Abstract
In the summer of 1754, Samuel Richardson and his family moved to a suburban villa in Parsons Green; a small village on the King’s Road between Fulham and Chelsea. As with his first villa in North End, also in Fulham, the one in Parsons Green was an agreeable site of sociability where Richardson would act as generous host to his ever-growing coterie. One of this circle included Miss Catherine Talbot, who, in a letter to Mrs Berkeley, described her summer visit to the villa in 1756. As she writes,
I wish you there, because those who only know Mr Richardson as an Author do not know the most amiable part of his Character. His Villa is fitted up in the same Style his Books are writ. Every Minute detail attended to, yet every one with a view to its being useful or pleasing. Not an inch in his Garden unimproved or unadorned, his very Poultry made happy by fifty neat Contrivances, his House prepared not for his family only but for every friend high or low to whom Air & Recess may be of Benefit.2
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Notes
Catherine Talbot to Mrs George Berkeley, 9 Aug. [1756], B.M.Add.MS. 39, 311, fos. 83–85 in T.C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, (1971) Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp.496–497.
I. Ware, (1756) A complete Body of architecture adorned with plans and elevations from original designs. In which are interspersed some designs of Inigo Jones, never before published (London: T. Osborne and J. Shipton), p.325.
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A. Vickery, (1998) The Gentleman’s Daughter, p.206. For more on the function of the dining room in the second half of the century see S. Parissien, (1992) Adam Style (London: Phaidon), pp.142–144.
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Elizabeth White (compiler) (1990) Pictorial Dictionary of British Eighteenth-Century Furniture Design: The Printed Sources (Suffolk: Antique Collector’s Club), pp.124
G. Beard and C. Gilbert, (1986) (eds.) Dictionary of English Furniture Makers, 1660–1840 (London: Furniture History Society), p.205.
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© 2012 Karen Lipsedge
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Lipsedge, K. (2012). ‘At Home’. In: Domestic Space in Eighteenth-Century British Novels. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137283504_2
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