ABSTRACT
Plumtree Court was just as gloomy in the nineteenth century, as George Godwin found when he visited 'this pestilent hole' in 1854. Situated just south of London's Holborn Viaduct, Plumtree Court is a gloomy side street, shadowed on one side by the brick cliff that is the rear wall of the City Temple and on the other by the new headquarters of an investment bank. The Holborn mantelpiece may have been decorated with prosaic cats and parrots and bowls of plaster fruit but it linked to material evidence of a significant working-class cultural literacy that was uniform throughout the industrializing world of the nineteenth century. Godwin's drawing is a detailed and hugely valuable record of a rarely studied aspect of the interior lives of those he called 'the labouring classes.' It reveals a mantelpiece and chimney-breast crowded with seemingly unremarkable domestic paraphernalia, some of which is utilitarian, some associated with faith surrounding a significant array of purely decorative objects.
