Stories from Home: English Domestic Interiors 1750-1850 (review)

Readers interested in material culture and Victorian domesticity will find much to enjoy and profit from in this study of provincial homes and their contents. Margaret Ponsonby is a design historian; her work is characterized by close attention to the details of household furnishings within specific architectural settings, and careful analysis of documentary evidence regarding the production, consumption, and disposition of domestic things. Taking as her subject the homes of "ordinary people" outside of London, Ponsonby investigates exactly what kinds of things were used and stored in them. This approach allows her to develop a materially and historically specific view of "home," a view that registers the power of cultural imperatives in the construction of domestic life while also acknowledging individual deviations from socially approved patterns. One of the key points in Ponsonby's argument, in fact, is that real homes differed from each other and from the ideals disseminated by the popular press. As her title indicates, she is interested in changes that took place in the way homes were furnished and inhabited between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, but she is also alert to change on a smaller scale, at the level of the individual domestic establishment, and she reminds us that in actual practice the home was never a fixed or static artifact. In this way, the home as a lived environment differs significantly from the "historic house" opened to the public, and in the last section of her book Ponsonby considers the interpretive and practical challenges associated with such houses in England and the United States and what she calls their "representations" of domestic interiors (9).

The first, longest, and most important part of Stories from Home reads a fascinating body of documentary evidence about middle-class provincial homes. Ponsonby draws on wills, inventories, auction catalogues, trade directories and catalogues, notebooks, letters, diaries, and account books to garner specific information about the kinds of things that appeared in these homes—things such as "a well-made mahogany sofa, with hair squab seat, and two square pillows" (109). She demonstrates that "the presence or not of objects, their place in the home, their storage, their means of acquisition, the reason for their disposal, their relationship to other household goods and their relationship to the homemaker all produce nuances of ownership, use, and meaning" (5). A useful appendix lists the names of householders and tradespeople who appear in the text, and the bibliography records a fairly extensive set of archival sources.

Ponsonby structures the results of her study and advances her conclusions in five chapters: "Provincial Homes," "Transient Homes," "Recycled Homes," "Extended Households," and "Incomplete Households." While there might be some quibbling about the logic of this system of classification, the text's organization works because it focuses attention on key points of Ponsonby's argument. In "Provincial Homes," for instance, she addresses what she believes to be a bias toward London homes in studies of material culture and domesticity while also considering the degree to which London fashions dominated the market in household goods. Using references in her source materials to specific retail purchases, and reasoning about the way pattern books were used in the construction of furniture, Ponsonby concludes that metropolitan ideas and designs were not simply copied in provincial homes but were "translated" into "appropriate forms for local consumption" (38). "Provincial taste," then was "a hybrid and separate version of London taste" (43).

Although not particularly theoretical, Stories from Home offers a nuanced look at practices of consumption operating within a historically specific context. Establishing and maintaining a provincial home depended on the acquisition of a variable (but not random) set of material things. Early in the period considered here, buyers would have depended on local upholsterers and cabinetmakers to provide these goods, but Ponsonby shows that larger, national firms took over much of the retail and wholesale trade by the middle of the nineteenth century, resulting in an increasingly standardized line of goods...