Description
Focusing on everyday life in nineteenth-century Britain and its imperial possessions”from preparing tea to cleaning the kitchen, from packing for imperial adventures to arranging home décor”the essays in this collection share a common focus on materiality, the nitty-gritty elements that helped give shape and meaning to British self-definition during the period. Each essay demonstrates how preoccupations with common household goods and habits fueled contemporary debates about cultural institutions ranging from personal matters of marriage and family to more overtly political issues of empire building. While existing scholarship on material culture in the nineteenth century has centered on artifacts in museums and galleries, this collection brings together disparate fields”history of design, landscape history, childhood studies, and feminist and postcolonial literary studies”to focus on ordinary objects and practices, with specific attention to how Britons of all classes established the tenets of domesticity as central to individual happiness, national security, and imperial hegemony.
Table of Contents
Part 1: Mapping Domestic Territories
1. The Tangible Shape of the Nation: The State, the Cheap Printed Map, and the Manufacture of British Identit, 1784 - 1855
Jo Guldi
2. The Material Stability: Conforming to Type in British House Furnishings, 1860-1910
Clive Edwards
3. The Material Lessons of Children's Literature: Unearthing Class Standards in E. Nesbit's The Story of the Treasure Seekers
Mary Jeanette Moran
Part 2: Hearth, Home, and Housekeeping
4. Housekeeping: Shine, Polish, Gloss and Glaze as Surface Strategies in the Domestic Interior
Victoria Kelley
5. Kitchen Magic: Reforming the Victorian Kitchen with Alexis Soyer
Sumangala Bhattacharya
6. Tea Gender and Middle-Class Taste
Deirdre H. McMahon
Part 3: Imperial Possessions, Community Culture and Colonial Return
7. "A cross, a lion and a scroll or two": The Victorial Cross and the Substance of British Identity
Jason Howard Mezey
8. Monkeys in the House: Commodities and Competing Fetishisms in Late Victorian Popular Culture
Bradley Deane
9. Lady Montagu's Smokers' Pastils and The Graphoc Advertising the Harem in the Home
Kellie Holzer
