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, Domestic Space in Britain, 1750-1840 demonstrates that the 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 material processes that made the home a focus for contemporaries’ social and emotional lives.
The first book on its subject, Domestic Space in Britain, 1750-1840 employs methodologies from both art history and material culture studies to examine previously unpublished interiors, spaces, texts, images, and objects. Utilising extensive archival research; visual, material, and textual analysis; and histories of emotion, sociability, and materiality, it sheds light on the decoration and reception of a broad array of domestic spaces. In so doing, it writes 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.
By:
Dr. Freya Gowrley (University of Bristol UK)
Imprint: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
Weight: 730g
ISBN: 9781501343360
ISBN 10: 150134336X
Series: Material Culture of Art and Design
Pages: 272
Publication Date: 21 April 2022
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Introduction Chapter 1 ‘Anecdotes of this social neighbourhood’: The thick description of Caroline Lybbe Powys Chapter 2 ‘So profound an adept in the Fine Arts’: Publishing John Wilkes’s ‘Villakin’ Chapter 3 Biographical Objects: Craft(ing) Narratives at A la Ronde Chapter 4 ‘A little temple, consecrate to Friendship and the Muses’: Romantic friendship and gift-exchange at Plas Newydd, Llangollen Chapter 5 ‘Seat of the Hon. Mrs. Damer’: Inheriting Strawberry Hill Epilogue The Empty Home Bibliography Index
Freya Gowrley is Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, UK.
Reviews for Domestic Space in Britain, 1750-1840: Materiality, Sociability and Emotion
Gowrley's intention to view the four houses and their owners, through an historical and contextual lens, is meticulously achieved in this richly fascinating study; the multi-layered, emotional sub-texts invested in material objects are sensitively extracted and interpreted, to display meaningful domestic spaces, three of which outlived their owners. * Women's Studies Group 1558 - 1837 *
