Trans-Local Stories of Lighting Innovations in the c19th English Country House

• In Event: Lighting Across the British Empire: The Lighting Revolution in England, Canada and India

Abstract

England has been recognized as a hub of development for new lighting technologies in the nineteenth century. Given its central point in the histories of the Empire and the Commonwealth, it is important to consider its role in disseminating invention out via its spokes across the globe. However, instead of looking for grand transnational links, this paper increases the scale of observation to focus on the local stories at work in the adoption of new forms of lighting. Close examination of this English energy transition reveals that change was no simple, teleological march to progress. Instead it was comprised of individual economic, social, cultural and often deeply gendered responses to the availability and the promise of new technologies, as well as the possibilities afforded by the environmental siting of individual homes. Before the countrywide call to embrace the national grid as a matter of patriotism after the first world war, the majority of homes in rural England had to be largely self sufficient in terms of energy. This included the great country houses of both the aristocracy and the newly-minted industrial elite, such as Cragside, Chatsworth, Hatfield and Standen, all sites of significant lighting innovation. This paper provides case studies from these country houses to reveal the innovative practices in lighting that their owners and designers implemented as individualized responses to the technologies and the local environments involved. This paper concludes by investigating how such localised experiences and solutions were disseminated across social, cultural and political networks of the Empire, and through the popular press and journals.

Author

• Abigail Harrison Moore, University of Leeds, UK