ABSTRACT
In this chapter the various approaches taken to the aesthetic education of the working classes through a didactic literature of design reform are examined in the context of moral hygiene, social reform, and postwar politics. Whether perceived or real, the intransigence of the working-class consumer in pre- and postwar Britain necessitated the production of considerable amounts of aesthetic and political propaganda around design and its consumption. Straddling the period from 1937 to 1954, the texts under discussion here concentrated on the sanitization of the working-class home and its occupants and represent the attempts made by political agencies during these years to correct and civilize working-class taste and produce a “discriminating” working-class public. This specific period is particularly fertile with texts encompassing as it does the aftermath of two world wars and the social reconstruction these precipitated.
