Atdtda22: [42.2i] Kitsch in third-class, 610

[Paul Nightingale]

[610.17] "... a suite of equivocal shadows, whose walls were covered with
Lincrusta-Walton embossed in Asian motifs, not all of them considered
respectable ..."

And so to:

[611.9-10] "Lew undid the line and carefully lowered Lamont Replevin (for it
was he) to the smart linoleum flooring."

See the Wikipedia summary:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincrusta


On modernist anxiety, the following from Roger Fry, writing in 1912, is to
the point:

I take pains to write the succeeding paragraphs in a railway
refreshment-room, where I am actually looking at those terribly familiar but
fortunately fleeting images which such places afford. And one must remember
that public places of this kind merely reflect the average citizen's soul,
as expressed in his home. 

The space my eye travels over is a small one, but I am appalled at the
amount of "art" that it harbours. The window towards which I look is filled
in its lower part by stained glass; within a highly elaborate border,
designed by someone who knew the conventions of thirteenth-century glass, is
a pattern of yellow and purple vine leaves with bunches of grapes, and
flitting about among these many small birds. In front is a lace curtain with
patterns taken from at least four centuries and as many countries. On the
walls, up to a height of four feet, is a covering of lincrusta walton
stamped with a complicated pattern in two colours, with sham silver
medallions. Above that a moulding but an inch wide, and yet creeping
throughout its whole with a degenerate descendant of a Graeco-Roman carved
guilloche pattern; this has evidently been cut out of the wood by machine or
stamped out of some composition--its nature is so perfectly concealed that
it is hard to say which. Above this is a wall-paper in which an effect of
eighteenth-century satin brocade is imitated by shaded staining of the
paper. Each of the little refreshment-tables has two cloths, one arranged
symmetrically with the table, the other a highly ornate printed cotton
arranged "artistically" in a diagonal position. In the centre of each table
is a large pot in which every beautiful quality in the material and making
of pots has been carefully obliterated by methods each of which implies
profound scientific knowledge and great inventive talent. Within each pot is
a plant with large dark green leaves, apparently made of india-rubber. This
painful catalogue makes up only a small part of the inventory of the "art"
of the restaurant. If I were to go on to tell of the legs of the tables, of
the electric light fittings, of the chairs into the wooden seats of which
some tremendous mechanical force has deeply impressed a large distorted
anthemion--if I were to tell of all these things, my reader and I might both
begin to realize with painful acuteness something of the horrible toil
involved in all this display. Display is indeed the end and explanation of
it all. Not one of these things has been made because the maker enjoyed the
making; not one has been bought because its contemplation would give any one
any pleasure, but solely because each of these things is accepted as a
symbol of a particular social status. I say their contemplation can give no
one pleasure; they are there because their absence would be resented by the
average man who regards a large amount of futile display as in some way
inseparable from the conditions of that well-to-do life to which he belongs
or aspires to belong. If everything were merely clean and serviceable he
would proclaim the place bare and uncomfortable.

Cited in: Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde,
Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism, Duke University Press, 1987, 250-251.

Cf. the following throwaway comment:

Decoration in the superior sorts of carriage, and in many of the ordinary
types also, especially on the Midland Railway and the Great Central, was
highly elaborate. The art-flights of the British Pullman Car Company had
given people a taste for gilt-and-gingerbread. Even the staid and solid
London and North Western Railway achieved a combination of emerald green
moquette and pink lincrusta-walton in its best third class; the Midland
enjoyed itself with luscious plushes and much moulding in walnut or
mahogany. Handles and luggage racks glittered under the gas, and the
lighting fixtures themselves blossomed.

From: Hamilton Ellis, British Railway History: An Outline from the Accession
of William IV to the Nationalization of Railways, 1877-1947, George Allen
and Unwin, 1959, 178.