who in the office has to deal with reality, needs the domestic interior to
sustain him in his illusions... his living room is a box in the theater of the
world.’^6 In his short text Benjamin confirmed the idea that the separation
of the worlds of the private and the public was a defining one for modern -
ity, and by implication for the interior.^7 Nor was the representation of
modernity by historical styles a contradiction for Benjamin. Rather it
provided a confirmation of the way the domestic interior made it possible
for its occupants to ‘bring together the far away and the long ago’, a neces-
sary requirement, he felt, of life in the modern world.^8 For Benjamin, who
looked beyond styles to the cultural meanings of the visual, material and
spatial world, Victorian domesticity was intrinsically linked to modernity,
rather than a marker of resistance to it. It did not emerge suddenly, of
course, but was the result of the confluence of a number of earlier develop-
ments. Prior to the eighteenth century, for most of the populations of
Europe, ‘home’ had been the place in which work, leisure activities, extended
family relationships, the manufacture of clothes and food, and moral edu-
cation had all co-existed. In the Renaissance Italy, for example, the casa had
been ‘a hub of activity – domestic, economic and social.’^9 By the eighteenth
century a model of bourgeois privacy and domesticity, developed in the
Netherlands, had spread across Northern Europe. It was joined at that time
by the idea of ‘comfort’, which had originated in the aristocratic French
interior. A century later the concepts of privacy, domesticity and comfort
had converged to fulfil the needs of the new middle-class population which
had arrived on the back of industrialization and urbanization – first in
Great Britain and subsequently in Europe and the us.^10 The translation of
those values into visual, material and spatial form resulted in the emer-
gence of the nineteenth-century domestic interior.^11
Rather than being an irrelevance in the modern world, the pull of
the past in the domestic interior, in a context in which enhanced social
mobility meant that change was increasingly the norm, could, as
Benjamin understood, be seen to confirm its modernity. Materially,
according to Benjamin, the interior held on to the past through ‘an abun-
dance of covers and protectors, liners and cases... on which the traces of
objects of everyday use are imprinted.’^12 Nowhere was that attempt to
capture the past for the present more evident than in the mid-nineteenth-
century domestic parlour, where layers of textiles covered the walls,
the furnishings, the mantelpiece and the windows. As one writer has
explained, ‘Tables would be covered with chenille cloths, hearths would be
often dangerously draped with curtains hanging from a pelmet board 23