Introduction: Domesticity, Culture, and the Victorian Press

Introduction:Domesticity, Culture, and the Victorian Press Julie Codell (bio) Over the last several decades, the issue of Victorian domestic life has become a major topic in scholarly publications.1 Deborah Cohen's Household Gods (2009) and Thad Logan's The Victorian Parlour (2001) both articulate a critical analysis of Victorian domestic life, joined with material culture studies, to go beyond the stereotypes of cluttered rooms and gendered "separate" spaces. Cohen argues, for example, that only after women's legal relationship to property changed did they have agency in decorating and the control of furnishings. Recently, Jane Hamlett's Material Relations (2010) continues the exploration of "how middle-class families imagined, described and used rooms, furnishings and domestic ephemera and the role these objects play in family life" to discover bonds or avoidances between married couples, "how children formed their first ideas of identity, and how servants and mistresses might forge relationships that could cross class boundaries."2 Spaces defined identities, for example, the nursery's children and their relationship to their drawing-room-dwelling parents. Among the changes after mid-century were the increasing number of people who fit into the middle classes, the new furniture shops in London's West End, and the furnishings that moved from the status quo of crammed bric-à-brac to the development of tasteful artistic craftsmanship as a model of decoration for middle-class homes. Hamlett interrogates the meaning of objects brought home and valued for a wide variety of reasons beyond status, including their religious, nostalgic, gender, age, and kinship associations. Interiors also reflected the growing distance between the home as a refuge and the world outside, and consequently they registered a desire for privacy conveyed by an internal organization of rooms that served to create and restrict family relationships within and beyond the nuclear family to include wider kinship relations and live-in servants.3 She argues, too, that men were engaged in domestic [End Page 215] decoration and planning, both financially and emotionally, and that material objects could express marital dynamics.4 Scholars such as John Potvin explore interior design in relation to orientalism, sexual orientation, and modernity, contributing to the flood of material culture studies sparked by Daniel Miller, Bill Brown, Judith Attfield, and other scholars.5 Others offer new readings of Isabella Beeton, Charles Eastlake, and Mary Eliza Haweis, authors who wrote authoritatively on domestic taste and furnishings.6 Coffee table books on Victorian interiors and furnishings have proliferated, reflecting the popularity of Victorian things and a neo-Victorian fascination with Victorian design, food, cooking culture, and household management. The fascination with Victorian domestic life continues today in television shows like Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey, as well as in films about Victorian life and times. The Victorian press actively shaped the interconnections between domestic life and material culture around several topics: architecture, interior design, and the gendering of domestic space.7 Domestic life touched on a wide range of Victorian topics and concerns: law, society, politics, gender, class, aesthetics, property, design, dress, sexuality, family relations, food production, and visual and literary representation. Periodicals became a rich source of information and advice on how to live a respectable and tasteful domestic life. The popular Hints on Household Taste (1868) by Charles Locke Eastlake, nephew of art critic Elizabeth Eastlake and Charles Lock Eastlake, director of the National Gallery, first appeared as a series of articles in the Cornhill Magazine ("The Fashion of Furniture"), after which Eastlake was invited to write a series of articles on household taste for the Queen which first appeared on June 24, 1865, and were published in book form in 1868.8 The Magazine of Art and the Art Journal both ran articles on Elizabethan manor houses, comparing them to modern urban homes. Photographs and articles on artists in their home studios contributed to the respectable image of artists as middle-class professionals.9 Mary Eliza Haweis, author of books on interior decoration and beauty, began publishing articles on fashion and furnishings in Saint Paul's Magazine and a series on artistic houses in the Queen. Isabella Beeton contributed to her husband's publication, the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, writing a cooking column and...

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