I find photographs of domestic interiors fascinating. If I didn't already collect a thousand things: photographs like these would be high on my list. I have a fantasy that one day I could produce a book in which each page displays a wonderful interior, not just Victorian or Edwardian but right up into the Twentieth Century, with notes to each photograph detailing the objects in the room and the decoration scheme. I fear it is merely a daydream, but one I enjoy nonetheless. Photographs of interiors are not as common in Victorian and Edwardian photo albums as outdoor photographs and studio portraits. Obviously, a lot of this is down to the technicalities of photography in the period and difficulty of successfully lighting domestic interiors. But interior shots which concentrate on decor and furnishing are scarcer than other subjects in the photography of all ages simply because few people thought of their camera as a piece of technology for recording the way they lived, more for recording the living itself.
The photographs in this post all come from the same album and the top two photos are two different angles on the same room: as are the bottom two photos. All of them are from a reasonably wealthy middle-class home in the 1890s and certainly the bottom two are from a home in Perth in Scotland. The location of the other photos is not so clear. Any antique enthusiasts among you can spend time picking out various objects and wondering what you might have to pay for them now in an antique shop - which would, of course, be much of the appeal of my book!
