Objects play a paramount role throughout Ford Madox Ford’s tetralogy, Parade’s End. From the ‘gleaming chandeliers’ that act as chorus to the action in the grandiose Edwardian homes predating the First World War to the bareness of Tietjens’s interior on Armistice Day, it may be argued that the evolution of the characters’ psyche, as that of society as a whole in the second decade of the twentieth century, can be delineated through their relationship to things. Objects act as metonyms for their users: Sylvia, embracing electricity and mass-circulation press, appears to a large extent as the embodiment of the New Woman; conversely, Tietjens, who evinces an unrivalled knowledge of eighteenth-century furniture, is consistently described as a character who does not belong in the twentieth century. Such easy correspondences between objects and subjects, however, is soon questioned by the deliberate use of furniture and décor as a means for the Duchemin and Macmaster clique to construct and display their social identity. In a manner that brings to mind the figure of the book collector in Benjamin’s essay ‘Unpacking my Library’, the Duchemins’ and the Macmasters’ relationship to objects ‘does not emphasize their functional, utilitarian value […] but studies and loves them as the scene, the stage, of their fate’. This endeavour to erase the utilitarian value of the object can be related to the modernist anxiety pertaining to mass production and consumption, and to the modernist critique of capitalism. However, in a way that is typical of Fordian ambivalence, this specific relationship to the object is simultaneously celebrated and derided in Parade’s End. Through the constant attention to things, through the ‘marketing of personality’ – a termed coined by Douglas Mao in Solid Objects – via artefacts, the barrier between human and nonhuman erodes in a manner that can alternately appear as disquieting and as bringing to light a novel form of relationship between human and nonhuman that I wish to explore in the light of Jane Bennett’s concept of ‘vital materiality’. Ford’s narrative never concludes on this ever-evolving relationship, but rather highlights the way in which the shifting relationship to the object exposes the metamorphic quality of the subject.