Victorian Comfort

"Like Altick, this was one of the breakthrough books for a whole generation of historians. He also took a subject – furniture – and said it was not enough to look at it in terms of aesthetics, but that objects had meanings. Upholstery, for example, a fairly recent historical invention, was not just a new technology, but marked a societal shift, from seeing a chair as an object that confers status (the dining chair with arms is only given to the head of the household) to one where how it feels when you sit on it matters. Similarly, we expect our clothes to be comfortable, but for millennia that wasn’t their purpose. Clothes were (apart from simply covering bodies, obviously) designed to convey status. The idea of “comfort” is a change in our ideas about the purpose of life. I think it probably has. That happens a lot historically – periods get labelled “dusty” or “boring”, and it takes a new generation to look at them. One of the things that is endlessly fascinating about 19th century design, which Gloag is so good at, is how the age of classification – which brought us not just the Oxford English Dictionary , or the first thesaurus, or popularised Linnaeus – produced a whole new range of household items. So now you didn’t just have a spoon, you had a dessert spoon and a soup spoon – not just a knife, but a fish knife and a dinner knife and a butter knife. This tells us so much, not only about mass production and the rising standards of living that made these things affordable to many, but also about class and income differentiation, which made objects represent values about consumption, about people’s expectations of how life should be lived. It’s such a rich subject and Gloag really led the way."