Enfilade

From Routledge:

Stephen G. Hague and Karen Lipsedge, eds., At Home in the Eighteenth Century: Interrogating Domestic Space (New York: Routledge, 2021), 378 pages, ISBN 978-0367276799, $160.

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.

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).

C O N T E N T S

Introduction, Stephen Hague and Karen Lipsedge

Part I: The Organization and Arrangement of Space
1  Paula Humfrey, Staging Fictions for Domestic Privacy in Early Eighteenth-Century London Households
2  Karen Lipsedge, Reading Pamela through the Domestic Parlour: Rooms, Social Class, and Gender
3  Kristin Distel, ‘I will not be thus constrained’: Domestic Power, Shame, and the Role of the Staircase in Richardson’s Clarissa
4  Julie Park, ‘A Small House in the Country: Cottage Dreams and Desires in the Eighteenth-Century English Imagination

Part II: Money, Value, and Consumption
5  Stephen Hague, ‘I am now determined to inform you what I am sure will amaze you’: Objects, Domestic Space, and the Economics of Gentility
6  Beth Cortese, Home Economics: Female Estate Managers in Long Eighteenth-Century Fiction and Society
7  Gillian Williamson, Genteel, Respectable, and Airy: The Lodgings Market in London, 1770–1800
8  Deborah L. Miller, “Great earthly riches are no real advantage to our posterity”: Space, Archaeology, and the Philadelphia Home

Part III: Different Perspectives on Home
9  Victoria Barnett-Woods, Transatlantic Domesticity and the Limits of a Genre in A Woman of Colour
10  Margaret A. Miller, Making Room: Queer Domesticity in Jane Austen’s Emma and the Anne Lister Diaries
11  Jon Stobart, Servants’ Furniture: Hierarchies and Identities in the English Country House
12  Katie Barclay, Making the Bed, Making the Lower-Order Home in Eighteenth-Century Scotland
13  Laura Keim, Hierarchies of the Home: Spaces, Things, and People in the Eighteenth Century
14  Oliver Cox, Twenty-First Century Visitors in Eighteenth-Century Spaces: Challenges and Opportunities

Conclusion: Assessing Eighteenth-Century Domestic Space, Stephen Hague and Karen Lipsedge