flemmings | (no subject)

Dreamed of being on the subway again, getting on at the wrong entrance at Spadina (there is no wrong entrance in reality because both lead to the platform, but in my dream half the platform was walled off from the other half) and once again coming above ground in Paris. Was travelling with K-chan and staying with friends of hers, a couple who owed at least half their make-up to Kushner and Sherman. And one of them was utterly delighted because now she had someone to play chess with- me- and I didn't want to play chess and didn't know how but I had to anyway, in order to get my purse back (I don't own any purses) which had been suspended from hooks in the celing, along with my coat. And that last bit is from The Colour of Magic, the hooks in the ceiling in the Pern-spoof section, though what it's spoofing I have no idea because I never read Pern.

Because The Woman in White is much more readable than an anthropological analysis of guanxi, I read TWIW while bicycling, and came across this puzzling description of Marion Halcombe's new house:

"My two rooms, and all the good bedooms beside, are on the first floor, and the basement contains a drawing-room, a dining room, a morning- room, a library, and a pretty little boudoir for Laura..."

OK, I know the English convention of 'first floor is what we call second floor' but this sounds like all the rooms that we expect to find on the ground floor are somehow underground. Did basement mean something different in 1850-whatever?

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Sort of? This sort of basement is about halfway underground, so you have windows to halfway down its exterior walls, and shallower window-wells than a fully buried floor would need. There may also be an entire excavated area, either in front or back or both, surrounded by railings, with a half-flight of stairs from the street down to the basement's exterior door(s). And then the usual entrance floor has taller front steps than you would otherwise expect. NYC brownstones, from that era and later, tend to run to this pattern, and it's very easy to cut up into a basement apartment and the Rest Of House.

I think today we'd still call it a basement but emphasize the exterior windows and any associated excavated areas in the real estate listing.

Ohhkay. I know the kind you mean. But it seems an odd construction for a house in the country. Also means that your bedrooms are a lot closer to the ground than I personally would be comfortable with.

Well, she does say all the good bedrooms are on the second floor! What fascinates me is, if Laura has one of the good bedrooms, the distance there must be between her bedroom and boudoir. I guess if the back stairs run directly between the two... I thought they were usually next door to one another, but I may be mistaken.

I'm guessing that boudoir is less 'small room with clothes and vanity table' and more 'small sitting room for daytime use.' The idea of the mistress of a house using the back stairs seems all wrong.

What I wonder is, does second floor here mean 'the floor above the basement'? Because if not, there's a whole empty floor between the bedrooms and the living rooms. And where is the kitchen and pantry and the laundries and all? That's what's supposed to be in the basement or half-basement. Weird to have them on the first floor and have dinner brought down to the gentry.