Jane Hamlett
Biographic Data
| ID | 1189909 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jane Hamlett |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jane |
| FAMILY NAME | Hamlett |
| SIGNATURE | HAMLETT J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Royal Holloway University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6450-5345 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 32 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 24 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
‘Every Description of Domestic Pets Will Here Be Found’
By the mid-twentieth century, the pet shop was an established feature of London’s retail landscape. Pet shops presented themselves as modern, hygienic, and compassionate spaces that used the kerb appeal of furry animals to lure consumers onto their premises. This article tracks the boom in pet sales across the capital from the early nineteenth century, through street trade, markets and, increasingly, shops. Animals figured as part of the consumer…
Inheriting the Family
Noisy, Despotic, Fascinating’
Siamese cats were introduced in Britain in the late nineteenth century and by the 1950s were one of the most popular pedigree cats. Their role in modern domestic life was increasingly celebrated in pet-themed memoirs and broadcasts. This article explores the social and emotional dimension of their rise – arguing that Siamese were particularly feted for their communicative capacities as well as their powerful albeit disruptive role in domestic lif…
Animals and Home
An overview of the essays included in the Special Issue highlighting the contribution the issue makes to scholarship
Pets and family relationships in twentieth-century British diaries
During the twentieth-century British family life was transformed through changes in family size, relationships and the development of new expectations about emotions and behaviour. But in this important social transformation one factor has gone almost entirely unremarked by family historians – the role of animals in family life. Sociologists and psychologists have demonstrated that pets played an important and complex role in British family life …
Animals in the family mini-special issue introduction and historiographical review
In Britain today, pets are often at the heart of family life, but we know relatively little about the roles they played in families in the past. From the early nineteenth century, pets were a central focus of middle- and working-class homes in Britain but are almost completely unremarked in historical studies of the home and family. In this mini-special issue we present four new essays, developed from papers given at the panel, exploring the evol…
A Cultural History of the Home in Antiquity
‘Home’ is a powerful idea throughout antiquity, from Odysseus’ epic journey to recover his own home, nostalgically longed-for through his long absence, to the implanting of Christianity in the domestic sphere in late antiquity. We can recognise the idea even if there is no word for it that quite corresponds to our own: the Greek oikos and the Latin domus mean both house and family, the essential components of home. To attempt a history of ‘the ho…
Mothering in the Archives
During the 1910s, Edith Vidler, the wife of a shipping merchant based in Rye, began work on a scrapbook devoted to the life of her daughter Barbara, born in 1902 (see Plate 1). The opening pages were inscribed ‘Barbara Elneth Cressy Vidler — Her Book’ and ‘For mother to keep a record of my years’. Beginning with Barbara’s birth and birthplace, Edith created a visual and material record of Barbara’s life as a child and her family history. A series…
Rotten Effeminate Stuff”
During the nineteenth century, British public schools became increasingly important, turning out thousands of elite young men. Historians have long recognized the centrality of these institutions to modern British history and to understandings of masculinity in this era. While studies of universities and clubs have revealed how fundamental the rituals and everyday life of institutions were to the creation of masculinity, public schools have not b…
Curating ‘Homes of the Homeless’
Curating the Victorians
Home, Business, and Household
This chapter examines the buildings occupied by trading households, where the commercial and the domestic continued to coexist under the same roof throughout the period of the Industrial Revolution. It explores the numbers of individuals who lived and worked together in these households, the structures and internal layouts of the houses that they occupied, and the possible uses of the different rooms within them, as suggested by practices of room…
Wanting and Having
Peter Gurney's excellent new book analyzes how nineteenth-century political movements mobilized the image of the poor as consumers. While the figure of the consumer has been central to discussions of citizenship in later periods, Gurney's work is the first to demonstrate that the construction of the consumer was also an important political device from the early nineteenth century. The book focuses on how ideas of the poor consumer were used by th…
Introduction
Introduction to the journal's special issue, 'Women as Wives and Workers: Marking Fifty Years of The Feminine Mystique
White-Painted Fortresses”
In Victorian and Edwardian upper- and middle-class homes in England, children were often segregated in a nursery at the top of the house under the direct care of a nanny or nursemaid. This article explores the material culture of the nursery and the way it functioned as a space within the wider home. It demonstrates the impact of this on relationships between parents, children, and servants as well as the formation of early ideas of gender. While…
Comfort in Small Things? Clothing, Control and Agency in County Lunatic Asylums in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century England
This article examines clothing in public lunatic asylums in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England. It considers the intentions of the authorities but also explores patient experience and agency, which have been notoriously difficult to access. Publicly funded (pauper) patients had to give up their own clothes and wear the asylum's standard apparel. Asylum authorities did not envision this as a uniform, either honorific or punitive, and …
Material Women, 1750-1950
Material Women, 1750–1950: Consuming Desires and Collecting Practices, ed. Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes TobinWomen and Things, 1750–1950: Gendered Material Strategies, ed. Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes TobinWomen and the Material Culture of Needlework and Textiles, 1750-1950, ed. Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin Material Women, 1750–1950: Consuming Desires and Collecting Practices, ed. Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tob…
The foundations of female entrepreneurship
The Cosmopolitan Interior
Judith Neiswander has produced a fascinating book on the late nineteenth-century craze for home decoration and its broader intellectual significance. Domestic interior studies have grown dramatically in the past decade, and a wealth of new books have recently appeared (or are about to appear) on the social meaning of the British domestic interior in history. These include studies of nineteenth-century household goods by Deborah Cohen and Margaret…
Living above the Shop
This article explores the living arrangements and familial relations of small business households in northwest English towns between 1760 and 1820. Focusing on evidence from inventories and personal writing, it examines the homes that such households lived and worked in and the ways in which space was ordered and used: indicating that access to particular spaces was determined by status. This study suggests both the continuance of the ‘‘household…
The British Domestic Interior and Social and Cultural History
Keywords: domestic interiormaterial cultureconsumptionpublic/privategender
The Dining Room Should Be the Man's Paradise, as the Drawing Room Is the Woman's’
In the middle‐class home in late nineteenth‐century England, drawing rooms, morning rooms and boudoirs became increasingly associated with women, while dining rooms, studies and smoking rooms were viewed as male spaces. Historians have linked this to the exclusion of women from social power and a male ‘flight from domesticity’. This article questions these interpretations and explores gendered space through advice manuals, inventories and sale ca…
Victorian Women in Britain and the United States
Ethnicity and Consumption
This article reviews the literature that explores the relationship between ethnic identities and food consumption, with particular reference to business management studies. It focuses on the food shopping practices of south Asians in Britain in the period 1947 to 1975, to illustrate the need for more historically contextualized studies that can provide a more nuanced exploration of any interconnections between ethnic identity and shopping behavio…
Nicely Feminine, Yet Learned
This article uses photographs of student rooms at Royal Holloway and the Oxford and Cambridge colleges to examine the material culture of everyday life at these institutions in late nineteenth‐century Britain. Male and female student rooms are compared, revealing the impact of gender on nineteenth‐century student life. Both male and female student rooms were anxiously surveyed by the college authorities. Under pressure from a hostile media to con…
Ethnicity and Consumption
This article reviews the literature that explores the relationship between ethnic identities and food consumption, with particular reference to business management studies. It focuses on the food shopping practices of south Asians in Britain in the period 1947 to 1975, to illustrate the need for more historically contextualized studies that can provide a more nuanced exploration of any interconnections between ethnic identity and shopping behavio…
Comfort in Small Things? Clothing, Control and Agency in County Lunatic Asylums in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century England
This article examines clothing in public lunatic asylums in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England. It considers the intentions of the authorities but also explores patient experience and agency, which have been notoriously difficult to access. Publicly funded (pauper) patients had to give up their own clothes and wear the asylum's standard apparel. Asylum authorities did not envision this as a uniform, either honorific or punitive, and …
The Dining Room Should Be the Man's Paradise, as the Drawing Room Is the Woman's’
In the middle‐class home in late nineteenth‐century England, drawing rooms, morning rooms and boudoirs became increasingly associated with women, while dining rooms, studies and smoking rooms were viewed as male spaces. Historians have linked this to the exclusion of women from social power and a male ‘flight from domesticity’. This article questions these interpretations and explores gendered space through advice manuals, inventories and sale ca…
The British Domestic Interior and Social and Cultural History
Keywords: domestic interiormaterial cultureconsumptionpublic/privategender
Nicely Feminine, Yet Learned
This article uses photographs of student rooms at Royal Holloway and the Oxford and Cambridge colleges to examine the material culture of everyday life at these institutions in late nineteenth‐century Britain. Male and female student rooms are compared, revealing the impact of gender on nineteenth‐century student life. Both male and female student rooms were anxiously surveyed by the college authorities. Under pressure from a hostile media to con…
Pets and family relationships in twentieth-century British diaries
During the twentieth-century British family life was transformed through changes in family size, relationships and the development of new expectations about emotions and behaviour. But in this important social transformation one factor has gone almost entirely unremarked by family historians – the role of animals in family life. Sociologists and psychologists have demonstrated that pets played an important and complex role in British family life …
Animals in the family mini-special issue introduction and historiographical review
In Britain today, pets are often at the heart of family life, but we know relatively little about the roles they played in families in the past. From the early nineteenth century, pets were a central focus of middle- and working-class homes in Britain but are almost completely unremarked in historical studies of the home and family. In this mini-special issue we present four new essays, developed from papers given at the panel, exploring the evol…
A Cultural History of the Home in Antiquity
‘Home’ is a powerful idea throughout antiquity, from Odysseus’ epic journey to recover his own home, nostalgically longed-for through his long absence, to the implanting of Christianity in the domestic sphere in late antiquity. We can recognise the idea even if there is no word for it that quite corresponds to our own: the Greek oikos and the Latin domus mean both house and family, the essential components of home. To attempt a history of ‘the ho…
Mothering in the Archives
During the 1910s, Edith Vidler, the wife of a shipping merchant based in Rye, began work on a scrapbook devoted to the life of her daughter Barbara, born in 1902 (see Plate 1). The opening pages were inscribed ‘Barbara Elneth Cressy Vidler — Her Book’ and ‘For mother to keep a record of my years’. Beginning with Barbara’s birth and birthplace, Edith created a visual and material record of Barbara’s life as a child and her family history. A series…
Living above the Shop
This article explores the living arrangements and familial relations of small business households in northwest English towns between 1760 and 1820. Focusing on evidence from inventories and personal writing, it examines the homes that such households lived and worked in and the ways in which space was ordered and used: indicating that access to particular spaces was determined by status. This study suggests both the continuance of the ‘‘household…
Nicely Feminine, Yet Learned
This article uses photographs of student rooms at Royal Holloway and the Oxford and Cambridge colleges to examine the material culture of everyday life at these institutions in late nineteenth‐century Britain. Male and female student rooms are compared, revealing the impact of gender on nineteenth‐century student life. Both male and female student rooms were anxiously surveyed by the college authorities. Under pressure from a hostile media to con…
Ethnicity and Consumption
This article reviews the literature that explores the relationship between ethnic identities and food consumption, with particular reference to business management studies. It focuses on the food shopping practices of south Asians in Britain in the period 1947 to 1975, to illustrate the need for more historically contextualized studies that can provide a more nuanced exploration of any interconnections between ethnic identity and shopping behavio…
The British Domestic Interior and Social and Cultural History
Keywords: domestic interiormaterial cultureconsumptionpublic/privategender
The Dining Room Should Be the Man's Paradise, as the Drawing Room Is the Woman's’
In the middle‐class home in late nineteenth‐century England, drawing rooms, morning rooms and boudoirs became increasingly associated with women, while dining rooms, studies and smoking rooms were viewed as male spaces. Historians have linked this to the exclusion of women from social power and a male ‘flight from domesticity’. This article questions these interpretations and explores gendered space through advice manuals, inventories and sale ca…
Victorian Women in Britain and the United States
The Cosmopolitan Interior
Judith Neiswander has produced a fascinating book on the late nineteenth-century craze for home decoration and its broader intellectual significance. Domestic interior studies have grown dramatically in the past decade, and a wealth of new books have recently appeared (or are about to appear) on the social meaning of the British domestic interior in history. These include studies of nineteenth-century household goods by Deborah Cohen and Margaret…
Living above the Shop
This article explores the living arrangements and familial relations of small business households in northwest English towns between 1760 and 1820. Focusing on evidence from inventories and personal writing, it examines the homes that such households lived and worked in and the ways in which space was ordered and used: indicating that access to particular spaces was determined by status. This study suggests both the continuance of the ‘‘household…
Material Women, 1750-1950
Material Women, 1750–1950: Consuming Desires and Collecting Practices, ed. Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes TobinWomen and Things, 1750–1950: Gendered Material Strategies, ed. Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes TobinWomen and the Material Culture of Needlework and Textiles, 1750-1950, ed. Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin Material Women, 1750–1950: Consuming Desires and Collecting Practices, ed. Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tob…
The foundations of female entrepreneurship
White-Painted Fortresses”
In Victorian and Edwardian upper- and middle-class homes in England, children were often segregated in a nursery at the top of the house under the direct care of a nanny or nursemaid. This article explores the material culture of the nursery and the way it functioned as a space within the wider home. It demonstrates the impact of this on relationships between parents, children, and servants as well as the formation of early ideas of gender. While…
Comfort in Small Things? Clothing, Control and Agency in County Lunatic Asylums in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century England
This article examines clothing in public lunatic asylums in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England. It considers the intentions of the authorities but also explores patient experience and agency, which have been notoriously difficult to access. Publicly funded (pauper) patients had to give up their own clothes and wear the asylum's standard apparel. Asylum authorities did not envision this as a uniform, either honorific or punitive, and …
Introduction
Introduction to the journal's special issue, 'Women as Wives and Workers: Marking Fifty Years of The Feminine Mystique
Wanting and Having
Peter Gurney's excellent new book analyzes how nineteenth-century political movements mobilized the image of the poor as consumers. While the figure of the consumer has been central to discussions of citizenship in later periods, Gurney's work is the first to demonstrate that the construction of the consumer was also an important political device from the early nineteenth century. The book focuses on how ideas of the poor consumer were used by th…
Home, Business, and Household
This chapter examines the buildings occupied by trading households, where the commercial and the domestic continued to coexist under the same roof throughout the period of the Industrial Revolution. It explores the numbers of individuals who lived and worked together in these households, the structures and internal layouts of the houses that they occupied, and the possible uses of the different rooms within them, as suggested by practices of room…
Curating ‘Homes of the Homeless’
Curating the Victorians
Rotten Effeminate Stuff”
During the nineteenth century, British public schools became increasingly important, turning out thousands of elite young men. Historians have long recognized the centrality of these institutions to modern British history and to understandings of masculinity in this era. While studies of universities and clubs have revealed how fundamental the rituals and everyday life of institutions were to the creation of masculinity, public schools have not b…
Mothering in the Archives
During the 1910s, Edith Vidler, the wife of a shipping merchant based in Rye, began work on a scrapbook devoted to the life of her daughter Barbara, born in 1902 (see Plate 1). The opening pages were inscribed ‘Barbara Elneth Cressy Vidler — Her Book’ and ‘For mother to keep a record of my years’. Beginning with Barbara’s birth and birthplace, Edith created a visual and material record of Barbara’s life as a child and her family history. A series…
Animals and Home
An overview of the essays included in the Special Issue highlighting the contribution the issue makes to scholarship
Pets and family relationships in twentieth-century British diaries
During the twentieth-century British family life was transformed through changes in family size, relationships and the development of new expectations about emotions and behaviour. But in this important social transformation one factor has gone almost entirely unremarked by family historians – the role of animals in family life. Sociologists and psychologists have demonstrated that pets played an important and complex role in British family life …
Animals in the family mini-special issue introduction and historiographical review
In Britain today, pets are often at the heart of family life, but we know relatively little about the roles they played in families in the past. From the early nineteenth century, pets were a central focus of middle- and working-class homes in Britain but are almost completely unremarked in historical studies of the home and family. In this mini-special issue we present four new essays, developed from papers given at the panel, exploring the evol…
A Cultural History of the Home in Antiquity
‘Home’ is a powerful idea throughout antiquity, from Odysseus’ epic journey to recover his own home, nostalgically longed-for through his long absence, to the implanting of Christianity in the domestic sphere in late antiquity. We can recognise the idea even if there is no word for it that quite corresponds to our own: the Greek oikos and the Latin domus mean both house and family, the essential components of home. To attempt a history of ‘the ho…
Noisy, Despotic, Fascinating’
Siamese cats were introduced in Britain in the late nineteenth century and by the 1950s were one of the most popular pedigree cats. Their role in modern domestic life was increasingly celebrated in pet-themed memoirs and broadcasts. This article explores the social and emotional dimension of their rise – arguing that Siamese were particularly feted for their communicative capacities as well as their powerful albeit disruptive role in domestic lif…
‘Every Description of Domestic Pets Will Here Be Found’
By the mid-twentieth century, the pet shop was an established feature of London’s retail landscape. Pet shops presented themselves as modern, hygienic, and compassionate spaces that used the kerb appeal of furry animals to lure consumers onto their premises. This article tracks the boom in pet sales across the capital from the early nineteenth century, through street trade, markets and, increasingly, shops. Animals figured as part of the consumer…
Inheriting the Family
Sociology (18 works) · History (13 works) · History (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Political science (10 works) · Gender Studies (9 works) · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes (9 works) · Art (8 works) · Historical Economic and Social Studies (8 works) · Gender Studies (7 works)