Mirrors and Clocks at the Geffrye Museum

I have an aversion to crowds. I'm the type of person who likes to hear myself think, and I often feel like I can't do so surrounded by a lot of people. So when I saw the narrow hallway leading through the Geffrye Museum and all of my classmates crowding in, I immediately walked to the other end of the hallway. While this move began as a purely self-centered decision, it completely changed how I viewed the rooms in the museum as I moved backwards through time. 

A drawing room from 1890 with many small mirrors
Source: http://www.geffrye-museum.org.uk/
period-rooms-and-gardens/explore
-rooms/drawing-room-1890/

My choice to start from the end, in the 1890 room, and move towards the 1630 room helped me see trends that I may not have noticed moving in the opposite direction. Moving backwards also forced me to go back to rooms and check if something that appeared in a room from an earlier time appeared in the later rooms. I immediately noticed how important small, segmented mirrors were in the room from 1890. Mirrors appeared above the fireplace, as well as on the walls in other areas of the room. This arrangement of mirrors in both places in the room combined the placement of mirrors in previous rooms. Mirrors appeared above the fireplace in both the room from 1870 and the room from 1745, while mirrors appeared on the walls in the rooms from 1695, 1745, 1790, and 1830. But a mirror does not appear in the room from 1630. Recognizing this change, I moved back to the text for the 1695 room, in which the first mirror appeared, to see if I could find an explanation. The manufacture of glass improved in England around 1695, including the manufacture of mirrors, which reduced the price of mirrors so more people could buy what had once been considered a luxury good. For that reason, families in 1695 could buy a mirror and families from every period after. Changes in taste influenced how mirrors were placed in the rooms, so that by 1890, the aesthetic movement brought about the use of smaller, segmented mirrors that were used more for decoration than for vanity. The placement of the mirrors also emphasized the changes in the quality of the mirrors that were being manufactured. The mirrors that were more warped were smaller and hung high up on the wall, so they couldn't be used for checking one's reflection. Clearer, larger mirrors were hung in prominent positions over the fireplace in the center of the room so that people could easily check their reflection. Thus, the design of the room reflected not only the changes in taste and design, but also the changes in manufacturing that occurred as technology improved. 

A parlour from 1745 with a clock on the upper wall
Source: http://www.geffrye-museum.org.uk/
period-rooms-and-gardens/explore-
rooms/parlour-1745/

Another object that caught my eye in the museum was a large clock that hung high on the wall in the parlour from 1745. In our world, where clocks appear in almost every room and we're constantly checking the time on our phones and computers, the thought of not having a clock seems strange. But I noticed the clock in the 1745 room simply because I hadn't seen a clock anywhere else. I backtracked once again and found that the only other room that had a clock was the room from 1890, but that clock appeared in the corner as part of a larger wall hanging and didn't occupy a prominent space in the room. That made me question why such a large clock appeared in the room from 1745 and no where else. Unfortunately, the text for the room didn't provide an explanation for the clock's presence. But the absence of clocks in most of the rooms alluded to the type of life the room's owners lived. Since most of the rooms appearing in the museum were considered the domains of women, the lack of clocks spoke to the life of leisure many middle and upper class women were able to lead. While their husbands worked and their servants did the work in the house, the women of the house didn't need to keep track of the time. It also suggested the continuation of the reliance on the natural landscape for telling time. The passage of time had been tracked by the movement of the sun for so long and the large number of windows in the rooms shown in the museum would have allowed for residents to track the sun even from inside a cozy drawing room. Thus, the absence of clocks in many of the rooms showed both the relative unimportance of tracking time compared to our modern need for the constant tracking of time and the continued use of nature to check the movement of time. 

Tracking individual objects in the rooms of the Geffrye Museum, like mirrors or clocks, gave insight into changes in design, taste, manufacturing capabilities, economics, and lifestyle. Starting from 1890 and moving backward through time allowed me to see those objects after their evolution throughout time in English households and track how those objects had changed to reach that final point in the last room.