Tea at Trianon: Victorians and Consumerism

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, September 19, 2020

Victorians and Consumerism

From Literary Hub:

American domestic life circa 2020 feels far removed from that of the 19th-century Londoner or Liverpudlian. But Victorian notions of décor and comfort crossed the Atlantic and held sway in stateside imaginations and homes long after the age itself had faded into history books and period pieces on TV.

Since then, Victorian material culture has been stamped on the psyches of modern readers and viewers. Its staying power owes a debt to the 19th-century novelists and journalists who documented the era’s tastes and excesses, and to the movie and TV producers who have kept alive those sometimes overheated but rich descriptions.

“Victorian” has persisted as a convenient if imprecise shorthand for a style that’s heavy in every sense. “Victorian decor” invokes curtains-drawn houses where light goes to die and where rooms are filled with furniture dark, heavy, and overstuffed. Victorian rooms, as we imagine them, were temples (or mausoleums) of things, with every surface— mantels, tabletops, shelves, sideboards—obscured by ceramic figurines and keepsakes, and every inch of wall covered with paintings and portraits.

In 19th-century Britain, during Queen Victoria’s rule, industrialization, urbanization, and the expansion of empire, together with an uptick in disposable income, put more objects within reach of more people. Mainstream conventions did not encourage those with means to be minimalists.

The burdens imposed by bourgeois domesticity were not lost on contemporaries. “It is a folly to suppose, when a man amasses a quantity of furniture, that it belongs to him. On the contrary, it is he who belongs to his furniture,” wrote a wag in an 1854 squib on “The Tyranny of Furniture” in the satirical magazine Punch. (Read more.)