The Modern Interior

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upper middle-class woman, might be read by her daughters, her servants
and friends, then swapped for another through the exchange pages of
the first magazine before being thrown out or sent to a second-hand
bookshop.’ 8 Advertisements for items of furniture and other decorative
domestic objects were the most obvious way in which the housewife was
targeted as a consumer of, and for, the interior. They frequently showed
their ‘subjects’ within interior settings. An advertisement in the March
1914 edition of the American magazine, Ladies’ Home Journal, for example,
which was promoting a brand of floor polish, depicted a housewife
and her maidservant busy polishing while a group of children played
happily on the floor. The conventional, cosy, middle-class interior setting
that was represented, complete with its solid wood dining table, piano
and patterned curtains, was intended to make the product seem ‘real’ and
appealing. In an article titled ‘How You Can Furnish a Five-room
Apartment for $300’ the same journal once again focused housewives’
attention on the interior. ‘A careful shopper’, the author suggested, ‘can
furnish her apartment both inexpensively and tastefully’. 9 Colour drawings
and a list of prices were included. Editorials represented a much softer,
and possibly more effective, sell than advertisements. The same idea was
also appropriated by advertisers, however, as a Harrods’ advertisement in
a 1920 Ideal Home Exhibition catalogue, headed ‘Harrods Furnish a 6-
Room Flat Complete for £500’, clearly demonstrated. 10 Blurring their
promotional and editorial content, magazines played a role in reinforcing
their readers’ ambiguous identities as readers/home-makers/consumers.
Mail order catalogues provided another means of consuming interiors at
home. In the usa, where greater distances made them more necessary
than in Europe, the Sears, Roebuck and Company and Montgomery
Ward catalogues dominated the field.
Consumers of the interior did not always remain in their homes,
however. From the late nineteenth century onwards, as we have seen,
people (mostly women) came out of the home to buy household goods
to take back into it. A wide range of shopping options for direct purchasing
were on offer – from market stalls, to fixed shops, to chain stores, to
department stores. The last, however, were most linked with modernity
in those years and addressed themselves to middle-class female consumers
most directly. Those modern ‘cathedrals’ or ‘palaces’, as they have
been called at different times, played a key role in that context. 11 Much
has been written about the ways in which, in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, department stores employed varying levels of