Tag: Domesticity

‘Crushed Flounces and Broken Feathers’: British Women’s Fashions and their Indian Servants in Victorian India

Victorians Beyond the Academy, Victorians on Display

‘We have had so many inquiries respecting Indian outfits, and necessary articles of dress for the Presidencies…’ (The Englishwoman’s Conversazione, Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, 1 July 1869). Britain’s imperial control and power over India had reached its epitome in the nineteenth century, as the East India Company had become entrenched, and later, the colonial society was consolidated by the imposition of Crown Rule in 1858. The nineteenth century, especially the second half, witnessed many British women crossing the seas to reside

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How Victorian Cookbooks are Helping Us Cope with Covid

Other, Victorians Beyond the Academy

It is a truth universally acknowledged, at least by the Internet, that one way to cope with Covid is to bake banana bread. From social media to Stanley Tucci’s recent diary of quarantine cooking in The Atlantic to the New York Times’ “At Home” section, Americans are hearing at least one persistent and unified message about Covid-19: we should all be cooking. Or baking. Preferably bread. At first glance, the reasons behind the uptick in home cooking seem obvious. Shopping

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Sophie Cooper, ‘Oh woman! woman! Who can resist thy influence’: Male personal writings on romance in mid-nineteenth century Chicago

Published in JVC

Sophie Cooper is a third year PhD student and William McFarlane Scholar at the University of Edinburgh. She is studying Irish communities in Melbourne and Chicago between 1850 and 1890, specifically in relation to situational influences on identity formation and nationalist thought. Sophie tweets using the handle @SophcoCooper and more information can be found on her academia page If E___ be really a living thing of a warm heart – all elevated sentiments & deep womanly passions – not a

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The Victorian Tactile Imagination: Reappraising touch in nineteenth-century culture

Other

THE VICTORIAN TACTILE IMAGINATION: Reappraising touch in the nineteenth-century culture Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies, Birkbeck, London 19-20 July, 2013 It is always exciting when you feel part of something big, and when Professor David Howes (Concordia University) asserts that there are some ‘stirrings’ in the academy then you know it’s special. Many claims are made for the impact of a conference’s scope, and they do establish new ideas and contribute to the wider scholarship as well as create new networks

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Knickerbockers and Tight-Lacing:Ruth Goodman’s ‘How To Be A Victorian’

Other

‘How To Be A Victorian’ (Penguin/Viking, 2013) by Ruth Goodman review by Gabrielle Malcolm Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman, as the song goes. It was especially hard to be a Victorian woman. We think we know, and we certainly do – on many levels – understand the hardships that people underwent on a daily basis, from morning until night. But is this awareness not just one of academic, historic facts? Do we really appreciate or empathise with what

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The Delights of “Living in” and Working in a Cardiff Department Store

Victorians Beyond the Academy

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

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Walking the Corridors of the Past: A tour of Singleton Abbey

Victorians Beyond the Academy

Lucinda Matthews-Jones (Liverpool John Moores University) In a recent blog for History Workshop Online, Toby Butler suggests that field trips should become ‘an essential part of the…university curriculum’, noting that ‘[s]urely no history degree taught in a city could not find a place for a visit to a museum or a historic site, and perhaps a talk from a curator?’ I agree with Toby. As university teachers, I believe we should be thinking of imaginative ways to teach our modules

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Book Review: Elite Dancing and Dining in London and Paris

Book Reviews, Digital Forum

Society Dancing: Fashionable Bodies in England, 1870-1920, by Theresa Jill Buckland, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, x + 200 pp., £50.00 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-230-27714-4 Bourgeois Consumption: Food, Space and Identity in London and Paris, 1850-1914, by Rachel Rich, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011, ix + 213 pp., £55.00 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-7190-8112-5 Reviewed by Dr Kelly Boyd, Institute of Historical Research, University of London k.boyd@blueyonder.co.uk As Leonore Davidoff showed us in The Best Circles, one of the most difficult tasks in nineteenth-century English

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New Agenda – Fragments of the Modern City: Material Culture and the Rhythms of Everyday Life in Victorian London

Other

Lining the shelves of a Museum of London warehouse are thousands of boxes of the broken and fragmented belongings of Victorian Londoners. In JVC 15.2 Alastair Owens, Nigel Jeffries, Karen Wehner and Rupert Featherby consider how such evidence can contribute to our understanding of the social and cultural worlds of Victorian Londoners. Does it allow us to grasp the ‘actualities’ of life in the modern metropolis, obscured by a pervasive bourgeois gaze that saturates other historical sources? This article is

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Book Reviews (15.2)

Other

Malcolm Chase on G. W. M. Reynolds: Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Politics, and the Press, edited by Anne Humpherys and Louis James (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). To read the full review, visit http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1355%2d5502&volume=15&issue=2&spage=299 David Richter on Rebecca Stern’s Home Economics: Domestic Fraud in Victorian England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008). To read the full review, visit http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1355%2d5502&volume=15&issue=2&spage=303. Talia Schaffer on John Plotz’s Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). To read the full review, visit http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1355%2d5502&volume=15&issue=2&spage=307.

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