The Glow Behind the Firescreen

the hearth has long had in human domiciles. This place that is a source of heat, that can be a source of food, and is also kind of like the epicenter of culture for the immediate household, and also there are all these additional supernatural ideas associated with it. It becomes a gateway through which spirits might enter into the home and so forth. Yeah, and so today's episode is gonna be essentially kind of a sidebar to all of that. That was partially inspired by a recent visit that I

made to New Orleans. Traveled there with my family, and New Orleans, of course, is full of all sorts of interesting history, and I was touring a mid nineteenth century home that had been restored and redecorated so that it would look like it did back in the day. And you know, there are all sorts of little details and technological innovations of the time period that are pretty fascinating, but one in particular kind of caught my eye. And

it wasn't anything super advanced either. It wasn't related to plumbing or ventilation, well a little bit to ventilation, as we'll discuss, but it wasn't like high tech of the day. In fact, it had some kind of antique aspects about it. It was a fire screen. It was a decorative piece on a little stand placed in front of the fireplace. And I'm sure I've seen these before. I like, looking back, I'm like, oh, there's here's one in this museum I

went to and so forth. I don't know that I've ever really looked at one and thought about it all that much, But in this moment, I really was taken by it was why is that there? Why would we have something between us and the fire? Because, as we discussed in the heart episodes, like everybody loves looking at a roaring fire, right, why would you put something in

front of it? And you know, this question has some flaws in it as well, as we'll get into, but that's what we're going to be talking about in this episode today.

books about American furniture and antiques. The book is called Chests, Cupboards, Desks, and other Pieces, published by A. Knop in nineteen eighty two. Shout out that I found this because excerpts from the book were screenshotted on a website called Buffalo Architecture and History, which is still rocking and amazing. Early two thousands website design with like white text or sorry, black text on a white background divider bars. That great stuff made me yearn for the old web.

And the earlier screens that you would find going back into the Middle Ages would have generally been quite utilitarian in nature, less like the decorated pieces that we're going to talk about in a minute. You see more of the decorative, beautiful pieces later on, especially beginning around the seventeenth century. So what is the utilitarian function of a

fire screen? Well, you might imagine if you've ever sat out by a bonfire in the cold, or sat beside a large fireplace when no other form of heat was being used in a house, you'll know that it can be equal parts cozy and uncomfortable. You know, if you have no other heat source in a house and it's very cold in the winter, you know, if you get more than ten feet away from the fire, it's still freezing. Like it doesn't A fireplace does not distribute heat evenly

throughout the house like forced air central heating does. You know? Fourced air central heating uses convection. It warms the air with vents throughout the house. The fire is just mainly going to be sending radiant heat in straight lines out into the room where the fire is, and it's also heating up some of the stone, you know, tile or metal infrastructure around it that also radiates some heat. So most of the heat is just coming straight out of the fire and around where the fire is. So you

step away from the fire and it's still cold. In fact, we talked in our episodes on the Hearth about some research showing that well, it might feel nice and toasty right beside the fire. When you start a fire in a fireplace, usually the rest of the house gets colder because it's going to be sucking air in through little gaps and cracks and the windows and the doors in order to help drive the to help drive the convection that's going to be flowing up out of the chimney.

So if your only heat source is a fireplace, it's going to be cold stepping away from the fire. You got to stay close to it to be warm. However, when you're right up close, the warmth provided by a large fire is not gentle. It roasts you, and you might have to frequently adjust position or turn different parts of your body toward the fire every few minutes to prevent it from overheating any particular part of your flesh. I'm sure you've had this experience.

to the fire. I did not have a fireplace in my home, so I only get to enjoy them when I'm like staying in a cabin or something, you know, maybe at a hotel or a restaurant that has them. But even then it's it's often kind of fleeting, so you don't you don't get that like long term exposure

factor with one of these fires. And if I am encountering a fire, it's often not going to be the kind of roaring hearth that we're talking about, you know, historically here, it might be one of these more these tamer like gas powered features that we have today, which are great to look at, do put off some heat, but not on the level that we're talking about here.

conditions in the room. One thing I read mentioned in a few sources was that another function of various screens and guards of different kinds covering a fireplace, especially going back into the Middle Ages, one function of these various types of coverings, especially the tighter coverings, was to block cold air drafts when the fireplace was not in use.

to do. You may wish to socialize more directly with the people around you, or read a book or work on a craft, and the light might be too intense for that. You might want to focus your eyes on something else. Other than the fire, and in this reminded me a little bit of the There's a scene in the recent Nonseratu adaptation where we meet count Overlock more officially in this big room that has a roaring fire, and it's fabulously at the same time both really dim

and dark and also like blinding. So I feel like that scene maybe gets that some of the paradoxical realities of a hearth lit and hearth heated room, I think so. Yeah, and then the empty hearth is another important factor, one that I think is also easy to forget about if you don't have a fireplace, or if you have a modern fireplace that can maybe be s up a little

bit easier when it's not in use. But yeah, this idea that it is a potentially drafty affair in and of itself, and so you might want to block access to the wind to some degree, cut down on the airflow or even the sight of the empty fireplace, which I know is another factor involved here. Yeah.

terms fire screen and fire guard. Things that are I think more often called fire guards would have the benefit as well of blocking sudden ejections from the fire, like sparks and embers. But if you think about that, you know, some of these fire screens we're going to talk about it made a very delicate flammable material and so they probably you wouldn't want to use them for that purpose.

But in addition to these functional uses, fire screens were also decorative so catch them in this book mentions that in eighteenth century American examples quote the panels displayed fine needlework or later paintings, often made by the women of the house, as well as prints or various fabrics, And if you look up examples of eighteenth century American fire screens. I guess that's probably what you would have been seeing in the house you visited, Rob. Many of them are

absolutely beautiful, beautiful, elaborate designs. I just wanted to mention one that caught my eye when I was just image searching for these things, I found images of a screen hosted on a blog post for the Winterthur Museum in Delaware by a student named Tess Friedman. This image, Rob, I've got for you to look at in the outline. It's of what's called a pole screen. I'll explain that more in a minute. A pole screen that was made in New York between seventeen sixty and seventeen seventy five

with a mahogany base. The screen is a linen canvas with an elaborate hand embroidered image made out of yarn and silk, and it looks basically like a framed painting on a rectangular canvas attached to a pole on a wooden tripod, except, of course, it's not a painting. It's an embroidery design. The embroidered image on the canvas depicts a shepherdess and a shepherd out in this pastoral scene with sheep roaming the hills beside a city, and the

male shepherd is kneeling in front of the shepherdess. He's got his hand over his heart, looks he looks like he's asking for her attention or something. Maybe maybe he's asking her to marry him, and she seems to be kind of considering the offer or whatever it is. And I think, what's so captivating to me about this piece of furniture is imagining this beautiful, delicate work of art, delicate both in construction and even in subject matter, being

used as the shield from a roaring fire. But again, this contradiction is somewhat not a contradiction when you understand how these different types of fire shield furniture were used. There are actually lots of different designs for fire screens and fireguards. Some are wide and positioned on the floor closer to the fire to provide general protection to the

room or to the seating area around the hearth. Others, like this fire screen would be positioned usually closer to the person, with a targeted blocking radius, kind of like a little parasol for the fireplace, And these are often said to serve the purpose of shielding a person's face

rather than their whole body. This form again is often called the pole screen, and you can find a lot of examples like this that are a pole, a wooden pole, or a metal pole coming up off of a round or tripod base on the floor and then it's holding maybe a round or a rectangular screen of some kind, often with a beautiful design on it. And this type of furniture again would not be placed right next to

the fire. Instead, you should picture it maybe at the edge of a couch where a lady was resting, and the screen would be between next to the lady's head between her in the fire. Now I also mentioned that the pole screen, the smaller pole screen, is not the only design in contrast to these smaller elevated screens. Ketchum says that in the early nineteenth century, the cheval design became more popular in American homes. It was not invented at this time, but it became more popular in America

around then. The cheval design, named after the French word for horse, is a wide rectangular panel mounted load to the floor on two pairs of short legs, So it is kind of like a little you know, picture a little sawhorse, but instead of a cross beam. It's a big rectangular panel or screen.

staring at a television too much or something. I was rather intrigued by that idea, I have to say, though I did not have much luck in finding any specific Victorian notion of this situation where there was some sort of an idea that it was bad luck or thought bad for the eyes, especially to gaze into the fire. At the same time, again acknowledging that there was a need to shield yourself from the heat and or glare

of the fire. But I was expecting that maybe there might be something out there of a tradition where it was you know, bad luck or bad manners or bad health to do so. But I don't know. It seems based on what I was finding, that there's little in the way of cultural opposition to steering at a fire in general for human beings outside of some very specific cultural examples. Certainly nothing with a wide enough footprint in European and then American traditions of the time as far

as I can tell. That being said, however, as we discussed in the Hearth episodes, there all these rich ideas of the heart is some sort of a supernatural pathway through which things might enter the home. There's plenty of room for a tradition like that to emerge, even if it's very local, and you know, particularly if you're thinking of a place like New Orleans, where you have all these different cultures coming together and different ideas merging with

each other. So I'm not going to completely rule out the possibility, but I wasn't able to find much on it. What you will find, however, is an idea that these screens were important to keep the cosmetics of Victorian women from melting, essentially from their face melting off when they were hit with the intense heat of a fireplace, and therefore you would need to have a screen in place, either handheld or on a pole to protect them. This, as far as I can tell, so this is widely

discredited as a myth. But at the same time, it seems like this is maybe more on the exaggeration end of the myth spectrum. So as we've been discussing, like there were practical reasons to want to keep the heat off of your face and the glare of the fireplace out of your eyes. Could it mess up your makeup? I don't know, maybe not, but it doesn't seem to be.

You know, the prime reason for this, I think where it becomes a myth is when people say, oh, well they had that because ladies had wax based cosmetics and they didn't want the melt. Not the prime leading reason

as far as I can tell. Now, I want to briefly mention another tradition just because I feel like it helps us maybe understand like some of the broad strokes of this sort of technology, The idea of placing some sort of a screen between you and a heat source or between the heat source and other parts of your environment. And in that we have what is known in Japanese as a biobu, and I maybe butchering that pronunciation now byaba in general is just a folding screen, often decorated

with calligraphy or other images. These eventually found their way into European and American homes as well during the eighteenth century and then beyond. It led to a tradition in Mexico as well of a screen tradition that was inspired by it. And the word literally means protect action from the wind or wind wall in Japanese. And so you might use this to break up a space or indeed to sort of like prevent a draft from moving all

the way through a living environment. But then you also have a frosaki biago or furnace wind screen, and this is also decorative, sometimes a fine work of art, but it is specifically used to protect the furo or portable tea brasier from drafts that might blow on the coals and scatter the ashes and disrupt the tea ceremony that

you're conducting with this little portable, little portable stove. The stove would have used charcoal, it would have provided the specific heat needed for the creation of proper macha tea.

So it's one of these things that is again highly ceremonial, highly esthetic, but the at least original idea in its design is Okay, if you're going to have some sort of a heat source, a burning heat source, you might need to prevent the wind from catching it because this could at the very least disrupt things, get some ash where you don't want some ash, or it could potentially serve as a fire hazard. Again, easy to take all this for granted because central heating in a home, like

your airflow is part of the way your home is heated. Like, it's all built into the system. This problem has been solved for you, and you don't have to worry as much about that air circulation and how it relates to your heat and your heat sources.

with me as we go along. But what I wanted to talk about was a distinction between coal fires and wood fires, because when we in America think of a fire and a fireplace today, I bet almost everybody thinks of a wood fire where the fuel is split wedges of seasoned hardwood. But there are other sources of fuel, of course, and at other times and places in history, they might be more common in domestic fires, not just in say, a coal furnace or a coal stove, but

even in open hearth fireplaces in the home. And a big alternative here is coal. If you were to go look in the fireplace of, for example, a middle class or working class home in London in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, the fire in the fireplace would almost certainly be a coal fire and not a wood fire. Now, this doesn't hold true everywhere around the world. In fact, it wouldn't hold true even everywhere in Britain at the time.

If you went out into the countryside, you'd probably still find a lot of houses burning wood, But in the city coal would be the go to fuel source for cooking and heating in most homes.

it has not been lit. He wants to put it in the stove, and Scrooge is giving him a hard time about it, like, now, you're you're going to put us out of business if you've used one piece of coal. Yeah, I had to look up any mention of coal in the original literary work. I'm going to read a passage here the door of Scrooge's counting house was open that he might keep his eye upon his clerk, who, in a dismal little cell beyond a sort of tank, was

copying letters. Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk's fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal. But he couldn't replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal box in his own room, and so surely as the clerk came in with the shovel, the master predicted that it would be necessary for them to part. Wherefore the clerk put on his white comforter and tried to warm himself at the candle, in which effort, not being a man of a strong imagination, he failed.

would certainly include a lot of cities. In the industrial age, both wood and coal would have to travel a great distance to get to your home, and coal burns hotter and longer, so you're typically going to get a lot more bang for your buck buying coal than buying wood. You know, if you're shipping wood somewhere, you have huge amount of what you're shipping is just unburnable stuff in the way to the wood, water and air and stuff trapped in there. So coal is a much more or

energy dense and valuable product by weight. Of course, out in the country, if there's still trees nearby it, it probably makes economic sense to burn wood, whether you're gathering it yourself from around your house or buying it from somebody nearby. However, even many rural homes in Britain I think by the nineteenth century had made the switch to coal when it became available by rail lines, because it

was just a cheaper source of heat to acquire. Now, the urban coal dominance trend has not held true everywhere and at every time in history. It's not just like once you live in a densely populated urban environment you switch from wood to coal. From what I've been reading, it seems like in big cities in America in the nineteenth century, you'd find kind of a mix of coal

fired homes and wood fired homes. There were some of each, and around the world you would have all kinds of different pressures acting on what fuel source people used, different local economic pressures, what types of material were available, what forms of transportation for material were available. Climate, Oh, not just the availability of wood and coal, but like what types of wood and what types of coal, because that

makes a big difference. The coal often used in London in the you know, the seventeenth through the nineteenth century, would have been what they called sea coal, which was a bituminous coal, a kind of nasty coal. And there were even taste and cultural preferences about what types of

fuel to use, and these could rule the day. I came across this thing of I'd never heard about this before, but French writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth century in particular talking about the use of coal fire in London as just so gross. I dug up it. And there was an eighteenth century book called a Tour to London or New Observations on England and its Inhabitants, published by Lockyer David seventeen seventy two by an author named Pierre

Jean Grossly. Grossly was an eighteenth century French magistrate and author, kind of a travel writer.

that grow in the country about London. Cabbage, radishes and spinach being impregnated with the smoke of coal which fills the atmosphere of that town have a very disagreeable taste which they communicate to the meat wherewith they have been boiled. I ate nothing good of this sort in London, but some asparagus, which doubtless grew at a good distance from the capitol.

them the new principles of melancholy. Oh wow, So not the only time people complained about pre modern London is for being polluted. But I don't know, I found this an especially evocative and targeted attack on the use of coal in the city.

the fireplace heat. But a lot of you know, a lot of houses with fireplaces now don't really need them for heating. They're just a nice thing to have. And in those cases, it seems a lot of people prefer wood for these optional fires, at least most people in America do. I wonder if there's anywhere people actually have an esthetic preference for coal fires. It seems kind of unlikely to me, but I'd be interested to be surprised. I would like to hear about that.

and replenishment. A coal fire is going to get you a hot stream of radiant heat going, and it'll keep going for a long time. And so I was reading about this, and it made me wonder, is it possible fire screens or fireguards were more needed in homes that burned one type of fuel instead of the other. For example, because coal puts out a steadier, longer lasting stream of strong radiant heat. Would a coal fire be more likely to become uncomfortable without a guard of some kind for

the face or the skin? And you know, basically, does a coal fire more resemble a broiler aimed at the people by the hearth side? The answer, unfortunately, is I

don't know for sure. I was looking and couldn't find direct historical confirmation of this idea, but given the differences between the heat produced by wood versus coal fires, it seems to be plausible that there might be a kind of different experience around a coal fire than a wood fire, and that experience might manifest in a stronger desire to

put screens between yourself and the blaze. So yeah, if any listeners out there have more experience it's with this kind of thing and would like to comment on this issue, I'd be interested to read your thoughts.

for middle class homes in Victorian Britain. So this is getting into how fire screens figured into you know, not just fire screens, but fire screens and lots of associated furnishings and technology. Things around the fireplace are not just functional in nature, but they mean something within the cultural context,

and this is exploring that, certainly within Victorian Britain. So in Victorian Britain during the wintertime, she talks about how the hearth side was kind of a standard gathering place for household activities. By the fire, you'd sit and talk, you'd play games, you might eat meals. And in these middle class Victorian homes, the hearth was usually the center of the drawing room or the parlor, which was the part of the house that arguably carried the most social

and cultural meaning. Basically, all people at all times in some ways express who they are through the design and decoration of their homes, but obviously to different extents and in different ways. And I understand the argument here to be that the Victorian drawing room or parlor was an area of particular focus for expressing the homeliness of a home in Victorian Britain. In gaych Egg's words quote, a comfortable and well furnished drawing room became symbolic of some

of the key notions of Victorian morality. And this was in one sense an inward facing message as a place the family could gather and do things that expressed their bonds as a family, you know, so they would kind

of understand themselves through this space. But it was also an outward facing message as the place that would message to guests and visitors things about the family's identity, including everything from economic class and status to esthetic taste and moral values, and so these things that would communicate those ideas included a lot of furnishings and decorations related to the fireplace and its immediate surroundings. And fire screens are

a great example here. You could think also of all kind you know, coal buckets that you would restock the coal fire with, and you know metal fire guards, but also fire screens, fire screens with the embroidery or other designs on cloth. On these pole screens we've talked about, these would often be a way for the female head of the household to express her taste, her skill if she made the design herself, which was often the case,

and moral virtues. And gay Jag highlights one particular design for a pole screen, that is, it's on a pole with a tripod at the base, like the other one I was talking about earlier, but this one has baby fire breathing dragons made out of iron on the three studs of the tripod base. Nice and then it comes up to a very actually quite small fire screen it looks, you know, just small enough to block the face from the fire, which has a circular embroidered design and then

an elaborate frame around it. But this video really makes the distinction, for one thing, between fire screens like pole screens and the heartier things that would more often be

called fire guards, citing these brass based samples. No doubt these things would get very hot sitting right in front of the fire, but those would provide more solid protection against sparks or other material ejections from the fire, because again, you know of a pole screen like this that's a linen canvas or embroidered cloth or something something made out of wood, these would obviously be highly flammable, so they would not be something designed to go right up against

the fire. They would get scorched. So if you're talking about a fire screen that goes right up against the fire, you're going to be talking about different kinds of materials. But anyway, the main point being made in this video that I thought was worth noting was that at least within the Victorian middle class household in Britain, the fireplace and its immediate surroundings and furnishings are just a big part of how a domestic unit expressed and understood who

they were. And so these decorated fire screens were not just functional. They carried a lot of meaning and it had people's identities kind of poured into them.

included a picture of it here for you, Joe. It is made apparently with real taxidermide and hummingbirds, like seemingly dozens of them, and I cannot tell. I couldn't tell from the description or from certainly from the pictures whether there is a white screen involved here because it's shot against a white background, or if this is just open, if it's just like little artificial branches with a bunch

of stuffed hummingbirds on them. In either case, this seems very much like the sort of fire screen that would maybe be in front of an inactive fireplace, or if it were in front of a live fireplace, it would be positioned good ways out. Otherwise you're just going to roast your poor little taxidermy hummingbirds, and or it's going to shine right through it.

were some that were just decorative. They're just there to cover up a fire screen that's not currently or cover up a fire that's not currently in use, or just there to i don't know, position farther away and kind of have something nice to look at the fire through.

emerge or be born from burning logs. And it also highlights a fire screen that is made out of antique brass, jewels and glass, which itself was set before a hearth that also featured bits of colored glass placed before the fire, but behind the fire screen. So the idea here would apparently be you'd have these pieces of colored glass that are catching the light of the roaring fire, and essentially it's like you have a it's almost like a concert

light display in your home. It sounds pretty splendid. Trippy, yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, trippy. It's like some sort of a trippy light effect that you might purchase nowadays. Here's

what the article says. Quote set before the gleaming glass coals which shone through this gorgeous screen and one hundred changeful hues, nothing could be imagined more effective to light one corner or side of a room done in deep, warm shade of brown crimson or maroon, or to supply a glow of color to an apartment finished in snowy white and gilt, although the effect of the former would be somewhat more artistic to our thinking, it.

in the room. I have to read. There's another snippet from this that I just found amusing though, where they're just talking about how the popularity of various antiques and maybe the dubious historical notes associated with them. The author writes, to those who have a craze for the antique or a rage for genuine old wares, it might be a beneficent lesson to examine this modern work so superior in beauty, richness, and finish to most of the things which quote came

over on the Mayflower. The author then goes on to jestingly speculate just how many governor's chairs and tables the Mayflower must have contained if all of the claims of authenticity were correct.

be super old, maybe isn't as old. But at the very least, I love the idea of this particular hearth that the author is describing here, with its salamanders, with its pieces of colored glass, and then this rich ornate screen that goes in front of the fire that I don't know. I may be just blowing it out of proportion in my mind, but I'm just imagining a sitting room lit up like a disco, and it's pretty fabulous.

kind of colored lights can I throw into the scenario, But.

In the meantime, we'll just remind you of this. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episodes on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House.