Household Gods

Cohen’s elegant book tells the story of the middle-class obsession with furnishing, from the early Victorian period to the 1930s. Well-researched and beautifully illustrated, it is also a very good read, an increasingly rare thing among works of historical scholarship. 

Cohen has a fine eye for detail and the work includes many gems. Who now remembers, for example, that General Kitchener had a passionate love for china and curios, as well as a talent for flower arranging? Or that his rival, Field Marshall Lord Grenfell, was a self-confessed slave to his furniture?

Instead of focusing on intellectual killjoys such as Henry Cole and John Ruskin, who castigated the middle classes for their bad taste, Cohen instead privileges lived experience and actual consumer practice in her study. This approach allows her to demonstrate convincingly just how deeply the Victorians loved their homes and their things. 

As with so much else, Queen Victoria, who had her millions of possessions photographed from various angles, merely epitomised middle-class sensibilities here. And it was not just women who enjoyed the pleasures of the burgeoning world of goods to the full; many other men besides Kitchener and Grenfell took a keen interest in beautifying domestic space. She argues, somewhat less successfully, that middle-class consumers overcame the moral discipline of evangelicalism, which saw the devil’s work in the superfluities 

and luxuries of a growing consumer culture, by moralising goods themselves, furniture in particular. Though a rather self-enclosed account, which pays insufficient attention to outside political forces that shaped consumer practice, this is an attractive work of cultural history.

Dr Peter Gurney is senior lecturer in history, University of Essex