Victorian Wallpaper: Cultural & Artistic Influence

Papering a room was one of the most widespread acts of home decoration in the nineteenth century, and the papers themselves record what people wanted their homes to say. Dining rooms were often hung with heavy, dark, leathery patterns; bedrooms with lighter flowers and stripes; halls with imitation stone or tile. Sidewalls, borders, friezes and ceiling papers were sold as matching sets, so a room could be divided into tiers in the fashion of the day, with a dado below, a filling above and a frieze beneath the cornice.

The trade was international. French papers were prized in America in the first half of the century, and panoramic sets such as Zuber's North American views were exported from Alsace, while British and American factories later supplied each other's markets and borrowed each other's styles. Design books circulated just as freely. Owen Jones's Grammar of Ornament gave pattern-makers Egyptian, Moorish, Chinese and Celtic models, and Japanese motifs arrived in the 1870s and 1880s through trade and exhibitions, to be absorbed into the Anglo-Japanese papers that sold in both countries.

Papers also carried social aspiration and anxiety. Reformers such as Morris claimed that honest design in the home could improve people's lives, while manufacturers answered with ever more varied pattern for a growing middle class. Today the surviving sample books and trade catalogues are valued by social historians as well as designers, because they show what ordinary households could afford and what they chose. Because the historic images are in the public domain or released under open licenses, they now circulate freely again as inspiration for modern designers, restorers and teachers.