The Victorian sofa: coil springs, deep buttoning and the Chesterfield

In brief. Between 1837 and 1901 the sofa acquired the construction it kept for a century: coil springs under stitched horsehair, deep buttoning through the cover, and a low, padded profile in which upholstery rather than show-wood made the shape. The Chesterfield — arms level with the back, deep-buttoned leather, a low sprung seat — reached its familiar form in this period, though no museum record cited here confirms the story that an Earl of Chesterfield commissioned the first one. Mass production after the Great Exhibition of 1851 put sprung, buttoned seating into middle-class parlours, and the Arts and Crafts reaction produced the rush-seated Sussex chair and the adjustable-back “Morris” chair.

Coil springs patented

1828Standard for domestic seating by the 1830s; nearly universal by 1850

The Great Exhibition

1 May–11 Oct 1851Six million visitors; 244 objects bought to found the V&A

Deep buttoning in the trade

1860–80Albert Bentley’s upholsterer’s models, crimson damask, buttoned throughout

Morris & Co’s Sussex chair

c. 1860Ebonised beech, rush seat — the reaction to stuffed comfort

Howard & Sons’ royal warrant

1901Upholstered goods to Edward VII; “Elastic Seats” patented 1866

When did coil springs become standard in sofas?

Coil springs became the normal construction for British domestic seating in the 1830s, within a decade of the Queen’s accession. The Museum of the Home, describing a spoon-back armchair of about 1860, records that coiled steel springs were patented in 1828 and became standard in the mid-nineteenth century, allowing bulkier forms and deep buttoning that conveyed both comfort and luxury. The V&A, on an ebonised settee of about 1845–60, is more precise: spiral springs had been used for specialised furniture in the late eighteenth century, became standard for domestic seating only in the 1830s, and by 1850 almost every drawing-room chair or settee was sprung.

What a spring does to a seat can be seen on one chair. The V&A’s walnut parlour chair of about 1845 keeps its original upholstery: six copper-coated steel coil springs stitched to the webbing and compressed under a tacked cover, with stitched horsehair on top. The springs gave extra resilience, the museum says, and resulted in an increase in the depth of the upholstery. That is the whole Victorian profile in a sentence. A sprung seat needs a deep box to hold the springs, and the box is covered in cloth; the show-wood drops to a moulding at the foot or vanishes, and the sitter sinks lower and further back. Henry Eyles of Bath sent a walnut easy chair to the Great Exhibition of 1851; the V&A found its original springs and webbing intact beneath a later velvet.

Why were Victorian sofas deep-buttoned?

Deep buttoning was a practical answer to a practical problem, and only then a fashion. Loose horsehair on a sprung seat or padded back migrates and lumps with use; the earlier remedy, seen on seventeenth-century chairs, was to stitch through the stuffing at intervals. Pulling the cover itself down into the stuffing and holding it with a button does the same job more thoroughly, dividing the filling into cells that cannot shift. The V&A’s Belter sofa of about 1856 shows how permanent the pattern was: when it was conserved, the original horsehair pads still carried the original buttoning pattern, which guided the new cover.

The second reason was display. Buttoning uses more cloth and far more labour than a stretched cover, and the diamond folds catch the light in silk, velvet or leather. The Museum of the Home says plainly that the technique conveyed comfort and luxury; a buttoned back announced that its owner had paid an upholsterer for days of work. Bentley’s crimson models are buttoned on every surface, which is what a firm working for the royal household would want a client to see.

What did the Great Exhibition of 1851 change?

The Great Exhibition turned furniture into a spectacle and fixed the mid-Victorian taste for display. It opened in Paxton’s Crystal Palace on 1 May 1851 and closed on 11 October, having received more than six million visitors and nearly fourteen thousand exhibitors; the V&A records that 244 objects were bought from it for the Government School of Design, the seed of the museum that opened in 1857. Its sections — raw materials, machinery, manufactures and fine art — put the machine and the upholsterer’s shop under one glass roof.

The machine had been coming for some time. The Science Museum holds a mahogany veneer cut in 1791–93 on machinery patented by Samuel Bentham in 1793, forerunner of his production line for pulley blocks at Portsmouth after 1804. By mid-century the V&A places moulded veneer in industrial use and cites Belter’s New York patent of 1858, which let chair backs be made in batches of eight from a single mould, cutting time and cost. Not everyone approved: Henry Cole staged an exhibition of “False Principles in Design” at Marlborough House in 1852, in which a glazed cotton shown at the Great Exhibition by a London furnishing shop was catalogued as item sixteen, condemned for its imitation of ribbon upon chintz. Whether a machine-made thing should pretend to be something else was the argument of the next fifty years.

What are balloon-back and spoon-back chairs, and where did the chaise longue and ottoman fit?

The balloon-back was the standard Victorian side chair and the spoon-back its upholstered, sprung cousin. The V&A holds balloon-backs of about 1850–55: a mahogany side chair with turned front legs and a woven horsehair seat, and a child’s version of 1845–55 stained to look like rosewood, with the downward-curving hoop of the back and a curved bar across its centre. These were dining and bedroom chairs, made in quantity, and their hair-cloth seats were the plain end of the trade. The spoon-back was the drawing-room piece. The Museum of the Home’s example of about 1860 has a carved and scrolled mahogany frame on castors and a deep-buttoned back that curves like the bowl of a spoon to meet the sitter’s spine; its sprung seat is why it could be so low and so full. The V&A’s walnut parlour chair of about 1845, with a cartouche-shaped back and a Berlin woolwork cover of roses, is the same idea a decade earlier.

The chaise longue and the ottoman were the period’s long seats without a conventional pair of arms. The V&A holds a child’s chaise longue of 1851, mahogany with a scrolled head, short turned legs and black horsehair upholstery with a removable bolster, made for Mary Bulmer of West Derby in her third year; an Austrian bentwood chaise longue of 1860–70 shows the form reaching the mass market. Bentley’s miniatures include a circular ottoman, a buttoned, backless island of a seat meant to stand in the middle of a room, its cover often worked at home; the V&A’s beaded ottoman cover of about 1860 carries a floral bouquet in seed beads on a bright blue ground.

What is a Chesterfield sofa, and where did the name come from?

A Chesterfield is a fully upholstered sofa with arms the same height as its back, a low sprung seat and a deep-buttoned cover, most often leather; the form is Victorian, but the name is older than any record of the sofa. Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773), is the man usually credited. English Heritage, which looks after his house at Blackheath, records his 448 letters of advice to his son and the damask, japanned and gilt furniture he lived among, and the V&A holds Roubiliac’s bust of him from about 1745. Neither institution, nor any other cited on this page, connects him to a sofa. The story that he commissioned the first Chesterfield so that a gentleman could sit upright without creasing his coat is a tradition of the trade and should be read as exactly that: unverified. On museum databases the word appears as a generic type — the National Trust catalogues a “Chesterfield” at Croft Castle, Herefordshire, in brown corduroy over feather, without date or maker — rather than as a named commission.

What can be verified is the construction, and every part of it is Victorian. Equal-height arms are only possible once the frame is a padded box rather than a show-wood rail; the low seat follows from a deep spring box; the buttoning is the mid-century technique described above; and leather, tough and wipeable, was the cover for smoking rooms and clubs — the Museum of the Home notes that smoking in the parlour was frowned upon, so it had to go somewhere else.

Who were Howard & Sons, and what is a “Howard” chair?

Howard & Sons of Berners Street were the London upholsterers whose fully stuffed easy chairs set the standard for Victorian comfort at the top of the market. The Furniture History Society’s dictionary of British makers traces John Howard from Leman Street in 1820 to 22 Berners Street in 1847, with a factory later in Cleveland Street and Tottenham Street. George Howard held a run of patents, among them one of 28 November 1866 for “Elastic Seats” and one of 1898 for improvements in leg rests. On 3 December 1901 Walter Howard received a royal warrant to supply upholstered goods to Edward VII.

The “Howard” armchair that upholsterers still copy is a low, fully upholstered easy chair with a squab cushion and short turned legs, its comfort coming from springing and stuffing rather than the frame. BIFMO cites the Harley armchair of 1899–1904 in the State Hermitage Museum, stamped “Howard and Sons Ltd.”, and identifies a sofa of about 1855 in Lady Vernon’s sitting room at Sudbury Hall, Derbyshire, as probably the earliest surviving example of the firm’s intact original upholstery. The firm was acquired by Lenygon and Morant in 1935 and continued as Howard Chairs Ltd.

What was the Arts and Crafts reaction against Victorian upholstery?

The Arts and Crafts movement rejected the stuffed, sprung and machine-ornamented parlour in favour of plain frames, honest materials and hand work. The V&A dates the recognition of the damaging effects of machine production to the 1840s, the new approaches to the 1860s and 1870s, and the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society to 1887, with its first show in 1888. William Morris, whose firm Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co was trading by 1862 and became Morris & Co by 1875, put it bluntly: have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.

The furniture that followed is the opposite of a Chesterfield. The Sussex chair, probably designed by Philip Webb about 1860 after a country pattern and used by Morris at Red House from that year, is ebonised beech with turned ornament and a rush seat; the V&A’s example of 1870–90 was listed in the firm’s 1912 catalogue at nine shillings and ninepence, and Liberty and Heal’s copied it. The adjustable-back chair, sketched by Warrington Taylor in the workshop of the Sussex carpenter Ephraim Colman in 1866 and produced from about 1869, has a bobbin-turned ebonised frame whose back rests in one of seven notches on a wooden rail, and loose cushions in Utrecht velvet, an embossed mohair plush the firm sold for seat upholstery; the V&A’s oak example of 1883–1900 has cushions in Morris’s “Violet and Columbine” wool and mohair. Comfort here is a cushion you can lift off a frame you can see — the loose squab on a resilient base that the caned day-beds of the 1680s had used, and that the twentieth century would take up again.

Parlour or drawing room: how were Victorian sofas used?

The drawing room was the formal reception room and the parlour the family’s sitting room, and the sofa in each was dressed accordingly. The Museum of the Home’s drawing room of 1830 sets the starting point: a sofa of about 1820 in blue upholstery on tapered legs, in a room that had become a female domain for reading, painting and letters. The museum’s townhouse of 1878, based on a terraced house in Chelsea, shows the mid-Victorian middle-class version — a red upholstered armchair draped with embroidery, red carpet, mint-green patterned wallpaper, floral curtains and a piano — built from surveys of real streets on the London maps of 1862 and 1878. The current Rooms Through Time sequence has no separate 1870 or 1890 room, so the 1878 townhouse stands for both.

Lighting explains the colours. English Heritage records that gas reached middle-class homes in the 1840s, and that impure gas blackened walls and ceilings, took the gilding off picture frames, gave off heat and headaches and killed all but the hardiest plants — the aspidistra survived because nothing else would. Against soot and fumes, deep reds, greens and browns hid the dirt, dark leather wiped clean, and loose covers and antimacassars took the wear. Electricity, first installed at Cragside in 1878, was not general until after the First World War.

Materials: what went where, and why

Leather or fabric?

The Victorian answer depended on the room and the light. Hide went where men smoked and gas burned: it wiped clean, did not hold the smell, and buttoned in deep diamonds it looked as expensive as it was. Fabric went to the drawing room, where the cover could be worked at home — Berlin woolwork on the V&A’s parlour chair of about 1845, seed beads on its ottoman cover of about 1860, silk damask on Bentley’s crimson models. Glazed printed cotton, the chintz Cole condemned for imitating ribbon and silk, made loose covers that protected the good cloth beneath; Morris & Co sold mohair plush for cushions on frames with no fixed upholstery at all. Horsehair cloth, woven from the same material that filled the seat, was the hard-wearing choice for dining chairs and for a child’s chaise longue in 1851. The pattern is the one still used: leather for the working room, fabric for the room on show.

What survives in a sofa made today

More of this period survives in a modern sofa than of any other, because the Victorian upholsterer settled the shape. The comparisons below pair a Victorian form with a piece made in England today; each is a descendant of the form, built with the springs and fillings of its own century, and none is a reproduction.