The Country House: Material Culture and Consumption

摘要

For some years now, social historians of early modern Britain have been making imaginative use of inventories to draw up an increasingly detailed picture of consumption patterns, principally but not exclusively amongst the middling sort. At its best, this handsomely illustrated and neatly presented volume extends this approach to wealthier families to show the ways in which country houses, especially in the 'long eighteenth century', were important centres of consumption drawing on local, regional and national markets. In doing so, the contributors bring together the social history of consumption with the social history of the aristocracy, two literatures that have been largely distinct, though to some extent previously connected in the work of Amanda Vickery on gentry women and Richard Wilson and Alan Mackley on the building and decorating of the country house.