Bibliographies

Country House Bibliography

Annotated Guide to Country House Publications

Airs, Malcolm. The Making of the English Country House, 1500-1640. London: The Architectural Press Ltd, 1975.

Using the building accounts of country houses and the correspondence of their builders, Malcolm Airs reveals that the period between 1500 and 1640 was one of transition for the English country house. In his book Airs examines country houses not in terms of architecture, but instead as buildings that were designed, financed and painstakingly constructed. He looks into the practical and everyday problems that building a country house entailed. While considering the builders of country houses he also explores the lives and experiences of those surveyors, craftsmen and labourers who built it. He finds that between 1500 and 1640 contemporary ideas about architecture were changing, with more significance being given to the intellectual and theoretical underpinnings of architectural practice. As a result the role of architect became more pronounced and in turn led to the increasing use of surveyors as onsite administrators of the building work. Although a perfect distinction between the two roles was not consolidated by 1640, the change had begun and affected how building took place. Airs’ work, like Wilson and Mackley’s for the later period, contends with the multiplicity of ways in which building country houses affected numerous people’s lives.

Arnold, Dana (ed.). The Georgian Country House: Architecture, Landscape, and Society. Stroud: Sutton, 1998.

Chapter 1: The Country House: Form, Function and Meaning - Dana Arnold

Chapter 2: The Country House and its Publics - Dana Arnold

Chapter 3: Publishing Houses: Prints of Country Seats - Tim Clayton

Chapter 4: One Among the Many: Popular Aesthetics, Polite Culture and the Country House Landscape - Stephen Bending

Chapter 5: Defining Femininity: Women and the Country House - Dana Arnold

Chapter 6: The Illusion of Grandeur? Antiquity, Grand Tourism and the Country House - Dana Arnold

Chapter 7: Town House and Country House: their Interaction - M.H. Port

Chapter 8: Jane Austen and the Changing Face of England - Philippa Tristram

Chapter 9: Living off the Land: Innovations in Farming Practices and Farm Design - Dana Arnold

Chapter 10: Richard Payne Knight and the Picturesque Landscape - Andrew Ballantyne

In this volume Dana Arnold, along with contributions from Tim Clayton, Stephen Bending M.H. Port, Philippa Tristram and Andrew Ballantyne, explores the meaning of all kinds of architectural production’. Arnold and the other contributors use prints, literature and travelogues to examine what the country house meant in different social, political, economic and cultural contexts. How did its form and function affect what the country house was and what it could be? How was the country house represented in prints? Arnold and the other contributors explore how different publics have responded to country houses and the various meanings it has acquired as a result.

Christie, Christopher. The British Country House in the Eighteenth Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.

Christopher Christie explores how the country house acted as an important player in the architectural, artistic, social and economic history of eighteenth-century Britain. Christie examines multiple aspects of the country house to provide a rounded view of its forms and functions. Alongside his description of how the lands and estates that surrounded country houses created wealth, Christie also highlights the different financial strategies by which country houses were built and embellished during this period. Through an exploration of the architecture constructed in the eighteenth century, Christie demonstrates the breadth of building that took place. He then populates his houses and their gardens with families, servants and furnishings, before describing the wide variety of activities and entertainments with which they were involved. Using financial accounts, plans, engravings, travel accounts and correspondence, Christie’s book provides an important starting place for considering the eighteenth-century country house in all its different guises.

Clemenson, Heather A. English Country Houses and Landed Estates. London and Canberra: Croon Helm, 1982.

Heather Clemenson explores the English country house as a visual symbol of wealth, status and power and tracks how it changed in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Clemenson divides her analysis into two temporal sections, first the period from the eighteenth century to around 1880 and second, from 1880 until 1982. She uses parliamentary papers, estate papers and contemporary published sources to examine the experiences of five hundred landed families during this period. In doing so she includes over a third of the largest private landowners in England in the late nineteenth century. What makes Clemenson’s analysis unique is her interest not only in country houses, their gardens and amenity lands as symbols of wealth and status, but that she also acknowledges the significance of agricultural and wood lands as symbols of power and prestige. Clemenson demonstrates the changing ‘visual impact’ of estates by plotting a trajectory of rise before 1880 and then eventual decline between that point and the post-war period. Clemenson completes the book by assessing the potential futures of the country house.

Elton, Arthur, Brett Harrison and Keith Wark. Researching the Country House: A Guide for Local Historians. London: B.T. Batsford Ltd, 1992.

Although slightly out of date due to the impact of the internet, Elton, Harrison and Wark’s book provides a good starting point for those interested in learning about and researching the country house in England. Researching the Country House explains how country houses and their estates were owned, built, managed and improved, the role of the landowner in society and the work performed by servants. Alongside this they also include discussions of the effects of industrialisation on the country house in the nineteenth century and its decline and conservation in the twentieth. During their explanation of each of these topics Elton, Harrison and Wark include suggestions about important sources, where they can be found, how to access them and the possible frustrations and challenges researchers may encounter. For example they show readers various ways of using bills, newspaper advertisements, architectural plans and correspondence. In doing so Elton, Harrison and Wark illuminate the wide variety of sources that historians can use to construct the histories of the country house.

Girouard, Mark. Life in the English Country House. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978.

Rather than focusing upon who built the house, when and how, Mark Girouard seeks to examine how English country houses were used and what they were intended to do. Girouard understands the house as a social, political and economic space in which people outwardly performed particular roles. Girouard uses a range of sources to explore these topics including inventories, family papers, plans, travelogues and images. In his analysis he focuses on two themes, which he sees as central to understanding the country house and its role – power and pleasure. Traditionally the country house owner derived power from the land that made up his estate. Land earned rents, peopled armies and until the nineteenth century, created votes. How this calculation changed over time was intrinsically important to the role and meaning of the country house. At the same time, however, the country house was also a site of pleasure; specifically designed to allow its owners to fill their leisure hours ‘as agreeably as possible’. Girouard’s work provides an overview of the role of the country house from the medieval period until the 1940s.

Gomme, Andor and Alison Maguire. Design and Plan in the Country House: From Castle Donjons to Palladian Boxes. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008.

Andor Gomme and Alison Maguire examine the changing design of the country house. More particularly, they explore the different factors that prompted the development of the double pile layout, where houses were more than one room deep. Through an analysis of plans, architecture and architects they demonstrate the role of technology, materials, politics, money, social habits and daily life in creating these new designs. Gomme and Maguire take a long view from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to the eighteenth. In doing so they pick out long threads of change towards ‘compact’ design and reassess what has previously been seen as a distinct shift in the seventeenth century. Design and Plan is particularly well illustrated and usefully includes ground plans alongside photos of specific houses. It provides the reader with a solid understanding of the processes from which the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English country house emerged.

Holmes, Michael. The Country House Described: An Index to the Country Houses of Great Britain and Ireland. Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1986.

The Country House Described is an important reference work for researching the country house and is available in most large libraries. It lists 4,000 country houses from different parts of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland and provides references to all the literature relating to those individual houses. The literature that Holmes lists is available in the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The Country House Described is a particularly good guide to illustrations of houses, but also lists guides about individual houses, catalogues of collections, sales catalogues and Country Life articles. It offers a starting point for any research on particular country houses.

Mandler, Peter. The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home. London: Yale University Press, 1997.

In The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home, Peter Mandler critically examines the changing perceptions of the country house from c. 1815 until c. 1974. Mandler argues that it was not until the nineteenth century that people came to understand country houses as symbols of national heritage. In the early years of that century country houses opened their doors to an increasingly interested public. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, country houses were once again seen in an unflattering light. Finding themselves and their houses out of favour, the aristocracy withdrew from public view, a process which in some cases led to the dereliction of their homes. By the 1950s, as the aristocracy’s power reduced, country houses could be understood in a more generous light – as pieces of national heritage in need of conservation. Mandler’s research, which uses manuscript collections alongside newspapers and magazines, is important in encouraging us to question the changing status and meanings given to the country house by the general population. Far from a steady icon of English heritage, Mandler demonstrates that the image of the country house has been as vulnerable to the changing social, political and economic conditions as its owners.

Wilson, Richard and Alan Mackley. Creating Paradise: The Building of the English Country House, 1660-1880. London Hambledon and London, 2001.

In Creating Paradise, Richard Wilson and Alan Mackley reveal who built English country houses in the years between 1660 and 1880. They show why they built them, where they built them and how they financed such building. Concentrating on houses in Cheshire, Gloucestershire, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, Suffolk and Yorkshire, they explore the different experiences that inspired country house builders to build. More specifically, they also question why country house builders decided to build in certain styles, using particular architects. Wilson and Mackley also demonstrate the magnitude of building operations by focusing in on the details of the building process itself. For instance, they examine procedures such as how the materials were sourced, how they reached the site and how much the labourers were paid. Creating Paradise provides the reader with a solid understanding of the many costs and frustrations that people bore in order to build their country houses.

Country House: General

Airs, Malcolm (ed.). The Edwardian Great House. Oxford: University of Oxford, Department for Continuing Education, 2000.

Airs, Malcolm (ed.). The Victorian Great House. Oxford: University of Oxford, Department for Continuing Education, 2000.

Airs, Malcolm, (ed). The Later Eighteenth Century Great House. Oxford: University of Oxford, Department for Continuing Education, 1997.

Airs, Malcolm. The Tudor & Jacobean Country House: A Building History. Stroud: Sutton, 1995.

Airs, Malcolm. The Making of the English Country House. London: The Architectural Press Ltd, 1975.

Arnold, Dana (ed.). The Georgian Country House: Architecture, Landscape, and Society. Stroud: Sutton, 1998.

Baird, Rosemary. Mistress of the House: Great Ladies and Grand Houses, 1670-1830. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2003.

Barstow, Phyllida. The English Country House Party. Wellingborough: Equation, 1989.

Beckett, John Vincent. ‘Country House Life’, Historical Journal, 45:1 (2002), 235-44.

Bence-Jones, Mark. Great English Homes: Ancestral Homes of England and Wales and the People Who Lived in Them. London: National Trust: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984.

Bence-Jones, Mark. Life in an Irish Country House. London: Constable, 1996.

Bence-Jones, Mark. Palaces of the Raj. London: Allen and Unwin, 1973.

Beresford, M.W. ‘Building History from Insurance Records’, Urban History Yearbook, (1976), 7-14.

Chadarevian, Soraya de. ‘Laboratory Science versus Country-House Experiments: The Controversy between Julius Sachs and Charles Darwin’, British Journal for the History of Science, 29:1 (1996), 17-41.

Christie, Christopher. The British Country House in the Eighteenth Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.

Ciro, Jennifer. ‘Country House Libraries in the Nineteenth Century’, Library History, 18:2 (2002), 89-98.

Clemenson, H.A. English Country Houses and Landed Estates. London and Canberra: Croon Helm, 1982.

Cliffe, John Trevor. The World of the Country House in Seventeenth-Century England. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1999.

Coffey, Laura. ‘Evelyn Waugh’s Country House Trinity: Memory, History and Catholicism in Brideshead Revisited’, Literature & History, 15:1 (2006), 59-73.

Colvin, Howard Montagu. ‘Lease or Demolish? The Problem of the Redundant Country House in Georgian England’, Airs, Malcolm (ed.). The Later Eighteenth Century Great House. Oxford: University of Oxford, Department for Continuing Education, 1997.

Conner, Patrick. Oriental Architecture in the West. London: Thames and Hudson, 1979.

Coope, R. ‘The “Long Gallery”: Its Origins, Development, Use and Decoration’, Architectural History, 29 (1986), 43-84.

Cross, Sophia. ‘The Country House is Just Like a Flag’, Arnold, Dana (ed.). Cultural Identities and the Aesthetics of Britishness. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004.

Cruikshank, D. A Guide to the Georgian Buildings of Britain and Ireland. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson for the National Trust and the Irish Georgian Society, 1985.

Durant, David Norton. Life in the Country House: A Historical Dictionary. London: John Murray, 1996.

Dyer, Christopher and Catherine Richardson (eds). William Dugdale, Historian, 1605-1686: His Life, His Writings and His County. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009.

Elliott, Brent. The Country House Garden: From the Archives of Country Life, 1897-1939. London: Mitchell Beazley, 1995.

Elton, Arthur, Brett Harrison and Keith Wark. Researching the Country House: A Guide for Local Historians. London: B.T. Batsford Ltd, 1992.

Fitzgerald, Desmond and James Peill. The Irish Country House. London: Thames & Hudson, 2010.

Fowler, Alastair. The Country House Poem: A Cabinet of Seventeenth-Century Estate Poems and Related Items. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993.

Franklin, Jill. The Gentleman’s Country House and Its Plan, 1835-1914. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1981.

Franklin, Jill. ‘The Victorian Country House’, Mingay, Gordon Edmund (ed.). The Victorian Countryside. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981.

Franklin, Jill. ‘Troops of Servants: Labour and Planning in the Country House, 1840-1914’, Victorian Studies, 19 (1975), 211-39.

Gardiner, Juliet. The Edwardian Country House. London: Channel 4 Books, 2002.

Garnett, Oliver. Country House Pastimes. London: National Trust, 1998.

Gerard, Jessica. Country House Life: Family and Servants, 1815-1914. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994.

Gerard, J. A. ‘Invisible Servants: The Country House and the Local Community’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 57 (1984), 178-88.

Girouard, Mark. Life in the English Country House. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978.

Girouard, Mark. Town and Country. London: Yale University Press, 1992.

Girouard, Mark. The Victorian Country House. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1979.

Glendinning, M., R. MacInnes and A. MacKechnie. A History of Scottish Architecture from the Renaissance to the Present Day. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996.

Goodenough, Richard. Researching the History of a Country House: A Guide to Sources and Their Use. Canterbury: Mickle Print, 2008.

Gomme, Andor and Alison Maguire. Design and Plan in the Country House: From Castle Donjons to Palladian Boxes. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008.

Gow, I. The Scottish Interior. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992.

Gow, Ian and Alistair Rowan (eds). Scottish Country Houses, 1600-1914. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994.

Gray, Todd, Margery M. Rowe and Audrey Erskine (eds). Tudor and Stuart Devon: The Common Estate and Government. Essays Presented to Joyce Youings. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1992.

Hall, Michael. The English Country House: From the Archives of ‘Country Life’, 1897-1939. London: Aurum Press, 2001.

Harris, John Frederick. A Country House Index: An Index to over 2000 Country Houses Illustrated.... Shalfleet Manor Isle of Wight: Pinhorns, 1971.

Harris, John Frederick. Echoing Voices: More Memories of a Country House Snooper. London: John Murray, 2002.

Hearn, Karen. In Celebration: The Art of the Country House. London: Tate Publishing, 1998.

Herbert, Eugenia W. ‘The Gardens of Barrackpore’, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, 27:1 (2007), 31-60.

Hill, N. A. ‘Nevill Holt: The Development of an English Country House’, Archaeological Journal, 156 (1999), 246-93.

Holmes, Michael. The Country House Described: An Index to the Country Houses of Great Britain and Ireland.... Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1986.

Horn, Pamela. Ladies of the Manor: Wives and Daughters in Country House Society, 1830-1918. Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1991.

Hughes, Harold and Tom Munnelly. ‘Marty O'Malley - The Spirit of the Irish Country House’, Dal gCais, 7 (1984), 85-91.

Hughes, Helen. John Fowler: The Invention of the Country-House Style. Shaftesbury: Donhead, 2005.

Hussey, Christopher. English Country Houses: Early Georgian 1715-1760. London: Country Life, 1955.

Hussey, Christopher. English Country Houses: Mid Georgian 1760-1800. London: Country Life, 1955.

Hussey, Christopher. English Country Houses: Late Georgian 1800-1840. London: Country Life, 1955.

Jackson-Stops, Gervase, Gordon J. Schochet, Lena Cowen Orlin and Elisabeth Blair MacDowgall (eds). The Fashioning and Functioning of the British Country House. Washington, DC; National Gallery of Art; Hanover, NH; London: University Press of New England, 1989.

Jackson-Stops, Gervase. The Treasure Houses of Britain: Five Hundred Years of Private Patronage and Art Collecting. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

Jenkins, D.T. Indexes of the Fire Insurance Policies of the Sun Fire Office and the Royal Exchange Assurance, 1775-87. York: Economic Social and Research Council, 1986.

Jervis, Simon Swynfen. ‘Furniture in Eighteenth-Century Country House Guides’, Furniture History, 42 (2006), 63-152.

Jervis, Simon Swynfen. ‘The English Country House Library: An Architectural History’, Library History, 18:3 (2002), 175-90.

Jones, L.J. and L.D. Schwarz. ‘Wealth, Occupation, and Insurance in the Late Eighteenth Century: The Policy Registers of the Sun Fire Office’, Economic History Review, 2^nd ser., 36 (1983), 365-73.

Jordan, E. T. ‘Inigo Jones and the Architecture of Poetry’, Renaissance Quarterly, 44 (1991), 280-319.

Kenworthy-Browne, J., Peter Reid and Mark Bence-Jones. Burke’s Guide to Country Houses. London: Burke’s Peerage, 1978

Larsen, Ruth. ‘The British Country House, 1939-1945’, Everyone’s War, 15 (2007), 50-55.

Lecercle, Anne. ‘Country House, Catholicity and Crypt(ic) in Twelfth Night’, Dutton, Richard; Findlay, Alison; Wilson, Richard (eds). Region, Religion and Patronage. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003.

Lewis, Judith, 'When a House is Not a Home: Elite English Women and the Eighteenth-Century Country House, Journal of British Studies, 48 (2009), 336-63.

Littlejohn, David. The Fate of the English Country House. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Lloyd, Thomas. ‘Country-House Libraries of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, Jones, Philip Henry; Rees, Eiluned (ed.). A Nation and Its Books: A History of the Book in Wales. Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales in association with Aberystwyth Centre for the Book, 1998.

Lowrey, John. ‘Practical Palladianism: The Scottish Country House and the Concept of the Villa in the Late Seventeenth Century’, Architectural Heritage, 18:1 (2007), 151-67.

Lummis, Trevor, Jan Marsh. The Woman's Domain: Women and the English Country House. London: Viking, 1990.

Mackley, Alan. ‘The Documentary Evidence for Country House Building during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, Margeson, Sue (ed.). A Festival of Norfolk Archaeology: In Celebration of the 150th Anniversary of the Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society. Norwich: Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society, 1996.

Mandler, Peter. The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home. London: Yale University Press, 1997.

Mandler, Peter. ‘Nationalising the Country House’, Hunter, Michael Cyril William (ed.), Preserving the Past: The Rise of Heritage in Modern Britain. Stroud: Sutton, 1996.

Martin, Joanna. Wives and Daughters: Women and Children in the Georgian Country House. London: Hambledon, 2004.

Robinson, John Martin. The English Country Estate. London: Century in association with the National Trust, 1988.

McBride, Kari Boyd. Country House Discourse in Early Modern England: A Cultural Study of Landscape and Legitimacy. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001.

McKean, Christopher. The Scottish Chateau: The Country House of Renaissance Scotland. Stroud: Sutton, 2002.

Mowl, Timothy and Brian Earnshaw. Trumpet at a Distant Gate: The Lodge as Prelude to the Country House. London: Waterstone, 1985.

Opitz, Donald L. ‘“This House is a Temple of Research”: Country-House Centres for Late Victorian Science’, Clifford, David (ed.). Repositioning Victorian Sciences: Shifting Centres in Nineteenth-Century Scientific Thinking. London and New York: Anthem Press, 2006, 235-259.

Palmer, Marilyn. ‘The Country House: Technology and Society’, Industrial Archaeology Review, 27:1 (2005), 97-103.

Pearson, Jacqueline. ‘"An Emblem of Themselves, in Plum or Pear": Poetry the Female Body and the Country House’, in Smith, Barbara; Appelt, Ursula (eds). Write or be Written: Early Modern Women Poets and Cultural Constraints. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001, 87-104.

Port, M.H. ‘West End Palaces: The Aristocratic Town House in London, 1730-1830’, London Journal, 20, 1 (1995), 17-46.

Purcell, Mark. ‘The Country House Library Reassess’d: Or, Did the “Country House Library” Ever Really Exist?’, Library History, 18:3 (2002), 157-74.

Rackham, Oliver. ‘Pre-existing Trees and Woods in Country-House Parks’, Landscapes, 5:2 (2004), 1-16.

Reid, Peter H. ‘The Decline and Fall of the British Country House Library’, Libraries and Culture, 36:2 (2001), 345-66.

Retford, Kate. ‘Patrilineal Portraiture? Gender and Genealogy in the Eighteenth-Century English Country House’, Styles, John; Vickery, Amanda (eds). Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700-1830. New Haven, CT and London: The Yale Center for British Art and The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2006.

Ricketts, Annabel Ophelia Clare and Simon Ricketts. The English Country House Chapel: Building a Protestant Tradition. Reading: Spire Books, 2007.

Roberts, Judith and Martin Hargreaves. ‘Stephen Switzer, Hydrosticks and Technology in the Country House Landscape’, Transactions of the Newcomen Society, 73:2 (2003), 163-78.

Sambrook, Pamela A. Keeping Their Place: Domestic Service in the Country House, 1700-1920. Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2005.

Sambrook, Pamela A. Country House Brewing in England, 1500-1900. London: Hambledon, 1996.

Sambrook, Pamela A. The Country House Kitchen 1650-1900: Skills and Equipment for Food Provisioning. Stroud: Alan Sutton in association with the National Trust, 1996.

Saumarez Smith, Charles. ‘Supply and Demand in English Country House Building 1660-1740’, Oxford Art Journal, 11, 2 (1988), 3-9.

Seebohm, Caroline. The Country House: A Wartime History, 1939-1945. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989.

Sebba, Anne. The Exiled Collector: William Bankes and the Making of an English Country House. London: John Murray, 2004.

Skelton, Kimberley. ‘Redefining Hospitality: The Leisured World of the 1650s English Country House’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 68:4 (2009), 496-513.

Somerville-Large, Peter. The Irish Country House: A Social History. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995.

Stewart, R. The Classic English Town House. London: New Holland, 2006.

Strong, Roy, M. Binney and J. Harris. The Destruction of the Country House. London: Thames and Hudson, 1974.

Summerson, John. ‘The Classical Country House in Eighteenth Century England’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 107 (1959), 539-87.

Sykes, Christopher Simon. The Big House: The Story of Country House and its Family. London: HarperCollins, 2004.

Thompson, M. W. ‘Keep or Country House? Thin-walled Norman “Proto-Keeps”’, Fortress: The Castles & Fortifications Quarterly, 12 (1992), 13-22.

Tinniswood, Adrian. A History of Country House Visiting: Five Centuries of Tourism and Taste. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.

Tinniswood, Adrian. A Polite Tourist: A History of Country House Visiting. London: National Trust Enterprises, 1998.

Toynbee, P. ‘Horace Walpole’s Journals of Visits to Country Seats Etc.’, Walpole Society, 16 (1927-28).

Wall, C. ‘The English Auction: Narratives of Dismantlings’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 31 (1997), 1-25.

Wall, Cynthia. The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2006.

Watkin, David. The Classical Country House: From the Archives of Country Life. London: Aurum, 2010.

West, Susie. ‘Social Space and the English Country House’, Tarlow, Sarah; West, Susie (eds). The Familiar Past? Archaeologies of Later Historical Britain. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.

Whyte, William. ‘How Do Buildings Mean? Some Issues of Interpretation in the History of Architecture’, History and Theory, 45 (2006), 153-177.

Wilson, C. Anne. The Country House Kitchen Garden, 1600-1950: How Produce Was Grown and How It Was Used. Stroud: Sutton in association with the National Trust, 1998.

Wilson, M. I. The English Country House and Its Furnishings. London: Batsford, 1977.

Wilson, Richard. ‘Novelty and Amusement?: Visiting the Georgian Country House’, The Historian, 70 (2001), 4-9.

Wilson, Richard and Alan Mackley. Creating Paradise: The Building of the English Country House, 1660-1880. London: Hambledon and London, 2001.

Wilson, Richard and Alan Mackley. 'How Much Did the English Country House Cost to Build, 1660-1880?', Economic History Review, 52:3 (1999), 436-468.

Williamson, Tom. ‘Politeness and Palladianism: Archaeology and the Country House’, Margeson, Sue (ed.). A Festival of Norfolk Archaeology: in Celebration of the 150th Anniversary of the Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society. Norwich: Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society, 1996.

Worsley, Giles. ‘Beyond the Powerhouse: Understanding the Country House in the Twenty-First Century’, Historical Research, 78 (2005), 423-435.

Worsley, Lucy. ‘Female Architectural Patronage in the Eighteenth Century and the Case of Henrietta Cavendish Holles Harley’, Architectural History, 48 (2005), 139-162.

Country House: Specific Counties and Cities

Baggs, Tony. ‘The Hearth Tax and the Country House in “Old” Cambridgeshire’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 93 (2004), 151-8.

Billington, J. ‘London's Royal Country House’, Illustrated London News, 280:7108 (1992), 38-45.

Brears, Peter Charles David. ‘York and the Gentry: the York Season and the Country House’, White, Eileen (ed.). Feeding a City: York: The Provision of Food from Roman Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century. Totnes: Prospect Books, 2000.

Bryant, Julius J. V. London's Country House Collections. London: Scala, with English Heritage, 1993.

de Figueiredo, P. and J. Treuherz. Cheshire Country Houses. Chichester: Phillimore & Co Ltd, 1988.

Hereward, J. and R. Taylor. The Country Houses of Northamptonshire. Swindon: Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, 1996.

Kingsley, N. The Country Houses of Gloucestershire: II, 1660-1830. Chichester: Phillimore & Co Ltd, 1992.

Larsen, Ruth M. (ed.). Maids and Mistresses: Celebrating Three Hundred Years of Women and the Yorkshire Country House. Castle Howard: The Yorkshire Country House Partnership, 2004.

Lowery, Phoebe. ‘Patronage and the Country House in Northumberland’. Faulkner, Tom E. (ed.). Northumbrian Panorama: Studies in the History and Culture of North East England. London: Octavian, 1996.

Millar, A.H. Historical and Descriptive Accounts of the Castles and Mansions of Ayrshire. Edinburgh: William Paterson, 1885.

Oswald, Arthur. Country Houses of Dorset. London: Country Life, 1959.

Oswald, Arthur. Country Houses of Kent. London: Country Life Ltd, 1933.

Pinnell, Blake. Country House History Around Lymington, Brockenhurst and Milford-on-Sea. Lymington: B. Pinnell, 1987.

Ridgway, Christopher and Allen Warren. ‘The Yorkshire Country House Partnership’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, 81 (2009), 351-54.

Ridgway, C.L. and Allen Warren. ‘Collaborative Opportunities for the Study of the Country House: The Yorkshire Country House Partnership’, Historical Research, 78:200 (2005), 162-79.

Smith, J.T. English Houses, 1200-1800: The Hertfordshire Evidence. London: HMSO, 1992.

Smith, John Guthrie and John Oswald Michell. The Old Country Houses of the Old Glasgow Gentry. Glasgow: James Maclehose & Sons, 1878.

Stone, Lawrence and C. F. Jeanne. ‘Country Houses and Their Owners in Hertfordshire, 1540-1879’, Ayedelotte, W.O. (ed.). The Dimensions of Quantitative Research. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972, 56-123.

Tyack, Geoffrey. Warwickshire Country Houses. Warwick: Warwickshire Local History Society, 1989.

Tyack, Geoffrey. ‘Thomas Ward and the Warwickshire Country House’, Architectural History, 27 (1984), 534-42.

Tyack, Geoffrey. The Making of the Warwickshire Country House 1500-1650. S.l: Warwickshire Local History Society, 1982.

Wood, C. ‘Music-Making in a Yorkshire Country House’, Zon, Bennett M. (ed.). Nineteenth-Century British Music Studies, vol. 1. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999.

Country House: Specific House Histories

Ainsworth, Stewart. ‘Howley Hall, West Yorkshire: Field Survey’, Bowden, Mark; MacKay, Donnie; Topping, Peter (eds). From Cornwall to Caithness: Some Aspects of British Field Archaeology. Papers Presented to Norman V. Quinnell. Oxford: B.A.R, 1989.

Allen, Brian. ‘Two Successful Restorations: Wilton House and Frogmore House’, Apollo: The International Magazine of the Arts, 132:345 (1990), 336-39.

Anon. Argyll: An Inventory of the Ancient Monuments. 7 vols. Edinburgh: Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments and Constructions of Scotland, 1971-1992.

Baker, Mark. Plas Teg: A Jacobean Country House, Pontblyddyn. Cardiff: Brampton House Publishing, 2006.

Bennett, Eleanor. ‘Changing Lifestyles in a Lincolnshire Country House: Brackenborough Hall in the 1950s’, Sturman, Christopher (ed.). Lincolnshire People and Places: Essays in Memory of Terence R. Leach (1937-1994). Lincoln: Society for Lincolnshire History and Archaeology, 1996.

Berry, Sue. ‘Stanmer House and Park, East Sussex: The Evolution of a Small Downland Country House and Its Setting, c. 1710-1805’, Sussex Archaeological Collections, 143 (2005), 239-55.

Brooks, Jeanice. ‘Musical Monuments for the Country House: Music, Collection, and Display at Tatton Park’, Music & Letters, 91:4 (2010), 513-35.

Bryant, Julius J. V. The Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood. London: Historic House Museums Trust, 1990.

Campbell, Louise. ‘Constructivism and Contextualism in a Modern Country House: The Design of Brackenfell’, Architectural History, 50 (2007), 247-266.

Chalcraft, Anna and Judith Viscardi. Strawberry Hill: Horace Walpole’s Gothic Castle London: Frances Lincoln, 2007.

Clarke, Stephen. ‘“Lord God! Jesus! What a House!”: Describing and Visiting Strawberry Hill’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 33:3 (2010), 357-380.

Duggan, Dianne. ‘Woburn Abbey: The First Episode of a Great Country House’, Architectural History, 46 (2003), 57-80.

Fairclough, Oliver. ‘John Thorpe and Aston Hall’, Architectural History, 32 (1989), 30-51.

Gomme, Andor. ‘Four Eighteenth-Century Buildings at Halton’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire & Cheshire, 135 (1986), 37-59.

Hewlings, Richard. ‘Younsgbury’, The Georgian Group Journal, 9 (1999), 107-15.

Hiskey, Christine. ‘Palladian and Practical: Country House Technology at Holkham Hall’, Construction History, 22 (2007), 3-26.

Hodder, M. A. Excavations at Sandwell Priory and Hall, 1982-88: A Mesolithic Settlement, Medieval Monastery and Post-Medieval Country House in West Bromwich. West Bromwich: Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council, 1991.

Holdsworth, G. Hemsworth High Hall: A Georgian Country House. Woolley, Yorkshire: Wakefield History Publications, 1982.

Howell, Kate, Cefn Mably. ‘Glamorgan: An Architectural and Archaeological Survey of a Grand Country House, 1998-2000’, Archaeologia Cambrensis, 148 (1999), 154-89.

Hudson, Derek. Holland House in Kensington. London: P. Davies, 1967.

Lyons, Nick. ‘A Country House Inventory: Hagnaby Priory, 1927-1930, Shortly Before Demolition’ in Turman, Christopher (ed.), Lincolnshire People and Places: Essays in Memory of Terence R. Leach (1937-1994). Lincoln: Society for Lincolnshire History and Archaeology, 1996.

Inskip, Peter. ‘Discoveries, Challenges, and Moral Dilemmas in the Restoration of Garden Buildings at Stowe’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 55:3 (1992) 511-26.

Johnson, H. A. ‘The Architecture of Osberton Hall, Nottinghamshire’, Transactions of the Thoroton Society of Nottinghamshire, 87 (1984 for 1983), 60-70.

Kennedy, Carol. Harewood: The Life and Times of an English Country House. London: Random House, 1982.

Mackley, A.L. ‘The Construction of Henman Hall’, Journal of the Georgian Group, 6 (1996), 85-96.

Mackley, A.L. ‘The Building of Haverlingland Hall’, Norfolk Archaeology, 43 (1999), 111-132.

Martin Robinson, John Shugborough. London: National Trust Books, 1989.

Maguire, Alison. ‘Radley Hall: The Rediscovery of a Country House’, Architectural History, 44 (2001), 341-50.

Moffett, Cameron and Bob Meeson. ‘Madeley Court, Shropshire: From Monastic Grange to Country House Hotel, Excavations 1978-9 and 1987’, Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological and Historical Society, 81 (2006), 1-78.

Omand, G.W. (ed.). The Arniston Memoirs: Three Centuries of a Scottish House, 1751-1838. Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1887.

Palin, Will. Saving Wotton: The Remarkable Story of a Soane Country House. London: Sir John Soane’s Museum, 2004.

Penzer, N. M. ‘The Plate at Knole’, The Connoisseur, 147 (1961), 84-91, 178-84.

Robinson, James. ‘Newberry Hall, Carbury, Co. Kildare – A Country House and Its People’, Dublin Historical Record, 61 (2008), 158-168.

Roy, Ian. ‘An English Country House at War: Littlecote and the Pophams’, Freedman, Lawrence; Hayes, Paul; O'Neill, Robert (eds). War, Strategy and International Politics: Essays in honour of Sir Michael Howard. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.

Sambrook, Pamela A. A Country House at Work: Three Centuries of Dunham Massey. London: National Trust, 2003.

Scott-Fox, Charles. Bickham House and the Short(e) Family: The History of a Devon Country House and the Family Who Built It. Great Britain: Charles Scott-Fox, 2006.

Sebba, Anne. The Exiled Collector: William Bankes and the Making of an English Country House. London: John Murray, 2004.

Sicca, C. M. ‘Holkham Hall, Norfolk’ in Ford, Boris (ed.). The Cambridge Guide to the Arts in Britain, 5: the Augustan Age. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1991.

Simon, Jacob. Beningbrough Hall, North Yorkshire. London: National Trust, 1992.

Smith, Ann. ‘Sherborne Castle: from Tudor Lodge to Country House: New Evidence from the Archives’, Local Historian, 25:4 (1995), 231-41.

Smith, M.P., Russel, A.D. ‘Northlands House 1882-2004: The Last Country House in Southampton’, Proceedings of the Hampshire Field Club & Archaeological Society, 59 (2004), 210-18.

Smith, Peter. ‘Lady Oxford’s Alterations at Wellbeck Abbey, 1741-55’, The Georgian Group Journal, 11 (2001), 133-168.

Snodin, Michael with Cynthia Roman. Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill. London: Yale University Press, 2009.

Stamp, Gavin. ‘Architecture: Vanbrugh’s Indian Villa’, Apollo, 169:562 (February 2009), 52-53.

Stanley-Millson, Caroline and John Newman. ‘Blickling Hall: The Building of a Jacobean Mansion’, Architectural History, 29 (1986) 1-42.

Telfer, A., Beasley, Mark. ‘Hart's Hospital, From Farm to Country House: Phase II and III Excavations’, London Archaeologist, 8:7 (1997), 181-186.

Turberville, A.S. A History of Wellbeck Abbey and Its Owners, 2 vols. London: Faber and Faber, 1938.

Wilson, Richard and Alan Mackley, ‘Founding a Landed Dynasty, Building a Country House: The Rolfes of Heacham in the Eighteenth Century’, Rawcliffe, Carole; Virgoe, Roger; Wilson, Richard G. (eds). Counties and Communities: Essays on East Anglian History: Presented to Hassell Smith. Norwich: Centre of East Anglian Studies, University of East Anglia, 1996.

Country House: Research Reference Guides

Colvin, Howard. A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600-1840. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008 [1954].

Currie, C.R.J. and C.P. Lewis. A Guide to English County Histories. Thrupp: Sutton Publishing Ltd, 1997.

Greeves, Lydia. Houses of the National Trust: Outstanding Buildings of Britain. London: National Trust Books, 2008.

Holmes, Michael. The Country House Described: An Index to the Country Houses of Great Britain and Ireland. Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies in association with the Victoria & Albert Museum, 1986.

Pevsner, Nikolaus - The Buildings of England Series

Tipping, H. Avray. English Homes: Period 2. Vol. 1 Early Tudor, 1485-1558. London: Country Life, 1929.

Tipping, H. Avray. English Homes: Period 3. Vol. 1 Late Tudor and Early Stuart. London: Country Life, 1922.

Tipping, H. Avray. English Homes: Period 3. Vol. 2 Late Tudor and Early Stuart. London: Country Life, 1927.

Tipping, H. Avray. English Homes: Period 4. Vol. 1 Late Stuart, 1649-1714. London, Country Life, 1929.

Tipping, H. Avray. English Homes: Period 4. Vol. 2. The Work of Sir John Vanbrugh and his School, 1699-1736. London: Country Life, 1928.

Tipping, H. Avray. English Homes: Period 5. Vol. 1, Early Georgian, 1714-1760. London: Country Life, 1921.

Country House Bibliography Acknowledgements

The first version of this bibliography was primarily compiled by Kate Smith.

Interiors and Interior Decoration Bibliography

Annotated Guide to Interiors and Interior Decoration Publications

Aynsley, Jeremy and Charlotte Grant (eds). Imagined Interiors: Representing the Domestic Interior since the Renaissance. V&A Publications: London, 2006.

Imagined Interiors is a collection of essays, which arose out of the AHRC-funded Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior. The Centre housed collaborative work between the Royal College of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Bedford Centre for the History of Women at Royal Holloway University of London. By combining the different expertise of these three institutions the Centre ensured an interdisciplinary approach to its research. Imagined Interiors shows how successful that approach can be. It examines a wide range of evidence, including account books, inventories, manuscripts, letters, essays, fiction, poetry, drama, advertisements and design manuals to survey the changing representations of domestic interiors in Europe and North America from 1400 to the present day. In doing so it also seeks to understand the changing meanings ascribed to interiors in this period. Representations, Aynsley and Grant argue, provide a fruitful way of unearthing meaning. Representations are ‘complex and coded’ and by examining the codes that shape them, meaning is revealed. At the same time, representations are also powerful agents which shape attitudes and behaviour. As a result they are central to meaning making. Imagined Interiors brings together a mixture of historians, art historians, design historians, anthropologists, artists and curators to provide a complex reading of English interiors and their representations.

Jeremy Aynsley and Charlotte Grant – ‘Introduction’

Flora Dennis – ‘Representing the Domestic Interior in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Italy: From the Birth of the Virgin to Palaces of Cheese’

Luke Syson – ‘Fifteenth-Century Interiors in the Netherlands’

Ann Matchette – ‘Dismembering the Home in Renaissance Italy’

Catherine Richardson – ‘Home, Household and Domesticity in Drama in Early Modern London’

Marta Ajmar-Wollheim – ‘Domestic Life: Instructing on the Art of Living Well’

Elizabeth Miller – ‘Renaissance Prints and the Home’

John Loughman – ‘Between Reality and Artful Fiction: The Representation of the Domestic Interior in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art’

Giorgio Riello – ‘Cataloguing the Domestic: Inventories’

Hannah Grieg – ‘Eighteenth-Century English Interiors in Image and Text’

Michael Snodin – ‘Representing Rooms: Plans and Other Drawings’

Carolyn Sargentson – ‘Inside the Interior: Furniture and its Inner Spaces in Eighteenth-Century France’

Karen Harvey – ‘Eroticizing the Interior’

Charlotte Grant – ‘”One’s Self and One’s House, One’s Furniture”: From Object to Interior in British Fiction, 1720-1900’

John Styles – ‘Picturing Domesticity: The Cottage Genre in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain’

Halina Pasierbska – ‘Modelling Houses: the Killer Cabinet House’

Mark Jones – Temperance and the Domestic Ideal’

Francesca Berry – ‘Lived Perspective: The Art of the French Nineteenth-Century Interior’

Jane Hamlett – ‘Managing and Making the Home: Domestic Advice Books’

Amanda Girling-Budd – ‘Advertising Interiors and Interiors in Advertising’

Jeremy Aynsley – ‘Displaying Designs for the Domestic Interior in Europe and America, 1850-1950’

Rebecca Preston – ‘Reading, the Child and the Home: Illustrated Children’s Books in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain’

Trevor Keeble – ‘Photographing Home’

Tim Benton – ‘The Twentieth-Century Architectural Interior: Representing Modernity’

Christopher Frayling – ‘Hollywood Studio Design: the Great Hall of Xanadu’

Harriet McKay – ‘Designing Lifestyles: Retail Catalogues’

Rod Mengham – ‘”Anthropology at Home”: Domestic Interiors in British Film and Fiction of the 1930s and 1940s’

Micahel McMillan – ‘The “West Indian” Front Room: Migrant Aesthetics in the Home’

Viviana Narotzky – ‘Dream Homes and DIY: Television, New Media and the Domestic Makeover’

Inge Maria Daniels – ‘Ethnographic Representations of the Home’

Olivier Richon and Alexandra McGlynn – ‘Modernism on Holiday’

Bryden, Inga and Janet Floyd (eds). Domestic Space: Reading the Nineteenth-Century Interior. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999.

Domestic Space is a collection of essays, which (re)examines the nineteenth-century interior. Contributors not only read texts about interiors, they also read interiors as texts. Although recent work by historians such as William Whyte has prompted scholars to rethink such an approach, it is used in this collection to great effect. Together these essays question the relationship between the interior as a ‘private’ space and the outside world. In doing so, these essays move past the separate spheres argument by encouraging readers to reconsider the interior as a liminal space. These essays are interested in the hidden parts of any interior and the ways in which people inhabit or fail to inhabit these spaces. This collection significantly interrogates the relationships that exist between people, space and objects and the meanings created by such relationships.

Carolyn Steedman - ‘What a Rag Rug Means’

Ann. C. Colley - ‘Bodies and Mirrors: The Childhood Interiors of Ruskin, Pater and Stevenson’

Lynne Walker and Vron Ware - ‘Political Pincushions: Decorating the Abolitionist Interior, 1787-1865’

Sarah Milan - ‘Refracting the Gaselier: Understanding Victorian Responses to Domestic Gas Lighting’

Moira Donald - ‘Tranquil Havens?: Critiquing the Idea of Home as the Middle-Class Sanctuary’

Martin Hewitt - ‘District Visiting and the Constitution of Domestic Space in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’

S. J. Kleinberg - ‘Gendered Space: Housing, Privacy and Domesticity in the Nineteenth-Century United States’

Alan Louis Ackerman, Jr - ‘Theatre and the Private Sphere in the Fiction of Louisa May Alcott’

Saraj Luria - ‘The Architecture of Manners: Henry James, Edith Wharton and The Mount’

Cohen, Deborah. Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions. London: Yale University Press, 2006.

Deborah Cohen’s work explores the peculiarly British love affair with the domestic interior. By looking beyond canonical figures such as William Morris and John Ruskin, Cohen uncovers how the middle classes related to the domestic interior between 1830 and 1930. Cohen uses unpublished diaries, family photograph albums and objects found in flea markets to understand what filled middle-class homes and what they meant. She also exploits other sources such as stock books, business correspondence and trade papers to show what people bought and why. In doing so, Cohen unearths a significant trajectory which saw the early Victorians overcoming their religious scruples to enjoy guiltless consumption and self expression through objects and interiors. After the horrors of the First World War, however, Cohen finds an important shift. At this time members of the middle class became more cautious, instituting simpler, more uniform types of domestic decoration. Alongside these changes, Cohen also uncovers the different roles, which men and women assumed in relation to interior decoration. While men invested time, effort and money in interior decoration choices in the nineteenth century, by the twentieth century they had relinquished that role. Within this change Cohen finds the beginnings of a modern gender stereotype, which has shaped perceptions of women’s relationship with the home. In examining these compelling narratives, Household Gods provides a thought-provoking survey of the middle class’s relationship to domestic interiors.

Crowley, John E. The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Changing conceptions of comfort are central to our understanding of interiors. In his 2001 book, The Invention of Comfort, John Crowley argues that historians have often understood ideas of comfort as ‘natural’ and ahistorical. In contrast, he asserts that the ways in which different cultures have understood the relationships between body, material culture and environment have significantly changed over time. Crowley uses poetry, design books, travelogues and prints to examine the ways in which people valued heat and light in early modern Britain and North America. In doing so, Crowley shows that the eighteenth century was a key turning point in re-shaping ideas of comfort. He finds that in this century political economists and philosophers invested much intellectual effort in demonstrating the need for the improvement of people’s physical circumstances. Towards the end of the book he shows how, by the nineteenth century, domestic comfort began to be seen as a right and an obligation. Crowley’s work is important in highlighting how people’s relationship to and conception of interiors has changed over time.

Edwards, Jason and Imogen Hart (eds). Rethinking the Interior, c.1867-1896: Aestheticism and Arts and Crafts. Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010.

This collection of essays, which originated from The Aesthetic Interior: Neo-Gothic, Aesthetic, Arts and Crafts Conference held at the University of York in 2005, offers a new methodology through which to consider interiors. The essays in this volume focus on the two principal British artistic movements between Pre-Raphaelitism and early Modernism, Aestheticism and Arts and Crafts. By examining these movements in their local, European, Atlantic and imperial contexts, the essays seek to disrupt the familiar trajectory of Victorian cultural history. In doing so, they include a wider remit of historical actors, such as the so-called Pre-Raphaelite sisterhood and thus complicate received understandings of both movements. The essays also seek to investigate the relationship between the Aesthetic and Arts and Craft movement. Rather than understanding that relationship as one of opposition, they uncover various places of overlap and agreement. The collection of essays is particularly interesting for the study of interiors more broadly because of the methodological innovations they seek to implement. The contributors take seriously the different ways in which historical interiors are mediated through images and texts. At the same time the contributors also seek to bypass such mediation by giving value to present-tense encounters with interiors and objects. How these objects feel in the hands of researchers is given importance. Despite the inherent problems of such evidence, uncovered by anthropologists such as Constance Classen and David Howes, by giving it value these contributors do offer up an important means of understanding material culture.

Jason Edwards and Imogen Hart - ‘Introduction – The Victorian Interior: A Collaborative, Eclectic Introduction’

Sally-Anne Huxtable – ‘Re-reading the Green Dining Room’

Jane Hawkes – ‘Superabundance and Disorder: Ruskin’s “Two Great Evils” and the Church of St Mary, Studley Royal’

Imogen Hart – ‘An “Enchanted Interior”: William Morris at Kelmscott House’

Jason Edwards – ‘The Lessons of Leighton House: Aesthetics, Politics, Erotics’

Anne Anderson – ‘”Fearful Consequences...of Living up to One’s Teapot”: Men, Women and “Cultchah” in the Aesthetic Movement’

Paul Holden, ‘”Of Things Both Old and New”: The Work of Richard Coad and James MacLaren’

Morna O’Neill – “Paintings from Nowhere: Walter Crane, Socialism and the Aesthetic Interior’

John Potvin – ‘The Aesthetics of Community: Queer Interiors and the Desire for Intimacy’

Diana Maltz – ‘”Baffling Arrangements”: Vernon Lee and John Singer Sargent in Queer Tangier’

Martina Droth – ‘Sculpture and Aesthetic Intent in the Late-Victorian Interior’

Fowler, John and John Cornforth. English Decoration in the Eighteenth Century. London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1974.

Fowler and Cornforth tentatively suggest three stylistic periods for eighteenth-century decoration. They term the fifty years before 1720 as the Baroque and Palladian period and understand the half century that followed this to be the Rococo period. During these years, they argue, society and social relations were more relaxed and the idea of interior decoration became slowly established. In contrast, by the third period, the final quarter of the eighteenth century, fashion had become more regimented and it was upholsterers who dictated the decoration choices of the elites. By constructing this periodization, Fowler and Cornforth suggest eighteenth-century decoration to be relatively homogenous, simply moving from one stylistic movement to the next. Yet they also demonstrate how, within these periods, contemporaries constantly disrupted ‘styles’. Fowler and Cornforth use case studies, such as Carlton House, to show how people continually changed interior decoration schemes of their houses. Moreover, although the authors argue that fashion was driven emulation and imitation they also recognise how ideas of family lineage and tradition could disrupt fashion’s influence. As interiors had to work on different levels for different audiences, such as family members, household members, visitors and tourists, they grew into complex spaces. Hence, despite giving much weight to stylistic changes, Fowler and Cornforth also present a more complicated view of eighteenth-century decoration.

Jones, Robin D. Interiors of Empire: Objects, Space and Identity within the Indian Subcontinent, c. 1800-1947. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007.

Interiors of Empire describes and explains the interior spaces inhabited by the British and local middle classes in India in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It does so, by examining published advice literature, diaries, correspondence, inventories, photographs, house plans and extant examples of artefacts. Jones is particularly interested in the tensions created by the discrepancies between British ideals of home and interiors and the realities in which they lived. He finds that limited access to furniture and materials in local contexts forced the British in India to create incoherent domestic interiors. These limitations disrupted their ability to use the home as a space of self expression and self fashioning. Jones uses design history and material culture studies to demonstrate the effects of these tensions upon the British in India. Interiors of Empire also explores the effects of the prolonged colonial contact on the domestic spaces of the local middle classes. In doing so, Jones demonstrates the importance of the domestic interior as a site of analysis, which reveals the effects of the colonial experience on both the colonizers and the colonized.

McKellar, Susie and Penny Sparke. Interior Design and Identity. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2004.

Interior Design and Identity is a collection of essays which all examine the relationships between interior design and identity. This collection depicts the relationship between interiors and identities as both horizontally and vertically dynamic. It argues that in the modern world people created interiors, which reflected their identity, these environments then shaped the identities of other individuals who entered that space. For these design historians interiors have agency. At the same time, they also stress that interiors are constantly changing and that the identities they express and shape are never stable. Interior Design and Identity makes other importance conceptual contributions, particularly the idea of the hybrid space. For contributors such as Mary Guyatt, Fiona Walmsley and Emma Gieben-Gamal, the division between ‘home’ and ‘non-home’, ‘private’ and ‘public’ needs further questioning. The spaces examined in these case studies disrupt the simple binary of public and private by simultaneously embodying both. Such studies suggest at the value of further research into hybrid spaces. The essays contained in Interior Design and Identity are generally wary of binaries and find other examples where particular spaces or people take on multiple roles – the idea of producers as consumers and consumers as producers is particularly compelling. This collection of essays is significant in encouraging scholars to disrupt simple readings of interiors and recognise them more fully as complex and often contradictory spaces.

Katherine Sharp – ‘Women’s Creativity and Display in the Eighteenth-Century British Domestic Interior’

Amanda Girling-Budd – ‘Comfort and Gentility: Furnishings by Gillows, Lancaster, 1840-55’

Mary Guyatt – ‘A Semblance of Home: Mental Asylum Interiors, 1880-1914’

Penny Sparke – ‘The Domestic Interior and the Construction of Self: The New York Homes of Elsie de Wolfe’

Louise Ward – ‘Chintz, Swags and Bows: The Myth of English Country-House Style, 1930-90’

Quintin Colville – ‘The Role of the Interior in Constructing Notions of Class and Status: A Case Study of Britannia Royal Naval College Dartmouth, 1905-39’

Emma Gieben-Gamal – ‘Feminine Spaces, Modern Experiences: The Design and Display Strategies of British Hairdressing Salons in the 1920s and 1930s’

Fiona Walmsley – ‘Pragmatism and Pluralism: The Interior Decoration of the Queen Mary’

Scott Oram – ‘”Constructing Contemporary”: Common-Sense Approaches to “Going Modern” in the 1950s’

Jeremy Myerson – ‘After Modernism: The Contemporary Office Environment’

Saumarez Smith, Charles. Eighteenth-Century Decoration: Design and the Domestic Interior in England. Weidenfeld and Nicolson: London, 1993.

Eighteenth-Century Decoration is a large book, full of images of eighteenth-century interiors. Architectural drawings, pattern books, paintings and engravings fill the pages. The images are ordered according to date and are accompanied by text, which explains why the interiors that appear in these images change. Saumarez Smith argued that this approach freed the study of interiors from the history of style – a significant methodological change. In many ways, Eighteenth-Century Decoration was an important precursor to the research conducted by the Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior. Eighteenth-Century Decoration continues to provide a sound overview of the eighteenth-century interior and also acts, just as Saumarez Smith desired it would, as an excellent source book.

Wall, Cynthia. The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2006.

Wall considers the interior spaces, which are included in and described by novels. She tracks the role of description in novels from the Renaissance to the twentieth century and finds an important shift taking place in the eighteenth century. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century things appeared in novels as isolated emblems with little context. Objects only came into view when required to by the narrative – for instance, a particular narrative would only notice a dining room sideboard when the protagonist fainted upon it. By the late eighteenth century, however, novelists had become increasingly interested in the particulars of these things. Description fleshed out spaces and the objects that filled them before the protagonist entered. Wall explains this change by exploring new technologies of seeing, the expansion of consumer culture, new attitudes towards the general and the particular and new perceptions of domestic spaces. She conducts her exploration by employing novels, travelogues, auction catalogues, advertisements and maps. In doing so Wall provides an important means through which to consider the changing ways in which contemporaries perceived and valued interior spaces and objects in the eighteenth century.

Vickery, Amanda. Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England. London: Yale University Press, 2009.

In Behind Closed Doors, Amanda Vickery focuses on the homes of the middling and genteel classes in England during the long eighteenth century in order to examine their role in the creation of ‘power, emotion, status and choices.’ For instance, Vickery examines how objects were used to delineate the boundaries of privacy, how ideas of taste were navigated through the concept of neatness and how female crafts could act as a means of consolidating property. Vickery examines Georgian homes by exploring a range of sources, including lists, inventories and account books, personal letters and diaries. While the majority of Vickery’s analysis focuses on couples and families such as the Gibbs’s, Hewitt’s and Bruce’s, she also explores those who sit on the periphery of the family unit, such as Gertrude Savile and Mary Hartley. Vickery tries to understand particular objects – the way they looked, how they were used, what they meant – by matching them to manufacturers’ pattern books and museum objects. In doing so, Vickery reads the Georgian interior as a space in which people used objects to hold and concede power, strengthen emotional bonds and mark status.

Interiors and Interior Decoration: General Bibliography

Agnew, J.C. ‘A House of Fiction: Domestic Interiors and the Commodity Aesthetic’, in Bronner, S. (ed.) Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America 1880-1920. New York: Norton, 1989.

Archer, Mildred Agnes. ‘Exotic Commissions: Sir Elijah and Lady Impey: Collectors of Indian Paintings’, Interiors, (March 1982), 70-79.

Atfield, Judy and Pat Kirkham. A View from the Interior: Feminism, Women and Design History. London: Women’s Press, 1989.

Auslander, Leora. Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1996.

Ayres, James. The Shell Book of the Home in Britain: Decoration, Design and Construction of Vernacular Interiors, 1500-1850. London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1981.

Ayres, James. Domestic Interiors: The British Tradition, 1500-1850. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003.

Baker, Malcolm. ‘Public Images for Private Spaces? The Place of Sculpture in the Georgian Domestic Interior’, Journal of Design History, 20:4 (2007), 309-23.

Barrett, H and J. Phillips. Suburban Style: The British Home, 1840-1960. London: Macdonald & Co., 1987.

Battersby, M. The Decorative Thirties. London: Studio Vista, 1969.

Beard, Geoffrey. Upholsterers and Interior Furnishing in England, 1530-1840. New Haven and London: Yale University Press for the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, 1997.

Beard, Geoffrey. The National Trust Book of the English House Interior. London and New York: Viking in association with The National Trust, 1990.

Beard, Geoffrey. Craftsmen and Interior Decoration in England, 1660-1820. London: Bloomsbury Books, 1986.

Bender, John. Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Bristow, Ian C. Architectural Colour in British Interiors, 1615-1840. London and New Haven: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1996.

Bryant, Julius. ‘Curating the Georgian Interior: From Period Rooms to Marketplace?’, Journal of Design History, 20:4 (2007), 345-50.

Bryden, I. and Floyd, J. (eds). Domestic Space: Reading the Nineteenth-Century Interior. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999.

Busch, A. Geography of Home: Writings on Where We Live. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999.

Calloway, Stephen. Twentieth-Century Decoration: The Domestic Interior from 1900 to the Present Day. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998.

Chang, Elizabeth Hope. Britain's Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010.

Cieerad, I. (ed.) An Anthropology of Domestic Space. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999.

Clark, Katherine R. P. ‘Getting Plastered: Ornamentation, Iconography, and the "Desperate Faction"’, Baxter, Denise Amy and Meredith Martin (ed.) Architectural Space in Eighteenth-Century Europe: Constructing Identities and Interiors. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010.

Cohen, Deborah. Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions. London: Yale University Press, 2006.

Collingham, Elizabeth. Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2001.

Colomina, B. ‘The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism’, in Colomina, B. (ed.) Sexuality and Space. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992.

Cornforth, John. Early Georgian Interiors. New Haven and London: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2004.

Cornforth, John. London Interiors from the Archives of Country Life. London: Aurum Press, 2000.

Cornforth, John. English Interiors, 1790-1848: The Quest for Comfort. London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1978.

Crowley, J. The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Edwards, Jason and Imogen Hart (eds). Rethinking the Interior, c.1867-1896: Aestheticism and Arts and Crafts. Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010.

Finn, Margot. ‘Scenes of Literary Life: The Homes of England’, in Chandler, James (ed.) The New Cambridge History of English Literature: The Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, 293-313.

Forty, Adrian. Objects of Desire: Design and Society Since 1750. London: Thames and Hudson, 1986.

Fowler, John and Cornforth, John. English Decoration in the Eighteenth Century. London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1974.

Friedman, Alice. Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

Friedman, Joe. Inside London: Discovering London's Period Interiors. Oxford: Phaidon, 1988.

Garner, M. J. ‘Seventeenth-Century Painted Wall Decoration at Burfa’, Transactions of the Radnorshire Society, 44 (1974), 69-74.

Gere, Charlotte. Nineteenth-Century Decoration: the Art of the Interior. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989.

Gore, Ann and Alan Gore. The History of English Interiors. Oxford: Phaidon, 1990.

Grant, Charlotte. "One's Self, and One's House, One's Furniture": From Object to Interior in British Fiction, 1720-1900’, Aynsley, Jeremy and Charlotte Grant (ed.) Imagined Interiors: Representing the Domestic Interior since the Renaissance. London: V&A, 2006, 134-53.

Greig, Hannah. ‘Eighteenth-Century English Interiors in Image and Text’, Aynsley, Jeremy and Charlotte Grant (ed.) Imagined Interiors: Representing the Domestic Interior since the Renaissance. London: V&A, 2006, 102-127.

Greig, Hannah and Giorgio Riello. ‘Eighteenth-Century Interiors: Redesigning the Georgian: Introduction’, Journal of Design History, 20:4 (2007), 273-89.

Grier, Katherine. Culture and Comfort: Parlour Making and Middle-Class Identity, 1850-1930. Washington D.C. and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997.

Hall, Michael. ‘Treasures of the Country Life Library. Pt. 3.’, Country Life, 188:15 (1994), 78-81.

Halttunen, K. ‘From Parlor to Living Room: Domestic Space, Interior Decoration, and the Culture of Personality’, in Bronner S. (ed.) Consuming Vision. New York: Norton, 1989.

Hamlett, Jane. Material Relations: Domestic Interiors and Middle-Class Families in England, 1850-1910. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010.

Hamlett, J. ‘”Nicely Feminine Yet Learned”’, Women’s History Review, 15:1, 2006, 137-61.

Harris, Eileen. ‘Robert Adam at Apsley House: The Great Architect Designed the Interiors of No 1 London Down to the Last Details’, Country Life, 195:44 (2001), 98-101.

Harris, Eileen. The Genius of Robert Adam: His Interiors. New Haven and London: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2001.

Jones, Francis Welsh. ‘Interiors. 2, Abermarlais’, Archaeologia Cambrensis, 116 (1966), 165-91.

Jones, Francis Welsh. ‘Interiors. 1, Picton Castle, 1729’, Archaeologia Cambrensis, 114 (1965), 48-59.

Jones, Robin D. ‘"Furnished in English Style": Anglicization of Local Elite Domestic Interiors in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) c. 1850 to 1910’, South Asian Studies, 20 (2003), 45-56.

Jones, Robin D. Interiors of Empire: Objects, Space and Identity within the Indian Subcontinent, c. 1800-1947. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007.

Kinchin, J. ‘Interiors: Nineteenth-Century Essays on the “Masculine” and the “Feminine” Room’, in Kirkham, P. (ed.) The Gendered Object. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996.

Leslie, F. Designs for Twentieth-Century Interiors. London: V&A Publications, 2000.

Logan, Thad. The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Logan, T. ‘Decorating Domestic Space: Middle-Class Women and Victorian Interiors’, Dickerson, V. Keeping the Victorian House. New York: Garland, 1995.

Lubey, Kathleen. ‘Erotic Interiors in Joseph Addison's Imagination’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 20:3 (2008), 415-44.

Lupton, E. and J. A. Miller. The Bathroom, the Kitchen and the Aesthetics of Waste. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992.

Marcus, Sharon. Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1999.

Martin, Meredith. ‘Interiors and Interiority in the Ornamental Dairy Tradition’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 20:3 (2008), 357-84.

Massey, A. Interior Design of the Twentieth Century. London: Thames & Hudson, 1990.

McKellar, Elizabeth. ‘Representing the Georgian: Constructing Interiors in Early Twentieth-Century Publications, 1890-1930’, Journal of Design History, 20:4 (2007), 325-44.

Millar, Delia. ‘Headquarters of Taste: Early Victorian Interiors of Buckingham Palace’, Country Life, 180 (1986), 1762-6.

Miller, Daniel. The Comfort of Things. Cambridge: Polity, 2008.

Miller, Daniel (ed.) Home Possessions. London: Berg, 2000.

Mitchell, David M. ‘"My Purple Will Be Too Sad for that Melancholy Room": Furnishings for Interiors in London and Paris, 1660-1735’, Textile History, 40:1 (2009), 3-28.

Morris, Jan. Stones of Empire: The Buildings of the Raj. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Murison, Barbara C. ‘Getting and Spending: William Blathwayt and Dyrham Park’, History Today, 40:12 (1990), 22-28.

Ogborn, Miles. Spaces of Modernity: London’s Geographies 1680-1780. New York and London: The Guildford Press, 1998.

Ogborn, Miles and Charles W.J. Withers (eds). Georgian Geographies: Essays on Space, Place and Landscapes in the Eighteenth Century. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2004.

Palin, William. Saving Wotton: The Remarkable Story of a Soane Country House. London: Sir John Soane's Museum, 2004.

Ponsonby, Margaret. Stories from Home: English Domestic Interiors, 1750-1850. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.

Port, Michael Harry. ‘Library Architecture and Interiors’, in Mandelbrote, Giles and Keith A. Manley (eds). The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland: Vol. 2: 1640-1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 459-478.

Powers, Alan. ‘From Blore to Webb: Inventing a Sense of Tradition’, Apollo, 138 (1993), 105-11.

Praz, Mario. An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration, from Pompeii to Art Noveau. London: Thames and Hudson, 1964.

Reed, Christopher. Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture. London: Thames and Hudson, 1996.

Retford, Kate. ‘From the Interior to Interiority: The Conversation Piece in Georgian England’, Journal of Design History, 20:4 (2007), 291-307.

Richter, Anne Nellis. ‘Improving Public Taste in the Private Interior: Gentlemen's Galleries in Post-Napoleonic London’, Baxter, Denise Amy and Meredith Martin (ed.) Architectural Space in Eighteenth-Century Europe: Constructing Identities and Interiors. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010, 169-186.

Rybczynski, Witold. Home: A Short History of an Idea. New York and London: Penguin, 1986.

Sarin, Sophie. ‘The Floor Cloth and Other Floor Coverings in the London Domestic Interior, 1700-1800’, Journal of Design History, 18 (2005), 133-145.

Saumarez Smith, Charles. Eighteenth-Century Decoration: Design and the Domestic Interior in England. Weidenfeld and Nicolson: London, 1993.

Service, Alastair. Edwardian Interiors: Inside the Homes of the Poor, the Average and the Wealthy. London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1982.

Sloboda, Stacey. ‘Fashioning Bluestocking Conversation: Elizabeth Montagu's Chinese Room’, Baxter, Denise Amy and Martin, Meredith (ed.) Architectural Space in Eighteenth-Century Europe: Constructing Identities and Interiors. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010, 129-148.

Styles, John and Amanda Vickery (eds). Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006.

Tristram, Philippa. Living Space in Fact and Fiction. London: Routledge, 1989.

Thornton, Peter. Seventeenth-Century Interior Decoration in England, France and Holland. New Haven: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 1978.

Varey, Simon. Space and the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Vickery, Amanda. Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England. London: Yale University Press, 2009.

Wall, Cynthia. The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2006.

Wall, Cynthia. ‘Gendering Rooms: Domestic Architecture and Literary Acts’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 5 (1993), 360-367.

Wheeler, Kathleen. ‘Interior Decoration at the Cape, 1815-1835’, Bulletin of the South African Cultural History Museum, 6 (1985), 5-15.

Woodward, Carolyn. ‘From Multi-Purpose Parlour to Drawing Room: The Development of the Principal Voorkamer in the Fashionable Cape House, 1670-1820’, Bulletin of the South African Cultural Museum, 4 (1983), 5-19.

Yarwood, Doreen. Five Hundred Years of Technology in the Home. London: Batsford, 1983.

Interiors and Interior Decoration Acknowledgements

The first version of this bibliography was primarily compiled by Kate Smith.

The second version (13.01.12) of this bibliography was enhanced by a suggestion from Margot Finn.

Nabobs and the Empire at Home Bibliography

Annotated Guide to Nabobs and the Empire at Home Publications

Colllingham, E.M. Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c.1800-1947. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press and Blackwell, 2001.

In Imperial Bodies, Elizabeth Collingham examines the impact of colonialism upon the European body. More particularly, she explores how power impacted upon the bodies of those wielding it, rather than those subjected to it. Collingham argues that British experiences of India were intensely physical. Both in India and when Anglo-Indians returned home, their experiences of India were written upon their physique. India seemingly affected the food individuals ate, the clothes they wore and the complexion of their skin. Due to the physicality of their experiences Anglo-Indians were particularly interested in defining what made a particular body British. Collingham argues that rather than simply mirroring changes in the metropole, the Anglo-Indian body underwent its own narrative of change. Between 1800 and 1857 bodily practices kept pace with cultural changes in India and Britain. After 1857, however, a different chronology emerged to ensure that Anglo-Indians became culturally and bodily out of step during the twentieth century. Collingham argues that the Anglo-Indians disregard for the Indian response to British bodies severely undermined their position. Finally, in discarding Western clothes and in favour of the dhoti, Indian nationalists confronted the British with a rediscovered Indian body.

Hall, Catherine and Rose, Sonya O. (eds). At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Hall and Rose’s edited volume takes the end of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century as its starting point. They argue that this moment marks ‘a new historical conjuncture’, which ‘brought with it reworked conceptions of race, nation and empire’. At this moment revolutionary thinking, religious revival and the defeat of Napoleon’s imperial ambitions meant the end of one type of empire and the creation of another. More particularly the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834 led to a need for new ways of explaining inequalities. In response, systems of classification and new technologies of measurement were appropriated as means by which to justify inequalities of power and opportunity. The new imperial project also affected the everyday in that it quickly became an accepted and ordinary aspect of British life. Those belonging to British society did become more aware of empire but only during specific events, which brought with them a particular type of intensity. On the whole, this volume argues, empire was an inevitable and familiar backdrop to British life.

Catherine Hall & Sonya Rose ‘Introduction: being at home with the Empire’

Catherine Hall ‘At home with history: Macaulay and the History of England’

Laura Tabili ‘A homogenous society? Britain’s internal “others”, 1800-present’

Christine Kinealy ‘At home with the Empire: the example of Ireland’

Jane Rendall ‘The condition of women, women’s writing and the Empire in nineteenth-century Britain’

Philippa Levine ‘Sexuality and empire’

Susan Thorne ‘Religion and empire at home’

Joanna de Groot ‘Metropolitan desires and colonial connections: reflections on consumption and empire’

Cora Kaplan ‘Imagining empire: history, fantasy and literature’

Antoinette Burton ‘New narratives of imperial politics in the nineteenth century’

Clare Midgley ‘Bringing the Empire home: women activists in imperial Britain, 1790s-1930s’

James Epstein ‘Taking class notes on empire’

Keith McClelland & Sonya Rose ‘Citizenship and empire, 1867-1928’

Holzman, James M. The Nabobs in England: A Study of the Returned Anglo-Indian, 1760-1785. New York, 1926.

In The Nabobs in England, Holzman concentrates on the years between 1760 and 1785 as the most significant period in contemporary responses to the nabob figure. Holzman argues that due to the levels of fortunes created and their small but significant numbers, this period was particularly vital in creating the idea of the nabob as a problematic entity. After 1785, Holzman argues, the nabob became less contentious and was increasingly accepted within British society. Holzman relies on a variety of sources to construct his argument. Newspaper articles, contemporary accounts, county histories and trade guides all play a role. In terms of The East India Company at Home project, Holzman is particularly useful in that he uses a chapter to focus on the nabob at home and more particularly their propensity to buy and build country houses.

Juneja, Renu. ’The Native and the Nabob: Representations of the Indian Experience in Eighteenth-Century English Literature’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 27:1 (1992), 183-198.

In this short article, Renu Juneja tracks eighteenth-century literary responses to the nabob. As Juneja notes, by the end of the eighteenth-century the term ‘nabob’ had become relatively innocuous. Yet in the 1770s and 1780s the term had deeply complex connotations. Like Lawson and Phillips, Juneja argues that returned East India Company officials were not the target of criticism simply due to feelings of envy or moral anger on the part of the critics. Rather the complex responses they prompted were, Juneja argues, due to concerns over violations of class hierarchies through social mobility as experienced by nabobs who returned home with large fortunes. Juneja also highlights how ostentatious spending by nabobs prompted much criticism. Vulgar and uncontrollable, such spending hinted at a deeper concern namely that the Indian experience led nabobs into psychological and moral instability. Critics were clearly concerned that nabobs returned to Britain lacking the self-discipline upon which the British thrived. As such they pointed to their fears about the ‘East’ and the dislocation from moral, social and psychological norms that it might engender.

Lawson, Philip and Phillips, Jim. ‘"Our Execrable Banditti": Perceptions of Nabobs in Mid-Eighteenth Century Britain’, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, 16:3 (1984), 225-241.

Lawson and Phillips examine why critiques of the nabobs became so widespread in the second half of the eighteenth century. They assert that envy and snobbery do not fully account for the level of criticism that returned East India Company officials and their families encountered. Rather, Lawson and Phillips claim that the criticisms aimed at nabobs by the press and in poetry and plays were in response to popular fears about the changes to moral and political behaviour that nabobs brought and might bring. More particularly, late eighteenth-century society questioned the level of control that the British government retained over the East India Company in India and worried over the power that nabobs appeared to accumulate once returned home. Individuals also showed concern for the ways in which nabobs acquired power in Britain. Instances of excessive bribery and corruption during electoral campaigns signalled a changing moral climate that opponents of the nabobs fought hard to stop. At the same time communities responded badly to the more local affects that nabobs might have upon moving to a specific area. Provision prices were believed to soar when nabobs took a greater range of goods out of the marketplace, creating inflated prices for those limited goods that were left. For Lawson and Phillips then it was fear over the changes that nabobs appeared to have wrought on local and national communities that motivated contemporaries to launch critical and satirical attacks.

Jordan, Sarah. The Anxieties of Idleness: Idleness in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2003.

Sarah Jordan’s book The Anxieties of Idleness provides a useful context for considering why and how British people expended so much energy satirizing and criticizing returning East India Company officials in the second half of the eighteenth century. Jordan argues that rather than defining themselves as a single people in response to the ‘other’ abroad, some Britons defined themselves as truly British relative to other British people. She asserts that ‘the discourse of idleness’ played an important role in defining both foreign and domestic ‘others’ and consequently in defining a sense of true Britishness. As both a foreign and domestic ‘other’, British people quickly implicated returning East India Company officials (affected by the climate of India) in a ‘discourse of idleness’. Although Jordan deals only briefly with Europeans in India, further investigation of their role once returned home would clearly enrich the text.

Nechtman, Tillman W. Nabobs, Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Nechtman understands the imperial experience undergone by East India Company servants in a particular way. He argues that East India Company servants understood India as an extension of the British imperial nation. Rather than somewhere peripheral or different therefore it was another part of home. As a result, when East India Company servants and officials returned from India in the second half of the eighteenth century they did not feel that they needed to re-establish themselves because they had never really left. Moreover, rather than ridding themselves of the accoutrements of Indian life they brought those objects back with them as symbols of the expanding British empire. For others in Britain, such behaviour raised concern. The presence of nabobs and their accoutrements suggested that the categories of “nation” and “empire” were neither stable, nor separate. Nabobs demonstrated that the British “nation” was subject to competing definitions. While it lasted, therefore, the nabob controversy was the focal point for discussions about nation and empire in the second half of the eighteenth century. Nechtman employs a variety of sources to construct his argument. He particularly focuses on print culture, examining sources such as newspapers, periodicals, novels, plays, travel accounts and memoirs. Alongside this he also explores prints, correspondences and sale catalogues.

Smylitopoulos, Christina. ‘Rewritten and Reused: Imagining the Nabob through “Upstart Iconography”’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 32:2 (2008), 39-59.

Smylitopoulos’s article focuses on a series of graphic satires in order to examine the iconography through which contemporaries identified the nabob in the second half of the eighteenth century. In doing so Smylitopoulos exposes a pre-exisiting visual language that initially emerged to identify the ‘up-start’ in Georgian society. Smylitopoulos then demonstrates how graphic satirists employed this visual language to draw attention to nabobs and their seemingly problematic place in eighteenth-century British culture. By contextualising the stereotype of the nabob in this way Smylitopoulos reveals how this particular type emerged in and was exacerbated by pre-existing discussions of the ‘upstart’.

Spear, Percival. The Nabobs: A Study of the Social Life of the English in Eighteenth-Century India. [1932] New York, 1998.

In The Nabobs, Percival Spear offers a broad survey of the social life of the English living in India in the eighteenth century. Spear pointedly seeks to develop a narrative of this life over the entire century in order to track the different phases of settlement. Through the eighteenth century he sees English settlement in India developing from an isolated commercial life based around specific trading posts to a vigorous settlement life that took place in well established ‘cities’. Spear hopes that by following this trajectory of development he can show how the everyday life of everyday men changed during the period in question. He does by looking to a variety of sources, which include traveller’s reports and diaries. He also uses sources from the India Office Records including dispatches, wills, letters and diaries. Although historical scholarship about Anglo-Indian life in the eighteenth century has of course developed since the original publication of The Nabobs in 1932, Spear’s volume contains a series of interesting sources with which this topic can be considered.

Travers, Robert. ‘Death and the Nabob: Imperialism and Commemoration in Eighteenth-Century India’, Past & Present, 196 (2007), 83-124.

Focusing on monuments and burial grounds, Travers explores the changes in the ‘British way of death’ in Calcutta. Travers argues that death became an important tool for projecting British imperial power in Calcutta, an important outpost of British imperialism, and India more generally. In the article, Travers tracks change over time to find three important stages. First, in the eighteenth century rites of burial were a way of differentiating between Christians and Hindus. At the same time, by building large, elaborate tombs the British were able to assert their power within the political and cultural world of late Mughal India. Second, as conflicts between Indian rulers and European competitors intensified the idea that Indian rulers were attempting to wipe out Europeans provided a strong justification for British aggression and conquests. In this stage built memorials focused the British rallying cry. Finally, after the initial conquests, representations of death shaped the identity of the British Empire. Burial grounds and monuments became standardised and thus presented the British Empire as a unified entity. In terms of The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 project Travers work prompts greater consideration of the role of memorials (both written and built) within Britain.

Nabobs and the Empire at Home Bibliography: General

Bannerman, G.E. ‘The “Nabob of the North”: Sir Lawrence Dundas as Government Contractor’, Historical Research, 83:219 (2010), 102-23.

Barr, Pat. The Memsahibs: The Women of Victorian India. London: Secker and Warburg, 1976.

Bingham, H. Elihu Yale: The American Nabob of Queen Square. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1939.

Bowen, H.V. ‘Privilege and Profit: Commanders of East Indiamen as Private Traders, Entrepreneurs and Smugglers, 1760-1813’, International Journal of Maritime History, 19:2 (2007), 43-88.

Bowen, Huw V. ‘‘‘No longer mere Traders”: Continuities and Change in the Metropolitan Development of the East India Company, 1600-1834’, Huw V. Bowen et al. (eds.). The Worlds of the East India Company. Woodbridge: Boydell Press in association with the National Maritime Museum and the University of Leicester, 2004, 19-32.

Bowen, Huw V. The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756-1833. Cambridge: Cambridge University of Press, 2006.

Brown, Laura. Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century Literature. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993.

Colley, Linda. The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History. New York: Pantheon Books, 2007.

Dalrymple, William. White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India. London: Flamingo, 2003.

Davies, Cuthbert Collin. ‘Warren Hastings and the Younger Pitt’, English Historical Review, 70 (1955), 609-22.

Davis, Richard H. Lives of Indian Images. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.

Dirks, Nicholas B. The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain. Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap, 2006.

Eaton, Natasha. ‘The Art of Colonial Despotism: Portraits, Politics, and Empire in South India, 1750–1795’, Cultural Critique, 70 (2008), 63-93.

Edwardes, Michael. The Nabobs at Home. London: Constable, 1991.

Edwardes, Michael. The Sahibs and the Lotus: The British in India. London: Constable, 1988.

Fawcett, Charles Gordon Hill. ‘The Forged Bonds of the Nabob of the Carnatic’, Journal of India History, 6:1 (1927), 88-95.

Feiling, Keith. Warren Hastings. London and New York: Macmillan, 1954.

Finn, Margot C. ‘Colonial Gifts: Family Politics and the Exchange of Goods in British India, 1780-1820’, Modern Asian Studies, 40:1 (2006), 203-31.

Fryer, Peter. Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain. London: Pluto Press, 1984.

Furber, Holden. Private Fortunes and Company Profits in the India Trade in the 18th Century. (ed. by Rosane Rocher). Aldershot: Variorum, 1997.

Furber, Holden. John Company at Work: A Study of European Expansion in India in the Late Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948.

Ghosh, Durba. Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Ghosh, Suresh Chandra. The Social Condition of the British Community in Bengal, 1757-1800. Leiden: E.J.Brill, 1970.

Gosden, Chris and Knowles, Chantal. Collecting Colonialism: Material Culture and Colonial Change. New York: Berg, 2001.

Grier, Sydney C. The Letters of Warren Hastings to His Wife. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1905.

Holzman, James M. The Nabobs in England: A Study of the Returned Anglo-Indian, 1760-1785. New York, 1926.

Jordan, Sarah. The Anxieties of Idleness: Idleness in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture. London: Associated University Presses, 2003.

Joseph, Betty. Reading the East India Company, 1720-1840: Colonial Currencies of Gender. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Juneja, Renu. ’The Native and the Nabob: Representations of the Indian Experience in Eighteenth-Century English Literature’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 27:1 (1992), 183-198.

Kuiters, Willem G. J. ‘William Paxton, 1744–1824: The History of an East India Fortune’, Bengal Past and Present, 111 (1992), 1-22.

Lawson, Philip and Phillips, Jim. ‘"Our Execrable Banditti": Perceptions of Nabobs in Mid-Eighteenth Century Britain’, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, 16:3 (1984), 225-241.

Leppert, Richard. ‘Music, Domestic Life and Cultural Chauvinism: Images of British Subjects at Home in India', Richard Leppert and Susan McClary (eds), Music and Society: the Politics of Composition, Performance, and Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, 63-104.

MacMillan, Margaret. Women of the Raj. London: Thames and Hudson, 1988.

MacKillop, Andrew. ‘Europeans, Britons, and Scots: Scottish Sojourning Networks and Identities in Asia, c.1700-1815’, Angela McCarthy (ed.), A Global Clan: Scottish Migrant Networks and Identities Since the Eighteenth Century. London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2006.

Mackillop, Andrew. ‘The Highlands and the Returning Nabob: Sir Hector Munro of Novar, 1760-1807’, in Harper, Marjory (ed.), Emigrant Homecomings: The Return Movement of Emigrants, 1600-2000. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005, 233-261.

Marshall, Peter J. The Impeachment of Warren Hastings. London: Oxford University Press, 1965.

Marshall, Peter J. ‘The Personal Fortune of Warren Hastings: Hastings in Retirement’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 28:3 (1965), 541-552.

Marshall, Peter J. East Indian Fortunes: The British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976.

Mason, J.F.A. ‘”A Nabob Worth Half a Million”: Robert Clive and Shropshire Politics, 1754-1774’, Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological and Historical Society, 73 (1998), 52-61.

Mentz, Søren. The English Gentlemen Merchant at Work: Madras and the City of London, 1660-1740. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen, 2005.

Nechtman, Tillman W. ‘Nabobinas: Luxury, Gender, and the Sexual Politics of British Imperialism in India in the Late Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Women’s History, 18:4 (2006), 8–30.

Nechtman, Tillman W. ‘A Jewel in the Crown? Indian Wealth in Domestic Britain in the Late Eighteenth Century’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 41:1 (2007), 71-86.

Nechtman, Tillman W. Nabobs, Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Owen, John Roger. ‘A Nabob at Holyhead: Richard Griffith, Post Office Packet Agent, 1815-1820’, Maritime Wales, 25 (2004), 27-55.

Raven, James. Judging New Wealth: Popular Publishing and Responses to Commerce in England, 1750-1800. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992.

Sen, Sudipta. Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Smylitopoulos, Christina. ‘Rewritten and Reused: Imagining the Nabob through “Upstart Iconography”’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 32:2 (2008), 39-59.

Spear, Percival. The Nabobs: A Study of the Social Life of the English in Eighteenth-Century India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Stoler, Ann Laura. ‘Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Race, and Morality in Colonial Asia,’ Joan Wallach Scott (ed.), Feminism and History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, 209-266.

Tammita Delgoda, Sinharaja. ‘”Nabob, Historian and Orientalist.” Robert Orme: The Life and Career of the East India Company Servant (1728-1801), Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 2:3 (1992), 363-76.

Tobin, Beth Fowkes. Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Arts and Letters, 1760-1820. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

Travers, Robert. ‘Death and the Nabob: Imperialism and Commemoration in Eighteenth-Century India’, Past & Present, 196 (2007), 83-124.

Walters, Gwyn. ‘Books from the “Nabob”: The Benefactions of Thomas Phillips at Lampeter and Llandovery’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 5 (1999 for 1998), 36-61.

Walvin, James. Fruits of Empire: Exotic Produce and British Taste, 1600-1800. New York: New York University Press, 1997.

Watson, Ian Bruce. Foundation for Empire: English Private Trade in India, 1659-1760. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1980.

Webster, Anthony. The Richest East India Merchant: the Life and Business of John Palmer of Calcutta, 1767-1836. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2007.

Williams, Clive. The Nabobs of Berkshire. Purley on Thames: Goosecroft Publications: 2010.

Wheeler, Roxanne. The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.

Wylie, David, T. ‘A Nabob and His Friends: Major John Grant M.P.’, Bengal Past & Present, 38 (1929), 119-27.

Yogev, Gedelia. Diamonds and Coral: Anglo-Dutch Jews and Eighteenth-Century Trade. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1978.

Unpublished Papers

Rees, Lowri Ann. ‘Middleton Hall and Aberglasney: Two Carmarthenshire Landed Estates and Their Families, c.1780-1875’ (Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Aberystwyth, 2009).

Kuiters, Willem G. J. ‘William Paxton, 1744-1824: Middleton Hall and the Adventures of a Scottish “Nabob” in South Wales’ (Unpublished Paper).

Head, Raymond. ‘Sezincote: A Paradigm of the Indian Style’ (Unpublished MA Thesis, Royal College of Art, 1982).

Nabobs and the Empire at Home Bibliography Acknowledgements

Kate Smith compiled the first version of ‘Nabobs and the Empire at Home Bibliography’ (20.06.12).