Clothing and Poverty in Nineteenth-century England

Clothing the Poor in Nineteenth-Century England is a genuinely original intervention in historical scholarship, and in questions of the plight of the poor in the long nineteenth century in England, which it examines through the paradigm of clothing, its availability, and its social and cultural significance. Vivienne Richmond's book is cultural and social history at its best. Her empirical focus on clothes, and the culture and economy of clothing in the period, adds immeasurably to our understanding of the identities and the lived experience of being in poverty, of the hard surfaces of life that faced the poor in this period. This is a significant achievement. Too often since the ‘cultural turn’ histories which focus on representations, while producing wonderful intellectual insights, have lost sight of the social and economic realities facing individuals and groups particularly at the lowest ends of the social spectrum. As John Tosh has argued recently, the ‘privileging of representation over experience, the dissolution of the integrated subject, and the abstraction of power relations’ in the more rigorous and exclusive notion of culture inherent in histories since the ‘cultural turn’ has had the tendency to elide social history and its quest for the historical lived experience.1

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Clothing · Cultural turn · Period (music) · Political science · Poor relief · Poverty · Power (physics) · Scholarship · Social history (medicine) · Social science · Sociology · Subject (documents) · Crafts, Textile, and Design · Fashion and Cultural Textiles · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · History · Law

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