Social Rooms

Abstract

In his Life in the English Country House, Girouard uses the term’ social house’ to refer to the English country house from 1720–1770.¹ His apt term signals the increased sociability of the polite elite. It also indicates the direct impact this social mingling had on the way in which the polite elite designed and used their houses, not only in the country but also in the fashionable urban centres of London, Bath and Bristol. During this period, families may ‘have begun to value their privacy’ but, as Girouard explains, the contemporary desire for increased privacy ‘had to be reconciled with growing sociability’.² But which rooms were employed as sites of sociability in the domestic interiors of the polite elite? What was their social significance and decorative style, and how are social rooms represented in the imagined worlds of Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa; Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph and Burney’s Evelina? These are just some of the questions that this chapter seeks to answer.