Amateur Work: Reader Participation and Dialogicm in Late-nineteenth-century Domestic Design Advice

摘要

This article offers a rereading of Victorian domestic design advice that emphasizes its dialogic qualities rather than presuming its didactic or discursive status. Previous work on late nineteenth-century design advice literature has rightly identified its distance from everyday practice, but various publications demonstrate that domestic design was mediated by readers and often developed through an ongoing conversation with them. This article identifies the dialogic apparatus of one late nineteenth-century how-to magazine, Amateur Work (1881-96), edited by Francis Chilton-Young. Adopting Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of dialogism (how texts emerge from different authors and "extraliterary" contexts), this article shows how Amateur Work's editor and writers were in constant dialog with their readers, principally through the reader-response column in each issue entitled "Amateurs in Council." Case studies on bookcase and fernery construction in this section serve as examples of how content was generated out of reader-to-reader interaction, how tips were shared, and how readers adapted advice to their particular circumstances. Such evidence challenges the presumption that readers of domestic design advice were passive, uncritically following prescriptions by authors or reading such literature for entertainment alone.