• At home with the poor
1 1

At home with the poor

£85.00
£85.00 £85.00
Sale Sold out
This book opens the doors to the homes of the forgotten poor and traces the goods they owned before, during and after the industrial revolution. Using a vast range of sources, it argues that the po...
Read More
  • Format:
  • 18 June 2024
View Product Details
This book opens the doors to the homes of the forgotten poor and traces the goods they owned before, during and after the industrial revolution (c. 1650–1850). Using a vast and diverse range of sources, it gets to the very heart of what it meant to be ‘poor’ by examining the homes of the impoverished and mapping how numerous household goods became more widespread. As the book argues, poverty did not necessarily equate to owning very little and living in squalor. In fact, its novel findings show that most of the poor strove to improve their domestic spheres and that their demand for goods was so great that it was a driving force of the industrial revolution.
files/i.png Icon
Price: £85.00
Pages: 272
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Series: Studies in Design and Material Culture
Publication Date: 18 June 2024
ISBN: 9781526160843
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:

HISTORY / Social History, Material culture, HISTORY / Europe / Great Britain / Georgian Era (1714-1837), HISTORY / Europe / Great Britain / Stuart Era (1603-1714), BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Economic History, BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Consumer Behavior, Social and cultural history, Poverty and precarity
REVIEWS Icon

'This is a fabulous addition to the fields of material culture, consumption, and economic history during the period 1650–1850.'
CHOICE Reviews

'At Home with the Poor provides a view into the homes of the so-called ‘forgotten poor’ across the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, considering the condition of the poor before, during and after the Industrial Revolution... Harley brings his subjects to life with plentiful examples. The potential reader may be expecting a book about the objects poor people had. However, this work is much more about these ordinary people, seen through the lens of their objects.'
Joe Saunders, Family & Community History

'Overall, At Home with the Poor is a landmark study based on an exceptional set of sources. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the daily life and material culture of the poor in Northwestern Europe before, during, and after the Industrial Revolution.'
Jeroen Kole, The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History

Joseph Harley is a Senior Lecturer in History at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge

Introduction
1 Accommodating the poor
2 Material wealth and material poverty
3 Building blocks of the home
4 Comforts of the hearth
5 Eating and drinking
6 Non-essential goods
7 Contrasting genders and locations
Conclusion
Index