Volume 20, Issue 3 (2008) Interiors

Moving Parts: The Life of Eighteenth-Century Interiors

Messages in code, petticoat hoop skirts, tie-on pockets, erotic cabinets, far-flung grottoes, ornamental dairies, and the gilded quarters of colonial parvenus in London: these interiors make up this special issue. Unlike the ancestral homes that have supplied our visions of eighteenth-century interiors—from the prison of Mr B’s Lincolnshire estate to the "lofty and handsome" rooms of Darcy’s Pemberley—the interiors here are moveable, protean, and eminently malleable. And unlike the Gothic grandeur of Squire Allworthy's Paradise Hall or the terror-ridden corridors of Udolpho, Otranto, and Mazzini, these interiors spring from fresh lineages and inventions, and belong more to the laws of imagination than to those of patrimony and history.

Novel rather than traditional, portable rather than fixed, contingent rather than central, transient rather than permanent, and adaptable rather than monolithic, the interiors in this issue move much more freely between the interior and the exterior than was imagined before. They reframe and even challenge customary ideas of the eighteenth-century interior as a domestic space. ... Read the rest of this essay by Dr Julie Park: Interiors Introduction.

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