About

During the nineteenth century, the English country cottage was envisioned by the middle and upper classes as an idyllic retreat from the bustling industrial towns and cities. Cottage architecture and rural traditions were celebrated as modern industry and urban expansion threatened their survival. Artists sought to capture a charming image of the old cottage, with rustic cottagers seemingly living in the heart of rural bliss. Historical and cultural studies of the cottage, however, have identified a clear debate between this idyllic perception and a grimmer reality of the hardships of nineteenth-century cottage life. Most cottages during this period were cramped, dilapidated buildings and were the homes of working-class labourers and the poor. Although cottages make a frequent appearance in nineteenth-century fiction, academic study has tended to focus on cottage art and architecture rather than this literary form of cottage representation. My research assesses how nineteenth-century authors responded to the cottage debate, whether they too sought to romanticise the cottage or expose its reality, and how this influenced their narratives. I conduct close readings of cottage settings in a range of fiction for children and adults published throughout the century, from the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and George MacDonald to the novels of Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. Through their writing, the cottage emerges as a complex symbol for various social and cultural discourses. Drawing upon contexts of class and gender, and temporal and spatial theories, my research establishes a literary discourse of the cottage space and posits the cottage as a site for rich interdisciplinary discussion.