ignored within the family models. In this way the ‘solitary household’ was born, a category that could contain any number of individuals, as long as they were not related to the household head.3 The obsession with the married couple and the nuclear family as the definition of normality has, however, longer roots in western society. In 1853 the International Statistical Congress defined the ‘normal family’ as: father, mother and four young children.4 In this case, the aim was to create Continuity and Change 31 (1), 2016, 1–8. © Cambridge University Press 2016 doi:10.1017/S0268416016000072