Our own snug fireside

Jane C. Nylander

In this portrayal of home life in New England from the years preceding the American Revolution to the eve of the Civil War, Jane Nylander explores both everyday realities and the myths that have obscured them. She shows how, thanks to the nineteenth century's literary, historical, antiquarian, and art movements - from the romantic visions of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Harriet Beecher Stowe through the paintings of Frank Henry Shapleigh and the carefully staged photographs of Wallace Nutting - the New England family home was idealized as warm, welcoming, comfortable, unchanging, and self-sufficient, and became representative, around the world, of the American domestic scene. The thump of the churn and the whir of the spinning wheel were seen as the heartbeats of a daily life that was perpetually "colonial" and "rural." For the most part, the growing reality of mill towns and...

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