Keeping up with the Joneses : Attitudes toward modernization through wallpaper among the Swedish farming population 1850-90

The aim of this essay is to examine how people living in the Swedish countryside looked upon changes in the interiors through modernization in 1850-90. For the first time, there was an abundance of objects available in stores in the countryside that the majority of the population had money buy. Many novelties were introduced in the interior decoration of ordinary peoples´ homes. This study focuses on the introduction and use of wallpaper and is based on a questionnaire about wallpaper sent from the Nordiska museet, National museum of Culture history in Sweden, to people all over Sweden in 1948. 148 people responded to the questions about use and attitudes toward wallpaper during the second half of the 19th century. My theoretical perspective is cultural diffusion, the spread of cultural items, more specific the diffusion of innovations from larger to smaller places, often influenced by social elites, hierarchical diffusion, and between individuals, contagious diffusion. The analytical perspective used for the analysis is based on the concepts of basic and variable modernity, initiated by the historian Sven-Eric Liedman. Basic modernity describes the structural modernization in society as a whole within the fields of economy, technology and natural sciences. The variable modernity represents the different attitudes, likes and dislikes, opinions, viewpoints and cultural differences every individual possesses, the attitudes that decide how and if the modernity is received in each household. My intent has been to ascertain the factors that made production and distribution of relatively cheap wallpaper all over Sweden possible, pinpoint the most important driving forces for creating an interest in wallpaper within the villages, discover how wallpaper was introduced in the individual homes of farmers and how wallpaper was received. The use of wallpaper in the interiors has been examined in order to find out if, and how the modernization affected and was affected by the way people were living their lives within the home