Happiness in Things?

Pennell’s chapter engages with the idea that objects acquire individual and social meaning partly because of the emotions that subjects attach to them, in the context of the often fragile hold that the eighteenth-century poor had on their goods and chattels. The poor might routinely pawn possessions or surrender them to distraint for debt, or for release from the sponging house or debtors’ prison. Pennell focuses in particular on the commonplace drama of distraint, increasingly visible across the eighteenth century following the 1689 Sale of Goods Distrained for Rent Act. Accounts suggest that those who fell foul of warrants for distraint often experienced suffering more because their home was violated than because of the loss of specific goods within it. This suggests a pragmatic view of possessions in which goods were regarded as stores of value, more than as objects of emotional investment.