REALIZAR EL COTEJO

Jane Hamlett has argued that recent historical interest in the domestic interior has contributed to historical understanding of consumption and gender in a number of ways.¹²⁰ It is therefore an appropriate field to end this survey of the different discourses that contribute to my thesis. Hamlett suggests that the study of domesticity has combined material culture and gender studies by looking at the ‘power dynamics

117 Ibid., 31.

118 Alexandra Shepard and Karen Harvey, “Special Feature on Masculinities,” The Journal of British Studies, 44 no. 2 (April 2005).

119 Bailey, Parenting in England.

120 Jane Hamlett, “The British Domestic Interior and Social and Cultural History,”

Cultural and Social History, 6 no. 1 (2009): 97-107, 97.

associated with the control over the selection of goods for the home as well as the role of objects in constructing gendered identities’.¹²¹ Moreover, it has furthered the discussion of gender and the organisation of space. Studies of the domestic interior have also explored the role of domestic rituals of hospitality and politeness, and the meanings of the objects involved in them, in relation to the construction of gendered identity and status.

In the 1970s an interest developed in the country house, partly as a reaction against the large-scale demolition of stately homes in Britain and due to a growing public interest, as stately homes increasingly became open to the public.¹²² An exhibition ‘The Destruction of the Country House 1875-1975’ was held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1974.¹²³ Publications began to be produced with the country home as their subjects. The material layout of the elite home was initially the interest of art and design historians who took direct interest in the stylistic changes of the architecture and the interior design of homes. Such studies have focused on the agency of the designers and architects rather than the consumers in the creation and development of aesthetic styles.¹²⁴ Further developments in the field led to an examination of life in the country house from the perspective of the occupants and

121 Ibid., 97.

122 Helen Clifford, “Domestic Subjects: the East India Company at Home, 1757-1857,” (paper presented at the Institute of Historical Research, February 8, 2012).

123 Roy Strong, John Harris and Marcus Binney, The Destruction of the Country House 1875-1975 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974).

124 Malcolm Airs, The Making of the English Country House, 1500-1640 (London:

Architectural Press, 1975). Heather Clemenson, English Country Houses and Landed Estates (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1982). Peter Thornton, Authentic Decor:

The Domestic Interior, 1620-1920 (New York: Viking, 1984).

servants, most notably, Mark Girouard in his study, Life in the English Country House:

A Social and Architectural History.¹²⁵ As the country house became accepted as a focus of analysis, historians such as Charles Saumarez Smith began to consider the cultural and affective meanings of these buildings and the objects within them, arguing that a new social elite used country houses to be ‘artistically commemorated at home’.¹²⁶ Giorgio Riello and Grieg have commented that the art-historical approaches, and focus on stately homes, have tended to privilege the elite, because of the nature of surviving collections in museums.¹²⁷ They argued that the focus on elite homes and designers caused a rift between such studies and the interests of social and cultural historians of the eighteenth century who ‘have explicitly sought to recover the consumption choices of the non-elite’.¹²⁸ However, important studies of the elite home, discussed in the following paragraphs, exist which examine the elite from a social and cultural perspective, bridging the gap between art-historical approaches to the study of the elite and social and cultural histories of the non-elite.

A recent study by Richard Wilson and Alan Mackley has examined elite men’s role in the building of the country house and how men’s ‘political authority was

125 Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (London: Yale University Press, 1978). See also Mark Bence-Jones, Life in an Irish Country House (London: Constable, 1996). David Durant, Life in the Country House: A Historical Dictionary (London: John Murray, 1996).

126 Charles Saumarez Smith, Eighteenth-Century Decoration: Design and the Domestic Interior in England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1993), 221.

127 Giorgio Riello and Hannah Grieg, “Eighteenth-Century Interiors: Redesigning the Georgian,” Journal of Design History 20 no. 4 (2007): 273-289.

128 Riello and Grieg, “Eighteenth-Century Interiors,” 279.

displayed in the houses they built.’¹²⁹ Rothery and Stobart examine ‘the importance of heritance and patina alongside fashion and taste in shaping both the material culture of the country house and elite status and identity’.¹³⁰ Coltman studies the significance which men invested in collecting in Classical Sculpture and the Culture of Collecting in Britain since 1970.¹³¹ She uses correspondence as well as other sources to show the significance for men of the classical objects which they displayed in their country homes. Although her work has not focused exclusively on country homes and elite men’s relationships with objects, her chapter ‘‘Placed with Propriety’: The Display and Viewing of Ancient Sculpture’ uses correspondence between the men to reveal the extent to which men were invested in the objects inside their homes as well as their display.¹³² This recent work, which deals with elite consumption, especially in the context of politics, status and identity is an important development in the field, particularly in relation to this thesis, which looks at the country homes of a number of elite men to examine how men used domestic material culture to create and communicate their identity and status.

Stobart and Rothery criticise the tendency to ‘study the conspicuous consumption of the wealthier aristocracy’, because of the assumption that the ‘status of

129 Richard Wilson and Alan Mackley, Creating Paradise: The Building of the

English Country House, 1660-1880 (London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2000), 354.

130 Jon Stobart and Mark Rothery, “Fashion, Heritance and Family: New and Old in the Georgian Country House,” Cultural and Social History 11 no. 3 (2014): 385-406, 385.

131 Viccy Coltman, Classical Sculpture and the Culture of Collecting in Britain since 1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

132 Coltman, Classical Sculpture, 191-232.

landed elites was partly defined by their extravagant spending habits and lavish homes’.¹³³ They demonstrate that moderate spending was in fact more important to preserve wealth and status for landed families, which was interspersed by surges of conspicuous consumption following inheritance events. ¹³⁴ Likewise Stobart demonstrates that even for a spinster the importance of lineage and inheritance linked to notions of rank and dignity, creating ‘a specifically aristocratic mode of consumption, built around signifiers of family, lineage and pedigree’.¹³⁵ He argues that,

the importance of the diachronic family went beyond specific forms of material culture to encompass the practices of acquiring goods and choosing suppliers. This releases the construction of lineage-family from the deliberate and self-aware practices of collecting, writing and heirlooming, and into the realm of everyday processes.¹³⁶

Historians have taken an interest in the gender roles involved in home decoration.

Whilst early studies have assumed that domestic decoration and household management were the prerogative of the female, this has recently begun to be

133 Mark Rothery and Jon Stobart, “Inheritance Events and Spending Patterns in the English Country House: the Leigh family of Stoneleigh Abbey, 1738-1806,”

Continuity and Change 27 no. 3 (2012): 379-407, 379.

134 Rothery and Stobart, “Inheritance Events and Spending Patterns in the English Country House,” 381.

135 Jon Stobart, “Status, Gender and Life Cycle in the Consumption Practices of the English Elite. The Case of Mary Leigh, 1736-1806,” Social History 40 (2015): 82-103, 102-103.

136 Stobart, “Status, Gender and Life Cycle in the Consumption Practices of the English Elite,” 103.

examined. However, this assumption has recently begun to be re-examined. Vickery has argued that there was a gendered division of household management with men and women taking responsibility for different areas of consumption in the home. ‘A sexual division of consumer responsibilities is a feature of household accounting among the provincial gentry, a partition mirrored in middling correspondence.’¹³⁷ Her work is a useful starting block for studies of masculine domesticity, however historians continue to emphasise women’s roles in domestic consumption more strongly than men’s.

Deborah Cohen has also explored the use of domestic material culture in nineteenth-century middling-sort homes as an expression of the consumer’s ideals and values.¹³⁸ For the nineteenth-century home, Cohen argues that ‘the Victorian interior was neither chiefly the responsibility, nor even the prerogative of the woman’.¹³⁹ Most recently, Harvey has analysed the division of consumption between marital partners in the eighteenth-century home. She focuses explicitly on male domestic engagement. Her conclusion suggests that men were often closely involved in household matters.¹⁴⁰ She argues that home consumption was often undertaken jointly, but that men had overall responsibility for the household economy. Peter McNeil has researched the ways in which interior design and material objects were used by three men, ‘Horace Walpole (at Strawberry Hill), William Beckford (at Fonthill), and the Swedish King Gustav III

137 Vickery, Behind Closed Doors, 12.

138 Deborah Cohen, Household Gods: The British and their Possessions (New Haven:

Yale University Press, 2006).

139 Cohen, Household Gods, 89.

140 Harvey, The Little Republic, 98.

(at Haga)’, to construct and display their own distinct masculine identities.¹⁴¹ Quentin Colville conducted an insightful study of the link between masculine identity, interior design and material culture by examining the material world of the all-male establishments of naval colleges and public schools.¹⁴² Similar studies could be conducted on the material worlds of other homosocial establishments such as clubs to better understand the masculine relationship to interior design and material objects.

Drawing on these works and Tosh’s emphasis on the importance of studying masculinity in relation to all-male associations, my thesis will add to this area of research by examining material culture and male relationships within the home. It will not analyse exclusive homosocial establishments but the homosocial engagement with domestic material objects in the public and private spheres.

Spatial definition in relation to gender, public, and private practices, as discussed in the previous section, also occurred within the home. Mark Girouard explored the relationship between the design and spatial organisation of the home and the way it was used by owners, visitors and servants. He examined the relationship between architectural and social change, analysing how interior decoration was necessary to support contemporary behaviour.¹⁴³ Historians have now taken an interest in the relationship between space and social practices and the role of the user in the way

141 Peter McNeil, “Crafting Queer Spaces: Privacy and Posturing,” in Fashion, Interior Design and the Contours of Modern Identity ed. Alla Myzelev and John Potvin (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 19-41, 19.

142 Quentin Colville, “The Role of the Interior in Constructing Notions of Class and Status; A Case Study of Dartmouth Naval College, 1930-1960,” in Interior Design and Identity ed. Penny Sparke and Susie McKellar (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 499-519.

143 Girouard, Life in the English Country House.

space was ‘designed, represented and experienced’.¹⁴⁴ Through a study of the London town house, Frank E. Brown examined changes in domestic life in London and ‘the way in which differences in patterns of living inscribe themselves in the spatial organisation of the home’.¹⁴⁵ Amanda Flather has explored the structure and use of space in the home in the context of gender and social power for the early modern period.¹⁴⁶ While Moira Donald, looking at the nineteenth-century home, examines the relationship between domestic space and privacy, analysing the varying uses and meanings of the home for the servants, visitors and householders.¹⁴⁷ Vickery has recently analysed public and private spaces within the eighteenth-century home. Her essay ‘translates metaphysical abstractions like the public and the private into everyday rituals and physical objects, whilst revealing that these procedures were themselves freighted with conceptual meaning for the protagonists’.¹⁴⁸ By utilising theories of gendered space within the home I will be able to put the use and display of objects in different rooms into a spatial and gendered context.

144 Hamlett, “The British Domestic Interior,” 98.

145 Frank Brown, “Continuity and Change in the Urban House: Developments in Domestic Space Organisation in Seventeenth-Century London,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 28 (1986): 558-90, 559.

146 Amanda Flather, Gender and Space in Early Modern England (Woodbridge:

Boydell Press, 2007).

147 Moira Donald, “Tranquil Havens? Critiquing the Idea of Home as the Middle-Class Sanctuary,” in Domestic Space: Reading the Nineteenth-Century Interior ed.

Inga Bryden and Janet Floyd (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999), 103-120.

148 Amanda Vickery, “An Englishman’s Home is His Castle? Thresholds, Boundaries and Privacies in the Eighteenth-Century London House,” Past and Present 199 (2008): 147-173, 148.

Historians have also argued that the use and experience of space is ever-changing and represents changes in power, hierarchies, status and modes of sociability.

For instance, the mid-eighteenth century changes which saw expensive objects shift from their location in the bedroom to the dining room has been linked to masculine domestic practices, hospitality and display.¹⁴⁹ The ‘introduction of the large dining table and objects associated with male drinking, brought a change in the gender orientation of important possessions and spaces’.¹⁵⁰

One area with which my thesis proposes to engage (combining material culture, gender and domesticity) involves the display of identity through material objects associated with specific rooms in the home used for gendered rituals of hospitality.

Theories discussing the way that objects are used and their connection to rituals comes from anthropological studies. Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood define consumption as ‘a system of reciprocal rituals’.¹⁵¹ The anthropologist Daniel Miller has discussed similar ideas in a number of his collaborative works.¹⁵² His thesis, which ‘highlights the symbolic and ritual role of the home and its impact on social relations, shows how the home functions as a theatre for the expression of identity’.¹⁵³ This area of interest has previously been dominated by historians exploring women’s domestic activities.

149 Stana Nenadic, “Middle-Rank Consumers and Domestic Culture in Edinburgh and Glasgow, 1720-1840,” Past and Present 145 (1994): 146.

150 Ibid., 150.

151 Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods (London and New York:

Routledge, 1979), 22.

152 Daniel Miller, ed., Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind Closed Doors (Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers, 2001) and Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998).

153 Hamlett, “The British Domestic Interior,” 99.

Many have argued that women acquired and maintained agency through the use of material displays during rituals of domestic hospitality such as tea parties. Historians have argued that women’s control of the domestic environment even drew them into political debates outside the home. The use of sugar at the tea table, for instance, allowed women to actively participate in political discussions about abolition.

Kowaleski-Wallace argues that regardless of whether women abstained or continued to consume sugar they were drafted into a national political debate.¹⁵⁴

The use of material objects in such rituals has also been described by some historians as a performance. Kowaleski-Wallace argues that the ritual of the tea table disciplined the female body and defined it as a consuming subject. She draws on a Foucauldian model to argue that gestures were broken down and organised at the tea table, to discipline and standardise the female body in a class-specific way.¹⁵⁵ Mimi Hellman argues that specialised furniture appeared to facilitate ease, whilst actually requiring complex and culturally specific knowledge to operate, signalling a cultivated body.¹⁵⁶ The tea table demanded female participation in a formal dynamic, which contributed to the processes of civilisation and discipline of the female body. However, as Smith has recently shown in her study of the role of hands in female self-presentation and identity creation, material practices might sometimes fail or could be open to doubt and ambiguity.¹⁵⁷ The display practices of the men in this thesis were not always successful, as a witness account of Buccleuch’s cluelessness in hosting his first dinner

154 Kowaleski-Wallace, “Women, China, and Consumer Culture,” 47.

155 Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects, 26.

156 Mimi Hellman, “Furniture, Sociability, and the Work of Leisure in Eighteenth-Century France,” Eighteenth-Eighteenth-Century Studies 32 no. 4 (1999): 415-445, 416.

157 Smith, “In Her Hands,” 489.

party as a duke shows.¹⁵⁸ The sources show that the men suffered from doubt and anxiety about the potential success of their efforts.

However, there has not been the same level of interest in how similar rituals affected masculine identities. Historians have recognised that there was a shift in masculine entertainment towards the domestic sphere during the eighteenth century. In particular historians have recently emphasised the importance of dinner and punch parties for the male householder.¹⁵⁹ Harvey examines the domestic and homosocial ritual of punch drinking and its material culture, an area that has previously received very little historical attention.¹⁶⁰ Her recent book highlights the importance of dining rituals to men of the middling-sort.¹⁶¹ Nenadic also stresses the significance of dining and drinking to the male householder in the eighteenth-century.¹⁶² She emphasises the importance of the material objects involved in domestic homosociability to the display of the male householder’s wealth and status. She argues that, ‘the valuable possessions that were located in the dining-room allowed the host to demonstrate his wealth and credit status - important considerations in areas of business’.¹⁶³ To understand masculine domesticity in a similar depth to that of women, further studies could be conducted into the way rituals of domestic hospitality and the material culture

158 Alexander Carlyle, Autobiography of the Rev. Dr Alexander Carlyle, Minister of Inveresk, Containing Memorials of the Men and Events of His Time (Edinburgh and London: William Blackson & Sons, 1861), 488.

159 Nenadic, “Middle-Rank Consumers.”

160 Karen Harvey, “Barbarity in a Teacup? Punch, Domesticity and Gender in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Design History 21 (2008): 205-221.

161 Harvey, The Little Republic, 128-130.

162 Nenadic, “Middle-Rank Consumers,” 147.

163 Ibid. 147.

associated with them influenced the male host and householder. This thesis takes this forward by placing a special focus on the hosting and dining rituals of the men in the case studies. It examines both their discussion of the importance of hosting and dining as well as an in-depth look at many of the objects in their homes which were associated with hospitality. In particular it places an emphasis on dining ware and ceramics. These are especially revealing for a number of reasons. They were central to hospitality; they were usually objects of great value and therefore appear in detail in the inventories; and the decoration, style and provenance of ceramic pieces can tell a detailed story about the owner.