Eighteenth-century interiors - Redesigning the Georgian: Introduction

Journal of Design History

Volumn 20, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 273-289

  Greig, Hannah ^a   Riello, Giorgio ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

Domestic; Eighteenth century; Georgian; Historiography; Material culture; Style

Indexed keywords

EID: 62749158286     PISSN: 09524649     EISSN: 17417279     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/jdh/epm025     Document Type: Article

References (111)

1. This extract is included in the 'Domestic Interiors Database', available on www.rca.ac.uk/csdi (ID code: RP153).
2. Anonymous, The Greatest Expositions: Completely Illustrated Official Views of the Louisana Purchase Exhibition (1904), p. 24. The emphasis is ours.
3. There exists a prolific range of decorative arts studies of particular categories of goods. Recent publications examining silverware include P. Glanville & H. Young (eds.), Elegant Eating: 400 Years of Dining in Style, V&A Publications, London, 2002;
4. W. Guthrie, Dundee Silver 1750-1850, Dundee, 1994;
5. J. Lomax, British Silver at Temple Newsam House and Lotherton Hall: A Catalogue of the Leeds Collection, Maney, Leeds, 1992;
6. broad survey texts, such as P. Glanville, Silver in England, Unwin Hyman, London, 1986, covered the history of materials and products across more than a century.
7. A recent important contribution which combines decorative arts studies with a business and social history is H. Clifford, Silver in London: The Parker and Wakelin Partnership, 1760-76, Yale University Press, London, 2004.
8. Other categories of goods are covered in publications such as G.W. Beard, Upholsterers and Interior Furnishings in England 1530-1840, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1997;
9. C. Gilbert, A Pictorial Dictionary of Marked London Furniture 1700-1840, Furniture History Society, London, 1996;
10. A. Coleridge, Chippendale Furniture: The Work of Thomas Chippendale and His Contemporaries in the Rococo Taste, c. 1745-65, Faber, London, 1968.
11. Texts celebrating the achievements of particular architects include E. Harris, The Genius of Robert Adam: His Interiors, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2001.
12. The classic survey of visual sources is P. Thornton, Authentic Decor: The Domestic Interior 1620-1920, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1984;
13. C.S. Smith, Eighteenth-Century Decoration. Design and the Domestic Interior in England, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, New York, 1993, was initially classed as a 'sourcebook' even though he was pioneering a reinterpretation seeking to complicate the narratives and to position visual representations of the interior in a broader social and cultural history. It was only later published as a standard monograph, alas with few of the original images.
14. See C.S. Smith, The Rise of Design: Design and the Domestic Interior in Eighteenth-Century England, Pimlico, London, 2000.
15. J. Summerson, Georgian London, Harmondsworth, 1945, pp. 1-9.
16. M. Rosso, 'Georgian London Revisited', London Journal, vol. 26, no. 2, 2001, pp. 35-50;
17. E. McKellar, 'Popularism versus Professionalism: John Summerson and the Twentieth-Century Creation of the "Georgian"', in Articulating British Classicism: New Approaches to Eighteenth-Century Architecture, B Arciszewska & E McKellar (eds.), Ashgate, Aldershot, 2004, pp. 35-56.
18. P. Borsay, 'Why Are Houses Interesting?', Urban History, vol. 34, 2007, p. 338.
19. This topic has been dealt with by P. McNeil, 'Rarely Looking in: The Writing of Australian Design History c. 1900-1990', Designing Australia: Readings in the History of Design, Pluto Press, Sydney, 2002, pp. 14-29.
20. J.M. Robinson, The Latest Country Houses, Bodley Head, London, 1984.
21. As work by Ian Gow and Stana Nenadic on the Scottish interior reminds us, ' British' does not always encapsulate a cohesive stylistic form and fails to account for the wide variety of regional distinctions which are equally central to understanding domestic interiors and experiences in the eighteenth century. I. Gow, The Scottish Interior: Georgian and Victorian Decor, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1992;
22. S. Nenadic, 'Middle Rank Consumers and Domestic Culture in Edinburgh and Glasgow, 1720-1840', Past and Present, vol. 145, 1994, pp. 122-56.
23. E. McKellar, The Birth of Modern London: The Development and Design of the City 1660-1720, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1999
24. especially introduction and her article ' C. H.B. Quennell (1872-1935): Architecture, History and the Quest for the Modern', Architectural History, vol. 50, 2007.
25. M. Baker, Figured in Marble: The Making and Viewing of Eighteenth-Century Sculpture, V&A Publications, London, 2000.
26. The portrayal of the eighteenth century as a key moment of social and political change is summarized in Langford's concept of a 'polite and commercial society', see P. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727-1783, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989;
27. Jonathan Clark, however, has argued that eighteenth-century England remained an ancien régime society, marked as much by continuity as change, see J. C.D. Clark, English Society 1688-1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Régime, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985.
28. Clark's thesis has been extensively criticized but a recent reappraisal is offered by Frank O'Gorman in the Institute of Historical Research's online 'Reviews in History', see http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/reapp/frank.html.
29. P. Langford, 'The Uses of Eighteenth-Century Politeness', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., vol. 12, 2002, pp. 311-13;
30. and ibid., ' British Politeness and the Progress of Western Manners: An Eighteenth-Century Enigma', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., vol. 7, 1997, pp. 53-72;
31. L.E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994;
32. P. Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660-1770, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989.
33. See, for instance, M. Berg, ' New Commodities, Luxuries and Their Consumers in Eighteenth-Century England', in Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe, 1650-1850, M. Berg & H. Clifford (eds.), Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1999, pp. 63-85;
34. J. Styles, 'Product Innovation in Early Modern London', Past & Present, vol. 168, 2000, pp. 124-69;
35. D.L. Porter, ' Monstrous Beauty: Eighteenth Century Fashion and the Aesthetic of the Chinese Taste', Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 35, no. 3, 2002, pp. 395-411;
36. M. Berg, 'Asian Luxury and the Making of the European Consumer Revolution', in Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods, M. Berg & E. Eger (eds.), Palgrave, Basingstoke, 2003, pp. 228-43;
37. D. Ormrod, 'Cultural Production and Import Substitution: The Fine Decorative Arts in London, 1660-1730', in Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe: Golden Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam and London, P. K. O'Brien et al. (eds.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000, pp. 210-30.
38. A number of essays in the recent collection, J. Styles & A. Vickery (eds.), Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and American 1700-1830, Yale University Press, London, 2007, seek to rectify such limitations. Amanda Vickery, for example, explores choice, issues of taste and the relationship between consumer and interior decorative styles in her study of Trollope & Sons, wallpaper order and letter book, and Ellen Hartigan-O'Conner and Claire Walsh examine the experience of shopping (and particularly the role of the proxy-shopper) in consumer practices in eighteenth-century America and Britain.
39. There has been a rejection of the emulative models of consumption which originally structured the history of consumption, complicating the emphasis placed by historians on elite models of taste. See in particular the critique of McKendrick's bottom-up theory of emulation (N. McKendrick, J. Brewer & J.H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialisation of Eighteenth Century England, Europa, 1982)
40. by Weatherill, Fine and Leopold and Overton et al.: L. Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660-1760, Routledge, London, 2nd edn., 1996;
41. B. Fine & E. Leopold, 'Consumerism and the Industrial Revolution', Social History, 1990, vol. 15, no. 2, 1990, pp. 151-79;
42. M. Overton, J. Whittle, D. Dean & A. Hann, Production and Consumption in English Households, 1600-1750, Routledge, London, 2004.
43. J. Fowler & J. Cornforth, English Decoration in the Eighteenth Century, Barrie & Jenkins, London, 1974;
44. M. Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1978, 1994;
45. J. Cornforth, English Interiors 1790-1848: The Quest for Comfort, Barrie & Jenkins, London, 1978;
46. J. Harris, The Artist and the Country House: A History of Country House and Garden View Painting in Britain, Sotheby Parke Bernet, London, 1979;
47. M. Girouard, Cities and People: A Social and Architectural History, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1985;
48. D. Cruikshank & N. Burton, Life in the Georgian City, Viking, London, 1990;
49. D. Arnold, The Georgian Villa, Alan Sutton, Stroud, 1996;
50. P. Mandler, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home, Yale University Press, London, 1997;
51. D. Arnold, The Georgian Country House: Architecture, Landscape and Society, Alan Sutton, Stroud, 1998;
52. A. Tinniswood, The Polite Tourist: Four Centuries of Country House Visiting, The National Trust, London, 1998;
53. N. Cooper, Houses of the Gentry: 1480-1680, Yale University Press, London, 1999;
54. C. Christie, The British Country House in the Eighteenth Century, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2000;
55. J. Ayres, Domestic Interiors: The British Tradition 1500-1850, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2003
56. first published as The Shell Book of the Home: Decoration, Design and the Construction of Vernacular Interiors 1500-1850, 1981);
57. J. Cornforth, Early Georgian Interiors, Yale University Press, London, 2005. Notably, in his historiographical review of a selection of country house publications from the late 1990s, J.V. Beckett argues that whilst there has been increasing raft of interest in the use and function of the country house by contemporary occupiers, there remains a distinct lack of critical enquiry about the role and meaning of the same country houses as they are preserved in our modern society. Beckett suggests that a culture of publishing country house books as ' coffee table' publications for a tourist market stunts the field and notes the continuation of an 'uncomfortable divide between the scholarly and the popular, between the social and the architectural historian'.
58. See J.V. Beckett, 'Country House Life', Historical Journal, vol. 45, no. 1, 2002, pp. 235-44.
59. A. Forty, Objects of Desire. Design and Society, 1750-1980, Thames and Hudson, London, 1986.
60. John Styles critique of design history's concern with mass production. J. Styles, ' Design for Large-Scale Production in Eighteenth-Century Britain', Oxford Art Journal, vol. 9, no. 2, 1988, pp. 10-16
61. and ibid., 'Manufacturing, Consumption and Design in Eighteenth-Century England', in Consumption and the World of Goods, J. Brewer & R. Porter (eds.), Routledge, London, 1993, pp. 527-54.
62. For example, a recent collection of history of design essays exploring the interior includes a chapter on eighteenth-century interiors as its starting point: K. Sharpe, ' Women's Creativity and Display in the Eighteenth-Century British Domestic Interior', in Interior Design and Identity, S. McKellar & P. Sparke (eds.), Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2004. Notably, in this collection the eighteenth-century study examines the role of the 'amateur' and influence of 'craft' on the home, in contrast to the nineteenth-and twentieth-century professionalization and institutionalization of domesticity suggested in other contributions to the volume.
63. E. Fernie, ' History and Architectural History', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol. 13, 2003, pp. 199-206.
64. M. Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity: London's Geographies, 1680-1780, Guildford Press, New York, 1998;
65. J. Rendell, The Pursuit of Pleasure: Gender, Space and Architecture in Regency London, Athlone Press, London, 2002;
66. D. Arnold (ed.), 'The Country House: Form, Function and Meaning', The Georgian Country House. Architecture, Landscape and Society, Alan Sutton, Stroud, 1998, pp. 1-19;
67. M. Ogborn & C. W.J. Withers (eds.), Georgian Geographies: Essays on Space, Place and Landscape in the Eighteenth Century, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2004.
68. For a useful overview, see M. Ogborn, 'Georgian Geographies?', Journal of Historical Geography, vol. 24, no. 2, 1998, pp. 218-23.
69. See, for instance, E. McKellar, 'Peripheral Visions: Alternative Aspects and Rural Presence in Mid-Eighteenth-Century London', Art History, vol. 22, no. 4, 1999, pp. 495-513;
70. J. Marriot, 'The Spatiality of the Poor in Eighteenth-Century London', in The Streets of London: From the Great Fire to the Great Stink, T. Hitchcock & H. Shore (eds.), London, 2003, pp. 119-34;
71. J. Schlarman, 'The Social Geography of Grosvenor Square: Mapping Gender and Politics, 1720-1760', London Journal, vol. 28, no. 1, 2003, pp. 8-28.
72. L. Stone, Family Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1977.
73. K. Retford offers a more nuanced reading of domestic portraiture in The Art of Domestic Life: Family Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century England, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2006.
74. P. Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, Vintage Books, New York, 1962.
75. For a revisionist interpretation, see N. Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001.
76. The seminal text was L. Davidoff & C. Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850, Hutchinson, London, 1987.
77. See also, M. Hunt, Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680-1780, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1996;
78. R.B. Shoemaker, Gender in English Society, 1650-1850: The Emergence of Separate Spheres?, Longman, London, 1998.
79. A. Vickery, 'Golden Age to Separate Spheres: A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women's History', Historical Journal, vol. 36, no. 2, 1993, pp. 383-414;
80. L.E. Klein, 'Gender and the Public/Private Distinction in the Eighteenth Century: Some Questions about Evidence and Analytic Procedure', Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 29, no. 1, 1995, pp. 97-109;
81. K. Gleadle, '"Our Several Spheres": Middle-Class Women and the Feminisms of Early Victorian Radical Politics', in Women in British Politics 1760-1860: The Power of the Petticoat, K. Gleadle & S. Richardson (eds.), Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2000.
82. Karen Harvey has argued that the history of men needs to be reintroduced to studies of the home if a more rounded picture of eighteenth-century domestic culture is to be attained: K. Harvey, 'Domesticity and Authority: Writing, Men and the Home', paper presented to the British History in the Long Eighteenth Century Seminar, Institute of Historical Research, 31 January 2007.
83. T. Logan, The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001;
84. D. Cohen, Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2006;
85. M. Ponsonby, Stories from Home: English Domestic Interiors 1750-1850, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2007.
86. A nuanced reading of the concept of 'privacy' within the home is being developed by Amanda Vickery as part of a major new research project on the eighteenth-century home. A. Vickery, 'An Englishman's Home Is His Castle? Thresholds, Boundaries and Privacies in the Eighteenth-Century London House', paper presented at 'History 1680-1850' seminar, University of Oxford, 25 January 2007.
87. A body of current research may well finally debunk the separate spheres legacy, including J. Hamlett, '"Nicely Feminine yet Learned": Student Rooms at Royal Holloway and the Oxford and Cambridge Colleges in the Late Nineteenth Century', Women's History Review, vol. 15, no. 1, 2006, pp. 137-61;
88. and ibid., 'Materializing Gender: Identity and Middle-Class Domestic Interiors 1850-1910', unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Royal Holloway University of London, 2005.
89. K. Harvey, 'Spaces of Erotic Delight', in op. cit., M. Ogborn & W.J. Withers (eds.);
90. and ibid., ' Eroticizing the Interior', in Imagined Interiors: Representing the Domestic Interior Since the Renaissance, J. Aynsley & C. Grant (eds.), V&A Publications, London, 2006;
91. P. McNeil, ' Crafting Queer Spaces: Privacy and Posturing', paper presented at the conference 'Queer Space: Centres and Peripheries', University of Technology, Sydney, 20-21 February 2007.
92. See in particular the special issue of the journal Home Cultures, vol. 2, no. 3, 2005, on the domestic interior in British literature edited by C. Grant;
93. C. Richardson, ' Home, Household and Domesticity in Drama in Early Modern London'
94. and C. Grant, '"One's Self and One' House, One' Furniture": from Object to Interior in British Fiction, 1720-1900', both in J. Aynsley & C. Grant (eds.), op. cit.;
95. C. Richardson, Domestic Life and Domestic Tragedy in Early Modern England, The Material Life of the Household, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2006.
96. P. Guillery, The Small House in Eighteenth-Century London: A Social and Architectural History, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2004;
97. J. Styles, ' Lodging at the Old Bailey: Lodgings and Their Furnishing in Eighteenth-Century London'
98. and J. White, 'The Laboring-Class Domestic Sphere in Eighteenth-Century British Thought', both in J. Styles and A. Vickery (eds.), op. cit., pp. 61-80.
99. On clothing, see J. Styles, 'Involuntary Consumers? Servants and Their Clothes in Eighteenth Century England', Textile History, vol. 33, no. 1, 2002, pp. 9-21;
100. See, for instance, J. Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century, London, 1997.
101. On comfort, see J.E. Crowley, The Invention of Comfort. Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2000.
102. On respectability, see W. Smith, Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600-1800, Routledge, New York, 2002.
103. On manufacturing, see M. Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Oxford University Press, 2005.
104. A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Pespective, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1986.
105. See in particular L. Auslander, 'Regeneration through the Everyday? Clothing, Architecture and Furniture in Revolutionary Paris', Art History, vol. 28, no. 2, 2005, pp. 227-47, and the recent research by Carolyn Sargentson on eighteenth-century French furniture and secrecy.
106. Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, available on http://www.moda.mdx.ac.uk/
107. the Geffrye Museum, alongside its period rooms, has run a series of exhibitions examining 'home and garden' from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, available on http://www.geffrye-museum.org.uk;
108. the Yorkshire Country House Partnership Project, available on http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/cecs/ych.htm, has included themed exhibitions on domestic lives including 'Maids and Mistresses' (2004) and 'Work and Play'(2007);
109. The 'At Home in Renaissance Italy' exhibition, held at the V&A Museum (October 2006-January 2007) presented renaissance art and architecture in a domestic context, M. Ajmar & F. Dennis (eds.), At Home in Renaissance Italy, V&A Publications, London, 2006.
110. For a review of the social and cultural histories that underpinned the V&A's remodelled British Galleries, see M. Snodin and J. Styles, Design and the Decorative Arts, Britain 1500-1900, V&A Publications, London, 2001.
111. H. Greig, 'Eighteenth-Century English Interiors in Image and Text', in J. Aynsley & C. Grant (eds.), op. cit., pp. 102-27.