COAL

THE DOMESTIC REVOLUTION : How the introduction of coal into Victorian homes changed everything by Ruth Goodman

the art of building fire from different fuels spanning wood to coal / temperature control, efficiency, longevity. p3 onwards
how different fuels/materials are suited to some jobs more than others p5
animal dung p.8
-cassons were dungs individually dried out for fuel
-manure is a term specifically for gathering dung into wet heaps, letting it break down and use as fertiliser.
dung as fuel p.9
How modern cattle feed produces a wet and smelly dung
How traditional cattle feeds were a high fibre (not high nutrient) diet.
Peat and turfs/ turves p11
Peat areas – ‘fens’ in shallow valleys (created naturally where drainage was poor and seasonal waterlogging was common) see p18
trees and wood as fuel p.21
coppicing wood p22 and also how it affects animal and land management
billets – term for pre-prepared piece of ready made firewood with set dimensions and circumferences for domestic fires p.30
tallwood – larger uniform prepared wood/ cordwood/ sold by the cord p31
faggots – tied bundles of small sticks, twigs and brushwood in uniform measurements p36
-purposed for lighting fires and stoking ovens, furnaces and kilns p38
furze / gorse (scrublike vegetation of a heath) p.41
Heathland – not a naturally occurring habitat p. 41
Charcoal p42
earthernware chaffing dishes -basically heat warmers both for food but also as foot warmers or to take the chill out of a small area of a room p.43
common land/ wood pasture/ trade off between grazing and fuel production p48
Pollards p.49 ‘trees that are periodically cut like coppice stools, but the cut is made not at ground level but further up the main trunk…each cut resets the tree’s natural lifespan…and provides a useful crop of small branches.’
impact of coal on land manegement p53+
‘coal did not just change the landscape, climate and environment with its slag heaps, smoke and industrial expansion. It also changed the hedgerows and woods, fields and farming, the speices mixes and plant communities’ p.57

COAL AND FIREGRATE
A coal fire flat on the ground can be a sluggish thing whose vigor is sapped by the build up of its ash and clinker. Oxygen is the key factor here. Modern coal fires are burnt in a grate that exposes coal surfaces to the air by lifting the pile of fuel up off the ground and letting the ash and clinker fall away. Cold air is actively drawn up the grate by the very act of combustion with the rising heat creating a vacuum, or ‘draw’. This draught is transformative. Coal with and without the use of a grate is almost unrecognisable as the same fuel. p.59-60

basket grate
illustration p.60 ‘the grate lifts the coals off the ground, ensuring good airflow to the fire’.

iron fire support / fire dog
wood and iron fire supports to improve oxygen circulation & encourage draw:
‘with pieces of wood propped up on both sides, a sort of tunnel was formed beneath the bar that encouraged cold air to be drawn in from both ends; the upright bars at the sides prevented the wood from rolling off’
p.61 ‘

COAL SMOKE p.63 how it can collect in the air and irritate eyes
SMOKE MANAGEMENT in the house and how the ideosyncracies of house would inform placement of furniture/planting of trees etc p.64
EVOLUTION OF CHIMNEYS p73 onwards

Commercial fishing and role of navy in England:
‘The government had long advocated support for the commercial fishing trade as a means of training sailors who could be pressed into naval service should the need arise. Previously, this policy had mostly taken the form of ‘pariotic’ fish eating. Many puritanical elements in this Protestant nation had wanted to abandon the old Catholic practice of obsverving meat-free days. But Queen Elizabeth, near the start of her reign, had decreed that Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays were still to be ‘fish days’ – not for religious reasons, she proclaimed, but as a way of providing ample employ for her country’s fishermen and thus training for young sailors. Now, the coal trade was showing that it too could help fufil this vital national security function’ p..119-120
[ie the importance of merchant shipping transportation of coal down the ‘Newcastle run’ to service increasing coal demand in london]

Cast iron firebacks in chimney as response to coal as fuel (higher heat and release of acidic chemicals damaging traditional brick and stone chimneys) p131

architecture in homes: to “stop the keyhole in the door” – stop people listening to you inside. from 1700s p132 – is this the function of the little flipper on keyholes in household doors.

evolution of cast iron p.132
evolution of pig iron p.134

fire grates p.139
grid iron grate p.139
basket grate p144

cooking with coal p.143
one-pot cookery

symbiotic relationship: coal and baking bread
‘Bread was a respectable ‘convenience food’, considered to be a bit posher than porridge, a little more desirable. So as the cheaper thick and sticky starch options became more difficult and unreliable to cook upon coal fires, many people increasingly chose the easy trip to a dependable baker’s shop.’ p172

-how coal influenced uptake of potatoes in english diet p172
-how coal popularised boiled pudding p173
coal and roasting p178

STARTING AND MAINTAINING A COAL FIRE
‘Getting coal to catch straight from a bit of burning paper is little short of a miracle. Most people with any fire experience will tell you that you need some wood. A piece of paper or charred linen is sufficient to light a few small twings or shavings of wood, which will light some larger sticks, and this nice, hot little fire of sticks will set fire to your coal…
Wherever there were sufficient reserves to keep a fire burning, people generally chose to do so. Servants had every reason to favour this option as they were the ones who would have the labour and trouble of lighting the fire, and bore none of the extra fuel costs, Naturally, masters and mistresses saw it rather differently, but they were not always the last ones to go to bed or the ones up at the crack of dawn, when fires were stirred back to life.’ p185
-info on how to bring a fire back to life, various techniques. and how to keep embers going overnight p185

roasting and baking of meat p188 onwards inc. cast iron ovens
roasting vs boiling meat p.196 roasting for the gentlepeople, boiled meat for the servants- economies of food for the upstairs downstairs

history of sugar, sugar as medicinal p.198

colonies outside of england:
‘Australia and New Zeland…were more strongly marked by coal’s influence…A large percentage of these British settlers had been brought up in a coal-burning world, eating coal-cookery food. On a new continent far from home, they stuck with what they knew, though until the great coal reserves of the two countries began to be unlocked, many of them had to manage coal cookery over wood fires. Here the baked meats known as ‘roasts’ remain popular, despite the climate and great influx of Asian cooking styles.’ -p209

‘…The mistress had scant experience of cooking over wood, and her local servants had no experience of the dishes and methods she was asking them to re-create. [[me:over wood as opposed to coal from england]] Indeed, they were being asked to do something technically awkward and their chances of success were slim.’ p210

‘Many people…went to the enormous expense of hauling familiar cooking equipment to their new homes…..Once these large, heavy iron contraptions were in place, however, they generally had to be fired with wood since coal was scarce.’ p210

‘Colonial homes often had to make do with a rather ad-hoc mixture of fuels as both supply and price fluctuated’ p211 and further expands on the technical ways to do both with a cast iron range.

EARTHENWARE p.288 – you can sand scour it in cold water, in a world before detergeants and introduction of soaps for washing up. (and use wood ash for stubbon grease).
wood ash/ pot ash uses p229

Soap industry, ready-made soap p.233
animal fats used in soaps p.234
tallow p235
train oil p.235 – it’s marine oils from fish, cod and whales

‘Washing up with soap may have played a part in the rise of pottery within the home’ ‘Households that were aquiring more pottery (ie chinee porcelai etc) were more likely to convert to soap’ p,239

HOUSE INTERIOR DECORATION and cleaning with coal as household fuel:
‘Applying oil paint to window frames and doors may have signalled a similar evolution in cleaning tactics. Most architectural historians imagine that it was the use in the use of softwoods that triggered this change. Traditionally, British homes had employed oak and other hardwoods – woods that could stand up to the vagaries of the climate- for the structure as well as window frames and doors.
Cheaper pine windows were more prone to rot unless they were protected by the elements in some manner, and several coats of oil-based paint did the job very well. Inside the house, however, where weatherproofing was of little value, people were discovering that the same protective layer was ideal for surfaces that needed regular cleaning with soap and water’ -p250
-since soap was needed to dissolve the smut from coal in a way that traditional cleaning could not.
‘Washable paint had, by mid seventeeth century, moved indoors’
‘Like the possible positive feedback loop between soap and pottery in the kitchen, there might have been a positive feedback loop between soap and oil-based paintwork and varnishes’ p252

textile wall hangings tradition in england p253

rise of commercialisation of soap p264

COAL SMUTS in the house
‘I have also found that the sticky smuts of coal smoke, along with the coal dust of unburnt fuel, make a home much, much dirtier than the wood-burning equivalents, either as raw fuel or by-products. It is not merely that the smuts and dusts of coal are dirty in themselves. Coal smuts weld themselves to all other forms of dirt. Flies and other inspects get entrapped in it, as does fluff from clothing and hair from people and animals. To thoroughly clear a room of cobwebs, fluff, dust, hair and mud in a simply furnished wood-burning home is the work of half an hour; to do so in a coal-burning home – and achieve a similar standard of cleanliness – takes twice as long, even when armed with soap, flannels and mops.’ p281

—how the increasing work load in keeping a coal fuelled house clean meant women were less and less sharing agricultural load outdoors inc. diary work and poultry work and outdoor labour and their role becomes increasingly driven within the house.
-how this may have been the increased workload required for the house that creates specialisation of labour between genders
this is an amazing theory
‘cleanliess asserts itself as a powerful class marker throughout the eighteenth and nineteeth centuries. in the same period there was a rising division in labour between the sexes. Was the shift to coal the spur to both of these cultural phemomena?
pp281-284

Fireplaces In The 1800s

Later in the mid 1800’s, as households began burning coal instead of wood there was a shift in design to horseshoe-arched cast iron styles. (see https://fosterfuels.com/blog/history-of-the-fireplace/)

–the fact that a small shallow fireplace is built just for coal not for wood fires.

fireplaces included a cast-iron combination- the first inserts. The legs of the surround were also detailed with decorative tiles.

cast iron insert
Materials: While colonial fireplaces were often made from stone or brick, by the Victorian era, marble was the go-to material in grand homes. Cast iron inserts also became popular, not only adding to the design but also improving heat efficiency. source https://rhng.com.au/post/128/at-home-the-fireplace

stealing coal
POLICE INTELLIGENCE. (1873, August 12). The Age (Melbourne, Vic. : 1854 – 1954), p. 4. Retrieved March 15, 2025, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article202517875

Old King Coal. (1872, June 6). Melbourne Punch (Vic. : 1855 – 1900), p. 7. Retrieved March 13, 2025, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article1745440

COAL (1875, January 13). The Herald (Melbourne, Vic. : 1861 – 1954), p. 2. Retrieved March 13, 2025, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article244336300

Advertising (1876, January 29). Mercury (Fitzroy, Vic. : 1875 – 1877), p. 1. Retrieved March 15, 2025, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article58153376