Material Relations

This well-researched and imaginative text has its roots in the author’s doctoral thesis and is also associated with the pioneering work of the AHRC-funded Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior. The goal of this larger project has been to develop new histories of the home, its contents and representation. Jane Hamlett’s new book is an important addition to the rich literature which has emerged (and is still emerging) from this project: work by Jeremy Aynsley, Charlotte Grant, John Styles and others, as well as Amanda Vickery’s recent best-seller, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (2009; rev. supra). Hamlett’s book draws fully on all of this recent research while representing an important contribution to our understanding of Victorian home life in its own right. Hamlett’s mission is to show how ‘material culture, space and family relationships were mutually constitutive’, and how arrangements in the home both reflected and fostered intimacy and distance. The book has five main chapters. It starts by subjecting to close scrutiny the idea that the Victorian middle classes sought or achieved any increase in privacy, thereby reflecting on that persistent debate among Victorian gender historians, the division between public (male) and private (female) space. Hamlett emphasises that, far from being a fortified refuge, the Victorian home was quite open to intrusion from the ‘public’ world, not least on account of the coming and going of visitors and servants, and also because many professional men worked from home. Interestingly, she pays much less attention to women’s patterns of home-based ‘work’ which would have brought contact from ‘outside’—particularly the common practice of taking in lodgers or ‘paying guests’, or running small-scale private schools or academies. Both practices were extremely widespread in seaside and spa towns particularly, and can be explored through census data and directories

Media studies · Middle class · Political science · Politics · Public sphere · Representation (politics · Scrutiny · Sociology · Space (punctuation) · Architecture, Design, and Social History · Gender Studies · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Law