Hilary Hinds has written a compelling cultural history of twin beds—a study of an everyday object that reveals shifting cultural mores between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While the home, its material culture, and everyday life are now firmly on the horizon for historians, there are few studies that effectively interrogate the role of domestic objects in this way. Hinds uses a wide range of sources, including medical discourse, advertisements and shop catalogues, marital advice, films, and fiction to track the different ways the beds were represented in contemporary culture. She uses these sources to locate the emergence of the beds in the nineteenth century and their establishment as a norm in domestic furnishing in the first half of the twentieth before considering the reasons for their gradual decline in usage from the 1950s. Highly original in content and approach, A Cultural History of Twin Beds presents an exciting and novel historical story and sets up a good model for future studies of domestic objects.

Hinds begins with the origin of twin beds in the Victorian period and their role in discourses of health and hygiene. While there were occasional uses of twin beds before this, it was in the second half of the nineteenth century that they began to be widely recognized and used. In her early research, Hinds had expected the beds to be linked to ideas of marital intimacy—but instead found that they were initially promoted for health reasons. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, double beds were criticized by domestic sanitarians such as Benjamin Ward Richardson, who published in health periodicals in Britain and North America. Ventilation was all important (so much so that a “bed ventilator” [40] was briefly promoted). Richardson saw “the single bed system” as the solution to this problem (41). There were also worries—put forward by the proponents of “vital force” theory—that proximate sleeping bodies might emit damaging forces or electrical charges (45). Intergenerational sleeping was seen as particularly problematic. But co-sleeping in double beds could also be dangerous for married couples who lacked “natural affinity” (62). While “vital force” was associated with fringe medical ideas the idea was widely circulated in late Victorian culture.

Hinds then moves to examine how the beds became associated with modern design in the early decades of the twentieth century. Here, Hinds convincingly traces the design history of twin beds—locating their appearance in the sale catalogues of the furniture manufacturer Heals from the 1890s. At this point “twin beds” became a recognized term, in both Britain and the United States. After the First World War, as tastemakers increasingly sought ways to consciously distance themselves from their Victorian forebears, twin beds became a useful symbol of modern living that could be adopted on a mass scale. The beds featured in schemes promoted by elite modernist designers, including Mackintosh and Le Corbusier, but they were also marketed by the British designer Betty Joel to much wider audiences who lived in smaller homes. A mark of their cultural significance is the fact that from the mid-1930s they were used to depict the marital bedroom in Hollywood films. Double beds were frowned on by British film censors, and controversy was stirred in 1947 by a film that would have shown twin beds too close together for the censors’ comfort.

The third part of the book deals with the relationship between twin beds and marital intimacy. Hinds argues that twin beds could recalibrate marriage—making it possible to live married life “together and apart” and creating “a new cultural inflection of the married couple” (133). Hinds convincingly demonstrates that considering how the beds could mediate marital behavior can help us understand how modern marriage worked. The use of the beds in promoting sexual continence is linked to Simon Szreter's theory of the emergence of a culture of abstinence from the late nineteenth century. The decline of the beds from the mid-twentieth century is also associated with the rise of romantic love, identified by Claire Langhamer (The English in Love: The Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution, 2013). But Hinds is also careful to make it clear that the representation of twin beds was complex and understood in different ways. They could be seen as distancing—as in the film Brief Encounter where they symbolize the distance that has sprung by between the couple at the heart of the story. But the beds could also be a positive symbol of modern marriage. In E. M. Delafield's The Way Things Are (1927), the heroine, Laura, longs for an escape from her dull marriage—her yearnings are expressed through a desire to replace the marital double bed with hygienic modern twins. For Laura the beds in part represented new possibilities. Nor were twin beds always antithetical to sexual activity. For some writers, they spiced things up. The distance between the beds gave new opportunities for “come hither” signaling—welcome perhaps in marriages rendered stale through constant proximity.