Household Gods is a stimulating reappraisal of the growth of domestic consumerism in Britain during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (1830–1930). The author, Deborah Cohen, puts forward some original arguments to account for what she regards as a particularly British “infatuation” (ix) with the decoration and material content of their homes, reflected today in the plethora of television programs promising wealth and cultural acceptance through trading up in the property market and the associated restyling of what has become “property” rather than “home.”

In the first chapter, “Material Good,” the main, and original, thesis of the book associates “middle-class” materialism with nineteenth-century religious enthusiasm. Cohen charts how the puritanical evangelism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, later evoked in Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, by the 1840s had been usurped by an interest in the moral value of possessions and the association of “beauty and godliness” (26). Well-known design reformers such as Pugin, Cole, Ruskin, and Morris considered design values as moral issues and taste education as a social necessity—Cole's “Chamber of [taste] Horrors” at Marlborough House representing the material equivalent of hell paintings in medieval churches. Cohen argues, however, that sermons on taste also came increasingly from the pulpit; self-appointed but ordained arbiters such as W. J. Loftie and Andrew Boyd argued that the cultivation of taste was both a “moral” and a “religious duty” (27). Both commerce in and consumption of the right things could thus be regarded as a moral imperative; “readily incarnationalist conviction could underwrite consumer pleasures” (28). Thus, genuine moral purpose—the improvement of taste—underlay even the founding of the journal Cabinet Maker by “the trade paper magnate” John Benn (27).

In subsequent chapters, Cohen considers mass production, shops, and the democratization of luxury (chap. 2, “Cathedrals to Commerce”), arguing that the cause of design reform eventually “foundered on the shoals of the consumer” (44) and his/her sanctioned seduction by goods. Chapter 3, “Art at Home: How the House Became Artistic,” considers how the notion of the “artistic” home gradually replaced that of the virtuous home, encouraged by decorating and style advisers such as Mary Eliza Haweis who assumed the role of guides, via the new print media, in the bewildering landscape of mass-produced goods. Cohen suggests that these advisers had a more lasting impact than well-known aesthetes, partly because of their contact with readers—confirmed by the large volume of anxious correspondence engendered by their columns. In chapter 4, “In Possession: Men, Women and Decoration,” she argues that the domestic gender divide shifted as women came to be in control of home decorating as a precursor to other forms of self-assertion. For the Reverend Haweis, his wife's own emancipation and overzealousness at home improvements eventually represented the destruction of his own “household gods” (88). Subsequent chapters discuss the notion of the home as a “stage” or form of self-expression and how the cult of antiques came to be seen as an expression of individuality in taste as well as conferring patina on the home. The final chapter, “Modern Living: The Triumph of Safety First,” is concerned with Britain's reluctance to embrace modernism; here Cohen emphasizes the conservatism of interwar advice manuals and decorating magazines in contrast to the innovative suggestions of their nineteenth-century predecessors. From the evidence of recent television makeover programs, Cohen concludes that “homogenization” has become the standard in British home decorating.

Household Gods has a broad canvas; rather than considering high design, the author adopts the recent more populist approach of cultural historians in order to engage the expression of taste in middle-class homes and what was actually being bought in a variety of locations beyond the elite or craft furnishing suppliers. The book is driven by interesting ideas and is extremely readable, although the density of research is almost overwhelming, as one might perhaps expect from a book written with the assistance of “four research assistants” (viii). Yet, despite a volume of facts that might have satisfied Gradgrind, the book somehow has a narrow focus. In its deliberate emphasis on Britain's materialism and domesticity, the book apparently ignores the parallel development of other nations. All the major European and American capitals had their great stores filled with domestic goods and sent out their huge catalogs of merchandise, yet Cohen suggests that somehow the British were more “remorselessly capitalist” (xvi) than any other nation. The common European perception of the United States as the midwife of modern materialism is not registered. Selfridges department store in London's West End, based on Marshall Field's of Chicago, was regarded as the nadir of tasteless commercialism by its London rivals. Despite a passing acknowledgment of the global reach of British retailers (53), Cohen does not address the crucial internationalism of commerce. The second half of the century saw some forty influential and highly commercial international exhibitions in cities besides London and as far apart as Dublin, Philadelphia, Calcutta, and Guatemala City, all of them dedicated to the proliferation of material goods.

Nonetheless, despite some journalistic lapses (“Between 1997 and 2004, consumer spending rose a whopping 27 percent” [203]), the book conveys a very tactile sense of the “stuff” that filled the late Victorian home and eventually leached out into the flea markets and auction houses where the author begins her story. It is a lively addition to the many other interpretations of Victorian material culture that have preceded it, such as John Gloag's “religion of comfort” (John Gloag, Victorian Taste: Some Social Aspects of Architecture and Industrial Design from 1820–1900 [London, 1962]), Pevsner's formalist accounts, and those of scholars such as Mark Girouard, J. Mordaunt Crook, and Diane Sachko Macleod, to name only a few.