Approaching the Interior of the Eighteenth-Century English Country House

• Published in: Style (University Park, PA) Vol. 48; no. 4; pp. 543 - 562
• Main Author: Wall, Cynthia
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: DeKalb Pennsylvania State University Press 22.12.2014; Penn State University Press
• Subjects: 18th century; Architectural design; Architecture; British & Irish literature; Cottages; Country homes; Criticism and interpretation; English language; Free indirect discourse; Houses; Language history; Narratives; Nouns; Novels; Portrayals; Reading; Rooms; Scott, Walter (1771-1832); Scottish literature; Windows; United Kingdom; United Kingdom > UK; England
• DOI: 10.5325/style.48.4.543
• ISSN: 0039-4238

In the late eighteenth century in Britain, the term “approach” became a noun, with a very specific architectural meaning as “a variety ofroadpeculiar to a house in the country, designed as an experience in perspective to “form new combinations on every movement of the spectator” (J. C. Loudon, 1806). In this essay I use the concept of the architectural approach to the estate as a means to approach the domestic interiors of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the narrative and psychological interiors of the novels that house them. The country house tour brought the tourist inside the house; the guidebooks and architectural treatises and novels, increasingly devoted to describing those interiors, brought the reader in as well. And all the approaches – narratival and linguistic as well as experiential – privileged a winding line to form new combinations of perceptions, bringing new kinds of interiors into view.