ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by tracing the coming to market of twin beds, and then tracks the relationship between these new consumer commodities and the idea of ‘the modern’ that was so fundamental to their early twentieth-century reputation. Despite the recommendations of separate sleeping arrangements from many late nineteenth-century health practitioners, twin bedsteads – named and marketed under that name – were a long time coming. Couples wishing to introduce Dr Richardson’s ‘single bed system’ into the marital bedroom could, of course, perfectly well do so by purchasing two single beds. While Richardson’s term for separated sleeping was ‘the single bed system’, by the 1890s ‘twin beds’ had become the recognized term, both in Britain and the United States, for the separated marital beds gaining currency in the two countries. The twinness of these beds was therefore most frequently the object of comment, whether favourable or condemnatory, at either end of their century of cultural prominence.
