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Deborah Cohen, Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006. Pp. xviii + 296. $40.00.
Academic historians all too frequently dismiss trends in consumer spending as passing fancies, whose study by default falls into hands of their colleagues in fields such as cultural studies. One long-lived obsession which has only recently come under the scrutiny of historians is kitsch: One generation's IKEA is the next's definition of bad taste, and therein lies a story.
The trajectory of Deborah Cohen's study is, as she puts it, "from evangelical selfrestraint to the reign of personality" (146). The author traces the clash between the design elite's vision for Britons and consumers' concern with sense of self through shaping the interiors of their homes during the century before 1940, but also addresses contemporary consumerism in an epilogue. The difficulty for consumers and those design reformers who sought to guard the home against its inhabitants was that many occupiers had no protection against their homes, for in almost the blink of an eye chic could become passé.
From the 1830s on, for two generations, morality was the metric for evaluating household possessions. For evangelicals, shopping was a test of their faith. Then incomes rose in mid-century, and as they did observers noticed that homes became stuffed with more objects, the new consumerism justified by a...