Master Bedroom, Hampton Mansion

"every wife who occupied the house etched her name into a pane of glass in the window to the right of the fireplace upon taking up residence."

Sounds a bit like when one enters old prison cells and sees the groups of 4 vertical lines and one diagonal to mark days/weeks/months/years(?) scratched onto the walls.

Were there many names etched onto the pane of glass?

Mick.

@Mick Fagan There's I think five or six. The Hampton mansion was owned by the family that built it continuously until they donated it to the US Park Service in the 1950s. It has a striking amount of the original furnishings, dating back to the 1790s, as a result, and you can see the evolution of decorating tastes in the various public spaces in the house (sitting room, dining room, library, etc). Interestingly, there is no bathroom inside the house - because the family fortunes had waned to such a degree by the 1910s/20s when indoor plumbing was becoming commonplace, and the last generation of the family didn't live in it often, there was no bathroom installed while the house was a private residence. There were chamberpots and an outside privy. Bathing would have been done by carrying heated water upstairs to movable bath tubs. The kitchen was also still a brick fireplace affair.

Bathrooms were not commonplace at all. My house was built far, far later, 1902 and did not have a bathroom. It was not considered the done thing to have a bathroom even when plumbing was relatively easy. Bathrooms were not remotely aspirational but quite the opposite. To have a bathroom was a direct admission that one could not afford enough servants and so had to D.I.Y. It was the servants job to fetch water and fill a tin bath in front of the fire, usually in the bedroom. Bathrooms did not have open fires and were far too cold until the "central heating". Even in the 1970's when I grew up we did not have the central heating. Now we have a few radiators but mostly open fires. It isn't worth it to take floorboards up to put in new plumbing. We rely on lead pipes.

@Svenedin That may be true in the UK - here in the US, there was a different attitude toward such things. I've been to several other similar era plantation mansions in this area of the US, and in the 1920s, they all got fairly upscale bathrooms that included radiator heat, toilets and baths/showers. I can understand in the great country houses where running the plumbing to just one bathroom would be frightfully expensive and destructive, given the distances they would have to run pipe and the flooring, plasterwork and paneling they would have to risk. Here in the US, the whole servants thing was starting to die out in all but the wealthiest of households by the beginning of the 20th century. Today, there are probably only a few families that have full-time live-in staff here.

That's interesting. Bathrooms seem to be the popular thing these days and new-builds have to have so many of them in a house. My modest 6 bedroom house has one bathroom and that's how it will stay. One is more than enough. I think it was installed in the 1930's's by stealing a bit from the bedrooms on either side. Certainly the bath and basin are from the 1930's and still perfectly serviceable. It is very difficult to find plumbers who can do wiped lead joints these days.