Jessica Cox read Wuthering Heights at the age of sixteen, resulting in a developing obsession with all things Victorian. This eventually led to her completing a PhD (on sensation writer Wilkie Collins) at Swansea University in 2007. She is currently a lecturer in English at Brunel University, London. Jessica has research interests in Victorian popular fiction (particularly sensation fiction), the Brontёs, first-wave feminism, and neo-Victorianism. She is the author of a short biography of Charlotte Brontё, editor of a collection
Read moreTag: Domestic Space
Sarah Olwen Jones, ‘Bringing the Carlyles to Life: Public Intimacies of a Chelsea Interior’
By Sarah Olwen Jones My recent article, ‘Staging the Interior: The Public and Private Intimacies of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle’s Domestic Lives,’ has it roots in a seemingly chance and brief conversation. Several years ago, I found myself in a University of Sydney elevator being quizzed by Associate Professor Richard White about why so many great men and women — great literary figures, prominent intellectuals, and other persons of ‘note’ — frequented Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyles’ London residence.
Read moreThe Delights of “Living in” and Working in a Cardiff Department Store
Michelle Matthews (Independent Scholar) The industrial revolution has typically been characterised as separating home from work. Yet as the BBC drama ‘The Paradise’ shows, home and work merged in the department store with shop assistants often living over the shop as part of their employment term. Fondly known as ‘Living in’, this practice played a crucial role in the recruitment of staff in a number of professions during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the department store it functioned as
Read moreA Walking Tour of London’s Forgotten Model Lodging Houses?
Jane Hamlett and Rebecca Preston Everyday, across London, thousands of people pass by hundreds of homes for the poor erected by Victorian philanthropists. Their exteriors often impress, but some are less noticeable, and probably very few Londoners realise what went on inside them. Last summer, equipped with contemporary maps and illustrations, Jane Hamlett, Lesley Hoskins and Rebecca Preston from Royal Holloway’s ESRC-funded At Home in the Institution Project set out on a London street walk to rediscover some of these
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