13 R. Dutton, The Victorian Home: Some Aspects of Nineteenth-century Taste and Manners
(London, 1954 ), p. 84.
14 See Juliet Kinchin, ‘Interiors: Nineteenth-century Essays on the “Masculine” and the
“Feminine” Room’, in The Gendered Object, ed. P. Kirkham (Manchester, 1996 ), p. 20.
Kinchin has written that ‘a level of civilising “refinement” was expressed in the proliferation
and complexity of objects’.
15 T. L o g a n , The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study (Cambridge, 2001 ), p. 97.
16 Kinchin, ‘Interiors’, p. 13.
17 Saisselin, Bricobracomania: The Bourgeois and the Bibelot, p. 30.
18 Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman, Jr, The Decoration of Houses(London, 1897 ).
19 Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (Basingstoke and Oxford, 2000 ), pp. 38 – 9.
20 H. Maguire, ‘The Victorian Theatre as a Home from Home’, in Journal of Design History,
xiii(Oxford, 2 November 2000 ), p. 107.
21 Ibid.
22 M. Guyatt, ‘A Semblance of Home: Mental Asylum Interiors, 1880 – 1914 ’ in Interior Design
and Identity, ed. S. McKellar and Penny Sparke (Manchester, 2004 ), pp. 48 – 71.
23 In her book Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton,
nj, 2000 ) Erika Diane Rappaport notes the advent of ‘a new notion of bourgeois femininity,
public space and conceptions of modernity’ and the emergence of a number of women’s
clubs – Berner’s Club, the Woman’s University Club, formed in 1891 ; the Writers’ Club,
established in 1878 ; the Somerville; the Pioneer Club; the Empress Club and the Lyceum
Club, opened in 1904 , among many others.
24 Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, p. 254
25 Elsie de Wolfe, ‘The Story of the Colony Club’, in The Delineator (November 1911 ), p. 370.
26 See http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid= 40571 (accessed 8 February 2008 ).
27 With his wife Marie-Louise, César Ritz was known for creating striking neo-rococo interiors.
See Elaine Denby, Grand Hotels: Reality and Illusion (London, 1998 ).
28 Denby, Grand Hotels, p. 8.
29 Many of the women attached to the English Arts and Crafts movement, among them Janie
Morris, Kate Faulkner, Phoebe Traquair and Edith Dawson, helped to encourage women’s
domestic production, see I. Anscombe, A Woman’s Touch: Women in Design from 1860 to the
Present Day (London, 1984 ).
30 K. Halttunen, ‘From Parlor to Living Room: Domestic Space, Interior Decoration, and
the Culture of Personality’, in Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display in America,
1880 – 1920 , ed. S. J. Bronner (Wintherthur, de, 1989 ), p. 164.
31 See Halttunen, ‘From Parlor to Living Room’, 1989 , p. 8 , and B. Gordon, ‘Woman’s Domestic
Body: The Conceptual Conflation of Women and Interiors in the Industrial Age’, in
Wintherthur Portfolio: A Journal of American Material Culture,xxxi/ 4 (Winter, 1996 ), p. 283.
Gordon wrote: ‘In a world of urban strangers, appearance became ever-more important as
the outward sign of such achievement. This in itself was not new; wealthy individuals since
the Renaissance had been very concerned with the impression created by what they
wore. However, this preoccupation was now extended to whole new categories of people,
comprising the majority of the population. Individuals on nearly every step of the social
ladder had to be vigilantly concerned with and conscious of their presentation of self.
Dress – the decoration of the body – and interior furnishings – the decoration of the home- together formed what in more contemporary terms has been called the front that projected
the desired image to the world at large.’
32 Halttunen, ‘From Parlor to Living Room’, p. 158. 215
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