Nooks and Corners / being the companion volume to 'From Kitchen to Garret'

NOOKS AND CORNERS
PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE LONDON


I have been asked by a great many readers of ‘From Kitchen to Garret’ to produce another book on the ever fascinating subject of household management and house decoration; and I have been furthermore requested to consider Edwin and Angelina from another standpoint, and to regard them as having increased their borders in more ways than one, and, having become richer and at the same time more numerous, as now beginning to move from their small house, furnished so joyfully and hopefully in the early flush of their married happiness, to one larger in every way, and more suited to their present income and growing family.
I confess that I begin my task with just a little diffidence, and a little misgiving, too, and feel just a wee bit as sad over the beginning of this little volume as I know my young couples must feel when, no longer quite as young as they were, they turn their backs on that dear little first home, and take up their abode in the newer, far more convenient habitation, welcomed so joyfully by the children, who declare that now, and now only, they will have room in which to breathe!
For, successful as ‘From Kitchen to Garret’ is, and many as are the friends I have made through its pages, I am rather doubtful about another book on the same lines; still, I can but do my best, and so, without any more forewords on the matter, I will at once plunge into my subject, and will trust that all those who have made their little houses pretty by either following or improving on the hints given in my first book will not disdain to follow me once more into those Nooks and Corners of house-furnishing and house-keeping, which were deemed too ambitious for my young couple, or were forgotten in the first essay on the subject.
Besides which, as life goes on, I am thankful to say that decoration becomes more and more a fine art.
Formerly people rather scorned the idea of being ‘house-proud’ in the same manner in which all are nowadays. Their house-pride was merely expressed in the amount of gilding compressed into a single room; in the thickness of their carpets, the heaviness of their draperies, and the general costliness of the plenishing, and the amount of money these things had cost was far more often spoken of than anything else; while the name of the upholsterer was mentioned, not as a guarantee that taste and skill had been called into action, but as a proof that money in this case had not been an object. Formerly, did I say? Alas! cases still exist of this heavy and depressing style of thing! Money is poured out like water on carpets that are nightmares, and on papers that are as absolutely meaningless as they are ugly, and the despair of anyone who is called in, as I am constantly, to mitigate the horrors of some gigantic monument of bad taste and lavish expenditure.