ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at objects, images, and spaces as part of nineteenth-century visual and material culture. The selected texts discuss material goods including examples from domestic design, industrial art, metalwork, jewellery, ceramics and glass, furniture, textiles, graphic and visual design, wallpaper, dress and fashion, engineering, urban design, including architecture. Furniture followed a similar path to metalwork, often being designed as either functional objects or display pieces, but following a stylistic trend dependent on the prevailing fashions. The first is Edgar Allan Poe's 'Philosophy of Furniture', that despises the show and cost of the conspicuous consumption of furnishings, and demolishes the current taste, especially aiming at the issue of glare and glitter. This article considers the practical versus the aesthetic, and the issue of cost, but the main argument against the Classical is nationalistic. The ‘foreign’ classic style was allegedly linked to Romanism whilst Gothic was supposedly rooted in national history.
