At Home with the Poor: Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in England, C.1650-1850

This book opens the doors to the homes of the forgotten poor and traces the goods they owned before, during and after the industrial revolution. Using a vast range of sources, it argues that the poor owned greater numbers and varieties of items with each generation and that poverty did not always mean living in squalor.

Joseph Harley is a Senior Lecturer in History at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge