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THE
BEDROOM AND BOUDOIR.

CHAPTER I.
AN IDEAL BEDROOM.—ITS WALLS.

IT is only too easy to shock some people, and at the risk of shocking many of my readers at the outset, I must declare that very few bedrooms are so built and furnished as to remain thoroughly sweet, fresh, and airy all through the night. This is not going so far as others however. Emerson repeats an assertion he once heard made by Thoreau, the American so-called “Stoic,”—whose senses by the way seem to have been preternaturally acute—that “by night every dwelling-house gives out a bad air, like a slaughter-house.” As this need not be a necessary consequence of sleeping in a room, it remains to be discovered why one’s first impulse on entering a bedroom in the morning should either be to open the windows, or to wish the windows were open. Every one knows how often this is the case, not only in small, low, ill-contrived houses in a town, but even in very spacious dwellings, standing too amid all the fragrant possibilities of the open country. It is a very easy solution of the difficulty to say that we ought always to sleep with our windows wide open. The fact remains that many people cannot do so; it is a risk—nay, a certainty—of illness to some very young children, to many old people, and to nearly all invalids. In a large room the risk is diminished, because there would be a greater distance between the bed and window, or a space for a sheltering screen. Now, in a small room, where fresh air is still more essential and precious, the chances are that the window might open directly on the bed, which would probably stand in a draught between door and fireplace as well.

I take it for granted that every one understands the enormous importance of having a fireplace in each sleeping-room in an English house, for the sake of the ventilation afforded by the chimney. And even then a sharp watch must be kept on the house-maid, who out of pure “cussedness” (there is no other word for it) generally makes it the serious business of her life to keep the iron flap of the register stove shut down, and so to do away entirely with one of the uses of the chimney. If it be impossible to have a fireplace in the sleeping-room, then a ventilator of some sort should be introduced. There is, I believe, a system in use in some of the wards of St. George’s Hospital and in the schools under the control of the London School Board, known as Tobin’s Patent. Ventilation is here secured by means of a tube or pipe communicating directly with the outer air, which can thus be brought from that side of the building on which the atmosphere is freshest. If report can be trusted, this system certainly appears to come nearer to what is wanted than any with which we are yet acquainted, for it introduces fresh air without producing a draught, and the supply of air can be regulated by a lid at the mouth of the pipe. A sort of double-star is often introduced in a pane of glass in the window, but this is somewhat costly, and it would not be difficult to find other simpler and more primitive methods, from a tin shaft or loosened brick in a wall, down to half a dozen large holes bored by an