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Technology and Culture 43.4 (2002) 795-796



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The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America. By John E. Crowley. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Pp. xi+361. $42.

Cultural historians of technology welcome studies that place technological development at the center of interesting cultural processes. In The Invention of Comfort, John Crowley questions the assumption that the desire for comfort is a natural state of being—that, given their druthers, people would naturally want to be warm, dry, and bathed in light, as opposed to cold, damp, and in the dark. Rather, Crowley argues that comfort was a value that developed as a crucial component of eighteenth-century material culture.

Crowley sees this development as part of an intellectual effort to legitimize popular consumption as the Anglo world's political economy entered into and solidified the underlying economic system of the consumer revolution. It would be impossible to tell this story without paying attention to the usual technological suspects that supported this revolution in material comfort, technologies of heat, light, and architectural design. This book is based largely on published sources, and constitutes a reinterpretation of existing work in material culture. But Crowley adds to this body of knowledge with primary evidence from literature, images, and manuscript collections. The book is both exhaustive and exhausting. Crowley's argument is innovative and important, yet the voluminous evidence and Crowley's tendentious prose will prove daunting for even the most interested reader.

The Invention of Comfort is divided into three parts. The first, "Traditional Architectural Amenity," describes and interprets the evolution of domestic architecture from designs based on the central open hearth typical of the late medieval period to early-nineteenth-century American slave quarters. What holds this surprising trajectory in place are developing ideas about comfort and their dissemination among the varied cultures of the Atlantic world. Crowley asserts that in the early period no word existed to describe physical comfort, yet, by the nineteenth century, adherence to minimum standards for physical comfort served to support apologies for slavery. In between these chronological and geographic poles, Crowley charts the shift from houses designed around an open hearth to those with specialized multistoried spaces dependent on chimneys and glazed windows. He argues that military, monastic, and domestic needs determined the adoption of chimneys, not the assumed superiority of comfort that chimneys implied. Subsequently, as courtly styles of manners and entertainment prevailed, chimneys and the specialization of space that they represented came to indicate status and wealth. By the seventeenth century, the hearth tax replaced the poll tax. [End Page 795]

The middle section, "From Luxury to Comfort," begins by exploring the relationship between artificial lighting and the use of mirrors, which combined to establish a physical environment in which urbanites experienced pleasure and satisfaction with their surroundings. In the book's strongest section, Crowley chronicles the way in which the political economy of Adam Smith's world redefined newly acquired tastes for comfort in morally neutral terms that equated the possession of technologically produced comforts with happiness. This process benefited all classes, rich to poor, and, by the end of the eighteenth century, naturalized the idea that people everywhere were entitled to certain conveniences and comforts, such as warmth, light, and protection from the elements. The Enlightenment project, which sought scientific explanations and solutions, further heightened expectations for heat and light and found its expression in such innovations as the Franklin stove.

The third section, "The Landscape of Comfort," focuses on the Picturesque aesthetic and the transformation of the cottage from a "mean" domicile synonymous with poverty and misery to the kitsch of a comfortable country house. Crowley argues that the cottage was the first type of house for which comfort was a design priority. This section explores, too, the evolution of the veranda and concludes with a comparison of Catherine Beecher's and Andrew Jackson Downing's ideas about domestic comfort. The juxtaposition of these two well-known arbiters of domestic taste and practice is interesting...

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