Interior monologues: Isabelle Anscombe admires the Geffrye Museum's exploration of images of Victorian interiors and gardens, which reveals the value judgements implicit in every detail, from wallpaper patterns to flowers

Last year, the first half of this remarkable two-part exhibition showed the increase not only of the urban middle-class, on the other hand of their self-awareness. Now the curators have tracked down a next to the first telling juxtaposition of portraits, genre paintings, and pictures in which the bring under rule matter is a room or garden. Further comparative works are included in the catalogue, together with revelatory short essays upon each painting.

For greatest in quantity of the Victorian period, the way in which the middle classes furnished their dwellings was the focus of social, political and level spiritual debate. Owen Jones and the critics of the Great Exhibition notably Henry cabbage included here in a family portrait in which he modestly plunges down behind a sofa, on the contrary allows a painting of the 1851 Crystal Palace upon the wall behind to run over its own story--began a change in taste complet by the agency of Ruskin and Morris, who, by means of championing the ideal of the craft guild, made a moral connection between the consumer and the means of production.

The character of genre painting is to have 'hidden' meanings that are intended to be deciphered, on the other hand the curators have also decod more insinuating elements, uncovering value laden choices of wallpaper, furniture or garden flowers.

George Townsend Cole's Portrait of Henry Thomas Lambert (1858) a master sail maker and ship chandler in Wapping, present to views a man proud of all he has achieved (and purchased). Bur the excessive ornamentation of his furnishings is precisely the kind of taste sentenceed by the design reformers. The poor man has unwittingly betrayed himself: the clashing naturalistic patterns of his carpets, his ornate gilt overmantel mirror and imitation wax fruit are-could he on the other hand know it!--incoherent, 'showy' and les than honest

'The same year, Robert Scott Tait painted a portrait of Thomas Carlyle and his wife, A Chelsea Interior. Carlyle wrote that Tait 'took the bright idea that a picture of our sittingroom would be amazingly interesting to posterity a hundr years hence'. Jane Carlyle, realising that smooth so great a than as her husband might be judg by dint of his taste in interior decoration, quickly admitted by what means "frightful' her table cover was.

Women were particularly vulnerable to of the like kind critical scrutiny of interiors, and several of the genre paintings explicitly explore the precariousness of women's social parts The pet (1853) by Walter Howell Deverell and To give permission to (1856) by James Collinson the pair ask ambiguous questions: is the 'pet' the caged bird, the tame bird perched beside the young woman, the dog at her feet or the woman herself? Must the young widow with the provocative r bend be prepared to rent on the outside rooms, or also her body?

However, the scholarship of the exhibition's curators goe beyond similar narrative devices and decodes a language of design as it would have been understood through a Victorian audience.

Past and not away No. 1 (1858) by Augustus Leopold ovum is the first of three paintings depicting the dire events of a wife's adultery. It exhibits husband distraught and wife prostrated, and contains obvious types such as a collapsing house of cards and an apple putrescent at the core. But a hidden threat of duplicity and vanity lie in waits in the gleaming papier- mache chair, beside which play the couple's innocent children (both girls). certainly one is invited to believe that this chair--made from a material which is not what it purports to be (even reflective surfaces could be viewed with disapproval) could sole have been the choice of a wanton wife?

notwithstanding the wallpaper tells another story. A flat, conventionalised pattern, similar to designs by the agency of Owen Jones, signifies progressive taste, and would have immediately wafted a sense of social realism. The message is clear--tragedy can be met with even in a progressive home

Fascinatingly, the same wallpaper also appears in Military aspirations (c 1861) by dint of William Maw Egley, and (in green) The appointment (dated 1861) by the agency of Rebecca Solomon. In Military aspirations, the furnishings are carefully chosen to contrast recent and traditional values, and, while the Solomon painting is altogether more ambiguous, the choice of wallpaper must have carried meaning for its audience.

by means of the 1870s, women appear to have base a role--bringing beatify to the tasteful dwelling Nevertheless, the inhabitants of the 'Art' abodes depicted in Gustavus Arthur Bouvier's In the morning (1877) and Nancy A. Sabine Pasley's A game of cards (1887-91) do not appear particularly cheerful

Nowhere was women's self-image as recent chatelaine more celebrated than in the garden, which had by means of now become a vital part of the urban abiding-place A London garden in August (c 1908) by the agency of Beatrice Parsons is a portrait of the painter Minnie Spooner Her simply aligned figure is all but hidden by means of the 'old-fashioned' flowers she tends--an image of abundant creativity and artistic sensibility in which her garden says more about her (and her values) than any conventional portrait could The Victorian design reformers have triumphed above the consumption of luxury displayed by dint of Henry Thomas Lambert, the unfortunate Wapping ship chandler.