Freya Gowrley's Domestic Space in Britain, 1750-1840: Materiality, Sociability and Emotion is a story of five real homes, their inhabitants, and their representation from the mid-eighteenth century to mid-nineteenth century when the home was increasingly becoming a 'repository of sentimental engagement' (p. 14) constructed through material things. In combining approaches of eighteenth-century art, material, and cultural history, Gowrley demonstrates the rich possibilities of studying eighteenth-century domestic space by thinking through both how people described and narrated domestic materiality as well as the objects that populated these figures' lives. Gowrley begins with a fascinating exploration of a nineteenth-century miniature ceramic Staffordshire cottage as both a representation of a house but also an object that populated many homes. But the idea of home that this object evokes is partly one that Gowrley seeks to smash apart by exploring elite homes, their occupiers, and their visitors, ignored by canonical and heteronormative histories of country houses.
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