Victorian Gothic Furniture
The throwback to medieval Gothic styles came from the desire to create a quintessentially English look
The term “Victorian Gothic” is a bit misleading, in that the gothic period in art, architecture, design and literature began several decades before Queen Victoria came to the throne of Great Britain in 1837 and had run its course long before her death in 1901. Indeed, the Great Exhibition of 1851 contained very few examples of gothic style among the many hundreds of pieces on display, because the style was by then largely on its way out. It is therefore necessary to look at the development of furniture design from around 1800 in order to understand it fully.
The fashion for all things gothic, although it had been lurking in the background for some time (for example, Thomas Chippendale used gothic motifs in some of his designs in the mid-18th century), took off when England’s emerging middle class sought to spend their new-found wealth on design that was noticeably “English”. An important reason for this was that Britain was at war with Napoleonic France until 1815 and there was a conscious desire not to copy French design, whether Classical or Rococo.
The trend was to look backwards in time to the medieval period, when English armies were defeating French ones at Agincourt and…
