1899, originally in reference to the artistic, literary, and decorative styles popular in middle-class, mid-19c. German households, from German, a reference to Gottlieb Biedermeier, name of a fictitious writer of stodgy poems (invented by Ludwig Eichrodt as a satire on bourgeois taste). The term was used in German publications from c. 1870. Also as an adjective, "conventional, bourgeois."
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