For some time, managing warmth was a task that called for some expertise, and not all methods were equally successful. This description from the London Quarterly Review in 1866 concedes that fires, while a traditional form of heat, are not particularly efficient: “An English fireplace is so cheerful and attractive, even though we may be roasted on one side and frozen on the other . . . It is argued that the open fire causes excellent ventilation, and no doubt it does, but not so effectually as to remove the air which has become most vitiated by animal exhalation, namely, that at the upper part of the room. Our legs may thus be refrigerated, while our heads are immersed in contaminated air above.”
Stoves required specialized knowledge and careful handling. Due to the lower conductivity of clay, tiled stoves retain heat longer than metal ones and radiate it out more slowly and evenly, to the benefit of all present. Marie von Redelien, headmistress of a domestic science school in Riga in the late nineteenth century, recommended: “In order to avoid the iron stove plate popping out, grease it generously with bacon rinds before using the oven.” It was not just how you handled the stove that mattered, however; the selection of good fuel was equally important. Today, this knowledge has been lost, for the most part because the materials we use are different. How do you burn wet wood that has been piled up in the stove? What is the heating value of different kinds of wood? Does dry wood have to be split into small pieces? (As a general rule, the drier the wood, the hotter the heat.) Purchasing fuel was an activity that engaged all the senses. “When you buy wood,” von Redelien instructed, “test the cut end to ensure that it gives a little but is not overly soft or damp. When you knock on it, it should sound light and bright, not heavy or dull.”
The eminent importance of a well-stoked stove on the Canadian prairies in the 1930s was described by John C. Charyk in The Little White Schoolhouse: “In the winter the stove became the hub of the day’s activities. Here the overshoes and outer garments were left to dry or to warm after a session of playing outdoors.” Any items left too near the stove could get toasted and shrivel up into a useless mass. But this was not all. As the cold season of the year was the time for numerous minor sicknesses, the air in the school room “became saturated with the aroma of liniment, camphorated oil, wintergreen, mustard plasters, and goose-grease. On blustery days with the windows closed and a goodly fire roaring in the stove, more than one teacher grew faint from such a malodorous onslaught . . . To top it off there was the lad who had tended his trap line on the way to school and depending on whether he had handled weasel, skunk, or marten, he added one of the several distinctive flavors to the already rich assortment.”
Modern central heating—with hot air, steam, and hot water—was developed as early as the eighteenth century, but people were slow to adopt the new systems, and at first only the privileged social classes benefited. The nineteenth-century shift from fire and candles to gas and electricity altered people’s relationship with dark and cold, and from that point forward, people experienced winter quite differently, but just how thin the veneer of civilization was became especially apparent in times of war, when things suddenly reverted to how they would have been a few centuries previously.
After the First World War, Stefan Zweig chronicled a trip to Austria that “called for preparation(s) similar to those for an Arctic expedition at that time. Warm clothes and woolen underwear were needed because it was known that across the border there was no coal with winter at the door. Shoes had to be soled for there were none but wooden soles over there. Provisions and chocolate in such quantities as Switzerland permitted were taken so that the traveler could keep going until he received bread and fat ration cards.”
Others remember that in the war years, if homes had heat at all, it was most often the living rooms that were heated, while the bedrooms rarely were. “Everyone tried their best to avoid a trip to the outhouse during the freezing nights. On winter mornings, urine was frozen in our chamber pots, and ice flowers covered the windows all the way to the top. I remember that on the coldest days the edge of the blanket near my face had a hoary frost on its surface from my breath,” wrote Bernat Rosner of the conditions in post-war Europe.
Gradually an understanding developed of what appropriate, more optimized heating could look like; different apparatuses promised the best solution. Smaller, freestanding furnaces increased options for heating rooms, but were dogged by the problem that the gases produced by combustion escaped, which in the worst-case scenario could result in casualties. In 1902, for example, novelist Émile Zola died in his sleep of carbon monoxide poisoning.
By the 1930s, the AGA stove, imported from Sweden, became a fixture in many country kitchens in Britain, and they continue to be popular to this day. The heavy cast-iron cooker, originally designed to burn a solid fuel such as coal, combined two large hot plates and two ovens in a single unit that radiated heat throughout the kitchen. In a March 18, 2017, interview, British cookbook author and television personality Mary Berry related that she folded newly washed sweaters over the lids of the AGA in her kitchen so they didn’t need ironing and that her husband swore by the heat to dry the dogs after a wet walk outside. In 2009, there was a competition to find the oldest AGA cooker still in use in Britain: the prize went to an AGA in Sussex that had been installed in 1932, providing an impressive seventy-seven uninterrupted years of heating and cooking.
Where winter tarried and escape was not possible, people designed their interior accommodations to make the season as comfortable as possible. Scandinavians, for example, used to design their homes taking into consideration the lack of light during the winter months. This was helped by a furnishing and interior design style that was brought back from France by Gustave III, who reigned in the latter part of the eighteenth century—thus the term Gustavian style. The Swedish king adapted the French elegance he had admired while visiting King Louis XIV to his home country: chalky-white ceilings and dove-gray paneling echoed the crisp white snow outside, at the same time softening it and setting it off with pale yellows and blues, which brought the wan light of the surrounding countryside indoors where it could warm in a way it never could outside. This muted color scheme also made the most of natural light. Rooms were oriented so that the largest possible amount of that rare commodity could penetrate inside, and crystal chandeliers scattered the little light that entered. Where winter cannot be ignored, one way to live with it is to invite it inside.
Modern interior designers continue to borrow from this style, adding special touches for the festive season: white Christmas trees, strings of white lights, white paper garlands, frosted fir cones and pinecones nestled on cotton wads in large vases, curtains trimmed with larger-than-life “snowflakes,” whitewashed furniture, white-leather couches, white candle settings—there are no limits to the imagination as long as the overall effect is white. Ideally, windows decorated for winter should allow for a view of a snow-covered landscape outside.
A Home in the Wilderness, Currier and Ives, 1870
Georg Favre and Anna Hackman heavily clad in bear and fox fur, Finland, ca. 1910−20
Bundling Up and Stripping Down
GENERATIONS OF SCHOLARS studying The Overcoat and its protagonist, Akaky Akakievitch, a government official in St. Petersburg, have focused on the socio-critical dimensions of his story, but you could also see Nikolai Gogol’s tragicomic tale as a simple statement about the importance of a winter coat in the harsh Russian winter. Akakievitch’s old coat had long been worn out, and his new coat became his obsession. It was almost prohibitively expensive, and the cutting and time-consuming stitching of the coat took two weeks. It had a collar made of cat fur, which could be taken for marten at a distance. The finished coat was the most glorious garment Akakievitch had ever owned. Gogol wrote: