Stately Homes of England
The term "stately home" is subject to debate and indifferent use, and avoided by historians and other academics. As a description of a country house, the term was first used in a poem by Felicia Hemans, The Homes of England, originally published in Blackwood's Magazine in 1827. In the 20th century, the term was later popularised in a song by Noël Coward, and in modern usage it often implies a country house that is open to visitors at least some of the time.
In England, the terms "country house" and "stately home" are sometimes used vaguely and interchangeably, however, many country houses such as Ascott in Buckinghamshire were deliberately designed not to be stately, and to harmonise with the landscape, while some of the great houses such as Kedleston Hall and Holkham Hall were built as "power houses" to impress and dominate the landscape, and were most certainly intended to be "stately" and impressive. In his book Historic Houses: Conversations in Stately Homes, the author and journalist Robert Harling documents nineteen "stately homes"; these range in size from the vast Blenheim palace to the minuscule Ebberston Hall and in architecture from the Jacobean Renaissance of Hatfield House to the eccentricities of Sezincote. The book's collection of stately homes also includes George IV's Brighton town palace, the Royal Pavilion.
Read more about this topic: English Country House
Famous quotes containing the words homes of england, stately homes of, stately, homes and/or england:
“Those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“The stately Homes of England,
How beautiful they stand,
To prove the upper classes
Have still the upper hand.”
—Noël Coward (1899–1973)
“Writing a book I have found to be like building a house. A man forms a plan, and collects materials. He thinks he has enough to raise a large and stately edifice; but after he has arranged, compacted and polished, his work turns out to be a very small performance. The authour however like the builder, knows how much labour his work has cost him; and therefore estimates it at a higher rate than other people think it deserves,”
—James Boswell (1740–1795)
“As fathers, men often feel either like guests in their own homes or clumsy bulls in china shops, deferring to their wives as the “emotional experts” and squelching their own wish to be fully involved.”
—Ron Taffel (20th century)
“The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)