Professor Jon Stobart

My work on Consumption and the Country House has involved collaborative initiatives with a number of heritage organisations representing country houses in the Midlands. My aim here is to facilitate different ways of interpreting and presenting the history of these houses, focused on the owners’ consumption practices.

I have worked with the National Trust at Canons Ashby, Northamptonshire. One aspect of this was facilitating story-telling centred on the lives of Sir John Turner Dryden and his wife Elizabeth Dryden, the story culminating with the chance to see his dress suit, held at the house but rarely on publlic display. Another was producing interpretative materials for the house, including a smart phone app which provided an alternative mechanism for navigating the house. This proved especially popular with younger visitors, one of whom reported that it was ‘better than talking to old people’!

I have also collaborated with Stoneleigh Abbey Trust, again producing a range of interpretive materials and a small exhibition which told the story of the Honourable Mary Leigh who had a life interest in the house in the late eighteenth century. The purpose here was to throw light on one of the neglected episodes in the history of the property and challenge visitors to think about the impact of apparently minor characters in shaping the house as it is seen today.

A key focus of my research in recent years has been the English country house - viewed as a site and nexus of consumption and a material manifestation of the habitus of the landowning classes. This has produced a large number of publications, most notably Consumption and the Country House (OUP, 2016) - the key output of an AHRC-funded project. 

Building on this, I have developed four related areas of activity.

The first is to explore the country house as a place of comfort. This is most evident in a material sense, with different forms of furniture, improved heating and lighting, and new ways of organising rooms helping to create a domestic environment that was more convenient and physically comfortable. Comforts were also social and emotional: it was important to people that they should feel comfortable by conforming to social norms and through their relationships with family and friends. This work has recently been published as Comfort in the Eighteenth-Century Country House (Routledge, 2022).

Second, and linked to the idea of comfort, is to open up our understanding of the lives and material worlds of country house servants across eighteenth-century Europe. To do this, I am co-ordinating an AHRC-funded research network which brings together academics and heritage professionals from across Europe in a series of workshops examining servants’ material culture; their social and familial networks; their representation in literary and visual sources, and their inclusion in the presentation of country houses to the public. We will shortly have a website for the project, but please contact me directly.

The third is to widen the geographical scope of this work by focusing specifically on the place of global goods within the country house, and to do this for houses throughout Europe and across the world. Bringing together scholars from Europe, North America, the Caribbean and India, I have curated a book project that explores the supply, meaning and impact of global goods in the houses of the elite, and the ways in which local contexts (from west Africa to Wallachia, and from Japan to Jamaica) impacted on the character and meaning of global goods. This will shortly be published by UCL Press as an open access book: Global Goods in the Country House. Linked to this, I am starting to explore the domestic goods owned by merchants, plantation owners and others in the British Caribbean. More specifically, I am interested in the role of auctions as a means for acquiring and dispersing household goods; work that is funded by a British Academy Small Grant.

Fourth and finally, I am seeking to deepen our understanding of how questions of how morality shaped consumption and lifestyle. To do this, I am focusing on the Church of England clergy through the long eighteenth century, exploring how their lifestyle, consumption practices and houses were shaped by: societal attitudes to the clergy; their own collective and normative self-image, and their individual attitudes to questions of worldliness, hospitality and charity. This research was funded by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung and is being published as Life in the Georgian Parsonage (Bloomsbury, forthcoming, 2024).

Alongside this, I am continuing my research on retailing. In addition to co-writing a major study of the second-hand trade, specifically the nature and role of household auctions in recirculating goods, I am commencing an international comparative study of rural retailing in Germany and England during the long eighteenth century. Funded by the DFG, this seeks to fill a lacuna in the historiography of retailing and challenge misconceptions about the absence of shops in German villages and the “primitive” nature of English village shops (see https://uni-tuebingen.de/en/faculties/faculty-of-humanities/departments…) . 

Why do I teach?

I enjoy sharing my love of history and of the eighteenth century with others, whether undergraduates, PhD students or the wider public.

How I’ll teach you

I like to put historical sources at the heart of my teaching, encouraging you to discover your own insights into the lives, experiences and emotions of people in the past, and to think about how these might challenge our established views of past societies.

Why study…

Histories of retailing and consumption offer important insights into the lives of individuals, the nature and development of settlements, the social and economic networks that bound together societies and economies, and a wide range of global interactions.

For example, an eighteenth-century tea-table might take us to the Caribbean and supplies of sugar; to China to understand the complexities of the tea-trade; to Central America and the source of mahogany for the table itself. We might want to consider the skills of craftspeople who made the table, the porcelain and the silverware on display, or the retail networks that brought them into the home. It might also lead to to think about gender relations and cultures of polite sociability; of the emotions of those seated at the table, and the nature of the gossip they exchanged.

Subject areas

Histories of retailing and consumption, material culture and leisure. 

I welcome enquiries about PhD projects on social and cultural histories of eighteenth-century Britain and Europe, especially those that explore material culture, consumption and leisure, the country house and global goods

I have supervised to completion a range of PhD projects, including:

Vicky Morgan (2003), Producing consumer space in 18th-century England: shops and shopping.

Rosie MacArthur (2010), Material culture and consumption on an English estate: Kelmarsh Hall, c.1687-1845 (AHRC Collaborative Award)

Amy Barnett (2010), Taste and Material Culture in Provincial England: The role of the Shopkeeper 1660-1800.

George Watley (2012), The consumer behaviour of Caribbean settlers in Northamptonshire, c.1955-1975 (AHRC Collaborative Award)

Fiona Cosson (2013), Community cohesion and identity: a lifecourse approach

Barbara Russell (2014), Social capital, community and business integration: taking the long view

Hannah Waugh (2014), Consumption, material culture and the country house – case study of Audley End (AHRC Collaborative Award)

PhD Lucy Bailey (2015), The village shop in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: image and reality

Tom McGrath (2022), ‘Northern Powerhouses: The Homes of the Industrial Elite c.1750-1900’

Helen Brown (2023), Rethinking the English Country House Garden: Creation and Consumption, 1750-1850 (a CDA with English Heritage)

I am currently director of studies for:

Paula Martin, Global connections and local contexts: the material culture of Saltram, c. 1725-1840 (an AHRC CDA, working with the National Trust)

Alyssa Myers, Suburban villas in eighteenth-century London: forms, functions and networks (an AHRC CDA, working with English Heritage)

My research ranges across the economic, social and cultural history of England in the long eighteenth century.

A long while ago now, I worked on industrial, urban and regional development in the Midlands and north-west England, published as The First Industrial Region (MUP, 2004) and Towns, Regions and Industries (MUP, 2005), and on the construction and articulation of social and business networks.

Subsequently, I switched to focus more on the geographies and practices of leisure, consumption and retailing. The last of these involved research, funded by The Leverhulme Trust, on the inter-relationship between the spaces and social practices of polite leisure and shopping in provincial towns which was published as Spaces of Consumption (Routledge, 2007). Following on from this, my book Sugar and Spice (OUP, 2013) comprises a major study of the changing world of the grocery trade in the period 1650-1850 – a time during which both retailers and consumers transformed their behaviour and attitudes in the face of a range of new exotic imports.

I have also co-edited several collections of essays that explore retailing, consumption and daily life in a comparative European context, including Modernity and the Second-Hand Trade (Palgrave, 2010), Selling Textiles in the Long Eighteenth Century (Palgrave, 2014), the Routledge Companion to the History of Retailing (Routledge, 2019) and Daily Lives and Daily Routines in the Long Eighteenth Century (Routledge, 2021).

In recent years, I have mostly focused my research on the spatiality and practice of consumption in the English country house - research funded by the AHRC. Through detailed case studies of Warwickshire and Northamptonshire country houses, this project links the identity, supply networks and consumption practices of the gentry. It has led a number of journal articles and book chapters, and a monograph, Consumption and the Country House, published by OUP.

Building on this, I developed a joint project with Marie-Curie Fellow, Dr Cristina Prytz (Uppsala University), which explored physical and emotional comfort in the English and Swedish country house during the long eighteenth century. We co-curated exhibitions at a number of Swedish houses and published some of our findings in a range of articles and books chapters. I have recently published collection of essays on the topic, Comforts of Home in Western Europe, 1700-1900 (Bloomsbury, 2020) and a monograph, Comfort and the Eighteenth-Century Country House (Routledge, 2022) .

Based on collaborative work with colleagues from Europe, North America, India and the Caribbean, I have recently published an open access edited collection which explores the presence, meaning and impact of global goods in country houses across the globe: Global Goods in the Country House.

I have just completed a project on the consumption and lifestyle of Church of England clergy and their families in the long eighteenth century, funded by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung. it will be published as Life in the Georgian Parsonage (Bloomsbury, forthcoming, 2024) .