The ‘House Beautiful’ that Oscar Wilde referred to in his 1882 American lecture series on decorating and furnishing the aesthetic house, paraphrased the ideals of John Ruskin and William Morris for a wider public and illustrated a whole gamut of late Victorian interior design principles. Aestheticism, a mid-to-late nineteenth-century art movement, resists any single definition, because it advocated an aesthetic sensibility that was not limited to art. One of the tenets of the movement, the ‘art for art's sake’ dictum, referred not only to the creation of art without moral, religious or narrative considerations, but also to the belief in bringing a quality of attention to the structure and execution of one's surroundings. Proponents of the aesthetic movement like Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater surrounded themselves with fashion, art and interior design in order to reach a level of refinement that elevated their lives to works of art. As aestheticism became a more widely recognized movement, designers such as Edward William Godwin and William Morris found that their embroideries, tapestries, fabrics, wallpapers, drawings and sketches, furniture and stained glass proved popular with British tastes. Morris, in particular, strove to cultivate an agreeable ‘house-hold taste’ so as to promote a superior national aesthetic.

The aesthetic interiors admired and implemented by Wilde and Morris provided material for British women writers like Lady Barker and Mary Eliza Haweis to add their voice to the education of British tastes.