ABSTRACT
Setting up home has long been held as intensely feminine. Focusing primarily on genteel homes within eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, this chapter engages with the corpus of material goods purchased for and produced in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English households. It reveals how both men and women consumed, made and crafted items for use in domestic space, and how these items were integrated into a wider culture of collaborative domestic consumption. Alongside child-rearing, sociability and domestic work, the material culture of domestic space has long been considered through a gendered lens. The materiality of the domestic sphere is important to understanding not only roles and dynamics within the home but also how people positioned their homes in relation to wider social and political issues. The relationship between the material culture of the domestic interior and making within and for the home is central to the watercolours of Mary Ellen Best.
