The Domestic Hearth: Writings by Dickens, Beeton, Stevenson, and Hodgson Burnett

It is a starting point rather than a truism that the Victorians’ vision of domesticity had ‘the domestic hearth’ front and centre. This post will discuss novels (or novellas) written in the 1840s to the 1880s, by Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Frances Hodgson Burnett. These authors explore the theme of the domestic hearth through characters whose experiences of states like warmth, comfort, mutuality, cold, want, and social isolation may be fixed, or undergo transformations. Meanwhile, Isabella Beeton’s Book of

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Vicky Holmes – Lodger in the Bedroom

Vicky Holmes – University of Essex This post accompanies Vicky Holmes JVC 2014 article ‘Accommodating the Lodger: The Domestic Arrangements of Lodgers in Working-Class Dwellings in a Victorian Provincial Town’, which can be downloaded here. In my article, ‘Accommodating the Lodger: The Domestic Arrangements of Lodgers in Working-Class Dwellings in a Victorian Provincial Town’, I attempt to locate the lodger and reappraise our understanding of their position in working-class homes, including their place in the family’s bedroom.Despite the idea that the

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