The British domestic interior and social and cultural history

Cultural and Social History

Volumn 6, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 97-107

  Hamlett, Jane ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Consumption; Domestic interior; Gender; Material culture; Public private

Indexed keywords

EID: 65549158038     PISSN: 14780038     EISSN: 14780046     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2752/147800409X377947     Document Type: Review

References (117)

1. M. Praz, An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration: From Pompeii to Art Nouveau (London, 1964).
2. See S. Calloway, Twentieth-Century Decoration: The Domestic Interior from 1900 to the Present Day (London, 1988);
3. C. Gere, Nineteenth-Century Interiors: An Album of Watercolours (London, 1992);
4. C. Gere, Nineteenth-Century Decoration: The Art of the Interior (London, 1989);
5. I. Gow, The Scottish Interior: Georgian and Victorian Décor (Edinburgh, 1992);
6. C.S. Smith, Eighteenth-Century Decoration, Design and the Domestic Interior in England (New York, 1993);
7. P. Thornton, Authentic Decor: The Domestic Interior 1620-1920 (London, 1984);
8. C. Wainwright, The Romantic Interior: The British Collector at Home (London, 1989).
9. H. Greig and G. Reillo, 'Eighteenth-Century Interiors - Redesigning the Georgian: Introduction', Journal of Design History, 20 (2007), p. 279.
10. J. Attfield, Bringing Modernity Home: Writings on Popular Design and Material Culture (Manchester, 2007), p. 2.
11. Also see J. Attfield, Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life (Oxford, 2000);
12. J. Attfield and P. Kirkham (eds), A View from the Interior: Feminism, Women and Design History (London, 1989);
13. P. Kirkham (ed.), The Gendered Object (Manchester, 1996);
14. P. Sparke, As Long as It's Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste (London, 1995);
15. P. Sparke and S. McKellar (eds), Interior Design and Identity (Manchester, 2004).
16. For more details see the Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior website, http://www.rca.ac.uk/csdi/, accessed 17 March 2008.
17. The first explorations of the historical material world came from cultural history. See F. Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible (London, 1981)
18. and A. Briggs, Victorian Things (London, 1988).
19. D. Cohen, Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (London, 2006).
20. A. Vickery, '"Neat and Not Too Showey":Words and Wallpaper in Regency England', in J. Styles and A. Vickery (eds), Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America 1700-1830 (London, 2007), pp. 201-24.
21. M. Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (London, 1978), chapters 7 and 10.
22. Also see J. Franklin, The Gentleman's Country House and Its Plan 1835-1914 (London, 1981);
23. H.C. Long, The Edwardian House: The Middle-Class Home in Britain 1880-1914 (Manchester, 1993);
24. J. Bold, 'Privacy and the Plan', in J. Bold and E. Chaney (eds), English Architecture: Public and Private Essays for Kerry Downes (London, 1993), pp. 107-19;
25. F.E. Brown, 'Continuity and Change in the Urban House: Developments in Domestic Space Organisation in Seventeenth-Century London', Comparative Studies in Society and History, 28 (1986), pp. 558-90.
26. I. Borden, J. Kerr and J. Rendell with A. Pivaro, 'Things, Flows, Filters, Tactics', in I. Borden, Joe Kerr, Jane Rendell and Alicia Pivaro (eds), The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space (Massachusetts, 2001), pp. 2-27.
27. D. Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Oxford, 1994), p. 2.
28. Daphne Spain, Gendered Spaces (Chapel Hill, NC, and London, 1992), p. 6;
29. S. Ardener, Women and Space: Ground Rules and Social Maps for Women (Oxford, 1993), p. 2.
30. I. Bryden and J. Floyd (eds), Domestic Space: Reading the Nineteenth-Century Interior (Manchester, 1999);
31. J. Rendell, The Pursuit of Pleasure: Gender, Space and Architecture in Regency London (London, 2002);
32. R. Blair St George, 'Reading Spaces in Eighteenth-Century New England', in Styles and Vickery (eds), Gender, Taste and Material Culture, pp. 81-106;
33. K. Lipsedge, "'Enter into Thy Closet": Women, Closet Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century English Novel', in Styles and Vickery (eds), Gender, Taste and Material Culture, pp. 107-24.
34. M. Donald, 'Tranquil Havens? Critiquing the Idea of Home as a Middle-Class Sanctuary', in Bryden and Floyd, Domestic Space, p. 107.
35. A. Flather, Gender and Space in Early Modern England (Suffolk, 2007), p. 63, p. 69.
36. For a summary of anthropologists' engagement with the study of material culture throughout the twentieth century, see V. Buchli, 'Introduction', in Victor Buchli (ed.), The Material Culture Reader (Oxford, 2002), pp. 1-22,
37. and M. Osteen, 'Introduction: Questions of the Gift', in M. Osteen (ed.), The Question of the Gift: Essays across Disciplines (London, 2002), pp. 1-42.
38. M. Douglas and B. Isherwood, The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption (London, 1996), p. xxii.
39. Ibid., p. 37.
40. A. Appadurai, 'Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value', in A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, 1986), p. 17;
41. I. Koptytoff, 'The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as a Process', in Appadurai, Social Life, p. 67.
42. Also see D. Miller, 'Why Some Things Matter', in D. Miller (ed.), Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter (London, 1998);
43. I. Cieraad, 'Introduction: Anthropology at Home', in I. Cieraad (ed.), At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space (New York, 1999).
44. D. Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption (Oxford, 1987), p. 1.
45. Miller, Material Culture, passim.
46. D. Miller, 'Behind Closed Doors', in D. Miller (ed.), Home Possessions: Material Culture behind Closed Doors (Oxford, 2001), p. 3.
47. Ibid., pp. 10-11.
48. Miller, 'Why Some Things Matter', p. 11.
49. See website for details of conference 'Interior Insights: Design, Ethnography and the Home', held in November 2005 at the Royal College of Art. http://www.rca.ac.uk/csdi/interiorinsights/, accessed 17 March 2008.
50. Also see I.M. Daniels, 'Ethnographic Representations of the Home', in J. Aynsley and C. Grant (eds), Imagined Interiors: Representing the Domestic Interior since the Renaissance (London, 2006), pp. 274-5.
51. L. Purbrick, The Wedding Present: Domestic Life beyond Consumption (Aldershot, 2007), p. 16.
52. M. Locock, 'Meaningful Architecture', in M. Locock (ed.), Meaningful Architecture: Social Interpretations of Buildings (Aldershot, 1994), pp. 1-13.
53. T.J. Schlereth, 'Material Culture Studies in America, 1876-1976', in T.J. Schlereth (ed.), Material Culture Studies in America (Nashville, TN, 1982), pp. 3-35.
54. Also see A. Smart Martin and J. Ritchie Garrison, 'Shaping the Field: The Multidisciplinary Perspectives of Material Culture', in A. Smart Martin and J. Ritchie Garrison (eds), American Material Culture: The Shape of the Field (Winterthur, 1997), pp. 1-21.
55. Smart Martin and Garrison, 'Shaping the Field', p. 2.
56. K.C. Grier, Culture and Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle-Class Identity 1850-1930 (Rochester, NY, 1988), p. vii.
57. L. Taylor, The Study of Dress History (Manchester, 2002), p. 1.
58. Also see C. Horwood, Keeping up Appearances: Fashion and Class between the Wars (Stroud, 2005).
59. B. Burman and C. Turbin, 'Introduction: Material Strategies Engendered', Gender and History, 14 (2002), p. 371.
60. Taylor, Dress History, p. 64.
61. J. Styles, The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 2008).
62. M. Ponsonby, Stories from Home: English Domestic Interiors 1750-1850 (Aldershot, 2007), ch. 6.
63. P. Tristram, Living Space in Fact and Fiction (London, 1989).
64. L. Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (London, 1996);
65. T. Logan, The Victorian Parlour (Cambridge, 2001).
66. Aynsley and Grant, Imagined Interiors, p. 18.
67. Aynsley and Grant, Imagined Interiors, p. 13.
68. Also see C. Grant, 'Reading the House of Fiction: From Object to Interior 1720-1920', Home Cultures, 2 (2005), pp. 233-49.
69. Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore, MD, 2005), p. xvii.
70. Also see Charles Rice, The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity and Domesticity (London, 2007), p. 4.
71. N. McKendrick, J. Brewer and J.H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialisation of Eighteenth Century England (London, 1982), p. 9.
72. Ibid., p. 11.
73. T. Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions (London, 1899), p. 25.
74. See J. Lears, 'Beyond Veblen: Rethinking Consumer Culture in America', in S.J. Bronner (ed.), Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America 1880-1920 (London and New York, 1989), p. 75;
75. A. Bermingham, 'Introduction to the Consumption of Culture: Image, Object, Text', in A. Bermingham and J. Brewer (eds), The Consumption of Culture 1600-1800: Image, Object, Text (London, 1995), p. 14;
76. T. Breen, 'The Meaning of Things: Interpreting the Consumer Economy in the Eighteenth Century', in J. Brewer and R. Porter (eds), Consumption and the World of Goods (London, 1993), pp. 257-8;
77. J. Styles, 'Involuntary consumers? Servants and Their Clothes in Eighteenth-Century England', Textile History, 33 (2002), p. 18.
78. L. Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain 1660-1760 (Cambridge, 1996), p. 185.
79. For similar conclusions see M. Overton, J. Whittle, D. Dean and A. Hann, Production and Consumption in English Households 1600-1750 (London, 2004), p. 120.
80. A. Vickery, 'Women and theWorld of Goods: A Lancashire Consumer and Her Possessions 1751-81', in Brewer and Porter, Consumption, pp. 274-301;
81. L. Weatherill, 'A Possession of One's Own: Women and Consumer Behaviour in England 1660-1740', Journal of British Studies, 25 (1986), pp. 155-6;
82. M. Finn, 'Men's Things: Masculine Possession in the Consumer Revolution', Social History, 25 (2000), p. 135.
83. For a summary of the enormous literature on contemporary consumption and its recent history see the ESRC Cultures of Consumption Project website, http://www.consume.bbk.ac.uk/index.html, accessed 17 March 2008.
84. Purbrick, Wedding Present, p. 20.
85. Ibid., p. 22.
86. J. Styles, 'Lodging at the Old Bailey: Lodgings and Their Furnishing in Eighteenth-Century London', in Styles and Vickery, Gender, Taste and Material Culture, p. 63.
87. Styles, Dress of the People, chs 15, 16 and 17.
88. Ibid., p. 321.
89. Georges Duby, 'Forward', in P. Aries and G. Duby (eds), A History of Private Life: I. From Pagan Rome to Byzantium (Cambridge, 1987), p. ix.
90. L. Davidoff and C. Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850 (London, 1987), p. 114;
91. C. Hall, 'Gender Divisions and Class Formation in the Birmingham Middle Class 1780-1850', in R. Samuel (ed.), People's History and Socialist Theory (London, 1981), p. 166.
92. For example, A. Vickery, 'Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women's History', Historical Journal, 36 (1993), pp. 383-414.
93. Flather, Gender and Space, p. 44, p. 176.
94. McKeon, Secret History, p. 53.
95. Ibid., p. 244, p. 256.
96. Ponsonby, Stories from Home, p. 103.
97. A. Vickery, 'An Englishman's Home is His Castle? Thresholds, Boundaries and Privacies in the Eighteenth-Century London House', Past and Present, 199 (2008), p.161.
98. Cohen, Household Gods, p. 89.
99. The male contribution to nineteenth-century domesticity has been outlined by John Tosh in A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (London, 1999).
100. For a reconsideration of this thesis, see M. Francis, 'The Domestication of the Male? Recent Research on Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century British Masculinity', The Historical Journal, 45 (2002), pp. 637-52.
101. M. Finn, 'Men's Things'.
102. A. Vickery, 'His and Hers: Gender, Consumption and Household Accounting in Eighteenth-Century England', Past and Present, supplement, 1 (2006), p. 15, p. 19.
103. Purbrick, Wedding Present, pp. 8-12.
104. For the eighteenth century, Vickery has found a connection between women and smaller domestic goods. Vickery, 'His and Hers', p. 35.
105. Also see K. Sharpe, 'Women's Creativity and Display in the Eighteenth-Century British Domestic Interior', in Sparke and McKellar, Interior Design, pp. 10-26.
106. On the meaning of women's domestic handiwork in the nineteenth century see R. Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London, 1984), p. 26;
107. T. Logan, 'Decorating Domestic Space: Middle-Class Women and Victorian Interiors', in V.D. Dickerson (ed.), Keeping the Victorian House: A Collection of Essays (London, 1995), p. 213;
108. C. Edwards, '"Home is Where the Art Is": Women, Handicraft and Home Improvements 1750-1900', Journal of Design History, 19 (2006), pp. 11-21.
109. J. Kinchin, 'Interiors: Nineteenth-Century Essays on the "Masculine" and the "Feminine" Room', in Kirkham, Gendered Object, pp. 12-29.
110. Q. Colville, 'The Role of the Interior in Constructing Notions of Class and Status: Case Study of Britannia Royal Naval College Dartmouth, 1905-39', in Sparke and McKellar, Interior Design, pp. 114-32.
111. J. Styles, 'Dress in History: Reflections on a Contested Terrain', Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture, 2 (1998), p. 387.
112. Miller, 'Why Some Things Matter', p. 7.
113. Also see 'Editorial', Journal of Material Culture Studies, 1 (1996), pp. 5-14;
114. Burman and Turbin, 'Material Strategies', p. 375.
115. Miller, 'Why Some Things Matter', p. 3.
116. Purbrick, Wedding Present, p. 74.
117. Vickery, '"Neat and Not Too Showey"', p. 215