PRESIDING DIVINITIES: IDEAL SCULPTURE IN ... - Indiana University

from the door, affording room only for the hat stand and a chair.” 85 The plan of the
Greeleys’ home was typical for a New York row house built before the 1850s. 86 The first
floor contained the entrance hall, stairs, and three connected rooms: a front parlor, a back
parlor of the same size, and a smaller “tea room” at the very back of the house. One of
these rooms was usually used as a formal dining room; however, the Greeleys used all
three as parlors, a fact that suggests their frequent use of these rooms for large social
gatherings. 87 Given the Greeleys’ reformist sympathies, it’s almost certain that they
hosted political meetings in their home.
Of all the rooms in a typical nineteenth-century middle or upper-class house, the
parlor was the one that best articulated the idea of “home.” 88 It was both a private space
used by members of a family and a semi-public space in which guests were entertained.
Because of its dual role, visitors understood that a parlor revealed much about the private,
domestic life of its owners. Furthermore, a parlor’s arrangement and décor always
resulted from a combination of convention and personal taste. For this reason, as
Katherine Grier has argued, it expressed a family’s relationship to the values of the larger
culture. 89 Through their parlors, nineteenth-century men and women strove to present
85 Parton, Life of Horace Greeley, 428,
86 See Lockwood, Bricks and Brownstone, 164-67.
87 Parton, Life of Horace Greeley, 428-29. The Greeleys probably ate their meals in the
basement, in a room adjacent to the kitchen. On the upper floors would have been
bedrooms, informal sitting rooms and servant’s quarters.
88 Logan, The Victorian Parlor, 105.
89 Katherine C. Grier, Culture and Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle-Class Identity,
1850-1930 (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988), 89.
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