A dash of Dickens’ decor
In this, the great British author’s double centenary year, we learn that Charles Dickens wasn’t just a stickler for the intricacies of plot and character development – home decoration was also a lifelong obsession!
IT WAS only when I read his article on wallpaper that I realised a hitherto unappreciated aspect of Charles Dickens: his interest in interior decor. Charles Dickens At Home, the book I was writing about the houses and areas where he’d lived, took on a much more literal meaning.
That article, “Household Scenery”, for Household Words, the journal Dickens launched in 1850, comprised 6,000 words on all sorts of wall covering from tapestry to gutta percha (form of natural rubber that offered a solution to rising damp) but focused mainly on wallpaper, in more aspects than one could have imagined. It was one of the journal’s “process” pieces, on the manufacture of familiar domestic items such as pottery. But it also exhibited his personal taste,, alluding to “what we owe to the designers of good paper hangings”, and includingng his impres-impressions of American ways of wallpapering, gleaned from his 1842 tour with his wife, Catherine.
Dickens recounted how they stood “in perplexed contemplation of our chamber wall”, musing on the bad joins and disregard for matching patterns. He even gave his own idea for a wallpaper - design: “a hanging which, being dark near the floor, becomes gradually lighter hter towards the ceiling. At present,” nt,” he went on, “decorators depend end on a dark carpet and a light ceiling ceiled to give the effect indicated by decorative principle and required by a trained eye, some me aid being given by a dark skirting board, and a cornice of light and bright colours; but there seems to be no reason why the hangings on the walls should not do their part.”
Dickens had more than a journalistic interest in the subject. From his time at No.48 Doughty Street, his first house and now the Charles Dickens Museum in central London, his firm views on interior decor were apparent. The drawing room, restored to its appearance during his tenancy from 1837-1839, shows the changes he made, with the thennew fashion of “new-papering” to the floor after removing the dado rail, and the shade of pink chosen for the woodwork.
Interior decor enthusiast
He clearly enjoyed home-making – and shopping. Early in his relationship with Catherine, for example, he wrote with satisfaction of preparations for her visit to Furnival’s Inn, his first independent home, describing his purchases of “a pair of quart Decanters, and a pair of pots, a chrystal Jug and three brown dittos with plated tops, for beer and hot water, a pair of lustres and two magnificent china Jars – all, I flatter myself, slight bargains”.
This pride in his home was in contrast to the chaotic period in his late childhood, moving through many London homes as his father fled creditors. Dickens’s habit of rearranging the furniture wherever he stayed, even for one night, no doubt indicated his need for control. But his pleasure and attention to detail in decoration is striking. In 1845, he wrote from Italy, where the family was living for a year, to Thomas Mitton, his friend and lawyer, with instructions regarding No.1 Devonshire Terrace, the house he had moved his growing family to in 1839.
“I should like the skirting board to be painted in imitation of Satin-wood – the ceiling to have a faint pink blush in it – and a little wreath of flowers to be painted round the lamp. The paper must be blue and gold or purple and gold – to agree with the furniture and curtains; and I should wish it to be cheerful and gay ... I have said nothing about this to Mrs D: wishing it to be a surprise, if I do it at all. Gold moulding round the paper.” He wanted the exterior painted “a nice bright cheerful green”; hall and staircase to be a similar colour, “a good green: not too decided, of course, to spoil the effect of the prints”.
The initiative was always his – though Catherine had the last word here: “Kate thinks with you,” he wrote to Mitton “that green for the hall is quite out of the question.”
He also requested the installation of a letterbox, an important innovation in the 1840s. Harriet Martineau, a visitor to Devonshire Terrace, wrote to a friend: “We are all putting our letter-boxes on our hall-doors with great glee.” Dickens was, as usual, keeping up with the times – just as when he installed gas lighting at a time when it was mainly used only in public buildings.
His enthusiasm for interior decor can be seen, unexpectedly, in Urania Cottage, the home for fallen women, set up with the philanthropist Henrietta Burdett Coutts. It was Dickens who chose furnishings, commissioned blinds and purchased material at Shoolbreds, the leading drapers in London’s Tottenham Court Road, for the dresses of residents. He even offered to design a room for Burdett Coutts in her Stratton Street home.
His advice included “a long tasteful piece of drapery, falling from the curtain-cornice as part of the curtains” and a new carpet: “It should be something – of a small pattern of course – in dark chocolate or russet, with maybe a little green and red. The eye would rise from a dark warm ground, with great pleasure, to the light walls and the rich-coloured damask.”
Fully involved
In 1851 he had a new chance to practise his art, after moving to Tavistock House, instigating a huge plan of improvements. Directing operations from their summer home in the coastal town of Broadstairs, Dickens fired off demands in all directions – to Shoolbreds, to builders, and to carpenters about repairing furniture and regilding mirrors. He involved himself in everything from the position of bedroom bells to the kitchen range – and dummy bookshelves, commissioned for a sliding door in his study, with “a facetious list” of titles such as Cats’ Lives in nine volumes.
He paid particular attention to his daughters’ bedroom. Every item in it, said his elder daughter Mamie, was expressly chosen by him, from the wallpaper patterned with wild flowers and bedsteads hung with flowery chintz to the pairs of work tables and easy chairs – all “so pretty and elegant”.
His most fervent instructions related to the bathroom – he was passionate about showers, again showing his modern tastes. “What I want is, a Cold Shower of the best quality, always charged to an unlimited extent, so that I have but to pull the string, and take any shower of cold water I choose.” With “an elegant drawing”, he demonstrated how “light, cheerful-coloured waterproof curtains” would hang on a wo-oden fframe. He added that he would “decidedly partition off the WC ... The Bather would be happier and easier in mind, if the WC (water closet, ie, the toilet) did not demonstrate itself obtrusively.” The final results of refurbishment were much admired by visitors – though not by author George Eliot, who remarked cuttingly on the “splendid library, of course, with soft carpet, couches etc, such as became a sympathiser with the suffering classes. How can we sufficiently pity the needy unless we know fully the blessings of the plenty?”
In 1856, Dickens bought his last house in Kent, close to his childhood home. Gad’s Hill Place was intended as a holiday retreat, but after his marriage ended, he moved there permanently, and indulged in a favourite pastime, the devising of “an immense number of small inventions”. Daughter Mamie wrote that he “was never happier than when going about the house with a hammer and nails doing some wonderful piece of carpentering”. He engaged in a rolling programme of alterations from carving new bedrooms out of the roof to an extension of drawing room and a new staircase – the upper landing “inlaid in a banquet of precious-woods” – all of which he enthusiastically relayed to friends.
His final achievement was a conservatory. He had long coveted one and now he had a grand structure with arched windows. On June 7, 1870, he showed it off to his younger daughter, saying: “Well, Katie, now you see POSITIVELY the last improvement at Gad’s Hill.” He had fixed Chinese lanterns and sat there, smoking a cigar, enjoying his longdesired acquisition. The following day he was taken ill and on June 9 he died, his family around him and with sunlight streaming in from the conservatory. – Guardian News & Media
Journalist and travel writer Hilary Macaskill’s Charles Dickens At Home (Publisher: Frances Lincoln, 144 pages, ISBN: 978-0711232273) was released in October.