The Antique Victorian Furniture Blog

Which is the most famous of all Victorian mirrors? Well, obviously, that’s a speculative question, if you’ll pardon the pun. But here’s a piece of writing containing a mirror that would rank pretty high:

“Now, if you’ll only attend, Kitty, and not talk so much, I’ll tell you all my ideas about Looking-glass House. First, there’s the room you can see through the glass — that’s just the same as our drawing room, only the things go the other way. I can see all of it when I get upon a chair — all but the bit behind the fireplace. Oh! I do so wish I could see THAT bit! I want so much to know whether they’ve a fire in the winter: you never CAN tell, you know, unless our fire smokes, and then smoke comes up in that room too — but that may be only pretence, just to make it look as if they had a fire. Well then, the books are something like our books, only the words go the wrong way; I know that, because I’ve held up one of our books to the glass, and then they hold up one in the other room. How would you like to live in Looking-glass House, Kitty? I wonder if they’d give you milk in there? Perhaps Looking-glass milk isn’t good to drink — But oh, Kitty! now we come to the passage. You can just see a little PEEP of the passage in Looking-glass House, if you leave the door of our drawing-room wide open: and it’s very like our passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond. Oh, Kitty! how nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking- glass House! I’m sure it’s got, oh! such beautiful things in it!”

Now admittedly, that’s a fictional mirror, or looking-glass, not a real one. But it’s a famous one nevertheless. Those lines were written in 1872 by English author Lewis Carroll. And the person talking to her Kitty is of course young Alice, in Carroll’s wonderful book Through the Looking-Glass And What Alice Found There.

It dawned on me a while ago that there must be an enormous number of descriptions of furniture contained in the great works of British Victorian literature, written by the likes of Carroll, Dickens, and the Bronte sisters. And that there could be a rather interesting perspective to gain by reading them. What could be more intriguing to a lover of antique Victorian furniture than getting a description of a period Victorian table from the pen of Charlotte Bronte?

I got the idea of quoting Carroll here by reading a post in some random forum by a man who was thinking of doing a scholarly investigation into the symbolic meaning of mirrors in Victorian literature. He was led to this idea not only by Through the Looking Glass, but also by Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Hmmm. He could be onto something there.

In any case, I’ll pursue my own idea of tracking down passages in Victorian literature with furniture in them. Whenever I find a good one, I promise to share it here on The Antique Victorian Furniture Blog.

Technorati Tags: 19th Century, Alice, Lewis, Literature, Mirror, Victorian