Dining Rooms and Meal Service

“The dining-room ought to be the pleasantest place in the house; it is the meeting room where the family are expected to be always present at stated times, and where the events of the day are talked over while the pleasant business of eating is being discussed.” So wrote Laura Holloway Langford in her household manual The Hearthstone (1883), capturing the Victorian sentiment of the dining room as domestic sanctuary. Icons such as Norman Rockwell’s painting, “Freedom from Want,” in which three generations of smiling faces gather round the table, fuel the nostalgia for the dining room as the heart of middle-class family life.