ABSTRACT
In 1939, the British cartoonist Osbert Lancaster (1908-86) published Homes Sweet
Homes. This book confirmed, if confirmation were needed, that conventions of
interior decoration were fully understood and the idea of a period room could become
a topic of humour broadly understood by the general public. As his well-known illus-
trations reveal, Lancaster was keen to connect people’s choice of interior design with
lifestyle – there was an assumption that manners and interiors could be associated
and in so doing, he demonstrated their comic potential. In the context of the outbreak
of the Second World War, Lancaster wrote:
For the history of the home provides the most intimate, and in some ways
the most reliable, picture of the growth and development of European
culture; at all periods the average man (or for that matter abnormal man)
has revealed most clearly his prejudices, his standards and his general
Lancaster’s gender bias aside, his choice of categories can be taken as symptomatic
of a broader understanding of how the domestic imagination could be captured in an
assured and acutely rendered graphic style for popular consumption. In his book,
Lancaster took familiar period styles such as Rococo, Regency and Art Nouveau, and
combined them with more finely tuned terms, such as Greenery Yallery, a term that
invention, such as Stockbrokers’ Tudor, coined for the first time in this volume. And
in terms of the modern, he had no problem bringing his series up to date with ‘the
modernistic’, ‘the functional’ and what Lancaster called ‘the even more functional’,
which in this case, was an air-raid shelter (Figure 1.1).
