Description
Book SynopsisBetween 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in Britain, 1750-1840 employs methodologies from both art history and material culture studies to examine previously unpublished interiors, spaces, texts, images, and objects.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 l
Trade ReviewGowrley’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 *
Table of ContentsList of Plates List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction
Part I: Representation 1. ‘My anecdotes of this social neighbourhood’: The thick description of Caroline Lybbe Powys 2. Publishing John Wilkes’s ‘Villakin’: Reception and Reputation at Sandham Cottage
Part II: Movement 3. Material Translations, Biographical Objects: Craft(ing) Narratives at A la Ronde 4. ‘A little temple, consecrate to Friendship and the Muses’: Romantic friendship and gift-exchange at Plas Newydd, Llangollen
Part III: Ownership 5. ‘I love her as my own child’: Inheritance, Extra-Illustration, and Queer Familial Intimacies at Strawberry Hill Conclusion: Materialising Loss Bibliography Index
