A Day at Home is a study of how the middling sort's houses and possessions defined their identity. The authors share the caution of other historians in using a concept they describe as a historiographical construct, which conceals considerable variety. In his study of The Middle Sort of People in Provincial England (2007), Henry French denies that the “middle sort” had any cultural identity, beyond the aspirations to gentility of its most prominent members. Yet the importance of houses and possessions to middling identity is stressed throughout A Day at Home. The middling were set apart from those less well-off by a variety of decorated and furnished spaces, by the number and diversity of their possessions, and even by the whiteness of their linen and the scent of their houses. They shared godly values, self-conscious conformity to ideals of behavior, an orderly mindset, and concern to maintain continuity of status between generations. The transformation of spaces was central to the expression and development of middling identities. Middling houses enabled their inhabitants to enjoy luxury of time and space for contemplation, but they were also places of production, trade, and employment.
The assertion of middling cultural identity is surprising in a study of such an early period, when other historians have focused on changes after 1660. It should be stressed that Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson are not making a case, as others have, either for the making of the middle class or for emulation of the gentry. Their primary focus is on the upper echelons, on the chief inhabitants who exercised local power and authority, leaving questions about how deeply into the middling sort the culture and values they describe penetrated. At several points, especially in discussion of the transformation of physical spaces, they show how practice differed between those better and less well-off.
Any reservations about the case for middling identity should not be allowed to obscure the other qualities of this wonderful book, which is rich in ideas, insights, and images. Hamling and Richardson begin by making a case for the importance of the household as a social and political unit, and for understanding domestic life as experienced. Organized by chapters that take the reader from rising in the morning, through the working day, to bedtime, the book's structure provides a good basis for explorations of many topics and issues, including consumption and shopping, women's and men's work, the changing use and decoration of space, privacy, religious practices, attitudes toward death, and household and local government. The strengths of the book lie in Hamling and Richardson's interdisciplinary approach, which exploits a wide range of sources to give a comprehensive picture of social change; the rich illustrations, which provide strong evidence for the significance of interior decoration, furniture and household equipment; and most of all, the case studies and stories, through which the authors bring houses and their inhabitants to life.
Inventories make an excellent source on houses and their material contents, but they require contextualization to understand their meanings. Hamling and Richardson include statistics from probate inventories, but they make far more use of other sources and artifacts. Some of the best recent writing on material culture tells stories about and through objects, as in the work of historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and anthropologist Janet Hoskins. Many of the stories in A Day at Home come from court testimony, especially from defamation cases. Depositions describe overheard conversations, revealing the spatial contexts in which arguments occurred and also the permeability of boundaries, so that witnesses could report events occurring elsewhere within the house or outside in the street.
Other sources also have stories to tell. The murder of Thomas Arden, in Faversham in Kent, represented in drama, makes several appearances, contributing to consideration of locks, stairs, and evening recreations. From account books, we learn that Thomas Cocks played games with others for money 158 times in one year. Another set of accounts shows the thrifty farmer Robert Loder puzzling over the economics of malting and the employment of female maid servants, whose wages appeared to produce no income, evidence (if it were needed) of the invisibility of women's work to contemporaries. Material objects and buildings tell stories, too, often aided by text inscribed on the side of earthenware tankards or painted in cartouches on the walls. Bequests reveal the importance of furniture and plate to the preservation of the family line.
This book is well informed by historiography. The Hamling and Richardson confirm the findings of others that ownership of household goods expanded considerably in the period, well before the eighteenth-century “birth of a consumer society.” The transformation and use of physical space is a central theme. This was the period of W. G. Hoskins’ much-criticized notion of a “Great Rebuilding,” and there is ample evidence here of physical changes to buildings, as houses were extended by the addition of more specialized spaces. These developments were more complicated than Hoskins suggested. Following the archaeologist Matthew Johnson, the authors argue that conversion was a gradual process, rather than an event. While some households stopped cooking and dining in the hall, while still using it as a symbolic space, others continued either to cook or eat there. Also important, and often overlooked, were changes to the interior decoration of houses, as shown by surviving wall paintings and plasterwork. These often show biblical scenes, casting doubt on Patrick Collinson's argument that godly Protestants became iconophobic. The messages of paintings might be reinforced by inscriptions, sometimes in the black letter of popular print, providing a suitably godly environment for the morning assembly of all members of the household to hear a Bible reading.
This review has barely scratched the surface of this important book. There can be few historians of early modern Britain who will not find material relevant to them here. Most importantly, Hamling and Richardson achieve their goal of showing how behaviors shaped, and were shaped by, the material environment of the household.
