Household Gods: The British and Their PossessionsAt what point did the British develop their mania for interiors, wallpaper, furniture, and decoration? Why have the middle classes developed so passionate an attachment to the contents of their homes? This absorbing book offers surprising answers to these questions, uncovering the roots of today’s consumer society and investigating the forces that shape consumer desires. Richly illustrated, Household Gods chronicles a hundred years of British interiors, focusing on class, choice, shopping, and possessions. Exploring a wealth of unusual records and archives, Deborah Cohen locates the source of modern consumerism and materialism in early nineteenth-century religious fervor. Over the course of the Victorian era, consumerism shed the taint of sin to become the preeminent means of expressing individuality. The book ranges from musty antique shops to luxurious emporia, from suburban semi-detached houses to elegant city villas, from husbands fretting about mantelpieces to women appropriating home decoration as a feminist cause. It uncovers a society of consumers whose identities have become entwined with the things they put in their houses. |
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advertised aesthetic Antique Collector architect Archives artistic Barry Bucknell Benn Britain British Britons Cabinet Maker Cambridge carpet Class Coke MSS colour Consumption Culture Cutting Book Decorative Art design reform Diary domestic interior Drane drawing-room E.F. Benson E.M. Forster E.W. Godwin Edwardian Edwardian period Eighteenth-Century England English evangelical Exhibition Frederick Litchfield Frow Furniture Gazette Garrett Haven and London Haweis Heal's Hearth and Home History home decoration House Beautiful household Ibid Ideal Home individual Industry inter-war interior decoration John Journal lady art advisors lived London Luxury Magazine Manchester manufacturers middle middle-class moral Museum nineteenth century objects Oscar Wilde Oxford personality possessions Queen Mary's dolls readers Record Office retailers Rosamund Marriott Watson shops Social style Syrie Syrie Maugham Talbot Coke Papers taste things trade twentieth century University Press Victorian Waring Waring & Gillow Whiteley's William woman women World wrote York