The Motion of Moveables
While moral and spiritual comfort arrived in English through Anglo-Norman, our sense
of comfortable as being physically content, relaxed and reclined, appears in the late eighteenth
century. Soon after, a type of French easy chair, the confortable, became popular at home and
abroad. What made it cozy? The systematic use of springs, hidden beneath inflated upholstery. In
1833, it was still possible for J.C. Loudon to claim that “the effect of spiral springs as stuffing
has been long known to men of science; but so little to upholsterers, that a patent for using them
in stuffing was taken out, some years ago, as a new invention.”22 Soon after, however, chairs
gained ornate shapes, cushioned bases that had been impossible before the employment of
springs. “It would appear that as the century drew to its close”, writes Dorothy Holley, “some of
the furniture assumed proportions so great as though it would burst.”23 During a wild treatise on
posture, Sigfried Giedion describes this period as the reign of the upholster. “Furniture became a
means of filling the room; to inflate its bulk was the first step.”24 Whereas chairs were once
classified under a set of possessions called moveables (meubles), now that motion had moved
into the seat itself.25
Figures from the “Springing Up” chapter of John W. Stephenson’s Furniture
Upholstering (1914) — Source.
The elasticity of springs created new caches in the Victorian imagination. Chairs were no longer
skeletons — now their bones were buried inside vaulted seats and cushions, fabrics domed on
animate springs in coiled and zig-zag form. With new spaces (however hidden) come new
narrative possibilities. To wit: a story called “The Scissors Swallower” from Frederick Barnard
and Charles H. Ross’s Behind the Brass Knocker: Some Grim Realities (1883). Mrs. Mite’s
boarding house has a particular problem: the scissors always disappear. Not one pair, mind, “I
mean everybody’s scissors—the scissors of the united household—and every lady member of it,
and, indeed, a few of the gentlemen even, continually invest in pair after pair of scissors with
quite reckless prodigality.”26 A rumor starts — hearsay spreads like bedbugs in the
boardinghouse — that a certain “aged, shriveled, high-dried” woman is the culprit.27 The narrator
first compares her to a voracious shark, then to a “cheerful nautical person” who participated in a
fatal, object-eating wager.28 Upon dissection, his stomach is found to contain half-digested
knives, “some of them with four blades”, among other kitchen items.29
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When the old woman dies, another kind of dissection takes place. Mrs. Mite inherits her
armchair and reupholsters it, ripping off the worn leather to get at the stuffing below. “The
stuffing below! What think you it was composed of? Horsehair, to be sure, and springs more or
less damaged, and fifty-three pairs of scissors that had somehow slipped down through the
crevices in the woodwork.”30 The Scissors Swallower of the title is not the late woman after all,
but her lounger. The story trades on a resemblance between the spring cushion’s rhythmic
compressions and a stomach’s accordion rhythms. The seat partakes in a mechanical form of
deglutition and digestion.
An 18th-century engraving by Robert Bénard after Radel, which shows the stages
of upholstering a chair before the popularization of springs — Source.
In the spatial imaginary, locked rooms are a default location for hidden psychic content. Yet in
the examples to follow, repression is offset by a kind of evidential decompression. Moving
furniture resists the compartmentalization of domestic space: worn-out springs hint at last night’s
affairs, the rocker’s rasps amplify an activity taking place behind closed doors. If the basement
of American homes served as a storehouse for the id in the twentieth century, the upwelling of
libidinous energy exploited by Hitchcock and other contributors to horror, new furniture
technologies played an analogous role in the nineteenth-century parlor. For the latter case,
however, we find moving furniture explicitly coupled to fraught scenes of sexuality.
Dershowitz was not the first teen to get off on seatbacks. Consider, for instance, the trope of
broken springs or rockers, evidence of hanky-pank conducted in the social, family rooms of
Britain and America. Three years after “The Scissors Swallower”, the
Birmingham Owl published a humorous “letter” titled “A Sweetheart’s Bill,” supposedly penned
by a father named Hezekiah Blodgers, whose daughter, Maria, has given her suitor “the
sack”.31 Note, below, the broken rocking chair and the damaged upholstery springs.
Detail from “A Sweetheart’s Bill” in The Owl: A Journal of Wit and Wisdom (1886)
— Source.