Town House: Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City, 1780-1830.

Town House: Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City, 1780-1830. By Bernard L. Herman. (Chapel Hill: Published by the University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, c. 2005. Pp. xx, 295. $45.00, ISBN 0-8078-2991-9.)

Bernard L. Herman begins Town House: Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City, 1780-1830 by introducing several abstract concepts to be employed throughout the book. While the impulse to establish terms and concepts at the outset is understandable, it is a bit difficult to sort out the particular meanings of "such terms as presence of place, situation, comportment, and circumstance" before we can connect them to specific places (p. 2). However, the book as a whole is a tour de force, a remarkably rich and textured examination not only of the built environment but also of the people who inhabited the ports in early America. Herman draws on research from many cities, including places in England and Germany. He deals with all levels of wealth and status and with many different occupations, creating houses and urban centers that are alive with people.

Filled with copious plans and illustrations, the book's chapters are organized around occupation and status beginning with the most elaborate material environment of the merchant's house, moving through the "Burgher's Dilemma," the servants' quarter, the widow's dower, the shipwright's lodgings, and concluding with the traveler's portable trappings of home. In each chapter the author examines the interplay between a shared North Atlantic culture and specific local inflections. Often it is on the exterior that local influences prevail. This is most obvious in the houses of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with their German influence or in the Charleston, South Carolina, single house and its accommodations for slave labor. Herman also traces a sculptural language of objects, forms, and styles common to homes in Atlantic ports for over one hundred years. Even in the most modest living quarters one finds expressions of a cosmopolitan culture. Again and again servants' lodgings, artisans' rooms, and travelers' portmanteaus held an object or two that connoted gentility such as a tea caddy or tea tray.

The most compelling section of the book is the chapter on the widow's dower. Here readers find bereaved women standing aside (or occasionally asserting themselves) as men from the community traipse through their house to determine which rooms they might purchase and occupy. Juggling the claims of domesticity, gentility, and business produced different combinations of spaces depending on wealth and status. Sometimes the best room or parlor with limited or no access to the kitchen was all that remained for the widow after sections of the house were sold. Other times what few genteel objects she possessed had to occupy an allotted corner of the kitchen. A few wealthy widows such as Margaret Manning of Portsmouth might have a whole house to themselves. Clearly women's material as well as emotional lives changed upon widowhood, not usually for the better.

Overall, Herman presents a story of crowded, cramped spaces except at the most elite levels. We picture a widow scuttling back and forth through other families' living quarters to reach her rooms or the privy. We imagine the narrow passageways between Charleston's single houses or the urban yards found in Philadelphia, Baltimore, or Norfolk crammed with wash houses, store houses, stables, coach houses, sculleries, and necessaries. Because the dramatically different spaces available to a wealthy merchant's family or to a common laborer's were usually within easy walking distance of each other, inequality of circumstances was glaringly evident and inescapable in the very moving, richly textured urban spaces that Herman bring forth. Scholars and students alike will be much the better for his gilts.

PHYLLIS WHITMAN HUNTER

University of North Carolina, Greensboro