Longlisted for the Historians of British Art (HBA) Book Prize 2023

Between 1750 and 1840, the home took on unprecedented social and emotional significance. Focusing on the design, decoration, and reception of a range of elite and middling class homes from this period, Domestic Space in Britain, 1750-1840 demonstrates that the material culture of domestic life was central to how this function of the home was experienced, expressed, and understood at this time. Examining craft production and collection, gift exchange and written description, inheritance and loss, it carefully unpacks the material processes that made the home a focus for contemporaries’ social and emotional lives.

The first book on its subject, Domestic Space in Britain, 1750-1840 employs methodologies from both art history and material culture studies to examine previously unpublished interiors, spaces, texts, images, and objects. Utilising extensive archival research; visual, material, and textual analysis; and histories of emotion, sociability, and materiality, it sheds light on the decoration and reception of a broad array of domestic spaces. In so doing, it writes a new history of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century domestic space, establishing the materiality of the home as a crucial site for identity formation, social interaction, and emotional expression.

Gowrley’s intention to view the four houses and their owners, through an historical and contextual lens, is meticulously achieved in this richly fascinating study; the multi-layered, emotional sub-texts invested in material objects are sensitively extracted and interpreted, to display meaningful domestic spaces, three of which outlived their owners. -- Penelope Cave * Women's Studies Group 1558 – 1837 *
This is a theoretically engaged and well researched study that significantly advances our understanding of the role of domestic material culture in eighteenth and nineteenth century society ... For the first time, the book maps the processes that created the social and emotional meaning of objects, and clearly demonstrates that these meanings were of equal if not greater significance than the cultural capital they afforded. This argument, in addition to the discussion of queer identities, makes this book a significant contribution to the literature on the home and domestic interior. It is also beautifully presented—with generous illustrations and colour plates—which help bring its important argument to life. -- Jane Hamlett, Royal Holloway University of London, UK * Women's History Review *
This is a well-theorised study which shows how, for these men and women, ‘home’ was a social place, deeply imbued with affect, where identities were forged and circulated … [The general reader] will therefore find much to reflect and build upon in Domestic Spaces. -- Gillian Williamson * Cultural and Social History *

Freya Gowrley is Lecturer in History of Art and Liberal Arts at the University of Bristol, UK.