• Forming a new concept of home: how consumption of textiles contributed to homemaking between 1760 and 1850

      Ponsonby, Margaret (Middlesex University Press, 2002)
      THIS BOOK: Textiles form the largest group of designed objects available for study, whether as objects in their own rights, as constituents parts of fashion, furniture and interiors, or as industry - the latter embracing production, trade and working environments and experiences. This anthology demonstrates the range of textile studies through eighteen essays that consider the process of designing and making, the makers and manufacturers, the product itself, or how it is sold, used and perceived. Tackling subjects from prehistory to the 1990s, each has been ed to be of particular interest to students and professionals in design, cultural history, fashion and textiles, but also will be of use to anyone who is interested in the study of objects. Set within the context of interdisciplinary techniques in the study of designed objects, the contributors have been drawn from diverse professional backgrounds in both the United Kingdom and the United States. Their experience encompasses the history of textiles and dress, design and economics, museology, social history, psychoanalytical therapy, artchitecture, sociology and textile practice. Divided into four sections, this volume both demonstrates and explores cross-disciplinary research, while enriching and making acccessible the myriad of ways in which textiles - and objects in general - can be interpreted. The editors are the freelance historian, Mary Schoeser, and Dr Christine Boydell, Senior Lecturer in the Department of History of Art and Material Culture, De Montfort University. Published widely, they previously collaborated on the exhibition and publication The Architect of Floors: modernism, art and Marion Dorn designs (1996). (Middlesex University Press)
    • Ideals, Reality and Meaning: Homemaking in England in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century

      Ponsonby, Margaret (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)
      Advice books in the first half of the nineteenth century offered homemakers instructions for creating the ideal home. The problem for the design historian is to ascertain with what results the homemaker mediated these instructions. This article suggests using lists of house contents, which survive in a variety of forms, and adopting a qualitative approach to their analysis. Evidence for a number of middle-class homes is used to explore the variations. The symbolic value of individual objects and their role within the material culture of the home is examined - in particular, the use of textiles to articulate the practical and symbolic functions of living rooms. Although all the examples followed the general tendencies of the period as described in advice books, they also showed distinct differences according to social status,age. sex and occupation. A qualitative approach to the evedence permits exploration of the differences between homes and the possible social and cultural meaning that they conveyed. (Oxford University Press)
    • Stories from Home: English Domestic Interiors, 1750-1850

      Ponsonby, Margaret (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2006)
      Most homes in the past were not elite, wealthy interiors complete with high fashion furnishings, designed by well-known architects and designers, as many domestic histories often seem to have assumed. As this book makes clear, there were in fact an enormous variety of house interiors in England during the period 1750–1850, reflecting the location, status and gender of particular householders, as well as their changing attitudes, tastes and aspirations. By focusing on non-metropolitan homes, which represented the majority of households in England, this study highlights the need for historians to look beyond prevailing attitudes that often reduce interiors to generic descriptions based on high fashions of the decorative arts. Instead it shows how numerous social and cultural influences affected the manner in which homes were furnished and decorated. Issues such as the availability of goods, gender, regional taste, income, the second-hand market, changing notions of privacy and household hierarchies and print culture, could all have a significant impact on domestic furnishing. The study ends with a discussion of how domestic interiors of historic properties have been presented and displayed in modern times, highlighting how competing notions of the past can cloud as well as illuminate the issue. Combining cultural history and qualitative analysis of evidence, this book presents a new way of looking at 'ordinary' and 'provincial' homes that enriches our understanding of English domestic life of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. (Ashgate Publishing)
    • Towards an Interpretation of Textiles in the Provincial Domestic Interior: Three Homes in the West Midlands, 1780-1848

      Ponsonby, Margaret (Maney Publishing, 2007)
      This article explores the role of textiles in the home in the later eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. The methodology adopted is a response to the difficulties of researching homes in this period when probate inventories had largely ceased to be made. Instead of using quantitative analysis, this essay focuses on three case studies of homes where detailed lists allow speculation on the uses of furnishing textiles in these homes. Three themes are identified: conspicuous consumption, domestic ideology and the possible meanings of stored textiles. These themes are explored using recent cultural theories to provide a framework for analysis. (Ingenta)