Domestic Space in Britain.
Domestic Space in Britain, 1750-1840: Materiality, Sociability and Emotion
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Between 1750 and 1840, the home took on unprecedented social and emotional significance. Focusing on the design, decoration, and reception of a range of elite and middling class homes from this period, this book demonstrates that the visual and material culture of domestic life was central to how this function of the home was experienced, expressed, and understood at this time. Examining craft production and collection, gift exchange and written description, inheritance and loss, it carefully unpacks the cultural processes that made the home a focus for contemporaries’ social and emotional lives.
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Despite the relative abundance of literature on the history of the home and its furnishings, there is currently no full-length study examining the complex relationship between sociability, emotion, and the visual and material culture of domestic space in the period 1750-1840. Domestic Space in Britain accordingly builds on this existing literature to write a new history of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century domestic space, establishing the materiality of the home as a crucial site for identity formation, social interaction, and emotional expression. The book employs methodologies from art and design history as well as visual and material culture studies in order to provide detailed discussions of interiors, texts, images, and objects. Utilising extensive archival research; visual, material, and textual analysis; and the frameworks of emotion, sociability, and materiality, it sheds light on a broad array of domestic spaces.
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The first book on its subject, it adopts a methodologically-innovative approach rooted in the processes that characterised the production and consumption of visual and material culture during this period. To date, scholarship on the eighteenth-century home has primarily focused on the collections and furnishings of a distinctive group of country homes and London town houses. Conversely, this book actively questions traditional divisions between the fine and decorative arts, permanent and transient forms of interior design, and the country house, metropolitan residence, and the provincial home. By focusing on homes beyond this canon, it reveals the overlooked narratives uncovered when attention is paid to the places and objects that lie outside of the traditional areas of both art historical enquiry, and heteronormative histories of the home.