The Dining Room
Formal dinners were elaborate affairs, where etiquette and aesthetics were as important as to the quality of the meal, which by todays standards would have seemed a little rich for modern palates. Light was really important and its availability shaped most domestic activities. This can be seen in the dinning room, today hung with an early nineteenth century oil chandelier. Such improvements in lighting, over expensive wax and unpleasant smelling tallow candles, allowed the main meal of the day to move from the mid afternoon to early evening by the turn of the nineteenth century.
