Britain in 1868 and in the usafour years later, provided them with infor-
mation about the fashionable styles of the day. It was followed by an
avalanche of advice books published through the 1880 s and 1990 s, aimed
at less affluent households, which increasingly addressed themselves to,
and were written by, women. By the last years of the nineteenth century
the strongly moral focus of the domestic sphere of a few decades earlier
had been subtly replaced by a more overtly aesthetic preoccupation with
the home. The shift from the eclectic, mid-Victorian, morally-oriented,
domestic interior to the ‘artistic home’ was hugely significant in the evo-
lution of the modern interior. It demonstrated an understanding that
the interior’s aesthetic had become a significant marker of taste and
social status for an increasingly wide sector of society. Impelled by social
pressures to participate in the creation of ‘artistic homes’, middle-class
women learnt how to engage with the rules of taste and fashion and to
translate that engagement both into the clothes they wore and into the
domestic spaces they inhabited and controlled. Although the emphasis
was increasingly upon visual harmony and control this did not lessen
the desire to acquire large numbers of domestic goods. Rather it has been
suggested that a new clutter, made up of ‘an indiscriminate mix of
women’s handiwork, rattan furniture, peacock’s feathers, beaded curtains
and Japanese fans’, simply replaced the old one.^30 In the frontispiece to
his 1881 book Decoration and Furniture of Town Houses(illus. 14 ), Robert
W. Edis confirmed that this was indeed the case. The space he depicted
contained all the necessary components of a fashionable ‘aesthetic’
interior, from the classically inspired frieze above the picture rail (depict-
ing a peacock, the aesthetic icon par excellence), to decorated china in
a dresser, a Japanese screen, an Oriental vase and a number of light,
cane-seated chairs.
The emergence of the self-consciously aesthetic domestic interior
brought with it a new emphasis upon visuality over materiality and spa-
tiality. The dominance of the eye within modern consumer culture has
been noted by a number of writers.^31 Its arrival also coincided with the
emergence of the idea of a ‘modern lifestyle’ and its effects on the way
spaces were used, and in which occupants developed their identities
through their homes. By the turn of the century the parlour had been
replaced by the living room, the latter seen as a much more informal space
in which the notion of ‘personality’ rather than of ‘character’, could be
expressed.^32 The former was linked to morality and to a world which rec-
ognized fixed principles of conduct while the latter ‘connoted magnetic 35