Wedding Present

Louise Purbrick is a Senior Lecturer in the History of Art and Design, in the School of Historical and Critical Studies at the University of Brighton, UK. She works on material and visual culture from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century.

'By deftly weaving together anthropological, historical and materialist perspectives, The Wedding Present is itself a gift to a new interdisciplinary marriage. It is beautifully written, sympathetic, and critically astute. Louise Purbrick has given us a wonderful, moving and important book.' Ben Highmore, University of the West of England, UK 'Meticulously researched and richly detailed, this book offers unique and original insight into the consumption of everyday objects and designs in the British home. Incorporating especially commissioned primary research from the Mass Observation Archive regarding the gifting practices around marriage, The Wedding Present makes a key multi-disciplinary contribution to the history and anthropology of material culture.' Alison Clarke, University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria 'I warmly recommend this book to anthropologists interested in contemporary material culture, for its novel materials collected in a systematic way and especially for its diachronic dimension.' The Australian Journal of Anthropology '...The Wedding Present interrupts, pleasantly and substantively, our thinking about consumption and asks that we consider anew our assumptions of consumers and things.' Journal of Design History 'Louise Purbrick has undertaken an informative study in material culture of wedding gift giving and receiving among Britons from 1945-2003... Purbrick does a fine job of mining written responses to assess self-described "ordinary people's" (14) experiences and interpretations of marital gifts and gift exchanges. Purbrick's extensive use if respondents first-person voices lends authenticity to her account of the wedding gift exchange as a complex social, contextual, and personal reality.' INTAMS

• Contents: Introduction making homes and worlds: marriage and consumption from 1945 to today; Objects of approval; China and Pyrex: the practices of preservation; Accounting for change: forgotten, neglected and altered objects; The list: domesticity, conformity and class; Methods: mass-observation; Afterword: unmarried households; Bibliography; Appendices; Index.