Building, furnishings and social change in early Victorian Grahamstown

Abstract

Research in North America has plotted distinctive changes in house form and other aspects of material culture which, together, show how the world came to be viewed differently over time. A further study has shown how similar transformations took place in the rural areas of the eastern Cape Province after its settlement by English immigrants early in the nineteenth century. In this paper, the evidence for changes in the structural use of material culture in urban Grahamstown is examined. It is shown how house form and furnishings were an expression of social class, and how an urban eastern Cape form emerged in response to specific social and economic conditions.