Over the past few months my conception of home has altered radically. Instead of my usual too-ing and fro-ing between Edinburgh and Derby for my weekly commute, or travelling to America to undertake archival research (as has been a yearly spring/summer ritual since 2016), home has become a constant. Fixed. As someone at higher (albeit not highest) risk from COVID-19, home has been a source of protection; a physical and emotional barrier from the perceived threat of outdoors. I have obsessively drawn comfort from my home; cleaning, nesting, and purchasing decorative items and other such comforts online. I have also engaged consistently in activities that have heightened my sense of my home’s homeliness, such as cooking, baking, and other forms of domestic economy. And I am not the only one, with numerous memes about ‘sourdough bakers’ emerging as a means by which to satirise the new-found love of bread-making that has become such a characteristic of lockdown. I have also found myself leaning into neoliberal discourses of self-improvement by ‘decluttering’, ‘sorting’, and ‘organising’ my home; undoubtedly an attempt to exert some form of control over life as it has felt like it has spiralled.
Home has also been transformed from a relatively private space into a workplace. My partner and I now sit side-by-side at our kitchen table-come-desk as we try and arrange Zoom meetings that don’t conflict with each other’s work day. These meetings are in themselves intriguing glimpses into colleague’s domestic lives: their interior design choices glimpsed over shoulders and their house’s other residents (whether they have two or four legs) occasionally wandering in. A whole twitter account has emerged in response to how we obsessively read these zoomified domestic spaces: Bookcase Credibility (@BCredibility), which gently mocks the background bookcases (and accordant self-fashioning) of interviewees from daily news programmes and other such media.
These are, undoubtedly, privileged experiences of the global pandemic: so far my job is secure, and I have been able to work from home; I have no doubt that my feelings on this issue would shift dramatically were I still having to travel, work, and generally spend more time outside of my house.
As a historian of domestic space, the home is similarly omnipresent in my intellectual life. I have thoroughly enjoyed attending Lucie Matthews-Jones’ bi-weekly ‘Home’ reading group, as part of which we have thought about nineteenth-century soldiers and sailors leaving and returning home, home-baking and the Great British bakeoff, and the East India Company at home, so far. Home has also been on my mind as I work to finalise my manuscript for my book Domestic Space in Britain, 1750-1840: Materiality, Sociability & Emotion. I even got to look at cover options last month, my favourite of which I’ve included here. I should get my final set of reader’s reports this month, which I am both hugely excited for and absolutely dreading.
I’m currently working on an article relating to this work on Plas Newydd, home of the so-called ‘Ladies of Llangollen’, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby. As I re-read the women’s diaries and letters I’m struck by how powerfully the idea of home featured in their lives. They rarely, if ever, left Plas Newydd, and their home and its surrounding gardens and estate were the source of great comfort and joy following their elopement from Ireland to Wales in the 1770s. The materiality of their home was deeply affective; with the innumerable gifted drawings, portraits, books and other objects that the women were given by their friends and admirers and later displayed at the house ensuring that Plas Newydd became a space dedicated to friendship. Occasioned by their desire to live and be together, Butler and Ponsonby’s removal to their Welsh home meant that they could live as same-sex couple who enjoyed a relationship of unquestionable intimacy that transcended contemporary conventions of friendship. For Butler and Ponsonby, as for me now (albeit in myriad different ways), home was an escape and security; whose very material domesticity provided joy and comfort to its inhabitants.
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