Margaret Ponsonby's aim, in this carefully and resourcefully researched book, is to expose to view the sorts of domestic interiors that only rarely catch historians’ attention. Rightly criticizing design history's nearly exclusive focus upon the domestic decor of the great and good, Ponsonby directs her attention instead to the homes occupied by the anonymous, middling stratum of society. She lays emphasis upon specificity and variation. She asks how rooms differed when their inhabitants lived in provincial England, as opposed to London; she contrasts the dwellings of bachelors with those of maiden sisters; she compares properties that had to accommodate labor and trade with those that reflected the division of home life from work; she inquires into rented furniture, homes lost to bankruptcy or fire, and the traffic in secondhand goods; and she dredges up untidy interiors as well as well-maintained rooms. The book concludes with a chapter that compares British and American approaches to the presentation of historic houses. Where American organizations such as the National Trust for Historic Preservation have often favored restoration, British authorities tend to preserve houses “as found.” Whatever the technique, the look to be avoided—Ponsonby contends—is the generic period room that, with its interchangeable set of items, conveys little of the texture or meaning of people's lives.

The strength of this volume lies in Ponsonby's archival research. Drawing mainly upon records from the West Midlands and West Sussex, Ponsonby makes creative use of house inventories. Although inventories have often been deployed in the aggregate for quantitative analysis, Ponsonby demonstrates how much can be gleaned about individual lives from these seemingly unpromising lists of household goods. What sort of domestic order prevailed in the home of the bachelor farmer and butcher James Mullock, who stored eight small cheeses and a quantity of lead weights in a bedroom in his house? Not just individual eccentricities, but broader patterns are amply evidenced in his volume. Based upon her forays into the records of cabinetmakers, pattern books, and household accounts, Ponsonby argues that provincial consumers were concerned with good value and appropriate furnishing—not with copying the latest London styles. Although metropolitan fashions would by the mid-nineteenth century intrude upon regional furnishings, Ponsonby warns that we should not assume a straightforward pattern of emulation. Scrupulously attentive herself to the factors of region, locale, gender, generation, marital status, and class that shaped what people had in their houses, she indicates how particular manners and mores should be deduced from material possessions. To take one example: inventories from Chichester in the 1840s indicate that even well-to-do spinsters and widows lacked a designated dining room. Independent women, Ponsonby thus surmises, were unlikely to have hosted formal dinner parties in the early nineteenth century. The quantity of china ware stored in front parlors and drawing rooms suggests instead that their entertaining took the form of tea parties.

So conscious is Ponsonby of the immense variety of middling homes that her book often seems kaleidoscopic: each detail eye-catching, but the whole picture still fragmentary. Historians of Britain more generally may wish that Ponsonby had done more to link her research findings to the larger narratives of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century history. Ponsonby's subject is the middling sort at precisely the point in which the middle class was ostensibly made. Material goods undoubtedly played a significant part both in cementing group affiliation and in distinguishing middle-class Britons from each other. However, because Ponsonby does not engage debates about the making of the middle classes, we miss an opportunity to learn how objects functioned in that process. In this regard, it would be helpful to know more about the meanings that Ponsonby's subjects ascribed to their belongings. Though autobiographical and diary accounts of furnishing are admittedly rarer for her period than they became in the late nineteenth century, Ponsonby relies upon them less extensively than she might. Such sources can be read for general attitudes toward possessions, as Margot Finn has done, and for their absences as well as their descriptions of furnishing. My own sense is that belongings in this period generally carried less “selfhood” (73) than later generations would impose upon them. Ponsonby hints at this dimension, which she explains as a function of the insecurities of life: “emotions were therefore channeled into a minority of possessions that were retained in all but the direst of circumstances” (11). However, given that economic insecurity was a persistent feature of the nineteenth century and that Victorians were notoriously attached to their things, I wonder whether it was the conception of the self, rather than the durability of ownership, that changed.

Ponsonby has written a book from which historians of the domestic interior will greatly profit. Stories from Home signals a worthy new direction in the history of design.