Middle-Class Culture 541

Kitchens and even dining rooms became separate rooms, as did attached
offices for notaries, lawyers, and doctors. A distinct middle-class style of
interior design slowly emerged, with national and regional variations. The
accoutrements of the salon were likely to include an armoire or two, a chest
of drawers, an elegant table and chairs, Limoges porcelain in France, Wedg­
wood china in England, crystal glasses, a clock, candelabras, a painting or
print or two on the walls, all passed down from one generation to the next.
The German decorative style offered wallpaper and sparse, austere furnish­
ings and ornamentation. Pianos and other musical instruments became more
common in the home and accompanied family singing. Flush toilets with
running water began to replace outdoor privies and the chamber pots that
had caused many unfortunate mishaps when emptied unceremoniously out

windows.

Victorian Britons in particular embraced household possessions with a
passion that verged on obsession. Leaving the simplicity of decoration
behind, they began to fill up their residences with china, carpets, mantel­
pieces, statues, and garishly decorated fire-screens and teapots. They
ascribed to furniture and items of interior decoration a kind of moral quality
they believed suggested that their owners were living good lives. The Victori­
ans’ identification with their homes also arguably reflected the threat to
class distinctions that was indeed very real in a century of enormous social
change. Some of these novelties—such as antiques of fairly dubious origin
or copies of colonial items purchased in curiosity shops—may seem to us in
hindsight to be remarkable for their bad taste. But they enabled their owners
to defy the trend of mass manufactured items, and try to reflect their status
in Victorian society.
The old Roman saying that “clothes make the man” rang true of the
nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. Middle-class men wore black suits, perhaps
enlivened by a cashmere scarf. Their wives dressed only somewhat less sim­
ply; it was left to jewelry to suggest family wealth.
Expanding readership during the first half of the century encouraged a
proliferation of novels, histories, poetry, literary reviews, newspapers, and
political pamphlets, reflecting the diversity of middle-class interests. Read­
ing clubs and bookshops flourished. Balzac’s novels were first published in
France as installments of lengthy serials—authors were often paid by the
word—that appeared at the bottom of the front page of newspapers. Charles
Dickens (1812—1870), too, first reached his public in monthly installments.
The Pickwick Papers (1836-1837) attracted 40,000 regular readers in Great
Britain.
Travel for pleasure became more common among the middle class. It also
became a business. In 1835 in the German Rhineland, a young publisher
named Karl Baedeker (1801-1859) published a guide to sites along the
Rhine River. He soon published similar guides to Paris, German states, Aus­
tria, Belgium, and the Netherlands. In Britain, Thomas Cook (1808-1892)
organized his first collective excursion in 1841 when he chartered a special