Customer Reviews

At Home: The American Family 1750-1870

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At Home gives detailed descriptions of the daily routine "behind the scenes" for families and houses from 1750-1870. This book provides valuable background for understanding the lives of people who inhabited the historic homes that I take my interior design students to visit. We can appreciate the objects, furniture, and furnishings much more when we realize how they were used and how much work it took to maintain them!

In this book, all the really interesting bits that in other books are smushed into one chapter, are given their rightful place. Using many quotations, mostly from women, Garrett brings us into earlier American domestic life.

Why did 18th Century people keep the furniture around the walls of the rooms? Aesthetics, or, as Garrett suggests, to avoid falling over a stool as you make your way around in the dark, with only a candle? And how did they anything done with a lively toddler running around, when it is "too cold to tye her into a chair"?

Possibly my favorite word picture in the book is "Benjamin Franklin Perry, visiting in Columbia, South Carolina, reached out automatically in his sleep to make sure his son's crib covers were up, awakening to find that he wasn't at home after all."

It's a lovely book--large, glossy, with a bibliography and index, with notes at the end where they are out of the way yet findable, and illustrated thoroughly.

As a reenactor/interpreter of life in America in the late 18th/early 19th Century, my primary interest is in the day to day life of common people during those times. This book provided an in depth, well organized, and "digestable" look at that topic.