"A small house in the country": Cottage dreams and desires in the eighteenth-century english imagination

This chapter examines the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century transformation of the cottage from a type of domestic dwelling once associated with the poor into a fashionable architectural medium for projecting interiority and the affective and physical state of being known as comfort. How did the cottage transform from a "mean habitation" (Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language, 1755) to a place of abundant "comfort" and "smiles" (James Malton, An Essay on British Architecture, 1798) by the end of the eighteenth century? How did this particular domestic site function as a socially inflected medium for the imagination itself? By considering socioeconomic conditions, cottage designs in pattern books, and new cultural standards of comfort, this essay will shed light on the persistence of the imagination as a historical shaping agent in late eighteenth-century conceptions and designs of the cottage. Ultimately it argues that the cottage is an architectural artifact that reveals the critical roles of interiority and the imagination in late eighteenth-century England's conceptions of home.