1The present selection of essays originates in the S.F.E.V.E. conference of January 2022, in which scholars were invited to look afresh at the historical emergence, concrete manifestations and cultural significance of the interior in the nineteenth century. Building on recent interdisciplinary research in material studies, architectural design theory, the Victorian architectural imaginary and the poetics, politics and phenomenology of dwelling, the articles included in this issue of Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens seek to explore the multiple facets of the interior, from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the end of the Edwardian era.
2Central to the concept of ‘interior’ is the imbrication of the word’s spatial, physical, emotional, mystical and political meanings. The Oxford English Dictionary indicates that ‘interior’ came into use in the English language in the sixteenth century to mean inside as divided from outside, but also more specifically to describe the deeper, more spiritual nature of the soul within the body. Derived from the Latin ‘intus’ (i.e. ‘within’), ‘interior’ is a comparative form, whose meaning is accentuated in the superlative ‘intimus’ (i.e. innermost, deepest, most secret, most private). From the early eighteenth century, ‘interiority’ was used to evoke inner character and individual subjectivity. But in the second half of the eighteenth century the ‘interior’ was also a geo-political term used to refer to the domestic affairs of a state and to a country’s territory. It was only at the beginning of the nineteenth century that, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the ‘interior’ came to mean ‘the inside of a building or room especially in reference to the artistic effect; also a picture or representation of the inside of a building. Also, in a theatre, a “set” consisting of the inside of a building or room.’
3Thus, as Charles Rice notes, the nineteenth-century interior is inherently double, both a physical three-dimensional space and at the same time an image—a painting, print, theatrical backdrop—which can ‘be imagined and dreamed, and inhabited as such’ (2). This new development is illustrated in the rise of the pictorial genre of the interior portrait, or Zimmerbild, which reached its apogee in the nineteenth century. While Victorian conceptualizations of the interior were clearly linked to important questions of public health, territorial expansion, historical knowledge and the exploration of the body, subjectivity and the unconscious, the Victorians foregrounded the idea of the interior’s deliberate and artful constructedness. Significantly, in some of the commemorative colour prints of interiors on display at the Crystal Palace in 1851, for example, the theatricality of the interior is regularly emphasized through the presence of visitors/spectators peering through drawn curtains (Figure 1).
Figure 1. India no 1.
Dickinson’s Comprehensive pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851 (London: Dickinson, 1852) from the originals painted by Louis Hague, Joseph Nash, David Roberts—Public Domain.
4The notion of ‘interior decoration’, which appeared for the first time in Thomas Hope’s 1807 Household Furniture and Interior Decoration and was popularized through countless Victorian and Edwardian periodicals and manuals, firmly articulated the idea of the interior through décor. This new preoccupation led to the founding in 1837 of the London School of Design, rebranded in 1853 as the Museum of Ornamental Art, today known as the Victorian & Albert Museum. The interior became understood as the creation of a scenography, complete with adornments and furnishings which served to soften, conceal or transform—however fleetingly—the architectural structure, in order to make it livable, hospitable and culturally legible. In Vlad Ionescu’s words, the interior can thus be seen as the ‘moment when a building receives its cultural significance [and] “speaks” to its users’ (2). Such a dynamic, dialogic, relational approach to the interior is particularly striking in nineteenth-century print culture, through which a great variety of interiors were depicted and shaped. The idea of the interior as relational is also poignantly captured in numerous works of literature. One memorable example (among many) can be found in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, in the following exchange between Louisa and her dying mother: ‘“Are you in pain, dear mother?” “I think there’s a pain somewhere in the room,” said Mrs. Gradgrind, “but I couldn’t positively say that I have got it”’ (chapter 9).
5If, as Walter Benjamin famously put it in the 1930s, ‘[t]he nineteenth century, like no other century, was addicted to dwelling’, this volume, however, attempts to qualify and/or revise Benjamin’s conceptualization of the Victorian interior as ‘the étui of the private individual’ (9), as well as his rather sinister notion that the nineteenth century encased the person ‘so deeply in the dwelling’s interior that one might be reminded of the inside of a compass case, where the instrument with all its accessories lies embedded in deep, usually violet folds of velvet’ (Benjamin 220).
6Indeed, the contributors to this volume broaden the scope of attention to Victorian and Edwardian interiors that are not necessarily the predominantly bourgeois, domestic and urban spaces which Benjamin had in mind. They complicate our understanding of inside spaces by considering a diverse array of interiors—public or private, commercial or sacred, cosmopolitan or colonial, natural or artistic, political or utopian, gendered or queer—and explore the dispositions, circulations or interactions they induce, as well as the narratives they elicit. All in all, they challenge us to reconsider our assumptions about inside and outside, interiority and exteriority, objects and things, and show that inhabiting, designing and narrating Victorian and Edwardian interiors enabled a renewed critical engagement with the exterior world, rather than an anti-historical retreat from it.
7In the opening essay, Kate Lawson’s study of the Brontës’ Haworth parsonage drawing-room casts a new light on one of the key sites of the British middle-class interior: the Victorian parlour. If, as Thad Logan has shown, the parlour was a cultural artifact of critical importance in shaping Victorian experience, Lawson demonstrates that in the case of the Brontës the parlour was more than a domestic ‘site of collection and display comparable to the museum’ (Logan xiii). Indeed, the three sisters’ well-documented daily practice of shared writing and indoor walking around the drawing-room table inspires Lawson to propose a materialist account of literary influence, exploring how the composition of the six novels written in this communal room during the 1840s and 50s can be illuminated through a consideration of the material entanglements and kinetic spatial practices in which they originated.
8In the next article, Chandrica Barua takes a fresh approach to colonial interiors and imperial interiorities. More specifically, she investigates the colonial archives looking for traces of the Indian Princess Victoria Gouramma’s elusive presence at Queen Victoria’s Court in the 1850s. Offered to the Queen as a ward and a religious convert by her father, the deposed King of Coorg, the young Gouramma inhabited the margins of royal London interiors for several years, during which she was paraded as the glorious civilizing project of the Empire. The metropolitan ‘colonial sanctuary’ which Barua reconstitutes reveals a pernicious politics of imperial care at a moment when the Empire seems to be drawn inwards and the Victorian court becomes an interior site of conquest.
9Charlotte Ribeyrol’s essay breaks new ground by exploring how the chromatic revolution affected British interior decoration in the second half of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the invention of the first aniline coal-tar based dyes in the 1850s introduced a wealth of new tints which transformed Victorian homes, as cheaply-dyed fabrics, rugs and wallpapers gradually became available to all. Ribeyrol shows that this democratization of colour caused much anxiety, leading a growing number of periodicals and popular handbooks to offer guidance on how to avoid chromatic unease and disharmony, while critics and designers such as John Ruskin, William Morris, E. W. Godwin, J. A. M. Whistler, Mary Eliza Haweis, or William Lethaby experimented with ‘poetic’ colour arrangements. Building on a rich corpus of textual and visual sources, Ribeyrol’s research into the colours of the Victorian interior culminates in a study of the home and painted furniture of architect-designer William Burges.
10Ideas of interior decoration affiliated with Aestheticism and Arts and Crafts also inform the poetic writing of Alfred Hayes, as Stefanie John demonstrates in the next essay. Her detailed reading of Hayes’s The Vale of Arden and Other Poems (1895), as a collection of poems and as a material text, reveals his important though so far largely neglected contribution to fin-de-siècle religious and pastoral poetry. Focusing on Hayes’s combinations of natural forms with imagery inspired by the textures of late-Victorian furnishing objects and interior décors, John shows that the poet’s vision of rural England integrates artistic principles of material culture which, ultimately, test the boundaries between text/textile, landscape/interior, exteriority/interiority. By turning the Midlands countryside into a refined poetic home, John argues, Hayes also gestures towards an eco-aesthetic that abolishes boundaries and hierarchies between ‘the physical outdoors, the “textual habitat” and the “lived environment” of the fin-de-siècle interior’.
11Claire Masurel-Murray’s and Kate Morris’s essays then turn our attention to public buildings which qualify as what Mark Pimlott calls ‘public interiors’: spaces typically regarded as public, even though they may be privately owned, which illustrate ‘the values of a society and its ideas about citizens’ relations to each other, to the various agents of power and to the world’ (Pimlott 16). Masurel-Murray examines descriptions of Catholic church interiors in the works of Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, Theodore Wratislaw and Oscar Wilde, in conjunction with contemporary debates about the organisation and decoration of liturgical spaces. Building on the work of architectural historian William Whyte, she argues that late-Victorian literary representations of sacred interiors, filled with incense, music, colour and texture, contributed to the emergence of an ‘architecture of affect’ in which the divine is accessed via sensory overload. In Kate Morris’s essay, we move from the religious interior of the church to the secular temple of consumption: the department store. Drawing primarily from accounts published in late-Victorian periodicals, Morris examines the gendered micro-geographies of mercantile interiors at the end of the nineteenth century. Her study, grounded in archaeological research, focuses on high-end London stores and their female patrons, in order to show how the subdivision of space and curation of movement affected consumer experience and customer/retailer relationships.
12Richard W. Hayes’s article also tackles the reciprocal influence between physical deportment and interior design, but his focus is on two hallmark interiors of British Aestheticism: the artist’s studio and the London theatre. As sites of posing and self-display, these loci are frequently featured in the fiction of Henry James and Oscar Wilde as privileged milieux for the observation of the body. Attention to bodily disposition was also a major concern for Wilde’s friend, the architect E. W. Godwin, in his designs for actual artists’ studios, furniture, stage designs and theatrical costumes. Comparing the fictional interiors of James’s The Tragic Muse (1890) and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) with actual designs by E. W. Godwin, Hayes examines the varying subtle interrelationships created between bodies, furniture and interiors at the fin de siècle.
13If the painter’s studio was regularly used as a metonym for the creative activity of the artist in late-Victorian fiction and art, Audrey Doussot’s article demonstrates that literary authorship too was durably shaped through photographic representations of writers in their libraries and homes, or at their desks. Using a corpus of photographs from the collections of the British National Portrait Gallery, Doussot highlights the major developments and increasing sophistication of the genre of the writer’s photographic portrait, from the 1840s to the 1900s. In her detailed examinations of a daguerreotype of Maria Edgeworth, several carte-de-visite portraits of Charles Dickens and a photographic interview of George Bernard Shaw, she retraces the shifting constructions of public literary identities mediated through photographic images of carefully staged interiors.
14This journal issue which begins in the Brontës’ home ends in the Edwardian house of fiction. The final essay, by Laurent Mellet, examines Edwardian novelists’ use of the house to investigate new territories of Englishness and domestic identity. Taking the exemplary case of Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale (1908), Mellet charts the emergence of Bennett’s characters’ individualities through unexpected forms of interaction with their environment. He shows that the concept of dwelling is problematized through a blurring of the distinctions between interior/exterior, and argues that the novelist’s unique use of interior monologue and liminal tropes such as doorframes and windows contributes to an egalitarian type of characterisation and a democratic narrative form, and ultimately to the revaluing of the domestic interior as a space of mediation, hospitality and happiness.