The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America (review)

Good books cross lines drawn in the sand by others. Terrific books scatter the sand and redraw the lines. John E. Crowley’s The Invention of Comfort is one of the latter. He has given us a new way to think about modernity, as eighteenth-century men and women were forced to construct new models for social practice and economic relations. He has similarly challenged us to examine how, despite all our seemingly theoretical sophistication, we still assume that people in the past wished to be like us—comfortable. Together, Crowley has accomplished what many of us have been waiting for, a masterful and sweeping interpretation of material culture evidence that asks important historical questions.

Seldom does a scholar take the reader on such dizzying rides. Crowley leads us from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century in his search for a human desire for “commodious comfort.” En route, grand historical constructs such as “the Great Rebuilding” of the English landscape are quite simply laid aside. According to Crowley’s painstaking research, early modern British people did not seem to want domestic spaces that might be warmer and lighter. Time and time again, even if given the funds and technology, people built and lived in old ways.

Now that Crowley has articulated that conundrum—why didn’t people want to live in warmer, lighter, softer and roomier places?—it seems so astonishingly obvious. Comfort was a cultural construct that did not yet matter in the way we think it should. For example, even as the Chesapeake grandees began to build large, classically-inspired, gracious homes to express their wealth in architectural form, few others did. The majority of colonial people lived in houses that were rather small, dark, and cold. Still, even for the rich, chair backs were straight and clothes were tight because politeness mattered more than comfort.

The second section moves deeper, both physically (a domestic interior) and intellectually (a philosophical debate). Crowley carefully frames the evolution of artificial lighting in multiple ways. Candles were the ultimate luxury and most of the Anglo-American population still used various low technology oil lamps that had banished night for millennia. Crowley digs hard to uncover the economic and technological issues of varying candle wax prices and mirror qualities, but he does not stop there. Part of the prohibition of candles was that they were a luxury usually experienced in churches, not domestic dwellings. Thus, the sinfulness of extending the day into night was a disincentive for innovation. A truly lit night would await the nineteenth century. Moreover, the significance of most innovations in heating technology was that they were ignored. Franklins’ stove was too radical to replace a hearth.

The problematic notion of luxury and appropriate comfort was transformed when moral philosophers began to provide a political rationale for increasing consumerism. The flood of new consumer goods that often made life easier and, even occasionally more comfortable, needed an acceptable way of thinking about how one should live. Contemporaries claimed that over 500 pamphlets were published in the 1760s that debated ideas about luxury. The groundswell was important: this economic and moral debate enabled a changing template for measuring class. Crowley visited this ground before in two previous books, but the trope of comfort takes us to new questions. It could be a legitimizing motive for popular consumption. Decencies, luxuries, amenities and comfort: all were words that shifted and slid through the discourse of eighteenth-century Anglo-America. Nonetheless, the specter of sinful luxury could be summoned when needed; hence the colonies could re-invent luxury as debauchery in the coming of the Revolution.

A more modern definition of comfort awaited the middle of the nineteenth century when Alexander Jackson Downing and Catherine Beecher preached that the middle class deserved a “comfortable cottage.” Crowley only tempts us with that idea for those writings were...