The Modern Interior

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While the haute couture profession offered much that was useful
and relevant to the new interior decorating profession of the twentieth
century, the close links that existed between fashionable dress and the
interior were also understood by housewives who decorated their homes
as amateurs, this having been made possible by the availability of advice
literature and the new opportunities offered through mass consumption.
In spite of the transference of much domestic manufacture to factories
in the nineteenth century, some hand-making survived in the domestic
context, focused for the most part on home dress-making and interior
decoration. Many of the small artefacts that were made at home, crocheted
antimacassars for example, were often combined, in interior
settings, with purchased items, such as sofas. By that time the ‘crafting’
of the interior covered a spectrum of activities, from making objects to
employing taste values in the selection and consumption of artefacts,
as well as arranging them in a setting which may also have included
self-made artefacts. The modernity of that practice lay in its enhanced
significance for increasing numbers of women who undertook such work
both as a form of self-expression and as part of their newly acquired
responsibility for its interior decoration.
Home-makers were helped in their task by an expanding body of
interior decoration advice books which were published from the 1870s
onwards to assist those women who had not had the necessary skills
passed down to them. Many of those texts embraced the idealistic, Arts
and Crafts-oriented visions of John Ruskin, A.W.N. Pugin, William
Morris and others, while others were more practical. Editions of key texts
appeared on both sides of the Atlantic. As we have seen, Charles Eastlake’s
misogynistic Hints on Household Taste of 1868 appeared in the us four
years later and was enormously influential, while the American writer
Clarence Cook published his manifesto about aestheticism in the household,
The House Beautiful (1878), on the heels of the appearance in
Britain of the Art at Home series published by Macmillan. In the us Janet
Ruetz-Rees’s Home Decoration (1881) opened that decade, while the
reforming zeal of other American Aesthetic Movement enthusiasts filled
the pages of a series of publications titled Artistic Houses, in 1893 and
1894. 22 While each individual text had a slightly different agenda, the
publications of the 1870s and ’80s, on both sides of the Atlantic, shared a
commitment to the concepts of good taste, good workmanship and the
importance of ‘art’ in the home. In the us a series of journals including
Godey’s Lady’s Book, Petersons and The Household added their contribu-