The Dining Room

Definition

The dining room is the Victorian house's formal eating room — downstairs, enclosed, and in the period's furnishing code masculine-coded: solid, dark, oaken. It enters this wiki through Eastlake's excerpt (1868), which uses the room less as a designed interior than as the emblem of the downstairs pole of the house's furnishing convention: "In obedience to this injunction we sit down to dine upon an oaken chair before an oaken table, with a Turkey carpet under our feet, and a red flock-paper staring us in the face" (p. 101). Its assigned character is solidity: the dining-room table and sideboard "should, on account of the use to which they are put, be made after a more solid fashion than the drawing-room table and the cheffonier" (p. 101) — the one room-difference Eastlake accepts as use-based. Its registered pathology is the same convention's shadow side: "We leave a solid, gloomy, and often cumbersome class of furniture below, to find a flimsy and extravagant one above" (p. 102) — the dining room as the "solid, gloomy" pole of the upstairs/downstairs split. In the house's gendered choreography it is the men's room, the terminal point of the after-dinner sequence that begins when "the ladies ascend into a green and gold-papered drawing-room" (p. 101). (The phrase has a second life: the public men's room as theorized by Edelman — the sex-segregated washroom as the apparatus of masculine subjectivity — is analyzed at mens-room; the domestic after-dinner room and the public washroom are the two "men's rooms" of the gendered interior, one marked by solidity and withdrawal, the other by display and vigilance.)

Key Thinkers

Charles L. Eastlake — the room's theorist-by-satire (1868): the dining room as the exemplar of downstairs solidity (oak, Turkey carpet, red flock-paper) and of legitimate use-based variation; its conventionality ("red flock-paper staring us in the face") as the upholsterer's fallacy made visible.
Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston — the editors who selected this excerpt for the theory reader under the room's own name, making the dining room the figure for the whole house's room-code system.
Catharine E. Beecher & Harriet Beecher Stowe — the American counter-programme (1869): the kitchen-and-workside organization of the same domestic program, in which eating is planned as household economy ("the close packing of conveniences") rather than coded by formality.

The Drawing Room — the dining room's upstairs foil: "solid, gloomy, and often cumbersome" below against "flimsy and extravagant" above; the ladies' postprandial ascent as the daily ritual that separates the two rooms and their occupants.
Separate Spheres — the dining room as the masculine-coded interior pole of the house's spatial division: the men's terminal room against the drawing room's feminine one.
Gender and the Interior — the room's gender coding as a furnishing code: oak/solidity/darkness for the masculine room against walnut/green-gold/"garlands and bouquets" for the feminine one.
The Upholsterer — the code's author-figure: the dining room's conventions are the trade's "wholesome doctrine" — one of the "series of rules by which certain types of form and certain shades of colour are to be… for ever associated with certain apartments in the house" (p. 101).
Domestic Interior — the room-type within the house-wide system the domestic interior names; the room whose conventions Eastlake's stylistic-unity program dissolves.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

The Dining Room (Eastlake 1868/2006) — the primary source: the oaken table-and-chair tableau with Turkey carpet and red flock-paper (p. 101); the use-based solidity of dining-room furniture (p. 101); the "solid, gloomy, and often cumbersome" verdict (p. 102); the gendered dinner-then-ascent choreography (p. 101); the sitting-room carpet comparison (Oriental loom downstairs vs "the vulgarity of garlands and bouquets" above, p. 102).
A Christian House (Beecher & Stowe 1869/2006) — the American contemporary's contrasting room-program: the eating function planned into a labor-saving household economy rather than coded by formality and wood-species.
Men's Room (Edelman 1996/2006) — the companion "men's room" at public scale: Edelman's sex-segregated washroom, where (as here) an all-male interior runs on display, surveillance and the exclusion of women's witness — the domestic after-dinner room's apparatus generalized to the city. The pairing tests the room-type genre: solidity vs. vigilance as two architectures of the same gendered exclusion. See mens-room.
'Decorators May be Compared to Doctors' (Ferry 2003/2006) — the room's interior critique and its redecoration by professional women (1876): the Garretts make the dining room's gender coding explicit and ironic — "the gloomy appearance of the rest of the room reminds one of the British boast that every Englishman's house is his castle, and that he wishes neither to observe nor to be observed when he retires into the dignified seclusion of this, the especially masculine department of the house-hold" (quoted p. 112). The room is also change's dead zone: "no other room in the house where innovations are more grudgingly permitted, and an Englishman would suspect you of every other revolutionary tendency, if you proposed any radical changes in the colour of the walls, or in the forms and arrangements of the furniture" (quoted p. 112). The Garretts redecorate it anyway, "leaving the master of the house to decide whether his digestion will be able to assimilate the novel treatment just proposed" (quoted pp. 112–113) — women as "positive agents of change and innovation" (Ferry, p. 112) acting on the masculine room against its owner's resistance. Where Eastlake's excerpt records the room's code from the diner's seat, Ferry's Garretts redesign it — the room-type page's first case of the coded room being worked on by the code's excluded. See separate-spheres, house-decorator, queen-anne-style.
From Wiener Kunst im Hause to the Wiener Werkstätte (Houze 2002/2006) — the room-code's Viennese confirmation and its intellectual extension: on the modern interior's founding scene the room grammar holds — "the social space of the dining room and the intellectual space of the library were coded masculine" (p. 159) — with the Viennese version adding the rationale the Anglo-American sources leave implicit: the dining room's social function (its gatherings) is what codes it masculine, not its oak. The Viennese house thereby confirms the room-code as pan-European structure at the birth of modern design, even as the Werkstätte's showrooms dissolved its upstairs/downstairs logic into one purchasable ensemble (see separate-spheres, drawing-room, wiener-werkstatte).
Social, Spatial and Temporal Factors (Lawrence 1987/2006) — the dining room's twentieth-century audit and its pairing: the editors' headnote names the room (with the kitchen) as the chapter's emphasis — "rooms for eating and preparing food in Australian and English households" (p. 184) — and delivers the modernist verdict: "although modernism brought aesthetic resolution to the kitchen and dining room, it failed to address a need for these rooms adapting to demographic shifts in family constitution and population" (p. 184). The room that Eastlake found coded by oak and ritual is, by the late twentieth century, a room whose form survived its household's transformations — the dining room as the case where aesthetic closure met social change (see kitchen, flexible-interior, consumerism).
The Apartment (Perec 1974/2006) — the room-type's satirical definition and its timetable-slot: "a dining-room is a room in which there are a table and chairs, and often a sideboard" (p. 259) — the room reduced to a furniture-inventory; the day's two formal meals — "12.30 The father and the mother have lunch in the [dining-room] (the child is a day boarder)" (p. 261) and "19.00 The whole small family has supper in the [dining-room]" (p. 261) — the room as the slice of the day when the household convenes (and the parenthetical "day boarder" that marks the child's absence as a scheduling fact); and the open-plan renaming — "not a dining-room but an eating-area" (p. 262). Where the page's other sources give the room its code (Eastlake), its critique and redecoration (Ferry's Garretts), its Viennese confirmation (Houze) and its modernist audit (Lawrence), Perec gives its plainest functional definition and its place in the nycthemeral day — the room-type as furniture-list plus time-slice (nycthemeral, everyday-life).
The Kitchen as a Place to Be (Potter 1990/2006) — the room-pair's circulation architecture, the page's only source that designs the kitchen–dining relation into cabinetry: the Penton kitchen "with dining space adjoining, touching and noting all its perimeters" (p. 266) in one continuous space; the through-circulation of table things — "clearing to the outside of the sink surface, washing, drying, storage into the two-sided glass fronted cupboard, table-laying from the other side of it" (p. 267); the one-way cupboard formalizing the route — "A cupboard opening only one way – towards the dining table – does duty for what is usually called a 'sideboard;' that is to say, it houses items such as table napkins and cereals which simply go backwards and forwards to the table without any more interior kitchen circulation" (p. 267); and the boundary's everyday negotiation at item scale — the cupboard "hesitating in its orientation" for things "used partly within the kitchen and partly on the table," where "From the angle of inclination, the kitchen interior is seen to win, but… marmalade, as an instance, might store in the table cupboard. The logic of this would depend partly on familiarity of use" (p. 267). Cooperation built in: "Help with various operations, such as washing-up or clearing from the dining table, or table setting, therefore takes place across the relevant work-surfaces rather than side-on to them" (p. 266). Where the page's other sources give the dining room its code, audit or satire, Potter builds its adjacency — the two rooms as one circulation system (see kitchen, everyday-life).

Open Questions

The excerpt is titled for this room but barely designs it — the dining room appears only as the emblem of convention. Is the room-type recoverable from the sources that satirize it, or does the dining room exist in this wiki only as the negative image of the reform program?
The dining room is the wiki's first room-type page: the kitchen, parlour, library, boudoir and drawing room (paged separately) are the other members of the Victorian room-code system. What would a full set of room-type pages show about the house as a designed system — and should room-type pages be the wiki's standard unit for the domestic interior's historical analysis?
Eastlake accepts the dining room's solidity as use-based — but solidity and gloom are also social coding (masculine gravity, formality). Can the use/convention distinction be drawn inside a single room's furnishing, or does the dining room's case show the distinction collapsing?
The Garretts redecorate the dining room over the Paterfamilias's resistance and leave him "to decide whether his digestion will be able to assimilate the novel treatment" — is the masculine room's reform possible only by ironizing its owner (the digestion joke), and does the professional woman's authority in the masculine room hold only as wit? See separate-spheres, gender-and-the-interior.
Two theories of the room-type now face each other on this page: Eastlake's furnishing code (solidity, species, gender-grammar — the room as convention) and Perec's furniture-inventory ("a room in which there are a table and chairs, and often a sideboard" — the room as function-holder). Is the code just the inventory grown social (formality = the table and its rituals), or does the inventory deliberately withhold everything the code encodes — and can a room-type page hold both without collapsing into either? See nycthemeral.

Notes

This is the wiki's first room-type page; drawing-room is its counterpart, created from the same source. The room-type genre is new to the concept space — treat domestic-interior as the hub page and the room-type pages as its annexes.