2025 Bursary Recipient: Corinne Hoge
Corinne Hoge, our second Merryl Huxtable Award Winner for 2025, outlines her research into nineteenth-century wallpaper manufacturing and its impact on consumption and taste.
My doctoral research explores the impact of capitalism on the British domestic interior between 1834 and 1884. More specifically, I look at the role manufacturers of wallpapers and carpets had in the introduction of new decorative ‘wants’ and their impact on the definition of taste and gender.
My research has been greatly influenced by the work of design historian Adrian Forty, more specifically his analysis of nineteenth-century products and brands. In Objects of Desire: Design and Society since 1750, Forty writes:
In capitalist societies, the primary purpose of the manufacture of artefacts, a process of which design is a part, has to be to make a profit for the manufacturer. Whatever degree of artistic imagination is lavished upon the design of the objects, it is done not to give expression to the designer’s creativity and imagination, but to make the products saleable and profitable.[1]
​
Building on Forty’s research, I want to show how the ‘artistic imagination’ of new patterns as well as the ‘designer’s creativity and imagination’ of well-known names such as Owen Jones, William Morris or Christopher Dresser muddled the debate of art versus industrial production to launch the new capitalist world of mass consumption. The custom-built interiors of previous centuries, by prestigious architects such as the Adam brothers, gave way to the mass-produced interiors by William Morris and Christopher Dresser, still aimed at an elite, but papering and carpeting hundreds of interiors with the exact same product.
​
​Whilst the overall perception of designs and patterns for both industries was so negative in the 1830s that it led to the creation of the Government Schools of Design in 1837, there is no real understanding of what was produced between the 1830s and the 1870s. With research based on either museum-curated collections or contemporary literature, the actual product is often missing. The aim of my research is to fill the gap in the knowledge of mid-to-late nineteenth-century wallpaper and carpet production.​
​​
​
​
​
​​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
One place where the physical objects (or designs for carpets) are present is in The Board of Trade Design Registration archives at the National Archives in Kew. These archival records offer a new perspective on both industries by giving an uncurated view of what was produced between 1839 and 1884. Comparing and contrasting the state of both industries, their evolution in terms of numbers of companies and products, as well as centres of production, allows for a better understanding of business practices, such as ‘flooding the market’, and the role of design and designers not only as marketing agents, but also as creators of a new integrated product: the overall decoration scheme for domestic interiors.
​
I am grateful to the Wallpaper History Society for awarding me the Merryl Huxtable Award 2026. The grant will allow me to put together a database of more than 9,000 wallpapers registered between 1839 and 1884 and will permit the first quantitative research on British wallpapers of this period. The data collected will allow for a better understanding of the role of patterns and their evolution, as well as permit a more critical reading of nineteenth-century British wallpaper history, as written by manufacturers.
The database will also provide a unique tool for heritage and conservation specialists to help in the identification of nineteenth-century wallpapers.
Corinne Hoge
​
[[1] Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire: Design and Society since 1750, p. 7, 1986
​
