The Changing Ideas of Furnishings and Upholstery as Represented inRealist Novels in the Long Nineteenth Century.

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The nineteenth-century realist novels often contain the representations of furnishings and upholstery, especially in connection with the identity issue of characters and their desire to climb the social ladder. Those novels include works by Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, George Gissing, and Henry James. These representations tend to be interpreted as a part of literary craftsmanship of each novelist, if examined independently of other novelists’ works and his contemporary cultural context of interior decoration. However, studying them together in the context of design reform movement throughout the nineteenth century reveals that those representations elaborately reflect the nineteenth-century socio-cultural connotations of furnishings and upholstery.