ABSTRACT
This chapter provides documents which address the concerns that influenced design thinking and practice during the nineteenth century. During the early part of the nineteenth century, this approach started to be challenged by the materialist idea of the aesthetic being subject to the same ‘laws’ as other physical things where beauty was recognised in an object’s fitness for use. Victorian aesthetic discourse then concerned itself with both a subject’s emotional experience and an object’s qualities, which were determined by what kind of object it was. The anonymous reviewer of Charles Eastlake’s lecture titled ‘Rustic Theory of Industrial Art’, reveals another aspect of design reform that took vernacular models or designs as exemplars of applied art and skill; this was to become a watchword of the Arts and Crafts movement. In a similar vein the artist Edward John Poynter, in his Ten Lectures on Art, makes the link between beauty and usefulness, and between form and function.
