Chairs That Go Bump in the Night: Gothic Furniture, Part 1

Literature wasn’t the only thing that was influenced by the Gothic craze in 18^th and early 19^th century England.  Horace Walpole, who’d started the whole Gothic thing with The Castle of Otranto, built and decorated his home, Strawberry Hill in Twickenham as a sort of fairytale homage to the middle ages... and for the next hundred and fifty years or so, this fanciful style fell in and out of fashion.

Even the Prince Regent himself was caught up in the early nineteenth century’s “in” cycle of Gothic love: his splendid London home, Carlton House, featured Gothic rooms such as the cast iron and stained glass conservatory (and it is a serious downer that he decided to demolish Carlton House and focus instead on Buckingham Palace; the existing illustrations of it are amazing.)

Well, if it was good enough for Prinny, it was good enough for the rest of society...and our old friend Mr. Ackermann followed suit in The Repository with a series of illustrations of Gothic furniture, suitable for fashionable homes everywhere...even if your house wasn’t Strawberry Hill.

The series started in 1825, but the interest in Gothic decor was already well underway, as demonstrated by this State Bed from the September 1823 issue. The description is interesting: The authors who have written on the arrangement of furniture in olden times, have given to the common bed a width of six feet, and to state ones an altitude quite unknown to the present day, except as we see it exemplified in some of our very ancient mansions, whose chambers exhibit the four-post bedstead at from 20 to 30 feet in height.... The recurrence to such sources for designs of furniture for buildings in the Gothic style is to be desired, because they afford the means of assimilating them to such edifices, in accordance with the practices of the times which they are intended to imitate. 

Here we have an Episcopal Chair in The Repository's November 1825 issue (...the wood is of light oak with gilt mouldings, relieved by rich crimson velvet cushions and tassels. This chair may be introduced with propriety into a church, prelate's mansion, or an extensive library.) The Drawing-Room Chair...is light oak, and the mouldings gilt; the tracery should be filled up with velvet of the same colour as the room; perhaps it would be more appropriate if it were of rose-wood or cedar. And the Table for a Boudoir (can I pretty please have a boudoir some day?) is also of oak or rose-wood.

This Gothic Sofa (Ackermann, December 1825) would appear to be completely at home (so to speak) in a gothic novel, conveniently located, perhaps, for the beleaguered heroine to swoon onto... This piece of furniture, in which the modern form is preserved, is embellished according to the style of the 13th century; or rather the parts are adapted from Gothic tracery executed at that period, so as to combine the peculiar features of Gothic art with the form that is now considered to afford the best accommodation for its purpose.)

I do like the griffin-like beasts guarding the pedestal of this Gothic Table from March 1826, as well as the illuminated manuscripts and books so artfully displayed on its surface...because of course, doesn’t everyone just have to have a table like this to display their 14th century psalter collection? Somehow this plate really brings home that these plates are truly advertisements—that they are selling a "look" to which readers longing to be fashionable should aspire.

More delicious Gothic Chairs...I find the right-hand chair with the blue seat to be most interesting, as it marries aspects of the previously fashionable Classical influence with Gothic decoration. I think I'll skip the middle one, though, as it doesn’t look very comfortable. (The Repository, May 1926)

And to end on a high note (see what I did there? ☺) we have An Horizontal Grand Pianoforte (July 1826’s Repository). Even the editor who wrote the descriptive copy accompanying the plate is forced to recognize the irony of decorating a pianoforte, a relatively recent invention at the time, in the style of many centuries past: This instrument being totally unknown to our ancestors, and only invented within the last half century, we can merely decorate the given forms by traceries and other Gothic ornaments best calculated to assist the sound, and to fulfil the intent of the instrument.

I’ll post more Gothic furniture in coming weeks...which was your favorite?

The Prince Regent, Part 2: The Most Accomplished Gentleman?

At the age of eight, like most other well-born lads of the age, George left the nursery and the kindly and sensible Lady Charlotte, and was set up in a separate household where his brothers would eventually join him. There they would be taught to be humble, virtuous, devoted and obedient to their parents and to their religion, and fond of simple living.

It didn’t work out that way.

As I said in the last part, George was intelligent and seems to have worked hard at his studies. Unfortunately, he was also a high-spirited boy, and his tutors had been commanded by the King not to tolerate any laziness or schoolboy silliness on the part of George or his brothers. Any of that met with immediate—and generally harsh—punishment. King George became concerned by the reports of his son’s governor Lord Holdernesse, who seems to have been as earnest and as ineffectual and clueless as the King. This resulted in a steady diet of parental lectures and thrashings, administered in the presence of George’s younger sisters—hardly treatment for a warm-hearted but highly-strung boy.

To make matters worse, in-fighting among young George’s various tutors led to a high turn-over and a lack of continuity. And to top it off, the King continued to make no secret of the fact that he was much fonder of George’s younger brother Fred. It was something of a miracle that the two boys remained devoted to each other, when any scrapes the pair got into were always blamed on the elder.

All of George’s younger brothers eventually got shipped off to join the army (or navy, in William’s case) and therefore had something to do, some focus and outlet. That route was not open to the heir to the throne—yet the King refused to start tutoring George in how to be a king and thereby give him some purpose in life. George had so little knowledge of his future kingly duties that when be became Prince Regent, he even had to be shown how to sign royal documents.

Is there really any wonder, then, that pretty soon there was a full-scale rebellion in the palace?

Though George was forced to remain living with his parents until he was 21, by age 16 he was already figuring out how to sneak out to go partying and how to get other people to cover for him. At 17 he became violently infatuated with the actress Mary Robinson, whom he called “Perdita” after the Shakespearean role in which he first saw her. Affairs with other women soon followed, to his parents’ dismay (and to the cost of their purses, buying these women off). Nor was womanizing the only problem; according to his (almost) lifelong friend, the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, George spend most of the 1780s “frequently drunk”, and his friendship with the rather disreputable Sir John Lade led to daredevil exploits in his phaeton, including driving to Brighton from London and back in under ten hours. Other boon companions in partying too hard were the Dukes of Cumberland and Gloucester, George’s uncles and the King’s brothers, who had also suffered from too much restriction at the King’s hands.

Georgiana, the famous Duchess of Devonshire, left a perceptive word portrait of the twenty-year-old George:

“The Prince of Wales is rather tall, and has a figure which, although striking is not perfect. He is inclined to be too fat and looks too much like a woman in men’s clothes, but the gracefulness of his manner and his height certainly make him a pleasing figure. His face is very handsome, and he is fond of dress even to a tawdry degree, which young as he is will soon wear off. His person, his dress and the admiration he has met with…take up his thoughts chiefly. He is good-natur’d and rather extravagant…but he certainly does not want for understanding, and his jokes sometimes have the appearance of wit….”

So here we have it…a son who turned out to be the exact opposite of what his parents intended. The King tried to curb George by keeping him on a tight allowance; in retaliation, George became an outrageous spendthrift. Once he turned 21, the King could no longer force him to stay living at home, and George acquired his own homes—Carlton House in London (that's it at right), and a seaside villa in the village of Brighton. If the King had been despondent before, George’s next action would push him beyond despair.

Young George got married.

Stay tuned for The Prince Regent, Part 3: Mrs. Fitzherbert