Buying for the Home: Shopping for the Domestic from the Seventeenth Century to the Present

Buying for the Home examines how strategies of retailers were both arbitrated by, and negotiated through the actions and desires of the homemaker as a consumer in early-modern, modern and post-modern society. Drawing on a wide selection of interdisciplinary work from established scholars and new researchers, the volume is organised around four key themes: retail arenas and the everyday; identity and lifestyle; fashioning domestic space; and cultural practice. Through ten linked case studies, Buying for the Home forces us to consider the fractured space that existed between the world of goods and the middle- and working-class home.

David Hussey and Margaret Ponsonby are both based in the Department of History at the University of Wolverhampton, UK.