The Modern Interior

spaces of work and commerce. The idea of comfort emphasized the
physical link between the bodies of the occupants of such spaces and
the material objects within them. In Victorian England, as elsewhere in
the industrialized western world, domestic family life took on a new
significance at that time, as a symbol of Christian values, nationhood and
empire. However, in response to the increasing complexity of public
life, the threat from increased social mobility to hitherto stable identities,
and the need, within modernity, for the individual to develop a
concept of ‘selfhood’, privacy and the opportunity for self-reflection were
demanded of the Victorian home above all else.
Inevitably the idea of the separation of the spheres was strongly gendered.
By the end of the nineteenth century women had been given the
responsibility for most the activities that went on within the home, most
importantly for its appearance. In undertaking their tasks ‘housewives’ had
to negotiate a subtle tension between the need to make the home a centre
for fashionable living and display and the necessity of ensuring that it
remained a comfortable ‘haven’ and a protection for the family from the
realities of commerce and the capitalistic values of the marketplace. Gender
differentiation was materialized and visualized in the choice of furnishings
and decorative details in the Victorian home. In dining rooms, for example,
usually seen as ‘masculine’ spaces, dark colours were frequently employed
and the furniture items were often large and imposing. The dining room of
a late nineteenth-century Manchester home, Sedgley New Hall, for instance,
contained a number of such heavy furniture items, including a large
mirrored sideboard (pictured overleaf). A male portrait on the wall above
it reinforced that particular room’s dominant masculinity. That focus was
often contrasted by the decoration of parlours and boudoirs where lighter
colours and more delicate, elegant furniture pieces were often included. 16
Both men and women had spaces in the home designated for their use
which were both less and more private. Men, for example, invited others
into their billiard and smoking rooms, but probably not into their studies,
while women entertained in the parlour but undoubtedly less so in the
bedroom or boudoir. Within their private spaces the codification of the
furniture and décor served as an aid to the construction of men’s and
women’s self-identities, while in the more public areas of the home it was
their social identities that were being formed and reinforced.
Differences of social class and aspiration were also clearly embedded
within the nineteenth-century home. The mid-century, middle-class
European home modelled itself materially upon that of the aristocracy 25