Scott MacKenzie's monograph on the emergence and nature of “home” in the eighteenth-century British cultural imaginary begins with a suitably complex discussion of the eccentric nature of the word “home” in the English language. Home, uniquely, has retained its locative case: “Every other locational noun requires an orienting preposition, I may be home, but I must be at school, in Auckland” And it also retains a lative case, which expresses movement to: “I may choose to go home, but I cannot go the Getty Center” (1). Home's double signification as both dwelling and nation of origin or residence was notable in the early industrial period, and from the 1790s to 1830, “home” was used to marshal both class and political alliances. Through an examination of the rhetorical characteristics of the polemics of home in this period, MacKenzie's study seeks to explain the process by which home emerged from a limited concept to its modern hegemonic form.

Be It Ever So Humble employs two essential theoretical sociologies: the Foucauldian concept of a “dispositif” (or “apparatus”) and Antonio Gramsci's model of hegemonic processes. Both concepts are explained lucidly in MacKenzie's introduction, and it is not hard to see the importance of these conceptual frameworks to this study. In particular, Jacob Torfing's interpretation of Gramscian hegemony provides a theoretical basis for MacKenzie to see home as a “discursive formation that provides a surface of inscription for a wide range of demands, views and attitudes” (17). This introduction lays out the ambitious nature of MacKenzie's study, which joins feminist and postcolonial critiques of the modern, private home.

MacKenzie claims that discussions of pauper management played a crucial role in creating a new view of home in the 1790s. This is a creative and original argument, which he justifies with reference to tracts on poverty, fictional works and philosophical and political treatises. Arguing that these genres shifted from advocating institutional care for the poor in workhouses to promoting outdoor relief (especially cottages for the poor), MacKenzie believes that the original ideal of the modern home was created by the middle class, but for the laboring class. There is certainly ample literary evidence to show a ubiquitous critique of eighteenth-century workhouses by the 1790s, and there is no doubt that cottages for the poor were proposed as a way of both domesticating and rendering productive the working poor. Unfortunately, even with MacKenzie's reassurance that he is tracing rhetoric rather than lived experience, social historians will likely balk at his claims that the middle-class home rose from “the ruins of the parish” (44) and that the 1790s to 1800s witnessed an “abatement in carceral poverty supervision” (11). Recent studies of the Old Poor Law see the parish context as crucial in the period, and there is ample evidence (from the work of David Green, Steve King, Alannah Tomkins, and others) to demonstrate that the use of workhouses expanded in these decades. Promotion of pauper cottages may have fed into the new conceptions of home, but the influence of that movement should not be overstated.

The bulk of Mackenzie's argument, however, rests on his analysis of literary sources that engage with the conception of home. The first chapter, “Stock the Parish with Beauties: Henry Fielding's Parochial Vision,” effectively argues for the efficacy of considering Fielding's fictional works and his tracts on poor relief management together as a body of evidence. MacKenzie argues that Fielding viewed the parish as the ideal locus for poverty management, allowing managers of the poor to combine disciplinary, judicial oversight with intimate acquaintance and thus to manage the problem of poverty with authenticity. While this chapter weaves fictional and nonfictional sources into a fascinating narrative about Fielding's attitudes towards poor reform, it is not always easy to follow the thread of MacKenzie's argument about emerging attitudes towards home.

The second chapter, “An English Woman's Workhouse Is Her Castle: Poverty Management and the Radcliffean Gothic,” discusses parallels between gothic novels' heroines and the experiences of the poor. Specifically, MacKenzie argues, “debates over poverty acquire sufficient cultural prominence by the end of the eighteenth century to inflect most, if not all, narrative descriptions of the single woman and her fortunes, and that representations of and responses to poverty are pivotal to the formation of the modern middle-class home” (84). In Ann Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest, for example, the use of words like “relief,” “settlement,” and “remove” are ubiquitous. These gothic novels and debates over poor relief reveal a turning point for the conception of the home because of the dual focus of these very disparate genres: in both, the power of the cottage—of the independent home—is presented as the ultimate solution to the problems both of poor relief and of the gothic heroine, while the workhouse and the gothic castle are home's antitheses. By the end of the 1790s, the British cultural imagination has embraced a shared vision of the home and celebrated the effects of domesticity.

Almost immediately, MacKenzie argues, “the figure of home starts to acquire the vestments of naturalness and universality that settle over fully developed ideological formations,” and as such, it becomes “a privileged term evoked from virtually every political perspective” and was often contested (130–31). In novels, stories, and poetry, MacKenzie shows, home is as likely to be considered stifling as treated with nostalgia, as two types of argument converge: a statist critique of private homes as sources of rebellious secrecy, and a radical critique of households that associates them with the restriction of personal freedoms. This chapter ranges widely over a range of literary sources and cultural phenomena, with particularly interesting discussions of Wordsworth's conception of homelessness and of the rise of the postal service as a key component in the emerging hegemonic status of home.

The final chapter looks northward, and examines the complex reception of home in Scottish prose fiction. In Scotland, with its very different relationship to Britons' “home nation,” MacKenzie points out that themes of exile and emigration are pervasive, particularly with reference to the poor. Throughout this chapter, the contrasts with England are clear, and there are gestures towards the broader imperial context. This chapter and a brief conclusion are suitable ends to an ambitious and thought-provoking monograph that demonstrates the power and complexity of the emergence of the modern middle-class home.