KIRKHAMFurniture-Making1982.pdf

Edward Joy's (l.A. thesis, 'Some Aspects of The London Furniture
Industry In The Eighteenth Century', 1955, devoted approximately twenty
thousand words to furniture craftsmen and the structure of the London trade
in eighteenth century London 3 but there is no similar study for the
nineteenth century. J.L. Oliver's The Development and Structure of the
Furniture Industry, 1965, adds little to previous studies of the eighteenth
century while his analysis of the structure of the industry in the
nineteenth century is based mainly on locational changes 4 . Nevertheless,
Oliver provides a detailed account of those changes and useful comparative
data are given for 1859 and 1872, the two years he studied in detail.
Since 1964, a more scholarly approach to the history of furniture
and furniture-making has been apparent, largely through the efforts of the
Furniture History Society, founded in that year 5 . A series of articles
as well as lengthier studies, including Karin-Il. Walton's M.Phil. thesis
on eighteenth century upholstery 6 , have provided a more solid base for
wider studies such as the present work. However, certain aspects of the
subject remain neglected. There is no clear account of the various crafts
which constituted furniture-making nor of the ways in which they were brought
together within firms. Apprenticeship and other aspects of the guild
system have not been studied in detail from the point of view of furniture-
making but perhaps the most neglected area of all is the history of the
craftsmen who made the fLrniture. Labour history is now an accepted area
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of historical study but, with few exceptions , little attention has been
paid to furniture-makers. It is hoped that this thesis will shed some
new light on these topics.
There has been a considerable amount written about individual
firms and designers but these studies have remained isolated, with little
analysis of either the entrepreneurial role of the furniture-maker or the
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