Professor Jeremy Tambling will deliver a lecture entitled
Victorian Philosophies of Furniture
Whether it is Thackeray introducing into English the word bric-a-brac, or Poe in ‘The Philosophy of Furniture’ distinguishing types of furniture (and influencing Walter Benjamin on the ‘bourgeois interior’ and its traces, so appropriate for the detective novel, both in 1840), or whether it is Dickens following Hoffmann, thinking of the inanimate object as animate, objects surrounding the bourgeois take on a new sense in the nineteenth-century, becoming both standardised and expressions of manufactured individual taste, allowing for model apartments, dream houses. In ‘The Nature of Gothic’, Ruskin told the Victorian reader to look round on the furniture of the middle-class parlour, and to criticise its standardised ugliness: he could have been referring to Biedermeier tastes; and he commented on Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience that ‘nothing is more notable than the way in which even the most trivial objects force themselves upon the attention of a mind which has been fevered by violent and distressful excitement … there is not a single object in all that room [the room of a kept woman] – common, modern, vulgar … but it becomes tragical, if rightly read’. The reverse of that appears in the villa of Godfrey Ablewhite’s ‘kept woman’ in London’s ‘suburbs’ – ‘several fone pictures and statues; furniture tastefully selected, and admirably made; and a conservatory of the rarest flowers’ (The Moonstone, 1869). Here is the criminal – the man with the double life – as the aesthete, whose object is things, and the question of the reason for their fascination arises. And at the end of the century William Morris advises ‘have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful’: in these cases there is an assumption that things have become the index to people who are constructed by them. What sorts of knowledge do they generate? What new types of people does furniture construct? The paper will explore these topics, using the writers outlined above, especially Ruskin and Hunt, and Balzac in Cousin Pons, and Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, and Ibsen’s The Doll’s House, and Prus’ The Doll.
