1st Edition
At Home in the Eighteenth Century Interrogating Domestic Space
The eighteenth-century home, in terms of its structure, design, function, and furnishing, was a site of transformation – of spaces, identities, and practices. Home has myriad meanings, and although the eighteenth century in the common imagination is often associated with taking tea on polished mahogany tables, a far wider world of experience remains to be introduced. At Home in the Eighteenth Century brings together factual and fictive texts and spaces to explore aspects of the typical Georgian home that we think we know from Jane Austen novels and extant country houses while also engaging with uncharacteristic and underappreciated aspects of the home. At the core of the volume is the claim that exploring eighteenth-century domesticity from a range of disciplinary vantage points can yield original and interesting questions, as well as reveal new answers. Contributions from the fields of literature, history, archaeology, art history, heritage studies, and material culture brings the home more sharply into focus. In this way At Home in the Eighteenth Century reveals a more nuanced and fluid concept of the eighteenth-century home and becomes a steppingstone to greater understanding of domestic space for undergraduate level and beyond.
Introduction
Stephen G. Hague and Karen Lipsedge
Part I: The Organization and Arrangement of Space
- Staging Fictions for Domestic Privacy in Early Eighteenth-Century London Households
- Reading Pamela Through the Domestic Parlour: Rooms, Social Class, and Gender
- "I will not be thus constrained": Domestic Power, Shame, and the Role of the Staircase in Richardson’s Clarissa
- "A Small House in the Country": Cottage Dreams and Desires in the Eighteenth-Century English Imagination
- "I am now determined to inform you what I am sure will amaze you": Objects, Domestic Space, and the Economics of Gentility
- Home Economics: Female Estate Managers in Long Eighteenth-Century Fiction and Society
- Genteel, Respectable and Airy: The Lodgings Market in London, 1770-1800
- "Great earthly riches are no real advantage to our posterity": Space, Archaeology and the Philadelphia Home
- Transatlantic Domesticity and the Limits of a Genre in A Woman of Colour
- Making Room: Queer Domesticity in Jane Austen’s Emma and the Anne Lister Diaries
- Servants’ Furniture: Hierarchies and Identities in the English Country House
- Making the Bed, Making the Lower-Order Home in Eighteenth-Century Scotland
Paula Humfrey
Karen Lipsedge
Kristin Distel
Julie Park
Part II: Money, Value, and Consumption
Stephen G. Hague
Beth Cortese
Gillian Williamson
Deborah L. Miller
Part III: Different Perspectives on Home
Victoria Barnett-Woods
Margaret A. Miller
Jon Stobart
Katie Barclay
13. Hierarchies of the Home: Spaces, Things, and People in the Eighteenth Century
Laura Keim
14. Twenty-First Century Visitors in Eighteenth-Century Spaces: Challenges and Opportunities
Oliver Cox
Conclusion: Assessing Eighteenth-Century Domestic Space
Stephen G. Hague and Karen Lipsedge
Biography
Stephen G. Hague is an Associate Professor of Modern European History at Rowan University. He specializes in British and British imperial history and is the author of The Gentleman’s House in the British Atlantic World, 1680-1780 (2015). He researches and writes on the intersections of political, social, cultural, and architectural history.
Karen Lipsedge is an Associate Professor in English Literature, at Kingston University, England. Her research focuses on eighteenth-century domestic space, material culture, and society and its representation in British eighteenth-century literature and art. She is the author of Domestic Space in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel (2012) and has written and presented widely on the representation of home, the interior, and the lived experience of domestic space in eighteenth-century literature and art.
