ABSTRACT
It is difficult to exaggerate the influence of Victorian images on present-day beliefs about the 'ideal home'. Rapid social and economic changes since the close of the nineteenth century have done little to change the Victorian belief in the home as a private retreat within which a personal life can be enjoyed in peace and security. The term 'Victorian' is, of course, derived from the name of Queen Victoria, who ruled from 1837 to 1902 over what was once an extensive British Empire. But, like the empire she once ruled, 'Victorian' has come to refer to a series of attitudes and values whose influence goes well beyond the shores of Britain and the boundaries of the nineteenth century. As Grier (1988) has noted in her study of culture and comfort in the middle-class North American drawing room or 'parlour', the concept of Victorian can be defined in more global terms as the 'Anglo-American, transatlantic, bourgeois culture of industrialising western civilisation' (Grier 1988: 2).
