The Aroma of Bad Taste: the atmosphere of the Working Class home and its representation in the Literature of Design Reform.

This paper examines the representation of the everyday working class home in a set of literatures that strive to capture an atmosphere made foul by the occupant’s execrable taste. The stench of everyday working class life is evidenced again and again in many types of British literature. If observation of the underclass and its dirty habits was subject matter for vicarious Victorian writers it was also very much a part of the social and design reformers agenda in the interwar years. George Orwell would observe and capture the fetid atmosphere of working class domestic circumstances in The Road to Wigan Pier in 1937. At the same time design reformers such as Elizabeth Denby and Anthony Bertram would suggest methods not only to sanitise the working class home, both literally and visually, but also to cleanse the bad taste of its occupants. Equally the nascent discipline of ethnography and Mass Observation would attempt to document and record the social mores of the working class and their particular domestic culture. However, when the project of Modernism finally took hold in Britain in the interwar years clean lines quickly became synonymous with clean lives. It was not just matters of personal hygiene that would so exercise the design reformers but essentially the aroma of bad taste.