Household Gods, The British and their Possessions

Abstract

‘Household gods is a history of the British love affair with the domestic interior’, declares Deborah Cohen in this lively and hugely informative study of the nineteenth-and twentieth-century middle-class home. She is intrigued by what she calls ‘middle-class self fashioning’ (p. xv), and by how, when faced with a choice between what critics considered good and bad taste, middle-class customers usually opted for products that would have appalled William Morris, Henry Cole and other design reformers. The illustration on the dust-jacket makes the point. The photograph shows the parlour from an unidentified house in Bournville Village in the 1900s: a large plaster cast of the Venus de Milo occupies one corner, every surface is covered with ornaments and plants, reproductions of famous paintings crowd the walls, the heavily upholstered chairs are plumped up with cushions and patterned rugs lie on patterned carpet. In the text, Cohen pairs this photograph with one that shows a Bournville parlour as George Cadbury intended, and as Morris would have approved (p. xiv). A discreet aspidistra occupies the corner. The only seating is a solitary Windsor chair and an austere wooden bench. There is a small rag-rug on the polished wooden floor. Decorative objects are restricted to a Japanese fan and a few carefully placed pieces of china on the shelves above the fireplace against the backdrop of bare distempered walls.

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