Noble Households

''Noble Households: Eighteenth-Century Inventories of Great English Houses'' presents transcripts of inventories of nine great country houses and four London town houses as a tribute to the late historian John Cornforth.

Summary

The inventories document in astounding detail the taste and lifestyle of leading noble families and their households. John Cornforth first "put forward the idea of this publication as a primary resource for the interpretation of the historic interior". As the book's dust-wrapper states, it was his hope that it "would revitalise the study of the great house in the eighteenth century".

Structure

The inventories, compiled for a variety of purposes by professional appraisers in conjunction with family members or their stewards, are supplemented with a glossary and index to the items listed. The inventories are grouped as follows:

Part I: Montagu Inventories; Montagu House, Bloomsbury, London, 1709 and 1733; Boughton House, Northamptonshire, 1709, 1718, 1730; Ditton House, Buckinghamshire, 1709; Montagu House, Whitehall, London, 1746;
Part II: The Drayton Inventories; Drayton House, Northamptonshire, 1710 and 1724;
Part III: The Ditchley Inventories; Ditchley, Oxfordshire, 1743 and 1772;
Part IV: Norfolk Inventories; Houghton Hall, 1745 and 1792; Holkham Hall, Norfolk and Thanet House, London, 1760;
Part V: Inventories of the Marquess of Carmarthen; Kiveton and Thorp Salvin, Yorkshire, 1727;
Part VI: The Marlborough Inventories. Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire and Marlborough House, London, 1740.

Critical reception

In her review in ''Apollo'', Susan Jenkins encapsulated Cornforth's intentions when she averred that with the selection of inventories in the book, "Cornforth hoped to inspire another generation of scholars to take his work forward into the 21st century". This view was endorsed by James Miller when he wrote in the ''Times Literary Supplement'', "It is to be hoped that more inventories will now be published as they are the bedrock of the understanding of the taste of a particular period."

Writing in the ''Burlington Magazine'', Andrew Moore saw the book as "an important step in the wider recognition of archival studies in relation to the social and cultural history of England"; whereas in the ''Art Newspaper'' John Harris acknowledged the usefulness of the book's index, when he declared that it "demonstrates the value of inventories for an understanding of the furnished interior'.

Reviewing the book for ''Studies in the Decorative Arts'', the Bard Graduate Center's journal, Simon Swynfen Jervis commented that "When inventories are reasonably comprehensive and are ordered room by room ... —and this applies to all those in ''Noble Households''—they are difficult to surpass as documents of most aspects of interior decoration."''Studies in the Decorative Arts'', vol. XVI, no. 2, Spring/Summer 2009, pp. 167–9. Se
JSTOR
(accessed 28 October 2022).

Notes

External links

{{DEFAULTSORT:Noble Households
2006 non-fiction books
British non-fiction books
Cultural history
Social history
18th century in England
Country houses in England
Furniture