Scampering Sofas and “Skuttling” Tables: The Entertaining Interior

Abstract

This article examines the role taken by the domestic interior as a performing character in many familiar entertainments, particularly those of a comic, melodramatic, or fantastic nature. The attribution of personality and agency to spaces, objects, and settings has led to a variety of stereotypes that have become stock characters in the human comedy. These stereotypes can be traced in both “elite” and in popular culture since the mid-eighteenth century. Such animated interiors, with their quasi-magical character, embody and reflect something of both the dreams and the anxieties of the societies and times that created them. In particular the article examines the evolution of two such stereotypes whose characters formed the setting for “magical” performances in the nineteenth century, and suggests that they continue to have a place in the popular imagination today

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