Temples of Luxury

This two volume collection of British primary sources examines luxury institutions such as hotels, department stores, shopping arcades, libraries, museums, and performance spaces in the long nineteenth century. This period was marked not only by an increase of individual consumerism but also by the institutionalisation of opulent, often purpose-built spaces of consumption such as the much-admired new grand hotels, supposedly an American invention, and department stores, modelled on the French grands magasins, which, through their architecture and interior decoration alone, were veritable temples of luxury. At the same time, museums and big libraries advanced to becoming secular spaces in which cultural meaning was negotiated. Newly-built performance spaces, pleasure palaces, were important venues for enjoying one's spare time. These spaces were tied to the experience of leisure (no longer a prerogative of the upper classes) and thus to modernity. This two volume edition seeks to explore a fascinating but hitherto often neglected side of the British nineteenth century by bringing together a collection of annotated primary texts and visual material documenting these "temples of luxury" as they were seen by their contemporaries.