DUAL PERSONALITIES

VICTORIANS BETWEEN MATERIALISM AND ROMANTICISM

A DIVIDED PARLOUR

Engines and Enchantment

The nineteenth century in Britain loved to speak of progress and sentiment in the same breath. Factories procreated, the earth was harrowed while poetry bloomed. Victorians read balance sheets and ballads. Railways pushed through valleys while artists chased dawn and fame on moorland. This age built halls of iron and glass and then filled them with ferns and velvet. Ferns even had their own trending moment: the expression pteridomania, or ‘fern fever’ was coined by Charles Kingsley in 1855 in response to the lust for green indoors. These dual personalities in Victorian interiors were not a contradiction. It was a way to live. 

 The material face of the century was impossible to ignore. Coal and steam shortened distances and thickened skies. Iron, glass and machines nobody could have dreamed of poured goods into the market at a rate no earlier generation had seen. Homes and interiors changed with it. Gas brackets, cast iron ranges, patent stoves, printed cottons and machine-made furniture arrived in rooms that had once only known candlelight, silent conversations, and hand-planed boards. At the same time another impulse gathered force: poetry, medievalism, Wagner, natural history and a fascination with the picturesque and quaint found expression in art and domestic life. The same household that prized a new sewing machine might keep a pressed flower book on the sideboard. One hand embraced comfort from industry. The other reached for meaning in nature and the past. 

Rooms of Work and Rooms of Wonder

The interior became the stage on which these impulses were negotiated and solidified. Kitchens and sculleries absorbed the practical fruits of industry. Enamelled iron, washable tiles and soap made with factory precision answered a newfound desire for cleanliness and efficiency: an urge to purge the germs and stale air. In contrast, the parlour and drawing room favoured atmosphere, abundance and family. Under glass domes sat wax flowers and sad stuffed birds. Gilt frames carried landscapes, heavy strokes of oil paint and sentimental scenes. Shelves held books of poetry and travel. Even the chairs that looked heavy with carving might in truth be made by machines, their decoration a gesture toward craft rather than its true origin. Rooms announced their loyalties in material choices. Clay and iron below the dado. Velvet, paper and poems above it. 

Money culture is often used as a blunt explanation for Victorian taste. But money is not the full story. Yes, mass production brought goods at decent prices within reach for the general public, and enthusiastic display of said goods followed. But the desire to display and posture was braided with a wish to locate the home within a moral gradation. A shelf of improving and impressive leather bound books sat beside a factory-produced clock made possible by division of labour. A hand-woven hearth rug stamped out by the thousands might lie before an old-fashioned coal grate. Respectability required housekeeping, aesthetics, economy, charity and taste to live in the same room. The books and the clock were both present because they formed part of the story people wished their homes to tell. A story of plenty, morality and acceptance in society.  

Allegiance to materials, allegiance to originality

In the later century reformers argued for a reconciliation of the two opposing personalities. Ruskin spoke of truth to materials and honest labour (Seven Lamps, 1849; Stones of Venice II, 1853). Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement tried to rebuild domestic life around such ethics, recovering techniques that industrialism had put in danger.  Usefulness was to be joined to beauty by marriage of hand-made joints and visible brush strokes. The work should be visible in the thing made. The home should intone of human intervention; each item recollect its maker. However, due to the cost of human skills, many households adopted the look without the labour. Printed papers carried vines and birds that recalled the hand block. A mimicry of artisanal pursuits we are very well accustomed to today. Machine-made furniture spoke the language of joinery but lacking fluency. The ideal of honest work met the economy of the machine and a truce was drawn on the parlour floor. 

Nature indoors, nature outdoors 

The heightened romance with nature: its force, impressive strength and lavender reveries threaded through the century. Ferns were collected and kept in Wardian cases. Botanical prints climbed walls. Landscapes were arranged on mantels as if a walk was to be had between the small trees. At the same time mines deepened, canals widened, and even the earth beneath London was carved open for the Metropolitan Railway in 1863: the first Tube. The home became a place to keep a clean vision of the otherwise less than fragrant countryside, while the country itself, and cities with it, was being quarried, scoured, tilled and measured. Hypocrisy one might call it. Or in other terms: progress of human rule. Indoors could be tuned to soothe the conscience of the Victorians for what outdoors suffered. A green wallpaper could fire the imagination of what outdoors ought to be better than a pamphlet, and a vase of grasses could make up for a day spent at a desk. 

Urban growth obliged the home to invent itself as refuge. Noise and soot could be shut out by velvet curtains and thick pile. Fairytales were told indoors that countered the dirty city outside. A fresh seaside print above the sofa, a Highland scene, stag-complete, over the mantel, a vase painted with leaves and rosebuds, all asked the eye to travel to places in which the air was imagined to be clean. Industrial modernity built the networks that brought people and goods together. Romantic domesticity comforted the nerves that those networks frayed. 

Stealth Paradox 

The fear that industry would corrupt taste produced a literature of guidance. Sentences to steer and mould the minds of impressionable housewives. Household manuals instructed on plainness, suitability and propriety. Exhibitions celebrated order and innovation, teaching viewers to admire well-made objects whether by machine or hand. Even mirrors in parlours performed moral work. They doubled the room, broadened light, and told visitors that the family had no dust in the corners. Display cases spoke of careful collection rather than mere greedy acquisition. The moral life of the home was meant to be legible in the things it contained. 

 What looks like contradiction from a distance reads as deliberate action up close. A house that keeps a sewing machine under one cover and a pianoforte under another is open to both progress and tradition. Weekdays could be given to account books, Sundays to hymns and visits. The home acknowledged both. A cast iron range could cook a simple dinner while a hand-embroidered banner told visitors that there was no place like home. To the owners there was little conflict. To us, the combination explains why Victorian rooms feel dense, and to some eyes a little confusing. They are made to serve different lanes of attention. Like a motorway of thoughts before its time. 

 Sometimes the balance failed. Ornament piled upon ornament without understanding can stiffle a room. Mass-produced heavy carving can read as clumsiness. On the other hand, narrowminded purity can make a room mean. The insistence on plainness without softness produces barrenness. The most successful Victorian rooms find the line between abundance and an underlying performative frugality. They allow material comfort and mental comfort to sit together without squabbling.

What can we learn?   The schizophrenia of the age can enlighten us, if we let it. Accept the useful things and the ease of production that industry gives, but keep a hand in what requires judgement. Let machines do the heavy lifting. Give people the parts that ask for taste and discernment. A room that is only efficient is a Scrooge. A room that is only poetic might become a tedious Werther. Poor company versus impracticality and suffocation. The ideal is an interplay between the two in which each checks the other. Choose materials that will work and age well. Choose a few things that show the trace of the person who made them. Hang a landscape because you want somewhere for your mind to walk. Fix a good latch because you want a door to close.

How did it end?  

The Victorians lived two lives at once and furnished houses that could carry both. Their rooms offer a model rather than a museum. We can still hold utility and the sense of John Singer Sargent in the same space. A chair in which you sit well and a picture that sits well on the wall and in the mind are not enemies. Coal and steam are no longer our measures, but the pairing they forced upon the home remains. We will always need tools. We will always need stories. The most habitable rooms contain both and admit neither is the whole.