Advice Literature

Definition

Advice literature names the genre of practical instruction books through which domestic design knowledge circulated — handbooks on house decoration, furnishing and household management, addressed to (putatively amateur) readers, and written from the 1800s onward by reformers, tradespeople-turned-professionals, collector-designers and domestic economists. The wiki's decorator lineage is an advice-literature lineage, with a pattern-book prehistory: Thomas Hope's Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (1807) — the collector-designer publishing "a volume of his own furniture sketches and interiors" (editorial headnote), the genre's earliest ancestor-document, which argues its case rather than prescribes to a lay reader — then Eastlake's Hints on Household Taste (1868), the Beechers' The American Woman's Home (1869), the 'Art at Home' series of the 1870s–80s (the Garretts' Suggestions for House Decoration, 1876; Mrs Orrinsmith's The Drawing-Room, 1877), Dresser's Studies in Design (1876), de Wolfe's The House in Good Taste (1913), through Post's shelter-era manuals to Baldwin's manifesto-essays. The concept's analytic warrant comes from Emma Ferry, whom the Intimus editors introduce as the scholar who "champions advice literature as both narrative discourse and historical documentation on design and taste" — the genre is not mere prescriptive residue but a double document: a discourse (with narrators, inverted reader-figures, utopian sequels and muted counter-messages) and documentation (of professional claims, gender orders, trade relations, taste regimes). Read this way, advice books are the interior's richest vernacular archive: the site where the profession defines itself (house-decorator), where taste is taught and policed (taste), and where domestic ideology is negotiated, subverted or re-inscribed (separate-spheres).

Key Thinkers

• Thomas Hope — the genre's earliest ancestor-author (1807): the pattern-book phase before advice — the collector-designer publishing his own furniture sketches and interiors with an argued programme (the trade indicted, the ancients adapted, permanence prescribed) rather than instructions to a reader; the genre's design-theory pole from which the later handbooks' prescriptions descend.
• Emma Ferry — the genre's champion and methodologist: advice literature as "both narrative discourse and historical documentation on design and taste"; her reading practice attends to imitation, appropriation, inversion and the "muted discourse" between the lines (2003/2006).
• Charles L. Eastlake — the genre's most influential design-reform voice (1868): the handbook as polemic, its prescriptions of style and its gendered reader-figures (the flustered Materfamilias) setting the conventions the genre's later authors appropriate and invert.
• Catharine E. Beecher & Harriet Beecher Stowe — the American domestic-science branch: the advice book as design manual and treatise of female-led household government at once (1869).
• Elsie de Wolfe — the genre's professionalizing voice (1913): the decorator's method preached in the first person, taste as compass, the maxims that later fossilize into dicta.
• Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston — the genre's canonizers: Intimus assembles the advice-literature lineage (Beecher & Stowe → Eastlake → Dresser → de Wolfe → Baldwin) as interior design's theoretical prehistory, and notes taste's reach "through historical advice literature to popular interior magazines and journals of today" (p. 12).
• Edith Wharton & Ogden Codman Jr — the genre's architectural turn (1897/1898): the advice book written by a novelist and an architect as "one of the pivotal texts for interior designers" (headnote, p. 387), extending the reform lineage from furniture (Hope, Eastlake) to the room's architecture itself — the double test, the proportion doctrine, and the defense of conformity to style against the charges of servility, formality and pretentiousness.
• Rhoda and Agnes Garrett — the genre's first professional women (1876, PAGE NEEDED — see log): their Suggestions is the handbook that demonstrates, in Ferry's analysis, both the genre's subversive capacity and the professional identity (house-decorator) it can carry.

Related Concepts

• taste — the genre's core currency: taste's "reach runs through historical advice literature to popular interior magazines and journals of today" (Intimus, p. 12); the advice book is where taste is defined, taught, prescribed and policed.
• suitability — the genre's founding criterion: from Eastlake's fitness-to-use razor through de Wolfe's tripled gospel, the advice book's positive doctrine.
• simplicity — the genre's watchword: the "simpler cleaner style" demanded handbook after handbook, from Eastlake's attack on encumbrance to de Wolfe's elimination program.
• house-decorator — the professional identity the genre carries: the Garretts use their handbook "to demonstrate their professional status as trained 'house decorators' rather than domestic 'home-makers'" (Ferry, p. 110).
• historiography-of-the-interior — the genre as evidence: Ferry's documentation-claim makes advice books the interior's historical archive, with the same representation-problems (reader-figures as constructions, prescriptions as evidence of practice) the historiography debates.
• The Upholsterer — the genre's adversary and ancestor: advice books arm readers against trade decree while descending from the trade's expertise.
• Separate Spheres — the ideology the genre negotiates: address to the housewife, the gendered reader-figures, and Ferry's demonstration that the genre can subvert the ideology it appears to serve.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Historical Tradition (Wharton & Codman 1898/2006) — the genre's architectural turn and its canonical standing: the headnote's framing — "Writing at the turn of the century, novelist Edith Wharton and architect Ogden Codman are credited with producing one of the pivotal texts for interior designers. Their book equates architecture and decoration as professional activities, with the latter wrestled from the domain of upholsterers and considered as a harmonious addition to the architecture… Considered advice literature, this text is a champion of modern thinking and design values which privilege simplicity, appropriate proportion and sensible utilisation of ornamental style to define a new version of harmony for interior architecture" (p. 387). The genre's doctrine here is architectural: the double test (reason for being; harmonize with structure), the proportion thesis ("the essence of a style lies not in its use of ornament, but in its handling of proportion," p. 388), and the defense of conformity to style — "to conform within rational limits to a given style is no more servile than to pay one's taxes or to write according to the rules of grammar" (p. 389). The lineage's succession now runs Hope (1807) → Eastlake (1868) → Beecher & Stowe (1869) → Wharton & Codman (1898) → de Wolfe (1913) → Post → Baldwin, with Wharton & Codman the point where the advice book claims the room's architecture, not only its furniture. See interior-architecture, proportion, stylistic-unity.
• Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (Hope 1807/2006) — the genre's earliest ancestor-document (1807), predating Eastlake's handbook by sixty-one years: the headnote's "volume of his own furniture sketches and interiors… influential in changing period perceptions of upholstery and interior decoration" — the pattern-book as argued theory rather than lay instruction; its prose the genre's first manifesto-form (the trade indicted, the union-programme stated, the economics of permanence pressed), whose later advice-literature descendants (Eastlake's handbook, the Garretts' Suggestions) will convert into prescriptions addressed to readers. The genre's date-range thus extends back to 1807, and its founding voice is the collector-designer rather than the reformer or tradesman. See the-antique, upholsterer, design-reform.
• 'Decorators May be Compared to Doctors' (Ferry 2003/2006) — the concept's founding statement: the editors' framing ("champions advice literature as both narrative discourse and historical documentation on design and taste," p. 110); the method in operation — imitation traced line by line (the front-door prescriptions), the dominant discourse discerned (Eastlake), the muted discourse read "between the lines" (the purchaser addressed as 'he'), the inverted reader-figures (Paterfamilias for Materfamilias), and the professional claim carried by the handbook's Introduction.
• The Dining Room (Eastlake 1868/2006) — the genre's polemic template (1868): the upholsterer-attack, the stylistic-unity prescription, the conformity diagnosis, and the gendered reader-figures (the dazzled Materfamilias at the upholsterer's warehouse) that the Garretts later invert.
• A Christian House (Beecher & Stowe 1869/2006) — the genre's American domestic-science branch: the advice book as plan-book and treatise of "female-led domestic government" (editors, p. 43), with room-by-room specifications as its genre-form.
• On the Means by which Repose is Attainable in Decoration (Dresser 1876/2006) — the genre's prescriptive wing: decoration regulated by its own art-quality, "effect and experience… regulated by prescriptions of taste and decorum" (editors' headnote) — the advice book as rule-giving discourse.
• Suitability, Simplicity and Proportion (de Wolfe 1913/2006) — the genre's professional first-person: the decorator preaching suitability, proportion and simplicity; the maxims that Baldwin later shows petrifying into dicta — the advice book's self-deadening limit case.
• Proximities (Taylor & Preston 2006) — the genre's canonization and temporal reach: taste and room design discussed "through historical advice literature to popular interior magazines and journals of today" (p. 12); Intimus itself an anthology whose selections include four advice-literature documents.
• The Sterility of Perfection + The Rule Breaker's Success (Baldwin 1972/2006) — the genre's internal critique: the editors set Baldwin "in sharp contrast to advice literature of the nineteenth century" (p. 26) — the manifesto that names the genre's failure mode (maxims as "unalterable dictum," the roses that "were just furniture").
• Woman's Domestic Body (Gordon 1996/2006) — the genre as the conflation's primary archive: Gordon's method is exactly Ferry's documentation-claim in operation — the conceptual conflation "can be traced in everything from fiction to advice literature" (p. 127), and the advice texts carry its doctrine in quotable form: Julia McNair Wright's The Complete Home (1879) — the therapeutic tale of Margaret ("By 'fixing' her house, she had fixed herself," p. 126); Charles Warner's Home Decoration (1911) — rooms that look "just like her," with a school project whose "boys built an actual house, while the girls designed its interior" (p. 128); Helen Hunt Jackson's Making Home Life Attractive (1879) — rooms with "countenances" (p. 128); How to Make a Home Happy (1884) — home and woman "part and parcel of one great whole," surroundings that "make us" (pp. 127–128); Emily Burbank's Woman as Decoration (1920) — the woman "an actual piece" of the room (p. 128). The source shows the advice book as the place where the woman/interior identification was taught as everyday common sense — the genre doing identity-formation, not only taste-instruction. See 'Decorators May be Compared to Doctors', house-body-equation, woman-as-decoration.
• Designing a Place Called Home (Wentling 2017) — the genre's mass-market branch, the pattern-book and catalog lineage continued into the present: A.J. Downing's Victorian Cottage Residences (1842) — "the most well known of these pattern books," which "provided homebuilders with plans and elevations being used throughout the country" and brought "housing design… into a world similar to fashion, where homebuyers had several options to choose from" (p. 22); the mail-order branch — Sears, Roebuck's "approximately 100,000 homes with approximately 450 ready-to-go designs… shipped by rail directly to building sites" (1908–1940), letting styles "travel freely throughout the country" (p. 28); the contemporary stock-plan industry ("Many new houses still continue to be built without architects, from plans obtained from catalogs and plan books similar to A. J. Downing's pattern books in the 1800s… now more available than ever due to the internet," p. 41) with its matching problem — "Does a house that was designed for Houston work in Peoria?" (p. 42); and the genre's analytic twin, the builder's product line (3–5 compatible models, pp. 61, 75). Where the page's other documents are the genre's canonical interiors books, Wentling shows its mass-housing branch: the pattern book as the delivery mechanism of American residential style itself — "The use of 'patterns' obtained from books and magazines remains a common method for homebuilders to select and establish designs for their new houses" (p. 22). See typology, design-reform, taste.
• source-notes/rice-2006-rethinking-histories

Open Questions

• Advice literature documents prescriptions, not practice — how faithfully did readers follow? The genre's historical documentation-claim (Ferry) needs a companion account of reception: sales figures, marked copies, letters, the difference between the Materfamilias who is dazzled and the one who reads handbooks.
• The genre speaks in the first person (de Wolfe's "chatelaine," the Garretts' professional 'we', Eastlake's editorial 'we') — is the advice book a genre of persona? If so, whose voice is the muted discourse Ferry reads between the lines of?
• The lineage runs Eastlake → Dresser → the Garretts/Orrinsmith → de Wolfe → Post → Baldwin. Is this one tradition or several (British reform, American domestic science, professional decorator, practitioner-anti-advice) converging only in the anthology? See design-reform.
• Baldwin's manifesto is anti-advice ("The first rule of decoration is that you can break almost all the other rules") yet appears in the theory reader as the tradition's heir — can a genre's self-critique be its continuation? See rule-breaking, sterility-of-perfection.
• What is the advice book's relationship to the style manual the editors charge with suppressing the decorative (Praz, Gere, Thornton, via historiography-of-the-interior)? Is the handbook the vernacular twin of the style manual — and does Ferry's rehabilitation of the one extend to the other?