Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions

Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions. By Deborah Cohen. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. xvii + 294 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, notes, index. Cloth, $40.00. ISBN: 0-300-11213-0.

Reviewed by Lara Kriegel

Strikingly original, impressively researched, and beautifully illustrated, Household Gods offers a nuanced appraisal of the changing material world of the British middle-class home between 1830 and 1930. Deborah Cohen has plumbed unpublished diaries, photo albums, and the periodical press, as well as the archives of manufacturers, designers, and provincial retailers, to delineate a rich account of "the British loveaffair with the domestic interior" …