In his novel Hard Times (1854), Charles Dickens parodied some of the views of those people in the early 1850s who were promoting reform in design. To illustrate the faults of popular wallpaper patterns to a class of schoolchildren, his fictional official contemptuously describes a paper with repeated naturalistic images of horses. However, it is unlikely that a paper such as this one in the V&A’s collection would have been used in an ordinary domestic context. The subject matter would have made it an appropriate decoration for a public house, a games room or a sportsmen's club.