Design at Home

Domestic Advice Books in Britain and the USA since 1945

Grace Lees Maffei

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415656696
• eBook ISBN: 9781135075828
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Domestic advice literature is rich in information about design, ideals of domesticity, consumption and issues of identity, yet this literature remains a relatively neglected resource in comparison with magazines and film.

Design at Home brings together etiquette, homemaking and home decoration advice as sources in the first systematic demonstration of the historical value of domestic advice literature as a genre of word and image, and a discourse of dominance. This book traces a transatlantic domestic dialogue between the UK and the US as the chapters explore issues of design, domesticity, consumption, social interaction and identity markers including class, gender and age.

Areas covered include:

• the use of domestic advice by historians

• relationships between advice, housing and the middle class

• links between advice and gender

• advice and the teenage consumer

Design at Home is essential reading for students and scholars of cultural and social history, design history, and cultural studies.

Part I

1 The roots of domestic advice literature

In order to explore the historical value of domestic advice literature, it is essential to understand how the form and content of advice books is constituted by, and reflective of, historical, cultural and social changes. Domestic advice literature is here defined as a genre of advice concerning the social and material home, mediated through etiquette, homemaking and home decoration books. This genre has developed from a number of earlier, parallel, discourses, and therefore French historical sociologist and philosopher Michel Foucault's notion of genealogy is apt. Following German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche ([1887] 1996), Foucault rejected a history reliant on linear causality in favour of genealogy, which models historical development as a multifarious series of intertwined branches ([1969] 1972). Foucault examined institutions of power and control as they relate to the interrelationship of self and society, and emphasised the role of discourse in conditioning material experience and historical preoccupations. He proposed that knowledge and power have in common their possession by the few and their exertion over the many, especially in the case of writings on technical knowledge by specialists using a specialised vocabulary. His ‘science of discipline’ examined institutions such as schools, prisons, asylums or hospitals and families, each of which forms its individual inhabitants through repetitive exercises, detailed hierarchies, ‘normalizing judgment’ or laws and timetables (Foucault, 1979).

Domestic advice literature similarly functions as a discourse that forms identity and history, and as a disciplinary institution. The advice writer assumes an authority based on the possession of knowledge, as do other ‘experts’. This chapter traces the roots of contemporary domestic advice literature in a concise genealogy, before examining twentieth-century domestic advice literature in terms of various modes of authority, based on Max Weber's tripartite model of legitimisation. It closes by examining related channels, such as magazines and television, through which advice is mediated.

Specialization: from the courtly tradition to middle-class morals

Some of the earliest advice books were addressed to children and behaviour at court. Elias's History of Manners acknowledges that etiquette emerged before ‘Greco-Roman antiquity, and doubtless also of the related, preceding “civilizations”’. He mentions the Latin precepts for behaviour produced by ‘learned ecclesiastics’, such as De institutione novitarium by Hugh of St. Victor, who died in 1141 ([1939] 1994: 48). However, for Elias the most significant point in the history of manners was the development of the concept of civilité ‘at a time when chivalrous society and the unity of the Catholic Church were disintegrating’. Elias explains that: ‘Its individual starting point can be exactly determined. It owes the specific meaning adopted by society to a short treatise by Erasmus of Rotterdam, De civilitate morum puerilium (on civility in children), which appeared in 1530’ (Elias, [1939] 1994: 42–43). Elias notes the relative popularity of this text, based on its several re-editions. In Britain, early published domestic advice was offered in general texts, such as Thomas Twine's The Schoolemaster or Teacher of Table Philosophie (1576).

Early cookery books are important forerunners to the domestic manuals of the twentieth century. Texts dealing with domestic economy, which concerned recipes for food, drinks and toiletries and appeared from 1500 to 1700, divided in the mid-seventeenth century into those dealing with husbandry – farming and agriculture, and the management of country houses – and housewifery (‘the invisible labour of domestic women'), as well as books of ‘secrets’ offering information on ‘arcane alchemical experiments’ along with more straightforward recipes and hints (Hunter et al., 1999: 276–280). Lynette Hunter observes the coalescence from 1600 of three distinct types of advice text aimed at women: the cookery book with recipes; the ‘gentry housewife's book related to household activities, cookery and domestic medicine’, exemplified in the work of Gervase Markham; and ‘the aristocratic, or aspiring, lady's book concerned with preservation and conservation, […] medicines, experiments and some specialized cookery’, such as Sir Hugh Platt's Delightes for Ladies (1602). Further specialisation catered to women who made a living from domestic labour, and those who oversaw domestic work carried out in their homes. The work of Hannah Wolley, for example, including The Gentlewoman's Companion (ca. 1670), shifted ‘the focus firmly from the self-sufficient community of the country house to the private home of the urban middle class’ (Hunter et al., 1999: 277).

Cookery books flourished in the eighteenth century in both Britain and the USA. Waldo Lincoln (1849–1933), American Antiquarian Society president from 1907 to 1927, compiled a bibliography of American cookery books from his collection of more than 800 examples in 1929 (American Antiquarian Society 2004, 2005). Revised and enlarged by Eleanor Lowenstein ([1954] 1972) and William Woys Weaver (1983), his bibliography shows the extent of publishing activity in this area in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the USA. Britain was equally active. Although the trend in cookery books was for an increasing focus on recipes rather than general advice, works on both sides of the Atlantic combined ‘moralizing advice’ with ‘receipts for nourishing soups’ and enabled ‘the charitable lady to fulfil her obligations without excessive expense’ (Hunter et al., 1999: 279).

Writing on the development of manners across the longue durée, Andrew St. George (1993: 5) observed that: ‘In a world before specialisation, (or where generalism was the specialisation) [...] a certain type of society was preserved by courtesy and humanity’. The sixteenth century, he notes, ‘saw a march of courtesy books which were to divide over the succeeding centuries into books of parental advice, polite conduct, policy and civility’ (St. George, 1993: 3). However, St. George is only interested in early texts, such as Henry Peacham's The Compleat Gentleman of 1622, for the extent to which they prefigured or differed from the Victorian books that form his focus: ‘the Victorians sought, by means of codes of manners and behaviour, to re-establish the boundaries which had been eroded by the relatively fluid society of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with their gentlemen, courtiers, lawyers, poets and merchants’ (ibid. 6). With the development of print culture, published domestic discourse shifted from general works offering guidance for the Renaissance man, to expert guides on discrete, albeit related, subjects written for the specialist of the industrial era.

The novel, advice literature and the middle classes in the long nineteenth century

Several converging factors influenced the development of domestic advice literature in the eighteenth century. Elias ([1939] 1994) based his analysis of etiquette books on the structural understanding that industrialisation necessitated interaction between the aristocratic elite and growing groups of merchants, manufacturers and professionals. Ian Watt ([1957] 1987) notes that the conditions which led to the development of the novel as a specific literary form also produced Protestantism, capitalism and the middle class, each of which, like the novel, was anchored in individualism. The development of print culture was partly based on the expansion of literacy among those in middle-class occupations and, to a lesser extent, among those members of the working class who read technical, vocational material. Another catalyst was increased affluence among the growing numbers of retailers and office workers, who could afford a greater range of available printed materials, while the working classes chose from a limited selection of cheaper publications. As a new group of retailers, booksellers offered an alternative to the system of patronage in publishing. A third enabler for the growth of print culture was increased leisure, significantly for women in the middle and at the lower end of the social spectrum. Household servants, particularly, are likely to have enjoyed the (albeit limited) leisure, money, privacy, light to read by, access to reading matter and example set by their employers, necessary to engage in print culture.

Like the novel, advice literature has roots in the epistolary form. The fourth Earl of Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope (1694–1773), began writing letters to his five-year-old son in a mixture of English, French and Latin in 1737. The letters were not intended for publication, but following Chesterfield's death they were sold to a publisher by his daughter-in-law, Eugenia Stanhope, and were published as Letters to His Son, together with some letters Chesterfield wrote to his godson (Ward and Waller, [1907–1921] 2000). Chesterfield's Letters became a representative example of English manners both at home and abroad. Thirty-one editions were printed in the USA from 1775 to 1798, and six more editions appeared in the decade 1806 to 1816, usually with the ‘improprieties’ edited out. American historian Arthur Schlesinger notes that ‘in 1827, the work completed the final formality of naturalization by being offered to the public as The American Chesterfield’ ([1946] 1968: 13).

The literary developments of the eighteenth century paved the way for the expansion of advice literature in the nineteenth century as a means for disseminating Victorian values to a growing readership. A widening of the reading public resulted in a middle-class hegemony preferring the realism and narratives of social mobility found in the novel over the literature of the fantastic, abstract or general (Watt, [1957] 1987: 48). Richard Ohmann has noted that: ‘Together, manners and material culture partially unveil for our contemplation a style and an ethos well suited to the aspirations of middle class people in growing industrial and commercial cities’ (1996: 153). New styles of life were communicated to newly middle class consumers via a range of mediating channels. Social historian Bill Lancaster has described the growth of the department store as ‘almost a mirror image of the emerging middle-class household’ (1995: 13) and, just as the department store emerged in Britain and the USA, domestic advice literature mirrored and managed the development of the middle class.

Several best-selling advice books appeared in their first and successive editions during the second half of the nineteenth century. American domestic advice books by Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, discussed below, enjoyed regular reprintings. In Britain, Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help of 1859 became a best-seller by encouraging hard work and self-control in the virtuous working class, selling 20,000 copies in its first year and 250,000 copies in Smiles’ lifetime (Sinnema, 2002: vii). The current editor of Self-Help, Peter W. Sinnema, has described Mrs Beeton's landmark homemaking text Beeton's Book of Household Management as part of ‘Self-Help's Legacy’, a ‘companion-piece to that of Smiles’ for a specifically female audience’. Yet, Beeton's book appeared in the same year as Self-Help, as a serial in her husband's periodical The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, before it was published in a single volume two years later (Beeton, 1859–1861). And, Household Management sold more than three times as many copies as Self-Help in its first year, and two million copies in its first decade, as compared with the quarter of a million copies of Self-Help sold during the 45 years between its first publication and Smiles’ death (Humble, 2000: vii–xxx). Household Management eclipsed Self-Help to become the pre-eminent nineteenth-century advice book.

By combining recipes with general household advice, Beeton's book continued a typically eighteenth-century amalgam of advice. There was a continued market for such titles in both Britain and the USA; Beeton's American contemporary Eliza Leslie, who wrote literature, cookbooks and advice on domestic economy, found the latter to be her most profitable publications (Longone, 1999: 15–17; 1998–1999: 450–451). But, while English readers from the fifteenth to early eighteenth centuries found information on etiquette, homemaking and cookery in their advice books, nineteenth and twentieth century readers in the UK and the USA increasingly consulted discrete volumes for advice on these topics. American historian Sarah Leavitt's assertion that ‘Domestic advice manuals originated in the 1830s’ (2002: 9) is based on this pattern, although it is of course only accurate as a description of the US case, not the British or wider European markets. The effects of specialisation are seen, for example, in the first culinary advice books written specifically for working-class readers, which appeared in the nineteenth century. Early examples by Mrs Rundell (1807, 1815) and Eliza Acton (1845) were followed in 1852 by Charles Francatelli's Plain Cookery Book f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustration
• Acknowledgements
• Permissions
• Introduction - Defining a genre: domestic advice literature
• Part I
• Part II
• Conclusion
• References
• Index