The Working Class at Home, 1790-1940

This book examines life in the homes inhabited by the working class over the long nineteenth century. These working-class homes are often imagined as distinctly unhomely spaces, which the inhabitants struggled to fill with even the most basic of furniture, let alone acquire the comforts associated with middle-class domestic space. The concerned reformers of industrialising towns and cities painted a picture of severe deprivation, of rooms that were both cramped yet bare at the same time, and disease-ridden spaces from which their subjects required rescue. It is an image which is not only inadequate, but which also robs working-class people of their agency in creating domestic spaces which allowed for the expression of personal and familial feeling. Bringing together emerging scholars who challenge these ideas and using a range of innovative sources and approaches, this edited collection presents a new understanding of working-class homes.

Offers new insights into how the working class made a 'home' Conceptualises the working-class home as a material, emotional and highly divergent space Uses novel sources and approaches to challenge existing understandings

Autorentext

Vicky Holmes is Visiting Research Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London, UK in association with the Centre for Studies of Home. Her Palgrave Pivot, In Bed with the Victorians: The Life-Cycle of Working-Class Marriage, was published in 2017.

Joseph Harley is Lecturer in History at Anglia Ruskin University, UK. He has recently published Norfolk Pauper Inventories, c.1690-1834 (2020) and has articles in various journals including Agricultural History Review, Historical Journal and Social History. Laika Nevalainen is a historian of everyday life in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Finland.

Inhalt

1. Introduction: The Working Class at Home, 1790-1940.- Part I: The Material Home.- 2. 'I can barely provide the common necessaries of life': Material Wealth over the Life-cycle of the English poor, 1790-1834.- 3. Politicising the English Working-Class Home, c.1790-1820.- 4. Pulling Back the Covers: Uncovering Beds in the Victorian Working-Class Home.- Part II: The Emotional and the Exterior Home.- 5. Spaces of Girlhood: Autobiographical Recollections of Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Working-Class Homes.- 6. Songbirds in East London Homes, from Henry Mayhew to Charles Booth.- 7. Chickens, ducks, rabbits, and me dad's geraniums: The Use and Meanings of Yards, Gardens and Other Outside Spaces of Urban Working-Class Homes, 18901930.- Part III: Home beyond Home.- 8. Diligence and Dissipation: The Maid Servant's Bed Chamber in the Late Eighteenth Century.- 9. Pauper Lunatics at Home in the Asylum, 1845-1906.- 10. Flexible, Portable and Communal Domesticity: Everyday Domestic Practices of Finnish Sailors and Logging Workers, c. 1880s to 1930s.