Be it ever so humble: poverty, fiction, and the invention of the middle-class home

Before the rise of private homes as we now understand them, the realm ofpersonal, private, and local relations in England was the parish, which was also the sphere ofpoverty management.

Between the 1740s and the 1790s, legislators, political economists, reformers,and novelists transferred the parish system's functions to another institution that promisedself-sufficient prosperity: the laborer's cottage.

Expanding its scope beyond theparameters of literary history and previous studies of domesticity, Be It Ever So Humbleposits that the modern middle-class home was conceived during the eighteenth centuryin England, and that its first inhabitants were the poor.

Over the course of theeighteenth century, many participants in discussions about poverty management came to believe thatprivate family dwellings could turn England's indigent, unemployed, and discontent into aself-sufficient, productive, and patriotic labor force.

Writers and thinkers involved in thesedebates produced copious descriptions of what a private home was and how it related to thecollective national home.

In this body of texts, Scott MacKenzie pursues the origins of the modernmiddle-class home through an extensive set of discourses-including philosophy, law,religion, economics, and aesthetics-all of which brush up against and often spill over intoliterary representations.

Through close readings, the author substantiates hisclaim that the private home was first invented for the poor and that only later did the middle classappropriate it to themselves.

Thus, the late eighteenth century proves to be a watershed moment inhome's conceptual life, one that produced a remarkably rich and complex set of cultural ideas andimages.