ABSTRACT
By 1911, when the story of the Challoners appeared in The Evolution of ‘Fouracres’ – a Heal’s publicity booklet and advice manual in the form of a short story – twin beds had won their place in the household not as signifiers of hygiene, as they had earlier in domestic sanitarian discourse, but of modernity. They were now manifestly modern in design, in their more modest and simpler forms, and in the contexts in which they were displayed, invoked, produced and consumed. But this is to identify twin beds with modernity only by association, because of the company they kept. Nonetheless, despite differences in price, finish, materials and design, and their varying allegiances to tradition and the contemporary, twin bedsteads, no matter how modest or opulent, always have one thing in common: their disposition of the couple settling for the night into these two discrete, demarcated, one-person apparatuses.
