Living in Style: Fine Furniture in Victorian Quebec

Patricia Morley is professor emeritus of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University and the author of Margaret Laurence: The Long
Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

Culture is reflected in the objects of daily life and in the lifestyles
they support. This book focuses on the changing tastes of an emerging
society through the furniture produced by hundreds of cabinetmakers,
carvers, and decorators who worked in Quebec during Victoria’s reign.
It reflects the elegance, refinement, sensibilities, and eccentricities
of a remarkable era. Generously illustrated with 490 photographs in
black and white, and 60 in full color, the heavy, handsome volume also
reflects the sensuous and self-indulgent side of a culture now thought
of as prim and proper.

Editor John Porter, active in Quebec’s museum world for two decades,
has been chief curator at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts since 1990.
His introduction concludes that the artifacts reveal a world where an
apparent consensus “often disguised a multifaceted, pluralistic social
reality with ample room for individual ambitions and personalities to
flourish.”

This labor of love, begun as a multidisciplinary research project in
1986, brought together specialists and graduate students in search of a
shared past. Porter anticipates that other enthusiasts “will
undoubtedly find, as we have done, a nostalgic delight in disinterring
more of these shared memories lying dormant in our collective
consciousness.”

Porter and his team have created a work that will interest historians,
artists, sociologists, and craftpersons.