House and Home in Georgian Ireland, Spaces and Cultures of Domestic Life

Abstract

One of the pleasures of reading House and Home in Georgian Ireland, Spaces and Cultures of Domestic Life, is the richness of detail which each author of this collected volume commits to its pages. In a series of nine chapters, the book ‘introduces a broader appreciation of the diverse meanings and materialities ascribed to and associated with house and home in eighteenth-century Ireland’ (p. 28), but this might be considered an understatement, as contained within the collection is a wealth of reflections and careful consideration of lives lived in Irish houses during the period. The volume originated with the online conference ‘Species of domestic spaces: house and home in eighteenth-century Ireland’, convened at the Humanities Institute, University College Dublin in June 2021. The book’s editor, Conor Lucey, has captured the breadth of discussion from that event, and incorporated this alongside a series of powerful impressions of intimate historical interiors. Strikingly, the chapters describe lived experiences amid private and public encounters with domestic spaces, incorporating the humblest of interior furnishings in single rooms and lodgings to the most opulent decorative features of Dublin’s finest town houses. Throughout the volume, the writings of Gaston Bachelard and George Perec form an expressive metanarrative to historical accounts of many of the homes that no longer exist, as ‘bit by bit, the house that was lost in the mists of time will appear from out of the shadow ….’ (p. 171).