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Abstract

There is a various, shifting, but necessary relationship between ourselves in their different aspects and locations, and the scenes, furnishings and costumes which equip the events through which we move. The relationship is emblematic. Just as speech and dress are used to place a person socially, intellectually and culturally, so are furniture, house and even district used as map references for the present position and compass direction of a social career. We persuade ourselves that we can read in streets and frontages, and in the interiors deliberately, cunningly or rudely offered for view, the incomes, the social standing and the pretensions of the dwellers within, attaching the correct social weighting to looped window curtains as against straight hanging ones, or none, to figurines as against posters from the twenties, to an assortment of lamps on walls and furniture as against a central light.