ABSTRACT
When advisers, designers, manufacturers and consumers found in twin beds a structural form that signified modernity, and which did so in part by virtue of its anti-Victorian character, much more was being reshaped than the cumbrous form of the nineteenth-century four-poster. From the 1880s onwards, the relationship of the occupants of the imposing and ornate Victorian marriage bed was also the object of intense public, press and intellectual critical scrutiny and reforming zeal. Indeed, their most vigorous twentieth-century antagonist, Marie Stopes –– birth control campaigner, eugenicist and author of several popular marital advice books –– saw them as nothing less than a sign of the impoverishment of human relations under the conditions of modernity. Modern marriage, in contrast, where both sexes expect joy but too often find themselves ‘bitterly disappointed’, has lost its way, both in the speed and distractions of the modern city and in the cramped spaces of modern urban living.
