Since they're usually rich and upper class, my characters tend to live in large houses. I plant my dukes in a fictional version of Norfolk House or Northumberland House—buildings that occupied large chunks of London real estate. In the country, their domiciles are the fictional counterparts of Derbyshire’s Chatsworth or Hardwick Hall. If your library measures, say, 30 X 50 feet, with built-in shelves, you don’t have to worry all that much about where to put the books. Nor do you fret about fitting in a set of the latest mode in furniture for reading or writing or staring into the fire thinking shallow or deep thoughts, according to your inclinations.
But a great many people, including celebrities like Beau Brummell and Lord Byron, lived in lodgings. For them and others living in smaller quarters, furniture designers exercised their ingenuity.
Above is s a piece of fashionable furniture from January 1814.
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The chaste and elegant library table represented in the annexed engraving, is of a convenient form and moderate size, and is suited to an apartment of small dimensions: at the same time it exhibits that breadth of parts and greatness of design, which characterize most articles of modern furniture, and give a dignity heretofore unknown. The recess beneath renders it also extremely commodious for a writing table, which was not the case with the library tables formerly constructed. The chair is designed with equal attention to elegance and convenience, and made to correspond. They may both be formed of mahogany, with rings and ornaments of bronze; the shelves of the table will divide, so as to admit either a row of folios and octavos, or two rows of quartos.
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Excerpt from Rudolph Ackermann’s Repository of arts, literature, commerce, manufactures, fashions and politics, for January 1814, Vol. XI, 1814.
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