George Eliot lamented the decoration of her and George Henry Lewes's house, for which Owen Jones, the man behind the color scheme for the Crystal Palace, designed wallpaper and chose draperies. At the beginning of his chapter on Middlemarch in Novels Behind Glass, a detailed historicist study of Thackeray, Gaskell, Dickens, Eliot and the Great Exhibition, Andrew Miller quotes Eliot's lament: “Such fringing [sic] away of precious life in thinking of carpets and tables is an affliction to me and seems like a nightmare from which I shall find it bliss to awake into my old world of care for things quite apart from upholstery” (189). In the Afterword, Miller quotes the deathbed words of Oscar Wilde, whose earnestness about his own wallpapered predicament are quite in contrast with Eliot: “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death…. One or the other of us has to go” (221).