This book review examines Alice Morse Earle's 1898 work Home Life in Colonial Days, an encyclopedic catalogue of domestic life during the early American colonial period. The review summarizes Earle's coverage of colonial shelter, food, clothing, trade, transportation, and religious practice, while critically assessing the book's strengths and limitations. It praises Earle's meticulous research and accessible writing style, but notes her omissions — particularly the absence of slavery and indentured servitude — and her incomplete engagement with either rigorous social commentary or pure anthropology. The review concludes that despite its quirks, the book remains a valuable and impressively thorough historical resource.
Reference: Earle, Alice M. (1898). Home Life in Colonial Days. New York: Macmillan. 475 pp.
Alice Morse Earle was a prolific writer who specialized in the exploration of Puritan history. Her primary focus was anthropological in nature, and her writing has been described as friendly in tone and very well researched. Home Life in Colonial Days was Earle's twelfth book — her career included eighteen published books and several articles — and was written when she was forty-five.
The book is an anthropological study of the facets of everyday life within the home during the early colonial period. In essence, it is a catalogue of sorts that lists, describes, and places in context the domestic devices, customs, and processes used in daily life. From cooking and cleaning to weaving, jack-knives, and taverns, Earle succeeds in producing a work of significant scope — nearly five hundred pages of text and illustrations — all of which demonstrate exceptionally thorough research. This is particularly impressive given the enormous number of items listed and described, and the realization that all of her research would necessarily have been done through direct observation and collection from hundreds of people's attics and storage boxes. Earle seeks out not only the objects themselves, but places them in their proper context. Rather than producing a romanticized story or a work based largely on conjecture, what Earle accomplished was a clear and encyclopedic study of the mechanics by which the colonists lived in the New World.
Beginning with a description of the colonial homes themselves, Earle establishes the clear struggles that lay ahead of colonists who stepped off the ship: unlimited wood but few saws and no sawmills; all the elements needed to make bricks but no mortar; massive outcroppings of granite and no way to cut them from the earth. Earle correctly describes the colonists as "homeless men…baffled by pioneer conditions" (p. 1). These conditions also included very limited collective experience with farming. The settlers were forced to hew caves out of hillsides and live in primitive shelters until enough lumber could be harvested to construct even the most meager formal dwellings. This life, clearly, was not easy.
While Earle spends time describing various architectural styles and construction methods, her characterization of living conditions as "comfortable" must be understood only within a framework of comparative analysis. The late nineteenth-century American would generally have had little firsthand knowledge of log cabins, and existence in the colonies could not have been considered easy or comfortable by any standard. Indeed, Earle observes that "English men and women…longed to have…English houses" (p. 7). Over time, however, additional building materials became available as the colonies grew and attracted larger numbers of specialists and craftsmen capable of creating sawmills, quarries, tanneries, and blacksmith shops.
Earle's work often paints a picture of homogeneity that is supported by other research and period art. Individualism on a noticeable scale was clearly discouraged — unity in thought, heart, and deed was the order of the day in nearly every colonial community.
In the chapter on the serving of meals, Earle describes the use and style of tables, table linens, forks, and salt wells, as well as the social customs of seating more important guests "above" the salt — which remained in the middle of the table — and less important guests "below" it. Food selection is described as significantly limited. Despite the broad range of farmed produce, grains, and fruit that Native Americans cultivated, New Englanders had difficulty assimilating to the cuisine their surroundings imposed upon them. Apples, parsnips, potatoes, and corn grew quickly and easily in the New England soil and thus became the staples of colonial cuisine until livestock herds could be built up.
"Textile production and early colonial trade networks"
"Travel methods, Puritan worship, and community social order"
"Strengths, omissions, and lasting value of the book"
You’re 41% through this paper. Sign up to read the remaining 3 sections.
Sign Up Now — Instant Access Already a member? Log inAlways verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.