Reviewed by Jane Kamensky | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.3

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Reviewed by Jane Kamensky | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Jane Kamensky, Brandeis University

Town House: Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City, 1780–1830. By Bernard L. Herman. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. 320 pages. $45.00 (cloth).
In his wide-ranging, clearly written, and enormously creative study of domestic architecture and objects in early American cities, Bernard L. Herman makes buildings and objects explain rather than merely illustrate. Omnivorous if not promiscuous in his appetite for diverse sources and methods, Herman also reveals something of the different ways historians, art historians, literary scholars, and folklorists approach the past. Entwining the histories of dwelling places with those of the humans who dreamed, built, lived, and worked in them, the book offers a fresh perspective on the past lives of port towns stretching from Charleston, South Carolina, to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with detours to Bristol, Bath, and Baden along the way. Beautifully produced and lavishly illustrated, Herman's study is often captivating and sometimes transporting. At its best Town House conveys an almost palpable sense of the architectural hurly-burly that marked the "bustling, grimy, worldly" (39) cityscapes of early national America.	1
Town House unfolds in thematic chapters bracketed by a methodological introduction and a brief coda extolling the "ambiguity and lyricism" (262) of urban poetics. Herman organizes the half-dozen essays that form the book's core around particular modes of city living, from the mansions that embodied the transatlantic aspirations of merchants to the garrets, cellars, and work yards where servants and the enslaved lived and labored. These modes of living span the gamut of wealth and poverty, elegance and meanness. But Herman does not oppose high style and vernacular dwellings, nor do his chapters center, precisely, on building types. He demonstrates vast knowledge of the grammar of architecture across space and time and an enviable talent for teasing out the visual dialogue between, for example, middling homes in nineteenth-century Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and their equivalents in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German cities. Yet he resists the typological approach that marks traditional histories of architecture. In place of the false orderliness of formal taxonomy, Herman chases semiotic connections and exposes the startling "visual juxtapositions" (20) that marked early cities: places where rich and poor, men and women, whites and blacks, and work and home combined, however unequally and uneasily, within any given block, beneath any single roof. Throughout the study houses and people define one another in dynamic interaction. Dwellings, as stages for "the theater of the everyday" (35), fashioned their inhabitants; dwellers, as they "negotiated their architectural identities" (95), fashioned their homes.	2
Each chapter of Town House opens and closes with a vignette that draws out a particular thread of this densely woven tapestry of people and buildings. Mining sources including tax records, engravings, novels, and personal documents as well as site visits to scores of standing structures, Herman chooses these moments well, making them as memorable as they are emblematic. Readers enter the merchant family's cosmopolitan manse, for example, by imagining Mrs. Elizabeth Myers in her Norfolk, Virginia, parlor, planning the dessert she will serve her guests that night: spheres of spun sugar encasing posies or sprigs of myrtle. In those delicate sugar globes, Herman discovers "social and cultural maps" (36) that chart the family's desires: metropolitan longings echoed in everything from their gable-fronted home's restrained, symmetrical facade, to the composition ornaments that grace the Myerses' fireplaces, to the elegant chairs around their dining table. Yet the sugar globes also disclose the stickier wickets of mercantile aspiration: the labor of slaves, from the sugar gangs of the West Indies to the kitchen workers "who knelt, crouched, and stooped before the fire" (35) below stairs to create the edible baubles of Britain the diners would devour in a thrice.	. . .

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