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The Invention of Comfort, by John Crowley, Johns Hopkins University Press,
£32.50, ISBN 0801864372

A RECENT joke has the victim of an accident, lying on a stretcher, being
asked if he is comfortable. He replies, “Well, I’ve got £50,000 in a
savings account.”

“Comfort” is still acquiring new meanings. Once it meant consolation and no
more. Over the centuries it has evolved to mean warmth, light, easy chairs and
remote controls for the telly. It’s an intriguing progression and it brings in a
host of factors, starting with architecture, warmth and lighting and expanding
into social standards, technology and what John Crowley calls belief systems.
Religion was keen to distinguish comfort or convenience from sinful luxury and
even now there is a pejorative hint in newspaper mentions of a “luxury” home and
such clichés as “speaking from his £400,000 house…”

All this makes for a wide field but Crowley limits himself to the achievement
of comfort in early modern England and early America. Most pressure for
improvement came from the clergy, divorced from ordinary daily life and more
critical and innovative as a consequence. Another force was the wish to make
separate spaces for women’s protection and for their traditional tasks.
Illustrations and quotations from documents and diaries make The Invention
of Comfort very entertaining. Readers will be surprised to find that
landscape design was considered an important part of comfort.