ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns how older arrangements persisted despite fashionable developments, and how the newer trends were superimposed over imperfect situations. The quiet rural nature of Stone perhaps also led some of its residents to continue with old-fashioned ways of organizing their homes. While some households furnished the lodging room completely, leaving little for the lodger to personalize other people, like Elizabeth Jeffries, in Bridgnorth, just provided the basics of a bed, bedsteads and hangings, a chair and a box for clothes. Social visiting was important to all levels of middling-sort and middle-class households. The domestic environment was growing in importance, as, too, was the consumption of commodities to make the home more attractive, decorative and comfortable. People as well as objects needed to be accommodated in the extended home. Servants were present in most middling-sort and later, middle-class, homes. Their presence had to be accommodated without compromising the privacy of the family.
