Devil in the Details: Victorian Furniture, Art, & Today
They say the Devil is in the details. I tend to disagree. In pieces like this, the details announce impeccable craftsmanship, fine mimesis of the natural world, and symbolic meaning:
This is what we've lost with the decline of the furniture industry.
At one time, craftsmen and their clients participated in a certain tradition of meaningful artistic expression, a cultural consciousness that demanded aesthetic significance even from everyday objects. Yes, on the one hand, Victorian bookcases of this quality would have been limited to a privileged few, but on the other hand, we can say that even today's fine contemporary furniture bears the irreducible mark of stylized, mass reproducibility. We have passed from imitating "nature" to imitating the industrial process itself—with all the sterile angles and slight curves that postmodern furniture allows.
Wouldn't it be nice to have a bookcase like this, and to know that it is par for the course and not some exceptional rarity crafted over a century ago? I would like to see a return to this kind of masterful craftsmanship, to the art of rendering space in unique and emotionally significant ways—and trust me, I'm not just nerding out about this furniture (although that's part of it). Look at this drawer front, for example:
On it you can clearly see wheat paired with grapes (carved quite beautifully, at that). As a student of English poetry, I instantly recognize at least some of the meanings, here: wheat, the traditional symbol of death, but also (paradoxically) life and fertility. This is the kind of sly irony that you can expect from Victorian poetry, and here we see it in Victorian furniture, as well. And of course the grapes themselves bring their own, contrasting meaning: the fruit of wine, drink of the gods (especially Bacchus/Dionysus, who has always been linked to poetry and creativity). The meanings are numerous: death paired with life (a famous Victorian cliché), but also the notion of the harvest and thus of agrarian life, a culture that was already giving way toward modern industrialization even before the Victorian period, when the land-based nobility became the capitalist class, when the old ways gave way to the new, etc. Likewise, shortly thereafter England's long tradition of fine, hand-crafted furniture bottlenecked into the handful of dedicated hold-outs that we see today.
I don't pretend to hold some kind of scholarly knowledge about furniture, although I've learned my fair share here at English Classics. However, it is obvious that this bookcase at least exemplifies the aesthetic mentality of the day, providing some answers to the questions: what is art? and what is beauty? and how will we adapt these notions to the spaces that we live in? In my view, these are the questions that we should ask of our furniture.
But we have seen today an increasing focus on cheap utility—regardless of socioeconomic context—and although this approach has its merits (namely affordability), it often suffers from a brand of minimalism that is aimed less at the efficient use of space and more at the least amount of effort. The same could be said of a great deal of postmodern architecture, which offers its own can of worms. So, antiques aren't just about nostalgia. They bring a certain level of history and humanity to the spaces that they occupy. They remind us that we are not alone on this long historical trajectory, and that at one point furniture was valued for its art as much as for its function. So, we can hope that this level of dedicated appreciation might return again—and in a lot of ways, it has, e.g. our line of reproduction furniture. However, there is still work to be done in the culture at large, and I guess that's why we're here.
