Related Papers
'the Life of a Country Cottage'
Karen Sayer
Reading of the material culture of a cottage in a specific time/space location in light of wider socio-cultural norms and contexts.
Landscape and the Idea of the Cottage in Eighteenth-Century English Polite Society
DANIEL MAUDLIN
The idea of the cottage was a consuming interest for those members of English polite society in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries concerned with landscape design, a new appreciation of the English countryside and the 'objects' observed within it. At the heart of this English idea was a Roman idea about retreat from the bustle and stress of the city to a quiet simple life in the country as found in the works of Pliny, Horace and, above all, Virgil. This idea was adopted and adapted within the Classically-infused upper-class culture of eighteenth-century England where the cottage, as the embodiment of that idea, gained popularity with writers, artists, architects and their wealthy, landowning patrons who, from the later eighteenth-century built summer-houses, gate-lodges, estate workers’ cottages on their country estates and villas in rural locations designed to ‘appear as cottages’.
Habitations of the Labourer: Improvement, Reform and the Neoclassical Cottage in Eighteenth-Century Britain
DANIEL MAUDLIN
Habitations of the Labourer by the English architect John Wood the Younger was the fi rst architectural treatise and pattern book to address the dwelling of the rural labourer: the cottage. Wood combined the order and regularity of neoclassical design with a programme of humanitarian reform, centred upon material and structural standards, within the context of agricultural improvement and Britain’s nascent rural capital economy: a regular improved cottage for a regulated improved landscape. Wood’s rational approach to social reform and cottage design distinguishes the cottages described in Habitations of the Labourer from the irregular vernacular dwellings, material decay and rural poverty presented in the picturesque- cottage pattern books that dominated the late-Georgian architectural press .
Review: Domestic Interiors: Representing Home from the Victorians to the Moderns
Dr Georgina Downey, LESLEY HOSKINS
Joys of the Cottage: Labourers' Houses, Hovels and Huts in Britain and the British Colonies, 1770-1830
Sarah Lloyd
In a period when social commentators grew increasingly interested in the cottage as an antidote to pauperism, what uses, meanings and rituals did plebeian occupants locate in their dwellings and gardens?
Interpreting Country Houses in Britain
Tejaswi Mehta
The Agricultural History Review
'The regulation of cottage building in seventeenth-century Sussex', Agricultural History Review 59:1 (2011), pp. 18-35
2011 •
Danae Tankard
In 1589 a statute was passed entitled 'An act against erecting & maintaining cottages' which sought to regulate cottage building & the multiple occupation of cottages. This article examines the context of the act's passed & its relationship to other legislation of the late c16th & early c17th. It then offers a detailed exploration of the way the act's cottage clauses were enforced in c17th Sussex. It also considers the legal status of cottages that were 'continued' & looks at evidence for methods of cottage construction & the range of cottage types.
Redefining Hospitality: The Leisured World of the 1650s English Country House, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 68, no. 4 (December 2009): 496-513.
Kimberley Skelton
Past & Present
Cottage Conversations: Poverty and Manly Independence In Eighteenth-Century England
2004 •
Sarah Lloyd
'An Exquisite Man-Made Landscape:' Evelyn Waugh and Daphne du Maurier's English Country Houses
Muireann Leech
Conference Paper: Evelyn Waugh and Daphne du Maurier’s most beloved creations prominently feature the English country house as a locus of a past that refuses to be forgotten. The beginning of Brideshead Revisited (1945) and Rebecca (1938) presents a bleak image of a dull present, devoid of individuality and colour. The uninspiring present is contrasted throughout with the remarkable recent past. Both novels open with a sleeping protagonist dreaming of their privileged outsider’s perspective of ‘an exquisite man-made landscape’ (Brideshead 25). Yet the dream is in constant danger of tipping over the abyss into the realm of nightmares. Brideshead and Manderley reflect their creators’ ambiguous fascination with the big house. In their autobiographical writings Du Maurier [Myself When Young: The Shaping of a Writer (1977)] and Waugh [A Little Learning: The First Volume of an Autobiography (1964)] reimagine the country house as a synecdoche of England’s cultural international standing. These autobiographies outline the effect that early encounters with the structure of the country house had on them. Waugh’s fascination with the bric-a-brac housed in his aunts’ estate reflects his conservative nostalgia for a diminishing British Empire. His regrets the disappearance of an ordered, stratified and, for him, beautiful society and berates the void that is replacing it. Du Maurier’s recollections of her childhood visits to Milton House lead her to question the nature of time and history-making. It is not the things that the house contains that draws her, but the actual structure of the building. In her gothic appreciation of the big house the walls contain the ghost of yesterday. For both writers, the English country house not only acts as a vibrant literary trope that gives voice to concerns for their country’s current political and moral climate; it is also a desired abode where these intensely private people can escape their public.
