Shelf life

Shelves provide functional storage. But as we learnt from the setting of all those Covid lockdown interviews – the expert in front of their books, photographs and tchotchkes – shelves express personality, achievement and erudition. As those same interviews demonstrated, sometimes our best curatorial efforts might miss something too revealing about what we really read and truly value. For the Victorians, who were obsessed with privacy and established many of the norms around middle-class dwelling that continue to influence aspects of contemporary domesticity, shelves posed a particular problem precisely because you could never be sure who was looking at them and what kind of conclusions they might reasonably draw.
The great British architect of middle-class respectability, Robert Kerr, designed homes where privacy was the paramount and exalted objective, achieved through a complex network of ever more enclosable spaces designed to protect property and personal information from the apparently insatiable curiosity of servants.

Oh, the shame of it