Domestic Space in Britain, 1750-1840: Materiality, Sociability and Emotion

Focusing on the design, decoration, and reception of a range of elite and middling class homes from 1750-1840, this book demonstrates that the material culture of domestic life was central to how the function of the home was experienced, expressed, and understood at a time when it took on unprecedented social and emotional significance.

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in Britain, 1750-1840 employs methodologies from both art history and material culture studies to examine previously unpublished interiors, spaces, texts, images, and objects.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 18th- and early 19th-century domestic space, establishing the materiality of the home as a crucial site for identity formation, social interaction, and emotional expression.

Freya Gowrley is Lecturer in History of Art and Liberal Arts at the University of Bristol, UK.