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“Taste”: How to Achieve and Maintain as Described by the Magazine
EDM emphasizes the importance of taste as a defining feature in middle class homes, as well as a physical and aesthetic response based in class significance. By a definition, taste was thought of as an aesthetic, a social judgement, that created a sense of what’s appropriate, harmonious, and beautiful in the Victorian lifestyle. Much of the principle of taste was based in the decoration of the home, and one’s physical surroundings. Taste was aimed to make explicit the ways that aesthetic informed the physical. The magazine claims that the best way to achieve this sense of taste was through routine, both domestic and industrial. Routine was inherently English, modern, and moral. According to the magazine, these ideals of routine in patterning establishing a sensory response in the body were at once forcefully asserted and unstable. The goal was to establish a healthy routine to promote tastefulness that would be of essential value to middle class femininity.

Taste was based in the decoration of the home. The individuals working with the EDM believed that the physical surroundings in the home would be “insensibly internalized .” Examples of routines that individuals could cultivate that the magazine claimed would improve taste or tastefulness were sewing and patterning. Patterns in particular were an idea of taste equating to social virtue and sensory experiences. Working on patterns imprinted reactions that changed perception, and routines were instilled in the body through training of sensory responses. Patterning was a way of doing and being, and it was a formula for producing objects and training the senses. Being “tasteful” was not necessarily a fully sensed experience- it was as much denying sensation as it was recognizing a response. It could be noted through the heightening of all five senses, or the denial of any at all. Taste, according to the magazine, relied on turning sensing into feeling.

The aspect of the development of taste was a cultural category tied to the affective and moral values that underpinned class rather than market driven changes in fashion.Both sewing and patterning were modern and moral, in the sense that patterning did not promote self expression for the women taking it up. Mechanical patterns were thought to be better than ones that needed close attention or thought from the woman. Working on certain patterned heightened certain senses; therefore, the magazine chose patterns to put in their issues that had valuable meaning. Taste was accused of being materialistic, and the EDM refuted this by claiming that it was fundamental to middle class English identity. The magazine even went so far as to state that through pattern working, the reader could become noticeably middle class. As mentioned previously, the shift of taste as a sensory experience to a sensory control was something that the EDM exemplified. Class status, familial affect, and national identity within the senses of taste increased the magazine’s knowledge of taste.