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The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America (review)

Cultural historians of technology welcome studies that place technological development at the center of interesting cultural processes. In The Invention of Comfort, John Crowley questions the assumption that the desire for comfort is a natural state of being—that, given their druthers, people would naturally want to be warm, dry, and bathed in light, as opposed to cold, damp, and in the dark. Rather, Crowley argues that comfort was a value that developed as a crucial component of eighteenth-century material culture. Crowley sees this development as part of an intellectual effort to legitimize popular consumption as the Anglo world’s political economy entered into and solidified the underlying economic system of the consumer revolution. It would be impossible to tell this story without paying attention to the usual technological suspects that supported this revolution in material comfort, technologies of heat, light, and architectural design. This book is based largely on published sources, and constitutes a reinterpretation of existing work in material culture. But Crowley adds to this body of knowledge with primary evidence from literature, images, and manuscript collections. The book is both exhaustive and exhausting. Crowley’s argument is innovative and important, yet the voluminous evidence and Crowley’s tendentious prose will prove daunting for even the most interested reader. The Invention of Comfort is divided into three parts. The first, “Traditional Architectural Amenity,” describes and interprets the evolution of domestic architecture from designs based on the central open hearth typical of the late medieval period to early-nineteenth-century American slave quarters. What holds this surprising trajectory in place are developing ideas about comfort and their dissemination among the varied cultures of the Atlantic world. Crowley asserts that in the early period no word existed to describe physical comfort, yet, by the nineteenth century, adherence to minimum standards for physical comfort served to support apologies for slavery. In between these chronological and geographic poles, Crowley charts the shift from houses designed around an open hearth to those with specialized multistoried spaces dependent on chimneys and glazed windows. He argues that military, monastic, and domestic needs determined the adoption of chimneys, not the assumed superiority of comfort that chimneys implied. Subsequently, as courtly styles of manners and entertainment prevailed, chimneys and the specialization of space that they represented came to indicate status and wealth. By the seventeenth century, the hearth tax replaced the poll tax. B O O K R E V I E W S