Abstract
During the nineteenth century, a prevalent debate surrounding the country cottage emerged in
art, poetry, prose fiction, social commentaries and reports. The cottage was envisioned as an
idyllic space of old rural traditions, vernacular architecture, and social order, yet increasingly
threatened by modernity. Beneath this image, social theorists and authors identified a reality of
poverty and hardship among labouring cottagers. Literary cottage portrayals have received
limited attention in current cottage scholarship; however, this thesis demonstrates that
nineteenth-century fiction offers a valuable resource to explore the development of the cottage
debate throughout the century.
My first two chapters demonstrate how cottage ideology permeated literature, while my
last two chapters turn to the life of the working-class cottager. In Chapter One, I identify how
the foundational qualities of the cottage image are established in the medieval settings of
children’s fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm and George MacDonald, as a pre-industrial rural
retreat and a feminised domestic space. Chapter Two examines how these qualities are
embedded in nineteenth-century society through Charles Dickens’s use of various cottage
settings and qualities in David Copperfield and Bleak House to construct the ideal domestic
home. In Chapter Three, I explore George Eliot’s portrayal of the nuanced social dynamics
among nineteenth-century isolated cottage communities in Adam Bede and Silas Marner.
Finally, in Chapter Four, I consider how Thomas Hardy addresses the impacts of modernisation
on these traditional, yet outdated, communities in The Return of the Native and The Mayor of
Casterbridge.
From my readings, the cottage emerges as a symbol for numerous ideals, discourses and
concerns, positing the cottage as a crucial window into wider cultural and social history. As
idyllic perceptions of the cottage prevail today, my thesis provides a pertinent study into the
complex and conflicted backstory of this seemingly simple building.