Abstract
Chapter 2 focused on social rooms and how the desire for sociability is reflected in the representation of the parlour in Pamela and Clarissa, and the drawing-room in The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph and Evelina. But, as argued, in the eighteenth century the polite elite did not only conceive of the domestic interior as a social place. They also wanted a home that could provide them with a private, informal space removed from others, both upstairs and down. Consequently, growing sociability had to be reconciled with the desire for increased for privacy, especially in the first half of the eighteenth century. It is these private rooms that are under scrutiny in Chapter 3. In particular, this chapter interrogates the representation of the private closet and dressing-room in Richardson’s Pamela and The History of Sir Charles Grandison and Burney’s Evelina.
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Notes
D. Wahrman, (2004) The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (Connecticut: Yale University Press) p. xvi.
J. P. Hunter, (1984) “The World as Stage and Closet”, in Shirley Strum Kenny (ed.) British Theatre and the Other Arts, 1600–1800 (Washington: Folger Books), 282.
R. Morris, (1734) Lectures on Architecture, Consisting of Rules Founded upon Harmonick and Arithmetical Proportions in Building (London: J. Blindly), pp.23–24.
R. St George, (2006) ‘Reading Spaces in Eighteenth-Century New England’, in J. Styles and A. Vickery, (2006) (eds.) Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), pp.81–106.
E. Kowaleski-Wallace, (1997) Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century (Columbia: Columbia University Press), p.7.
Samuel Richardson to Sophia Westcombe, 15 September, 1746, in John Carroll, (1964) Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Oxford University Press) op.cit, p.68.
See for instance, W. Beatty Warner, (1979) Reading Clarissa: The Struggles of Interpretation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press)
T. Gwilliam, (1993) Samuel Richardson’s Fiction of Gender (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press)
J. P. Hunter, (1990) Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth Century English Fiction (London: Norton), p.157.
E. Climenson, (1899) (ed.) Passages from the Diaries of Mrs Philip Lybbe Powys of Hardwick House, Oxon, 1756–1808 (London: Longman) p. 116.
J. Lomax, (1983) ‘Heaton House’, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society 82, pp.77–79.
R. Steele and J. Addison, (1965) The Spectator, D. Bond (ed.) 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press)
T. Dykstal, (1995) ‘Evelina and the Culture Industry’, Criticism 37, 4 (Fall) pp. 559–581
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© 2012 Karen Lipsedge
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Lipsedge, K. (2012). Private Rooms. In: Domestic Space in Eighteenth-Century British Novels. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137283504_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137283504_4
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