If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home (26 page)

Kedleston’s visitors could see some of Britain’s most amazing furniture. Among the house’s greatest marvels are the drawing-room sofas made by the London cabinet-maker John Linnell (
plate 25
). (Unfortunately the sofas did not enjoy a smooth journey to Derbyshire: upon their arrival, a local workman had to be paid for ‘glueing bits’ back on.) In their sky-blue silk, with
languid gold sea gods supporting their sides, they look more like masque scenery than furniture. The sofa itself was a novel imported Arabian idea. Upon it one could lounge, lean back and spread out one’s skirts, a much more elegant and casual posture than it was possible to adopt in an upright seventeenth-century chair. These sofas were social pieces of furniture, made for two people to sit together. Earlier aristocrats, who sat in stately solitude upon a dais, would not have dreamed of this.

Once the aspiration to this kind of luxury, and the money and leisure time to pursue it, had filtered down the social scale, new ‘styles’ appeared in drawing rooms on a regular basis. There were successive crazes for the Chinese, Grecian, Etruscan, Neo-Pompeiian and Tudorbethan, new looks emerging at what seemed to be shorter and shorter intervals.

Perhaps none of these styles had a strong relationship to the time and place they were intended to recreate, but this didn’t matter. Successive historical revivals were simply excuses to go shopping for a whole new set of possessions. A desirable interior would strike the eye as novel, exotic and fresh, preferably referencing some distant world like China or ancient Rome to add a touch of class and erudition. This is what impressed a serial country-house visitor like Mrs Lybbe Powys. At Eastby, the destination of one of her many days out, she noted that ‘the Chinese bedroom and dressing-room in the attic storey is excessively droll and pretty, furnish’d exactly as in China’.

The owners of middle-class urban drawing rooms did not, of course, adopt the full-blown, gilded-sea-god splendour of Kedleston. Toning down avante-garde taste to make it palatable to a wider audience was part of the skill of the manufacturer of drawing-room furniture and fittings. Josiah Wedgwood junior, for example, once rejected a striking design for a black vase. ‘We are not bold enough to adopt at once anything that is new and beautiful,’ he explained, ‘but require the sanction of fashion to give it value.’ To shop successfully was a skill, and the errors
of pretentiousness and garishness were all too common.

Decorating the drawing room was one of the duties, or pleasures, of the newly married wife. In his 1745 book
The Pleasures and Felicities of Marriage
, Lemuel Gulliver lists the items that a woman will look forward to acquiring upon marriage: ‘costly Hangings, Venetian Looking-Glasses, enamel’d China, Velvet Chairs, Turkey Carpets, Capital Paintings, Side-board of wrought Plate, curious in-laid Cabinets’. The historian Amanda Vickery notes that in Jane Austen’s novels, a female character shown around a single man’s house is practically being given permission to assume that a proposal is forthcoming. In
Sense and Sensibility
, Mrs Jennings is shocked when an engagement does
not
follow on from Marianne’s tour of her prospective husband’s house. ‘No positive engagement indeed!’ her friends expostulated. ‘After taking her all over Allenham House, and fixing on the very rooms they were to live in hereafter!’

So decorating a drawing room was a social obligation, as was holding merry parties in it once it was complete. Indeed, gatherings in Georgian living rooms had a new levity and effervescence unknown in earlier centuries:

No more the Cedar Parlour’s formal gloom

With dullness chills, ’tis now the Living Room

Where Guests, to whim, or taste, or fancy true

Scatter’d in groups, their different plans pursue.

This new world of tasteful informality, cheeky chat and lovely curtains was worlds away from the hierarchic splendour of Hardwick Hall.

In the nineteenth century, though, the history of the living room was about to enter a darker phase.

26 – A History of Clutter

Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.

William Morris

The difference between Victorian living rooms and their predecessors lay in three main areas. Firstly, in the grandest Victorian houses living rooms proliferated yet again. Increased specialisation led to morning rooms, front parlours, billiard rooms and libraries, all different variations on the same theme. Secondly, their colour schemes were plunged into murk and gloom. Rich, dark colours replaced the light, bright Georgian tints, largely because of changes in heating and lighting technology, which we’ll investigate in the next chapter.

But thirdly, and most importantly, Victorian living rooms contained more
stuff
than ever before. Some of this clutter was familiar from living rooms of the past, reborn into modern form. Edith Wharton, the American novelist, decoded the language of the nineteenth-century drawing room in a scene set in Victorian Mayfair. The contemporary equivalent of a long gallery full of portraits expressing a family’s noble relatives, the room

was crowded with velvet-covered tables and quaint corner-shelves, all laden with photographs in heavy silver or morocco frames, surmounted
by coronets, from the baronial to the ducal – one, even, royal (in a place of honour by itself, on the mantel).

Because it was so much easier to collect photographs of your friends than it was to commission painted portraits, it was no wonder that such things multiplied.

Much of the stuff in a Victorian drawing room was showier than ever before; some of it could even be described as vulgar. An 1870s advert for a suite of drawing-room furniture makes grandiose claims: it contained ‘six well-carved chairs upholstered in rich silk, centre table on massive carved pillar and claws, the top beautifully inlaid with marquetry, large size chimney glass in handsome oil-gilt frame … pair of handsome ruby lustres’. Such ‘rich’, ‘handsome’ and ‘massive’ objects were Victorian must-haves. The sea-god sofas at Kedleston were rather overwhelming, but they were placed in an enormous room where few other pieces competed with them for attention. In the Victorian living room, variety was queen.

Its owners also wished to display the fruits of their industry and their empire. The Great Exhibition of 1851 inspired people to bring the whole world into their living rooms. Lucy Orrinsmith, author of
The Drawing Room, Its Decoration and Furniture
(1878), suggested that one’s ambition ought to extend beyond a coal scuttle decorated with a picture of Warwick Castle and a screen showing ‘Melrose Abbey by Moonlight’. Instead, homeowners should look out for quirky, exotic flourishes for their best room: ‘a Persian tile, an Algerian flower-pot, an old Flemish cup, a piece of Nankin blue, an Icelandic spoon, a Japanese cabinet, a Chinese fan … each in its own way beautiful and interesting’.

This craze to possess had in fact started long before the nineteenth century. The late-seventeenth-century invention of shops and shopping by an urban middle class who lived by trade was mirrored by the growth of a new type of domestic space. What might be termed the ‘middle-class’ living room was full
of superfluous objects, chosen for ornament rather than use yet cheap and not truly beautiful: a barricade of possessions intended to stabilise a precarious position in the world.

For those without the resources of the Curzons of Kedleston, wallpaper was an amazing material for a quick and cheap living-room makeover. When it first appeared in the seventeenth century, wallpaper was purchased at stationers’ shops. As it was so inexpensive to put up, it’s not surprising to find that between 1690 and 1820 there were more than five hundred stationers and paper-hanging businesses in London. In 1712, wallpaper became popular enough to attract a special tax. In 1836, the tax was repealed, and an even more marvellous world of choice was opened up: a visitor to the Sanderson Company’s wallpaper showroom in 1901 found ‘papers of a magnificence, a beauty, such as we had never imagined even in our wildest dreams of marble halls’.

Yet wallpaper was deceptive: it literally covered up problems. The business of making and selling it also attracted deceivers. A lively trade developed in counterfeits of the date stamps applied by wallpaper-tax inspectors to the backs of rolls. By 1806, the punishment for being caught creating these phoney stamps was increased to the death penalty. Wallpaper could even be hazardous to health: some inks contained arsenic, and when people went on holiday to the seaside, they felt better simply because they were no longer breathing in poisonous fumes from their drawing-room walls each day.

Despite its cheerfulness, wallpaper was sometimes
too
cheap, and looked tawdry. In nineteenth-century novels, a wallpapered room became a metaphor for a shallow, duplicitous character who overvalues appearances. In Thomas Hardy’s
Far from the Madding Crowd
(1874), the untrustworthy Sergeant Troy is displeased by the casements and dark corners of an ‘honest’ old farmhouse: ‘my notion is that sash-windows should be put in through-out … the walls papered’.

The literary scholar Julia Prewitt Brown argues that the first ever of these ‘bourgeois interiors’ (the crowded and slightly shoddy living rooms of the socially insecure) to be created in literature was situated on a desert island. In Daniel Defoe’s novel of 1719, the adventurer Robinson Crusoe was taught by his father to aspire to belong to the ‘middle state’ of society, and he was taught that honest industry would lead to a life of well-earned ease. After his shipwreck Crusoe is trapped on his desert island. Being a good member of the ‘middling sort’, he devotes himself to the archetypally bourgeois pastime of inventorying and protecting the stores and tools salvaged from the sea. He fortifies a cave to protect his possessions from ravenous beasts, and is rarely to be seen outside it without his umbrella and his gun.

Robinson Crusoe was followed by a horde of successors: everyone can recognise the overcluttered, stuffy, uptight living room of a truly anxious status-conscious person with neither the ease of aristocratic riches nor the genuine restrictions of poverty. This phenomenon reached its apogee in an imaginary Victorian living room forever damned by Henry James and smothered in

… trumpery ornament and scrapbook art, with strange excrescences and bunchy draperies, with gimcracks that might have been keepsakes for maid-servants … they had gone wildly astray over carpets and curtain; they had an infallible instinct for disaster.

From the late nineteenth century, two new design movements began to blow the cobwebs out of the overfurnished living room. The Arts and Crafts Movement, and then the twentieth-century Modernist Movement based on the minimalist aethestic of the factory and the machine, were both in their own ways reactions to the tide of clutter.

It was Oscar Wilde (1844–1900), travelling the world to give his renowned lecture on ‘The House Beautiful’ to packed halls, who began to get the Victorians to throw away their junk. Some of them went on to become patrons of the Arts and Crafts
Movement, which combined a love of craftsmanship with a devotion to the dignity and beauty of labour. The idea was to banish the machine-made, meretricious or the modern from the Victorian home and to return to an age of simplicity, authenticity and beauty.

One of Oscar Wilde’s listeners went on to create the ultimate Arts and Crafts house, Wightwick Manor near Wolverhampton. The teetotal and Congregationalist Theodore Mander made his fortune from his paint business, and in 1884 he attended a performance of Wilde’s ‘The House Beautiful’ in Wolverhampton. Mander made careful notes, including the celebrated dictum that your house should contain nothing ‘which you do not know to be useful or think to be beautiful’ (a phrase which Wilde himself had cribbed from the designer William Morris, 1834–96).

Full of enthusiasm for this new way of thinking, the paint magnate began work on a brand-new house, which would nevertheless appear to be terribly old. Wightwick had all the modern conveniences, yet might at first glance be mistaken for a Tudor manor. Mander’s architect, the appropriately named Edward Ould, intended that its timber frame should ‘soon pass through the crude and brand-new period’ to become a timeless, misty-eyed memory of a pre-industrial age. To furnish his house, Mander inevitably turned to William Morris, whose company produced entire interiors inspired by medieval colours and designs.