Flashback, December 1897: Wharton’s ‘Decoration of Houses’ Sets Architectural Standard

One hundred and twenty years ago this month, Edith Wharton published her first full-length book. Unlike nearly all her other works, it was nonfiction. Even more unusually, the strong-willed woman collaborated on the project. And, within a few short years, she was able to put her own ideas into practice in her own home in Western Massachusetts. 

Already, Wharton had written a couple of short-story collections when she decided she was ready to leap to a more extended work. She had a subject she felt strongly about—the hideously garish architecture she saw among her own moneyed class—and someone who shared her scorn: Ogden Codman, Jr., the Boston architect who had worked on the Newport “cottage” “Land’s End” for her and her husband Teddy.

The Decoration of Houses, the product of their thinking, did more than earn their publisher, Scribner's, good sales, or even launch Wharton firmly on the path toward her iconic status as first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in fiction (for her 1920 novel, The Age of Innocence). For thousands of the well-heeled over the years not in the habit of reading much of anything, let alone her deeply ambivalent fiction about them, it set a simpler, more tasteful direction in home design. 

Nearly 40 years later, Wharton recalled the dominant trend in homes of the wealthy in her memoir, A Backward Glance:

“The architects of that day looked down on house-decoration as a branch of dress-making, and left the field to the upholsterers, who crammed every room with curtains, lambrequins, jardinières of artificial plants, wobbly velvet-covered tables littered with silver gewgaws, and festoons of lace on mantelpieces and dressing-tables.”

Wharton had helped Codman land one of his biggest commissions, the Breakers, the Newport mansion of Cornelius Vanderbilt II. Perhaps she felt that the young architect’s restraint would mitigate the worst of the family’s excesses, since she wrote him in the spring of 1897: “I wish the Vanderbilts didn’t retard culture so very thoroughly. They are entrenched in a sort of Thermopylae of bad taste, from which apparently no force on earth can dislodge them.”

The first step toward overthrowing this mindset was a counter-revolution, in a phrase that their readers would understand perfectly: Good interior decoration, they proclaimed, was a matter of “good breeding.” But paradoxically, in a bow toward social mobility, they posited that these principles could be learned, a matter of “calculating”—particularly by attending to the example of fine European style they had examined in their separate travels.

All of this sounded a bit too esoteric to the president of the company to which the pair originally submitted their manuscript, Macmillan’s George Platt Brett, who, in a testy meeting, told them he was canceling the firm’s provisional agreement to release it. The annoyed Wharton told Codman that he was responsible for the rejection, informing him that, from then on, he should leave the marketing of the manuscript in her hands. 

Thankfully for the mental well-being of the architect, at the crucial revision stage of the manuscript, Codman was sidelined by sunstroke. Wharton turned for help to a lawyer who was her friend and soulmate, Walter Berry. Heeding his keen critical eye , she made appropriate alternations and turned in a manuscript suitable enough for Scribner's consultant, critic William Crary Brownell, to suggest acceptance, which the house did.

Through summer and fall, Wharton kept up a steady drumbeat of letters—29 in all—in which she peppered Scribner’s with suggestions for the book’s cover, as well as the title’s wording, printing and placement, not to mention the binding, paper, illustrations, introduction and conclusion, according to Eleanor Dwight’s 1994 biography, Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life. 

Given that background, as well as Wharton’s peevishness with Codman when the relationship with Macmillan went awry, one might instinctively side with Marc Aronson, author of a 1994 New York Times Book Review article called “Wharton and the House of Scribner: The Novelist as Pain in the Neck."

In other ways, though, Wharton’s behavior was understandable. In an era when women were still at a decided disadvantage in business, such demanding attention to detail might have been the only way she could ensure that the book would find its audience and she would gain a lasting outlet for her energy and questing intelligence.

Her marriage didn’t help matters. While not yet plagued by the mental illness that would doom their relationship in the next decade, it was increasingly clear that Teddy was incompatible with her in terms of age and intellect. He was, as affluent men of the time often were, a “man of leisure” whose major occupation was managing the couple’s real estate—and he was not even particularly good at that. He was the last person that Edith could lean on for editorial or commercial advice in dealing with Scribner’s. It all fell to her.

The publishing house gave the work the kind of attention that suggested they didn’t expect many buyers beyond the authors’ circle of family and friends: a handsome, clean typeface and layout reflecting its call for artistic simplicity and taste, but also a limited print run. To nearly everyone’s surprise, the book sold out its first edition and continued to yield royalties to Wharton until her death.

The wider impact was even greater. The book, Dwight observed, “initiated a new style of decoration, drawing on classical models that combined simplicity, harmony and beauty, which was carried on by others, such as Elsie de Wolfe, in rebellion against Victorian clutter.”

The novelist’s relationship with her collaborator and publisher continued strong for a few years until persistent strains attenuated her ties with them. For Codman, the sticking point became Wharton’s planned cottage in The Berkshires, The Mount. The architect, already chafing about her incessant demands and confident enough now in his practice to feel he didn’t need her patronage anymore, used a dispute about money to effect a mutual decision that he withdraw. The break was amicable enough that he remained on good terms with her for the rest of her life.

It took a half dozen years longer for Wharton to move away from Scribner's. The publisher’s enthusiasm for her work waxed and waned with the sales of her books. In 1912, disappointed by the budget for The Custom of the Country, she turned to Appleton for The Reef. Though Scribner’s published a few of her subsequent books, Appleton became from then on her primary conduit to readers.

The Decoration of Houses has naturally taken a back seat to Wharton’s fiction, but it represented an important milestone in her life. Its unanticipated commercial success made Scribner’s more open to her later ideas for novels and short-story collections, and it gave her increasing self-confidence. 

Moreover, the need to articulate her principles made her more conscious of the house that she would create in The Berkshires. The Mount embodied many of the principles of The Decoration of Houses, from its downstairs marble gallery (“the design, like those of the walls, should be clear and decided in outline”) to her library (its general decoration should “form a background or setting to the books, rather than to distract attention from them”).