Tag: Consumerism

‘Hearts and Pockets’: Consumerism and the early Salvation Army

Other

Figure 1 (header image): An advertisement for the wide range of goods to be purchased at the Salvation Army Trade Department, including an illustration of shoppers in the ‘Salvation Emporium’ showroom on Clerkenwell Road. From Salvation Army newspaper War Cry, 18 November 1893. Salvation Army International Heritage Centre. The notion of a ‘consumer identity’ is simultaneously ubiquitous and elusive. We are all consumers; and many of us do our best, in one way or another, to ensure that our consumer

Read more

Curry Tales of the Empire

Victorians Beyond the Academy

Indian curry is an extraordinarily popular genre of food, visible not only in the shape of curry houses across the world but also as take-aways, frozen curry meals and curry powders sold in grocers’ stores. But what is the history of the Indian curry? Was it Indian to begin with or a colonial imposition evolving from a simplified and over-generalized understanding of local food cultures?  This essay traces the history of Indian curry as we know it today and the

Read more

Megan A. Norcia, ”Come Buy, Come Buy’: Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’ and the Cries of London’

Other

A blazingly sunny summer day in 2009 found me camped out at the Baldwin Collection of Historical Children’s Literature at the University of Florida. I was there researching nineteenth-century children’s guides to London (or so I thought), when in the midst of this study, the happy serendipity of archival work led me to Andrew Tuer’s nineteenth-century collection of London cries. As I read through Tuer’s guide and then rapidly searched for and consumed several others, I kept scrawling in my

Read more