If Walls Could Talk: What We Can Learn
From Our Ancestors’ Wallpaper
This article first appeared in Discover Your Ancestors Online Periodical, March 2024
Image 1: Block Printed Paper Block printed on hand-made paper, this wallpaper was made by Jaquemart et Bernard, a French wallpaper manufacturer operating between 1791 and 1840. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Whilst few of us probably actually still live in the houses of our own ancestors, many of us certainly live in older properties with rich histories. If you’ve ever attempted a make-over of such a house, you might well have been surprised by the number of layers of wallpaper beneath the one with which you are familiar. Indeed, some renovators have reported more than ten different coverings that need to be peeled away, and in pubs and other public buildings, up to 30 layers have sometimes been espied!
British householders have always been keen on sprucing
up their homes, but the 1930s and the era after the Second World War saw
unprecedented and nationwide bursts of redecorating which may have left really
distinctive changes in colour and design on your walls. Evidence for the
wallpaper favoured by your ancestors may come from remnants of the paper
itself, or from paintings and photographs of the interiors of their homes in
the past.
So were your ancestors’ walls graced with splendid
foliage designs or peppered with a geometric repeating pattern? Did they depict
a scene or panorama, or display a design that can easily be attributed to one
of the popular wallpaper designers of the past such as William Morris or the children’s
illustrator Walter Crane? What was the function of the room in which you found the
paper? Was it papered by a tradesman or an amateur, do you think? Were the
walls simply papered over completely or fashionably split into dado, ‘filling’
and frieze areas? Was the paper in sheets or rolls, hand-painted, machine
printed or screen printed ? Has the
paper yellowed significantly (denoting its poor quality) or not? All of these
aspects might give clues to the people who chose the papers and the fashions
and technical capabilities of the times in which they lived.
People of different classes aspired to different
aesthetic ideals and bought different kinds of wallpaper. For example, whilst
the rich favoured high levels of ornamentation in the nineteenth century, the
poor often made do with plainer paper and distemper (a cheap alternative to
paint made with water, chalk, pigment and eggs). In the first quarter of the
twentieth century, however, something of the reverse situation appertained,
with the poor now favouring the now-more-affordable floral designs of the past
whilst those higher up the social ladder were eschewing the over-stuffiness of
their Victorian forebears and opting for simpler designs or even no wallpaper
at all.
So, if you’re going to analyse your ancestors’ walls,
you might need to employ some lateral thinking. Remember that working-class
people tended to hang on to older designs until long after they had gone out of
fashion, for example. And whilst you might assume that the poor in the past would
go for darker papers that would need to be replaced less often, it’s worthwhile
remembering that in an era of candlelight, cream-coloured papers might actually
have been a more popular option since they automatically made a room brighter.
Image 2: Print Trade Card. An engraving on a trade card for Richard Masefield’s Paper Hanging and Papier Mache Manufactory on the Strand, London. Two elegant ladies inspect a piece of floral wallpaper. Many other papers are visible in compartments around the shop. C 1758. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Wallpapers and Health
Strangely enough, wallpapers have cropped up in family
history research for some rather sinister reasons. In the nineteenth-century,
some of the new chemicals used in creating wallpapers were untried and not
properly understood and they could prove dangerous to those who lived and
worked around them.
Many newspapers around the country, including the Altrincham,
Bowdon and Hale Guardian of April 23rd 1879, reported the
Metropolitan case of six-month old Frank Smith of Peckham, London who had been,
‘left on a chair at the table, playing with a piece of green wallpaper. A few
minutes later it [sic] was seen sucking the colour off the paper….The dangerous
plaything was at once taken away from it but…on the same afternoon it was taken
ill and on the next day it died.’ A
post-mortem examination found a large quantity of lead in the child’s stomach
and it was discovered that the basis of the wallpaper was covered in either
oxide or carbonide of lead.
And you didn’t have to go as far as actually sucking
wallpapers to be badly affected by them. Further cases, later in the century,
suggested that wallpapers coloured with a chemical known as ‘Scheele’s Green’ (which
was the basis of many different colours of wallpaper not just green), had caused
the deaths and severe illness of many people who had simply sat in rooms
decorated with them. It took some time for the detrimental effects of these
papers to become recognised since the incidence of poisoning - due to white
arsenic in the chemical - was affected by the humidity of rooms and the fact
that different people reacted to it in different ways.
Whilst poisoning by arsenic was perhaps the most dramatic way in which wallpaper could affect the lives of our ancestors, there were numerous other ways in which it could annoy and disgust them and even make them ill. The practice of papering over old paper rather than scraping it off was widely perceived as dangerous to health since the layered paper was seen to trap dust and dirt and to harbour bedbugs. It was generally advised that sickrooms and nurseries should have painted rather than papered walls. During the Second World War, when money was tight and repapering probably a distant dream for most, newspaper articles recommended cleaning wallpapers by removing pictures and rubbing them with bran and chalk.
Image 3: Panoramic Wall Painting. Found in the 1950s beneath four layers of wallpaper, a panoramic wall painting in the Romantic tradition, Grosvenor Square, Bath. Thought to have been painted in about 1815. Illustrated London News, 23rd July, 1955.
Help in dating your old wallpapers can be had from the dedicated books and websites listed at the end of this article. You can also view many old wallpapers at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Many stately homes around the country have attempted to replicate old wallpapers and tour guides are often able to explain their provenance if you care to ask. Likewise, museums that show the everyday life of the masses, such as York Castle Museum, include wallpapered interiors from different eras of British history.
History of Wallpaper Timeline
Seventeenth
and Eighteenth Centuries
In the distant past,
wallpaper was a luxury item. The walls of aristocratic homes might be covered
in the French manner with hundreds of small sheets of engraved block-printed
paper. Flock wallpapers, which imitated textiles (with shredded wool glued to
parts of the design), were popular as wallcoverings as were Chinese silks and
Chinese wallpapers.
Late
eighteenth-early nineteenth centuries
Wallpapers were made more
affordable by the development of machines including Christophe-Philippe
Oberkamps’ printing machine (1785) which used engraved copper rollers to print and
colour design. In 1799, Louis-Nicolas
Robert designed a process for manufacturing endless rolls of wallpaper and this
was improved by the Fourdrinier brothers with a machine that could cut sheets
to any length in 1807. Not only was wallpaper now in rolls rather than sheets,
but the new wallpapers had finer detail
and better shading and perspective.
After a lull in wallpaper production during
the Napoleonic Wars, the trade took off again in the second decade of the
nineteenth century, with British products in high demand on the Continent. However, tax had to paid on wallpapers
between 1712 and 1836 which meant that decorating walls in this way remained
the provenance of the well-to-do.
Mid-nineteenth
century
By 1850, wallpapers had
become an expectation in middle-class homes, and were indeed fairly common
across the social spectrum. Loud floral and leaf designs became a key feature
of the Victorian drawing room where they added to the general air of sumptuous clutter.
Some simpler repeating designs championed by Owen Jones (The Grammar of
Ornament, 1856) and inspired by Islamic Art also flourished in wealthy
homes.
By the 1860s, wealthy
people could go to department stores to view illustrated catalogues of
wallpapers. These famously included designs (now well-recognised since they
have oft been copied) by William Morris featuring naturalistic trailing plants
and flowers in rich colours. Morris, as a proponent of the Art and Crafts
Movement, objected to the industrialisation of wallpaper production, and favoured
the older method of hand printing with wooden blocks.
In the 1870s, so-called
‘sanitary’ wallpapers were developed using oil-based rather than water-based
inks. Sometimes imitating marble, woodpanelling or even tiles, these could
easily be washed or wiped. Such papers were popular in working-class homes and
for the harder wearing areas of middle-class homes such as hallways.
In the 1880s. it was
fashionable to divide walls up into three separate areas: the dado area (at the
bottom) the filling (in the middle) and the frieze (at the top). The filling
areas tended be the plainest, since in this way, paintings and the like could
be shown off to their best. Wealthier customers could afford designs created by
well-known artists. Several new wallpaper firms emerged that were able to
produce wallpapers with fancy names at a fraction of earlier costs.
Lincrusta and
Anaglypta (1883) wallpapers didn’t absorb water in the same way as earlier
papers and could, therefore, be cleaned more easily. The walls and ceilings of
your ancestors’ local public house and nearby civic buildings were probably
covered in these textured papers that imitated plaster, wood panelling or even
leather and which could be painted over many times.
Image 5: Page from a Sample Book. This wallpaper was made by Jeffrey and Company to a design by William Morris in 1887. The sample book contains 178 sheets and show this design in various different colours. Individual sheets of this particular wallpaper were sold at twelve yards long and twenty one inches wide. Via Wikimedia Commons
Early 1900s
The dawn of the new century brought a revolt against the over-fussiness of Victorian wallpapers. Art Nouveau brought in smaller, more stylised floral designs with curving lines. After world War One, Art Deco added sharper angles, more geometric shapes and an overall more abstract appearance to the walls of some British homes. By the 1920s and 1930s, wallpaper had somewhat started to lose its attraction for the upper classes, some of whom came to prefer plain painted walls.
Image 6: Office Wallpaper By 1930, offices, as well as homes, were experimenting with bold new wallpaper designs. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Post-War
With the new mood of
optimism that swept the country after the end of the Second World War, many new
homes were built to replace those damaged by bombs; many other homes were
renovated. New wallpapers were brightly coloured and innovative with British
manufacturers and designers actively promoted by the government in an effort to
boost the post-War economy. A wave of consumerism stimulated far more variety
of design. New screen printing techniques with heavy ink coverage and more vibrant
colours allowed for relatively short runs of more customised wallpapers to be produced.
Late Twentieth
Century
As tradesmen
gradually came to be more and more in short supply, people started to decorate
their own homes – including kitchens and bathrooms - in a surge of DIY fervour
promoted by magazines and television programmes. Manufacturers started
producing papers - some of them vinyl-coated for hygiene and durability - that
were ready trimmed, and wallpaper paste that was water soluble and easier to
mix. Open plan-living meant that different wallpapers were sometimes used, in
the absence of extra walls, to demarcate one area of the home from another.
Useful Websites
www.vam.ac.uk/articles/a-brief-history-of-wallpaper
Information from the Victoria and Albert Museum on the history of wallpaper.
www.thevictorianemporium.com/publications/history/article/history_of_wallcoverings.
The history of wallcoverings and wallpapers.
www.wallpaperhistorysociety.org The Wallpaper History Society
website provides a network through which professionals, manufacturers and
enthusiasts can talk about wallpaper.
Books
Brunet, Genevieve, The Wallpaper Book, Thames and Hudson, 2012
Mckennar Susie and Sparke, Penny, Interior Design and Identity (Studies in Design and Material Culture), Manchester University Press, 2011.
Hawksley,
Linda, Bitten by Witch-Fever: Wallpaper and Arsenic in the Victorian Home,
Thames and Hudson, 2016.
Hendon,
Zoe, Wallpaper, Shire, 2018.
Schoeser,
Mary, The Art of Wallpaper: Morris & Co. in Context, ACC Art Books, 2022.
Sugden,
Alan Victor, A History of English Wallpaper, 1509-1914 (Classic
Reprint), Forgotten Books, 2018.
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