ABSTRACT
One wayof approaching the rather obscure phenomenon called kitsch is to say that we often havea feeling that almost all the material cultureof the nineteenth century – or of the England of the Victorian era at least – was kitsch. ‘In various guises our idea of kitsch comprises every article that was ever exhibited in the nineteenth century and signifies our determination that Victorian commodities are no longer capable of performing the cultural work they once did’ (Richards 1990: 91). Kitsch would in this way relate to all the objects whose cultural significance has in some way become incomprehensible and strange to us. But why should this have happened to many of the products of the nineteenth century in particular? According to Ewen, kitsch is related to the products of last century, especially those that were imitations of elite style aimed at the middle class and produced by mass production (see Ewen 1988: 64). What makes an object kitsch is that it is a cheap, mass-produced copy of some original object or model which was considered elegant.
