Noble Households
Noble Households jacket
Jacket showing "The General Front of Blenheim Castle", from John Woolfe and James Gandon, Vitruvius Britannicus, vol. v, 1771
AuthorTessa Murdoch, with inventories transcribed by Candace Briggs and Laurie Lindey
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
Release number
1st edition
SubjectSocial history, Material culture
PublishedCambridge
PublisherJohn Adamson
Publication date
21 November 2006
Media typePrint
Pages320
ISBN978-0-9524322-5-8
OCLC78044620
LC ClassNK928 .N53 2006
WebsiteBook on publisher's website

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".[1] 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".[2]

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

Part II: The Drayton Inventories

Part III: The Ditchley Inventories

Part IV: Norfolk Inventories

Part V: Inventories of the Marquess of Carmarthen

  • Kiveton and Thorp Salvin, Yorkshire, 1727[15]

Part VI: The Marlborough Inventories

The end matter comprises:

  • Glossary and concordance
  • Further reading (John Cornforth's writings which draw on the inventories in this book)
  • Credits (photographs and inventories)
  • Index

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".[17] 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."[18]

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";[19] whereas John Harris writing in the Art Newspaper 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'.[20]

Reviewing the book for Studies in the Decorative Arts, the Bard Graduate Center's journal,[21] 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."[22]

Notes

  1. ↑ See "John Cornforth and the Marc Fitch Fund" on the book's web page.
  2. ↑ In his extensive review of Noble Households in the Georgian (issue 2, 2007, pp. 26–31), James Ayres wrote (on p. 31): "[I]t is fair to assume that the success of this volume will be measured most of all in the trajectory that it will certainly trace through future publications". As things turned out, the book ostensibly led to the publication in 2022 of a companion book of eighteenth-century inventories from across all Ireland: Great Irish Households: Inventories from the Long Eighteenth Century, also under Tessa Murdoch's editorship.
  3. ↑ Drawn up for probate on the death of Ralph, 1st Duke of Montagu.
  4. ↑ Taken prior to the move of the 2nd Duke and Duchess of Montagu to Whitehall.
  5. ↑ Taken on the death of Ralph, 1st Duke of Montagu.
  6. ↑ Both inventories of goods belonging to the 2nd Duke of Montagu.
  7. ↑ The inventory records the contents of the house on the death of Ralph, 1st Duke of Montagu and also of the house of the steward Mark Anthony.
  8. ↑ Records the contents of the new house designed by Henry Flitcroft.
  9. ↑ Both inventories drawn up at the request of Lady Elizabeth (Betty) Germaine.
  10. ↑ Inventory taken at the time of the death of George Henry Lee, 2nd Earl of Lichfield.
  11. ↑ Inventory taken at the time of the death of George Henry Lee II, 3rd Earl of Lichfield.
  12. ↑ Inventory drawn up in the year Sir Robert Walpole died.
  13. ↑ Inventory of the goods and chattels belonging to the late 3rd Earl of Orford.
  14. ↑ Both inventories drawn up on the death of Thomas Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester.
  15. ↑ Both inventories drawn up for Peregrine Osborne, 2nd Duke of Leeds.
  16. ↑ Both inventories were drawn up for Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough.
  17. ↑ Apollo, June 2007, p. 113.
  18. ↑ Times Literary Supplement, no. 5427, 6 April 2007, p. 19.
  19. ↑ Burlington Magazine, vol. CXLIX, no. 1251, June 2007, p. 418.
  20. ↑ Art Newspaper, no. 178, March 2007, p. 47.
  21. ↑ Now called West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture.
  22. ↑ Studies in the Decorative Arts, vol. XVI, no. 2, Spring/Summer 2009, pp. 167–9. See JSTOR (accessed 28 October 2022).
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