ABSTRACT
The later nineteenth century was the era of the home, on both sides of the Atlantic. Both Britain and America had an interest in elaborating ideas of home; America because it stood on the threshold of enormous growth and development, with the prospect of mass immigration, Britain because it was assuming its position as the centre of empire. Historic events had lead Americans to separate themselves from what many had once considered home in Europe, while the years spent in the New World had contributed to the practices which led them to feel at home in the settled areas of the United States. The challenges to those ideas of the American home evolved through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the new wealth now beginning to find its way into the cities and the extending territories of the country westward. How could the Puritan ethos of the early years be translated into the homes of the rich, and how could the American home be replicated across the prairies as far as the Pacific? In addition, as mass immigration became a reality, how could such large numbers of poor Europeans be inculcated with the values of the home, based as they were on the self-sufficient individual?
