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Contracted to a Rumford: The Rumford Fireplace

© Viola Ashford

When Catherine Morland arrives at her boyfriend, Henry Tilney's manor house, Northanger Abbey, she expects to see a funereal and eerie place. Instead she is surprised to see an airy house with elegant furniture and a fireplace 'contracted to a Rumford'. A Rumford fireplace, in Jane Austen's time, was the very height of modernity in the latest décor.

Count Rumford was born an American but he became a loyalist and fled the country with the British. Although he spent much of his life employed by the Bavarian government where he was created a 'Count of the Holy Roman Empire' by the elector of Bavaris. He invented his famous fireplace in England. Shocked by the dense, dark cloud hanging over London caused by the burning of coal he decided to attempt to improve fireplaces so that the air would be fresher. London must have been a very unpleasant, polluted place when he arrived, beset by this eighteenth century form of 'smog'.

Instead of using the large fireplaces then popular, Rumford decided that small fireplaces with small intense fires with their sides arranged with widely angled coving to radiate as much heat as possible were the ideal shape. It was better to make them tall and shallow to reflect more heat. He also created streamlined throats to carry away the smoke rather than sending it through the chimneys. This also resulted in little loss of heated room air.

Jane Austen probably saw this kind of fireplace before she revised her manuscript. Apparently many of the fireplaces at Chawton house are in the style of Rumsford.

Thomas Jefferson liked this new style of fireplace and improved the ones at Monticello so that they fitted this tall, elegant, heat-saving design. By 1854 Rumford fireplaces were regarded by the famous American writer, Thoreau, along with plaster walls and Venetian blinds as among the comforts taken for granted by civilized men.

The Rumford fireplace is still very popular in England and America, especially in rooms with high ceilings where it features as an elegant centerpiece.

Count Rumsford also made several other practical inventions such as roasting ovens, fireless cookers, and pots and pans of various designs, for example a coffeepot.

There is an excellent caricature of Count Rumford standing before his new design at: http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/rgnclf...

A mosaic dedicated to Rumsford may be seen at Dartmouth College in Massachusets: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~library/Librar...