The Working Class at Home, 1790–1940 3030892727, 9783030892722

Table of contents :
Preface
Acknowledgements
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
List of Tables
Chapter 1: Introduction: The Working Class at Home, 1790–1940
1.1 Locating the Working Class at Home
1.2 Defining the Working Class at Home
1.3 Scope of the Book
1.4 Meanings of Home
1.5 Accessing the Working Class at Home
Part I: The Material Home
Chapter 2: ‘I can barely provide the common necessaries of life’: Material Wealth over the Life-Cycle of the English Poor, 1790-1834
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Sources
2.3 Material Wealth and Material Poverty
2.4 Material Culture Over the Life-cycle
2.5 Conclusion
Chapter 3: Politicising the English Working-Class Home, c.1790–1820
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Sources
3.3 The Politics of Work in the Working-Class Home
3.4 Gender, Respectability, and Domestic Work
3.5 The Politics of Privacy
3.6 The Politics of Consumption
3.7 Conclusions
Chapter 4: Pulling Back the Covers: Uncovering Beds in the Victorian Working-Class Home
4.1 Introduction
4.2 The Victorian Coroner’s Court and Press Reporting
4.3 Acquisition and Ownership
4.4 A Place to Sleep
4.5 Destitution and Deterioration
4.6 Conclusion
Part II: The Emotional and the Exterior Home
Chapter 5: Spaces of Girlhood: Autobiographical Recollections of Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Working Class
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Girls at Home: Re-capturing the Child’s Gaze
5.3 Playing house: dolls, dollhouses and interior worlds
5.4 Conclusion
Chapter 6: Songbirds in East London Homes, from Henry Mayhew to Charles Booth
6.1 Introduction
6.2 The Economic and Spatial Management of Birds in the Home
6.3 Feelings of Stability and Continuity
6.4 An Emotional Relationship
6.5 Birds and Other Pets on the Rise
6.6 Conclusions
Chapter 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, 1890–1930
7.1 Introduction
7.2 Method and Sources
7.3 The Physical Shape of the Outside Spaces
7.4 The Limits of Privacy
7.5 Jostling for Space: Animals, Plants, and People
7.6 Conclusions: Economy, Comfort, Pleasure—and More
Part III: Home Beyond Home
Chapter 8: Diligence and Dissipation: The Maid Servant’s Bed Chamber in the Late Eighteenth Century
8.1 On the Bedchamber
8.2 Diligence and Dissipation
8.3 ‘Her Chamber’
8.4 The Wanton Maid Revealed
8.5 The Problem with the Modest Maid…
8.6 Conclusion
Chapter 9: Pauper Lunatics at Home in the Asylum, 1845–1906
9.1 Overview
9.2 Context
9.3 At Home in the Asylum
9.3.1 Domesticity in the Asylum
9.3.2 Patient Attachment to Material Goods
9.3.3 The Asylum as a Sanctuary
9.4 Conclusion
Chapter 10: Flexible, Portable and Communal Domesticity: Everyday Domestic Practices of Finnish Sailors and Logging Workers, c. 1880s to 1930s
10.1 Introduction
10.2 Sources
10.3 Sailors’ and Logging Workers’ Living Conditions
10.4 Portable Domesticity
10.5 Flexible and Temporal Domesticity
10.6 Communal Domesticity
10.7 Conclusions
Appendix 1 Inventory of the goods in the possession of Mr and Mrs Mills, 1799
Bibliography
Unpublished Manuscripts
Index

Citation preview

The Working Class at Home, 1790 –1940 Edited by Joseph Harley · Vicky Holmes Laika Nevalainen

The Working Class at Home, 1790–1940

Joseph Harley  •  Vicky Holmes Laika Nevalainen Editors

The Working Class at Home, 1790–1940

Editors Joseph Harley Anglia Ruskin University Cambridge, UK

Vicky Holmes Queen Mary University of London London, UK

Laika Nevalainen Suomen maatalousmuseo Sarka/ Sarka – The Finnish Museum of Agriculture Loimaa, Finland

ISBN 978-3-030-89272-2    ISBN 978-3-030-89273-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89273-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: duncan1890 / GettyImages This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For our little ones

Preface

In 1997 and 2011, Palgrave Macmillan published two seminal books on indigent populations, Chronicling Poverty and Accommodating Poverty, respectively. The first book considered the lives, strategies, and voices of the poor using a wide range of sources ‘from below’. Accommodating Poverty followed a similar remit but focused on the living arrangements and material circumstances of the poor in the myriad spaces that they resided. This current book shares many of the same objectives of these two books, but moves away from the seventeenth and ‘long’ eighteenth centuries to consider the domestic lives of the working class from the eve of the industrial revolution to the onset of the Second World War. In so doing, this book deals with many similar themes to Chronicling Poverty and Accommodating Poverty such as agency, identity, and the economy of makeshifts, and uses many similar underutilised sources including pauper inventories, coroners’ inquests, and autobiographies, but it is distinct in several other respects. It studies the working class in infamous nineteenth-­ century ‘total institutions’ such as asylums, as well as those who called ships, logging cabins, and servant bedchambers ‘home’. Several chapters consider themes such as people’s emotional and sensory experiences of places, spaces, and objects, which have only come to the forefront of historical research in recent years. The period 1790 to 1940 is especially important, as it was during this epoch that contemporaries took more of an interest in the living quarters of the working class. Marxists such as Friedrich Engels argued that working-class housing in places like Manchester was appalling as a result of industrialisation, and Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree’s investigations of London and York at the vii

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turn of the twentieth century showed how many people’s living conditions were dire and that they had little power to change this. While these accounts are undoubtedly important, they can obscure as much as they inform our understanding. The chapters in this book collectively show that in spite of much hardship and destitution, the working class often made the best of their situations to create a space that was ‘home’ to them. Cambridge, UK London, UK 

Joseph Harley Vicky Holmes

Acknowledgements

This edited collection began as a one-day interdisciplinary workshop hosted at The Museum of the Home in 2017, funded by the Centre for Studies of Home (a partnership between Queen Mary University of London and the Museum of Home). I would particularly like to thank Danielle Patten, Alastair Owens, and Alison Blunt for their assistance in organising the workshop. I would also like to thank Owens for his assistance in the initial planning of the edited collection, as well as Jane Hamlett, Ruth Mather, and Laika Nevalainen for their feedback on the introduction. Circumstances saw a change in the editorship of this collection, and I am eternally grateful for Joseph Harley coming on board midway through. His insight and skills as an editor have greatly shaped the final outcome of this book. Writing the introduction together (via virtual means) was a great experience, and there are not many people with whom one would feel confident in sharing a first draft. I would also like to thank all the contributors to the collection, both those who made it into the final manuscript and those who did not. The pandemic unfortunately meant that some of the chapters intended for this collection never got completed. Nonetheless, we were fortunate to pick up some more contributors along the way, and all of the authors’ efforts to complete their chapters in time for the deadline have been nothing short of monumental. London, UK

Vicky Holmes ix

Contents

1 Introduction: The Working Class at Home, 1790–1940  1 Joseph Harley and Vicky Holmes Part I The Material Home  23 2 ‘I can barely provide the common necessaries of life’: Material Wealth over the Life-Cycle of the English Poor, 1790-1834 25 Joseph Harley 3 Politicising the English Working-Class Home, c.1790–1820 47 Ruth Mather 4 Pulling Back the Covers: Uncovering Beds in the Victorian Working-Class Home 73 Vicky Holmes Part II The Emotional and the Exterior Home  97 5 Spaces of Girlhood: Autobiographical Recollections of Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Working Class 99 Emily Cuming xi

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6 Songbirds in East London Homes, from Henry Mayhew to Charles Booth123 Michael Guida 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, 1890–1930145 Lesley Hoskins and Rebecca Preston Part III Home Beyond Home 171 8 Diligence and Dissipation: The Maid Servant’s Bed Chamber in the Late Eighteenth Century173 Tessa Chynoweth 9 Pauper Lunatics at Home in the Asylum, 1845–1906193 Cara Dobbing 10 Flexible, Portable and Communal Domesticity: Everyday Domestic Practices of Finnish Sailors and Logging Workers, c. 1880s to 1930s213 Laika Nevalainen  Appendix 1 Inventory of the goods in the possession of Mr and Mrs Mills, 1799237 Bibliography241 Index253

Notes on Contributors

Tessa  Chynoweth  is a curator interested in histories of everyday and domestic life. She is currently Curator and Heritage Manager at the Pankhurst Centre, where she is leading the development of the site where Emmeline Pankhurst and her family lived and where the suffragette campaign began. Emily Cuming  is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Liverpool John Moores University. She is the author of Housing, Class and Gender in Modern British Writing, 1880–2012 (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and has published in Life Writing, Journal of Victorian Culture, Contemporary Women’s Writing, Victorian Literature and Culture, and Family and Community History. Her current research involves work on nineteenth-century sailors and family life, and a project on working-class girlhood. Cara  Dobbing  is an independent early career researcher. Her research examines the individual experience of being classified insane in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Particularly, her interests lie in recounting the stories of the paupers admitted to lunatic asylums in this period. Her various publications have sought to redress imbalances in the vast literature of asylum history in a bid to expand the coverage of ‘history from below’ in relation to these institutions. She completed her PhD in 2019 at the University of Leicester and has since become an expert in the history of lunatic asylums and in the experience of being mentally unwell in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Currently, she is working xiii

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on a monograph that extends her PhD research to examine the rate of transfer of pauper lunatics in and out of asylums in the nineteenth century. Michael  Guida  is a cultural historian with a particular interest in the place of nature in British modernity. He is a Research Associate and Tutor at the University of Sussex in the Department of Media & Cultural Studies. His recent publications explore the keeping of song birds in captivity as a method of recreating the dawn chorus in Victorian London and the origins of public participation in scientific bird-watching in Britain. Guida has contributed a chapter about birdsong and emotions to The Routledge Handbook of Animal-Human History, and his first book, Listening to British Nature: Wartime, Radio and Modern Life, 1914–1945, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2022. Joseph Harley  is a Lecturer in History at Anglia Ruskin University. Prior to this he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Derby and an Economic History Society Junior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research. He is an expert in the history of poverty, consumption, and material culture over the early modern, Georgian, and Victorian periods and has published a book and several articles on these themes. Currently, he is working on a monograph which considers the material culture and consumer behaviour of the English poor c. 1650–1850 for Manchester University Press. Vicky Holmes  is a Visiting Research Fellow at Queen Mary University of London, in association with the Centre for Studies of Home. Having completed her PhD in 2012 on the topic of Victorian domestic dangers, she turned her focus to exploring in depth the domestic lives of those living and sleeping within the working-class home. Her current publications include work on domestic methodology, lodgers, and domestic safety legislation and her most recent book, In Bed with the Victorians (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), explores working-class marriage through a study of the marital bed. Lesley  Hoskins researches and writes about the material culture of British homes and institutions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is presently Research Associate for Woodlanders’ Lives and Landscapes, a lottery-funded community history project investigating the lives of people who worked in the rural and domestic industries of the Central Chilterns. Her recent publications include: ‘Putting People on the Page: Material Culture as a way into Everyday Life behind the Facades of Tallis’s

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

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London Street Views’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 22 (2017), pp. 329–338; and, with Rebecca Preston, ‘The House: Inside and Outside Villas and Terraces in England’, in Jane Hamlett (ed.), A Cultural History of the Home in the Age of Empire (1815–1920) (Bloomsbury, 2020). Ruth  Mather  is a social and cultural historian of the long nineteenth century with research interests in gender, class, and popular politics, particularly where these find expression through material culture and in everyday life. She has previously published on the role of women in early nineteenth-century radical politics in Lancashire, and on the use of domestic spaces and practices in commemorative activity following the Peterloo massacre of 1819. Laika  Nevalainen is a historian of everyday life in nineteenth- and twentieth-­century Finland, with a special focus on housing and food. She received her PhD from the European University Institute (Florence, Italy) in 2018. In her PhD research, she examined the homes and everyday practices of bachelors in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Finland. She is currently working at the Finnish Museum of Agriculture. Rebecca Preston  is a historian with the English Heritage London blue plaques scheme. She has particular interests in the relationship of people to place, of landscape to the built environment, and of gardens and outside spaces to the home. Her recent publications include: with Clare Hickman, ‘Cultivation in Captivity: Gender, Class and Reform in the Promotion and Practice of Women’s Prison Gardening in England, 1900–1939’, Women’s History, 2 (2019), pp.  27–32; and, with Lesley Hoskins, ‘Behind the Scenes: The Development of London’s Interwar Suburban Shopping Parades’, Architecture and Culture, 6 (2018), pp. 99–121.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2

Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2

Inventories of Daniel Drake’s possessions in Little Waltham, 1805 and 1816. Essex Record Office D/P 220/18/7; D/P 220/12/439 Inventories of Rhoda Cook’s possessions in Tolleshunt D’arcy, 1808 and 1809. Essex Record Office D/P 105/8/2 39 Anon, Cobler’s Hall. (Bowles & Carver, 1800) Etching. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library 59 Inventory of goods in the possession of Sarah Hargreaves, 1821. West Yorkshire Archive Service Bradford TONG/129/9265 Inventory of goods in the possession of John Holmes, 1818. West Yorkshire Archive Service Bradford 49/D90/6/G/13 65 The Workwoman’s Guide (London: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co, 1838), plate 22. Digitised by Internet Archive (public domain) 77 A hopeless drunkard lying on his bed watched by his poor wife and son. Coloured etching by G. Cruikshank, c. 1842, after himself. Wellcome Collection, Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) 81 A photograph of a back yard in Spitalfields (c. 1900). Photograph by Horace Warner, reproduced from Spitalfields Nippers (2014) with permission from Spitalfields Life Books 127 Chas Palmer’s bird shop, Sclater Street, Bethnal Green, with the ‘London’ style cage on the left (1880). From Sonia Roberts’ Bird-Keeping and Birdcages: A History (photographer unknown) 130

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List of Figures

Fig. 6.3 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 8.1

Fig. 8.2

Fig. 8.3

Fig. 10.1 Fig. 10.2 Fig. 10.3

Fig. 10.4

A Spitalfields weaver at work, with two stuffed birds above the door (1895). Courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, London (photographer unknown) 134 Photograph, 1911, of the back of 22 Albury Street, Deptford. ©London Metropolitan Archives 150 ‘Real photo’ postcard, postmark Surbiton, 11 July 1906, with a message on the reverse from the sitter to his wife. Authors’ collection154 Thomas Gaugain and Thomas Hellyer (after James Northcote), Diligence and Dissipation, Plate 4, ‘The Modest Girl in her Bed Chamber’ (London, 1797), stipple, etching. Rijksmuseum, 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication (CC BY 1.0) 178 Thomas Gaugain and Thomas Hellyer (after James Northcote), Diligence and Dissipation, Plate 3, ‘The Wanton in her Bed Chamber’ (London, 1797), stipple, etching. Rijksmuseum, 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication (CC BY 1.0) 179 Thomas Cook (after William Hogarth), ‘Tom Idle and a prostitute sit on a broken bed in a garret’ (London, 1795). Wellcome Collection, Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)185 Logging workers by the fireplace in a forest sauna in 1923. Sakari Pälsi, Ethnographic Picture Collection, Finnish Heritage Agency (CC BY 4.0) 217 Logging workers lying on a wooden bench built for sleeping in a forest sauna in 1926. Ahti Rytkönen, Ethnographic Picture Collection, Finnish Heritage Agency (CC BY 4.0) 218 Sailors in the skanssi of sailing ship Favell in 1929–1930. FÅA - SILJA LINE Collection, The Finnish Maritime Museum’s Picture Collection, The Maritime Museum of Finland (CC BY 4.0) 219 An example of a seaman’s chest from the turn of the twentieth century. The Finnish Maritime Museum’s Collection, The Maritime Museum of Finland (CC BY 4.0) 224

List of Tables

Table 2.1 Table 10.1

Percentage of pauper inventories which record various household items, 1790-1834 Typical foods eaten by Finnish sailors and logging workers

31 220

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Working Class at Home, 1790–1940 Joseph Harley and Vicky Holmes

In 1998 Carolyn Steedman, one of the most influential writers of working-class life and ‘history from below’, argued that: It is the cellar, the greasy walls, the stained and broken ceiling, that endure in the imagination … despite the wealth of alternative description from the nineteenth century available for historical description.1

Over twenty years on, Steedman’s statement still largely rings true. Working-class abodes continue to be perceived as unhomely, their dwellings devoid of all that makes them a home, such as a secure boundary to the outside world, the most basic of furnishings, material comforts, and, crucially—in a disease-ridden time—cleanliness. This edited collection does not deny the existence of squalor. Rather, it demonstrates that such J. Harley (*) Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK e-mail: [email protected] V. Holmes Queen Mary University of London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Harley et al. (eds.), The Working Class at Home, 1790–1940, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89273-9_1

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contemporary depictions do not represent the typical experience of the working class at home in the long nineteenth century. Indeed, there was no typical working-class experience of home. ‘Home’ to the working class was understood in a range of contexts, from the personal dwelling to the institution, and these perceptions could vary considerably according to age, gender, occupation, marital status, and countless other factors. Bringing together the research of a number of emerging scholars in the now well-established field of studies of the home, this edited collection challenges many long-held preconceptions of working-class dwellings and provides new understandings of their experiences of life both in and beyond domestic settings. Our re-readings of well-known sources and use of sources typically overlooked by historians bring together a more homely, diverse, and detailed picture of the interiors and the domestic lives of the working class. Moreover, several chapters in this edited volume step beyond the front door of the working-class dwelling and show how people could forge a home in a range of non-domestic locations such as ships and asylums.

1.1   Locating the Working Class at Home Early studies on working-class dwellings focused on buildings, byelaws, policies, and infrastructure.2 Yet, in this context, such buildings are largely empty spaces, devoid of what makes them ‘home’, such as its inhabitants and the material and emotional elements that made up everyday life. In Martin Daunton’s classic study House and Home in the Victorian City, for instance, he considered how government policy and private enterprise influenced the building of working-class houses at a national and local level, but hitherto explored how such buildings became a ‘home’ beyond domestic technologies and a brief discussion of internal and external living spaces.3 Further glimpses of the working class at home can be found in research undertaken during the 1980s and 1990s which drew on oral history, household budgets, and personal testimonies to consider myriad factors including education, work, household economies, childhood, and family. While home was not the central focus in these texts, they were often the backdrop to working-class lives being played out.4 Indeed, these historians have provided the grounding for the research undertaken by many of the authors in this present book. The study of the ‘home’ has come into sharp focus particularly among scholars of the middle class over the past three decades.5 However, for the

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working class the doors to their living spaces is only slightly ajar. Nonetheless, some significant research has been conducted in recent years which has helped to reassess our understanding of the working class at home. Work on domestic objects such as the grandfather clock, the chair, and the bed have been used to explore the interpersonal relationships and daily family dynamics that existed behind closed doors.6 Similarly, studies of consumption have revealed how a growing number of goods entered the dwellings of labouring people especially from the eighteenth century, and the impact that these items could have on domestic culture.7 Alastair Owens and Nigel Jeffries have used archaeological evidence to unpick life in the Victorian East End,8 while Jane Hamlett’s seminal work on the Victorian and Edwardian institution has opened up the discussion on the working-class experience of ‘home beyond home’, through an examination of those living behind the walls of public asylums and lodging houses.9 Bookending this edited collection is Nicola Wilson’s Home in British Working-Class Fiction, in which she uses working-class writing to depict home as an emotional and material site from the Edwardian period to the 1990s.10 It is beyond the scope of this volume to fully survey this literature, but clearly there is a growing appetite and need for further research on the abodes of ordinary people.

1.2   Defining the Working Class at Home The label ‘working class’ is highly problematic and has elicited much debate over several decades as to its meaning and exactly who it includes, which has often been surmised to, as Steedman states, those who ‘must labour for their bread’.11 Yet, the working class were far from a homogenous mass, nor were they the people who were ‘simply not middle or upper class’.12 Among this vast population, there were significant economic, social, cultural, and even regional differences, and this volume endeavours to show a number of the experiences of being ‘at home’ across a broad spectrum of people.13 In terms of economic classification, the working class are broadly defined as being employees rather than employers, wage earners rather than salaried, and comprised of skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled workers. They also encompass those who were most likely to face dire economic crisis, resulting in becoming a pauper, beggar, or vagrant. Such an economic-centric definition of ‘working class’ is particularly tricky to use when addressing the topic of the home, for it often entails women and

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children—the central figures in the domestic space—being defined by their husband’s or father’s occupation. Yet, as recent literature on consumption, fatherhood, and marriage has illustrated and this edited collection attests, the breadwinner male was also a central actor in the home, and their economic status and occupation were crucial in shaping their and their family’s domestic culture.14 For example, the presence of work in the home not only altered physical and domestic arrangements, but changed its environment (in sight, smell, and sound), created issues around privacy, and revised the boundaries of the home.15 Several chapters in this edited collection also demonstrate the importance of recognising fluidity in the economic categorisation of the working class. As Matthew Woollard has shown, skilled male workers could find themselves marginalised and ‘deskilled’—and in turn their earnings reduced—as they enter the period of old age,16 while an accident, illness, or death befalling the breadwinner, as well as family breakdown, could see a household slip into poverty.17 Conversely, a person could prosper and rise through the ranks to achieve lower middle-class status through a combination of luck and hard work. The consequences of a slip or rise in economic status reverberated right through the home and, for many, fundamentally altered their domestic lives. Further graduations of the definition and experience of the working class at home are derived from where they lived. The wages that men, women, and children could expect to receive—and thus the experience of being ‘working class’—varied considerably depending upon where they lived. In large parts of the south-west of England, Wales and Scotland, for example, wages were low for male workers, whereas in rapidly expanding areas such as London, Middlesex, and Lancashire wages were relatively high.18 Moreover, as Doreen Massey demonstrates in her analysis of capitalism and patriarchy, regional variations in industry, economic opportunities for women, and industrial development shaped gender relations in the domestic space, and therefore, in turn, home life.19 At another level, the properties in which the working class resided varied considerably across urban, rural, local, regional, and national lines, from the cramped single-­ roomed dwelling in the city in which all daily and nocturnal life was centred, to the spacious cottage where residents could divide multiple rooms according to function and had ample outdoor space for both leisure and growing produce. Divisions are also evident on a much smaller scale. In his seminal text, The Uses of Literacy, Richard Hoggart states that as well as there being a ‘fine range of distinctions in prestige from street to street’,

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on a single road there existed ‘elaborate differences of status, of “standing,” between the houses themselves’ such as additional rooms and yard spaces for only a few pence more in rent, which set others apart from their neighbours.20 The distinction between the urban working class and the (often overlooked) rural working class is also striking, not just in terms of their earnings, housing, and consumption, but also in how they defined themselves. As Emily Cuming reveals in her chapter, Laura, the young protagonist in Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford, saw herself as superior to her counterparts in the London slums in spite of her impoverishment. Blurring the more rigid ideas of what it meant to be working class were social and cultural divisions such as between the ‘respectable’ and the ‘rough’.21 Which category a person found themselves in greatly depended on an adherence to certain practices and shared attitudes, such as religious devotion, sobriety, thrift, and industriousness. Also central to this dichotomy was home and the (female) performance of domesticity. As discussed in the literature on women’s lives and their labours, a donkey-stoned doorstep, curtained windows, white-washed yards, and well-turned-out children distinguished the respectable working class from their less respectable ‘rough’ neighbours.22 This edited collection, as well as engaging with the notion of respectability in its shaping of the experience of being ‘at home’, also demonstrates that social practices surrounding domesticity and homeliness were not just about keeping up appearances. Most crucially, as several chapters will attest, they were important in creating an individual’s own sense of home.

1.3   Scope of the Book This volume considers a rather unusual ‘long’ nineteenth century, stretching from c. 1790 to 1940. In covering a prolonged period, we are able to engage with diverse and important shifting attitudes towards the working class and consider how this shaped their domestic culture. In England and Wales this can be reflected in the administration of poor relief and various reforms which affected the working class at home. Under the Old Poor Law, those who fell into poverty benefitted from a relatively flexible and benevolent system of poor relief in large parts of the country.23 Yet, from around the 1790s authorities increasingly treated claimants with distain and became resentful of people who applied for help.24 By 1834, with the passing of the New Poor Law, this system became increasingly hostile to

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deter applications. Although there were regional and local variations in the administration of poor relief, the remit for who was eligible for outdoor relief grew ever smaller.25 The suspicion and abhorrence that applicants faced became particularly acute during the 1870s crusade against out-­ relief.26 The consequences of an increasingly stringent Poor Law system could be, as several chapters in this collection attest, the loss of home, both in terms of eviction and the loss of material possessions through pawning and selling.27 Indeed, as Vicky Holmes’s chapter reveals, such was the fear of the workhouse—as by design—that many people disengaged with the system entirely. Yet, from the twentieth century we do see some gradual improvements, brought on by the liberal reforms of 1906–1914 which included sick pay and old-age pensions and improvements in public housing from the 1920s, and an arguably more compassionate welfare state.28 Many classic histories of the nineteenth century have focused on the industrial urban working class who lived in rapidly developing towns and cities such as London, Manchester, Sheffield, and Birmingham.29 These groups were important and it is unsurprising that they have generated so much interest, as their homes were created during swift building sprees and housed the people who worked in the bourgeoning industrial heartlands of Britain. Yet, these histories tend to depict working-class abodes as inexorably overcrowded, unsanitary, and unhomely, often without ever entering the front door. It is important to remember that across Europe there was a plethora of lived experiences and this edited collection acknowledges this through studies on the working class in a range of areas. We pay homage to the urban working class in cities such as London, Bristol, and Manchester with chapters from Ruth Mather, Lesley Hoskins and Rebecca Preston, and Michael Guida, while most of the other chapters consider the lives of the working class in a range of other areas, including the rural south, regions of economic decline, and even the forest and open seas. Although this book considers working-class experiences in a range of contexts, every chapter, barring one on Finland, focuses on England. This is unfortunate, as the original outline of the volume included more chapters on other European countries. However, owing to the COVID-19 pandemic and other circumstances, some colleagues had to withdraw and new chapters needed to be found. In spite of this, what remains is an edited collection which accommodates a number of working-class people whose domestic conditions have been under-researched.

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1.4   Meanings of Home Homes were not just empty spaces in which people slept, ate, and rested. They held furniture, clothing, pets, and a range of keepsakes and knickknacks that had been amassed over a lifetime. Items from the grandiose to the ephemeral have agency and thus the power to shape a host of facets including identity, family life, and standard of living. As noted above, the bulk of literature on material culture has, however, focused on the middle class, while working people have not been afforded the same attention. Many contemporaries and historians have instead emphasised what the working class did not own or what they lost as a result of industrialisation, rather than what they actually possessed and how they made the best of what they had. E. P. Thompson and Friedrich Engels—perhaps the two most notable writers of the nineteenth century working class—took this approach. Engels largely portrayed the working class as the victim of industrialisation, arguing that ‘Before the introduction of machinery… [workers’] material position was far better than that of their successors’.30 He went on to discuss various working-class dwellings in industrial areas, emphasising how many did not even have beds to sleep in and had ‘no cleanliness, no convenience, and consequently no comfortable family life’.31 In a similar vein, Thompson argued that the ‘“average” working man remained very close to subsistence level’, as their only material benefits from industrialisation ‘consisted of more potatoes, a few articles of cotton clothing for his family, soap and candles, [and] some tea and sugar’.32 There has been something of a re-think to these long-held beliefs in recent years. For instance, archaeological work on  former slums has revealed that the working class owned a wide array of dinnerware and that they would enjoy a range of substances in the domestic sphere including tea, alcohol, and tobacco.33 Inventories and court cases involving theft have also shown that working-class homes were not bare and were increasingly adorned with various items including clocks, looking glasses, and new textiles, particularly from the late eighteenth century.34 Continuing this material approach to the home, Joseph Harley, Mather, and Holmes’s chapters in Part I of this volume begin to populate these once thought of sparse spaces with things. Harley’s chapter analyses food, clothing, and fuel consumption as well as household goods to consider pauper abodes holistically, while Mather’s contribution presents working-class dwellings as a site of production and consumption, intertwined with political

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identity and display. Holmes’s chapter, meanwhile, focuses on the space which occupied around one-third of people’s lives: the bed. These chapters together allow one to understand how material wealth and conditions varied between the working classes, the role of agency, and the life-cycle of people and their goods. There is nothing quite like the home for capturing emotional and sensory imagery. As the phrases go: home is where the heart is; an Englishman’s home is his castle; and there is no place like home. Following the emotional and sensory ‘turn’, Part II of this collection explores the role of emotions in living spaces. In recent years, historians have used emotions and the senses to study various abodes and the interpersonal relationships therein. Key to taking this approach is studying how inhabitants connected to their dwellings—its space, furnishings, rituals, and routines— through the senses: taste, touch, smell, sight, and sound.35 In Megan Doolittle’s 2011 article, for example, she considered the domestic lives of the Victorian working class through tactile remembrances of the father’s chair and the grandfather clock, creating, in what Cuming’s terms in her chapter, a ‘sensory inventory’. These emotional connections were often involuntary and subconscious, but they were nevertheless powerful and helped to shape how people saw the world. This edited collection contributes to this growing literature through discussion of the emotional bonds that people made during childhood and through pet ownership. Cuming’s chapter focuses on the emotional associations that young girls forged from watching their parents go about their days and the items that they remembered from their childhood abodes such as flowers and ornaments. It was, however, the dollhouse that particularly captured young girls’ imaginations and brings a more nuanced understanding of girlhood during this period. Girls were not just domestic drudges. They would play make-believe for hours and even as adults they continued to hold dollhouses in awe and wonder. It was not only inanimate objects that brought people pleasure in the domestic space. Recent literature has begun to examine the place of the pet in middle- and working-­ class homes and the householders’ emotional connections to these ‘domesticated’ animals.36 Extending this discussion, Guida’s chapter focuses on the ownership of birds. Birds were not ‘useful’ pets in the sense that they might keep watch over families or catch vermin as dogs or cats might, but they were constant companions to their owners. While the caged bird could not be handled like other pets, its sound—the chorus and chirping—resonated throughout the interior and exterior of the

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home, bringing feelings of comfort and solace to those within. Emotion is also a recurring theme beyond Part II of this edited collection, as several chapters document emotional attachment to the home and domestic objects, including the grief, even trauma, that people felt at their loss. Part II also examines the exterior of working-class dwellings in the context of both the material and emotional home. Hoskins and Preston’s chapter takes us directly outside the door to examine yards, gardens, and other exterior spaces. As well as addressing the multitude of functions of these frequently small vicinities, their chapter also explores how these areas were both utilised and experienced among the home’s varying inhabitants. They reveal that the outdoor space of the home is just as crucial for understanding household and family dynamics as the interiors. In addition to Hoskins and Preston’s chapter considering function and daily life in exterior spaces, several chapters move beyond personal dwellings to study other structures which have not traditionally been researched for their residential uses in Part III. Large numbers of the working class were transient, and this only increased as the country urbanised and people migrated from rural areas to bourgeoning towns and cities. Many, therefore, had to find a ‘home beyond a home’ in a wide range of settings such as lodging houses and employer households. The working-class domestic servant was ever-present in the houses of the upper and middle classes, working behind the scenes to ensure that the residences of their masters and mistresses were as comfortable as they could be.37 Accounts of this group, however, have generally been located ‘downstairs’ in the functional spaces of the home. Tessa Chynoweth’s chapter moves beyond these spaces to consider the bedchamber of the live-in servant. While beds and bedchambers have received more scholarly attention of late, the servant’s bedchamber has yet to be studied in any detail.38 Addressing this, Chynoweth’s contribution demonstrates the importance of this ‘hidden’ space in understanding the complexities of multiple class co-habitation. Home might also be found in institutions during times of hardship. The rapid growth of establishments such as workhouses, prisons, and asylums in the nineteenth century saw many of the working class inhabit, at one point or another, one or more of these structures. These institutions, as Jane Hamlet has revealed, could be shaped by domestic ideas of the time and transformed into homely spaces through the ownership of small domestic comforts and routines.39 Cara Dobbing’s chapter, entering the asylum, continues this discussion and argues that for some the asylum was not a feared space, but rather could provide a sanctuary from a troubled

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home, where people became both attached to the furnishings and the asylum itself. The final chapter of this edited collection examines the concept of ‘home beyond home’ in the context of transient populations who worked in remote areas. As Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei have argued, ‘exile, longing for home, homelessness, and homesickness are incorporated into the idea and experience of home’.40 Laika Nevalainen’s chapter focuses on the domiciles of Finnish sailors at sea and logging workers in the forest, to consider the living arrangements of these groups when they resided with and worked side by side their co-workers. Her findings show that through portable domestic items and small scale (flexible and communal) domestic routines, these men were able to recreate a sense of home in the most hostile of environments.

1.5   Accessing the Working Class at Home Most of the authors in this collection draw on the voices of the working class themselves. The use of autobiographies, pauper letters, and oral histories has grown in recent years, providing a much greater understanding of the lives of working-class men, women, and children and their daily lives and economies.41 Yet, while many of these studies do touch upon the material, domestic, and emotional home, living spaces are nevertheless not of central focus in many of these texts. Six of the nine chapters in this collection help to address this issue through the detailed assessment of various personal testimonies. In the first two chapters, Harley and Mather study the working-class home through their writings from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Alongside a handful of autobiographies, Harley uses the letters written by paupers to Poor Law authorities to gauge material need and the reasons families faced destitution. Such letters have now been subject to several major studies and have been found to be highly revealing and surprisingly honest at outlining people’s needs and situations to Poor Law authorities.42 Mather, through the close reading of the writings of the radicals Samuel Bamford and Francis Place, argues that home was central to how people understood and practised their politics. The theme of agency through consumption is clear to see in both chapters. People, for example, would use their possessions to explicitly display their political beliefs such as through commemorative ceramics which featured radical heroes, and would take active steps to address financial problems by pawning and selling their goods when necessary.

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Cuming’s chapter, meanwhile, explores the writings of women looking back over their childhoods in their autobiographical writings. The contribution reminds us of the lasting importance that memories of the home could have on individuals in later life and how powerful such sources are for revealing the visual, sensory, and emotional lives of people. Two chapters in this edited collection use first-hand sources to expand our understanding of the working-class at home beyond the interior. In the case of Hoskins and Preston’s chapter, autobiographies are used alongside a range of other records to provide access to the exteriors inhabited by the working class, such as yards and gardens. Through this, they document the integral nature of these spaces to day-to-day life; a site in which not only domestic tasks such as the drying of laundry and gardening happened, but interpersonal relationships, playtime, leisure, and household dynamics played out. The final chapter by Nevalainen uses ego documents and oral history to transport us to the living quarters of those who resided in non-traditional spaces. Nevalainen illustrates how we can locate small-­ scale domestic practices and routines among working-class sailors and loggers who led a mostly mobile life, lived in small, crowded spaces with little privacy, and had little access to most domestic comforts. Though not technically ‘from below’, there are many sources which, when read closely, reveal the lives and domestic cultures of working-class people in intricate detail, often going beyond even their own words do. Holmes’s chapter demonstrates how coroner’s records, in the form of inquest reports in  local newspapers, provide an unprecedented level of access to the home’s most intimate object, the bed, on a typical day only rendered atypical by the event of sudden death. In contrast to autobiographies, the recollections of the working class are recorded by coroners and journalists just hours after the fatal event, providing an immediate account of the material home and the circumstances that shaped it. Building on the ground-breaking work of Peter King,43 Harley and Mather use pauper inventories, which were made by officials to document the goods that the dependent poor owned, to reconstruct their material lives during the concluding decades of the Old Poor Law. Such inventories are notoriously difficult to find and only survive in relatively small numbers, but where present they outline the possessions that were in people’s homes, often in the positions where the owners had left them and sometimes with details of rooms, item conditions, and financial values.44 Sources ‘from above’, therefore, clearly still have a place in our understanding of the working-class home. As Martin Hewitt has argued

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elsewhere by re-reading district visitors’ accounts, while these sources have been used by historians to emphasise a lack of working-class domesticity, they can be used to ‘read the working-class house as a home’.45 Guida’s chapter, alongside the use of three autobiographies, demonstrates that despite their various pitfalls, the writings of social investigators can be used to enrich our understanding of working-class domestic culture. For example, his chapter shows how Henry Mayhew did not just observe the grime of the working-class interior, but, in spotting markers of respectability, also provides an account of the comforts of East End housing. Institutional records, likewise, can provide a greater understanding of living arrangements. Dobbing’s chapter uses asylum patient records, alongside annual reports, newspapers, and other sources, to provide intimate case studies of patients who made themselves ‘at home’ in Garland Asylum, both through attachment to their surroundings and in the way that they viewed the asylum as a place of sanctuary from their troubled lives on the outside. Some of the authors in this collection use visual imagery to gauge working-class abodes. Paintings, prints, photographs, and other visual materials have increasingly been used by researchers to understand the lives of labouring people,46 but we must always be wary of their veracity and the intentions of their creators. After all, some of the most famous painters of plebeian society such as George Morland, George Cruikshank, and George Walker had bills to pay and paying clients to satisfy, despite any predispositions that they may have had to portray people from the lower echelons of society as accurately as possible. Chynoweth makes central use of the imagined interiors in James Northcote’s series Diligence and Dissipation to reconstruct servant bedchambers in their employer’s abodes. Hoskins and Preston’s chapter uses photographs alongside a host of other sources, to reframe our understanding of the exterior of working-­ class dwellings, while visual imagery is also put to use by Holmes, Mather, Guida, and Nevalainen to complement their textual sources. There are, of course, a range of other sources that can be used to access the working-class home that are not included in this edited collection at length. For example, criminal records such as those of the Old Bailey have been used in many creative ways to study consumption, lodging, and various other aspects of domestic life since they were digitised.47 However, it is not the intention of this book to provide a comprehensive overview of the sources ‘from above’ and ‘from below’, but rather to showcase many of the new methodological trends that are being used. Moreover, it is important to state that this volume does not seek to provide a complete

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picture of the working class at home in the long nineteenth century. Instead, it highlights various new avenues of research which are currently coming out from a new generation of writers, whose work both challenges and reframes our current perceptions of working-class abodes and sees homes as much more than just four walls.

Notes 1. C.  Steedman, ‘What a Rag Rug Means’, Journal of Material Culture, 3 (1998), p. 264. 2. J.  Burnett, A Social History of Housing, 1815–1985 (London: Methuen, 1986); S.D.  Chapman (ed.), The History of Working-Class Housing: A Symposium (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1971); M.J.  Daunton, House and Home in the Victorian City: Working-Class Housing 1850–1914 (London: Edward Arnold, 1983); E. Gauldie, Cruel Habitations: A History of Working-Class Housing 1780–1918 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1974); M. Swenarton, Home Fit for Heroes: The Politics and Architecture of Early State Housing in Britain (London: Heinemann, 1981); A.S.  Wohl, The Eternal Slum: Housing and Social Policy in Victorian London (London: E. Arnold, 1977). 3. Daunton, House and Home. 4. For example, see: J. Burnett (ed.), Useful Toil: Autobiographies of Working People from the 1820s to the 1920s (London: Allen Lane, 1974); Idem (ed.), Destiny Obscure: Autobiographies of Childhood, Education and Family from the 1820s to 1920s (London: Penguin, 1984); D. Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Working Class Autobiography (London: Methuen, 1981); J. Burnett, D. Vincent, and D. Mayall (eds), The Autobiography of the Working-Class: An Annotated Bibliography (3 vols., Brighton: Harvester, 1984–89); J. Bourke, Working Class Cultures in Britain, 1890–1960: Gender, Class and Ethnicity (London: Routledge, 1994); C. Chinn, They Worked all their Lives: Women of the Urban Poor in England, 1880–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988); A. Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London, 1870–1914 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996); P. Horn, The Victorian Country Child (Stroud: Sutton, 1997); P.  Horn, The Victorian Town Child (Stroud: Sutton, 1999); S. Horrell and J. Humphries, ‘Old Questions, New Data, and Alternative Perspectives: Families’ Living Standards in the Industrial Revolution’, Journal of Economic History, 52 (1992), pp.  849–880; E. Roberts, A Woman’s Place: An Oral History of Working-Class Women, 1890–1940 (Oxford: B.  Blackwell, 1984); E.  Ross, Love and Toil:

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Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 5. For example, see: D.  Cohen, Household Gods: The British and their Possessions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); J. Hamlett, Material Relations: Domestic Interiors and Middle-Class Families in England, 1850–1910 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010); L. Hoskins, ‘Reading the Inventory: Household Goods, Domestic Cultures and Difference in England and Wales, 1841–81’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, Queen Mary University of London, 2011); M.  Ponsonby, Stories from Home: English Domestic Interiors, 1750–1850 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); J.  Stobart (ed.), The Comforts of Home in Western Europe, 1700–1900 (London: Bloomsbury, 2020); D.  Sugg Ryan, Ideal Homes, 1918–39: Domestic Design and Suburban Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018); J.  Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). 6. M.  Doolittle, ‘Time, Space, and Memories: The Father’s Chair and Grandfather Clocks in Victorian Working-Class Domestic Lives’, Home Cultures, 8 (2011), pp.  245–264; J-M.  Strange, ‘Fatherhood, Furniture and the Inter-Personal Dynamics of Working-Class Homes, c. 1870–1914’, Urban History, 40 (2013), pp.  271–286; V.  Holmes, In Bed with the Victorians: The Life-Cycle of Working-Class Marriage (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); A.  Gerritsen and G.  Riello (eds), Writing Material Culture History (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). 7. J. Harley, ‘Consumption and Poverty in the Homes of the English Poor, c.1670–1834’, Social History, 43 (2018), pp. 81–104; J. Harley, ‘Domestic Production and Consumption in Poor English Households, 1670–1840’, Agricultural History Review, 69 (2021), pp.  25–49; C.  Muldrew, Food, Energy and the Creation of Industriousness: Work and Material Culture in Agrarian England, 1550–1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 163–207; J. Sear and K. Sneath, The Origins of the Consumer Revolution in England: From Brass Pots to Clocks (London: Routledge, 2020), pp. 230–272; A. Green, ‘Heartless and Unhomely? Dwellings of the Poor in East Anglia and North-East England’, in J.  McEwan and P.  Sharpe (eds), Accommodating Poverty: The Housing and Living Arrangements of the English poor, c. 1600–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), pp. 69–101; P. King, ‘Pauper Inventories and the Material Lives of the Poor in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, in T. Hitchcock, P. King, and P. Sharpe (eds), Chronicling Poverty: The Voices and Strategies of the English Poor, 1640–1840 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1997), pp. 155–191; J. Styles, ‘Lodging at the Old Bailey: Lodgings and their Furnishings in Eighteenth-­ Century London’, in J.  Styles and

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A.  Vickery (eds), Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America 1700–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 61–80; Hoskins, ‘Reading the Inventory’. 8. A.  Owens, N.  Jeffries, K.  Wehner, and R.  Featherby, ‘Fragments of the Modern City: Material Culture and the Rhythms of Everyday Life in Victorian London’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 15 (2010), pp. 212–225; A.  Owens and N.  Jeffries, ‘People and Things on the Move: Domestic Material Culture, Poverty and Mobility in Victorian London’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 20 (2016), pp. 804–827. 9. J. Hamlett, At Home in the Institution: Material Life in Asylums, Lodging Houses and Schools in Victorian and Edwardian England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 10. N.  Wilson, Home in British Working-Class Fiction (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). Also see E. Cuming, Housing, Class and Gender in Modern British Writing, 1880–2012 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 11. C.  Steedman, Labours Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 254–258. For some of the key texts on the ‘class’ debate, see: E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968); R.J.  Morris, Class and Class Consciousness in the Industrial Revolution, 1780–1850 (London: Macmillan, 1979); G. Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); P. Joyce (ed.), Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); R.  McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 12. V.  Kelley, Soap and Water: Cleanliness, Dirt and the Working Classes in Victorian and Edwardian Britain (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), p. 13. 13. This term is also used here to encompasses the ‘labouring class’, a term typically used by historians for the earlier period covered in this book. 14. Doolittle, ‘Time, Space, and Memories’; Holmes, In Bed with the Victorians; J-M Strange, Fatherhood and the British Working Class, 1865–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); E.  Griffin, Bread Winner: An Intimate History of the Victorian Economy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020); M. Finn, ‘Men’s Things: Masculine Possession in the Consumer Revolution’, Social History, 25 (2000), pp.  133–155; K.  Harvey, The Little Republic: Masculinity and Domestic Authority in Eighteenth-­century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 15. For more information on the interconnection of home and work during this period, see the special journal edition edited by J.  Hamlett and L. Hoskins: Home Cultures, 8:2 (2011); H. Barker and J. Hamlett, ‘Living above the Shop: Home, Business, and Family in the English “Industrial

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Revolution”’, Journal of Family History, 35 (2010), pp. 311–328; Harley, ‘Domestic Production and Consumption’. 16. M.  Woollard, ‘The Employment and Retirement of Older Men, 1851–1881: Further Evidence from the Census’, Continuity and Change, 17 (2002), pp. 437–463. 17. J-M. Strange, Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, 1870–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), chapters 2, 7; Strange, Fatherhood and the British Working Class, 1865–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), chapter 2: Griffin, Bread Winner, chapter 5; Holmes, In Bed with the Victorians, chapters 5, 6; R.M.  Smith (ed.), Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); S.A.  Shave, ‘The Dependent Poor? (Re)constructing the Lives of Individuals “on the parish” in Rural Dorset, 1800–1832’, Rural History, 20 (2009), pp. 67–97; S. Williams, Poverty, Gender and Life-Cycle under the English Poor Law 1760–1834 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2011), pp. 101–130; J. Bailey, Unquiet Lives: Marriage and Marriage Breakdown in England, 1660–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 18. For example, see the data in E.H. Hunt, ‘Industrialisation and Regional Inequality: Wages in Britain, 1760–1914’, Journal of Economic History, XLVI (1986), pp. 935–966; K.D.M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 411–417. 19. D.  Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Polity, 1994), pp. 191–211. 20. R. Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life (London, Penguin: 2009—original publication 1957), p. 11. 21. For more information on the notion and development of working-class respectability, see G. Crossick, ‘The Labour Aristocracy and its Values: A Study of Mid-Victorian Kentish London’, Victorian Studies, 19 (1976), pp. 301–328; Jennifer Davis, ‘Jennings’ Buildings and the Royal Borough: The Construction of the Underclass in Mid-Victorian England’, in David Feldman and Gareth Stedman Jones (eds), Metropolis London: Histories and Representations since 1800 (London: Routledge, 1989), pp.  11–39; R.  Gray, The Aristocracy of Labour in Nineteenth-Century Britain, 1850–1914 (London: Macmillan Press, 1981); P.  Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); L. MacKay, Respectability and the London Poor, 1780–1870 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013); C.W. Masters, The Respectability of Late Victorian Workers: A Case Study of York, 1867–1914 (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholar, 2011); E. Ross, ‘“Not the Sort That Would Sit on the Doorstep”: Respectability in Pre-World War I London Neighborhoods’, International Labor and Working-Class

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History, 27 (1985), pp. 39–59; W.D. Smith, Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600–1800 (London: Routledge, 2002), pp.  189–204; F.M.L.  Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain 1830–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 22. Roberts, A Women’s Place, pp. 3–6; Ross, ‘Not the Sort That Would Sit on the Doorstep’, pp. 39–59. 23. S. King, Poverty and Welfare in England 1700–1850: A Regional Perspective (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); S.  Hindle, On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England c. 1550–1750 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004); L.  Hollen Lees, The Solidarities of Strangers: The English Poor Laws and the People, 1700–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor, pp. 104–137. 24. P.  Dunkley, The Crisis of the Old Poor Law in England 1795–1834: An Interpretive Essay (London: Garland Publishing, 1982). 25. Among many others, see: M. Blaug, ‘The Poor Law Report Reexamined’, Journal of Economic History, 24 (1964), pp. 229–245; Idem, ‘The Myth of the Old Poor Law and the Making of the New’, Journal of Economic History, 23 (1963), pp.  151–184; A.  Brundage, The Making of the New Poor Law: The Politics of Inquiry, Enactment and Implementation 1832–39 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1978); A. Crowther, The Workhouse System 1834–1929 (London: Methuen, 1981); Lees, Solidarities of Strangers; King, Poverty and Welfare; S.A Shave, Pauper Policies: Poor Law Practice in England, 1780–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017). 26. M.  MacKinnon, ‘English Poor Law Policy and the Crusade Against Outrelief’, Journal of Economic History, 47 (1987), pp.  603–625; E.T. Hurren, Protesting about Pauperism: Poverty, Politics and Poor Relief in Late-Victorian England, 1870–1900 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2007); M.E. Rose, ‘The Crisis of Poor Relief in England, 1860–1900’, in W.J. Mommsen and W. Mock (eds), The Emergence of the Welfare State in Britain and Germany 1850–1950 (London: Routledge, 1981), pp. 50–70. 27. Such strategies fall under the category of the economy of makeshifts. For further information on the concept, see: S. King and A. Tomkins (eds), The Poor in England, 1700–1850: An Economy of Makeshifts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). 28. For more information on improvements to working-class housing, see Burnett, A Social History of Housing; Daunton, House and Home; A.J. Ley, A History of Building Control in England and Wales 1840–1990 (Coventry: RICS Books, 2000); Swenarton, Home Fit for Heroes. Meanwhile, for information on the development of the welfare state at the turn of the

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twentieth century, see Lees, The Solidarities of Strangers; P.  Thane, Foundations of the Welfare State (Harlow: Longman, 1996); D. Fraser, The Evolution of the British Welfare State: A History of Social Policy since the Industrial Revolution (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 4th ed., 2009); B. Harris, The Origins of the British Welfare State: Society, State and Social Welfare in England and Wales, 1800–1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 29. For example, see M.  Anderson, Family Structure in Nineteenth Century Lancashire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971); Chapman, The History of Working-Class Housing; Davin, Growing Up Poor; Roberts, A Woman’s Place; Ross, Love and Toil; Wohl, The Eternal Slum. 30. F. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, ed. V. Kiernan and T. Hunt (London: Penguin, 2009, reprint of 1892 ed.), pp. 50–51. 31. Ibid., p. 100. 32. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, p.  351. Also see: R.W.  Malcolmson, Life and Labour in England 1700–1780 (London: Hutchinson, 1981), p. 149; G.E. Fussell, The English Rural Labourer: His Home, Furniture, Clothing and Food from Tudor to Victorian Times (London: Batchworth Press, 1949). 33. Owens et al, ‘Fragments of the Modern City’, pp. 212–225; V.A. Crewe and D.M. Hadley, ‘“Uncle Tom was there, in crockery”: Material Culture and a Victorian Working-Class Childhood’, Childhood in the Past, 6 (2013), pp. 89–105. 34. For example, see: P. King, ‘Pauper Inventories’, pp. 155–191; A. Green, ‘Heartless and Unhomely? Dwellings of the poor in East Anglia and North-­East England’, in J. McEwan and P. Sharpe (eds), Accommodating Poverty: The Housing and Living Arrangements of the English poor, c. 1600–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), pp.  69–101; L.  Hoskins, ‘Reading the Inventory’; J. Harley, ‘Material Lives of the English Poor: A Regional Perspective, c.1670–1834’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Leicester, 2016); M.  Walker, ‘In the Inventories Deceased British Merchant Seafarers: Exploring Merchant Shipping and Material Culture, 1860–1880’, The International Journal of Maritime History, 31 (2019), pp.  330–346; S.  Horrell, J.  Humphries, and K.  Sneath, ‘Consumption Conundrums Unravelled’, Economic History Review, 68 (2015), pp.  830–857; A.  Helmreich, T.  Hitchcock, and J.  Turkel, ‘Rethinking Inventories in the Digital Age: The Case of the Old Bailey’, Journal of Art Historiography, 11 (2014), pp. 1–25; Styles, ‘Lodging at the Old Bailey’; S.  Horrell, J.  Humphries, and K.  Sneath, ‘Cupidity and Crime: Consumption as Revealed by Insights from the Old Bailey Records of Thefts in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, in M.  Casson and

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N.  Hashimzade (eds), Large Databases in Economic History Research Methods and Case Studies (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 246–267. 35. For example, see: G Jaritz (ed.), Emotions and Material Culture (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2003); S. Tarlow, ‘The Archaeology of Emotion and Affect’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 41 (2012), pp. 169–185; S. Broomhall (ed.), Emotions in the Household, 1200–1900 (Palgrave: Basingstoke, 2008); idem (ed.), Spaces for Feeling: Emotions and Sociabilities in Britain, 1650–1850 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015); S. Downes, S. Holloway, and S. Randles (eds), Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions through History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); S. Randles, ‘The Material World’, in K. Barclay, S. Crozier-De Rosa, and P.N. Stearns (eds), Sources for the History of Emotions: A Guide (London: Routledge, 2020), pp.  159–171; R.  Boddice and M.  Smith, Emotion, Sense, Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); R.  Boddice, The History of Emotions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), pp.  132–167; J.  Begiato, ‘Selfhood and “Nostalgia”: Sensory and Material Memories of the Childhood Home in Late Georgian Britain’, Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, 42 (2019), pp. 229–246. 36. For the most recent and detailed examination of working-class pet ownership and their place in family life, see J-M. Strange, ‘When John met Benny: Class, Pets, and Family Life in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain’, The History of the Family (published online 13 May 2021). 37. For example, see: P.  Horn, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant (Sutton, 1995); C.  Steedman, Labours Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); P. Sambrook, The Country House Servant (Stroud: Sutton, 1999). For further references see Chapter Eight. 38. There has been a substantial body of work undertaken on beds (and their meaning) in recent years, stretching from the medieval to the modern period. Spanning the period of the present book, see: Hamlett, Material Relations; Holmes, In Bed with the Victorians; Hoskins, ‘Reading the Inventory’, pp.  229–283; D. Hussey and M.  Ponsonby, The Single Homemaker and Material Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012); S.  Pennell, ‘Making the Bed in Later Stuart and Georgian England’, in J. Stobart and B. Blondé (eds), Selling Textiles in the Long Eighteenth Century: Comparative Perspectives from Western Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 30–45; M. Ponsonby, Stories from Home: English Domestic Interiors, 1750–1850 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). 39. Hamlett, At Home in the Institution.

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40. C.  Briganti and K.  Mezei (eds), The Domestic Space Reader (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2012), p. 6. 41. For example, see: Burnett, Useful Toil; Idem, Destiny Obscure; Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom; Roberts, A Woman’s Place; Burnett, Vincent and Mayall, Autobiography of the Working-Class; Ross, Love and Toil; Davin, Growing Up Poor; T.  Sokoll (ed.), Essex Pauper Letters, 1731–1837 (Oxford: British Academy/Oxford University Press, 2001); J.  Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); E.  Griffin, Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); J-M.  Strange, Fatherhood and the British Working Class; S.  King, Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s–1830s (London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019); E. Griffin, Bread Winner. 42. For example, see: Sokoll, Pauper Letters. Most recently, Steven King, sometimes with other authors, has used tens of thousands of pauper letters from across Britain during the Old and New Poor Laws to study the voices of paupers. Among others, see: S. King, Sickness, Medical Welfare and the English Poor 1750–1834 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018); Idem, Writing the Lives; S. King and P. Jones (eds), Navigating the Old English Poor Law: The Kirkby Lonsdale Letters, 1809–1836 (Oxford: British Academy/Oxford University Press, 2020); S. King and P. Jones, Pauper Voices, Public Opinion and Workhouse Reform in Mid-Victorian England: Bearing Witness (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2020). 43. P. King, ‘Pauper Inventories’, pp. 155–191. 44. For further information on how and why pauper inventories were made, as well as their shortcomings and advantages, see: J.  Harley (ed.), Norfolk Pauper Inventories, c.1690–1834 (Oxford: British Academy/Oxford University Press, 2020); idem, ‘Pauper Inventories, Social Relations, and the Nature of Poor Relief under the Old Poor Law, England, c.1601–1834’, Historical Journal, 62 (2019), pp. 375–398. 45. M. Hewitt, ‘District Visiting and the Constitution of Domestic Space in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, in I. Bryden and J. Floyd (eds), Domestic Space: Reading the Nineteenth-Century Interior (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 121–141. 46. For example, see: C.  Payne, ‘Rural Virtues for Urban Consumption: Cottage Scenes in Early Victorian Painting’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 3 (1998), pp. 45–68; J. Styles, The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); D.H.  Solkin, Painting Out of the Ordinary: Modernity and the Art of Everyday Life in Early-Nineteenth-Century Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); K.  D. M.  Snell, ‘In or Out of their Place: The

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Migrant Poor in English Art, 1740–1900’, Rural History, 24 (2013), pp.  73–100; R.  Duits (ed.), The Art of the Poor: The Aesthetic Material Culture of the Lower Classes in Europe 1300–1600 (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). Regarding photography, see: J. Hamlett, At Home in the Institution, chapters 1, 5, 6; R. Preston, ‘The Pastimes of the People: Photographing House and Garden in London’s Small Suburban Homes, 1880–1914’, London Journal, 39 (2014), pp. 205–226; R.L. Stein, ‘London’s Londons: Photographing Poverty in The People of the Abyss, Nineteenth Century Contexts, 22 (2001), pp. 587–629. 47. See endnote 34 above.

PART I

The Material Home

CHAPTER 2

‘I can barely provide the common necessaries of life’: Material Wealth over the Life-Cycle of the English Poor, 1790-1834 Joseph Harley

2.1   Introduction In 1901 B. Seebohm Rowntree published his ground-breaking research on York, in which he illustrated how individuals and their families were far more likely to be poor during several key moments in their lives. His model showed that impoverishment was more probable during childhood or when people had their own children, as the young were unable to

An earlier version of this chapter was given as a paper at the Economic and Social History of the Early Modern World Seminar at the IHR in London. I would like to thank the audience who asked some prying and interesting questions which helped to greatly improve the piece. Likewise, I appreciate the inputs of my colleagues who have been very generous with their time, including Paul Elliott, Freya Gowrley, Vicky Holmes, Erin Lafford, and Paul Whickman.

J. Harley (*) Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Harley et al. (eds.), The Working Class at Home, 1790–1940, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89273-9_2

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contribute to household earnings and there were more mouths to feed and bodies to clothe. When the children became old enough to move out, some parents would enjoy a few years of relative prosperity. This was interrupted when the couple became old as they struggled to work and their earnings declined. Sickness could impact families at any point, but during the later years of life various illnesses, infirmities and eventually death and burial were all omnipresent.1 Several historians have correctly argued that life was not always as neat as the model suggests or have emphasised how some phases of the life-cycle of poverty could be more important than others.2 Nevertheless, historians have found that experiences of poverty often follow this broad sequence and thus continue to use the model as a tool to conceptualise poverty.3 Research in recent years has used parts of the model to analyse changes in the labouring sorts’ consumption of goods. Beverley Lemire, Alexandra Shepard and others, for example, have shown that during more fruitful periods the poor were able to consume a wide range of items, but during difficult times they would often sell their possessions to make do. Their belongings were important stores of value which could be liquidated into cash or traded when needed.4 However, most of this research has concentrated on clothing and we have less sense of how the poor’s ownership and consumption of other items including fuel, food, and household goods could shift over the life course.5 This oversight is unfortunate considering that it was not just the ownership of clothing that was affected during these difficult junctures. Additionally, these studies have tended to offer only imprecise assertions as to the reasons and points when people struggled to make ends meet. Research on pawnshops, for example, has primarily focused on the sorts of goods that people pawned, rather than the types of individuals who used them.6 This chapter addresses these issues by examining how the poor’s ownership and ability to consume various items such as fuel, clothing, household goods, and food changed over the life-cycle and times of sickness. The focus is on Essex households during the final decades of the old poor law (c.1790-1834), but examples are also occasionally used from other counties. Pauper inventories, pauper letters, and autobiographies written by the poor are principally used. They have never been used in combination to examine consumption over the life-cycle. The sources indicate that during relatively prosperous years the poor consumed a wide range of goods including various foodstuffs and fuels, clothing, and myriad household possessions. However, during difficult periods such as old age and

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sickness, people often went cold as they could not afford fuel, their children became malnourished and ill-clothed, and many of their household goods were pawned or sold. Family priorities shifted at these points and people redirected their resources to acquiring the most basic items such as bread and medicine for their loved ones. Before proceeding it is important to outline what this chapter does not cover. The concluding decades of the old poor law have been characterised as ‘crisis’ years as more people became dependent upon poor relief and parish bills increased. The reasons for this are primarily economic and demographic. The country’s population was growing which meant that the labour market was overpopulated, wages lagged, and food became more expensive. The years also witnessed several notable harvest failures which meant that even more able-bodied men and their families required relief.7 This is a considerable area of the historiography, and the effect that these factors had on material wealth warrants investigation in its own right. Further to this, I will not be considering the detrimental effect that the irresponsible actions of individuals could have on households. As Emma Griffin has recently shown, when male breadwinners deserted their families or chose to prioritise drink, gambling, and other pursuits over supporting them, the result was often extreme hardship for their wives and children.8 This chapter will primarily concentrate on the effect that the life-cycle of poverty had on material wealth, while only mentioning these other factors when they exacerbated existing challenges such as old age and sickness.

2.2   Sources This chapter is based on autobiographies written by the poor and the analysis of pauper inventories and pauper letters from Essex. Wherever possible these sources have also been further contextualised through family reconstitution. Pauper inventories were made by poor law officials to record the household possessions of people while they were dependent on poor relief. Their goods would then normally revert back to the parish when they died and would be sold, used to furnish the parish workhouse/ poorhouse, or be given to other paupers. Ninety-two have been located for Essex for 1790 to 1834, but two have been excluded from this sample as they mainly list clothing and not household goods. They tended to be made of older parishioners who received a pension from the parish due to life-cycle related problems, such as the death of their partners. Research

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suggests that these sources are broadly representative of other paupers with similar problems who did not have their goods appraised by local authorities.9 Pauper letters were written when non-resident paupers (or scribes of some kind) wrote to ask for relief from ‘home’ parishes of settlement. This chapter uses 217 pauper letters that were sent within Essex between 1803 and 1835.10 A handful of autobiographies written by the poor themselves are also used. Pauper letters and autobiographies are particularly useful as they provide personal testimonies of poverty and material needs. Such first-hand accounts should, however, be read with caution as they may be inaccurate or even significantly under-record people’s needs. A number of writers outlined how they were struggling rather than specifying whether they needed food, clothing, and so on. Some chose to only mention their most pressing and expensive needs such as rent and medical bills, while others noted how they needed the ‘common necessaries of life’, indicating that they had a range of material needs. Writers may have also misremembered information or exaggerated certain aspects to portray themselves in a better light. Pauper letters are particularly shrouded in myriad rhetorical elements, intended to stress plight, and make their applications more powerful or pleasing to readers. Despite there being some element of fiction and minor embellishment in the letters and autobiographies, they are on the whole surprisingly honest sources and the writers were subject to checks by editors, poor law authorities, or neighbours.11 For example, parishes sometimes made surprise visits to pauper homes to check that their circumstances had not changed and that they were not being deceitful.12

2.3   Material Wealth and Material Poverty Pauper letters and autobiographies indicate that many people were lacking basic items to sustain the human body and warmth. Food made up half to three-quarters of working people’s yearly expenditure, meaning that hunger was fairly common.13 In 1824 Davey Rising wrote his home parish of Chelmsford to ask for assistance, remarking that he and his family had ‘not Ahad Abit of witells to Eat and I have not But my hand up to my mouth this Four days And I do not know when when I shall’.14 Various writers linked their ill-health to a lack of food. Samuel White of Halstead said that ‘I am recommended by the Docter to take nourishing things… to enable me to get that I may be the sooner restored to health and strength’ in 1828.15 William James was around 74 years old when he wrote to the overseer of St. Peter, Colchester in 1825 to plead for help:

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Yesterday I walked four Miles only = and through fatigue, and lack of strength, in the dark of the Evening, I was forced to sitt down, on a stop in a Vilage, fainting, and with much dificulty got home, this was Ocasioned, through want of Necessary Nourishment = and this day, I am very Unwell.16

Most of the documents comment on the absence of bread when food is mentioned, but other less essential provisions are also occasionally noted. In an earlier letter sent by William James, he stated that ‘it have not been in my power, to purchase any meat, these 6 weeks past, we have now a piece of Bread only, we are in want of every Necessary, for the support of Nature’.17 In 1827 he stressed how ‘both my self & daughter, are much reduced to a state of Extreme weakness, haveing chiefly fed on a scanty provision of bread & Potatoes’.18 Food was made even more difficult for the poor to acquire during periods of high prices and intermittent harvest failures. The Buckinghamshire labourer Joseph Mayett, for example, wrote how one failure meant that ‘bread was very dear’, which forced him into debt and left him to consider what to do with ‘very few of my goods that I had to sell’.19 The need for clothing and/or shoes is found in around one in six of the letters sampled here. The sources indicate that people generally did not just want new garments to update their wardrobes, but that their clothing had become so old and tattered that attire was needed for warmth and to be able to leave the home with some decency. In 1834 James Davey stated that ‘I am nearly naked my Self for I have not Get any Sharts nor StoCkens nor trouses to war hardly to Cover my nakedness’.20 The plight of vulnerable parishioners such as children was often stressed to encourage authorities to take action. William Ardley asserted that ‘my poor Children are in a Naked Situation’,21 while the son of Sarah Manning needed ‘Some Cloathes and Shoes as he is quite distress for he has no shoes hardly to his Feet’.22 The rhetoric of nakedness was common in pauper letters and was intended to illustrate how parishioners’ dignity had been compromised to invoke the parish’s moral responsibility to clothe its parishioners.23 The hearth was central to running the household and the wellbeing and comfort of inhabitants, through the light, warmth, and cooking facilities that it provided. It was a place where families would gather to work, discuss their days, and relax in the evenings. Fuel could, however, be lacking in pauper homes, making the hearth a less hospitable and useful space. In September 1811 Mary Mayden of Colchester stressed that ‘I can barely

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provide the common necessaries of life, & when the cold weather sets in it will not be in my power to purchase a sufficient quantity of Firing’.24 Ann Prig similarly asked for money ‘to enable me to get some Firing for the Winter’ in November of 1809.25 Most of the letters requesting fuel were written from paupers in urban spaces during the autumn and winter months, who would have struggled to source their own fuel from hedges and commons compared to their rural counterparts. In addition to food, clothing, and fuel, we have the fundamental need for shelter. Rent generally made up people’s second highest outgoing behind food and was requested or mentioned in around 15 per cent of the letters.26 Failure to pay one’s landlord could result in eviction, homelessness, material destitution and even imprisonment. Robert Griffith from Dedham said that ‘I have at this time a Distress in my house for the Sum of 6£ 7s 10d & my Goods will be sold on monday next if not paid’.27 Thomas Cleare of Braintree wrote that he had ‘sold my Linnen off my back’ to try and pay the rent and was worried that if he could not make up the shortfall he would be ‘turned into the Street & Loose my work for My Loom will be taken’.28 Harriet Twin said that she was ‘left only a few things to furnish a small house’, after recently pawning her late husband’s clothes ‘to defray the expence of moving here [Colchester] and the Rent of the house we inhabited at Glemsford’.29 Over the early nineteenth century the numbers of paupers who requested help to pay the rent appears to have gradually increased, which may indicate that meeting this requirement became increasingly difficult for tenants.30 These first-hand accounts clearly show that life for paupers could be extremely difficult when they lacked basic provisions. Pauper inventories generally do not record food, clothing, fuel, and rent arrears, but they do  allow us to study items related to cooking, the fireplace, and other household goods. The inventories overall appear to show much more positive results than the ego documents (Table  2.1). Pauper inventories should never be assumed to be complete, but the figures strongly suggest that by the 1790s pauper homes contained a wide range of goods which would have enabled them to live in relatively comfortable and well-­ equipped domestic environments. This was the result of the poor gradually consuming more goods from the proceeding decades, many of which were probably second hand.31 Bedsteads and mattresses were almost ubiquitous by the 1790s and just over half of the inventories recorded feather beds, while less comfortable flock and straw/chaff mattresses were recorded in 24 and 22 per cent of the inventories respectively. Chairs and

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Table 2.1  Percentage of pauper inventories which record various household items, 1790-1834 1790-1834 (%) Furniture Bed (bedstead and/or mattress) Bed (feather) Bed (flock) Bed (straw/chaff) Chair Chest of drawers Cupboard Stool Table (any type) Hearth and cooking goods Andirons/cobirons Bellows Boiler Fender Fire shovel Frying pan Gridiron Kettle Metal cooking pot Poker Saucepan Tongs Non-necessities Bed hangings Clock/watch Looking glass Picture Tea goods Warming pan Window curtains

99 51 24 22 93 44 68 49 92 19 56 48 21 21 44 24 23 10 31 31 53 36 27 33 12 72 40 11

tables were almost always noted in the inventories and on average each listed 5.8 chairs and 2.7 tables. These items were sometimes made from decorative and expensive materials. The 1807 inventory of Widow Piggot’s goods taken in Tolleshunt D’Arcy, for example, included a ‘Mahogny Tea Table’, alongside ‘½ doz. Beach Chairs’;32 while the inventory of Mrs Wiffen’s belongings taken several months earlier contained an ‘A Square oak Table & draw. & an Elm Table, Three Leather bottom’d Chairs, & 1

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Rush Do’.33 The poor also owned desirable, practical, and decorative storage items such as cupboards and chests of drawers in relatively high numbers. A wide range of hearth goods can be found in pauper homes. Items such as fenders and pokers tended to be used with coal so had very specific purposes, which suggests that maintaining a fire had become more sophisticated in poor abodes by the late eighteenth century. People appear to have had ample vessels and utensils to grill, roast, fry, bake, and toast various foods and thus potentially create diverse meals. Saucepans, for example, were introduced to pauper homes in greater numbers from the late eighteenth century and they helped to make cooking easier and more efficient as they heated quickly.34 Around one-third of the inventories included items described as ‘old’, but paupers also amassed a range of ‘luxury’ goods which were not necessary to support life and were often associated to decoration, status, vanity, and appearance.35 Looking glasses appear in 33 per cent of the inventories and allowed users to maintain their appearance and light their homes more efficiently. Tea goods were found in around three-fourths of pauper homes, showing that tea had gone from a rare luxury to a national drink of the English population over the long eighteenth century. Clocks/watches were heavily associated to respectability and status and can be found in at least 27 per cent of pauper inventories. Some of these goods would have been highly sought after. For example, the inventory of Thomas Baker’s goods recorded ‘An eight day Clock’ worth £3 3s.; John Whale’s home in Little Wakering contained a range of tea paraphernalia alongside ‘A Silver Spoone, Silver Sugar Nipers’; and Jon Millbank owned a ‘Swing [looking] glass’ worth 5s.36 The material wealth of the poor was, of course, smaller and much more modest than the middling sort who saw many of the same material alterations a century earlier,37 but for the poor themselves these changes were significant and show that their homes contained myriad possessions.

2.4   Material Culture Over the Life-cycle The ego documents and inventories reveal two opposing images of material life. On the one hand, the letters show that many parishioners could not afford sufficient clothing for their families and to keep them warm. Many lacked the most rudimentary items such as bread, resulting in ill-­ health and malnourishment. Pauper inventories, in contrast, show that commensurate to income the homes of the poor could be well equipped

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with a range of possessions, such as cooking vessels, hearth items, and ‘luxury’ goods. Owning an array of household goods was therefore not necessarily incompatible with struggling to feed and clothe oneself, but how do we account for these two polar accounts? The answer principally lies in the life-cycle of poverty and sickness. Many of the material goods that are listed in the pauper inventories had been amassed over many years, while purchases of fuel, clothing, and food were regular acquisitions, so when crisis hit it was these more perishable products that were missed first. The poor would sometimes sell their household goods to acquire these basic necessities and the inventories represent the goods that people owned after they had pawned and sold many of their possessions.38 The fact that some were able to retain a wide range of belongings after this is indicative of their changing desire to consume more goods and their amassing of items over a lifetime. It indicates that during relatively prosperous times in their lives they could own a considerable range of goods. However, during very precarious stages the poor’s material wealth shifted drastically as people relayed their resources to meeting their most fundamental needs such as medicine and food. Their material expectations at this point declined and many went without suitable clothing, food, and furniture to prevent total insolvency. This section will now examine these difficult phases and the effect that they had on material wealth. The poor could find themselves in material poverty at the start of their married lives. These years could be particularly challenging when people married young or were expecting. Hugh Constable was approximately 19-21 years old when he wrote to the overseer of Chelmsford in 1827 to ask for help to marry his fiancé Susan Rising, who was around the same age.39 He said ‘I am very willing to Marry her but am quite unable to defray the expences of marrying or Getting a few Household Goods’.40 The autobiography of the Lancashire mechanic/turner Benjamin Shaw reveals how the first months of marriage could be particularly difficult. He was still an apprentice when he wed his pregnant partner Betty in September 1793 and both were only 20 years old.41 The costs of setting up a new home meant that they could not afford many goods and that Benjamin made some of the items himself: we went to [our] House by our selves & had nothing to put in it, But a bed that [was] my fathers and me at dolphinholme, & Betty had a box for Cloaths, & a pair of tongs, & a fue pots, &c I made each of us a knife & fork, & 2 Stools, we got a pan, & a looking glass, & a few trifles …42

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The couple moved into their new home during the winter and they struggled to keep warm and feed themselves. Benjamin remarked that ‘coals were very dear here then… and turf was dear, & the house was very cold, we were nearly Starved’. The family resorted to ‘gather sticks’ and ‘fetch seeds to burn &c’.43 Many newlyweds had little choice but to move in with one of their parents or live somewhere as lodgers.44 When Benjamin and Betty Shaw’s 19-year-old son Thomas married his pregnant partner Ann in October 1826,45 Thomas had been out of work for eleven months and so the couple were forced to live with his parents for 9s. a week. After Thomas found employment the couple ‘got a few thing & we [Benjamin and Betty] found them a few more & and they went to house near the 3 tons north road’.46 The early years of marital life could therefore be marked by owning few possessions, due to the high costs of setting up a new home, rent, and the expense of the wedding. It was also not unusual for couples to rush marriage despite it not making economic sense as they were expecting a child.47 Some people made ends meet at this point by making their own furniture, foraging for materials, or relying on parental assistance. Couples were generally at the peak of their earning powers when they were in their 20s and 30s, but at these ages people had most of their children. When Benjamin and Betty Shaw’s second child arrived in July 1795, he noted how ‘I had 4 to keep with 14s a week, and few good in the house, & bread very dear, &c’.48 Samuel White was around 36 years old and earning 15s. a week in 1825 when he wrote the overseer to say that ‘flour and other nessecerais’ are ‘dearer’ since ‘one Death and two Births in the house’.49 In October 1828 he and his wife had eight children to support, including a newborn and six that were under 10 years old.50 He noted how ‘I am quite unable to feed and Clothe so many by my own earnings’.51 Writing in Springfield in 1809, Thomas Sagger asked for ‘a months pay’ as ‘our Children all eat so very harty that it Costs me 15 shillings a weak for flowr’ and ‘I Cand do to fill their bellys’.52 These problems were often perpetuated by economic factors such as stagnating wages, seasonal unemployment, and underemployment. Elizabeth Davey in 1833, for example, stressed how ‘my Famileay Is very Large and my husbands Irnasings are so small that I find It hard to git my children brad’.53 Most children did not enter employment until they were between seven to eleven years old and their wages tended to be around half of that of an adult.54 Moreover, average family size was increasing due to more people getting married at an earlier age from the late eighteenth century.55 This

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put a lot of pressure on parents to provide for their families and could lead to material hardships. Sickness is not technically part of the life-cycle of poverty, but it was often more probable and dangerous to people during certain stages of their lives such as childhood and old age and had a significant impact on material wealth. Steven King recently used nearly 13,000 letters written by paupers and officials to show that sickness was a common feature among indigent populations and that parishes allocated large amounts of money and resources to assisting the sick.56 This, albeit much smaller sample of letters, reveals similar trends to King and adds to this by showing how ill-­ health could spell material destitution for families. A range of illnesses and injuries are recorded in the letters, such as smallpox and broken bones, as well as instances of disability. The stresses of sickness were amplified when the main wage-earner was unwell. John Hall was a journeyman fellmonger and increasingly struggled to find work during the 1810s. In 1819 at 52 years old his situation worsened when he said ‘I Am Lame in my Leg through A Strain & am unable To Work’.57 George Webb Baynell also injured himself, saying ‘i have had a dad eye for a weak... so that i have not bean able to work through a pin getting in to it’.58 This could be particularly emasculating and disheartening for men who had to outline their shortcomings as providers for their families.59 During periods of unemployment brought on by ill-health, families needed to make cutbacks and sold off their belongings to make ends meet. In 1826 John Hall, now 59, wrote a letter to Chelmsford parish, indicating that as a result of his daughter being too sick to stay in service they had ‘Sold all my things Except my bed’. He asked the overseer to ‘Be so kind as to Send me A Something to buy her A Bed I Will get A fue things’.60 The 1806 autobiography of the vagrant Mary Saxby said that while her husband was unwell, ‘Our custom was, to go round the neighbouring villages, to sell our goods, and return at night’.61 Correspondence in this sample which recorded sickness increased from 52 per cent between 1800-1819 to 64 per cent between 1820-1835.62 This indicates that the numbers of sick poor or paupers who saw healthcare and medicine as a fundamental role of the parish was sizeable and possibly growing.63 It was often beyond the means of the poor to pay bills for doctors, nurses, carers, or medicine themselves. The average wage of labourers in Essex was approximately 9s. to 12s. per week at the turn of the century,64 making it very difficult for them to save a few shillings let alone the amount needed for healthcare. J.  B. Crowest in Upminster

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asserted that there was a ‘late long, & serious affliction’ on his family, meaning that ‘The Doctor’s Bill (which is only in part) amounts to more than £12’. He claimed that ‘I find myself yet much insolved… it will be impossible for me to extricate myself’.65 For paupers who received a pension from the parish this was rarely enough to cover medicine or healthcare. In 1824 the c.32-year-old Mary Baynes was under the care of her mother, Sarah, as she was ‘suffering from deseased lungs’. This resulted in a prodigious bill of £4 12s. 6d. from the apothecary, which compelled her mother to ask for additional help from authorities as ‘I am unable to Discharge it, having an allowance of only 2s pr Week from this Parish’.66 Household priorities shifted during times of sickness and many would sell possessions and redirect funds from rent, fuel, poor rates, and clothing to healthcare for their loved ones. For example, during the 1820s Samuel White’s wife Ann appears to have had a stroke, which meant that she needed a nurse. Their young children also required assistance on several occasions for measles and various other conditions. He wrote that from Ann’s ‘late atack she has not the full use of her left arm and her mental faculties are in a very weak state’.67 Samuel said that she has been ‘unable to Do for her Family... in such a state of stupidety and forgetfulness’ and that ‘her Paralattic attack Prevents her been able to earn any thing’.68 This meant that Samuel had been ‘unable to feed and Clothe so many by my own earnings’ and that he struggled to keep the fires in his house burning.69 Some paupers did not survive their sicknesses and their families were left in both emotional and material turmoil. From the passing of their husbands, women particularly found themselves in much reduced circumstances. Many widows were forced to downgrade their homes and material goods, as they lost their partner’s pay and were left to support themselves and any children they may have had on menial pay.70 Mary Saxby, for instance, recounted how she was left ‘a poor disconsolate widow, with five children, four of them young’ when her husband died. This meant that she fell ‘deeply in debt’ and ‘sold what I had, and discharged all our debts... I then applied to the parish for assistance: and, for a short time, they gave me three shillings weekly, but soon reduced this allowance’.71 Losing children was also a common occurrence over the life-cycle and families would ask parishes for help with burial costs. In 1805 Hannah Wall wrote the overseer of Rainham stating: my youngest Child Died this Morning... the Child has been Poorly this month Back, and has run me to a deal of Expence with Doctor & Medecins,

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I hope you will send me what Money you Think will Bury him, as to my Other Child, he is almost Naked for want of Cloths, and what to do I dont know, I am So much Distrested as to myself, my Cloths are all in the Pawn Brokers I hope you will send me Relief as Soon as Possible as I am greatley Distrest…72

From this one example a number of facets relating to material poverty can be noted. First, the writer highlighted how sudden illness can strike and how quickly bills for medicine, healthcare, and funeral costs can build up. Second, she revealed that these financial burdens had resulted in the pawning of goods and the neglect of other important material needs such as clothing for her other child. Finally, and perhaps most strikingly, she wrote this letter on the morning of her son’s death, so desperate was her financial need. At least one in ten of the paupers who wrote letters were old and/or lived with elderly family members.73 The letters indicate that most people had little expectation of retirement and laboured until they were physically incapable or died.74 They reveal that elderly people often felt a sense of shame as they could not work as intensely as they once could due to infirmity and their loss of strength and dexterity. These difficulties are best exemplified through the 53 letters of William James. He was around 67-69 when he wrote his first letter in 1818 and was 77-79 years old when he wrote the last in 1828.75 Over the course of his letters he contracted rheumatism, grew weaker, and his sight began to fail. He said that ‘at our advanced Age, these things are hard’ and that ‘I experience the decays of Nature so much, that I cannot work as I have done’.76 Unable to keep up with younger workers, he was paid less than them in his role as a bell hanger or labourer.77 William also became more susceptible to falls: ‘standing on the top of a pair of steps, & the string breaking, they fell, & myself with them... which Injured me, so much in my side & Arm, that I could not stir, nor speak for some minutes’.78 William’s mental health suffered as a result of this and he was less able to acquire basic necessities for his family. He stated ‘my Spirits & strength are Quite worn down – Eye sight fail me so much, that I cannot see to do any thing by Candle light & work so little to do  – & Strength failing me, that I cannot Earn enough to get bread’.79 In 1822 he said that ‘we live very scantily & hard’ and ‘my Earnings have been but small... with which we cannot procure Necessaries, to support health nor Nature’.80 On top of this his elderly wife (born c.1748-1749) and adult daughter (born c.1777) were often unwell.81 This

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led to declining levels of material wealth and a growing dependence on the parish and friends to support their material needs. In 1818, for instance, William stated that ‘the things we have, are only our Bed, & a few things bought in for us, by a friend or two, when my things were sold of… so that none of them are mine’.82 Such stories of multiple levels of struggle were common among the elderly. In fact, every letter that records old age also mentions sickness and/or infirmity of some sort. Furthermore, underemployment was more common among the aged, owing to the fact that employers probably chose younger workers over them. In total, 58 per cent of the letters which note old age also mentioned underemployment, while in contrast underemployment was recorded in 38 and 18 per cent of the letters written by widows/widowers and married couples respectively. Ego documents clearly outline that during times of poverty the poor would often turn to selling their possessions to make ends meet. Pauper inventories occasionally record this process. The 1792 inventory of John Suckling’s belongings, for example, listed ‘A Clock pawned to Mr Clay’ for £2.83 More speculatively, one can use multiple inventories for the same paupers to examine how the poor’s ownership of household goods changed over time. This approach is somewhat tentative, since one should never assume that inventories are complete. Yet, in nearly every example the material wealth of paupers appears to have declined over time, indicating that their power to consume goods declined when they were on poor relief and that they would sell and pawn their belongings to make thrift. Figures 2.1 and 2.2 record the possessions of two paupers who had their goods appraised in pauper inventories and workhouse admittance inventories (which record the possessions that the poor owned when they moved from outdoor to indoor relief).84 The first inventory of c.58-year-old Daniel Drake’s possessions records 34 goods,85 while the second inventory taken 11 years later only records 15 (Fig.  2.1). There is a similar decline in the number of items across the two inventories of spinster Rhoda Cook’s belongings, from around 52  in 1808 to 14  in 1809 (Fig.  2.2). Both inventories also record smaller varieties of possessions over time. The second inventory of Daniel Drake’s goods did not record candlesticks, various tools, and fire irons that are listed in the first source. Likewise, the latter inventory of Rhoda Cook’s possessions was missing a feather bed, chest of drawers, chair, stools, tables, linen, cooking vessels and fire irons. Both paupers had received money and relief in kind from their parishes for a number of years and ended up in the workhouse. Daniel Drake’s relief, for example, included £1 6s. towards his rent in

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Pauper inventory, 1805 Danl

Drakes Goods

Octr.

15 1805

1 Sacken Bedsted & flock Bed 1 Blanket & Sheet 1 Coverlet & Pilloes 3 Tables 3 Chairs 1 Spinning Wheel 2 Boxes & Stool 1 Tea Kettle & Tin Boiler 1 Bellows fender & fire Shovel 2 Candlesticks Warming Pan Tongs Box iron 1 old Saw & waterpot 1 Frying pan Dish & pan 1 Saw Trammell 1 Hammer

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Workhouse admittance-related inventory, 1816 1816 Jan-y 3

An Inventory of Danl Drakes articles Removed To the Workhouse 3 Tables 2 Cheers Bedstead with Sacking Bottom 1 Hutch 2 Boxes Tea Kettle a five pint Bottle 1 Tin Saucepan 1 Old flock Bed 1 Blacket & Coverlet

Fig. 2.1  Inventories of Daniel Drake’s possessions in Little Waltham, 1805 and 1816. Essex Record Office D/P 220/18/7; D/P 220/12/4

Pauper inventory, 1808 Inventory Of Rhoda Cook’s Goods taken 25th Feby.1808. – r

A sq . Deal Table, a round Table & three Chairs, a kneading-trough, Scales & 1 p’r Weight, pr. Bellows, Trevett, Fender, poker, Tongs, Fryg.pan, Box Iron & 2 Heaters, 1 Iron Candle Stick & 3 broken ones, –a Sping. Wheel, a pail & Wash tub, a Safe & small Tub, 2 Stools & Clothe Basket, a Small Chest of Drawers, 2 Feather Beds –2 pr. Sheets, 2 pr. Blankets, & 2 Coverlets –2 Stump Bed-Steads, 5 Curtain rods & 1 Curtain a hand Basket & an Oldpr. Racks –

Workhouse admittance-related inventory, 1809 Accot. of Rhoda Cooks Goods carried into the Workhouse Septr 30th. 1809. Stump Bedstead, Feather Bed & 2 pillows – 2 Sheets, 1 Blanket & a Coverlet, a Deal Safe, 2 Chairs & a Linnen Basket, a Wash Tub and an Oak Box –

Fig. 2.2  Inventories of Rhoda Cook’s possessions in Tolleshunt D’arcy, 1808 and 1809. Essex Record Office D/P 105/8/2

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October 1805 and Rhoda Cook received 1-2s. per week along with flour, coal, clothing, and shoes from the parish.86 They were thus struggling like their counterparts in the pauper letters and probably used their household goods to their advantage to alleviate their problems.

2.5   Conclusion The literature on material culture and consumption in poor households has been relatively positive in recent years, emphasising how the poor acquired new foods, clothing, and household goods from the early modern period.87 Pauper inventories record the possessions of people who were reliant on parish funds and had gone through episodes of selling their goods when crisis struck. The fact that these sources generally record a variety of possessions strongly suggests that there were significant material advances for the poor, and that some could amass a considerable range of possessions. It is, however, important to not present too Whiggish an interpretation of change and remember that gains could be very precarious. When sickness, death, or other challenges of the life course struck first-hand accounts almost ubiquitously record how people struggled to pay rent and feed and clothe themselves. Household goods were often sold or pawned at this point to pay bills and acquire necessities such as food and medicine. This chapter offers an important intervention by showing how people could go through several cycles of being materially rich and materially poor over their lifetimes. It shows that the poor were not passive victims of their circumstances, but would take active steps to address their problems and keep their heads above water. People still had agency and used their items, or even their lack of belongings, to their advantage. Many paupers pointed out how destitute they were of food, clothing, and household goods to get help from parochial authorities, while others would choose which items they wanted to sell or pawn to make ends meet. Thus, even in the bleakest households people could make some decisions over their own fates and would use whatever means they could to avert disaster.

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Notes 1. B.S. Rowntree, Poverty: A Study of Town Life, 3rd edn. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1902). 2. For example, B. Reay, Rural Englands: Labouring Lives in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp.  81-82; S.  Shave, ‘The Dependent Poor? (Re)constructing the Lives of Individuals “on the parish” in Rural Dorset, 1800-1832’, Rural History, 20 (2009), pp. 67-97. 3. Such as: T.  Wales, ‘Poverty, Poor Relief and Life-Cycle: Some Evidence from Seventeenth Century Norfolk’, in R.M. Smith (ed.), Land, Kinship and Life-­Cycle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 351-404; S.  Williams, Poverty, Gender and Life-Cycle under the English Poor Law 1760-­1834 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2011), pp.  101-130; S.  King, Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s-1830s (London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019), pp. 282-308. 4. B. Lemire, The Business of Everyday Life: Gender, Practice and Social Politics in England, c.1600-1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), pp. 82-109; A. Tomkins, The Experience of Urban Poverty, 1732-82: Parish, Charity and Credit (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), pp. 204-234; J. Styles, The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-­Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp.  229-245; A.  Toplis, The Clothing Trade in Provincial England 1800-1850 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), pp. 135-138, 146-149; A.  Shepard, Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status, and the Social Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 277-302. 5. There are, of course, exceptions such as: J. Harley, ‘Material Lives of the Poor and their Strategic Use of the Workhouse during the Final Decades of the English Old Poor Law’, Continuity and Change, 30 (2015), pp. 90-95; Shepard, Accounting for Oneself, pp. 277-302. 6. For example, Lemire, Business, pp. 90-97. 7. For further information, see: P. Dunkley, The Crisis of the Old Poor Law in England 1795–1834: An Interpretive Essay (London: Garland Publishing, 1982). 8. E.  Griffin, Bread Winner: An Intimate History of the Victorian Economy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), pp. 109-134, 147-152. 9. J. Harley, ‘Consumption and Poverty in the Homes of the English Poor, c. 1670-1834’, Social History, 43 (2018), pp.  81-104. For further background information on pauper inventories, see: idem, Norfolk Pauper Inventories, c. 1690-1834 (Oxford: British Academy/Oxford University Press, 2020); idem, ‘Pauper Inventories, Social Relations and the Nature of Poor Relief under the Old Poor Law, England c. 1601-1834’, Historical Journal, 62 (2019), pp. 375-398.

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10. These letters are transcribed in T.  Sokoll (ed.), Essex Pauper Letters, 1731-1837 (Oxford: British Academy/Oxford University Press, 2001). 11. As starting points for further information on these two sources, see: ibid.; King, Writing; E.  Griffin, Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), pp. 5-10; Griffin, Bread Winner, pp. 8-23. 12. King, Writing, pp. 40-42; Harley, Norfolk Pauper Inventories, pp. 67-68. 13. C.  Shammas, The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 123-133; C. Muldrew, Food, Energy and the Creation of Industriousness: Work and Material Culture in Agrarian England, 1550-1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 29; Griffin, Bread Winner, pp. 193-226. 14. Sokoll, Pauper Letters, p. 177. 15. Ibid., p. 263. 16. Ibid., p. 458. My italics. 17. Ibid., p. 409. 18. Ibid., p. 477. 19. A.  Kussmaul (ed.), The Autobiography of Joseph Mayett of Quainton (1783-1839) (Chesham: Buckingham Record Society, 1986), p. 65. 20. Sokoll, Pauper Letters, p. 533. 21. Ibid., p. 170. 22. Ibid., p. 281. 23. King, Writing, pp. 266-267; P. Jones, ‘“I cannot keep my place without being deascent”: Pauper Letters, Parish Clothing and Pragmatism in the South of England, 1750-1830’, Rural History, 20 (2009), pp. 33-38. 24. Sokoll, Pauper Letters, p. 376. 25. Ibid., p. 567. 26. F.M. Eden, The State of the Poor, Vols. 1-3 (London: J. Davis, 1797), passim; D. Davies, The Case of Labourers in Husbandry (London: G.G. and J. Robinson, 1795), passim. 27. Sokoll, Pauper Letters, p. 250. 28. Ibid., p. 104. 29. Ibid., p. 280. 30. Between 1800-1819 the need for rent was recorded in 8 per cent of letters (n=48), but between 1820-1835 it was noted in 17 per cent (n=164). More tentatively, between 1800-1815 it was not recorded in any letters (n=16), but 16 per cent 1816-1835 (n=196). 31. These changes in consumption are summarised in: J. Harley, ‘Consumption and Material Culture of Poverty in Early-Modern Europe, c. 1450-1800’, in D. Hitchcock and J. McClure (eds), The Routledge History of Poverty, 1450-1800 (London: Routledge, 2021), pp. 185-205. 32. Essex Record Office (ERO) D/P 105/8/1.

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33. Ibid. 34. J. Harley, ‘Material Lives of the English Poor: A Regional Perspective, c. 1670-1834’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Leicester, 2016), pp. 134, 136-137. 35. For further information on ‘luxury’ goods, see: M.  Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 36. ERO D/P 219/12/29; ERO D/P 194/18/4; ERO D/P 220/18/7. 37. L.  Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain 1660-1760, 2nd edn. (London: Routledge, 1996); M. Overton, J. Whittle, D. Dean, and A. Hann, Production and Consumption in English Households, 1600-1750 (London: Routledge, 2004). 38. Harley, Norfolk Pauper Inventories, pp. 64-65; idem, ‘Consumption and Poverty’, p. 102. 39. Age calculated from: National census, 1841. 40. Sokoll, Pauper Letters, p. 258. 41. A.  G. Crosby (ed.), The Family Records of Benjamin Shaw Mechanic of Dent, Dolphinholme and Preston, 1772-1841 (Stroud: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1991), pp. xvi, 120. 42. Ibid., p. 32. 43. Ibid., p. 32. 44. V.  Holmes, In Bed with the Victorians: The Life-Cycle of Working-Class Marriage (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 15-33. 45. Crosby, Benjamin Shaw, pp. lxxv-lxxvi. 46. Ibid., p. 97. 47. G.  Frost, Promises Broken: Courtship, Class, and Gender in Victorian England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), pp. 98-117. 48. Crosby, Benjamin Shaw, p. 34. 49. ERO D/CR 164; Sokoll, Pauper Letters, p. 215. 50. ERO D/P 36/28/3; Sokoll, Pauper Letters, pp. 264, 270. 51. Sokoll, Pauper Letters, p. 270. 52. Ibid., p. 566. 53. Ibid., p. 529. 54. Griffin, Liberty’s Dawn, pp. 60, 64, 68-78; J. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 176; Muldrew, Food, pp. 233-234. 55. E.  A. Wrigley and R.  S. Schofield, The Population History of England 1541-1871: A Reconstruction, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 208, 431. 56. S.  King, Sickness, Medical Welfare and the English Poor, 1750-1834 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018).

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57. Sokoll, Pauper Letters, 316; P.  Sharpe, ‘“The bowels of compation”: A Labouring Family and the Law, c.1790-1834’, in T. Hitchcock, P. King, and P.  Sharpe (eds), Chronicling Poverty: The Voices and Strategies of the English Poor, 1640-1840 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997), pp. 90-91. 58. Sokoll, Pauper Letters, p. 510. 59. A.  Tomkins, ‘“Labouring on a bed of sickness”: The Material and Rhetorical Deployment of Ill-Health in Male Pauper Letters’, in A. Gestrich, E. Hurren, and S. King (eds), Poverty and Sickness in Modern Europe: Narratives of the Sick Poor, 1780-1938 (London: Continuum, 2012), pp. 51-68. 60. Sokoll, Pauper Letters, p. 326; Sharpe, ‘Bowels’, p. 90. 61. M.  Saxby, Memoirs of a Female Vagrant (London: J.  W. Morris, 1806), p. 25. 62. In contrast, the numbers of letters which noted bills for doctors and medicine were relatively consistent over the same period (21 and 18 per cent respectively). 63. King also found that the frequency, duration, and costs of sicknesses was potentially increasing among the English poor over time. King, Sickness, Medical Welfare, pp. 33-68, 115-118. 64. R. Wall, ‘Families in Crisis and the English Poor Law as Exemplified by the Relief Programme in the Essex Parish of Ardleigh 1795-7’, in E. Ochiai (ed.), The Logic of Female Succession: Rethinking Patriarchy and Patrilineality in Global and Historical Perspective (Kyoto: International Research Center for Japanese Studies, 2003), p.  105; W.  Page and J. Horace Round (eds), The Victoria History of the County of Essex. Vol. 2 (London: Constable, 1907), p. 342. 65. Sokoll, Pauper Letters, p. 624. 66. Ibid., 195-196; ERO D/P 94/18/55. 67. Sokoll, Pauper Letters, p. 233. 68. Ibid., pp. 235, 264. 69. Ibid., pp. 241, 270. 70. Holmes, In Bed, pp. 83–102; J-M. Strange, Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, 1870-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 195-203. 71. Saxby, Memoirs, pp. 51-52. 72. Sokoll, Pauper Letters, p. 562. 73. This figure is based on the writer identifying themselves or members of their family as old. Thus, it is a subjective category and under-represents the numbers of elderly writers as some failed to mention it. 74. Empirical research on census materials supports this supposition. For example: Matthew Woollard, ‘The Employment and Retirement of Older

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Men, 1851-1881: Further Evidence from the Census’, Continuity and Change, 17 (2002), pp. 445-447. 75. Sokoll, Pauper Letters, p. 390; ERO D/P 178/1/15; ERO T/R 300/1. 76. Sokoll, Pauper Letters, pp. 409, 413. 77. Ibid., pp. 411, 414, 417. 78. Ibid., p. 479. 79. Ibid., pp. 483-484. 80. Ibid., pp. 414, 417. 81. Sokoll, Pauper Letters, p. 390; ERO T/R 61/3; ERO D/P 178/1/4. 82. Sokoll, Pauper Letters, p. 390. 83. ERO D/P 219/12/29. 84. For more information on workhouse admittance inventories see: Harley, ‘Material Lives of the Poor and their Strategic Use of the Workhouse’, pp. 71-103. 85. Age calculated from ERO D/P 105/1/19. 86. ERO D/P 220/12/3; ERO D/P 105/8/1-2. 87. For an overview of this literature, see: J.  Harley, ‘Consumption and Material culture’.

CHAPTER 3

Politicising the English Working-Class Home, c.1790–1820 Ruth Mather

3.1   Introduction On a cold, rainy evening in 1817, the Middleton weaver Samuel Bamford returned to his cottage after a few days as a fugitive, evading the attentions of the law amid a crackdown on radical activity following the attempted March of the Blanketeers. Remembering that night while writing his

This research was conducted with assistance from the Economic History Society and a Principal’s PhD Scholarship from Queen Mary, University of London. I am grateful to Amanda Vickery and Barbara Taylor for their support and guidance whilst working on the initial research and to the editors of this volume for their patience and insight which have greatly improved this piece for publication. Writing this in 2020-21, when the boundaries between home and work have blurred considerably for so many of us, I would also like to thank my family for their support with balancing both in order to complete this work.

R. Mather (*) Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Harley et al. (eds.), The Working Class at Home, 1790–1940, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89273-9_3

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memoir a couple of decades later, Bamford transported his audience to the doorstep and extended his hospitality to the reader: come in from the frozen rain… Now down a step or two.—‘Tis better to keep low in the world than to climb only to fall…. A glimmer shews that the place is inhabited; that the nest has not been rifled while the old bird was away … A second door opens, and a flash of light shows that we are in a weaving room, clean and flagged, and in which are two looms with silken work of green and gold … Observe the room and its furniture. A humble but cleanly bed, screened by a dark old fashioned curtain, stands on our left. At the foot of the bed is a window closed from the looks of all street passers. Next are some chairs, and a round table of mahogany; then another chair, and next to it a long table, scoured very white. Above that is a looking glass with a picture on each side, of the resurrection and ascension on glass, ‘copied from Rubens’. A well-stocked shelf of crockery ware is the next object, and in a nook near it are a black oak carved chair or two, with a curious desk, or box, to match; and lastly, above the fire-place, are hung a rusty basket hilted sword, and old fuse, and a leathern cap. Such are the appearance and furniture of that humble abode … Such were the treasures I had hoarded in that lowly cell.1

Bamford’s detailed description of his domestic interior is surprising for two reasons. Firstly, as noted in the introduction to this volume, the nineteenth-­century working-class home of the popular imagination is a desolate, overcrowded, under-furnished, unhygienic space. Bamford’s home, as he described it, was humble, but clean and cosy. The objects he remarked upon included decorative items and curiosities, suggesting that the Bamford household had opportunities to display their aesthetic preferences. It was clearly an interior of which he was proud; a scene he thought it was important to display for his readers. We might also be surprised to find such a detailed description of a domestic interior in an autobiography devoted to the political life of its author, as was Passages in the Life of a Radical. Bamford’s memoir primarily aimed to provide an account of his experiences in the early-nineteenth century movement for political reform. Bamford was not, however, alone among his radical colleagues in making extensive reference to his home— his fellow autobiographer, Francis Place, also described his various living spaces in detail, while references to domestic life appear in countless radical speeches and pamphlets from the period. This implies that the working-­ class home has been overlooked as a political site, and I suggest here that

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the home was important to working-class radicals because it influenced both their political outlook and the opportunities they had to participate in political activity. Exploring the political potential of the working-class home also offers the opportunity to dispel the grim stereotypes of these dwellings, demonstrating the ways in which working-class people negotiated undeniable economic and spatial constraints to create meaningful living spaces that represented some of their own desires and ideals. Domestic space was both implicitly and explicitly politicised in late-­ eighteenth and early-nineteenth century England, as working-class homes formed the locus for a number of intersecting concerns including anxieties around the pace of industrial change, the growth of a consumer society, and the spread of democratic ideals among working-class people in the wake of the American and French Revolutions. David Solkin, in his exploration of nineteenth-century artistic depictions of ‘everyday life’, has argued that such images—including working-class domestic interiors— proliferated as part of ‘a wide range of efforts to find out more about the “character and condition” of the ‘common people’ on behalf of a British governing class alarmed by a ‘chronically restive plebeian subculture’.2 These efforts included not just ‘cottage door’ painting, depicting a reassuringly simple and rural labouring class, but also a growing body of ‘scientific’ investigations into the living conditions of working people. As Sandra Sherman has pointed out, the statistical accounts of poverty that flourished around the turn of the century de-individuated the poor, reducing them to numbers rather than subjective beings and failing to take account of their preferences or customary expectations while prescribing standardised, utilitarian solutions to poverty.3 Thus middle- and upper-­ class readers and viewers could reassure themselves that working-class people lived in plentiful simplicity, with any deprivation resulting from individual carelessness or poor judgement, rather than any structural cause. Frederick Morton Eden, for example, suggested that poverty could be accredited either to ‘life of idleness [in preference] to hard work and good wages’ or to ‘ignorance, custom or prejudice … improvident systems in dress, diet and in other branches of private expenditure’.4 The working-­ class home was thus subject to both surveillance and potentially hostile judgement. At the same time, moralising sermons and pamphlets including Hannah More’s popular Cheap Repository Tracts sought to dissuade the poor from political activity and convince them that the route to betterment was instead through prayer and industry. The idealised cosy rural cottage in art

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and literature acted to delegitimise the complaints of working-class people regarding the instability of their economic circumstances at a time when they endured high taxation (without political representation) to fund the wars against France. A series of poor harvests and, in 1815, the return of large numbers of demobilised soldiers compounded the financial difficulties endured by working-class people, yet their homes were portrayed as peaceful sites of rustic plenty. These cottage scenes were also contrasted with the imagined degradation of French Revolutionary homes as part of a culture war between English radicals and those loyal to the existing political order.5 As I have discussed elsewhere, radicals sought to counter this narrative by emphasising their own attachment to home and the role of government and employers in undermining their ability to maintain a respectable household.6 In this chapter, I want to look more closely at the role of the home itself as a physical space enmeshed in complex power relations, and how this affected and was affected by radical politics in this period.

3.2   Sources It is not possible to entirely separate representations of the working-class home from their material reality. The former influenced the ways in which domestic spaces were experienced and recorded, and vice versa. The published autobiographies of men like Samuel Bamford and Francis Place were carefully crafted with an eye to posterity and a desire to emphasise their own positive traits and to promote their political ambitions. Thus the cottage description above emphasises Bamford’s own humility (‘Tis better to keep low in the world …’), clean and tidy habits (the well-swept floor and scoured table), and, in the multitude of curious objects, ability to provide beyond the bare necessities of life.7 The cottage he described would not be out of place in a Cheap Repository Tract as the home of a modest, hardworking family, were it not for the context of Bamford’s return from political exile. This perhaps reveals the normative power of literary and artistic representations of the working-class home. Certainly, radical writing and speeches of the period were attuned to the emotive power of the domestic and particularly of the family in crisis.8 In turn, depictions of the working-class home needed to have at least some basis in reality to be believable to the reader or viewer, so the images and literary representations of the working-class home discussed here are understood

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to have both influenced and been influenced by the material realities of working-class domestic space.9 The representations of home within the memoirs of Bamford and Place act as case studies for this chapter, illustrating the meanings and practices of home-making for two working-class radical men, though with the recognition that their experiences were not necessarily representative of their class or of the radical movement more generally. Their accounts are therefore examined alongside evidence from images, inventories, social commentary, and archaeology in an attempt to understand working-class homes from the perspective of some of the people who lived within them. There is a regional focus on London, where Place lived, and the Pennine region around Manchester and Bamford’s Middleton home. These regions were subject to considerable social, economic, and political change in the early nineteenth century. Both also produced active radical movements, whose activities were chronicled in the local press and in the concerned communications of local magistrates, creating a rich record for historians. This study identifies common themes across the varied source material to counter the drawbacks of using any one form of evidence in isolation. The shortcomings of the autobiographical representations of home are noted above, and likewise, as Sherman has demonstrated, the ostensibly objective investigations of social observers such as Patrick Colquhoun or Frederick Morton Eden were built upon their own preconceived expectations and moral judgements.10 Inventories and surviving material culture alone tell us little about what the objects that furnished a home meant to its occupants, or the routines that shaped or were shaped by their use. It is only in reading across these sources that we can see how the spaces and objects associated with home were politicised, with implications for both the political outlook of working-class radicals and the opportunities they had to participate in political action. We can also recognise that a too-­ heavy reliance on accounts of social reformers, sources that were themselves political, has influenced our understanding of working-class homes, denying the individuality, humanity, and agency of their occupants. I have used the term ‘working class’ here to refer to a group who were keenly aware that their subsistence depended on remuneration for the labour of their own hands (or that of a family member). Carolyn Steedman has argued that, though they may not have used the language of class, working people were well aware of the hierarchies that shaped their lives: they ‘must labour for their bread, and … equally might be denied that bread.’11 Of course, economic circumstances varied over a life time, and

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both Francis Place and Samuel Bamford experienced fluctuations in their financial circumstances, but both fell within the broad definition of ‘working class’, based in economic precarity, during the periods they discuss in the sections of their memoirs used here. I do not mean to suggest in this chapter that all working-class people were politically radical, nor that they always understood themselves as a class—as we shall see, divisions and bitter political polarisation existed within the group broadly considered to be ‘working-class’ here.12 Rather, this chapter suggests that the working-class home was enmeshed in classed and gendered power relationships and could contribute to the adoption of radical politics, and that it certainly influenced the ways in which those politics could be acted upon.

3.3   The Politics of Work in the Working-Class Home Work itself was clearly of central importance to the experience of being ‘working class’. In the early nineteenth century, much paid labour took place within the home, and would have been a significant spatial and sensory presence, limiting the extent to which working-class people could control their domestic environment. A report on public health in the capital complained of ‘the cumbrous furniture, or utensils of trade with which the apartments [of working-class people] are clogged’, claiming that these prevented proper cleaning and contributed to ‘the accumulation of a heterogenous, fermenting filth’. Dr Willan’s distaste for the homes of London’s ‘lowest class’ is evident in the passage, which at the same time as complaining of the ‘idleness’ of inhabitants who failed to sufficiently clean their dwellings also criticised them for allowing children to play on the bed whilst doing laundry. 13 In the silk weaving districts visited by the doctor, high rents meant that a household often lived and worked in a single room within a subdivided house, often with other weaving families above and below.14 It is no wonder then that another visitor to Bethnal Green in 1803 complained that the ‘eternal hum of their looms conveys a confusing effect to the passenger, by no means pleasant’.15 Handloom weaving was noisy work, and archaeologists have found evidence of weavers layering sand between their floorboards and flags or stuffing waste material into floorboards to mitigate the aural impact of their work on others within the home or its surroundings.16

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In addition to noise, work within the home could be dusty, smelly, or require environmental conditions that similarly impacted the experience of all living within the space. Again, handloom weaving, the trade carried out by Bamford in the period covered by his memoir, provides an example. Rooms where weaving took place were often equipped with large windows to provide light for the work, but these needed to remain closed to prevent damage to raw materials, making the room uncomfortably hot in the summer and very cold during the winter when a weaver might refrain from lighting the fire to prevent smoke damage. 17 The kinds of remunerative work performed in working-class homes could therefore be an inescapable physical and sensory presence, shaping the ways in which the limited space available was used and experienced. Whilst preaching the virtues of industry, outside observers nonetheless expressed distaste for the unavoidable environmental impacts of conducting one’s trade alongside other domestic matters such as childcare and cleaning. It is possible that, in addition to enduring the negative attentions of social reformers, those who worked within the home also experienced its constant presence as a reminder of their status as workers. Francis Place described a kind of claustrophobia that he was sure every working-class man experienced when the relentlessness of their labour overwhelmed them, rendering them unable to work.18 Place, as we will see below, made efforts to separate home and work space, as did many other working-class households, and the ability to make physical and temporal distinctions between these spaces may have provided a refuge within which to escape the realities of working life. We should also remember, however, that work could be a source of pride. The first items noted in Bamford’s tour of his home are the two silk looms with work in progress—a symbol of the household’s industry, of course, but also a reminder of the importance of occupational identity. Home-based working could have practical advantages in allowing workers a degree of flexibility in how they used their time, away from the direct scrutiny of employers. E.P. Thompson famously contrasted the irregular working hours of domestic industry with the rigid timekeeping of factory labour, the latter designed to extract maximum efficiency from the worker and displacing customary patterns of frenzied work and vigorous leisure.19 Whilst disapproving moralists lamented that workers spent this leisure time drinking their wages, it could also be utilised in pursuit of self-improvement. John Binns, a labourer and member of the London Corresponding Society, finished work earlier than his friend Francis Place,

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so would sit and read to the latter while he continued his work, contributing to the self-education that was so vital to working-class radicals.20 Bamford recorded that his own education had taken place by his father’s loom, so radical families working at home had opportunities to share their values with the next generation, and indeed the radical press produced teaching resources for this purpose.21 Nonetheless, the ability to separate work and domestic functions within home space seems to have been desirable to many working-class people, perhaps because of the sensory impacts described above, or the implications for privacy discussed below. Hannah Barker and Jane Hamlett, in a study of Manchester inventories, found that most tradespeople attempted to impose some kind of differentiation between work and home activities.22 As Lesley Hoskins has suggested, albeit for a slightly later period, these distinctions could be temporal as well as spatial, involving the movement of furniture to indicate a different use for the same space.23 Samuel Bamford described his home as a single room (a ‘cell’), with the two looms mentioned alongside furnishings associated with eating and sleeping. The bed, perhaps the most intimate of domestic spaces, was screened from the rest of the room by a curtain. Francis Place felt that the separation of work from other domestic activities was particularly important, referring to this delineation of space as both a moral necessity and a means of social distinction: Nothing conduces so much to the degradation of a man and a woman in the opinion of each other, and of themselves in all respects; but most especially of the woman; than her having to eat and drink and cook and wash and iron and transact all her domestic concerns in the room in which her husband works, and in which they sleep. In some cases men and women are so ignorant and brutal, that this mode of life is of no moment to them; but to those who have every [sic] so small a share of information and consequently of refinement it is a terrible grievance and produces sad consequences.24

As we noted earlier, Place was able to recognise the potential for the relentlessness of work to overwhelm him, and it was perhaps for this reason that he was so adamant that working-class men should: make almost any sacrifice to keep possession of two rooms … to put the bed in the room in which as much as possible of the domestic work is done. A neat clean room tho it be as small as a closet, and however few the articles of

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furniture, is of more importance in its moral consequences than any body seems hitherto to have supposed.25

Place associated the ability to keep a tidy, clean room with self-respect and intelligence, and suggested that those unaffected by the desire to maintain an orderly home were beyond hope. Bamford likewise, though working and sleeping in a single room, stressed cleanliness and good order in his domestic interior. Such men saw self-respect as central to radical working-class manliness. Describing preparations for the march to St Peter’s Fields in 1819, Bamford commented on the ‘cleanliness, sobriety, and decorum’ of his fellow marchers, who were determined to prove themselves worthy of citizenship: ‘we would deserve their respect by shewing that we respected ourselves’.26 Reflecting on his role in the radical movement whilst writing the memoir, he cautioned readers on the need to set one’s own domestic affairs in order before attempting to reform the state: Come to thine own bosom and home, and there commence a reform… One evening spent… in the comforting of families,—in the blessings of children, and the improvement of their hearts and understandings,—in the devisements of cheerful economy and industry…one evening so spent, were to thyself and thy country, worth more than all thou has seen, heard or done at Radical or Chartist meetings.27

3.4   Gender, Respectability, and Domestic Work For both Bamford and Place, the suggestion that the working-class home was a degraded, desolate space would have been highly offensive, indicating that they themselves were incapable of maintaining respectable order. This was an understanding reflecting paternalistic conceptions of both home and state, whereby the king was father of the nation and the father was king in his household. It is an understanding reflected in the failure within both men’s memoirs to adequately recognise the labour of their wives to maintain domestic comfort, something which in turn had implications for women’s participation in popular radicalism. Unpaid housework—tasks such as cooking, cleaning, and care of children, elderly, and sick household members—overlapped with paid work and contributed to its successful performance (and continues to do so), but it has rarely been afforded similar status.28 This was reflected in the

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ways in which the autobiographies of Francis Place and Samuel Bamford recorded this gendered work. Discussing the benefits of allocating a large closet as a separate space to practice his trade, Place argued that this: enabled my wife to keep the room in better order … Attendance on the child was not as it had been always, in my presence. I was shut out from seeing the fire lighted the room washed and cleaned, and the cloaths washed and ironed, as well as the cooking. We frequently went to bed as we had but too often been accustomed to do with a wet or damp floor, and with the wet cloaths hanging up in the room, still a great deal of the annoyance, and too close an interference with each other in many disagreeable particulars which having but one room made inevitable were removed, happily removed forever.29

One wonders if Elizabeth Place was as happy with this arrangement as her husband, given that she was still to sleep in the room in which she cared for a young child as well as carrying out the monotonous list of domestic tasks noted above. Her husband could shut away his work tools at the end of the day, but the smells of cooking and wet laundry permeated the family’s sleeping space. Jemima Bamford’s domestic labour is not explicitly highlighted, but evidence of it is everywhere in the description of the cottage interior, from the swept floor to the scoured table. Within the same passage, Samuel introduces his wife, who he finds ‘with a thoughtful and meditative look … darning beside a good fire, which sheds warmth on the clean swept hearth’, while the couple’s daughter read to her from the Bible.30 Thus Jemima, who was a handloom weaver alongside her husband and had probably been working alone during his absence, also occupied her evenings in mending the family’s clothes and educating her child. If, as mentioned above, the physical and sensory presences of work equipment and processes acted to remind working-class people of their economic status, the inescapability of housework likewise emphasised gendered difference. Reading popular literature against the grain provides a glimpse of the frustrations that women could feel at the inequity of esteem afforded to their unpaid, domestic labour. Thompson’s account of the time flexibility afforded by home-based work notes the potential for domestic discord evident in the late eighteenth-century ballad, The Jovial Cutlers, in which the cutler’s wife’s resentment is triggered by her proximity to a workspace in which her husband and his colleagues indulged in drink. Her complaint

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is that her husband’s idling and drinking harm the family finances, exacerbating her struggle to maintain respectability, expressed through her clothing and ability to maintain a clean, well-fed household.31 One of Hannah More’s moralising tracts, The Wife Reformed, tells the story of a mason’s wife, Sarah, who neglects her home to indulge in gossip with a friend. Though the tale is a cautionary one, it is difficult not to feel sympathy with Sarah’s self-justificatory outburst: when people have families, you know, they cannot expect things to always be in print: where one has only two rooms and a little shed, and washing, and cooking, and mending and all to do, one must sometimes be in a little disorder; but Richard has no thought of that, if everything is not just in its place … the house is too hot to hold him.32

Like Francis Place, Sarah seems to have experienced the claustrophobic relentlessness of her work and felt the need to escape, but unlike Place or her husband, she was judged negatively for so doing because her work was viewed not as work but as duty. The implications of working-class women’s domestic labour for their participation in radical politics are clear. Often shouldering a double burden of paid and unpaid work, they simply had less leisure time to engage in the reading, sharing, and discussion of political ideas that were so crucial to the early radical movement. As the ‘washerwoman poet’ Mary Collier put it in the early eighteenth century, the relentlessness of women’s work left them ‘hardly ever Time to Dream’, and, as Emma Griffin has demonstrated, similar barriers to political participation persisted into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.33 A lack of leisure time is also reflected in the nature of historical evidence for women’s participation in radicalism—we do not, for the most part, have detailed memoirs by radical women to rival those of men like Bamford and Place, and women did not tend to have prominent public-facing roles within the movement.34 Where we do have political speeches and writing by radical women, these frequently refer to their domestic roles rather than to other occupational identities.35 Although domestic space and its associated labours could act as a constraint on women’s participation, in some cases the organisation of work within the home could facilitate household co-operation in politics. Iain McCalman has noted the ‘exceptional’ degree to which Janet Evans participated in politics alongside her husband Thomas, a member of the

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‘ultra-radical’ Spencean Society, declaring that ‘They worked together in the print colouring business and in underground politics’.36 Similarly, John and Winifred Gales worked together to print the Sheffield Register and to promote the Sheffield Society for Constitutional Information. Katrina Navickas has argued that the Gales’ printing shop was simultaneously a workspace, a home, and a space for like-minded individuals to meet.37 Although Samuel Bamford did not dwell on his wife’s politics, Jemima was a supportive presence, and, as we shall see, responded angrily to her husband’s arrest by shouting a radical slogan. As I have noted elsewhere, women were able to use their domestic experiences to make political statements and to sustain the radical movement, albeit often behind the scenes.38

3.5   The Politics of Privacy As we have seen, the working-class home was subject to scrutiny, often from disapproving outsiders, and while domestic-based industry offered some protection from direct employer supervision, other factors compromised the privacy of the working-class home. As Amanda Vickery and Martin Hewitt have shown, security and privacy were important at all social levels in eighteenth and nineteenth-century England, and working-­ class people sought to ensure the sanctity of domestic boundaries.39 However, the presence of work within the home often necessitated opening it up to some degree to people beyond the household, complicating these efforts. An anonymous print depicting a Cobler’s Hall, published around 1800, shows the cobbler working in front of an open window, providing light but perhaps also allowing potential customers to glance in and observe the man at work (Fig. 3.1). The room also accommodates some of the household’s domestic functions, with the cobbler’s wife, who is cooking behind him, visible to any curious passers-by. The visibility of the domestic interior, and particularly the presence of valuable work equipment, could prove tempting to thieves, as a glimpse at the records of the Old Bailey reveal. For example, William Griffith was indicted for stealing an anvil from his place of work, the home of a fellow smith in 1792, while in 1817 Jane Tourell of Bethnal Green had silk stolen directly from her loom.40 The thief in Tourell’s case was thought to be ‘a person acquainted with the trade’, and Griffith was not alone in using his access to and familiarity within his employer’s

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Fig. 3.1  Anon, Cobler’s Hall. (Bowles & Carver, 1800) Etching. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library

household to scope opportunities for theft. Ann Jackson, described as a journeywoman to the chairmaker Mr Cockerill, was accused of theft from her employers, a crime which had clearly shaken Mrs Cockerill, who told the court that ‘I do not wish to see the woman hanged, and yet I am in danger’.41 In the Pennine region too, the theft of goods in production, including cloth direct from the loom, seems to have been common.42 Work within the home could thus make it more difficult to maintain the security of its boundaries. Many working-class homes also accommodated household members beyond the immediate nuclear family. Employees, like the journeywoman Ann Jackson, often lived where they worked, incorporated into the family to a varying extent. This could be troubling not just for the householder, as in the case of Mrs Cockerill’s perceived vulnerability, but also for the employees themselves. As Hannah Barker and Jane Hamlett have shown, the liminal status of employees and apprentices in a family unit could be a source of resentment, reinforcing as it did the subordinate position of

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these household members.43 Such living arrangements could also solidify the centrality of work to one’s life and identity. Whilst working his apprenticeship, Francis Place was required to sleep in the shop where he worked through the day, sharing the space with a colleague.44 Apprenticeship in particular could be a life stage in which working men keenly felt their subordinate status, subject as they were to the whims of an employer, on whom they tended to rely for both work and a living space. Bamford’s friend Dr Healey attributed his ‘thorough abhorrence of tyranny’ to his experience of apprenticeship, during which he was treated brutally by his master, an example of how unequal power relations experienced in and through domestic living conditions could contribute to the adoption of radical politics.45 Work was just one contributing factor to the short supply of privacy in many working-­class households. Subdivision of larger houses was common, especially in the capital, with its high rents and large population. Francis Placed noted that: In a few years from this time it will scarcely be believed that an immense number of houses were built in narrow courts, and close lanes, each house being at least three stories and many of them four stories above the ground floor … many of these tall houses had two three and sometimes four rooms on a floor and that from the Garretts to the cellars a family lived or starved in each room…46

Policing the borders of the home was thus a task rendered more difficult by economic circumstances, and security within was also affected by power differentials between household members. The sense of vulnerability engendered by the porousness of domestic boundaries was intensified for working-class men and women involved in radical activity. During the period in question here, legislation expanded the definitions of treason and sedition and relaxed the requirements of evidence against an accused person. It was also a period in which politics were strongly polarised and feelings ran high. Radical homes were subject to surveillance and potentially to attack. During the war years, loyalist associations went door-todoor demanding declarations of loyalty to the king, with suspicion falling on those who failed to comply. One prominent radical to feel the effects of this climate of fear was William Blake, whose printroom was located within his Lambeth home. The room would have been visible to

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passers-by including his neighbour David Evans, one of the most active members of the local loyalist association. Michael Phillips has suggested that this threatening presence inhibited Blake from publishing politically controversial works in the early 1790s.47 Such fear may well have been justified. While the London radicals Thomas Hardy and John Thelwall were in prison for treason in 1794, their homes were attacked by mobs trying to enforce a celebratory household illumination for a British naval victory over the French, much to the terror of their families.48 There was therefore much to fear from hostile neighbours seeking to restrict radical activity in their local area, either by informing on suspected radicals or taking matters into their own hands. The London Corresponding Society complained that the violence against Hardy’s and Thelwall’s homes was tacitly sanctioned by magistrates who looked the other way.49 Indeed, the forces of law and order themselves demonstrated scant regard for the sanctity of the domestic interior. Hardy’s arrest in 1794 took place in the early hours of the morning, with his pregnant wife sitting helpless and humiliated in bed as men rummaged through the family’s belongings to obtain evidence.50 Samuel and Jemima Bamford were likewise abruptly awoken in 1819, with scarcely enough time to dress before the deputy constable and his assistants commenced a search of the house and arrested Samuel. Jemima was threatened with a gun as she defiantly shouted ‘Hunt and Liberty!’ after her husband.51 There were, however, benefits to close-knit living, which could reinforce bonds of trust and community where neighbours were not involved in political conflict.52 It was Francis Place’s landlord, a cabinet maker by trade, who encouraged Place to join the London Corresponding Society. Francis had waited in the man’s rooms while the landlady of the house assisted Elizabeth Place as she gave birth upstairs, and noted that ‘the quantity and kind of books I found in his room’, including the works of Thomas Paine, ‘made me desirous of his acquaintance’.53 While hostile neighbours might report suspected radicals to the authorities, friendly ones helped evade their attentions. Samuel Bamford and another Middleton radical, Joseph Healey, were able to take refuge in the home of a female reformer the night after the Blanketeers’ meeting, fearing that an attempt to involve them in a plot might result in their arrests.54 These community bonds were also reflected in radical organisation. Bamford described how, following the close of the wars with France, Lancashire towns and villages formed Hampden clubs, with delegates

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from local areas attending regional meetings and sending ‘missionaries’ further afield to recruit others to the cause.55 In 1819, as radicals marched to the famous meeting that was to result in the Peterloo massacre, they did so in local groups, each with their own banner, converging at St Peter’s fields.56 The expression of local identities within a wider regional and national organisation can also be seen earlier in the London Corresponding Society, which was divided into cells representing a local area, so that personal, community-based connections could underpin its famously unlimited membership.

3.6   The Politics of Consumption Socio-economic status clearly shaped the ways in which the home could be used both practically and as a site for self-fashioning, with implications for the ability to take political action. We have thus far explored the impact of work—paid and unpaid—on the sensory and physical experiences of the home, the ability to control its borders, and the power relations of household members. The home was, however, a site of consumption as well as production, and this too was a source of political tensions. The pace, extent, and outcomes of working-class consumerism during the industrial revolution remains a matter of debate among historians, but it is clear that by 1800, most households had access to a wider range of goods than would have been the case a century earlier.57 Emma Griffin has argued that the expansion of consumer potential helped to ‘drag wage-earners out of the servile submission that poverty had forced on them since time immemorial’.58 Timothy Breen has likewise suggested that growing consumer choice could lead to the expectation of choice in other areas of life, including in politics.59 As noted above, both Francis Place and Samuel Bamford were concerned with projecting a respectable masculinity based in part in their ability to provide for and manage a household. The ability to ensure the cleanliness, clothing, and nourishment of the family and a clean, well-­ furnished home offered evidence of hard work and care for the more vulnerable. In contrast, visual and literary depictions of working-class homes used dishevelled appearances, dilapidated housing or sparsely furnished interiors to signal the moral decline of a household and particularly its patriarch. George Morland’s portraits of The Comforts of Industry and The Miseries of Idleness contrast a family gathered in an interior adorned with decorative plates, plentiful food, an infant’s cradle and even a small wicker

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chair for another child with the same family configuration clothed in rags beside a bed with torn hangings, the baby crying on a pile of straw, a boy gnawing a bone and a barrel in the foreground indicating the source of the father’s indigence.60 Conservative commentators likewise conflated material deprivation with an unwillingness to work. Hannah More moralised on the theme in the cautionary tale of Black Giles the Poacher, who resided in a ‘beggarly looking cottage’, falling apart from lack of repair. More stressed that ‘it is neatness, housewifery, and a decent appearance, which draw the kindness of the rich and charitable, while they turn away disgusted from filth and laziness.’61 At the same time, however, conservatives preached satisfaction with one’s lot, cautioning against acquisitiveness that could lead to envy and discontent, including political discontent.62 Radicals had an alternative analysis of working-class economic struggles, blaming government corruption and war for the high taxation that devastated their household finances. As the Female Reformers of Blackburn declared that: our houses which once bore ample testimony of our industry and cleanliness, and were fit for the reception of a prince are now alas! robbed of all their ornaments, and our beds, that once afforded us cleanliness, health, and sweet repose, are now torn from us by the relentless hand of the unfeeling tax gatherer.63

Their words reflect once more the material condition of the home as a symbol of respectability, demonstrating the emotional and political significance of objects beyond the bare necessities of life. As Vicky Holmes has shown elsewhere in this volume, the loss of a bed tended to be the consequence of a decline into the direst poverty, usually associated with sickness or old age.64 Its use as an example by the Female Reformers is most likely a literary device to suggest the extent of degradation caused by the government, highlighting an object that not only had practical value but was also central to key familial moments such as marriage, childbirth and death. Likewise, the reference to ornaments suggests the desire for self-­ expression within the home through the display of decorative items, something we also saw in Samuel Bamford’s description of items hung above the fireplace, crockery-ware displayed on the shelf, and a mirror surrounded by pictures copied from Rubens. As other chapters in this collection demonstrate, few working-class homes were entirely devoid of material goods that afforded comfort or

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allowed for the expression of aesthetic preferences. The kind of objects itemised within Samuel Bamford’s home do not differ greatly from those owned by Sarah Hargreaves of Westgate Hill, West Yorkshire, when her belongings were inventoried at her death in 1821 by the overseers of the poor. Her goods included a feather bed and pillow, ‘good’ bedding, equipment to make and serve tea, and a looking glass.65 Another recipient of relief, John Holmes of Addingham, West Yorkshire, counted pictures and pottery items among his belongings, along with caged pet birds.66 Following the death of Mrs Mills of Teddington, on the outskirts of London, the parish sought to determine how best to relieve her young children, as the deceased had been deserted by her husband. In the Mills’ home they found prints, looking glasses, mahogany furniture, and a good supply of china and linen, as well as a wellstocked shop with new bow windows fitted. The house had more beds and rooms than would be needed for a mother and two young children, suggesting that Mrs Mills’ material wellbeing may have been a result of taking in lodgers in addition to running a shop (see Appendix 1) (Figs. 3.2 and 3.3).67 Other sources further challenge the popular image of working-class homes as dingy, dilapidated, and desolate. Archaeological investigations of early Victorian privies in Limehouse and eighteenth-century shipwrights cottages in Deptford revealed items such as teawares and children’s toys, as well as well-used scrubbing brushes demonstrating householders’ desire for cleanliness.68 Even in St Giles, a notorious London slum, one could purchase ‘pictures of wax-work Paris plaister’ for 6d a pair from local hawkers, and archaeologists have again found remains of the use of Wedgewood pottery in the area.69 If we return to the depiction of the Cobler’s Hall (Fig. 3.1), we can see ballad sheets tacked to the walls, glassware and ceramics displayed on open shelves, and a framed portrait of the Duke of Cumberland above the hearth. Though their finances were limited and their domestic spaces often crowded, many working-class people clearly sought to improve their homes with regular care and decoration. Asserting the agency to express aesthetic preferences within the home can be seen as an implicit act of rebellion against the careful surveillance of working-class spending, particularly in the context of the development of statistical studies and sample budgets that suggested poor households should limit themselves to the purchase of bare essentials.70 Working-class radicals were also able to use their consumer potential in explicitly political

Tong 13th March 1821 Notice is hereby given to whom it may concern that a S[c]hedule or regular Inventory of the Goods or Furniture of the late Sarah Hargreaves of Westgate Hill deceased, a Pauper is taken for the use and Benefit of the Church-wardens and Overseers of the Lowship and Liberty of Tong Viz 1 half headed Bedstead 1 Feather Bed 1 Pair of good Blankets 1 Long Feather Pillow 1 Short D[itt]o. 1 Coverlet 1 Pair of Chester Drawers 1 Tea Round Oak Table 1 D[itt]o. Deal Table 3 Chairs 1 Pair of Tongs 1 Tea Kettle 1 Toasting Jack 2 Black Silk Cloaks 2 Gowns 3 Handkerchiefs 1 Grey Cloak 1 Black Silk Bonnet 1 Pair of Shoes & Stockings 1 Looking Glass One Mahogany Tea board

Fig. 3.2  Inventory of goods in the possession of Sarah Hargreaves, 1821. West Yorkshire Archive Service Bradford TONG/129/92 An Inventory of the Goods of John Holmes taken by me Thomas Robinson this 14th Day of Decr 1818 1 Stove 1 Boiler 1 Table 1 Picture Pot Case 1 Iron Dish 2 Chairs Pots 1 Child’s Chair 2 Stools Bread Fleak Chamber 2 Bedsteads & Bedding 2 Bird Cages

Fig. 3.3  Inventory of goods in the possession of John Holmes, 1818. West Yorkshire Archive Service Bradford 49/D90/6/G/13

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ways, displaying objects communicating their politics, such as commemorative ceramics featuring radical heroes. Alternatively, they could withdraw their custom from individuals or institutions opposed to their cause.71 Again, the home environment shaped the ways that working-class people were able to formulate and express their politics.

3.7   Conclusions The popular image of nineteenth-century working-class homes as uniformly grim is not only inaccurate, it also robs the inhabitants of their agency. As this chapter has demonstrated, working-class people cared about creating a space that allowed for some comfort and self-expression, and worked hard to overcome the obstacles to maintaining a respectable home. The ability to do so was itself highly politicised in the context of growing working-class demands for representation, as well as tensions over the provision of welfare for the very poor at a time of considerable economic instability in Britain. It is vital that we are attentive to the strategies employed by working-class people to make home, even in difficult circumstances, if we are to recognise their agency as human beings and historical actors. This chapter has offered some suggestions of the ways in which power relationships within and beyond the home shaped popular politics in nineteenth-­century England, but further research is needed to more fully understand the ways that the experience of home affected working-class people in different circumstances. I have focused here on issues of class and gender, but as demonstrated by other authors in this volume, lifecycle was also crucial to domestic experience. This is perhaps particularly crucial to understanding women’s experiences, given the physical and mental demands posed by childrearing at particular points in their lives. In focusing on Francis Place and Samuel Bamford, I have discussed men working in classic domestic industries, but different occupations may well have had different implications for understandings of home and power. Domestic service has not been discussed in detail here, but servants may well have shared many of the resentments of apprentices, living and working in somebody else’s home. Similarly, the experiences of transitory and institutional homes discussed elsewhere in this volume may illuminate further power relationships not discussed in depth in this chapter, which has taken as case studies the representations of two married men in relatively settled domestic circumstances.

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Throughout this chapter, I have argued that the working-class home, as a site of production and consumption, was subject to considerable outside scrutiny and that the products of that scrutiny often inform popular imaginings of working-class homes in the nineteenth century. The published accounts of statisticians and social reformers are readily accessible to us, but here a wider range of source material has been used set those accounts within a wider context, offering a more complicated picture of homes which were shaped by socio-economic status but which also afforded opportunities for self-expression as well as for connections to wider communities. The working-class domestic interior could be a creative space, in which working-class people were able to experiment with ways of getting their political voices heard. Home could solidify awareness of social positions, but also provided opportunities to challenge these positions through community-building and opportunities to express radical views.

Notes 1. S. Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical and Early Days in Two Volumes, edited with an introduction by H. Dunckley (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1905), Vol. 2, pp. 68-69. 2. D.  H. Solkin, Painting Out of the Ordinary: Modernity and the Art of Everyday Life in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2008), p. 4. 3. S. Sherman, Imagining Poverty: Quantification and the Decline of Pater­ nalism (Columbus, Ohio State University Press, 2001). 4. F. M. Eden, The State of the Poor: Or, An History of the Labouring Classes in England from the Conquest to the Present Period. Vol. 1 (London: J. Davis: 1797. Facsimile published London: Frank Cass & Co., 1966), pp. 94, 100. 5. J. Barrell, The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), chapter 5, esp. pp. 228-237; R. Mather, ‘These Lancashire women are witches in politics’: Female Reform Societies and the Theatre of Radicalism, 1819—1820’, in R. Poole (ed.), Return to  Peterloo (Manchester Centre for Regional History, 2014), pp.  49-64; R.  Mather, ‘The Home-Making of the English Working Class: Radical Politics and Domestic Life in Late-Georgian England, c.1790—1820’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, Queen Mary University of London, 2016), esp. chapter 2. 6. Mather, ‘These Lancashire Women’; Mather, ‘The Home-Making of the English Working Class’, chapter 2. 7. Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical, Vol. 2, pp. 68-69.

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8. Mather, ‘These Lancashire Women’. 9. Barrell, The Spirit of Despotism, p. 213. 10. Sherman, Imagining Poverty, p.  93; T.  Hitchcock and R.  Shoemaker, London Lives: Poverty, Crime and the Making of a Modern City, 1690-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 401. 11. C.  Steedman, Labours Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 254-258. 12. See Mather, ‘The Home-Making of the English Working Class’, pp. 10-11 and p. 14 for a more detailed definition of radicalism and its relationship to loyalism and to class. 13. R.  Willan, Reports on the Diseases in London (1801), p.  256, quoted in M.D.  George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 95. 14. P. Guillery, The Small House in Eighteenth-Century London: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 95-97. 15. J.P. Malcolm, Londinium Redivivum: Or, An Ancient History and Modern Description of London, Vol. 1 (London, 1803), p. 5, quoted in Guillery, The Small House, p. 97. 16. F.  Holliss, ‘From Longhouse to Live/Work Unit: Parallel Histories and Absent Narratives’, in P.  Guillery (ed.), Built from Below: British Architecture and the Vernacular (Routledge, 2011), p. 202; M. Johnson, English Houses 1300-1800: Vernacular Architecture and Social Life (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2010), p. 146; W. J. Smith, ‘The Architecture of the Domestic System in South-East Lancashire and the Adjoining Pennines’, in S.  D. Chapman (ed.), The History of Working-Class Housing: A Symposium (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1971), pp. 258-259. 17. Holliss, ‘From Longhouse to Live/Work Unit’, p.  202; Smith, ‘The Architecture of the Domestic System in South-East Lancashire and the Adjoining Pennines’, pp. 262-264. 18. F. Place, Improvement of the Working People (1834), pp. 14-15, quoted in F. Place, The Autobiography of Francis Place, 1771- 1854, edited by Mary Thrale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). 19. E.  P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London: Penguin, 1993), pp. 370-382. 20. Place, Autobiography, pp. 143-144. 21. S. Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical and Early Days in Two Volumes, edited with an introduction by H. Dunckley (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1905), Vol. 1, p. 60. For teaching resources, see R. Mather, ‘Remembering Protest in the Late-Georgian Working-Class Home’, in C.  Griffin and B.  McDonagh (eds),  Remembering Protest: Memory, Materiality and Landscape in Britain since 1500 (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 141-142.

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22. H. Barker and J. Hamlett, ‘Living Above the Shop: Home, Business and Family in the English “Industrial Revolution”’, Journal of Family History, 35 (2010), pp. 315-317. 23. L.  Hoskins, ‘Reading the Inventory: Household Goods, Domestic Cultures and Difference in England and Wales, 1841-81’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, Queen Mary University of London, 2011), p. 219. 24. Place, Autobiography, p. 116. 25. Place, Autobiography, p. 138. 26. Bamford, Passages, Vol. 2, p. 142. 27. S. Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical (Oxford: Oxford University Press paperback, 1984). This passage does not appear in the Dunckley edition. 28. J. Whittle, ‘A Critique of Approaches to “Domestic Work”: Women, Work, and the Pre-Industrial Economy’, Past & Present, 243 (2019), pp. 35-70. 29. Place, Autobiography, p. 138. 30. Bamford, Passages, Vol. 2, p. 68. 31. Thompson, Customs in Common, p. 374; Anon., ‘The Jovial Cutlers.’ ballad c.1780-1790, in R. Palmer (ed.), Poverty Knock: A Picture of Industrial Life in the Nineteenth Century Though Songs, Ballads and Contemporary Accounts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), p. 7. 32. Anon. Cheap Repository: The Wife Reformed (London, c.1795-1798). Eighteenth Century Collections Online. (Gale), doc. ref. CW0117059284. Accessed 16th Apr. 2021, p. 8. 33. M. Collier, The woman's labour: an epistle to Mr. Stephen Duck; in answer to his late poem, called The thresher's labour. To which are added, the three wise sentences, taken from the first book of Esdras, Ch.III. and IV. By Mary Collier, Now a Washer-Woman, at Petersfield in Hempshire (London, 1739). Eighteenth Century Collections Online. (Gale), doc. ref. CW0110292985. Accessed 21st Apr. 2021, p. 11; E.  Griffin, Bread Winner: An Intimate History of the Victorian Economy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), chapter 9. 34. K. J. Mays, ‘Domestic Spaces, Readerly Acts: Reading(,) Gender, and Class in Working-Class Autobiography’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 30 (2008), esp. pp. 348-349, 351-353. 35. See Mather, ‘These Lancashire Women’. 36. I.  MacCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in London, 1795-1840 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), p. 32. 37. K.  Navickas, Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789-1848 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), p. 48. 38. Mather, ‘Remembering Protest in the Late-Georgian Working-Class Home’, pp. 150-152.

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39. A.  Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), chapter 1; M. Hewitt, ‘District Visiting and the Constitution of Domestic Space in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, in I.  Bryden and J.  Floyd (eds), Domestic Space: Reading the Nineteenth-­Century Interior (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 121-141. 40. Trial of William Griffith, 15th Dec. 1792. Old Bailey Proceedings Online, version 7.0. Ref. no. t17921215-14, accessed 16th Apr. 2021; Trial of Mary Lyons, 21st May 1817. Old Bailey Proceedings Online, version 6.0. Ref. no. t18170521-70, accessed 16th Apr. 2021, both via https://www. oldbaileyonline.org. 41. Trial of Ann Harney and Ann Jackson, 13th Jan. 1790. Old Bailey Proceedings Online, version 7.0. Ref. no. t17900113-2, accessed 16th Apr. 2021, https://www.oldbaileyonline.org. 42. See the advertisements in Manchester Archives+, GB127.BR FF 942.72 S176, ‘Volume of Broadsides on thefts, murder, burglary, robbery and elections 1792-1859’. 43. Barker and Hamlett, ‘Living Above the Shop’, p. 319. 44. Place, Autobiography, p. 79. 45. Bamford, Passages, Vol. 2, p. 47. 46. Place, Autobiography, p. 108. 47. M. Phillips, ‘Blake and the Terror, 1792-3’, The Library, Sixth Series, 16 (1994), pp. 274–278. 48. Anon., Reformers No Rioters: Printed by Order of the London Corresponding Society (London, 1794). Eighteenth Century Collections Online (Gale). Doc. ref. CW105551163. Accessed 16th Apr. 2021, p. 4. 49. Anon., Reformers No Rioters, p. 4. 50. T. Hardy, Memoir of Thomas Hardy: Founder of and Secretary to the London Corresponding Society (London: James Ridgeway, 1832), p. 32. 51. Bamford, Passages, Vol. 2, p. 172. 52. Lynn MacKay has explored in detail the positive and negative aspects of community life for poor Londoners in Respectability and the London Poor, 1780—1870 (Pickering and Chatto, 2013). In their study of the movement of people and goods in nineteenth-century Limehouse, Alastair Owens and Nigel Jeffries have suggested that the practical and emotional ties of a community resulted in high mobility, but within a relatively limited locale, while Beverley Lemire has shown the importance of personal connections in maintaining financial credit relationships, see A. Owens, N. Jeffries, K. Wehner, and R. Featherby, ‘Fragments of the Modern City: Material Culture and the Rhythms of Everyday Life in Victorian London’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 15 (2010),

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pp. 212-225; B. Lemire, The Business of Everyday Life: Gender, Practice and Social Politics in England, c.1600-1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), chapter 2. 53. Place, Autobiography, p. 127. 54. Bamford, Passages, Vol. 2, p. 39. 55. Bamford, Passages, pp. 12-13, see also Navickas, Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, p. 58. 56. Navickas, Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, p. 82. 57. For a recent perspective and summary of the literature, see J.  Harley, ‘Consumption and Poverty in the Homes of the English Poor’, Social History, 43 (2018), pp. 81-104. 58. E. Griffin, Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 247. 59. T.  H. Breen, ‘The Meanings of Things: Interpreting the Consumer Economy in the Eighteenth Century’, in J. Brewer and R. Porter (eds), Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 257. 60. G. Morland, The Comforts of Industry and The Miseries of Idleness (1780s). Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Scotland. 61. H. More, Tales for the Common People and other Cheap Repository Tracts, edited by C.  MacDonald Shaw (Nottingham: Trent Editions, 2002), p. 67, quoted in Barrell, The Spirit of Despotism, p. 215. 62. T. Biddulph, Seasonable Hints to the Poor on the Duties of Frugality, Piety, and Loyalty. Being the Substance of a Sermon Delivered in the Parish Church of St Maryport, Bristol, to Two Benefit Societies on Whit-Monday, June 5th, 1797 (Bristol: W.  Pine & Son, 1797). Eighteenth Century Collections Online (Gale), doc. ref. CW120415340, accessed 16th Apr. 2021, p. 12, p. 4. 63. Black Dwarf, July 14th, 1819, in R. Frow and E. Frow, Political Women, 1800-1850 (London: Pluto Press, 1989), p. 23 64. See Chapter 4 of this volume. 65. West Yorkshire Archive Service Bradford (WYAS), TONG/129/92 Inventory of goods belonging to Sarah Hargreaves, 1821. 66. WYAS Bradford, 49/D90/6/G/13 Inventory of goods belonging to John Holmes, 1818. 67. London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), MJ/SP/1799/04/049 Petition by the parish of Teddington to sell the goods and chattels of William Mills, labourer, of Teddington, 1799. 68. Owens et  al, ‘Fragments of the Modern City’, pp.  212-225; R.  Denson and N. Jeffries, ‘A Post-Medieval Shipyard and Shipwrights’ Cottages at Deptford: Some Observations on Pottery and Material Culture’ London Archaeologist, 10 (2002), pp. 20-27.

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69. Trial of Elizabeth Carr, 13th Jan. 1790. Old Bailey Proceedings Online, version 7.0. Ref. no. t17900113-14, accessed 16th Apr. 2021, https://www. oldbaileyonline.org; S. Anthony, Medieval settlement to 18th-/19th- century rookery: Excavations at Central St Giles, London Borough of Camden, 2006-8 (London: Museum of London, 2011), pp. 37-38. 70. See Sherman, Imagining Poverty. 71. For commemoratives and boycotts, see Mather, ‘Remembering Protest in the Late-Georgian Working-Class Home’, pp. 142-150.

CHAPTER 4

Pulling Back the Covers: Uncovering Beds in the Victorian Working-Class Home Vicky Holmes

4.1   Introduction It is the image of the bed-less working-class home presented by social investigators from their perambulations of the city slums and common lodging-houses that ‘endure in the imagination’.1 As noted in the introduction to this collection, it is these spaces, as Carolyn Steedman stated over twenty years ago, that are ‘poeticised and used for rhetorical purposes, despite the wealth of alternative description from the nineteenth century available to historians’.2 This largely remains the case today. There has been a substantial body of work undertaken on both the material and the emotional bed in recent years, stretching from the medieval to the modern period. Yet, these texts focus on those beds inhabited by the middling sort/class and the wealthy.3 An in-depth study of the material beds The author would like to thank Joseph Harley, Laika Nevalainen, Lesley Hoskins, Jonathan Memel, and Edward Higgs for their generous feedback on both early and latter drafts of this chapter. V. Holmes (*) Queen Mary University of London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Harley et al. (eds.), The Working Class at Home, 1790–1940, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89273-9_4

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of the working/poorer classes in their own homes has yet to be undertaken.4 This obscurity has largely emerged through the difficultly that both the Victorian outsider and the historian have faced in accessing these spaces. As Martin Hewitt’s reading of district visitors’ reports reveals, prying eyes routinely found their entrance barred or rebuffed.5 This chapter begins to piece together the material beds inhabited by the Victorian working class in terms of acquisition, arrangement, and condition by drawing on a neglected source—newspaper reports—which detail the findings of coroner’s inquests. Pulling back the covers, this chapter challenges preconceptions of the bed-less working class, providing a more comprehensive and intimate understanding of these physical objects and their inhabitants, demonstrating a picture of a life-cycle that could include both comfort and deterioration. The chapter focuses on the counties of Essex and Suffolk, with some examples from the bordering county of Norfolk. The period examined, 1840–1900, will cover the implementation of the New Poor Law, the impact of which fed right through to people’s beds.6 In turn, with parish relief (under the Old and New Poor Law) intending to only supplement rather than replace income, this chapter will also engage with the discussion surrounding the ‘economy of makeshift’.7 There has been much research undertaken into the manner by which poorer households supplemented their income under the Old Poor Law and early years of the New Poor Law, including charity, taking in lodgers, rent arrears, and the selling and pawning of possessions.8 Yet, in terms of their material goods, there has been little engagement with how this practice continued under the increasingly stringent rules of the New Poor Law. A study of beds has much to reveal on this matter. In examining the beds inhabited by the Victorian working class in their own homes, the chapter uncovers individual examples of survival strategies employed in working-class households. Before proceeding, it is important to note that this chapter does not seek to quantify bed ownership in any way, for, because of the nature of the source certain items might be over- or under-represented. For example, posted bedsteads are likely overrepresented in the coroners’ inquests because they provided a convenient means by which to commit suicide. It is also important to clarify what I mean by the term ‘bed’. Prior to the twentieth century, the term bed was sometimes used interchangeably with the term mattress. For the purposes of this chapter, the term bed is used to encompass the object in its entirety, which, in general, comprised of a bedstead, mattress, bedding, and pillows. Variations in this definition are explicitly noted.

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4.2   The Victorian Coroner’s Court and Press Reporting For those studying home, the coroner’s court offers the historian an unparalleled snapshot of the working class behind closed doors. Having determined an inquest necessary and assembled a jury of a least twelve local men, the first matter of the inquiry was to view the body. While the body was usually brought to the site of the inquest, recent research has shown that in the case of death taking place in a domestic setting, often in their beds, the coroner’s court would view the body lying in situ.9 Here, in addition to inspecting the deceased, they made their own observations on the surroundings, commenting on both the layout of the room and its furnishings. Things that captured their attention, whether relevant or not, were often recorded. Returning to the site of the inquest, the coroner and, on occasion, jurors, questioned lay witnesses who were present at the death or who might be able to shed any details on the circumstances of the death. Fastidious in investigations that often verged on prurient, it was not uncommon for the coroner’s questioning to go far beyond the parameters of the investigation. This was an imposition to the householder, but, as will be evident in this chapter, it is of great benefit to the historian. Professional witnesses, including medical men, relieving officers, NSPCC officials, and police constables, were also called to provide testimony. Having often visited these homes in the course of their duties prior to the death, they frequently provided their own insights on a working-class householder’s material and domestic circumstances. But here I should note some caution. The coroner’s inquest provided a public platform to highlight the distressing living conditions of the poor, of which professional witnesses and the coroner himself took regular advantage. Indeed, whilst in some of the inquest reports these witnesses describe a home as being devoid of all life’s material necessities, reading on the report often reveals at least some furniture. Being a public court, proceedings were typically reported in the local press. In towns, reporters would assemble at the site of the inquest, while in rural districts the coroner would frequently provide a summary of the inquest and dispatch to various local presses.10 These reports vary in length, but they could be incredibly detailed when it came to deaths

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occurring in the homes inhabited by the working class, frequently with witness testimony verbatim. Given the sparse survival of the coroner’s own records, local newspapers provide the historian with access to these valuable accounts of working-class life. With the advent of digitisation, numerous local and regional newspapers are now easily accessible online.11 Having undertaken an extensive search of Essex and Suffolk’s various provincial newspapers, I have uncovered well over one hundred inquest reports in which the bed, in its various forms, is documented in varying detail. The inquest reports discussed in this chapter have been drawn from a reading of the Ipswich Journal, Bury Post, and Essex Standard at three-­year intervals, beginning with 1840 and ending with 1900 via the British Library Newspaper Archive. Keywords searches have also been undertaken of other local newspapers in the region in case any pertinent details have been missed in the above newspapers’ reports.

4.3   Acquisition and Ownership Central to creating a comfortable home was the acquisition of a bedstead, a mattress, sufficient quantities of bedding, and a pillow upon which to rest one’s head. Bedsteads were sometimes acquired through bequests and inheritance. Sometimes they were simply left behind by a previous occupier.12 Others were purchased second-hand. As Clive Edwards and Margaret Ponsonby have found, there was a thriving second-hand furniture trade in the nineteenth century where at the ‘bottom of the market… “a broken down four poster bedstead or a rickety tent bed might be secured at almost any price”’.13 It is unsurprising, therefore, to find such a large variation in the types of bedsteads in working-class homes.14 Notably, there are few comments as to the conditions of posted bedsteads in the inquest reports, which either suggests that it was not pertinent to the investigation—which seems unlikely given the tangents the Victorian coroner would veer down—or, more likely, the bedstead’s condition was merely not noteworthy, simply neither grand nor pitiful and in a reasonable state. The inquest reports do, however, point to an issue with such frames. Frames of posted bedsteads generally comprised of ropes or cords that required continual tightening to prevent mattresses from sagging, eventually causing them to snap under the strain.15 If not repaired or replaced, at cost to the householder, the breakage would result in an

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uncomfortable and potentially dangerous night’s sleep. When Harriet Ungless, the infant daughter of a carpenter residing in Dock Street, Ipswich, was found dead in her mother’s bed, the inquest revealed that ‘she [had] rolled into a hole in the bed caused by the cord breaking … and so been suffocated’. Medical witness, Mr. Hoffman, having examined ‘the hole in the bed … found it so deep as to render it impossible for the deceased to have got out’.16 For a fraction of the price of a posted bedstead, the working-class householder could obtain a simpler bedstead such as the stump bedstead (see Fig. 4.1).17 These types of smaller bedsteads appear to have been generally acquired to accommodate children and those requiring a separate bed, namely lodgers.18 The posted bedstead, the inquest reports suggest, was typically the domain of the head of the household, their spouse, and a nursing infant on occasion.19 Yet, in some households, a solitary stump bedstead was all that could be afforded and the condition in which this was attained is telling. Labourer, Cornelius Neville, ‘engaged occasionally with the threshing machine’ in a ‘delicate state of health’, struggled to provide food, a habitable home, and the necessary beds for his young family. The Neville’s home in Ramsden Crays, described by the coroner as a ‘hovel’, was ‘a very small, low, thatched building that contained two diminutive rooms’. The one bedstead Neville acquired was described as ‘an old stump bedstead’. Though this bedstead was small—for it could not

Fig. 4.1  The Workwoman’s Guide (London: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co, 1838), plate 22. Digitised by Internet Archive (public domain)

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accommodate all of Neville’s children (two out of four slept on the floor)—it ‘nearly filled the space’. Impassioned by the family’s struggles revealed at the inquest into the death of their youngest child, the coroner implored Neville to seek parochial assistance. At the adjourned inquest, a few days later, it was noted that the family had promptly been provided with outrelief.20 In addition to the wear and tear, an age-old problem with ‘second-hand bargains’ was the potential to bring infestations into the home.21 As Sara Pennell notes, wood-boring beetles bore into bedframes, while bedbugs found ‘their way into existing cracks and orifices’.22 This seems to have been the case in the Colchester home of tailoress Julia Toler. Having escaped a violent relationship, Toler ‘hired a little house for herself’ and, to support herself further, took in lodgers. Having acquired a wooden stump bedstead for this purpose, her lodger found it to be ‘covered in vermin’ and requested that it be ‘taken down to be cleaned’. This would have involved—if done as advised—washing the frame with an application of ‘a strong solution of vitriol’ and boiling the wood in water to destroy the infestation.23 Whether Toler did this is unknown, for her lodger died shortly thereafter upon the bedstead’s temporary replacement of ‘a few shavings in a bag on the floor’.24 Metal bedsteads, ‘in which no bug could “nestle and breed”’, eventually made their way into the homes of Essex and Suffolk’s working class and, like the wooden stump bedstead, appear to have been generally acquired for children and lodgers.25 The first inquest report to note the presence of a metal bedstead in a working-class household was held in 1878 in Bury St Edmund’s pertaining to a fatal conflagration in the home of whitesmith, Walter Green, where the fire consumed everything located in an upstairs back room ‘except the [small] iron bedstead’.26 Indeed, in all instances (ten in total) they are referred to as iron bedsteads. Some of these iron bedsteads were in the possession of those living, as described by the coroner’s court, in ‘the direst poverty’.27 However, what likely distinguishes these households was the condition of the metal bedstead which came into their possession. The iron bedstead slept upon by the children of George Butcher, a Lowestoft smacksman who ‘earned very little’, was described as ‘an old iron bedstead’.28 As with the Neville’s stump bedstead, the use of the adjective ‘old’ suggests a somewhat deteriorated state.29 Moreover, whilst the metal bedstead might have kept some bugs away, it did not necessarily signify any great improvement in sleeping conditions. Ipswich landlady, Mrs Vincent, for example, provided an iron

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bedstead for her lodger, John Last. Yet, the physician who attended him just before his death noted at the inquest that the mattress ‘only halfcovered’ the bedstead.30 Mattresses, like bedsteads, could be purchased, perhaps even inherited, but they could also be produced by the householder themselves. Rural householders especially had a range of natural resources at their disposal to make mattresses such as feathers, straw, chaff, and flock.31 After being burnt to death in her cot, the coroner’s inquest in Matilda Mills’s death revealed that her mother had taken ‘the bed [meaning mattress] which was a flock one in a pillow case[,] from the cot and placed it before the fire to dry’, a spark from which ignited it. Believing she had extinguished the fire, the mother placed it back into the cot. In her absence, the fire took hold again.32 Such materials should have made it easier to refresh and replace the mattress, but this was not always the case. The straw mattress that adorned the iron bedstead slept upon by the Lowestoft smackman’s children was ‘rotten with filth’ according to a witness.33 Mattresses could become so infested with vermin that the only solution was to get rid of them entirely. In May 1887, in Badingham, Suffolk, an inquest was held regarding the death of the child of agricultural labourer, Andrew Crawford. The investigation noted that three children shared a ‘stump bedstead’ in the upstairs back room, but the mattress was missing. The children had been so covered in fleabites that Mrs Crawford got ‘rid of the bed’ (meaning the mattress) and made-do with sacks.34 Yet, in most other accounts which cover the death of a child in bed, there is no comment as to the condition of the mattress that the child died upon. Given the mattress’s pertinence to such cases, it may be that their conditions were largely unremarkable and thus in a fair state. Bedding was also obtained through various means. As well as the second-­hand market, more impoverished households could seek bedding through the parish or charity, as well as various local blanket and clothing clubs that provided blankets to the poorest families during the winter months.35 Indeed, upon their return, some clubs, as Pamela Horn notes, would clean and sell the blankets for as little as 1s. to other working-class households.36 Subscriptions might even be raised for a family in particular need. In March 1888, a fatal fire ripped through the double tenement cottages occupied by head horseman, Charles Hitchen, and gardener, Jonathan Rayner. Having lost all their possessions, the local Mayor began a subscription to replace their ‘clothing and bedding’. Within a week over £80 had been raised through collections, donations, and entertainments.

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This sum allowed for much more than the simple replacement of clothes and bedding. Indeed, it meant that both families were provided with fully furnished homes, which, as the newspapers commented, saw them ‘better supplied with home comforts than before’.37 Thrift also provided householders with the necessary bedding. Clothing that was beyond repair was resown into bedding, as were old sheets into pillowcases.38 In consequence, most homes uncovered in the inquest reports did not appear to lack bedding. In the home of Ipswich tailor, Thomas Gant, his winter bed-clothes consisted of pillows, ‘a sheet, two blankets, and a counterpane, all folded over’.39 Given Gant’s occupation, his family may have had access to surplus cloth to make extra bedding. Yet, this is not dissimilar to the amount of bedding that the aforementioned landlady, Toler, provided to her destitute lodger, which included ‘two old sheets and a quilt [and] two pillows’.40 Even the Nevilles small and old solitary stump bedstead was not entirely without bedding, albeit ‘scantily supplied’.41 Where perhaps the bedding of Toler and Neville do differ from that of Gants is in its condition. Pillows appear to be ubiquitous in working-class homes, even among the most impoverished and dissolute (see Fig. 4.2). In 1861, four inhabitants of the parish of Dovercourt, Essex, suffocated in their sleep after carbonic acid from an adjoining cement works seeped into their ‘hut’. Divided between two households, the interior was described as ‘miserably dirty and with scarcely a vestige of furniture, the poor creatures having to sleep upon a quantity of straw and rags’. Yet, despite the scene of abject poverty, one of the victims was noted to have been found with ‘a pillow under her head’.42 Poverty and thrift compelled many working-class householders to make use of all the materials available to them to keep warm at night. Returning again to the home of Lowestoft smacksman, George Butcher, whose children slept upon an old iron bedstead with a filthy straw mattress, it was further noted at the inquest into the death of the seven-yearold child that ‘there was absolutely no bed clothing in the place’. Instead, ‘old coats and a jacket were used as a covering’. Notably, the jury attached no blame to the mother who struggled to survive on her husband’s meagre earnings, despite the evidence that her child had died in part from ‘want of sufficient nourishment’, concluding she ‘had done the best under the circumstances’.43

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Fig. 4.2  A hopeless drunkard lying on his bed watched by his poor wife and son. Coloured etching by G. Cruikshank, c. 1842, after himself. Wellcome Collection, Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

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4.4   A Place to Sleep The inquest reports also reveal the placement and organisation of beds in the homes of the Victorian working class. These varied according to the size of the home, the number of inhabitants, demands of labour and occupation, and temporary adjustments such as sickness and the arrival of visitors. In working-class homes containing just one room for living and one room for sleeping, the inquest reports reveal that while some of the poorest homes contained a single bedstead and/or mattress, most contained multiple bedsteads and/or mattresses. Labourer, Robert Prior, of Old Heath, Colchester, despite ‘not being at present in regular work’, had been able to furnish his small house that comprised of a keeping room, bedroom, and lean-to kitchen.44 The family’s bedroom contained ‘three beds’, accommodating himself, his wife, and his five children. It has been suggested that in such arrangements labouring families would ‘curtain off’ each bed to provide some rudimentary privacy.45 However, in Prior’s home, there was ‘no partition, curtain, or anything between the beds’ and I have yet to find any accounts of such divisions in the inquest reports, bringing their common use into question. Just a few months after the Prior inquest, an Ipswich coroner’s inquest disclosed a similar arrangement in the home of labourer, George Holden. The jury, upon proceeding to the Holden’s two-roomed home to view the body of the infant that had died in bed just hours before, ‘found considerable difficulty in viewing the body, as the bedroom was so small’. This was further hindered by the presence of three beds. The mother’s testimony revealed that in one bed slept herself, her husband, and the deceased, in ‘a little bed’ slept her other child, and in the third their 16-year-old lodger, Emily Miller. Pressed by the coroner as to her presence in the Holden’s bedroom, Miller stated that there was ‘no room for her at home’. Clearly, the middle-class observers felt uneasy about the sleeping arrangements that they were viewing. Cramped sleeping spaces were widely thought to result in both poor physical health and moral degeneration.46 Having visited Prior’s home, ‘several of the Jury expressed a strong opinion as to the want of sleeping accommodation … being likely of itself to produce illness’. Prior’s wife had died of consumption just five months before and the body of the child they viewed had only recently been discharged from the sickbay of the workhouse.47 In the Holden case, the coroner remarked that the lodger’s presence in the bedroom was ‘beyond the bounds of decency and morality’ and advised her to seek suitable

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lodgings before her character was ‘injure[d]’.48 These situations, however, continued to persist in these types of dwellings throughout the Victorian period, and the working class themselves showed little ill-ease as to such nocturnal arrangements.49 In working-class dwellings with more than one designated bedroom the householder may have had more autonomy over the arrangements of beds, but the presence of work in the home encroached upon this. As Jon Stobart has shown in his work on the commercial use of domestic space in the early modern period, living spaces were ‘squeezed’ by the presence of a shop.50 Evidence of this is also found in inquest reports pertaining to the nineteenth century. In 1885, the home of 65-year-old Brentwood chimney sweep Richard Frostick was engulfed in a fire that took the lives of both Frostick and his 13-year-old granddaughter, Annie. The inquest reports, detailing the layout of Frostick’s home, revealed it was brick-built and ‘consisted of a front shop [the family’s second-hand shop], a backroom, a small kitchen on the ground floor, and four bedrooms on the upper floor’, accommodating eight persons.51 Occupying the front bedroom directly above the shop was Frostick, his wife, and granddaughter. The room contained at least one bedstead and beneath it was found Annie’s body. The other front bedroom, over the gateway, slept Frostick’s daughter, a child, and Jabez Cross—‘the man with whom she cohabits’. They did not, however, share a bed. Instead, Cross slept upon a sofa. A possible explanation for this arrangement would be that the bed was too small to inhabit all three of them, thus when Frostick’s daughter returned home, along with her tally-husband and illegitimate child, a sofa may have been brought upstairs to provide an additional bed. However, the presence of a shop downstairs could have also meant that this particular bedroom already contained seating because it doubled-up as an additional living space. The functionality of the two back bedrooms were dictated by Frostick’s trade and the presence of the second-hand shop. While one of the back-bedrooms did contain beds, they were inhabited by Frostick’s employees, ‘two young sweeps’. Meanwhile, the absence of occupants in the fourth bedroom suggests that this room, as was typical in such households, was used to store goods for the shop.52 The organisation of beds and sleeping in the working-class home could also be dictated by the need for a workshop. Some inquest reports suggest that when the male breadwinner’s work was home-based, such as shoemaking, then a room intended to be a bedroom would be repurposed into his workroom.53 With the back-bedroom providing Ipswich shoemaker,

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James Gooding, with his own workroom, their two surviving children shared a bedroom with their parents, laying together in ‘a little cot’; although it was noted when the mother arose in the morning she routinely placed her daughter into her bed alongside her father.54 Yet, situations varied across working-class dwellings where work and home overlapped. Despite having turned over the front rooms of their Lowestoft home to lodgers in their strained circumstances, the children of the aforementioned smacksman, George Butcher, slept in what their mother referred to as the ‘children’s room’.55 On the other hand, while work and daily life encroached upon designated sleeping spaces, the furnishings for sleep were rarely found in living spaces. The exception being, as shown in Ruth Mather’s chapter, the single-­roomed dwelling. The research of Anna Davin found that even in overcrowded London ‘kitchens and parlours were [only slept in] if there was absolutely no alternative’.56 In one of two instances of a bedstead specifically noted as being present in a designated living space in the inquest reports, this was not in its usual place. When her lodger fell ill with pneumonia, Mrs. Vincent (on the doctor’s orders) dismantled his bedstead and brought it downstairs to the ‘sitting room’ where he could be warmed by the fire.57 Sickness was one event that typically saw this space temporarily transformed to accommodate a sleeping body.58 Yet, the inquest reports suggest that it was couches, sofas, and chairs that served to temporarily separate the sick from the healthy. For example, when Robert Prior’s wife fell ill, ‘He had laid on the couch in the keeping-room’ and that same couch also served as a sickbed for his 18-month-old son.59 Infirmity and illness in old age necessitated a more semi-permanent arrangement in the living space, especially when the stairs, often little more than a ladder in rural homes, became too challenging to traverse.60 When former farm bailiff, John Baker, aged 71 years, of Framsden, Suffolk, cut his throat with a razor, the inquest report stated that, in consequence of his ill-health, he ‘had a bed [meaning mattress] downstairs’.61 Similarly, when retired bootmaker 75-year-old James French Webb died as a result of a smoking accident, his son informed Sudbury’s coroner’s court that his father, who lived alone, had ‘been in the habit of sleeping downstairs on a couch’. A few days prior to the fatal incident, ‘a feather bed [was] brought downstairs, and this was laid on the floor’.62 Visitors and lodgers were also sometimes accommodated in living spaces on temporary beds. A person in search of lodgings might find themselves temporarily offered a couch when all the beds were taken,

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while a visiting relative might have a bed made up in the living space when there was no room elsewhere in the house.63 In March 1900, several Essex newspapers reported on an inquest pertaining to the death of a 41-year-­ old spinster, Florence Davison, resident of 69 Church Street, Harwich. This was not her own home, but the ‘two-room’ dwelling of her sister, Emily Salter, where Florence had lived ‘on and off’ for 16 years. It is evident from the inquest report that her presence proved a disruption to the household domestically and in other ways. Her brother-in-law, Thomas Salter, told the court: ‘the deceased had been the torment of his life’. Asked in what way, he replied: ‘through upsetting his home’. Yet not being in any regular employment himself, he conceded to accommodate her for she brought money into the house. With only one bedroom, Florence slept in the ‘living room’. Precisely what she slept on was not stated, but presumably, given the domestic demands within the multifunctional living space, it was likely to have been something that could easily be folded away during the day. On the day of her death, being unwell, ‘At 7.45 she was transferred from her own bed to … her sister’s bed’. It was in this bed that Florence died.64 Destitution could also bring the living space into nocturnal use. 40-year-old Eliza Bedwell, a ‘widow’ of six years cohabiting outside of legal matrimony, struggled to maintain her living as a staymaker in declining health. Instead, she was supported by her son, a shoemaker, who earned just 7s. a week. Explaining their circumstances to the coroner’s court upon his mother’s death in 1886, he stated that they were in want of all the basic necessities of life. With ‘no candle or light in the house’, they sat in the evening in the dark and cold. On retiring at night, Eliza ‘slept on a feather bed on the floor’, while he slept ‘downstairs on three chairs’. Despite their desperate circumstances, Eliza refused to seek the assistance of the relieving officer in her sickness, for ‘she would rather die at home than in the workhouse’. Notably, ‘The Coroner, in summing up, remarked that he could not recall a case in which the house had been so destitute of furniture’.65 Such an observation is crucial in highlighting the irregularity of such deteriorated circumstances.

4.5   Destitution and Deterioration Destitution and deterioration of one’s bed is most evident in those inquest reports pertaining to Essex and Suffolk’s elderly working-class inhabitants. After being deserted by her husband in the early 1850s, Maria Spinks and

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her older children worked at the local factory to keep a roof over their heads.66 Maria’s household income began to decline as her adult children left to establish their own homes and, in increasing age and declining health, she rapidly spiralled further into poverty and material dearth. After a brief stay in Thetford’s workhouse infirmary, Maria returned to her home in Church Row where she died just a few days later. The coroner’s inquest found that, just like her stomach, her home was ‘quite empty’, for on viewing her body they saw ‘no furniture or other effects beyond a rickety chair, in which the girl [her daughter] stated that she usually slept, [and] the remains of an old stump bedstead’.67 Whether the observer was merely being pejorative rather than literal in their use of the word ‘remains’ is unclear. Certainly, reports of the time do refer to beds being slowly dismantled for the purpose of keeping warm. For example, a report on the living conditions of the poor in late 1880s Norwich remarks on one room containing the ‘the frame of a stump bedstead, without any middle, and portions of which have been used for firewood’.68 Remains of a bedstead are also evident in the Ipswich home of 78-year-­ old Henry Hutton and his wife, Eliza. The elderly couple, like many others in their situation, survived by various means. For as well as ‘hawk[ing] hearthstone for a living’, they were assisted by friends and charitable donations during periods of illness. None of this, however, added up to a habitable home. Upon Henry’s death, an inquest was opened and the coroner, along with his jury, gathered at the Garrod Court dwelling to view the body. The upper floor was, for unstated reasons, unused. Therefore, crammed into the foul-smelling lower room that measured ‘11ft square and 6½ft high’ for which the Hutton’s paid 2s. per week, they observed Henry’s filthy body laying upon its bed and its surrounding. What they saw was, along with just a few cooking items, ‘part of a bedstead, but no table or chair. The only bed covering was a counterpane’,69 having been provided by Miss Pye, the lady superintendent of Ipswich’s Nurses Home. Further comments on the bedstead were also made by the medical witness, describing it as ‘a broken-down bed, a sort of wooden wreck, covered with rough old sacking, or some such material’.70 Hutton’s cause of death was described in similar terms to his bedstead, having died from ‘a broken down constitution’. A journalist remarking on the case commented that ‘If this old couple had been induced to find a home in the workhouse, they would certainly have found comforts to which they must have been entirely strange in their wretched, dirty little abode’. These

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were ‘comforts’ that Eliza would soon experience, for she was removed to the workhouse.71 Similarly, in the nearby Suffolk market town of Woodbridge, when former cabinet maker, Charles Wood, was found dead in his bed in February 1895, the inquest report commented on both Wood’s own and his bed’s physical deterioration. Having once undertaken a skilled trade, Wood’s advancing age (78 years) reduced him to surviving on ‘a few odd jobs’ and charitable assistance.72 The local Wesleyan minister, having come to Wood’s home ‘for the purpose of giving [him] a ticket for tea’, discovered his body. It was noted that being ‘head strong’, he had not applied for parish relief. Wood instead was holding out for a place in Seckford Almshouse, which, it was stated, he would not get if he were in receipt of parish relief.73 Yet, this evidently came at a cost to his health and living standards. Police Constable Johnson informed the coroner’s court that on entering the ‘filthy place’ he found Wood’s body ‘on a piece of old feather bed’. The coroner’s jury concluded that Wood ‘died from frost and cold’. Possibly, to keep warm, he had broken up the bedstead and other wooden furniture for firewood.74 Those who did turn to the parish and were granted outdoor relief do not appear to have fared much better in their material circumstances. When the elderly widower, George Simpson, was no longer capable of working his trade as a cooper, he was allotted outdoor relief of 2s. 6.d per week. He also generated further income from taking in a relative as a lodger.75 At the inquest into his death at the age of c.70 years in 1864, the postmortem found his body to be ‘well nourished’, his neighbours confirming to the coroner’s court that they ‘did not think he was ever in want of food’. Nonetheless, his nourishment did not extend to his material conditions. A concerned neighbour, upon breaking into the house, found George Simpson dead on ‘the floor, with a pillow, an old shawl, and part of a blanket’; the bedding appearing to have deteriorated along with its occupant. George Kerridge, the relieving officer, testified at the inquest that ‘He had frequently advised [Simpson] to go into the Union, but he refused’.76 Sarah Lewsey of Coggeshall, Essex, however, believed the workhouse to be inevitable as her situation declined. Having recently lost her husband, she received 2s. a week (1s. 6d. of this going on rent) and ‘a loaf of bread’ from the parish. This, however, was not sufficient for her to maintain her own home and she was therefore forced to ‘[sell] off her furniture to keep herself going’. Being less portable than other objects, only the posted bedstead remained. With nothing left to sell apart from

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the bed she slept upon and dreading that she would now have to forego her home for the workhouse, the 68-year-old committed suicide by placing a handkerchief over ‘the spike of the bedpost’.77 Evidentially, the New Poor Law’s tactic of instilling fear of the workhouse to deter applicants of poor relief was driving some to suicide to avoid passing through its doors.78 Yet, it must be noted that not all working-class lives concluded with a downgrading in their beds. 55-year-old spinster, Harriet Griggs, turned to her married sister when she required a home in her declining years after leaving service. Here, with no children present, she found herself sleeping alone upon a tent bedstead—one of the more expensive styles of posted bedsteads—in her ‘own room’. Her brother-in-law, a working blacksmith, appeared willing and able to provide such accommodation in the absence of other dependents. Nonetheless, despite this security, Harriet also used the post of her bed to commit suicide by hanging.79

4.6   Conclusion This chapter has pulled back the covers to shed new light on the material beds inhabited by the Victorian working class and their living conditions. Though the inquest reports do not allow for a statistical study of types of beds and bedding, they are rich in detail regarding the sleeping spaces of the working class of Essex and Suffolk. They have allowed for a better understanding as to the arrangement of beds and sleeping bodies in the range of dwellings inhabited by both the rural and urban working classes. Significantly, this chapter has shown, regardless of financial resources, bedsteads were placed in what appeared to be designated bedrooms. Living spaces, except in times of sickness, were generally out of bounds for sleeping. Moreover, the arrangement of beds and sleeping bodies was also dictated by a multitude of competing household demands, including the need to accommodate extended family and the need to create a workspace for the breadwinner. This chapter has also brought to the fore personal accounts of the ‘coping strategies’80 of the Victorian working class. It has revealed their interactions with the New Poor Law, not just in terms of relief but also their fear and rejection of the system, as well as the formal and informal charitable support which brought bedding, even complete beds, to many of those in need. The inquest reports have also documented some of the means by which householders brought in additional income, which included taking in lodgers or the selling of possessions. Accommodating a

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lodger required additional bedsteads, mattresses, and bedding, likely purchased at bargain prices, for the comfort of a lodger was not always of concern. The struggle for income and the limitations of the ‘economy of makeshift’ are particularly evident in those inquest reports pertaining to the elderly. As Joseph Harley’s chapter has demonstrated, the stage in the life cycle that people were at had a prominent effect on a householder’s material possessions. The early years of marriage, with dependent children placing a strain on resources, particularly in low earning households, could affect the ability to provide adequate beds. Yet it was old age that had its greatest impact. A breakdown in health and the stringent application of the New Poor Law saw those lacking safety nets left with little more than their ‘remains’ of beds to sleep upon. Indeed, as this chapter has suggested, when resources were all but extinguished, the penniless elderly may well have resorted to burning their wooden bedsteads to stave off freezing to death. Nonetheless, as stated at the outset of this chapter, the Victorian working-­class of Essex and Suffolk were, it seems, far from the image of the bed-less masses. The working-class experience could be one of ‘home comforts’. For example, this chapter has shown that even in the most destitute of dwellings, there is evidence of sufficient quantities of bedding and the comfort of at least one or two pillows. One suspects, as other chapters in this collection have shown, that taking the inquest reports beyond the bed would continue to reveal ‘comforts’ throughout the working-­ class home.

Notes 1. C.  Steedman, Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 119. 2. Steedman, Dust, p.  119. For more information on such middle-class observations and their pitfalls, see F. Barret-Ducrocq, Love in the Time of Victoria: Sexuality, Class, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century London, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 5–37. 3. For Victorian and Edwardian period, see J. Hamlett, Material Relations: Middle-Class Families and Domestic Interiors in England, 1850–1910 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010); L.  Hoskins, ‘Reading the Inventory: Household Goods, Domestic Cultures and Difference in England and Wales, 1841–81’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, Queen Mary University of London, 2011), pp. 229–283.

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4. With the exception of A. Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London, 1870–1914 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996), pp.  44–57; J. Harley, ‘Material Lives of the English Poor: A Regional Perspective, c. 1670–1834’ (Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Leicester, 2016); V.  Holmes, In Bed with the Victorians: The Life-Cycle of Working-Class Marriage (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Hoskins, ‘Reading the Inventory’, pp. 229–283. J. Hamlett’s recent book, At Home in the Institution: Material Life in Asylums, Lodging Houses and Schools in Victorian and Edwardian England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) explored some of the beds inhabited by the working-class in institutional space, namely lodging houses and asylums. 5. M. Hewitt, ‘District Visiting and the Constitution of Domestic Space in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, in I. Bryden and J. Floyd (eds), Domestic Space: Reading the Nineteenth-Century Interior (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 121–141. 6. For a comprehensive overview of the English Poor Law, see L.H. Lees, The Solidarities of Strangers: The English Poor Laws and the People, 1700–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). In relation to the years covered by this chapter see Part II and III. Also see, P. Thane, Old Age in English History: Past Experiences, Present issues (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); P.  Thane, ‘Women and the Poor Law in Victorian and Edwardian England’, History Workshop, 6 (1978), pp. 29–51. 7. A term first coined by Olwen Hufton in her examination of the poor in eighteenth-century France. O.H. Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France 1750–1789 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974). 8. See, for example, see J.  Harley, ‘Material Lives of the Poor and their Strategic Use of the Workhouse during the Final Decades of the English Old Poor Law’, Continuity and Change, 30 (2015), pp. 71–103; Steven King and A. Tomkins (eds), The Poor in England, 1700–1850: An Economy of Makeshifts (Manchester: Manchester University, 2003); S.  Williams, ‘Earnings, Poor Relief and the Economy of Makeshifts: Bedfordshire in the early years of the New Poor Law’, Rural History, 16 (2005), pp. 21–52. 9. V. Holmes, ‘“Death of an Infant”’: Coroners’ Inquests and the Study of Victorian Domestic Practice’, Home Cultures, 11 (2014), p. 309. 10. V.  Holmes, ‘Dangerous Spaces: Working-Class Homes and Fatal Household Accidents, 1840–1900’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Essex, 2012), pp. 71–72. 11. This chapter has used newspapers from the British Library’s ‘The British Newspaper Archive’: www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk. 12. Harley, ‘Material Lives of the English Poor’ (Unpublished PhD thesis), pp. 83–88; A. McShane and J. Begiato, ‘Making Beds, Making Households: The Domestic and Emotional Landscape of the Bed in Early Modern

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England’ (unpublished online paper); also see S. Pennell, ‘Making the Bed in Later Stuart and Georgian England’, in J. Stobart and B. Blondé (eds), Selling Textiles in the Long Eighteenth Century: Comparative Perspectives from Western Europe (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 30–45; M. Doolittle, ‘Time, Space, and Memories: The Father’s Chair and Grandfather Clocks in Victorian Working-Class Domestic Lives’. Home Cultures, 8 (2011), pp. 251–252. 13. C.  Edwards and M.  Ponsonby, ‘Desirable Commodity or Practical Necessity? The Sale and Consumption of Second-Hand Furniture, 1750–1900’, in D. Hussey and M. Ponsonby (eds), Buying for the Home: Shopping for the Domestic from the Seventeenth Century to the Present (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 127–128. 14. 45 make specific reference to a ‘bedpost, bed post, bed-post’, 3 to a ‘french bedstead’, 2 to a ‘bed-curtain rod’, 2 to a ‘four-post’, and 1 to a ‘tent bedstead’. Occupation determined either through the coroner’s inquest report or Census Enumerators Book. 15. For more information on the maintenance of bedsteads, see S. Handley, Sleep in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), p. 122; Pennell, ‘Making the Bed’, pp. 33–35. 16. Ipswich Journal, April 3, 1858, p. 2. 17. The Workwoman’s Guide (second edition), (London: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., 1840), pp. 191–197. 18. In wealthier homes, stump bedsteads would be acquired for live-in servants, such as this example at the National Trust’s Hardwick Hall: http:// www.nationaltrustimages.org.uk/image/900184 (accessed 30.01.2021). 19. There is significant debate surrounding the issue of where the infant slept in the working-class home which is beyond the scope of the present chapter. 20. Essex Newsman, November 23, 1889, p. 3; Essex Newsman, November 25, 1889, p. 5; Essex Newsman, November 26, 1889, p. 6. A letter to the editor following the inquest somewhat disrupts the family’s narrative of poverty, suggesting that the family received much support in the community—from neighbours and a local rector—and that their circumstances were a consequence of ‘the terrible evils of drink and improvidence’. Chelmsford Chronicle, November 29, 1889, p. 7. 21. Pennell, ‘Making the Bed’, pp. 39–41. 22. Pennell, ‘Making the Bed’, p. 40. 23. L. Wright, Warm & Snug: The History of the Bed (Stroud: Sutton, 2004— originally published in 1962), p. 166. 24. Essex Standard, April 15, 1864, p. 6.

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25. Wright, Warm & Snug, p. 166. For more information on the development and consumption of metal bedstead see, Hoskins, ‘Reading the Inventory’, pp. 252–264. 26. Bury Post, July 18, 1878, p. 5. 27. Eastern Daily Press, October 11, 1892, p.  5; East Anglia Daily Times, November 21, 1892, p. 5. 28. Eastern Daily Press, October 11, 1892, p.  5; East Anglia Daily Times, November 21, 1892, p. 5. 29. As French, Smith, and Stanbury state regarding the conditions of beds in late Medieval England, the emphasis on the word ‘old’ suggested as a decrepit condition. L. French, K.A. Smith, and S. Stanbury, ‘An Honest Bed: The Scene of Life and Death in Late Medieval England’, Fragments, 5 (2016), p. 64. 30. Ipswich Journal, January 6, 1894, p. 2. 31. D. Woodward, ‘Straw, Bracken and The Wicklow Whale: The Exploitation of Natural Resources in England Since 1500’, Past & Present, 159 (1998), pp. 43–76; Pamela Horn, The Victorian Country Child (Stroud: Sutton, 1997), p. 10. 32. Ipswich Journal, October 24, 1857, p. 2. 33. East Anglia Daily Times, Nov 21, 1892, p. 5. 34. Ipswich Journal, May 6, 1887, p.  7; Framlingham Weekly News, May 7, 1887, p. 4. 35. V.  Richmond, Clothing the Poor in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 212–218; Horn, The Victorian Country Child, pp. 10–11. On childbed linen, see Holmes, In Bed with the Victorians, p. 37. 36. Horn, The Victorian Country Child, p. 10. 37. Chelmsford Chronicle, March 23, 1888, p.  5; Essex Herald, March 18, 1888, p. 3; Essex Standard, March 31, 1888, p. 8; Chelmsford Chronicle, March 30, 1888, p. 8; Essex Newsman, March 31, 1888, p. 3. 38. Grace Foakes, My Part of the River (London: Futura Publications, 1976), p. 114. 39. Ipswich Journal, December 29, 1866, p. 5. 40. Essex Standard, April 15, 1864, p. 6. 41. Essex Newsman, November 23, 1889, p. 3. 42. Essex Standard, October 9, 1861, p. 2; Chelmsford Chronicle, October 11, 1861, p. 4. 43. East Anglian Daily Times, November 21, 1892, p. 5; Eastern Daily Press, October 11, 1892, p. 5; East Anglia Daily Times, November 21, 1892, p. 5. For a recent discussion on the breadwinner and the impact of deficient earnings, see Emma Griffin, Bread Winner: An Intimate History of the Victorian Economy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020).

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44. Lean-to: ‘A building whose rafters pitch against or lean on to another building or against a wall’. “lean-to, n. and adj.”. OED Online. December 2020. Oxford University Press. 45. Horn, The Victorian Country Child, p.  10; Edward Twisleton, ‘On the dwellings of the labouring classes in the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk’, in Local Reports on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of England, in consequence of an inquiry directed to made by the Poor Law Commissioners (London, 1842), pp. 134–135. 46. Incest and sexual depravity were prime concerns pertaining shared sleeping arrangements. For a discussion on this A.S.  Wohl, ‘Sex and the Single Room: Incest among the Victorian Working Class’, in A.S. Wohl (ed.), The Victorian Family: Structure and Stresses (London: Croom Helm, 1978), pp.  197–216. Also see T.  Crook, ‘Norms, Forms and Beds: Spatializing Sleep in Victorian Britain’, Body & Society, 14 (2008), pp. 15–35. 47. Essex Standard, June 16, 1867, p. 5. 48. Ipswich Journal, November 23, 1867, p. 5; TNA RG10/1750, f. 44, p. 8. For more info on this case see V. Holmes, ‘Accommodating the Lodger: The Domestic Arrangements of Lodgers in Working-Class Dwellings in a Victorian Provincial Town’, Journal of Victorian Culture 19 (2014), pp. 322–324. 49. Barrett-Ducrocq, Love in the Time of Victoria, p. 18. 50. J. Stobart, ‘Accommodating the Shop: The Commercial Use of Domestic Space in English Provincial Towns, c. 1660–1740’, Città e Storia, 2 (2007), pp. 359–360. Also see: H. Barker and J. Hamlett, ‘Living above the Shop: Home, Business, and Family in the English ‘“Industrial Revolution”’, Journal of Family History, 35 (2010), p. 314. 51. TNA RG11/1756, f. 38, p. 7. 52. Essex Standard, July 4, 1885, p. 10; Chelmsford Chronicle, July 3, 1885, p. 10; Chelmsford Chronicle, July 10, 1885, p. 6; Stobart, ‘Accommodating the Shop’, pp. 359–360. 53. At a coroner’s inquest held in Ipswich in 1842 regarding the death of oneyear-old Samuel Schofield, son of an Ipswich shoemaker, it was noted that his father ‘was a work upstairs’ when Samuel, unattended, drank boiling water from the kettle. Ipswich Journal, June 18, 1842, p.  2. For other examples of work infringing on the bedroom and other spaces of the working-­class home, see Doolittle, ‘Time, Space, and Memories’, p. 250; J-M. Strange, ‘Fatherhood, Furniture and the Inter-Personal Dynamics of Working-Class Homes, c. 1870–1914’, Urban History, 40 (2013), p. 276. 54. Ipswich Journal, January 16, 1864, p. 6. 55. Eastern Daily Press, October 11, 1892, p.  5; East Anglia Daily Times, November 21, 1892, p. 5. 56. Davin, Growing Up Poor, p. 51.

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57. Ipswich Journal, January 6, 1894, p. 2; East Anglian Daily Times, January 4, 1894, p. 8. 58. V. Holmes, ‘“I slept in the living room of a sofa”: The Sleeping Spaces of the Nineteenth-Century Working-Class Home’ (seminar paper, Institute of Historical Research, London, November 4, 2015). 59. Essex Standard, June 7, 1867, p. 6. 60. For more information on stairs and its hazards in urban and rural Victorian working-class homes, see Holmes, ‘Dangerous Spaces’, pp. 235–260. 61. Ipswich Journal, April 9, 1888, p. 5. 62. Evening Star, November 9, 1904, p. 4. 63. For an example on the temporary accommodation of a lodger on the couch, see Holmes, ‘Accommodating the Lodger’, pp. 324–326. 64. Chelmsford Chronicle, March 30, 1900, p. 3; Essex Newsman, March 31, 1900, p. 1; Essex Standard, March 31, 1900, p. 2. 65. Ipswich Journal, March 18, 1886, p. 2; [Ipswich] Evening Star, March 18, 1886, p. 1; Framlingham Weekly News, March 20, 1886, p. 4. 66. TNA RG09/1267, f.47, p. 21; Norfolk Chronicle, July 16, 1853, p. 3—an advertisement pertaining to Isaac Spinks disappearance from Thetford. He was thought to be living in London. 67. Bury Post, September 14, 1869, p.  8; Norfolk Chronicle, September 11, 1869, p. 6; Norwich Mercury, September 8, 1869, p. 3. 68. Norwich Mercury, December 17, 1862, p. 3. 69. Ipswich Journal, September 23, 1893, p. 5. 70. East Anglian Daily Times, September 18, 1893, p. 5. 71. Ipswich Journal, September 23, 1893, p.  5; East Anglian Daily Times, September 19, 1893, p. 7. 72. For more information on the process of deskilling on old age among the male population, see M. Woollard, ‘The Employment and Retirement of Older Men, 1851–1881: Further Evidence from the Census’, Continuity and Change, 17 (2002), pp. 437–463. 73. For a recent discussion on the unwillingness to apply for poor relief during this period, see N. Muller, ‘Deceit, Deservingness, and Destitution: AbleBodied Widows and the New Poor Law’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 26 (2021), p. 95. 74. Ipswich Journal, February 16, 1895, p.  7; East Anglian Daily Times, February 12, 1895, p. 3. 75. TNA RG09/1157, f. 86, p. 18. 76. Ipswich Journal, October 8, 1864, p.  8; Suffolk Chronicle, October 1, 1864, p. 9. 77. Essex Standard, August 20, 1892, p. 6; Chelmsford Chronicle, August 19, 1892, p. 5; TNA RG12/1423, f. 64, p. 1. The Leeds Times reporting on this inquest, as was the case with several local newspapers around the coun-

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try with her plight capturing the imagination, stated that Lewsey’s had an ‘insurmountable horror’ if the workhouse. Leeds Times, August 20, 1892, p. 3. 78. For more information on the fear of the workhouse, see Lees, The Solidarities of Strangers, pp. 150–151. Furthermore, Victor Bailey’s work on suicide in the Victorian city has also found examples of men committing suicide in early old age unable to bear entering the workhouse when they were no longer able to support themselves. V.  Bailey, ‘This Rash Act’: Suicide Across the Life Cycle in the Victorian City (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 125. 79. The Workwoman’s Guide, pp. 191–197. Bury Post, August 30, 1864, p. 6; Ipswich Journal, September 3, 1864, p. 4. 80. Williams, ‘Earnings, Poor Relief’, p. 21.

PART II

The Emotional and the Exterior Home

CHAPTER 5

Spaces of Girlhood: Autobiographical Recollections of Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Working Class Emily Cuming

5.1   Introduction As shown in several chapters in this collection, many lasting images of the nineteenth-century working-class home derive from written accounts produced by sanitary inspectors, journalists, and reformers who documented, assessed, and evaluated the living conditions of the poor, as well as novelists who often drew on these reports.1 Less well utilised, but of rich historical and literary value, are the detailed and varied glimpses of domestic interiors to be found threaded throughout the autobiographies of working-­class men and women looking back to their childhoods of the I am very grateful to Katie Flanagan at Special Collections, Brunel University London, for her help in providing access to materials held in the Burnett Archive of Working Class Autobiographies.

E. Cuming (*) Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Harley et al. (eds.), The Working Class at Home, 1790–1940, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89273-9_5

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late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.2 As well as supplementing the historical record by offering vivid memories of physical aspects of the working-class home, these autobiographies reveal the more personal and intimate dimension of the family home as seen from ‘within’. As Jane Humphries notes, using a domestic analogy, this type of life-writing offers ‘a rare fenestration of working-class experience’, taking in ‘dimensions of life that remain beyond the searchlights of the state, hidden even from the investigative efforts of contemporary social commentators and providing a different perspective: a view from below’.3 This chapter explores and builds on this premise by addressing, quite literally, the ‘view from below’ of the child, and specifically, that of the young girl, as captured by a number of autobiographers writing retrospectively in adulthood. While many male autobiographers wrote in detailed and evocative ways about their childhood homes and domestic interiors in their memoirs, the focus here is on the experience of girls in the context of a wider gendered discourse that positioned girls specifically in relation to domestic space.4 A paucity of material means that it is difficult to recover first-person accounts written by girls, whom, like children generally, are ‘some of history’s most silent subjects’.5 But women writing their autobiographies in older age often tried to summon and put into words how the world of the home looked and felt to them in childhood and adolescence. This chapter asks, what happens if we put the gaze of the child at the centre of representations of the working-class home? What details did the girl’s eye light upon as she watched from within? And what is at stake when we take the girl’s subjective point of view—reshaped over time and through processes of autobiographical recall—as a serious object of enquiry? First-person testimonies of girlhood ‘at home’ offer a contrasting and overlooked contribution to the corpus of writing on working-class domesticity which has been dominated by outsider perspectives. For if middle-­ class observers presented their reports through an empirical and totalising lens (albeit producing accounts that were deeply subjective and ideological), autobiographical accounts that aim to capture the child’s gaze outwardly offer different modes of perceiving and interpreting the home. These life-writers frequently place emphasis precisely on the subjectivity which lies at the heart of their accounts, self-reflexively commenting on the impressionistic and fragmentary ways in which the home is evoked through processes of memory. My analysis thus aims to highlight how female autobiographers looking back on the childhood home give

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prominence not only on to what they saw but on how things felt, and their accounts are subsequently resonant with small, sensory, and telling detail. This focus on the small detail of the child’s world has a wider symbolic function. As Julia Swindells has argued in relation to approaches to working-­class memoir, ‘[p]erhaps it is now possible to allow the autobiographers some of their individuality, that which “distinguishes” as well as that which is “representative”. […] There is no need to diminish subjectivity in representativeness’.6 Indeed, if the method of the social explorers in their exposés often resulted in clichéd and repetitive stock images of ‘typical’ working-class interiors, autobiographies demand that we pay attention to the variability of experience and the richness of distinct and fragmentary memories that endured over the course of a lifetime. Using a number of published and unpublished autobiographies written by women born between 1876 and 1915, this chapter pays particular attention to the way that these life-writers depict their childhood selves as careful observers of the family home and how they convey a sense of such scrutiny in their accounts.7 As well as being an interesting feature of these texts in and of itself, the child’s watchfulness also serves to disrupt the received ‘still-life’ image of the working-class interior in both writing and pictorial representation in which the residents of poorer homes—when portrayed at all—were merely absorbed into the domestic scene as silent, observed figures. The broader political implications of recognising the residents of working-class homes as watchful agents are raised in Carolyn Steedman’s landmark autobiographical work Landscape for a Good Woman. In an initiatory scene, Steedman recalls her childhood self carefully observing the departure of a brusque health visitor who, like a wicked fairy, has issued the damning edict: ‘This house isn’t fit for a baby’.8 Steedman goes on to reflect on how such moments shaped her adult life and work as she comments: ‘I think now of all the stories, all the reading, all the dreams that help us to see ourselves in the landscape, and see ourselves watching as well’.9 The memoirist who looks back to see herself watching, as this vignette suggests, captures the sense that subjectivity, knowledge, and resistance are crucially forged at home. Reading, dreaming, and watching were, of course, not the main designated activities in the home for the working-class girl of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Girls were expected to play an active role in the running of the home and were valued for their ‘usefulness’, including the ability to assist with household duties, cleaning, needlework, and the care of younger siblings.10 As Emma Griffin has shown in her

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illuminating analysis of the complex balance of ‘bread winning’ within the Victorian household, girls working both inside and outside of the home were often essential to the family’s ability to remain economically afloat.11 The extent of girls’ work within and outside of some of the poorest homes in Victorian London did not escape the attention of the social investigator Henry Mayhew, who observed how the life of a coster-girl was framed by her contribution to the running of the household: ‘Her time is from the earliest years fully occupied; indeed, her parents cannot afford to keep her without doing and getting something’.12 He noted with some admiration the significance of girls’ work for the survival of impoverished households, commenting that ‘some will perform acts of marvellous heroism to keep together the little home’.13 Yet working-class girls’ fundamental contribution to the running of the home, including their participation in housework and child-rearing, makes it all the harder to establish how girlhood—that ‘contradictory and categorically diffuse place between infancy and womanhood’—might have been experienced.14 In her study of Victorian and Edwardian girlhood, Carol Dyhouse questions the extent to which a large proportion of working-class girls in the early decades of the twentieth century ever ‘experienced anything resembling a state of adolescence at all’. Taking on household duties and acting as ‘little mothers’, they were ‘much less likely than their brothers to have been allowed a period of legitimate freedom, however transitory, removed from adult surveillance and unencumbered by responsibility for domestic chores’.15 Flora Thompson, the writer of a semi-autobiographical trilogy discussed in more detail in the next section, pointed out that the visitor to the small Oxfordshire hamlet in which she grew up in the late nineteenth century would have been struck by the very absence of girls, since so many were ‘pushed out into the world’ by entering the domestic service workforce. ‘There was no girl over twelve or thirteen living permanently at home’, she observes of her environment.16 Writing from her own experience, Thompson notes how, as the girl reached school-leaving age, she was swiftly made to ‘feel herself one too many in the overcrowded home’ and would become aware that ‘the departure of even one small girl of twelve made a little more room for those remaining’.17 Given the discursive tradition surrounding notions of girls’ ‘usefulness’ within the home, aligned to the quantification of the valuable space she was deemed to occupy, this chapter seeks to move away from this more functional framing of the girl at home to explore the role of domestic space within autobiographical accounts of girlhood. My final section looks specifically at the evocation of

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memories of dolls and dollhouses in autobiography in order to examine how the working-class home was also experienced as a space for interiority and the imaginative life.

5.2   Girls at Home: Re-capturing the Child’s Gaze Flora Thompson drew on her memories of growing up in Juniper Hill, a small village in Oxfordshire, for her autobiographical trilogy Lark Rise to Candleford (1945), offering a unique insight into family and community life in an impoverished rural environment in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The daughter of a father who worked as a stonemason and builder’s labourer, Thompson was the eldest surviving child of a family of ten siblings. Intimacy and detachment are cleverly interwoven into the book’s form and tone, most notably through Thompson’s use of a third person voice to narrate the experiences of the young girl ‘Laura’—a protagonist whose background and life-trajectory closely follow those of the author. The third person voice, which observes the young protagonist Laura at a distance, mirrors the girl’s own characteristic stance as a close observer of her environment. This sense of semi-detachment marks Laura out; she is perceived by members of her own family, and by the inhabitants of Lark Rise, as ‘odd’ and a girl with ‘queer ideas’, while Laura’s mother likened her to that most still and watchful bird—the ‘moll heron’.18 As Juliet Dusinberre comments, the narrative of Lark Rise expresses an ‘extreme clarity of vision [which] belongs to the watchfulness of the child, feeding into the shaping adult mind the raw material of a changing way of life’.19 From an early age, Thompson notes, it is ‘some peculiarity of mental outlook’—specifically an attention to detail—that distinguished Laura and her brother from other children. She adds: ‘Small things which passed unnoticed by others interested, delighted, or saddened them. Nothing that took place around them went unnoted; words spoken and forgotten the next moment by the speaker were recorded in their memories, and the actions and reactions of others were impressed on their minds, until a clear, indelible impression of their little world remained with them for life’.20 The family home is one of the objects of Laura’s insistently watchful gaze. As in many working-class autobiographies, the word ‘slum’ hovers ambiguously at the margins of the prose and is invoked in the opening pages as the narrator insists that the hamlet ‘must not be thought of as a slum set down in the country’.21 Indeed, she recalls how the children of

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Lark Rise, living in two-bed cottages with ‘eight, ten, or even more in some families’, enjoyed tales of the London slums documented in their Sunday School Lending Library books, a reading experience which gave them ‘a cheering sense of superiority: Thank God, the reader had a whole house to herself with an upstairs and downstairs and did not have to “pig it” in one room; and real beds, and clean ones, not bundles of rags in corners, to sleep on’.22 Deviating from the image of leaky, cramped, and darkened rooms generically associated with poor housing conditions, Thompson instead lays emphasis on the openness of the hamlet homes which extended out to the surrounding countryside, typified by her description of hollyhocks and other tall flowers pushing their way into the cottage living-room to mingle with the potted geraniums and fuchsias on the window-sill.23 The narrative insists that ‘though poor, there was nothing sordid about their lives’ and there is thus a political aspect underpinning the intense lyricism of Thompson’s recollections of life in an impoverished small village.24 Richness of detail and the evocation of a complex sensory world make this representation of childhood a landscape that militates against a viewpoint that has historically castigated or romanticized working-class domestic life.25 The insistently subjective mode which focalises all that is seen through Laura’s point of view works precisely against the totalising empirical gaze that underpinned so much commentary on working-class homes in ‘sordid’ conditions of poverty. In this sense, along with its ‘semi-autobiographical’ mode, Lark Rise radically insists on the value of the immersive and sensory point of view which is derived, literally, from within the interior, and that settles its gaze on particular details that have personal, emotional, aesthetic or indeed nostalgic resonance. As Raymond Williams comments towards the end of The Country and the City (1993 [1973]), while ‘[g]reat confusion is caused if the real childhood memory is projected, unqualified, as history’, it is reductive to simply dismiss childhood memory as merely sentimental or nostalgic. For he argues that it is not the content of the memory itself, the ‘village or backstreet’ which is significant, but the attempt to lay hold of ‘what was once close, absorbing, accepted, familiar’—an evocation of the place where the individual felt themselves to be ‘a member, a discoverer, in a shared source of life’.26 In this sense, it is the form, as much as the content, of the autobiographer’s memories that bears political significance. Lark Rise is the place in which Flora/Laura has spent what she calls her most ‘impressionable years’, of which she would ‘bear their imprint

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through life’.27 Written from the point of view of someone who has moved away from this formative environment, the autobiographical trilogy therefore provides an acute and sensitive account of the girl’s simultaneous sense of deep attachment to family and place, and the developing autonomy that would push her away from home. In this sense Lark Rise is typical, for as John Burnett has noted, autobiographies of childhood often mark the turning point at which the individual comes to ‘the first consciousness of identity—the realization of self as having thoughts, emotions and desires distinct from those of the adults who have hitherto constituted the child’s world […] the first recognition of self is, for some, the experiencing of deep emotion which is individual and not shared by others’.28 Thus in the chapter ‘Growing Pains’, Thompson describes returning home from holidays in the nearby town of Candleford having reached a stage of girlhood, startlingly described in the villagers’ idiom as ‘an ok’ard age, neither ’ooman nor child, when they oughter be shut up in a box for a year or two’. She goes on to trace the subtle shift in relations at home as experienced by the sensitive and observant Laura. While at first giving herself the ‘airs of a returned traveller’, she quickly ‘slipped back into her own place again […] the plain spotlessness of her own home, with a few ornaments and no padding to obscure the homely outline, was good, too. She felt she belonged there’.29 But the girl is also aware that various shifts in the household mean that there is increasingly less space for her at home. Laura can no longer read as much indoors for there is a baby to look after, and her mother’s bedtime stories, which so captivated her as a child, are now directed at her younger siblings with whom she still shares a bed. She feels a ‘growing sense of inability to fit herself into the scheme of things as she knew it’,30 including an increasing resistance to the demands of domestic duties (for example, she perceives her mother’s disapproval as she feeds a younger sibling in one arm with a book distractingly held in the other). Yet for Thompson, as indeed for Williams and other ‘scholarship’ boys and girls later in the century, Laura’s process of self-formation and the acquisition of new forms of knowledge are shown to be precisely rooted in a sense of a powerful sense of belonging to a region and place, as well as what she refers to as a ‘protected home life’.31 The autobiographer’s careful attention to the home as a place of a formative and shifting sense of awareness is also manifest in Alice Foley’s A Bolton Childhood (1973)—an urban counterpart to Thompson’s Lark Rise. Born in 1891 to a boiler stoker father, and a mother who earned money as a washer woman, Foley was raised in a ‘two up, two down

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dwelling in the middle of a row’ in the Irish Catholic quarter of Bolton.32 Like Thompson, Foley’s descriptions of family life are notably framed by an awareness of the derogatory attitude to the place she terms ‘home’, and she is quick to appropriate that condemnatory word ‘slum’ early in her account: ‘We were true denizens of the street, born in slums and cramped spaces, and there we tended to stay’.33 Foley describes the family home as a ‘haphazard household’, where the family’s circumstances were subject to the vagaries of her father’s precarious employment.34 Overcrowding, so often seen from the viewpoint of the social investigator, is unusually rendered here from the point of view of the young child. In one instance, Foley describes how ‘[t]he growth of infantile consciousness and the awakening of awareness arouses misty visions of a crowded room with many figures moving around, the family being herded in that one small compass’.35 Other details are captured from a child’s perspective: her ‘infant gaze’ runs its eye across the contents of the spaces of the family home to document a pair of china dogs with golden neck-chains, a clock and tea-caddy, the false cornice over the fire-place with a faded brocade pelmet hiding the string on which damp laundry would be set to dry, an ‘old dilapidated horse-hair sofa [whose] hairy arms unrebukingly received our confidences in infantile griefs and joys’, and a brass latch on the front door ‘which caught my childish vision because it was kept brightly polished’.36 Here it is not so much the material objects in themselves that are meaningful, as Foley’s evocation of the emotional register of these household furnishings: this is a sensory inventory.37 As Megan Doolittle has noted, domestic objects, as recalled in life-writing, ‘are not just containers for sets of meanings, but have a material presence that can be remembered through the senses: what they looked like, how they felt, smelled, tasted and sounded. […] In these accounts, the feel of a chair and the sound of a clock can be deeply embedded in the shaping of autobiographical accounts’.38 Thus, in the manner of other working-class autobiographers, Foley provides a detailed recall of the images that hung on the wall of the home. While these may have been ‘shabby pictures’, whose meanings were mostly unfathomable to the young child, she recounts how they attracted her ‘infant curiosity and wonder’, especially on dark evenings ‘when the lamp-light threw ghostly shadows round the room’.39 Of particular fascination to the young girl was an image depicting the return of the prodigal son ‘recreating a moment of ecstatic joy and comprehension in the mind of a questing child, brooding in the dusk and absorbing queer images

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from fading, yellow pictures’.40 As with Thompson, the childhood home is studiously observed by the girl of the writer’s memory who tries to make sense of the ‘queer images’ that adorn the walls of the family home. Foley does not seek to ascribe a narrative meaning to these fragments of recollection. Despite a tendency in some autobiographical criticism to emphasise the writer’s apparent urge to shape and order the past into a coherent and chronological account, numerous memoirs, such as Foley’s, provide evidence of the way in which authors allow the strangeness and dis-ordered impressions of childhood to permeate the form of their accounts. These autobiographers’ detailed descriptions of the everyday personal items that furnished girlhood homes are furthermore an important addition to the obsessive inventories of working-class interiors produced by inspectors and reformers, which either remarked on the dilapidated furnishings and absence of domestic items, or recorded objects signifying ‘respectability’—such as polished fire grates, hanging clocks, pianos and well-tended flower-pots which were approvingly marked as evidence of healthy domestic standards.41 In Foley’s account, however, the respectable aspidistra plant is described as a much-cherished family possession, and she recalls the pride and pleasure she took in sponging and polishing with milk the leaves of this domestic plant. She recounts that ‘[u]nder these ministrations our aspidistra flourished prodigiously, and though in after years this household favourite of the poor became despised and rejected, for me, in those formative decades, it was a much-loved green oasis in a flowerless home’.42 Autobiographical recollections of working-class homes centre not only on domestic items and objects, but also on the sensory memory of the presence of family members as they engaged in activities around the home. One of Foley’s ‘most cherished memories’, for example, consists of her mother: sitting by the fireside near a gleaming steel-topped fender, and the lamplight falling on the bent head as she firmly held an old, cracked bobbin inside the heel of a stocking, zigzagging the needle of coarse black wool across a gaping hole. […] And so, my little cracked treasure, worn and polished by time and usage, remains a cherished symbol of those fragmentary, yet imperishable moments, crystallised by the passing years, of a mother’s cheerful acceptance and benign endurance of the sum of human frailties and fecklessness—a strange blossoming of spirit in an odd corner of strife and poverty.43

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In her unpublished autobiography, Kathleen Betterton, born in 1913 in Fulham, recalls a similar sense of security in sensing her mother’s presence through the repetitive sounds of the work she took on as dressmaker: ‘I grew up to the burr of a sewing-machine, often whirring far into the night when all other sounds were stilled, and my infant fingers played happily with buttons and cotton reels and spools’.44 For Lilian Hine, the gleaming kitchen in the small three-bedroomed home in Poplar which housed the family of thirteen, was viewed proudly by the daughter as evidence of her mother’s constant household efforts: ‘I can see the kitchen now, the “Home, Sweet Home” brass fender, which shone when the firelight was on it. The kitchener also shone, it was cleaned once a week with emery paper and Blacklead. Our kitchen table, which was made of whitewood, was scrubbed white as milk every day’.45 And Eleanor Hutchinson, one of a family of eight who occupied two rented rooms in a shared house in what she calls the ‘London slums’ of Paddington, also furnishes her memories of home by recalling her mother’s domestic labour: ‘It was in this [front] room where I often found myself alone, looking out of the window or playing out my fantasies, while my mother busied herself in the back’.46 As observed by Burnett, a ‘concern with cleanliness and polish, order and tidiness, both inside and outside the home, is constantly mentioned by autobiographers except those from the poorest homes’, reflecting their learned sense that domestic orderliness was a marker of working-class ‘respectability’.47 If many of the daughters moved away from the kind of domestic labour through which they filter these intimate recollections of their mother’s work and presence in the home, their autobiographies nevertheless express a sense of pride—and incredulity—at the relentless requirements of domestic upkeep.48 Yet if the mother’s presence as she engaged in work provided a source of comfort in these recollections, autobiographers also offer glimpses of how the mother’s place in the home could not be taken for granted. Foley’s memories of her mother are underscored by the knowledge that, through life, she ‘plodded gamely on, battling with a feckless husband whom she neither loved nor understood, and succouring her six children whom she never really wanted’. Indeed, Foley grows to fear her mother’s abandonment, prompting her to seek ‘ways of pleasing mother in the hope that she would not leave us’. Thus, for the young girl, a seemingly carefree game of Snakes and Ladders played by the fire on a quiet evening carried undue significance:

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I cheerfully manoeuvred to send my counter down a long snake so that my mother’s could reach ‘home’ safely. Then clapping my hands in glee there would be a shout, ‘Oh, mam, you’ve won again.’ If there was an answering twinkle in those dear brown eyes, a foolish, childish heart pulsed freely again with joy and relief.49

Hutchinson, who would be sent to live in a convent after her mother’s death from consumption and malnutrition, experienced a foreboding sense of the precarity of home from an unsettling encounter. At the age of seven, she had witnessed a ‘strange woman’ walk through the open door of the house like a ‘female henchman’ before summoning her mother to follow her to an uncertain destination.50 Before leaving with the visitor, Hutchinson’s mother attempted to change out of her indoor shoes into a pair of neat, laced shoes she reserved for formal occasions, for which she was severely and humiliatingly rebuked: ‘Take your foot down from the chair this instant!’ she ordered. My mother obeyed and with difficulty bent down to the floor to finish doing up the laces. To have argued would have been futile and my mother knew it. That was not enough. ‘You people want to learn to look after your chairs. Using them as foot-rests doesn’t improve them!’51

The emphasis Hutchinson places on her memory of witnessing this scene, and the strength of emotion it provokes, is not incidental. Noting that the woman ‘was not aware of my presence as I stood behind her in the doorway summing up her huge frame and big, fat, shapeless legs’, Hutchinson describes herself as ‘helpless [and] speechless’ to this exchange before ‘the picture then fades’.52 Yet the adult autobiographer also ascribes to the young girl a crucial watchful agency within this scene of domestic intrusion, unjust humiliation and class conflict. The girl here, once again, is shown to be a type of social observer, watching and registering the way in which the space of home could be both a refuge and interface for broader tensions relating to poverty, propriety, femininity, and class.

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5.3   Playing House: Dolls, Dollhouses and Interior Worlds As noted above, autobiographies recounting experiences of girlhood can help to expand the set of images associated with the working-class interior, offering a visual, sensory, and emotional record of these places as perceived through the doubled perspective of the writer, who attempts to capture the child’s point of view. But as well as documenting the space of the home, these accounts can concomitantly contribute to an understanding of girlhood and the way in which the girl’s inner life is portrayed through memoir. Outsider observers who surveyed, reported on and photographed working-class children’s leisure activities have tended to emphasise how it was the open space of the street, rather than the interior confines of the home, which afforded space for working-class children to play.53 In her 1913 survey of poor households in London’s Kennington district, for example, the Fabian reformer Maud Pember Reeves observed that ‘[i]ndoors there are no amusements. There are no books and no games, nor any place to play the games should they exist’.54 Yet while many autobiographies support the idea that the street served as a playground and place of relative freedom for young children, others offer important and overlooked accounts of the way in which domestic space could also house the girl’s imaginative life and developing sense of autonomy.55 In this context, even simple recollections of daydreaming—that state of mundane transcendence—function as a telling detail in autobiographical accounts of girlhood. Edna Bold grew up above the shop in which her father made a precarious living as a baker, among blackened terraced houses in the ‘mean, intricate streets’ of turn-of-the-century Beswick, Manchester.56 Bold’s father headed a single-parent household after his wife was admitted into an institution in Lancaster following a mental breakdown. Despite these hardships, Bold describes how an imaginative world of ‘play and dreaming’ formed a key part of her childhood: ‘I loved my dreaming life. I loved my waking life. The one was undoubtedly a reflection of the other’, she writes in her autobiography.57 Daydreaming in the space of her grandmother’s neighbouring house allowed Bold to escape the ‘fraught world where every moment seemed to be crammed with activity’, providing her with what she calls a ‘sense of “otherness”’ and a vivid feeling of ‘complete isolation with its miraculous momentary awareness’.58 For Betterton, being able to find the space to play at home, a flat in a small subdivided terraced house in Fulham, was a problem:

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‘Indoors there was almost no room to play without getting under grownup feet’.59 Despite the physical limitations, she played where she could: ‘I played school with my dolls on the backstairs and “kept house” behind my father’s chair. […] Makebelieve made up a large part of my life at home and with a few “properties” I was able to play countless parts’.60 Memories of playing with dolls and dollhouses recur with frequency throughout women’s autobiographies across the social scale, and a small but suggestive number of those can be found in working-class life-­ writing.61 In Mayhew’s well-known interview with the little watercress girl on the streets of London in the late 1840s, described by Steedman as ‘an almost unique piece of evidence about working-class childhood’,62 the girl is eager to impart not only details of the outdoor and indoor work she undertakes, but her knowledge of a ‘good many games’ and what is presumably a small collection of miniature toys. ‘Oh, yes; I’ve got some toys at home. I’ve a fire-place, and a box of toys, and a knife and fork, and two little chairs’, she tells Mayhew, although she adds, ‘I never had no doll’.63 These details have a disruptive and even unsettling effect; as Steedman points out, ‘toys, the possible symbols of easier childhoods, rest uneasily in a reading of the child’s account’.64 With reference to how descriptions of play feature in even the most impoverished accounts of childhood, Burnett refers to an autobiographer born in 1901, Norah P., who, in her words, had ‘forgotten how to play’ following her traumatic separation from family and entrance into Basford Workhouse in Nottingham. Nevertheless she retained memories of her home life before the move to the workhouse and how ‘she had happily played dressing up a clothes peg as substitute for a doll’.65 Indeed, such is the power of the doll in childhood that autobiographers recall not only the dolls they possessed, but the ones they sorely longed for: veritable objects of desire. Amy Langley recalls pressing her nose to a shop window, ‘gazing hard at a particular doll’s pram which I longed to have for Christmas, but alas and alas! I never had such a wonderful Christmas gift!’66 Grace Foakes, in turn, was spellbound as a child after glimpsing in the window of a Clerkenwell toyshop ‘the most wonderful doll’s pram [in which] sat a beautiful doll’. Aware that she and her sister would never be able to buy these coveted items for themselves, they allowed themselves to pretend that they possessed them: ‘Oh! the games we played in our imagination. […] Never have two children played a stranger game—with a doll and pram that they could never handle, or have’. They were inconsolable, however, when the window display was eventually changed and ‘cried all the way home, mourning for toys we

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had never possessed’.67 In her autobiography, Hutchinson recalls how a few weeks before the cataclysmic event of her mother’s death she had begged her grandmother to buy her a ‘chestnut beauty’ glimpsed in the toy department of a local shop. But the doll was said to be unaffordable, and her physical efforts to detain her grandmother were in vain: ‘I lost the tug o’ war & reluctantly followed her out of the shop, but not without turning to give the doll a long, lingering look as I secretly claimed her as my own’.68 Foley went one step further in her pursuit of a coveted play item; accompanying her mother on a washing job, she hid under her pinafore a ‘knitted doll’s frock’ she had found and took the purloined object home. But her pleasure was short-lived. ‘On reaching home, I slipped it over a battered dolly and gazed in wonder and admiration at her transformation’; yet as soon as her misdemeanour was discovered, ‘the little pink treasure was immediately returned to its rightful owner’.69 Usually considered an object-marker of the middle-class childhood, descriptions of dollhouses crop up in a small number of working-class autobiographies. Here too, these miniaturised domestic interiors function as a peculiarly charged object whose affective power clearly extended beyond the period of childhood. As Joanne Begiato argues, the dollhouse may serve as a powerful ‘emotional object’, one that has as much a hold on the imagination of the adult who looks back to childhood as it had on the child who played with it.70 Like dolls, dollhouses could seemingly be yielded from the most rudimentary material. In an unpublished journal entry written around 1895, for example, Sarah Dyson recalled playing ‘baby-house’ (an older term for dollhouse) on the family farm as a child. Like other families who made ingenious use of empty food boxes in the home,71 Dyson describes a precious dollhouse in her bedroom ‘made out of an orange box with two compartments upstairs and downstairs and [which] had lace curtains and toy furniture’.72 A more lavish account is given by Alice Chase, the Portsmouth-born daughter of a carpenter raised in a large working-class family in the 1880s. In her unpublished memoir she vividly recalls the dollhouse she shared with her sister (possibly a product of her father’s handiwork) which provided the main form of play at home during the winter months. The girl’s close-up, microscopic gaze and realist attention to detail reveal themselves in the future dressmaker’s descriptions of this cherished plaything: It was a simple affair, made of an oblong box divided across the middle into two rooms and set up on end. The hinged lid had four windows—real glass,

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with lace curtains and a false door painted on it. Oh, that little dolls’ house:—how we loved it. It had a small suite of four chairs and a sofa, covered in chintz with a pattern of small pink rosebuds. A little fireplace with red tinsel in the grate to look like fire, and a wool rug in front of the fire, a round marble-topped table in the middle of the room, and a clock in one corner.

This latter object was the source of great delight: ‘The clock was of bright shiny tin, ornamented with flowers and on the top a bird. […] It was a peach of a clock and we were very proud of it and wound it up once each time we played with the house’. Just as writers linger over the domestic objects of the childhood interior in their memoirs, Chase surveys the miniature fixtures and furnishings of her dollhouse in this alternative domestic inventory. Even in the parallel, imaginary world of the dollhouse, simple materials had been repurposed to great effect. ‘The bed was masterpiece of ingenuity’, Chase proudly comments: Mama made it out of a fix box. She nailed the two pieces of wood, which had formed the lid of the box, onto the box to form the head and foot. The box was padded and covered with white calico, the head and foot disguised with frills of chintz; a half of a round collar box covered in chintz with curtains hanging on each side was fastened to the bed-head to make a hood and the counterpane of chintz had a strip of white sewn across the top to look like a top sheet turned back.

Five small plain dolls resided within this interior. ‘Four of them were pudding dolls’, Chase admits, ‘like you put into the Christmas pud, and cost a farthing each.’73 But the two sisters also inhabited the small house through the semi-private world of the shared imagination: How we loved that little house and lived in it in a way. […] I may say of that dolls’ house that we never asked anyone to share it with us. It was ours. We played all sorts of games—whip top, marbles, hoops and swings, shuttle-­ cock, tip-cat, tag, skipping rope, and higher and higher, with all the other children round about and enjoyed ourselves hugely, but indoors we two kept our dolls’ house private. We never quarrelled while we played with it, but made up all kinds of stories about it and forgot the world outside.74

As Nancy Wei-Ning Chen writes, playing with dollhouses might be seen as a means of affording girls a means to ‘express imagination,

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creativity, and agency’.75 Dolls and dollhouses, where they appear in working-­class autobiographies, therefore function as ‘emotional objects’, which, no matter how plain or improvised in form, signify the child’s investment and desire for an object through its promise of an imaginative world of play: a small place of one’s own within the shared, and often crowded, space of the family home. It is ironically not so much the fact that they symbolise the home or domesticity, but that they signify precisely the use-lessness of the daydream and the world of the imagination, that makes dollhouses an especially important object within these accounts of working-class girlhood. In Susan Sontag’s words: To miniaturize means to make useless. For what is so grotesquely reduced is, in a sense, liberated from its meaning—its tininess being the outstanding thing about it. It is both a whole (that is, complete) and a fragment (so tiny, the wrong scale). It becomes an object of disinterested contemplation or reverie.76

In this sense, dollhouses are symbols of domesticity in outward appearance alone; in terms of the role they played in young girls’ lives, they are decidedly anti-utilitarian, representing the more escapist pleasures of play and privacy.

5.4   Conclusion While recognised as a slippery form of historical source material, autobiography undoubtedly offers a rich repository for anyone seeking to explore what Michael Roper has defined as the ‘deep, complex and varied individual emotional experiences that constitute the domain of subjectivity’.77 With its ability to represent fragmentary and impressionistic memories, autobiography can movingly capture the child’s close-up and sensory view of the interior, alongside the adult writer’s retroactive interpretation of the emotional significance of the domestic scene. Life-writing therefore has the capacity to offer rare insights into the experiences of girls—a social group that has generally eluded the gaze of surveyors, social explorers, and indeed historians, of the working-class home. As I have argued, the working-­class autobiography offers descriptions and experiences relating to the domestic environment which can usefully stand in contradistinction to some of the more entrenched and received images of working-class homes, from the sentimentalised cottage interior to the shared rooms of

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the crowded tenement. Autobiographies often seek to convey the child’s gaze within the home, showing this to be a point of view which attends to small, fragmentary, and sensory detail, thus breaking away from the dominant modes of realism and sensationalism that have characterised so much writing about the homes of working people. As Alison Light evocatively writes: A child’s world is perhaps always amorphous, searching for shapes to contain it, drifting between parallel universes, overlapping with, but not matching, where the adults live, full of multiple, shifting dimensions, more like a kaleidoscope of patterns than a stable view. This inner world is protean, can make infinite space of a nutshell; its walls are thin and airy, yet they can also stretch and insulate. This is the boundlessness of boredom, of fear and of play; the place where the child is perhaps most itself and most inaccessible, and where even at the bleakest of times, when all the colour is drained and the walls begin to buckle rather than bend, something which is isolated is also preserved.78

Light’s attention to the way in which the child may exist in ‘parallel universes, overlapping with, but not matching, where the adults live’ is especially significant for accounts of working-class girlhood. In such cases home was, after all, the place in which the girl learned not only how she was seen, but also how to observe and interpret the world as she learned to inhabit her multiple roles as daughter, sister, helpmate, worker, daydreamer, and writer.

Notes 1. These accounts have been widely collected and discussed. See, for example, P.  Keating (ed.), Into Unknown England, 1866–1913: Selections from the Social Explorers (London: Fontana, 1976); R.  Livesey, ‘Reading for Character: Women Social Reformers and Narratives of the Urban Poor in Late Victorian and Edwardian London’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 9 (2004), pp.  43-67; E.  Ross (ed.), Slum Travelers: Ladies and London Poverty, 1860–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); N.  Wilson, Home in British Working-Class Fiction (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp.  15-35; E.  Cuming, Housing, Class and Gender in Modern British Writing, 1880–2012 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp.  23-72; B.  Leckie, Open Houses:  Poverty, the Novel, and the

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Architectural Idea in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). 2. Key studies of working-class selfhood, family life, leisure, and work practices that draw on the extensive corpus of working-class autobiographies include: D. Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of NineteenthCentury Working Class Autobiography (London: Methuen, 1981); J. Burnett, Destiny Obscure: Autobiographies of Childhood, Education and Family from the 1820s to the 1920s (London: Penguin, 1984); R. Gagnier, Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832-1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); J. Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); J. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); J-M. Strange, Fatherhood and the British Working Class, 1865-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); E. Griffin, Bread Winner: An Intimate History of the Victorian Economy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020). 3. Humphries, Childhood, pp. 6, 15. 4. Indeed, many published nineteenth-century working-class autobiographies by male writers include an artist’s impression of the family home as an illustrative plate. 5. J.  Helgren and C.A.  Vasconcellos, ‘Introduction’, in J.  Helgren and C.A.  Vasconcellos (eds), Girlhood: A Global History, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010), p. 4. 6. J.  Swindells, Victorian Writing and Working Women: The Other Side of Silence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985), p. 205. 7. Most published working-class autobiographies by writers born in the period 1876–1915 were male, and surveys of this body of writing have tended to focus on the experience of boys and men. However, the use of unpublished autobiographical writing by ‘amateur’ authors, such as the accounts collected by John Burnett, David Vincent, and David Mayall, now deposited in the Burnett Archive of Working Class Autobiographies, offer unique insight into the lived experiences of women and girls. For an overview of the Burnett Archive, and the changing demographic of working-class life-­writing, see H. Rogers and E. Cuming, ‘Revealing Fragments: Close and Distant Reading of Working-Class Autobiography’, Family and Community History, 21 (2018), pp. 180–201; and Griffin, Bread Winner, pp. 8–16. 8. C.  Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), p. 2. 9. Steedman, Landscape, p. 24. Emphasis added. 10. The settlement worker May Craske provides a detailed description of the ‘little girl, aged from nine to fourteen, who is the drudge of the family’ in

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‘Girl Life in a Slum’, Economic Review, 18 (1908), p. 186. See also Ellen Ross’s exploration of ‘little mothers’ in Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp.  154–155; A.  Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London, 1870–1914 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996), pp.  88–91, 175–176. 11. Griffin, Bread Winner, pp. 27–36. 12. H.  Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (London: Penguin, 1985), p. 44. 13. Mayhew, London Labour, pp. 45. 14. Steedman, Landscape, p.  127. Sally Mitchell explores what she calls the ‘separate culture’ of girlhood in this period by tracing ‘the fantasies, the dreams, the mental climate, and the desires of girls themselves’, see S.  Mitchell, The New Girl: Girls’ Culture in England 1880-1915 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 3, 6. 15. C. Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 119. 16. F. Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford (London: Penguin, 2008), p. 155. 17. Thompson, Lark Rise, pp. 155–156. 18. Ibid., pp. 268, 380, 95. 19. J. Dusinberre, ‘The Child’s Eye and the Adult’s Voice: Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford’, The Review of English Studies, 35 (1984), p. 61. 20. Thompson, Lark Rise, pp. 46-47. 21. Ibid., p. 19. 22. Ibid., pp. 19, 253. The expression ‘to pig it’ means ‘to live in an untidy or slovenly fashion; to live in cheap or inferior accommodation’ (Oxford English Dictionary). Comparing the homes of the very poor to ‘pigsties’ was a common phrase in the parlance of nineteenth-century social investigation. 23. Thompson, Lark Rise, p. 264. 24. Ibid., p. 32. 25. As Dusinberre notes, ‘[f]or Thompson the story of real people and their lives offers fictions as artistically open-ended and inexhaustible as any writer could invent’, see Dusinberre, ‘Child’s Eye’, p. 66. 26. R.  Williams, The Country and the City (London: Hogarth Press, 1993), pp. 297-298. 27. Thompson, Lark Rise, p. 387. 28. Burnett, Destiny Obscure, pp. 26-27. 29. Thompson, Lark Rise, p. 374. 30. Ibid., p. 379. 31. Ibid., p. 318. Williams drew on his own experiences of family and community life in rural South Wales for his semi-­autobiographical novel Border

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Country (London: Chatto & Windus, 1960), further exploring his attachment to place in autobiographically-inflected sections of The Country and the City and ‘Culture is Ordinary’, in idem, Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism (London: Verso, 1989), pp. 3-14. 32. A. Foley, A Bolton Childhood (Manchester: Manchester University Extra-­ Mural Department, 1973), p. 5. 33. Foley, Bolton Childhood, p. 29. Working-class autobiographers’ own uses of the word ‘slum’, overlooked in received histories of the term, deserves further consideration. I discuss one such reclamation of the word as it occurs in Pat O’Mara’s The Autobiography of a Liverpool Slummy (London: Martin Hopkinson, 1934), see Cuming, Housing, pp. 69–71. 34. Foley, Bolton Childhood, p. 45. 35. Ibid., p. 4. 36. Ibid., pp. 5-7. 37. As Burnett observes, many autobiographers describe in photographic detail the physical arrangement of the home as ‘the place where consciousness first dawned’. Yet as he points out, there is a paradox in that the items described are often prosaic, utilitarian, and of little monetary value: ‘the tables and chairs, wash-tubs and fire-irons, tin tea-caddies and china dogs—are usually totally ordinary and unremarkable, hardly worthy, one would think, of recall or mention’, see Burnett, Destiny Obscure, p. 223. On the affective role of objects in autobiography and their containment of family stories, see L. Gloyn, V. Crewe, L. King, and A. Woodham, ‘The Ties that Bind: Materiality, Identity, and the Life Course in the “Things” Families Keep’, Journal of Family History, 43 (2018), pp. 157–176. 38. M.  Doolittle, ‘Time, Space, and Memories: The Father’s Chair and Grandfather Clocks in Victorian Working-Class Domestic Lives’, Home Cultures, 8 (2011), pp. 248–249. See also Julie-Marie Strange’s exploration of tables, chairs, and family relationships in ‘Fatherhood, Furniture and the Inter-Personal Dynamics of Working-Class Homes, c. 1870–1914’, Urban History, 40 (2013), pp. 271–286. 39. Foley, Bolton Childhood, p. 5. 40. Ibid., p. 6. 41. As Leckie notes, ‘these are homes defined in part—and in housing of the poor as described by middle-class commentators, in main –​by the ways things signify’, see Leckie, Open Houses, p.  24. On the ‘moral botany’ deployed by social reformers in relation to the cultivation of flowers and plants in the working-class home, see A.M.  Lawrence, ‘Morals and Mignonette; Or, the Use of Flowers in the Moral Regulation of the Working Classes in High Victorian London’, Journal of Historical Geography, 70 (2020), pp. 24–35. 42. Foley, Bolton Childhood, p. 24.

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43. Ibid., pp. 12–13. 44. K. Betterton, ‘White Pinnies, Black Aprons…’, Burnett Archive of Working Class Autobiographies, Special Collections, Brunel University London, 2:71, 11. 45. L. Hine, ‘A Poplar Childhood’, East London Record, 3 (1980), p. 40. 46. E. Hutchinson, ‘The Bells of St Mary’s’, Burnett Archive, 2:429, 15. 47. Burnett, Destiny Obscure, p. 218. 48. Humphries notes that in working-class memoir ‘[w]omen’s struggles against dirt were celebrated with almost as much frequency as their struggles against want, suggesting the error that is made in overlooking the contribution of cleanliness to comfort’, see Humphries, Childhood, p. 140. 49. Foley, Bolton Childhood, p. 9. 50. Hutchinson, ‘Bells of St Mary’s’, p. 38. The exact identity of the official is never confirmed, although Hutchinson considers the fact that it may have been a council official or prison worker (her father had been imprisoned for union activities). 51. Hutchinson, ‘Bells of St Mary’s’, p. 38. 52. Ibid., pp. 38-39. 53. Davin, Growing Up Poor, pp. 63–68. 54. M.  Pember Reeves, Round About a Pound a Week (London: G.  Bell & Sons, 1914), p. 192. 55. Reading, of course, was one way in which children could inhabit worlds of their own indoors, and Rose’s The Intellectual Life provides multiple examples of how working-class children found the space, time, and means to become avid readers in the home. More generally, sending children to play outdoors may have seemed a safer option for working-class parents; nineteenth-­century coroners’ reports, for example, supply evidence of children who died from burns and scalding injuries related to indoor play, see V. Holmes, ‘Dangerous Spaces: Working-Class Homes and Fatal Household Accidents in Suffolk, 1840-1900’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Essex, 2012). 56. E.  Bold, ‘The Long and Short of It. Being the Recollections and Reminiscences of Edna Bold’, Burnett Archive, 2:85, 1. 57. Bold, ‘The Long and Short of It’, pp. 14, 12. 58. Ibid., p. 32. 59. Betterton, ‘White Pinnies’, p. 8. 60. Ibid., pp. 8, 21. 61. For an account of dollhouses as they feature in middle-class autobiographies, see N.  Wei-Ning Chen, ‘Playing with Size and Reality: The Fascination of a Dolls’ House World’, Children’s Literature in Education, 46 (2015), pp. 278-295. 62. Steedman, Landscape, p. 127.

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63. Mayhew, London Labour, p. 67. 64. Steedman, Landscape, p. 137. 65. Burnett, Destiny Obscure, p. 240. By contrast, Samuel Bamford details how he played lively games with his ‘playmates’, made up of the pauper boys and girls at the Salford poor law workhouse overseen by his father; see Bamford, The Autobiography of Samuel Bamford: Volume One: Early Days (London: Frank Cass, 1967), pp. 69-70. 66. A. Langley, [Untitled], Burnett Archive, 2:466, 22. 67. G. Foakes, Four Meals for Fourpence (London: Virago, 2011), p. 57. 68. Hutchinson, ‘Bells of St Mary’s’, p. 53. 69. Foley, Bolton Childhood, p. 9. 70. J. Begiato, ‘Moving Objects: Emotional Transformation, Tangibility, and Time Travel’, in S.  Downes, S.  Holloway, and S.  Randles (eds), Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions Through History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 239-241. 71. Jack Lawson converted an ordinary orange box into a bookcase, while Arthur Harding recalled how such boxes served in the family home, alternatively, as chairs, storage and a baby’s cot; see Lawson, A Man’s Life (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1932), pp. 80-81; R. Samuel, Chapters in the Life of Arthur Harding (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), p.  21. Holmes addresses the makeshift use of ordinary objects in poor homes in her paper ‘The Egg-Box Cot: Renewing and Repurposing in the Victorian Working-Class Home’, British Association of Victorian Studies (BAVS) Annual Conference, ‘Victorian Renewals’, University of Dundee (2019). 72. Sarah Dyson, unpublished journal, in The Voices of Children 1700–1914, ed. I. Stickland (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973), p. 194. Cited in Wei-Ning Chen, ‘To the Doll’s House: Children’s Reading and Playing in Victorian and Edwardian England’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, UCL, 2014), p. 278. 73. A.  M. Chase, ‘The Memoirs of Alice Maud Chase’, Burnett Archive, 1:141, 21. 74. Chase, ‘Memoirs’, p. 22. 75. Chen, ‘Playing with Size’, p. 278. 76. S. Sontag, ‘Introduction’, in Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings (London: NLB, 1979), p.  20. In a similar vein, Susan Stewart argues: ‘That the world of things can open itself to reveal a secret life […] is a constant daydream that the miniature presents’, see Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 54. The functional uselessness of the dollhouse is nicely illustrated in Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Two Bad Mice (London: Frederick Warne and Co., 1904) in which Tom

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Thumb and his wife Hunca Munca remain desperately frustrated in their attempts to enjoy the domestic comforts of the miniature home. 77. M.  Roper, ‘Slipping Out of View: Subjectivity and Emotion in Gender History’, History Workshop Journal, 59 (2005), p. 59. 78. A.  Light, Common People: The History of an English Family (London: Penguin, 2015), p. 3.

CHAPTER 6

Songbirds in East London Homes, from Henry Mayhew to Charles Booth Michael Guida

6.1   Introduction Augustus Hare, a writer of guidebooks to foreign countries, noted when strolling through Spitalfields that ‘no one will fail to be struck with the number of singing-birds kept in the houses…’.1 This revealing glimpse of East London home-life in 1878 was documented by a curious middle-class outsider, one of many who travelled across town to take in the sights.2 Hare’s discovery was followed later in his writing by the thrill of a second-­ hand tale of working-class depravity; that bird-catchers from this part of London set their captives to sing in pubs for money until they fell from their perches in exhaustion. This was the kind of story that many middle-­ class writers and their readers relished. Such perspectives said as much Thanks to the editors of this collection and the anonymous reviewer for their very useful comments and suggestions for improvement, and to Hilda Kean for reading an early draft of this chapter and offering her insights.

M. Guida (*) Media & Cultural Studies, University of Sussex, Falmer, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Harley et al. (eds.), The Working Class at Home, 1790–1940, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89273-9_6

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about the commentator as the lives of the working class and they confirmed popular assumptions about disgraceful living conditions, irresponsibility and immoral behaviour. However, serious sociological accounts by middle-class observers can be valuable to the historian seeking evidence of working-class lived experience. I have found re-readings of Henry Mayhew’s well-known study London Labour and the London Poor (LLLP) allows a new understanding of working-class homelife in the mid-nineteenth century, being one of the few social investigators to gain access to people’s homes. Mayhew built a rapport on the street by showing empathy to his interviewees and through this he was sometimes able to ask or was invited to go inside the homes of some of the most deprived people in the capital. As Martin Hewitt’s work on district visitors has shown, this was no easy feat as outsiders were frequently unwelcome and barred from entering homes.3 Mayhew noted both what he saw and what his interviewees said. The voices he recorded were, of course, selected and transcribed by him and no doubt subjected to his journalist’s sense of story, though he claimed to relay the ‘unvarnished’ language’ of his subjects.4 Mayhew’s eye was certainly caught by the novel and the extraordinary, yet he was also motivated to find evidence of humanity and ‘respectability’ in the domesticity of the poor. His rich and distinctive reports from LLLP are the main source used here.5 These are complimented by three working-class autobiographies which discuss bird keeping, along with insights from John Burnett’s edited collections.6 A small set of photographs, domestic and pet-keeping manuals, and the books and periodicals of the bird-keeping fraternities of the nineteenth and early twentieth century are also examined. Charles Booth’s social survey work bookends this essay, allowing for an examination of the changes occurring in bird-keeping as the century drew to a close. Taken together, these sources spanning the 1850s to 1900s allow the place of birds in the working-class home to be illuminated for the first time, framed by the question of why wild birds were caged and kept during this period. Animals and pets have long been absent from the scholarship on working-­class home life, although in recent years interest has grown.7 Hilda Kean has begun to reveal the place of cats in the lives of ordinary people, showing a gradual change in their role as vermin killers at the beginning of the nineteenth century to an emerging ‘relationship of reciprocation’ towards the end of the century.8 Curiously, Ross McKibbin’s important work on sporting animals does not address their existence in the home when at rest from their competitive duties.9 Julie-Marie Strange

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has emphasised how the experience of pet-keeping should be seen in distinct class terms.10 Her study of pets in working-class family life in Victorian and Edwardian Britain acknowledges the popularity of birds, but concentrates on the companionship of dogs, cats and a fox. Although the literature is largely quiet on the keeping of birds in a cage for company and entertainment, it was a practice that bloomed across classes in the nineteenth and twentieth century.11 In this chapter I argue that wild birds occupied a significant place in East End working-class home life. They were the most widely kept creature in the home and far more practical in financial and spatial terms than dogs or cats. Their containment in a cage on the wall could give people a sense of stability, homeliness, and even respectability, ‘solidifying boundaries’ of home, to use Erica Fudge’s term.12 This sense of stability was valuable to the working class in an era when economic insecurity was common. While cats could be useful for vermin control and dogs for security, birds were not kept for practical purposes.13 Rather, it was their apparent sociability, linked especially to their song and chatter, that made them attractive to have in the home. A singing bird seemed to broadcast its own pleasure and happiness and was perceived to brighten up the home. The clear appreciation that East Enders had for their singing birds contrasts with pervasive middle-class narratives of noise and dissonance being the atmosphere produced and preferred by working people. I show here the extent to which working-class home life involved emotional engagement with wild songbirds in life and in death in the second half of the nineteenth century. Some of London’s working class caught and traded songbirds, while others took them to the pub to sing in contest against each other, but at the same time, many homes found companionship and pleasure in having a bird around.14 This chapter will first consider how the constraints and concerns that governed most working-class lives influenced pet ownership, taking into account their limited financial and spatial resources. I will go on to explain the practical purpose of keeping a songbird in the creation of a sense of a controlled and stable home environment, and then in terms of the emotional relationships that were forged, including a brief examination of the emotions surrounding the death of a bird. This research identifies a pet as an animal residing within the boundaries of the immediate home (indoor and outdoor spaces), with whom at least one householder had a companionable relationship.

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6.2   The Economic and Spatial Management of Birds in the Home An important consideration in taking on a wild bird as a pet was the cost of purchase and care. A vibrant bird-catching industry meant that a decent singing bird could be bought from a street trader or from a pet shop for only a few pence.15 The plain-looking linnet was the bird that Mayhew noticed most often in working-class homes, along with the slightly more expensive and brightly coloured goldfinch. Both species were highly regarded as singers. To house them, a small wooden cage was needed, costing around six pence to a shilling. A wicker cage for a thrush could be two shillings and six pence.16 The affordability of a bird and a cage would have varied but Mayhew noted that for ‘an unmarried operative scavager regularly employed, working for a large contractor’, an income of 18 shillings a week would stretch to a shilling or two spare for ‘amusements’ and the upkeep of a pet.17 Once purchased, a songbird was not costly to keep; it would survive on a bit of dried grass seed with some grit and water. The birds kept in working-class homes were wild species, yet their wildness was contained and controlled by caging. Cages were invariably small and took up no floor space since they were hung on the wall, often near to a window or door. In this respect they did not significantly encroach on living space and could be comfortably accommodated alongside even a typically busy family in the one or two rooms in which most lived.18 If most individuals, couples or families cooked, ate, worked, and took leisure in the same room, a small bird in a cage would not contribute significantly to the smells, dirt and physicality of the living space. In song, however, the presence of a bird would most certainly be felt, the mood of the room altering, presumably for the better. A bird’s cage would need to be kept clean, but this would be a less laborious task than caring for other animals. Within the constraints of the cage a bird could be part of a clean, tidy, and ordered home; a condition that many working-class wives strove toward.19 Birds were sometimes hung outside to give them fresh air and to encourage them to sing. It was a habit that the engraver John Thomas Smith noted between 1795 and 1805 in his depictions of poor and decaying areas of London such as Moorfields, Smithfield, and Fleet Street, which frequently showed large and small birdcages at street level or high up, outside a window.20 Figure 6.1 shows a characteristically small cage and its occupant in a back yard in Spitalfields  about one hundred years later.21 This photograph was probably taken to communicate the trials of poverty

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Fig. 6.1  A photograph of a back yard in Spitalfields (c. 1900). Photograph by Horace Warner, reproduced from Spitalfields Nippers (2014) with permission from Spitalfields Life Books

for campaigning and fundraising purposes, and so it is likely to indicate that some of the poorest would keep a bird. Keeping a bird, then, appears to have been possible within accepted working-class ideas of domestic order and cleanliness, and keeping a bird fed with seed, chickweed, and groundsel would not have been financially onerous. As we will see, the rising popularity of having a bird at home suggests these creatures became accepted as part of a respectable home, perhaps enhancing its status. Henry Mayhew observed that birds were ‘more extensively kept than ever in London’ by the 1850s, particularly by the working class:22

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The buyers of singing-birds are eminently the working people, along with the class of trades-men whose means and disposition are of the same character as those of the artisan. Grooms and coachmen are frequently fond of birds; many are kept in the several mews, and often the larger singing-birds, such as blackbirds and thrushes. The fondness of a whole body of artificers for any particular bird, animal, or flower, is remarkable. No better instance need be cited than that of the Spitalfields weavers. In the days of their prosperity they were the cultivators of choice tulips, afterwards, though not in so full a degree, of dahlias, and their pigeons were the best ‘fliers’ in England.23

The prosperous times of the Spitalfields weaver had passed, but Mayhew saw in skilled workers a taste for beautiful things from the natural world, including singing birds.24 Like many educated Victorians, he believed that these things were appreciated most by those with cultivated and sensitive minds, though of course the tradesmen and artisans he interviewed had more money to spend on a good singer and therefore were all the more noticed by him. Mayhew also saw and heard birds in the rooms of tailors, shoemakers, coopers, cabinetmakers, hatters, dress-makers, curriers, and street sellers.25 These were people that Mayhew said conducted themselves well and displayed good taste and intelligence.26 He contrasted them with dog-­owners, observing that the bird-lover was ‘generally a more domestic, and perhaps consequently, a more prosperous and contented man’.27 Mayhew searched for marks of respectability and refinement among the poor he met and was reassured to find among bird owners people that he felt were not so different to him. However, the working class made their own cultures of respectability and it is quite possible that Mayhew was seeing, from the outside, the emergence of a custom of songbird-keeping as an indicator of social distinction among men employed in skilled manual labour. A caged bird was becoming accepted as a pet by wives and women who were responsible for creating and managing a sense of home.28

6.3   Feelings of Stability and Continuity Beyond these practical considerations, what was the function of keeping a bird at home? On the one hand, it seems that the stability of a working-­ class home, which was often vulnerable to the possibility of unforeseen financial changes, could be threatened by the costs of a bird’s upkeep.29 But caring for a bird in hard times was probably feasible for most. The

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boundaries of home were certainly challenged by dogs and cats, which toed and froed and tended to stray or were encouraged to do so.30 In contrast, a bird in its cage could lend coherence to the home, solidifying boundaries through its entrapment and fixity.31 Perhaps the regular process of taking the cage outside and then back inside again underscored a pattern of control in which the human home boundaries were remade. The anthropologist Mary Douglas has argued that home is made by bringing ‘space under control’ and it seems that a bird in its cage was both compatible with and symbolic of this idea.32 We can go further to suggest that in an insecure world, a caged bird served to provide the comfort of knowing that life could be managed, made stable and predictable.33 The relatively simple rituals of daily pet care might lend reassurance in their repetition. And when the bird owner or family left the home, it was never completely unattended as the bird remained as a permanent member of the household. Two examples underscore and develop these ideas. First, the gift of a bird came with the promise of the creation of homeliness. This is notable in the tradition of giving a newly married couple a little bird in a cage, intended to bring good luck to their new shared home. Sometimes a young man would present to his betrothed an avian couple—a male and female bird—with all the future potential that implied.34 In fact, birds would hardly ever breed in captivity but the point was that this was a possibility. If it happened then the couple’s home would itself become a kind of nest in facilitating the raising of a successful brood. We know from many pet-keeping books that the middle classes felt the childhood experience of seeing young birds appear would make for a useful education in how nests were made and managed, and how feeding, cleaning, and development of young happened. With new life, children could behold a miniature tableaux of nurturing and domestic relations.35 Second, the cage itself was more than a symbol of home, it was a real, if artificial, home for a bird. It was often shaped as a miniature human house, with a pitched roof and its own simple furniture. A photograph taken in 1880 of the frontage of Palmer’s pet shop in Bethnal Green shows a range of large and small bird cages that could be hung in the window or on a wall (Fig. 6.2). The ‘London’ type of cage that Palmer’s stocked (shown on the left-hand side of the picture) quite explicitly featured the classical architectural motif of a broken pediment above the wire frontage.36 A bird cage could be seen, then, as a home within a home.

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Fig. 6.2  Chas Palmer’s bird shop, Sclater Street, Bethnal Green, with the ‘London’ style cage on the left (1880). From Sonia Roberts’ Bird-Keeping and Birdcages: A History (photographer unknown)

The cage gave householders an additional sense of control as it could be picked up and moved. This portability meant that birds could temporarily be removed from the home. For sport, men would take their beloved chaffinch or linnet to the pub to sing against another in what was called a ‘battle’. Participants bet money, but sometimes there were domestic prizes too such as copper kettles or sets of teaspoons.37 At the end of the evening, the bird would be taken home and put back in its place. To sing well, captive birds needed to hear the voices of those in the wild, and so some took their bird for a walk in the park to expose them to wild song.38 The family bird was sometimes taken on holiday where its presence must have brought a pleasing sense of homeliness to a rented lodging house.39 East London birds would even be taken much further afield: Henry Mayhew was told by one bird-seller that he sold ‘larks, linnets and goldfinches to the

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captains of ships to take to the West Indies’, presumably to evoke feelings of domesticity and English rurality to those away from home.40 The portability of a caged bird meant that it was part of the imagery of the moonlight flit depicted by Victorian cartoonists and fixed in popular culture by Marie Lloyd’s ‘cock linnet’ that she carried as she followed her old man’s van.41 These apparently romanticised scenes were rooted in reality, as the female social investigator T.  Sparrow made clear in her article called ‘Poverty’s Pets’, in which she documented a woman on the move with her cat and parrot on a cart of few belongings.42 When such mobile creatures were taken along, they may well have helped people more quickly feel at home in their new surroundings. Caged birds frequently had long lives that meant that they were present in the home for many years. A family could find a bird still at home when children had left to find employment or got married. Goldfinches were particularly known for their longevity. Mayhew’s informants confirmed this, telling him they would frequently live for fifteen or sixteen years. One had even ‘been known to exist twenty-three years in a cage’.43 This was long enough for a bird to be seen as one of the most familiar and unchanging parts of the home world. It was also long enough for an owner or family to develop a significant relationship with their bird and for its character to be understood and appreciated, or even as Strange suggests, to become part of the family.44

6.4   An Emotional Relationship The emotional dimensions of keeping a bird can be assessed alongside the important, but still small, literature about Victorian working-class emotional life from Strange and Emma Griffin.45 I will show here that birds were kept for the pleasure they gave, stemming from their song, and that owners became deeply attached to their house companions. Birds encouraged and propagated well-being, thereby changing for the better the emotions at play in the home. Goldfinches were particularly noted for their sociability and affectionate temperament.46 It was their chattiness and song that was interpreted as sociable and birds responded to their owner’s presence, suggesting a mutuality of interaction. Mayhew noticed how a bird could provide delight, entertainment, and companionship to those who spent almost all of their time indoors as home workers. His visit to the room of a ‘crippled’

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toymaker found three chorusing goldfinches next to his bed from which he worked: In the little square room adjoining the parlour, and which served the poor man for both bed-room and workshop, sat the toy-maker himself, making penny mouse-traps in the bed that he seldom or never quitted… Close within his reach hung three small square bird-cages—one on one side of his bed, and one on the other—and in them frolicked his favourite goldfinches, that seemed to bear their lifelong confinement as cheerfully as their master.47

This scene gives an indication of the potential for vocal exchange between an owner and his birds. It was their energetic sound-making that made finches such good company. Though a goldfinch was handsome with its striking red, black, and white face, and gold and black wing feathers, the linnet and chaffinch were relatively plain-looking. And yet, the linnet was the favourite singer of working-class ears. A century earlier the linnet had been rated as second only to the nightingale in the discerning assessment of Daines Barrington (a correspondent of the naturalist Gilbert White), who had devised a scheme to assess the quality of vocalizations of the seventeen most commonly kept British songbirds.48 When a bird began to sing it was tempting to imagine it was expressing and broadcasting its happiness.49 Fudge has pointed out that the relationship with a pet is experienced as one of pleasure, where any ‘mutual pleasure’ of human and animal has to be imagined.50 Imagining a content or happy pet brings similar feelings to the human. Certainly, the sound of a bird could lift the spirits of those who heard it. This idea was made explicit in Beeton’s Book of Home Pets which recommended that parents with ‘a morose and sulky boy’ should ‘buy him a chaffinch’.51 The cheering effect that birds could have on those in the home environment led to the development of deep attachment. Mayhew met people who told him of their fond feelings for their pets. Inside the home of a groundsel and chickweed seller and his wife, Mayhew was shown their ‘favourite linnet’ and the woman revealed: ‘I’m particular fond of little birds’.52 A confectioner of better and more reliable income was observed by Mayhew working away at his peppermint rock surrounded by the song of thrushes, linnets, and goldfinches, ‘all kept, not for profit, but because he “loved” to have them about him’.53 It seems clear from these brief examples that working-class emotional lives at home could be brightened by the relationship with birds. Moreover, feelings for birds could be articulated as ‘love’. Birds

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offered the sensuality of their song but did not provide the tactile pleasures of cuddling and stroking fur that cats and dogs could. Afterall, a bird remained wild and any notions of connection or pleasure or love were experienced from a distance. One way of contemplating the affection that surrounded animals in the home is to examine owners’ reactions when they died. Feelings of loss and mourning were sufficiently vivid that they appeared occasionally in letters, memoirs, and first-person accounts transcribed by journalists. For example, bird-lovers would attempt to manage their grief by writing letters to bird-­keeping magazines. In one case the readership of Cage and Aviary Birds was told of the passing of a 24-year-old blind goldfinch hybrid who died in the hands of the owner Mrs Wynn.54 Burial was another way that grief could be expressed. Walter Southgate was born in 1890 and lived in a two-­up, two-down cottage in Bethnal Green with a yard containing a toilet and an outhouse. In the remaining space, Southgate’s family created a tiny cemetery: ‘Our dead cats and dogs, who had been our pets, were decently buried in our own backyard with an appropriate cross to mark the spot; this is, until a new tenant took possession and upset this memorial’.55 The burial of pets in such close proximity to the home kept them in mind and suggests significant emotional attachment that continued to affect home life once the pet had died. Some opted to keep the presence of a favourite bird within the home by using taxidermy. Stuffing was a way of paying respect to a missed household member while extending its life-cycle.56 Once dead and stuffed, a bird did not need to be caged and it could thereby become more material and more present as an object in the home. Encasement in a glass display case brought a new kind of status to a dead bird and this was not an unusual method of keeping a bird in the home. Figure 6.3 is a photograph of a Spitalfields weaver working in sight of two stuffed birds in display boxes positioned above the door. In such a prominent position they could not be forgotten. Again, Mayhew provides examples. First, there is the groundsel and chickweed seller who does not hesitate to recall the sensation of bereavement when pointing out his stuffed linnet: ‘I was very sorry when the poor thing died’, he told Mayhew simply.57 Second is the coalporter, in whose family house taking centre stage on the mantelpiece was a ‘stuffed pet canary in a glass case’, resting among some sea shells and a ceramic shepherdess with lambs. It is probably not without significance that all of the assembled things were sourced from or evoked the dignity

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Fig. 6.3  A Spitalfields weaver at work, with two stuffed birds above the door (1895). Courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, London (photographer unknown)

of the natural world, a place largely inaccessible and sometimes longed for by the working class of the East End.58 Keeping a bird brought into play the powerful and long-lasting emotions of happiness, affection, and love. British birds or ‘exotic’ ones from overseas were caged and kept by all social classes with little compunction, because prevailing attitudes framed such practices, so long as they were caring, as natural, morally instructive, and healthy.59 Well-educated bird people were adept at articulating ethical explanations for their passion, even when they knew why a male bird would sing lustily in captivity: denied the possibility of a mate or territory to defend, it would by instinct

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continue vocalising in a futile attempt to attract a partner and to repel competitors.60 It seems unlikely that this uncomfortable reality was clear to most working-class owners. It should also be said that caged animals were not an unusual sight in London. London Zoo was open to visitors from 1828 and by the middle of the century working-class visitors were able to gain access.61 There were travelling menageries to be seen including the one at the annual St Bartholomew’s Fair, and also the Happy Family animal display was stationed around various parts of central London. In this display, caged together in apparent contented harmony, were all kinds of birds, alongside cats, dogs, rats, and monkeys.62

6.5   Birds and Other Pets on the Rise The culture of keeping birds at home appears to have been as buoyant at the end of the nineteenth century in East London. The Sunday bird market that supplied local buyers as well as those from further afield was as busy as Mayhew had found it at mid-century. Newspaper features about the market were common and photography from the first years of the 1900s shows dense crowds on Club Row and Sclater Street at the heart of the market.63 Bird-keeping became more common as tastes for different birds developed over time. Pigeon racing became increasingly prominent. Charles Booth’s 1886 to 1903 inquiry into the capital’s social conditions, for example, noted that ‘pigeon flying, street gambling and music hall going’ were the chief amusements in the Globe Road area of Bethnal Green.64 In Battersea at the turn of the century, Richard Church wrote in his autobiography that pigeon racing was a Sunday morning sport, ‘especially among the tattooed men in the poorer quarters of the parish, costers with flat black caps and hoarse voices, chokers instead of collars and ties, and Sunday boots of a ginger yellow’.65 Pigeons were homing creatures, but in contrast to songbirds they were not invited into the home. Their coops were set up in roof areas or in back yards, but when really pressed for space people were inventive. Booth reported on a woman who had ‘rigged up a pigeon-house and kept pigeons very successfully’ on the small balcony of her model dwelling building (that would almost certainly have contravened regulations).66 Pigeon coops could, then, on occasions be intimately connected to the human home and their intriguing homing behaviour was of course their most pleasing and useful characteristic to owners who raced them.

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The domesticated canary, originally a foreign bird, became more widely affordable in the early twentieth century. Canaries were bred for colour and body shape, as well as their voices. They had a reputation for remaining cheerful in confinement, becoming quite attached to their owner. A leading cage and aviary bird manual in 1911 announced that the canary was now ‘the home-bird of England, and one more generally met with than any other’ and included a photograph of ‘A Working Man and his Favourite’ to prove its wide popularity. The working man in flat cap and overalls held up a large wire cage.67 Nonetheless, a well-bred yellow canary with ram-rod deportment was a desired status symbol of the middle-class parlour in the first decades of the twentieth century, and was probably more likely to be found there than working-class homes.68 Almost fifty years after Henry Mayhew’s observations, Charles Booth and his researchers walked the neighbourhoods of London, noting an appetite for having animals and plants close at hand: Window-gardening or the cultivation of plants under glass, and still more the keeping of pet animals and other hobbies, are common to all classes, and are the source of very much pleasure, especially to those whose means are small. The cat’s-meat man and the bird-fancier’s shop are marks of a poor neighbourhood, and the itinerant vendor of plants is seen everywhere.69

Booth confirms here that many people across the social spectrum had a pet at home by the end of the century. He also seems to have made the assumption that some small contact with the world of nature was particularly appreciated by those whose lives were constrained by poverty. Perhaps it was. What is clear is that towards the end of the century, as well as wild birds, canaries were present in some homes and pigeon-keeping had increased in popularity, a practice that had its own associations and connections to the working-class home.

6.6   Conclusions If a pet was kept in a working-class East London home during the second half of the nineteenth century, then it was most likely to be a bird in a cage. Not everyone kept a wild bird, nor was every home transformed by their presence, but they were the working-class pet of choice, in preference to a dog or a cat. The working class had their own tastes and ideals of respectability in relation to keeping animals, though their decisions

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were shaped too by financial constraints and a lack of space. Birds were favoured for their affordability, compactness, and ease of care, but it was not just practical convenience that gave place to a linnet or goldfinch on the wall. Though a bird could not be handled or stroked, it touched its owners with chatter and song, sounds that could fill a room with musicality, and a sense of the vitality of the natural world. Birds offered no utilitarian value in vermin control or security; they were simply kept for the pleasure of their company. For many owners, a songbird contributed significantly to several aspects of the construction of home: providing a sense of stability and continuity through their long lives, contributing to the sociability of the home with their chirps and song, and being the focus for emotions described in terms of fondness and love. The intensity of the relationship was such that when a bird died it was sometimes stuffed so it could remain in the home. Men and women expressed these strong feelings and it appears that both men and women cared for their birds. The picture of masculine care and affection that emerges here is distinct from scholarship that has concentrated on male cruelty to animals, sporting interests, or the perceived irresponsibility of keeping a pet in straitened economic circumstances.70 Also distinct in this essay is the appreciation that the working class felt for bird song. Current accounts of Victorian life in London, derived from reformist or critical commentary, characterise the working class as being the source of unbearable city cacophony and insensitive to the sounds of civilized culture.71 Working-class life and culture may have been inherently noisy and disordered at home, at work and on the streets, but perhaps this was why songbird-keeping was so attractive. When a place was found for a caged bird, a potent domestic relationship developed that could be harmonious and long-lasting.

Notes 1. A.  J. C.  Hare, Walks in London (London: Dalby, Isbister, 1878), pp. 313–314. 2. Social investigators who published their observations about the people of East London included James Greenwood, Montegu Williams, and George Sims. Henry Mayhew and Charles Booth took a more serious and scientific approach, publishing their major social surveys in the middle and the late nineteenth century respectively. 3. M. Hewitt, ‘District Visiting and the Constitution of Domestic Space in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, in I. Bryden and J. Floyd (eds), Domestic

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Space: Reading the Nineteenth-Century Interior (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 121–141. 4. H. Mayhew, LLLP, volume 1 (London: Charles Griffin, 1861), p. xv. 5. For critiques of Mayhew’s work as historical source material see, for example, R.  Douglas-Fairhurst, LLLP: A Selected Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) and E. Cuming, ‘“Home is Home be it Never so Homely”: Reading Mid-Victorian Slum Interiors’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 18 (2013), pp. 368–386. 6. The sparsity of pets in working class retrospective testimonies reflects the status of animals and the (male) writer’s anxiety at being taken seriously, rather than an absence of pet-keeping: J-M.  Strange, ‘When John Met Benny: Class, Pets and Family Life in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain’, The History of the Family, May (2021), p. 4. Published autobiographical writing can be driven by the desire to communicate a hard life made good, underpinned by religious, moral, or educative enlightenment: J. Burnett, D. Vincent, and D. Mayall, The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated, Critical Bibliography, Volume 1: 1790–1900 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984); J.  Burnett, Destiny Obscure: Autobiographies of Childhood, Education and Family from the 1820s to the 1920s (London: Allen Lane, 1982), pp. 9–18. 7. Such as: N.  Pemberton, ‘The Rat-Catcher’s Prank: Interspecies Cunningness and Scavenging in Henry Mayhew’s London’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 19 (2014), pp. 520–535; Thomas Almeroth-Williams, City of Beasts: How Animals Shaped Georgian London (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019). 8. H. Kean, ‘From Skinned Cats to Angels in Fur: Feline Traces and the Start of the Cat-Human Relationship in Victorian England’, Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens, 88 (2018), paragraph 9. 9. R. McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 362. 10. Strange, ‘When John Met Benny’, pp. 2–3. 11. The key works that begin to explore the caged bird in British culture are S. Roberts, Bird-Keeping and Birdcages: A History (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1972); M. Cocker and R. Mabey, Birds Britannica (London: Chatto & Windus, 2005); T. Birkhead, The Red Canary: The Story of the First Genetically Engineered Animal (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). My own work argues that the keeping of birds in modern urban Britain has revolved around the potency of their song: M. Guida, ‘Strange Love: The Captive City Chorus in Victorian London’, in M. Collier, B. Hogg, and J. Strachan (eds), Songs of Place and Time: Birdsong and the Dawn Chorus in Natural History and the Arts (Gaia Project Press, 2021), pp. 154–164; M.  Guida, ‘Surviving Twentieth Century Modernity: Birdsong and

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Emotions in Britain’, in H.  Kean and P.  Howell (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Animal-Human History (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 367–389. 12. Erica Fudge, Pets (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008), p. 31. 13. Though dogs were increasingly popular in middle-class Victorian homes, they were too expensive for the majority of working-class people to buy and keep. On watchdogs see Almeroth-Williams, City of Beasts, pp. 194, 199; M. Worboys, J-M. Strange, and N. Pemberton, The Invention of the Modern Dog: Breed and Blood in Victorian Britain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), p. 48. 14. For a series of accounts of East London bird catching and trading seen through the eyes of one of the business social investigators, see J.  Greenwood, In Strange Company: Being the Experiences of a Roving Correspondent (London: Vizetelly, 1883). 15. On bird catching see R.  S. R.  Fitter, London’s Birds (London: Collins, 1949), p. 214; Cocker and Mabey, Birds Britannica, pp. 445–446. 16. Mayhew, LLLP, volume 2, p. 63. 17. For a sketch of the cost of living for Mayhew’s subjects, see Douglas-­ Fairhurst, LLLP, pp. 417–421. 18. Seven to ten children were not uncommon in a household according to Burnett, Destiny Obscure, pp. 215–217. 19. Burnett, Destiny Obscure, p. 218; Strange, When John Met Benny, pp. 9–10. 20. See the selection of etchings published on the Gentle Author’s blog: ‘John Thomas Smith’s Antient Topography’, Spitalfields Life, accessed April 15, 2021, https://spitalfieldslife.com/2021/04/15/john-­thomas-­smiths-­ antient-­topography-­o/. Arthur Morrison noted this habit of hanging birds high up outside the home in A Child of the Jago (Oxford World Classics, 2012 [1896]), pp. 134–135. 21. H. Warner, The Spitalfields Nippers (London: Spitalfields Life, 2014). 22. Mayhew, LLLP, volume 1, pp. 145, 155, 158. He made this claim based on the demand for ‘green stuff’—chickweed, groundsel, plantain, and turf—sold by many street traders for the varied tastes of different kinds of bird. 23. Mayhew, LLLP, volume 2, p. 63. 24. Bird-keeping had been established by the Huguenot silk weavers of Spitalfields in the previous century but the Sunday morning bird fair on Club Row in Bethnal Green nearby was only established from around 1840: ‘Sunday Bird Fair in Shoreditch’, Illustrated Times, August 8, 1868, p. 90. 25. Mayhew, LLLP, volume 2, p. 64. 26. Ibid., p. 64. 27. Ibid., p. 64.

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28. On the working-class construction of respectability and women’s domestic oversight of this social system see E. Ross, ‘“Not the Sort That Would Sit on the Doorstep”: Respectability in Pre-World War I London Neighborhoods’, International Labor and Working-Class History, 27 (1985), pp. 39–59. 29. P. Johnson, Saving and Spending: The Working Class Economy in Britain, 1870–1939 (New York: Clarendon, 1985). 30. H.  Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 179. 31. Fudge has examined the arguments about how dogs and cats may or may not disrupt the security and coherence of the home: Pets, pp. 19–21. 32. M. Douglas, ‘The Idea of a Home: A Kind of Space’, Social Research, 58 (1991), p. 289. 33. A. Franklin, Animals and Modern Cultures: A Sociology of Humans-­Animal Relations in Modernity (London: Sage, 1999), p. 85. 34. Mayhew, LLLP, volume 1, p. 145; ‘The Sunday Bird-Fair’, The Illustrated London News, June 9, 1888, pp. 617–618. 35. C. Pridham, Domestic Pets: Their Habits and Treatment (London: S. W. Partridge, 1893), p. 50; M. Byron, The Bird-Folk at Home (London: Cassell, 1910), pp. v, 11. 36. Roberts, Bird-Keeping, pp. 79–81. 37. Ibid., p. 72; Guida, ‘Strange Love’, p. 161. 38. W.H. Hudson, Birds in London (London: Longmans, 1898), p. 198. 39. Montegu Williams, for example, shared a railway carriage with a linnet in a cage and a cat in a basket, accompanying a family on their annual excursion to Ramsgate sands in Round London: Down East and Up West (London: Macmillan, 1893), pp. 164–169. 40. Mayhew, LLLP, volume 2, p. 68. For an interesting analysis of the relationship between sailors and their dogs and cats see S. Mäenpää, ‘Sailors and Their Pets: Men and Their Companion Animals Aboard Early Twentieth-­ Century Finnish Sailing Ships’, International Journal of Maritime History, 28 (2016), pp. 480–495. 41. Marie Lloyd’s song became a hit in 1919 but its coster heroine was very much a Victorian figure. George Cruikshank and other illustrators depicted birds and other household animals as part of the moonlight flit. 42. T. Sparrow, ‘Poverty’s Pets’, The Quiver, January, 1900, p. 280. 43. Mayhew, LLLP, volume 2, p. 59. 44. Strange considers emotional bonds with cats, dogs, and a fox: ‘When John Met Benny’. 45. E. Griffin, ‘The Emotions of Motherhood: Love, Culture and Poverty in Victorian Britain’, American Historical Review, 123 (2018), pp.  60–85; J-M. Strange, Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain 1870–1914 (Cambridge:

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Cambridge University Press, 2005); J-M.  Strange, Fatherhood and the British Working Class, 1865–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 46. C.  Dixon, Bird-life of London (London: William Heinemann, 1908), p. 178; W. A. Blakston, W. Swaysland, and A. F. Wiener, The Illustrated Book of Canaries and Cage-Birds, British and Foreign (London: Cassell, 1890), p. 325; S. Beeton, The Book of Home Pets (London: S. O. Beeton, 1862), p. 130. 47. P.  Razzell, Morning Chronicle Survey of Labour and the Poor (London: Routledge, 2017), digital edition, volume 3, letter XXXIX, February 28, 1850, paragraph 20. 48. Birkhead, The Red Canary, p. 69. 49. This was a scientific idea, as well as one that appeared to be common sense to Victorian observers. Charles Darwin, for example, observed that male song was a way to attract females, but also a clear expression of a range of emotions ‘such as distress, fear, anger, triumph, or mere happiness’. See C. Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, volume 1 (New York: D. Appleton, 1871), p. 54. 50. Fudge, Pets, p. 21. 51. Beeton, Book of Home Pets, p. 261. 52. Mayhew, LLLP, volume 1, p. 154. 53. Mayhew, LLLP, volume 2, p. 64. The word ‘love’ is found in many sources about birds. For example, Walter Southgate’s cousin George, who kept and bred canaries in the bedrooms of his Camden house, was ‘full of love and understanding for his native Norwich canaries and nothing else’. W.  Southgate, That’s the Way it Was: A Working Class Autobiography, 1890–1950 (London: New Clarion, 1982), p. 14. 54. Letter, Cage and Aviary Birds, April 18, 1903, p. 1182. 55. Southgate, That’s the Way it Was, p. 19. For a sense of the busy and often gendered activities that went on in the back yard of a terraced house, including the keeping of rabbits and pigeons, see R. Roberts, The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1971), p. 131. 56. Mayhew, LLLP, volume 3, p. 251. On the domestic life-cycles of material culture and how studying the use of objects can reveal something of the thoughts and feelings of those who used them see J.  Hamlett, Material Relations: Domestic Interiors and Middle-Class Families in England, 1850–1910 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), chapter 5. 57. Mayhew, LLLP, volume 1, p. 154. 58. Many social observers noticed the working-class attraction to bird life and explained it in terms of a longing for a lost connection with the pleasures of rural life that song emphasised. It was the case that the doubling in

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London’s population from the 1840s to the 1890s was based chiefly on migration from provincial Britain, Ireland, and Europe: see A.  Briggs, Victorian Cities (London: Penguin, 1990 [1963]), p. 61. 59. See, for example, J. Robson and S. H. Lewer, Canaries, Hybrids and British Birds in Cage and Aviary (London: Waverley, 1911), pp. 1–6. For discussions of the complex and changing attitudes towards the treatment of animals, see H. Kean, Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain since 1800 (London: Reaktion, 1998); R. Boddice, A History of Attitudes and Behaviours Toward Animals in Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-century Britain: Anthropocentrism and the Emergence of Animals (Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2008). 60. Johann Bechstein, Natural History of Cage Birds (1795); Birkhead, The Red Canary, p. 50. 61. T.  Ito, London Zoo and the Victorians, 1828–1859 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2014), pp. 88–100. 62. Mayhew, LLLP, volume 3, pp.  215–218. This collection consisted of nearly 200 different animals in one cage ‘amongst whom there seems to prevail lasting concord and amity’ according to the Exhibition Gazette (1845), quoted in T.  Kusamitsu, ‘The Great Exhibitions before 1851’, History Workshop, 9 (1980), p. 81. On working class attendance at travelling menageries see Helen Cowie, Exhibiting Animals in NineteenthCentury Britain: Empathy, Education, Entertainment (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 58–60. 63. For example, busy street trading is depicted by A. St John Adcock, ‘Sunday Morning East and West’, in G.  Sims (ed.) Living London, volume 1 (1903), p. 282. 64. From C.  Booth’s Labour and Life of the People, quoted in M.  Johnes, ‘Pigeon Racing and Working-Class Culture in Britain, c. 1870–1950’, Cultural and Social History, 4 (2007), p. 363. 65. From Richard Church’s autobiography, Over the Bridge, quoted in Johnes, ‘Pigeon Racing and Working-Class Culture’, p. 364. 66. C. Booth, Labour and Life of the People, volume 2 (London: Williams and Norgate, 1889), p. 270. The East End Dwellings Company did not allow chickens, rabbits or other animals in their homes according to R. O’Day, ‘Caring or Controlling? The East End of London in the 1880s and 1890s’, in C.  Emsley, E.  Johnson, and P.  Spierenburg (eds), Social Control in Europe: Volume 2, 1800–2000 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004), p. 158. 67. Robson and Lewer, Canaries, Hybrids and British Birds in Cage and Aviary, p. 5.

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68. C.  E. Humphry, The Book of the Home: A Comprehensive Guide on all Matters Pertaining to the Household, volume 5 (London: Gresham, 1912), p. 103. 69. C. Booth, Labour and Life of the People, volume 9 (London: Macmillan, 1897), pp. 237–238. 70. J. Hribal, ‘Animals are Part of the Working Class: A Challenge to Labour History’, Labour History, 44 (2003), pp. 435–453; Boddice, A History of Attitudes and Behaviours Toward Animals in Eighteenth-and ­Nineteenth-­century Britain, chapter 6; Johnes, ‘Pigeon Racing and Working-Class Culture in Britain’; Ritvo, The Animal Estate, p. 178. 71. On the class politics of urban sound-making see: J.  Picker, Victorian Soundscapes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp.  15–65; P. Bailey, ‘Breaking the Sound Barrier: A Historian Listens to Noise’, Body & Society 2 (1996), pp. 60–62.

CHAPTER 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, 1890–1930 Lesley Hoskins and Rebecca Preston

7.1   Introduction In 1886, as part of his survey of East End poverty, the social investigator Charles Booth lodged anonymously with working families, which allowed him to observe their domestic lives at close quarters, including We would like to the thank the editors, Vicky Holmes, Joseph Harley and Laika Nevalainen, for constructive comments on our text. We are also grateful to Geoffrey Crossick and Jane Hamlett for careful feedback on a first draft and to Julie-Marie Strange for sharing an unpublished journal article. Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre and Hammersmith and Fulham Local Studies and Archives were very helpful with drainage plans and other material. L. Hoskins Buckinghamshire New University, Wycombe, UK R. Preston (*) English Heritage, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Harley et al. (eds.), The Working Class at Home, 1790–1940, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89273-9_7

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how they used the outsides of their dwellings. He concluded that there were many advantages ‘of sufficient open space behind a house, whether it be called garden or yard, for economy, comfort, and even pleasure’. It was, he continued, essential for sanitation but he also acknowledged its purpose for ‘hobbies, pursuits of leisure hours—plants, flowers, fowls, pigeons, and there is room to sit out, when the weather is fine enough, with friend and pipe’.1 Booth offered a sunny and partly nostalgic view but how well did it accord with occupants’ experiences and what did he not mention? This chapter examines the outside spaces of the homes of urban working people and the part—material and experiential—they played in the domestic environment and household life of people living in mostly small, self-contained dwellings, built in repeat rows from the mid-­nineteenth century up to the First World War. Our discussion looks at forecourts, yards, and small gardens, none of which have previously been investigated in depth. From the 1960s onwards, social, economic, architectural, and urban historians established the context for the design of such dwellings and their associated outside spaces.2 Nineteenth-century contemporaries saw working people’s gardens as having a range of possible functions, the outdoor counterpart to the internal workings of the home: sanitary, economic (in the case of productive gardens), and sometimes social and aesthetic.3 The provision of enclosed space outside working-class houses for ventilation formed part of the discourses of public health and housing from at least the 1840s and was increasingly stipulated in building byelaws and local-authority regulation as the century progressed, when increasing incomes and the falling price of land supported the speculative building of huge numbers of improved and affordable dwellings.4 Subsequently, discussion about the nature of outside space for working-class houses broadened to include comfort, decency, and aspects of pleasure and leisure. Such concerns were codified in the Tudor Walters report of 1918, which set new standards for council-house design, and which marks the end of the period of house building discussed here. Domesticity, and gardening, were part of reforming campaigns to promote working-class industry, temperance, and thrift.5 But histories of

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working-class gardens have not generally looked in detail at the plots belonging to mass, speculatively financed housing built before World War One, nor the spatial configuration of yards and other outside places in relation to the home.6 Moreover, a focus on gardening means that other uses and meanings of these spaces for their occupiers—including those who did not garden—is generally of secondary consideration. Sanitary ideas promoted the urban through-house, with a front and back entrance and an open area behind, which was usually interpreted to mean an exclusive back space. The minimum specifications for this related to the height and width of the house, but its actual size depended on byelaws, available land, and hoped-for rental. The facilities contained there varied over time and by geographical location.7 The most important was the toilet. If the location had plumbed water the WC would be attached to the dwelling, generally as part of the back-extension scullery or washhouse but with separate external access. The yard might also contain a coal-shed or ash-heap but, again, this varied by area. At the front, byelaws required a certain distance between facing houses; small forecourts, which were included in this distance, made houses more desirable and raised their rental value. Martin Daunton has argued that making these outside spaces accessible for use only by the dwelling’s residents contributed to the domestic encapsulation that was increasingly a feature of working-class housing.8 This went hand-in-hand with the shift in working-class identity away from the workplace and the street and, with the growth of the bread-­ winner ideal, towards the family or household.9 However, historians have shown that, at all periods and across classes, the provision of delineated and named household spaces did not necessarily define or constrain their actual uses.10 The self-same space could have various uses and emotional registers. For example, Jane Hamlett has explored how nineteenth-century doctors, schoolmasters, and clergy used their personal studies for work but also as a location for interactions with their children.11 Moira Donald makes the point that the servant who cleaned a room in the morning had a different experience of it from the householders who entertained there later in the day.12 The restricted space available to poorer people made multifunctionality even more pressing, as shown by Lucy Faire and Vicky Holmes.13 Thomas Wright’s 1868 description of the transformation of a working-class parlour over the course of a single typical Sunday, by drafting in specialised equipment and giving access to different categories of visitor, is an eloquent example.14

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Our aim is, initially, to outline the shape and size, facilities, and layouts of the outside plots attached to working-class dwellings. We then turn to how people used them. We consider whether or not people observed the boundaries and encapsulation of the dwelling and the home. We are particularly interested in how access to, and control over, outside space was negotiated in houses in shared occupation and the meanings for the different parties involved. Additionally, Faire’s investigation of working-­class homes in 1900–1950 points out that the same physical spaces could have different functions and meanings for different users within the same household, finding that gender, age, and time of day, week, or year, were important differentiators and we pursue her insights here.15 Other recent work on working-class homes has focussed on material culture and family relationships. Julie-Marie Strange, for example, has examined the roles that were enacted in the kitchen around the father’s chair.16 Similarly here, understanding exterior spaces to be part of the home, we consider what meanings and uses they could have for their occupants beyond the practical: how were these spaces used to mediate privacy, gendered divisions, and family relationships in workingclass households.

7.2   Method and Sources Earlier historians of housing relied largely on ‘outsider’ materials, such as official reports and social surveys, house plans, and building regulations. Subsequent histories of the working-class home and family life, including those cited above and in the present volume, have additionally employed autobiographical accounts produced by residents themselves in order to approach more directly the occupants’ points of view.17 In this chapter we use both kinds of sources but bring to the forefront ‘insider’ accounts— visual and written—generated at least partly by inhabitants in order to understand how individual subjects actually engaged with the outside spaces of their home. The autobiographies studied here, written later in life, devote much space to the authors’ childhood years and thereby offer a different perspective on domestic spaces from records produced from an adult, and often normalising middle-class, perspective.18 However, just as ‘outsider’ accounts of working-class lives need to be treated with caution, memoirs also have interpretative issues that mean they cannot be taken straightforwardly at face value and we need to be aware of the circumstances of their

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production.19 Our photographic sources include those taken by external organisations and those made by, or for, the occupants. We look closely at nine memoirs and two photographs, relating to the outside spaces of homes in London and Bristol between the 1890s and 1930. The memoirists described themselves either as working-class or as lower-middle-class living in socially mixed areas. These two cities were selected because we examine the self-representations of the subjects against additional information about local geography, gained through documentary research and fieldwork; given access difficulties during 2020, it was sensible to concentrate on areas with which we were familiar. We did not take for granted that the writers were all representative (although four of them specifically claimed that their lives and environments were typical of their street or neighbourhood). Nor did we assume that they were exceptional. Rather we have, as Jane Humphries has advocated, ‘benchmarked’ autobiographical claims against normal standards of the time and place.20 Our benchmarking sources include further autobiographies and home photographs, maps, house plans, census and related data, district medical officers’ reports, builders’ advertisements, the popular gardening press, newspaper notices, social and economic surveys, and local histories. We mostly consider dwellings built from the mid-nineteenth century since they were increasingly designed with self-contained outside spaces. But, rather than concentrating solely upon how they were used when new, we consider them at different points in their lifespans up to about 1930. This is partly because most people, regardless of class, did not live in new houses; it also avoids associating the working classes—a huge and varied group—with particular house types and residential areas. We have found that exactly the same type of dwelling, in the same street, might be occupied by socially different occupants at the same time.

7.3   The Physical Shape of the Outside Spaces In 1908 the Board of Trade’s Report of the Enquiry … into Working-Class Rents, Housing and Retail Prices noted that ‘the small forecourt, and the back garden, complete the external appearance of a type of house of which there are many thousands in the outer part of London’.21 It found the same arrangement common to parts of Bristol. The Report calls the front area the ‘front garden’ or ‘forecourt’; the back plot was called the garden and sometimes ‘the yard or garden’. The distinction was apparently so well understood that there was no need to define the difference, although the

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implication is that size (and surface treatment) mattered. According to Zoe Crisp, the provision of attached outside space for working-class dwellings in the later nineteenth century varied hugely between towns.22 The recollections of the memoirists show that there was also considerable variation within towns. The main types of outside-space are outlined below, as the differences had some effect on the activities that they encompassed. It is helpful to start with a photograph. Figure 7.1 shows the backyard and garden of 22 Albury Street, Deptford, in south-east London; the image was one of several rear, interior, and street views taken locally in 1911, probably for development and social survey purposes.23 Although the house was much older and originally more upmarket than the others considered below, the photograph offers an exceptionally detailed view of

Fig. 7.1  Photograph, 1911, of the back of 22 Albury Street, Deptford. ©London Metropolitan Archives

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the back spaces of a working-class home in shared occupation, conforming with several of the autobiographers’ descriptions. It was longer than wide, with a trellis dividing the yard area from the garden. Maps of Albury Street from the 1870s to the 1920s show a line drawn across the back spaces at the end of the rear extensions, demonstrating the physicality of this boundary. The extensions at 22 probably contained a toilet and washhouse, while we can see that in the garden were flower-beds and other planting, paths of flattened earth, accommodation for animals or birds, a shed for storage, and poles to support the washing lines. An important function of a yard or garden was to provide facilities for washing and drying, an exhausting task that was undertaken by the women of the household.24 But other members also felt its effects, the severity depending on age and gender. Cecil Pope’s description of washday in his childhood is very informative about how it affected him. He lived in Albert Street, St Paul’s, in Bristol. This part of the city dated from the mid-1800s and, unlike Albury Street, was not considered a slum area; in 1908 it was described as being mainly occupied by respectable working-class families.25 Pope was born there in 1920. He writes of water everywhere, the draughts from the open door, the smells, and the sopping wood.26 He also remembers the significant inconvenience of the washing line, ‘full of wet laundry for its full length’ so that it was a battle to reach the WC. He summed it up: ‘Monday was very sad.’27 Although in Cecil Pope’s house the washing itself was done indoors, the water was re-used to clean the drain and yard. The yard has been understood as a ‘back-stage’ place for the foul and dirty work that enabled the house itself to be kept clean;28 but it was itself subject to some care and outwardly demonstrated hygiene and comfort. This can be seen in the practice of whitewashing the walls of the yard; the photograph of Albury Street shows them whitened to the height of the back door. Three of our subjects describe whitewashing. Pope records that ‘On Good Friday, Granfer Rendall in his house and my mother and father in ours used to whitewash the back of the house’ up to a certain height.29 Another, more working-class, Bristol resident, Joyce Storey (née Dark) lived in the 1920s in part of what looked from the outside to be a lower-middle-class villa in Kingswood, rented from two resident aunts. She notes the contrast between her own rather miserable home and that of an apparently better-­ off neighbour whose house was more comfortable and happy; the whitewashed walls of its yard ‘made a bright spot to look out on, and made the kitchen seem lighter as well’.30 Richard Church, who claimed

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lower-­middle-­class cultural and social status, but who lived in a mixed area of Battersea in the 1900s, notes that most people ‘tried, instinctively, to brighten their lives by a copious use of lime and whitewash’ in their yards, front and back, and also the lower courses of the house walls, to preserve the health of their rabbits, poultry, pigeons, and even goats.31 On the one hand, whitewashing was a sanitising process and could be ordered to yards and WCs by the district medical officer in areas of poor urban housing.32 On the other, our subjects felt that yards with whitewashed walls and, perhaps, floors were clean, bright, comfortable, and well-cared-for. And whitewash would have marked the yard as being part of the domestic facilities of the house, as distinct from the earth of the garden. It bore some similarity to the practice of whitening or reddening front doorsteps, which three memoirists mentioned.33 Cecil Pope offers a lot of information about the outside spaces of his family’s houses in Bristol. There were small, unnamed front areas, which a photograph in his book shows to have been bounded by a low wall and railings. The back plot of the house he lived in longest conforms well with the photograph of Albury Street (Fig.  7.1). Maps indicate that it was about twice as long as the main body of the house but that an approximately half-width back extension, most likely for the washhouse and toilet, extended about a third of the way up this space. Pope distinguishes between the garden and the backyard. The yard was adjacent to the house and contained a drain. It had a hard surface as his mother used to wash it down. The garden area—of which he remembers the black dirt—reached from the yard to the back wall. At the bottom of this garden the family had, for a while, a fowl house; next-door, in the same position, his grandfather had a greenhouse for his geraniums. Some of the houses in the street had a path down the middle of their gardens and Pope recalls riding a bicycle on his. The garden area, then, was for the chickens, for gardening (they collected manure for it), drying the washing, and for play—but the yard was a more directly functional space which was kept clean and orderly. The back area of Sidney Day’s north London home was not dissimilar in shape and size. Born in about 1912, he lived in Balmore Street, Highgate New Town, an area built in the later nineteenth century to accommodate working people, which almost immediately became known as a slum. Day’s house was erected in accordance with byelaws and sanitary requirements. From his account, together with maps and drainage plans, it is possible to build up a picture of the ‘garden’, which is what he calls the whole of the plot behind the house; he claims this to have been typical,

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although there was actually some variation in size along the street.34 Day mentions many of the same back-space facilities as Pope, such as a shed and aviary, as well as similar activities like drying laundry, growing plants, and keeping animals. Other back spaces were smaller. Walter Southgate, born in 1890, lived in a four-roomed mid-nineteenth-century workman’s cottage in Bethnal Green. It was probably the smallest in the memoir group and was, he wrote, a ‘slum’ house typical of thousands throughout the East End of London. There was no forecourt and the ‘small back yard’, measuring 12 feet by 16 feet, contained the tap and back-to-back WC. The Ordnance Survey of 1895 shows that the latter was towards the end of the yard, sharing its back wall with the neighbour’s.35 Another memoirist, Grace Foakes, writing of similar houses in Wapping in the early 1900s, noted that the toilet was usually at the bottom of the yard; some had running water, but many were earth closets.36 A different size and configuration of space was provided in cottage flats or half houses, where what looked like a single house from the outside was specifically designed for two separate households. This kind of dwelling became quite common in London suburbs in the early 1900s.37 Harry Burton, who went on to study at the University of Cambridge, was the son of an often-unemployed ‘feckless housepainter’. He lived as a child in one such upstairs self-contained flat in Fulham in about 1911 and writes of the outside space: You opened the back door on to a narrow balcony …, with roof and sides of corrugated iron. … On this verandah, measuring, I suppose, about ten feet by four, were the dust-bin, the wringer and various baths and dust-filled boxes for flowers and the cats … And yet I remember playing there for hours—with tops and even balls.38

Burton ironically calls this their ‘garden’, but it does seem to have provided for almost all of the outside activities seen in Pope’s, Day’s, and Albury Street’s more spacious plots. And, unlike the other memoirists including those with easy access to a self-contained garden, he did not much care for playing in the street. In other cases where houses were designed as two flats, the long narrow back space might be divided lengthwise or crosswise with separate access for each household (as in Fig. 7.2). In Lewisham and Chiswick, for example, the Board of Trade reported that ‘At the back there is usually a good

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Fig. 7.2  ‘Real photo’ postcard, postmark Surbiton, 11 July 1906, with a message on the reverse from the sitter to his wife. Authors’ collection

garden often divided between the two tenants, and an outside staircase leading from the upper flat’. But arrangements varied; in Walthamstow, a flat at 7s. a week came with its own garden, unlike those at only 5s. 9d., where the garden was common to the whole house.39 Forecourts or front gardens were designed to increase air circulation and light; as Charles Booth noted, they also created ‘some privacy’ for the front room.40 John Holloway notes that in 6 Waverley Road, South Norwood, on the fringes of south London, where he lived in the 1920s, ‘We didn’t have a privet hedge in our front garden, as many of our

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neighbours did—high, sometimes, so that passers-by couldn’t see into the little front parlours—but we did have several shiny green bushes of myrtle’.41 Forecourts increased the size and status of the dwelling and allowed for the formation of a downstairs bay window. However, it was not in fact necessarily easy to ‘read’ social status from the fronts. Holloway explained this in relation to his own small terraced house. His father was workingclass—a stoker—but the tiles, wall, and railings of this ‘minute front garden’ marked it out as a ‘little suburban villa’; as Holloway remarked, ‘all these distinctions and discriminations … turning out to be fluid and intricate at any point where you give them a close look’.42 Peter Guillery notes of nineteenth-century London that a focus on houses tends to obscure the prevalence of multi-occupation.43 This meant that what looked at first glance like lower middle-class streets with front gardens could have many working-class residents, underlining the difficulty of ascribing class to particular housing types. On the other hand, in Fulham, Harry Burton was fully aware that two front doors in one ‘house’ made it plain that his extended family lived in a flat. Some outsider accounts portrayed these little front gardens as all alike. But although there was not much space for variety, memoirs and social surveys do suggest that individuals could personalise their forecourts if they chose.44 Richard Church, in his account of turn-of-the-century Battersea, described his small nuclear family as lower-middle-class. His parents, a post-office sorter, and a London County Council schoolmistress, moved to their semi-detached home close to the river Thames in about 1895, when Richard was two. The house, which they were buying through a building society, had six rooms; later it was occupied by two separate families. The streets locally were, by Church’s own account, occupied by people like themselves and also by ‘artisan and labouring folk’.45 A Booth reporter noted in 1899 that it was a ‘high-class’ example of a fairly comfortable district but that nearby were very poor and ‘semi-­ criminal’ areas.46 The arrangements of the house and outside spaces were similar to the Holloways’ in South Norwood. At the front was a cemented yard with a gate. But those nearby demonstrated ‘a thousand eccentricities of domestic pride’: a front path paved with bottle-ends; a figurehead from a salvage yard; an old mast on a concrete deck.47 In their small front garden in Bristol, Cecil Pope’s mother trained jasmine by the door and other plants around the front window.48 Flower-growing and the ornamentation of house-fronts might be an indicator of domestic pride or individual creativity but were not necessarily associated with respectability. Several

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Booth reporters observed the flowerpots and birdcages fronting ‘semi-­ criminal’ streets.49 Nor, in more ‘respectable’ roads, was the front necessarily solely for formal display or separated from intimate or mundane activity. The family of Cecil Hewitt (another memoirist, writing as C. H. Rolph) put the pram in the ‘front garden’ of their Islington terrace so that the youngest could sleep in the sun. And at their earlier home in Finsbury Park in north London, his postman uncle kept a ladder there so as to get in through the first-floor window when he returned from a late shift.50 So this area could be a functional place for the family as well as an ornamental or buffer space. Aside from brief descriptions of arrangement, decoration, and planting, most memoirists whose homes had a front garden did not linger there. It was, for children, as Booth observed, the gateway to the ‘delights of the street’.51 Hedges provided Hewitt, the son of a policeman, with a hiding place while playing Knock Down Ginger—one of many ‘adult-baiting’ games enjoyed by several of our authors with gangs of neighbouring children. In his case these included not just the breaching of the boundary of the front gate but penetration of the house itself: ‘The only way to achieve a boundary hit was to drive the ball through a front window’.52 Like some of the other memoirists, Hewitt had a back garden in which he could have played. For children at least, the boundary between home and the outside world appears to have been fluid. Indeed as Anna Davin puts it, for many working-class children, home served ‘merely as base’.53

7.4   The Limits of Privacy These are the plots that we see when we look at maps and plans of many urban and suburban areas: small forecourts and back spaces varying in size, perhaps divided down the middle or crosswise. They are attached to what appear to be single dwellings, which would accord with increasing household encapsulation and privacy as discussed above. However, not apparent from the street nor, usually, in photographs, but clear in the memoirs and census records is how often these dwellings contained extended families, lodgers or more than one household. The 1908 Board of Trade Report observes that in London in 1901 it was very common for working-class households to live in tenements of between one and three rooms in shared houses, while in Battersea, for example, the washhouse and the backyard or garden was frequently used in common by two tenants.54

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Comments from some of our subjects throw light on the mechanics of sharing and the effect this could have on household privacy. The latenineteenth-century houses in Sidney Day’s area of north London were built with facilities for single-households but immediately went into multioccupation. By the time Day described it, in the late 1910s and early 1920s, the Days let the top floor of their house to another family with the concomitant effect on the use and privacy of space outside. Day said ‘We had one toilet for the two families …’. This appears to have been at the end of the back extension; access to it was, as was standard in working-­ class housing at this time, outside. Day remarks that ‘there was always a row’ about who should clean out the toilet.55 John Holloway also gives some clues to arrangements in his home.56 His first nine years, from 1920 to 1929, were spent in a ‘small but respectable’ five-roomed terraced house built around 1908 in South Norwood, a much more suburban area. Yet the lavatory was outside the back door.57 This made it ‘fresh and secluded’, although in winter it could be bitterly cold and early morning was ‘a bad moment to empty one’s bowels’.58 Holloway’s home included two separate lodgers, both elderly women. He notes of one that ‘In my early childhood she used to slip unostentatiously through our kitchen to the outside lavatory’.59 So, even in this ‘more respectable’ and consciously ‘better’ household, the familial privacy of the kitchen—which was the Holloways’ only living room—was compromised, discreetly, by having to share outdoor facilities with lodgers. In the Days’ case, a drainage plan suggests that, although people from the household upstairs did not need to enter the Days’ kitchen or front room, they would have had to pass through the scullery or washhouse to get to the toilet. It is also likely that the two households shared the scullery or washhouse. The Board of Trade report noted that, in such areas, the tenements were usually portions of larger houses ‘but still in many cases unadapted for the occupancy of more than one family’.60 Writing in 1913, social observer Maud Pember Reeves found that in Lambeth, an older working-class district similar to Bethnal Green, when two families shared a six-roomed house, ‘the landlady of the two probably chooses the ground floor, with command over the yard and washing arrangements’. She explains that ‘The upstairs people contract with her for the use of the copper and yard on one day of the week. The downstairs woman hates having the upstairs woman washing in her scullery, and the upstairs woman hates washing there’.61 But, apart from friction over the toilet, Sidney Day makes no specific reference to sharing and gives the impression that the

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garden was so chock-a-block with his family’s equipment and activities that there would hardly be space for anyone else.62 The Days were the main tenants and might not have shared the garden. Having to share a WC, scullery, or washhouse, and a yard, meant that these facilities were not private either in the sense of being discreet or totally controllable. Day does not record being bothered by this, but he was not a very domesticated boy. Harry Burton, on the other hand, who was studious and home-loving, hated living in a flat, even when it was designed to be self-contained. He surmises that in some of these, his family must have shared the garden. He did not complain about this, but his comment about moving in 1913 from ‘the drab, garden-less spring’ of the flat ‘to the neat luxury of our villa’ in a nearby road, makes the garden central to his self-contained domestic ideal.63 If encapsulation and privacy were physically compromised for many people by the need to live in shared dwellings, visual and aural breaches were universal. Mrs Holloway chatted to her more middle-class neighbours over the back fence. Nearby, two others would ‘clack’ across ‘the intervening silence’ of two houses in a road nearby, easily heard even from within Holloway’s house.64 Correspondence in Amateur Gardening magazine in 1890–1920 indicates that conflict between neighbours, particularly when plants or structures flouted boundaries or blocked light, was common; stray animals and boundary-transgressing pets were additional causes of strife. Emily Cockayne finds that dogs were a particular cause of neighbourly friction; disputes about overlooking, noise, boundaries, and access to facilities could end up in court.65 Children often broke the boundaries by launching balls, other objects and sometimes themselves over fences and walls. Almost the only mention by Cecil Hewitt of his back garden was in relation to playing Diabolo, which joined balls and shuttlecocks in needing always to be reclaimed from next door.66 Perhaps because he was an only child, John Holloway’s garden play was both less self-­contained and more obviously noisy: he at No. 6 and the little boy at No. 12 used to play at naval engagements, each mounted on their coalshed with a stick for a sixteen-inch gun.67 Overlooking was unavoidable. By the 1850s, the back spaces of small urban and suburban homes, as viewed from the vantage point of a railway carriage, became a common trope in observations of working-class homes.68 But the occupants were not simply victims of overlooking, they themselves looked over. Several of our young subjects seem to have got a thrill from this. In Bristol, Cecil Pope remembered:

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Mrs Fox’s garden backing onto ours. Their kids kept ducks in the black dirt pond in their backyard. Our little yard humped up high in black dirt at the end away from our house and we could run up the slope and see the ducks over the low wall.69

Similarly, Joyce Storey remembered surveying the yards and gardens from a mound of dirt just beyond her backyard in Kingswood, Bristol.70 The Burton family always took the upper floor in the homes they rented in Fulham and Harry recalls one where the veranda ‘gave a sweeping prospect of other people’s gardens’.71 This necessarily destabilised any public/private boundary at the back, as we can see in Fig.  7.2. This is a real-photo postcard portrait of Jack Kitto, a ship’s printer, taken and developed by a friend—as related on the reverse.72 It is postmarked 1906, Surbiton, to the south west of London, where he lived in a half-house. We do not know if this image shows Kitto’s own home, but it offers a good view of what appears to be a garden sub-­ divided cross-wise, demarcated by the trellised archway and a gate. We can see how open this space was: a neighbour in the backyard of the next street witnesses the taking of the photograph and presumably other activities in the yard, garden, and greenhouse. And, in another way, the privacy of this space was voluntarily disturbed. Kitto made this personal image into a number of postcards—a practice that was popular from 1902—sending one of them, unenclosed in an envelope, to his absent wife with a fond inscription. A favoured spot for real-photo postcards of working- and lower-middle-class family or friend groups was at the back of the house, often in the area next to the back extension. Such photographs were taken outdoors to get enough light and often some ‘indoor’ equipment would dress this space, which thereby appeared rather like a room. These pictures often captured a significant family occasion, such as a marriage. Yet, as with the Kitto example, these self-solicited images show an outside space that was decidedly private, familial, and encapsulated, but which was in a sense publicly distributed and overlooked.

7.5   Jostling for Space: Animals, Plants, and People Sidney Day in north London claimed that ‘Our garden was just like all the other gardens in the street’. Apart from the toilet, the rest was ‘filled with me dad’s geraniums, and pens and sheds for our chickens, ducks and rabbits. We kept pigeons to race and had an aviary full of wild birds. Our dogs

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was kept out there too—everyone in the street had dogs’.73 The photograph of the garden in Deptford (Fig. 7.1) shows how such activities were managed spatially. Parts of the space are reserved for a garden and laundry, while pens for animals or birds are ranged behind the sheds and outbuildings to one side. It is clear from our memoir group that many working people kept various birds and animals in their gardens. These creatures had a variety of often overlapping functions. Dogs could be guards and cats kept down vermin, but they could also be pets or companions. In her article on pets and family life in late-Victorian and Edwardian working-class homes, Julie-Marie Strange defines a ‘pet’ as an animal residing within the boundaries of home (including backyards and gardens), with whom one or more family members have a companionate relationship. Taking Sidney Day as an example, she finds that pets—and especially dogs—were seen from within as exemplifying working-class characteristics such as loyalty, cleverness and care as well as cruelty. Yet animals occupied precious space in small homes and needed to be fed; this meant that they were vulnerable to pawning, disposal, or serving for dinner when times were tight. Their care also, like other aspects of indoor and outdoor domestic life, demanded negotiation between husbands and wives and children.74 Walter Southgate, recalling life in his small East End terrace, noted that his family’s ‘pet’ cats and dogs were ‘decently buried in our own backyard with an appropriate cross’. A neighbour from Ireland kept fowls but there were protests when he mentioned wanting pigs; this was considered inappropriate in even this very poor residential area.75 Other creatures were for breeding and competition or for food, or both. John Holloway’s father kept pigeons. They were hobby creatures but, additionally, the Holloways ate the eggs, and John’s mother made delicious pigeon pies. It was ‘quite a special Sunday’ when they ate Black Tom. They had mixed feelings about this, not because he was a pet but because he was the bait used to trap many hen pigeons which flew into the garden in South Norwood.76 As for the planting, gardening in spaces overlooked by buildings in areas of poor air quality (which Deptford and the industrial-area memoir-­ writers must have suffered) would have been trying. By 1900 a number of cheap illustrated publications addressed the gardens of working-people’s homes. Some of these were reforming in nature and intended to improve the lives of the urban poor by ‘brightening’ home exteriors with flowers. Others, such as Amateur Gardening magazine, catered for a more socially mixed audience, but gave practical advice to those managing small ‘town’

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plots in their spare time.77 The Back Garden Beautiful (1912) focussed on the rectangle between the concrete yard and the rear fence. It advised on concealing walls, fences, the scullery, and the dustbin with climber-covered trellis; the economical creation of a ‘quick-result garden’ of hardy annuals and perennials, which favoured tenants’ rather than landlords’ interests, was its overall aim.78 Memoirs and photographs record a corresponding preference for herbaceous plants and fast-growing, often flowering, climbers in front and back gardens and yards. Climbing plants, grown over trellis or arches, helped to create visual privacy, as the popular gardening press recommended and as can be seen in the Deptford garden in Fig.  7.1. English leasehold laws stipulated that trees, and structures built on permanent footings, became landlords’ property and could not be removed on quitting, which probably discouraged more expensive gardening schemes. But both renting and owner-occupying families seem to have adopted this kind of practical gardening, which could be undertaken at little cost or for free.79 John Holloway’s mother sowed annuals from seed harvested from her parents’ country garden and ‘had no scruple over the odd garden plant, especially if you could get it without “setting foot” on someone else’s land’; she was equally free with ‘public and semi-public’ stocks of sand in the street.80 Richard Church’s mother ‘plundered’ plants from rural and inner London: ‘She could not be out in the streets of Battersea for a quarter of an hour, without coming home carrying a root of some kind, either found in a wall or crevice, or bought for a few coppers from the barrow boys’. ‘Foliage rather than flowers delighted her’, and this speciality drew her to aspidistras and ferns, which colonised both the inside and outside of their home.81 Gardens could be a place for playing out roles and personal relationships, as several of the accounts above have suggested. Sidney Day’s Dad, for example, taught him to fight in their back garden.82 In Bristol in the 1920s, Cecil Pope’s parents allowed the ornamental or productive function of the backyard and garden to take second place to the demands of play. The children stored a bike in the fowl house and rode it round the garden. They were allowed to cut a channel, which they tried to fill with water to float their boats. Cecil recalled playing cricket against the back-­ room wall, the wicket placed just below the window. Football season meant broken plants and a damaged garden—and complaints from neighbours as the boys either climbed over and trampled or called out persistently for the return of balls.83 John Holloway remembered that one of the worst rows his parents ever had started because John ‘began extensive

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open trench warfare operations for my tin soldiers’ near father’s wireless aerial.84 Our subjects suggest that garden activities were not standardly gendered. Mrs Church and Mrs Holloway were both noted by their sons to have been passionate gardeners, while Sidney Day’s father and Cecil Pope’s grandfather both cultivated geraniums.85 We can glimpse some temporal rhythm to outside activities. Every morning, for example, Sidney Day fed the chickens and dogs and sometimes took the dogs for a walk.86 Young Church remembered his Mother sitting with him and his brother while they played; she faced her flower border, with her back to Father’s cycle-shed (symbolically, due to his ‘dreaded’ family tandem rides), in moments snatched between teaching and housework. Presumably the geraniums of Mr Day and Cecil Pope’s grandfather also had to be tended outside paid work hours.87 Vicky Holmes has found that some women and children took refuge from violent husbands and fathers in outbuildings or toilets in the yard.88 The garden itself could also be a focus for the expression of familial tensions, as John Holloway recounts. His parents were originally country folk, and their activities in the garden and its location on the city fringes are symbolic of an unfulfilled desire to return. But this is not, as in many memoirs, a straightforward example of paradise lost. Their son recounts the battles over the back-garden space of their South Norwood home.89 Mrs Holloway had a ‘kitchen garden’, in which she grew lettuce, carrots, radishes, spring onions, and a flower garden. It was a material connection to her rural childhood: ‘Our flowers were annuals … The seed all came from my grandfather’s garden’ and she ‘still had the old cottage idea that it was nice to have little strips of grass … between the flower borders and the path’. But ‘her garden’ had to battle for space with her husband’s sheds, which physically and symbolically overshadowed it. These housed Mr Holloway’s chickens, pigeons, and rabbits. John’s mother taught him how to ‘put plants in’ and he helped her tend the garden; from his father, John learned how to look after the birds, rabbits, and the cat. Yet despite this neat division of space and labour, John’s mother ‘saw the garden as her exclusive property’, much to the annoyance of his father. ‘Just as my mother saw the flowers as hers, so he saw the chickens as his; but from time to time she questioned this on the ground that, as was inevitable of course, she did most of the looking-after, because he was out at work’. The adult Holloways could each find in the garden a refuge from their sometimes-difficult marriage but it was also one of the places where their

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differences were enacted. Unmentioned in their son’s account, these differences prefigured separation after the point at which the memoir ends. But, alongside the battle for ‘ownership’ of the outside spaces, there must have been mutually agreed uses and activities, such as drying laundry or access to the WC, which took priority regardless of other struggles over possession.

7.6   Conclusions: Economy, Comfort, Pleasure— and More The enclosed external spaces of urban working-class houses built in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries varied in size and facilities, but they all served a hygienic purpose, containing discrete spaces for the toilet and drainage, washing, and drying. Some were used for relaxation, for play, to house hobby, food and companion animals, or for gardening. These uses conform with Charles Booth’s description of the advantages of gardens for working people—comfort, economy, pleasure, exercise, and sociability. But detailed attention to the descriptions given in even a small number of memoirs shows that there was more experiential complexity to these outside spaces than Booth’s idealising and adult-male-orientated picture presents. We have found that gardens, yards, and forecourts were experienced as an integral part of the home and domestic space and that, alongside practical activities, they facilitated a breadth of interpersonal and interspecies relationships—both positive and negative—that reforming discourses and accounts, however positive they were intended to be, did not capture. A relatively contained open area at the back made it possible to relieve some of the pressure on the often crowded internal spaces of working-­ class dwellings by accommodating some activities outside. The WC was perhaps the only spot where adult members of the household could be guaranteed some time and place on their own; children did not seem, in retrospect, too concerned with obtaining their own space but some played alone, unobserved, in sheds. Taking charge of particular tasks, such as the plants or the animals, could also provide a sort of personal space. But activities and uses competed and it was necessary to prioritise, whether temporally or hierarchically. The recurrent demands of laundry, for example, took priority at specified times over play, gardening, and easy access to the WC. The result of such prioritisation could have an emotional as well

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as a practical effect. In cases other than laundry, there was more room for negotiating, imposing, or contesting priorities. The question of who in the household had most control or ownership of the outside spaces appears frequently in the memoirs studied here. And, indeed, the outside space could be a locus, not just a location, for reflecting or working out interpersonal familial situations and tensions. For John Holloway’s parents, the jostling between his mother’s gardening and his father’s animal sheds played out a relationship that ended in divorce. Our chapter has focused on small working-class dwellings but such issues could also be pursued in relation to larger houses, where there were more differentiated indoor spaces and more facilities as well as, usually, greater space outside. What were the priorities of use and the hierarchies of control in that situation? Were they distinctively, culturally, different? The provision of enclosed back and front spaces chimed with a growing working-class culture of domestic encapsulation, but this was compromised by the widespread necessity of multi-occupation. And, sharing aside, total privacy was never feasible as overlooking was inescapable in small plots. In any case people were willing to share their spaces in some ways, whether photographically or through neighbourly activities. Of course, many people continued to live in accommodation which did not provide private enclosed outside space, whether this was older buildings or purpose-built tenements. If there was no access to special outside spaces specifically associated with the dwelling, then, as some of these memoirists attest, both adults and children made use of doorsteps and the street.90 We have focused on the use of the dedicated enclosed spaces but it is clear that urban working-class street life continued throughout this period.91 Many children played outside, even when, as in the case of Sidney Day and Cecil Hewitt, they had their own back gardens. How adults navigated the boundaries between an enclosed space at the front of the house and the street might be pursued further. The photograph with which we began, of the long back garden in Deptford (Fig. 7.1), shows what appears to have been ample space for all sorts of household activities. But this house was, like many of its neighbours, shared by three families. It was an older terrace, and there were no forecourts. Perhaps consequently, a photograph of the front taken at the same time shows the narrow street full of people, clustered on doorsteps, kerbs, and in the road. Doubtless they also turned out for the photographer. But, either way, there is a sense that the photographer has encroached on their territory—even before he crossed the threshold to view the back gardens.

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Notes 1. C.  Booth, ‘Concerning the Whole District Under Review’, in C.  Booth (ed.), Life and Labour, Vol. I: East London (London: Williams & Norwell, 1889), pp. 31–32. 2. Discussed in more detail in L. Hoskins and R. Preston, ‘The House: Inside and Outside Villas and Terraces in England’, in J.  Hamlett (ed.), A Cultural History of the Home in The Age of Empire (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), pp. 67–69, 77–80. 3. Home Office, Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (London: HMSO, 1842), p. 142. 4. M. Daunton, ‘Introduction’, in M. Daunton (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Vol. 3: 1840–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 31. 5. S. M. Gaskell, ‘Gardens for the Working Class: Victorian Practical Pleasure’, Victorian Studies, 23 (1980), pp. 479–501. 6. S. Constantine, ‘Amateur Gardening and Popular Recreation in the 19th and 20th Centuries’, Journal of Social History, 14 (1981), pp. 387–406; R. Floud, An Economic History of the English Garden (London: Allen Lane, 2019), chapter 8; M. Willes, The Gardens of the British Working Class (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). For an exception see Z.  Crisp, ‘Housing and Private Outside Space in Nineteenth-Century England’ (CWPESH no. 3, 2012), http://www.econsoc.hist.cam.ac.uk/working_ papers.html (accessed 27 February 2021). 7. M.  Daunton, House and Home in the Victorian City: Working-Class Housing, 1850–1914 (London: Edward Arnold Martin, 1983), chapter 3; S.  Muthesius, The English Terraced House (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), chapter 12. 8. Daunton, House and Home, p. 37. 9. For an outline of the literature see J.-M. Strange, ‘Fatherhood, Providing, and Attachment in Late Victorian and Edwardian Working-Class Families’, Historical Journal, 55 (2012), pp. 1007-1027. 10. For an early example, see J.  D. Melville, ‘The Use and Organisation of Domestic Space in Late Seventeenth-Century London’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1999). 11. J.  Hamlett, Material Relations: Domestic Interiors and Middle-Class Families in England, 1850–1910 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), pp. 38–40. 12. M. Donald, ‘Tranquil Havens? Critiquing the Idea of Home as the MiddleClass Sanctuary’, in I. Bryden and J. Floyd (eds), Domestic Space: Reading the Nineteenth-Century Interior (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 103–120.

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13. L. Faire, ‘Making Home: Working-class Perceptions of Space, Time and Material Culture in Family Life, 1900–1955’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Leicester, 1998); V. Holmes, ‘Dangerous Spaces: Working-­ Class Homes and Fatal Household Accidents in Suffolk, 1840–1900’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Essex, 2012). 14. T. A. Wright, ‘Working Men’s Sundays’, in Some Habits and Customs of the Working Classes (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1867), pp. 204–239; Hoskins and Preston, ‘The House’, p. 86. 15. Faire, ‘Making Home’; A. Ravetz with R. Turkington, The Place of Home: English Domestic Environments, 1914–2000 (London: E. & F.N Spon, 1995) is rare in treating gardens and yards as part of the home. 16. J.-M. Strange, ‘Fatherhood, Furniture and the Inter-Personal Dynamics of Working-Class Homes, c.1870–1914’, Urban History, 40 (2013), pp. 271–286. 17. E.g. Faire, ‘Making Home’; A. Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London 1870–1914 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996); K.  Gleadle, British Women in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp.  37–47; J.-M.  Strange, Fatherhood and the British Working Class, 1865–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); E.  Griffin, Bread Winner: An Intimate History of the Victorian Economy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020). 18. As discussed in J.-M.  Strange, ‘When John met Benny: Class, Pets and Family Life in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain’, The History of the Family, 26 (2021), pp. 214–235. 19. R. N. Coe, When the Grass was Taller: Autobiography and the Experience of Childhood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); J. Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001; 2010 edn), pp. 1–3. 20. J.  Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 23. 21. Board of Trade, Report of an Enquiry by the Board of Trade into Working Class Rents, Housing, and Retail Prices (London: HMSO, 1908), p. 5. 22. Crisp, ‘Housing and Private Outside Space’. 23. See London Metropolitan Archives, London Picture Archive, reference numbers 59150, 59023, 59154; Lewisham Local History and Archives, A94/16/B12/6c. 24. For a detailed first-hand description see G. Foakes, My Part of the River (London: Futura Publications, 1976), p.  108; C.  Davidson, A Woman’s Work is Never Done: A History of Housework in the British Isles, 1650–1950 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1982), pp. 136–163. 25. Board of Trade, Report, pp. 115–116.

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26. C. Pope, A Family in St. Pauls 1920–1940, Scenes from Childhood (Bristol: Redcliffe Press, 1985), p. 52. 27. Ibid., p. 17. 28. V.  Kelley, Soap and Water: Cleanliness, Dirt and the Working Classes in Victorian and Edwardian Britain (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), pp. 103–110. 29. Pope, Family in St. Pauls, p. 19. 30. J.  Storey, The House in South Road: An Autobiography, ed. P.  Thorne (London: Virago Press, 2004), p. 50. 31. R. Church, Over the Bridge, an Essay in Autobiography (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1955), pp. 51–52, 114. 32. E.g. Metropolitan Borough of Poplar, Report of the Medical Officer of Health for Poplar (1910), pp. 283–284. 33. S. Day, ed. H. Day, London Born: A Memoir of a Forgotten City (London: Harper Perennial, 2006), p.  29; J.  Holloway, A London Childhood (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), p. 3; Church, Over the Bridge, p. 114. See Kelley, Soap and Water, pp. 109–110, for a discussion of the practice. 34. Day, London Born, p. 5. 35. W.  Southgate, ed. T.  Philpot, That’s the Way it Was: A Working Class Autobiography 1890–1950 (Oxted: New Clarion Press in association with History Workshop, 1982), pp. 18–19. 36. Foakes, My Part of the River, p. 153. 37. Board of Trade, Report, p. xviii. 38. H. M. Burton, There Was a Young Man (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1958), pp. 30, 51. 39. Board of Trade, Report, pp. 40, 55. 40. C.  Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London, Vol. II (London: Macmillan, 1892), pp. 234–235. 41. Holloway, London Childhood, pp. 3, 128. 42. Ibid., p. 3. 43. P. Guillery, ‘Houses and Flats in London, 1800 to 1900’, in P. S. Barnwell and M. Palmer (eds), Working-Class Housing: Improvement and Technology (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2019). 44. Hoskins and Preston, ‘The House’, pp. 78, 80. 45. Church, Over the Bridge, pp. 13–14. 46. LSE, Booth/B/366, pp. 169–171. 47. Church, Over the Bridge, p. 118. 48. Pope, Family in St. Pauls, p. 7. 49. R.  Preston, ‘The Pastimes of the People: Photographing House and Garden in London’s Small Suburban Homes, 1880–1914’, London Journal 39 (2014), p. 213. 50. C. H. Rolph, Living Twice (London: Victor Gollancz, 1974), p. 14.

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51. Booth, ‘Concerning the Whole District’, pp. 31–32. 52. Rolph, Living Twice, p. 28. 53. Davin, Growing Up Poor, p. 64. 54. Board of Trade, Report, pp. 3–4, 30. 55. Day, London Born, p. 5. 56. Holloway, London Childhood. 57. Ibid., p. 30. 58. Ibid., p. 33. 59. Ibid., p. 95. 60. Board of Trade, Report, p. 9. 61. M. S. Pember Reeves, Round About a Pound a Week (London: G. Bell & Sons Ltd., 1913), p. 33. 62. Day, London Born, p. 5. 63. Burton, There Was a Young Man, pp. 22, 51. 64. Holloway, London Childhood, pp. 85, 88. 65. E. Cockayne, Cheek by Jowl: A History of Neighbours (London: The Bodley Head, 2012), esp. chapters 3 and 4. 66. C. H. Rolph, London Particulars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980; 1982 printing), pp. 61–62. 67. Holloway, London Childhood, p. 85. 68. L. Vaughan, Mapping Society: The Spatial Dimensions of Social Cartography (London: UCL Press, 2018), pp. 9–10. 69. Pope, Family in St. Pauls, p. 5. 70. Storey, House in South Road, p. 6. 71. Burton, There Was a Young Man, p. 51. 72. For the history of real-photo postcards see Preston, ‘Pastimes’. 73. Day, London Born, p. 5. 74. Strange, ‘When John met Benny’. 75. Southgate, That’s the Way it Was, pp. 19, 35. 76. Holloway, London Childhood, pp. 110–112. 77. Preston, ‘Pastimes’, pp. 218–223. 78. H.  Havart, The Back Garden Beautiful (London: Amalgamated Press, [1912]). 79. Hoskins and Preston, ‘The House’, pp. 80–81. 80. Holloway, London Childhood, pp. 70–71, 121. 81. Church, Over the Bridge, pp. 47, 60–61. 82. Day, London Born, p. 19. 83. Pope, Family in St. Pauls, pp. 6, 14, 26, 52–53. 84. Holloway, London Childhood, p. 110. 85. Day, London Born, p. 5; Pope, Family in St. Pauls, p. 6. 86. Day, London Born, p. 29. 87. Church, Over the Bridge, pp. 90, 169, 60.

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88. V.  Holmes, In Bed with the Victorians: The Life-Cycle of Working-Class Marriage (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), p. 56. 89. Holloway, London Childhood, pp. 109–110. 90. Day, London Born, p. 18; Foakes, My Part of the River, p. 24. 91. See Davin, Growing Up Poor, esp. chapter 4; E.  Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 155.

PART III

Home Beyond Home

CHAPTER 8

Diligence and Dissipation: The Maid Servant’s Bed Chamber in the Late Eighteenth Century Tessa Chynoweth

In James Northcote’s 1796 series Diligence and Dissipation, a domestic space little known to consumers of eighteenth-century visual culture was made visible: the maid servant’s bedchamber.1 Despite the dramatic growth in artistic depictions of domestic settings in the eighteenth century, and the recent explosion of scholarly interest in the domestic, the bedchambers in which servants slept have remained resolutely in shadow.2 This chapter explores these rare bedchamber scenes as a way to gain access to this space, and to start to think about its meaning in the eighteenth century. To coin a well-worn phrase in the historiography of service,

This chapter is based on a chapter of my thesis, Tessa Chynoweth, ‘Domestic Service and Domestic Space in London 1750–1800’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, Queen Mary University of London, 2017). Online access: https://qmro.qmul. ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/25813

T. Chynoweth (*) University of Manchester, Manchester, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Harley et al. (eds.), The Working Class at Home, 1790–1940, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89273-9_8

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maid’s bedchambers were ‘ubiquitous’ in eighteenth-century households, but are ‘invisible’ in studies of the domestic space and the home.3 Long assumed to be functional utilitarian spaces, this chapter explores maid’s bedchambers as highly significant domestic sites through which social identities were navigated, and through which the challenges and strategies for accommodating servants within that most important eighteenth-­ century institution, the household, are made apparent.4 As one of the most important opportunities for paid labour for women, live in service was a commonplace domestic arrangement for women throughout the eighteenth century. The sheer scale of service in the capital in this period is suggested by the fact that contemporaries like Jonas Hanway and historians such as Bridget Hill, Tim Meldrum, and Peter Earle agree that one in every thirteen people in the city was employed as a domestic.5 In fast-expanding cities like London, day labourers and shopkeepers, business-owners, and the well-to-do alike employed servants to fulfil the varied but vital work of keeping house. The work expected of female servants was as wide-ranging as the households in which servants were employed, but the majority lived and laboured in households on their own, or with one or two other servants, typically as ‘maids of all work’.6

8.1   On the Bedchamber The focus on the bedchamber forces us to recognise the house in which servants laboured as a place of residence as well as a place of work. Whether particular servants felt the ‘deep’ associations of home which Karen Harvey identified as emerging for other members of the household in the eighteenth century is difficult to know.7 Arguably, it is the understanding of home as centring on the feelings of comfort and belonging which explains the lack of scholarly attention given to the space of the servant’s bedchamber. It is undoubtedly easier for us—with the weight of domestic ideology guiding our study of the past—to understand the servant’s place in the kitchen than in the bedchamber. Located in the kitchen, the servant’s place in the house is framed as one of a worker; located in a bedchamber, the multi-faceted nature of the duties and obligations of the service relationship become more apparent.8 Servants do not fit neatly within rigidly defined ideas about class.9 Thought to emulate the manners and material lives of their employers and to aspire to ideas about their station, they have been positioned as traitors

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to the kinds of labouring solidarity and group consciousness central to traditional constructions of the working classes. Eighteenth-century commentators described servants as ‘amphibious’ because of the opportunities their roles afforded them to slip between different ‘sorts’ of people.10 The troubling proximity between different ‘sorts’ could be managed in large country piles by the construction of separate service wings and elaborately devised domestic routines; in smaller households, and even in the large London townhouse depicted by Northcote, servant and employer lived ‘cheek by jowl’.11 It is arguably because of this proximity that servants were key individuals through which social difference was imagined in the eighteenth century, and service was one of the mechanisms through which individuals understood their place in society. For Carolyn Steedman, the ubiquity of service meant that servants were the prototypical worker, individuals through whom new theories of class were ‘imagined’. Servants, Steedman argues, ‘were the people—or, if you will have it this way, the working class’.12 The space allocated for servants to sleep was one way in which servants understood and experienced their subordinate position within the household, and through that, their place in the world.13 The images examined here allow us to think about the contemporary meanings of this space, and to draw attention to the ways in which social difference intersected with other social identifiers within the house, most obviously in this case, that of gender. Although entering into the domestic spaces of the past is notoriously difficult, the inclusion of servants’ bedchambers and beds in architectural plans and inventories means that these spaces are included in narratives about the historical trajectories of domestic architecture as well as in histories of private life.14 But a thorough interrogation, successfully employed by scholars on spaces such as the parlour and dressing room, and, more recently, the kitchen, is missing for servants’ bedchambers.15 By focusing on Northcote’s images, we are able to gain a rare glimpse into the meanings and significances of this forgotten domestic space. I do not suggest here that these images functioned as an ‘inscription of the real’— to use art historian Kate Retford’s evocative phrase—but rather as what Charlotte Grant and Jeremy Aynsley call an ‘imagined interior’.16 These images offer an opportunity to think about how this space was understood in the eighteenth century. The interiors depicted in these images were, of course, ‘imagined’ by the artist James Northcote and not by the maids

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who might have inhabited rooms like this. But, by placing these images in contemporary context, we can start to construct a more widely held understanding of this space and of the multiple layers of meaning individuals navigated in their domestic lives.

8.2   Diligence and Dissipation Diligence and Dissipation was a type of contemporary ‘modern’ moral story, which had been made famous by the likes of William Hogarth. The household depicted by Northcote is a fairly typical London townhouse; the master is a bachelor and wealthy enough to employ a housekeeper and two or three male servants, as well as the two maids who are the subject of the series.17 Northcote’s basic story is encapsulated in the first image where the modest maid is depicted ironing by the kitchen fireside, whilst the wanton maid is fawned over by male admirers. The message of the series is driven home in the last print which sees the modest maid married to her master whilst the wanton maid, overcome by poverty and venereal disease, is laid in her grave.18 Set almost exclusively within the domestic spaces in which the maids lived and worked, the series confirms the importance of the house as a representational strategy which viewers knew to ‘read’ for moral character.19 In a pamphlet written to accompany the series, Northcote invoked the edifying potential of the domestic against the grandiose scenes favoured by many of his contemporaries: ‘the downfall of kingdoms and revolutions of empires afford few lessons applicable to private life… [which he argued] are best discovered in those scenes, which are levelled to the general surface of the world’.20 For Northcote, the ‘lessons of virtue’ which he sought to deliver were better served through the familiar setting of the household which, he believed, more touched the ‘affections of the heart’ and ‘by that channel…diffuse instruction more widely through the various ranks of society’.21 Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1796, and produced as a high-quality printed series to be ‘framed as furniture’ or bound ‘together in a port-folio’ the following year, these scenes were intended to be ‘levelled to the general surface of the world’ via the conduit of the master and mistress, rather than being purchased by servants themselves.22 The prints were designed as another tool in the expanding didactic toolkit through which master and mistress hoped to instil modesty, morality, and productivity in their employees.

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8.3   ‘Her Chamber’ Northcote depicted each maid in a space identified as ‘Her Chamber’ as a way to further illustrate the character of each of his protagonists. The chastity, devotion, and ‘diligence’ of the modest maid was confirmed through her chamber practices: modestly attired with a handkerchief tied tightly around her shoulders and a cap fixed firmly in place, she knelt before her carefully-made bed and attended to her religious duties by the light of the moon. The deviance, carelessness, and vanity of the ‘wanton’ maid was similarly expressed through the scene in her bedchamber: she is depicted on a dishevelled bed, undressed, with her shoes and stays discarded on the floor, as what Northcote calls a ‘midnight libertine’ stalks into her room.23 Without the distractions of their domestic duties or the presence of other members of the household, the bedchamber may well have seemed the obvious choice of setting through which to demonstrate the ‘true’ nature of each maid. Depicted individually, and unobserved, the bedchamber allowed Northcote to dodge contemporary assumptions about ‘janus-faced’ maidservants and their proclivity to ‘eye service’, or the playing of the role of dutiful servant only when watched over by their master or mistress (Figs. 8.1 and 8.2).24 The identification of each room as ‘Her Chamber’ suggests the close connection between the space allocated to sleep and the individual in the eighteenth century, even if it belied the common experience of what Sasha Handley has called the ‘slumberferous overcrowding’ of many households.25 The individual (and gendered) identification of the bedchamber in which the servant slept also hint at the overlapping spheres of ownership that existed within the eighteenth-century domestic space. A similar linguistic claim over bedchambers by their inhabitants was revealed in Jennifer Melville’s analysis of seventeenth-century consistory court records which discovered that when deposing to the church court, servants and apprentices tended to separate the room in which they slept from the rest of the house: they spoke of ‘this deponent’s chamber’ in ‘this deponent’s master’s or mistress’s house’.26 As Melville states, this practice seems to confirm a distinction ‘between the discrete parts of the house which may be identified directly by a lodger, servant or apprentice as his or her ‘own’ room or lodgings, and the totality of the house which was ubiquitously identified with the master and/or mistress’.27 In a similar way, servants who appeared before the court of the Old Bailey in eighteenth-century London identified the bed on which they slept with the possessive

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Fig. 8.1  Thomas Gaugain and Thomas Hellyer (after James Northcote), Diligence and Dissipation, Plate 4, ‘The Modest Girl in her Bed Chamber’ (London, 1797), stipple, etching. Rijksmuseum, 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication (CC BY 1.0)

pronoun and often located it within a room identified in the same way.28 The servant Mary Roberts, for example, appeared at court in 1754 and referred to her bed as ‘my bed’ which she located within ‘my room where I lie’.29 Importantly, there is no indication that servants or apprentices had to be the sole occupant of a space in order to identify it as their own. That other members of the household acquiesced in this linguistic practice— referring to the ‘maid’s bed’ in ‘her room’—demonstrates that, however intangible, invisible borders operated within the domestic space, and that there was an expectation of autonomous action by servants within their bedchambers, however vulnerable these spaces were to assault.

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Fig. 8.2  Thomas Gaugain and Thomas Hellyer (after James Northcote), Diligence and Dissipation, Plate 3, ‘The Wanton in her Bed Chamber’ (London, 1797), stipple, etching. Rijksmuseum, 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication (CC BY 1.0)

Given the scholarly focus on material culture of the eighteenth-century domestic space, it is surprising that we still know little about the ways in which servants’ bedchambers were decorated and furnished. In what remains one of the most comprehensive analyses of servants’ rooms, written in 1956, J.  J. Hecht concluded that these spaces were ‘simply equipped’, that they were ‘quite literally a dormitory’, that they were a ‘matter of indifference to servants at the time’, and—in a sentence that revealed the clear gendered assumptions of Hecht’s study—‘that ordinarily he did little there besides sleep’.30 Northcote’s images confirm that far from being a ‘matter of indifference’, the bedchambers allocated to female servants were a matter of contemporary significance, and anxiety.

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But do the bedchambers depicted by Northcote bear any resemblance to the rooms in which servant maids would have slept? Understanding how these spaces might have been furnished is a difficult task. Eighteenth-­ century domestic advice literature focuses on the behaviour of servant maids, and—only from around the turn of the nineteenth century—starts to list instructions to mistresses about how to decorate their chambers. Although written nearly 30  years after Diligence and Dissipation was printed, Mrs Parkes’s guidance to mistresses about how to furnish maids’ rooms from the 1825 edition of Domestic Duties is instructive. The author advised mistresses to ‘[l]et your servant’s bedrooms be as plainly furnished as you like, but let the furniture be good of its kind, and such as will render those comfortable by night who have to labour by day’.31 The relative material comfort—even of the wanton maid’s bedchamber—would likely have been apparent to those familiar with scenes like that later in Northcote’s series where the wanton lays on the floor of a garret room covered only with a sheet. There are some striking similarities between the maid’s bedchambers as depicted by Northcote, and the material evidence suggested by that most useful source for the investigation of domestic histories—inventories. This appears to be the case notwithstanding the well-known difficulty of matching inventory evidence to material or visual sources, and the particular challenges of assessing servants’ bedchambers, which rarely appeared explicitly on inventories given the practice of listed these spaces simply as a chamber or a garret.32 An unusually detailed inventory of a room identified as a ‘maid’s room’ in a London baker’s house, taken in 1800, listed: A beech bedstead with sacking furniture, half inch blue cheque furniture, a straw mattress, old tick, feather bed bolster, one pillow, three blankets, striped cotton patchwork, pair of cotton window curtains, wainscoat chest of drawers, oval swing glass, deal table with drawer, beech chair with matted seat, four coloured prints framed and glased, four other prints framed and glased, old hair trunk.33

Other bedchambers identified as being inhabited by female servants were equipped with bedsteads, mattresses (the straw mattress listed in the room above is unusual—the majority of the small sample which explicitly identified a room as having been inhabited by a servant were described as feather or flock), feather bolsters, pillows, blankets, quilts, coverlids, bed rugs, and curtains for the bed were also present.34 Comfort, or at least, the

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provision of soft furnishings and bed furniture, appears to have been an important criteria for the outfitting of female servants’ rooms, although the recurrence of the adjective ‘old’ to describe these items, suggests the recycling of items previously used elsewhere in the house.35 The presence of tables, chairs, trunks, and chests of drawers in the inventories and in Northcote’s images indicates that these spaces functioned as much more than dormitories and that—at the very least—they offered a space in which to securely store goods.36 Evidence of framed prints and books in the prints and in the inventories confirms that these rooms were not materially bereft, and were intended as alternative spheres of action within the house. The furniture provided in the maid servant’s bedchamber was one part of the service agreement, one way in which the duty of masters’ and mistresses’ was made material. Far from mere dormitories, bedchambers were socially significant, their material constitution revealing the complex ties of duty and obedience which operated between members of the household family. Northcote’s images suggest what the inventories cannot—the effect that items belonging to individual servants could have on these spaces—a cloak and hat hung on a nail on the wall, shoes left on the floor, prints tacked to the wall, and books and other personal possessions could transform a space and appropriate it to a particular individual.37

8.4   The Wanton Maid Revealed Northcote’s prints demonstrate the various ways in which ideas of social difference intersected with those about gender to inform expectations about appropriate activity within the home. This was arguably particularly acute in the bedchamber, which perhaps more so than any other domestic space, was associated with the individual. The objects and practices depicted by Northcote in each  maid’s bedchamber was  informed by a knowledge about the material environment of these spaces, manipulated to better serve his story and demonstrate the character of each of his protagonists. The wanton maid is depicted luxuriating in all the behaviours householders worried their female servants would partake in whilst in place. Most worryingly, the possibility of withdrawing created the opportunity for sexual encounter. Northcote’s pamphlet describes how ‘[w]holly devoted to the impulse of unruly passions, she no longer guards her door from the invasions of the midnight libertine’.38 Although perhaps anxiety-­ provoking for the householder charged with watching over the virtue of their servant maids, this is not a particularly unusual cultural trope in the

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eighteenth century. The female bedchamber was a sexually charged space in the eighteenth century, and maid servants were seen as sexually-charged characters. Harvey’s analysis of eighteenth-century erotica revealed that ‘scenes of sexual intimacy invariably took place in women’s rooms’ and that in such texts women’s bodies were imagined in architectural form.39 In this context, the ‘entry’ of the young man into the room of the wanton, and the heavily locked and bolted door in the room of the modest girl, takes on more explicit connotations. In contemporary literature too, servant maids’ bedchambers acted as settings for the erotic encounters between the servant and male members of the household which so obsessed the eighteenth-century reading public.40 Although rarer in image than in text, this conception of the maid’s bedchamber is also evident in heavily sexualised images of this space such as Philippe Mercier’s Pamela rising from a bed and Jean-Frederic Schall’s Girl with a birdcage seated on a bed.41 The dishevelled bed, the state of undress, and the way in which the maid in each of these images brazenly meets the gaze of the (presumed male) viewer, hints at the much more widely available trope of the eroticised maid servant, whose sexuality stemmed from her youth and vulnerability, her domestic proximity, and the barrier-breaking taboo of encounters with the lower-class woman. The maid’s bedchamber appears to have absorbed all of these associations. In the image depicted by Northcote, the maid’s bedchamber was also the setting of many of the other vices commonly attributed to women lower down the social hierarchy. The mirror which lies broken on the floor, the advertisements for perfume tacked to the wall, and the clothes which lay scattered across the floor, testify to the lackadaisical attitude maid servants were accused of having towards property, particularly that belonging to their master or mistress. These visual cues also hint at the maid’s room as a site of feminine transformation; a place where eighteenth-­ century anxieties about masquerade, concealment, and dress as a threat to the authenticity and social decorum demanded of the period took place. The widespread concern about novel reading—particularly among women of the lower sorts—is also made manifest in this image, as a novel lies open on her pillow and is described by Northcote as ‘some of her silly romances’.42 The poster celebrating a notorious criminal tried at the Old Bailey further reiterates many commonly held views about servants and reiterated the wayward—and potentially criminal—nature of those in their employ. Northcote’s image of the wanton brought societal anxieties about the lower-class woman home. If accommodating these vices within the

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sanctum of the middle-class domestic space was problematic, the inevitable solution was also revealed through Northcote’s series; the wayward girl’s behaviour is discovered, she is turned out, and eventually meets her maker in a pauper’s grave—a reassuring sign to the employing classes of the inevitability of divine retribution for her sins. However harrowing this trajectory, it is perhaps surprisingly that it was the image of the modest maid’s chamber which received least cultural space in the eighteenth century. Female servants as objects of sexual intrigue, laziness, and extravagance and their rooms as sites of such activity, fitted with contemporary representations of servant maids and of the lower orders; the servant’s room as a site of modest retreat, did not.

8.5   The Problem with the Modest Maid… The morally sanctimonious maid servant was a mainstay of didactic and philanthropic literature and often appeared to call her master and mistress to account.43 Although a familiar figure in text, extant examples in visual imagery are exceedingly rare.44 If visual depictions of ‘good’ servant maids are few and far between, those set in the bedchamber are more uncommon still. Indeed, Northcote’s image is the only such example I have found. In Northcote’s series, the modest maid’s bedchamber is intended to testify to the modesty and domestic probity of the servant maid. Northcote describes that the ‘state of the room shews the regularity of her manners; the sampler, worked by herself…; a paper, inculcating the duty of servants… the Prayer Book and the Young Man’s best Companion; all tend to shew, that her feelings take a moral direction in every pursuit’.45 In contrast to the ‘silly romances’ discarded by the wanton, the modest maid reads instructional literature. In contrast to the dishevelled bed and material mess in the room of the wanton, the modest girl’s room is an example of material care and regular conduct—her bed is neatly made, her clothes carefully kept. And, most obvious of all, in contrast to the wanton maid who lets the ‘midnight libertine’ into her bed, the modest girl has locked and bolted her door in order to attend to her religious duties. If this was, as Northcote claimed, intended as an illustration of the good domestic behaviour expected of female servants in place, Northcote failed to account for the significant cultural associations of maid servants’ bedchambers. The bedchamber, associated as it was with the individual, with sleep and with the body, served as a poor choice of setting for representations of the productive labour, religious devotion, and unwavering

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obedience expected of ‘good’ maid servants. In attempting to demonstrate the maid’s modesty through reference to her bedchamber, Northcote appears to have confused the representational codes of lower- and middle-­ class women, a major misstep at a time when social distinctions were hardening around practices and ideas of domestic life. The independent withdrawal, religious devotion, material probity, and familial commitment depicted in this image can all be seen as decidedly middling models of femininity. Tellingly, a print advertising one of Northcote’s own works, Connubial Happiness, which depicts a well-to-do family in the type of middling domestic setting that became popular at the end of the century, is pinned to the wall of the modest girl’s bedchamber. Whether unwittingly or not, in the desire to advertise his own work, Northcote depicted the ‘good’ servant maid dreaming of that most audacious and impudent of futures; a life outside her place in the social hierarchy. Given the overtly sexual connotations of this space, and the slippage between social mores occasioned by it, the depiction of the maid servant’s bedchamber can be seen as a dangerous endeavour, particularly in context of the social and political upheavals of the 1790s (Fig. 8.3). The difficulty of depicting the bedchamber is confirmed with reference to a series which undoubtedly influenced Northcote’s Diligence and Dissipation. William Hogarth’s 1747 Industry and Idleness contrasted the divergent paths of two male apprentices to contemporary acclaim through a very similar series of scenarios.46 Like the majority of female servants, apprentices tended to live in with their masters until they were able to set up a business and a household of their own. Like the relationship between servants and their masters and mistresses, the relationship between apprentices and their masters was shifting in the eighteenth century. Traditionally separated only by virtue of their experience and expertise, a growing social distinction was evident by the eighteenth century, which made the domestic situation increasingly challenging. It is significant in this context that Hogarth—the master of contemporary mores—depicted the good apprentice Francis Goodchild in spaces aligned only with work, religion, and public office. It is only after Goodchild’s marriage that he is depicted anywhere near a domestic setting, and then he is depicted from the outside, at an open window offering alms to the poor. Hogarth’s external composition served to demonstrate the young man’s integration and participation in communal life, even as it celebrated his domestic decency. If the domestic space in general appears to have been a problematic representational site for the male apprentice, the bedchamber appears more difficult

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Fig. 8.3  Thomas Cook (after William Hogarth), ‘Tom Idle and a prostitute sit on a broken bed in a garret’ (London, 1795). Wellcome Collection, Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

still. In Hogarth’s reckoning, the bedchamber was reserved for Tom Idle. Hogarth’s infamous garret scene drew on a whole host of contemporary images which used the garret as an indicator of moral depravity, poverty, and downfall, particularly—but not exclusively—for men. Like the garret room in which the wanton maid lays dying at the end of Northcote’s series, Hogarth’s image acts as a warning of the misery and material ruination that came from idleness, disobedience, and sexual misconduct: the walls of the room are cracked, the floor is bare, and the bed—the mainstay of domestic comfort and security—is broken. Even for Hogarth, widely celebrated for depicting the moral ambiguities and highlighting the hypocrisies of the age, the domestic space, and particularly the bedchamber, appears too difficult a subject matter through which to portray the morality and domestic maturity of the male apprentice. This is something that

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James Northcote might have borne in mind, particularly as his protagonists bore the added weight of their femininity.

8.6   Conclusion Northcote’s series was, by all accounts, a failure. The paintings remained unsold in his studio for many years to come, and the artist complained that he ‘never received from these pictures more than the value of about 15 pounds’.47 There is not space here to consider the fluctuations of the eighteenth-­century art market, but it is telling that contemporary criticism focused on the content of the images, and on their moral message (or, more accurately, on the perceived lack thereof). When the influential critic John Williams visited the exhibition in 1796, he wrote a damning review suggesting the ‘tendencies of these pictures are diametrically opposite to the declared intention of the artist, and that they rather operate to corrupt, than correct youthful understanding’.48 Undoubtedly, the way in which the series was exhibited served to disrupt the ‘lessons of virtue’ which Northcote intended for his series. Although the series was displayed in order, viewers saw the story non-sequentially, with other artworks punctuating the series’ moral message. Indeed, Northcote advertised his explanatory pamphlet as being ‘necessary to Persons visiting the Exhibition as the Manner in which these most interesting Pictures are there separates confuses them, and prevents the Effects they have when seen together’.49 Arguably, the difficult setting of the bedchamber compounded this problem. Although the bedchamber was to become a common setting for visual renderings of proud patriarchs and their wives, Northcote failed to recognise the problematic associations of this space for those otherwise positioned in relation to the paterfamilias. Although Northcote claimed the series offered a didactic reassurance that servant maids would get what was coming to them, the representation of the wanton girl was so close to the titillating images of maid servants circulating in the period, and the representation of the modest girl had such limited cultural reach, that the moral message of the series was lost. The slippage between the middling codes of feminine morality and the ideas about working women evident in the scene of the modest maid’s bedchamber appear particularly problematic. As social distinctions crystallized, and as the home became an increasingly central part of the self-identity of the latent middle class, accommodating servants within the household became increasingly difficult, necessitating the highly choreographed routines and clearly demarcated domestic spaces which appear in detail in the nineteenth-century literature and visual

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imagery. Servants became associated with the work of the house, relegated to their place in the kitchen. Through Northcote’s images, however, we are reminded of the continued significance of the servant maid’s bedchamber, however much employers sought to hide them from view. If the maid servant’s bedchamber lacked cultural reach in the eighteenth century, it was not because it was not a highly significant domestic space. As a space associated with working women as individuals within the home of their employers, the maid servant’s bedchamber collapsed and complicated emergent ideas about social relations and the meanings of domestic life as dictated by the employing classes. In order to maintain the integrity of emergent understandings and significances of gendered domestic spaces, it was vital that the maid servant’s bedchamber remained invisible.

Notes 1. The series is available via the British Museum’s online catalogue: https:// www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_ details.aspx?objectId=3090254&par tId=1&people=123986&p eoA=123986-­2-­70&page=1, accessed March 23, 2019. 2. For artistic depictions of the domestic setting, see K. Retford, The Art of Domestic Life: Family Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016); C.  Grant and J.  Aynsley (eds), Imagined Interiors: Representing the Domestic Interior Since the Renaissance (London: V&A Publishing, 2006). For examples of scholarship on the eighteenth-­century domestic space, see A. Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); K.  Lipsedge, Domestic Space in Eighteenth-Century British Novels, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); T. Hamling and C. Richardson, A Day at Home in Early Modern England: Material Culture and Domestic Life, 1500–1700 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). 3. D.A. Kent, ‘Ubiquitous but Invisible: Female Domestic Servants in Mid-­ Eighteenth Century London’, History Workshop Journal, 28 (1989), pp. 111–128. 4. On the political significance of the household in the eighteenth century, see K. Harvey, The Little Republic: Masculinity and Domestic Authority in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 5. J. Hanway, Letters on the Importance of Preserving the Rising Generation of the Labouring Part of Our Fellow Subject (London, 1767), pp. 11, 158. For historical analysis see, for example: B.  Hill, Women, Work and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-Century England (London: UCL Press Limited, 1994), pp.  125–136; T.  Meldrum, Domestic Service and Gender, 1660–1750: Life and Work in the London Household (Pearson Education

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Limited: Harlow, 2000), pp.  13–15; P.  Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London 1660–1730 (London: Methuen, 1989), p. 357 (n. 187). 6. Meldrum, Domestic Service, pp. 15–16. 7. K.  Harvey, ‘Men Making Home: Masculinity and Domesticity in Eighteenth-­Century Britain’, Gender and History, 21 (2009), p. 526. 8. N. Tadmor, ‘The Concept of the Household Family in Eighteenth Century London’, Past & Present, 151 (1996), pp.  111–140; C.  Beardmore, C.  Dobbing, and S.  King (eds), Family Life in Britain, 1650–1910 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). 9. C. Steedman, Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); L.  Schwartz, Feminism and the Servant Problem: Class and Domestic Labour in the Women’s Suffrage Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); S.E. Brown, ‘Assessing Men and Maids: The Female Servant Tax and Meanings of Productive Labour in Late-Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Left History, 12 (2007), pp. 11–32. 10. A. Morton, Everybody’s Business is No-Body’s Business (London, 1725). For the workings of this ‘slippage’ in regards to clothing, see J.  Styles, ‘Involuntary Consumers? Servants and their Clothes in EighteenthCentury England’, Textile History, 3 (2002), pp. 9–21; J. Styles, The Dress of the People; Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 277–302. 11. M. Girourd, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 138. 12. Steedman, Labours Lost, pp. 16–20, 48, 133, 356. 13. A. Flather, Gender and Space in Early Modern England (Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2007), p. 69. 14. Flather, Gender and Space, pp.  69, 48; L.  Gowing, ‘The Twinkling of a Bedstaff: Recovering the Social Life of English Beds, 1500–1700’, Home Cultures, 11 (2014), p.  292; T.  Crook, ‘Norms, Forms and Beds: Spatializing Sleep in Victorian Britain’, Body & Society, 14 (2008), pp. 15–35, 17. 15. T.  Chico, Designing Women: The Dressing Room in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Culture (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2005); S. Pennell, The Birth of the English Kitchen, 1600–1850 (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). 16. K. Retford, ‘From the Interior to Interiority: The Conversation Piece in Georgian England’, Journal of Design History, 20 (2007), p. 292; Grant and Aynsley, Imagined Interiors.

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17. On bachelor homes, see D.  Hussey and M.  Ponsonby, The Single Homemaker and Material Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2012). 18. On a favourite eighteenth-century trope of a servant maid’s marriage to her master, see K.  Straub, Domestic Affairs: Intimacy, Eroticism, and Violence between Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2009). 19. Lipsedge, Domestic Space. 20. [James Northcote], Diligence and Dissipation; Or the Progress of A Modest Girl and a Wanton (London, 1797), pp. ii–iii. 21. Ibid, p. ii. 22. Ibid, p. iii. 23. Ibid, p. 13. 24. On eye service, see C.  Steedman, ‘Servants and the Relationship to the Unconscious’, Journal of British Studies, 42 (2003), pp. 337–338. 25. S.  Handley, ‘Sociable Sleeping in Early Modern England, 1660–1760’, History, 98 (2013), pp. 79–104. For discussion of sleeping arrangements, see Chynoweth, ‘Domestic Service and Domestic Space’, pp. 107–109. 26. J.  Melville, ‘The Use and Organisation of Domestic Space in Late Seventeenth-Century London’ (Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1999), pp. 90, 97–98. 27. Ibid., pp. 97–98. 28. Chynoweth, ‘Domestic Service and Domestic Space’, p. 129. For difference in the seventeenth century, see Gowing, ‘The Twinkling of a Bedstaff’, p. 292. 29. The Old Bailey Proceedings Online, 1674–1913 (www.oldbaileyonline. org, version 7.0, accessed 23 April 2017), January 1754, trial of John Smith (t17540116-50). For a discussion of the use of Old Bailey Proceedings in this context, see Chynoweth, ‘Domestic Service and Domestic Space’, pp. 45–49. 30. J.J. Hecht, The Domestic Servant Class in Eightenth-Century England (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956), pp. 102–109, my emphasis. Also see C. Gilbert, An Exhibition of Back-Stairs Furniture from Country Houses, exhibition catalogue (Temple Newsam, Leeds, 10 August–30 September 1977). On gendered distinctions in servant’s bed chambers, see Chynoweth, ‘Domestic Service and Domestic Space’, pp. 121–127. 31. Mrs William Parkes, Domestic Duties, or, Instructions to Young Married ladies, On the Management of their Households (New York, 1825). 32. The sample is made of up of 12 inventories which explicitly identify a room as a ‘servant’s’ or as a ‘maid’s or ‘man’s’ room or similar, and a further 29 which identify a garret room in which the presence of a bed and bed furniture suggest inhabitation by servants. For a discussion of the inventory

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sample and the methodological challenges of using inventories, see Chynoweth, ‘Domestic Service and Domestic Space’, pp.  39–43, 116, 120, 250, 254–256. 33. Nicholas Browning, 1800, PROB 31/921/736, National Archives, Geffrye Museum transcript. 34. Chynoweth, ‘Domestic Service and Domestic Space’, pp. 119, 250–253. 35. On historical contingency of comfort, see J.  Crowley, The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2010), p. 151. For an alternative view, see S. Williams, “‘I was forced to leave my place to hide my shame”: The Living Arrangements of Unmarried Mothers in London in the Early Nineteenth Century’, in J.  McEwen and P.  Sharpe (eds), Accommodating Poverty: The Housing and Living Arrangements of the English Poor, c. 1600–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 195. 36. See Chynoweth, ‘Domestic Service and Domestic Space’, pp.  125–126. On importance of storage, see Vickery, Behind Closed Doors, pp. 39–41. 37. For material fluidity in lodging houses, see J. Styles, ‘Lodging at the Old Bailey: Lodgings and their Furnishings in Eighteenth-Century London’, in J. Styles and A. Vickery (eds), Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America 1700–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p.  68. For an example of appropriation, see Chynoweth, ‘Domestic Service and Domestic Space’, pp. 129–130. 38. Northcote, Diligence and Dissipation, p. 13. 39. K. Harvey, Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 158–168. 40. See S.  Richardson, Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015 [1746]). On the reception of Pamela, see T. Keymer and P.  Sabor (eds), Pamela in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 41. A print after Mercier’s painting is available to view via the National Trust’s collections website: http://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/ object/1397517. Schall’s painting is available to view via the Victoria and Albert Museum’s collections website: http://collections.vam.ac.uk/ item/O125770/girl-­w ith-­a -­b irdcage-­s eated-­o il-­p ainting-­s chall-­j ean-­ frederic/. For a discussion of the Pamela images, see K.  Retford, ‘The Crown and Glory of Woman: Female Chastity in Eighteenth Century British Art’, in D. Arnold and D. Peters Corbett (eds), A Companion to British Art: 1600 to the Present (Chichester: Wiley, 2013), pp. 488–495. 42. Northcote, Diligence and Dissipation, p. 14.

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43. On servants in didactic texts, see Straub, Domestic Affairs; K.  Booker, Menials: Domestic Service and the Cultural Transformation of British Society, 1650–1850 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2018). 44. On servants in art, see A. French and G. Waterfield, Below Stairs: 400 Years of Servants’ Portraiture, exhibition catalogue (National Portrait Gallery London, 16 October 2003–11 January 2004); K.  Huneault, Difficult Subjects: Working Women and Visual Culture, Britain 1880–1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2002), pp.  23–53; E.  O’Leary, At Beck and Call: The Representation of Domestic Servants in Nineteenth-­ Century American Paintings (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996). 45. Northcote, Diligence and Dissipation, p. 18. 46. The series is available to view via the Tate’s website: https://www.tate.org. uk/whats-­o n/tate-­b ritain/exhibition/hogarth/hogarth-­h ogarths-­ modern-­moral-­series/hogarth-­hogarths-­3. 47. J. Simon, ‘The Account Book of James Northcote’, in The Volume of the Walpole Society, 58 (1995–1996), p. 64. 48. [J. Williams], A Critical Guide to the Exhibition of the Royal Academy for 1796, by Anthony Pasquin (London, 1797), p. 16. 49. Daily Advertiser (London), May 10, 1796, issue 21041.

CHAPTER 9

Pauper Lunatics at Home in the Asylum, 1845–1906 Cara Dobbing

In delightful weather, eight hundred ladies and gentlemen… took part in the formal opening of the new London County Lunatic Asylum at Claybury… the comfort, pleasure, and wellbeing of the patient seems assured. It seems, indeed, more a home than an asylum, and the conditions under which the poor people will live is striking proof of the great advance of humanity since the last century. —Anon., ‘Opening of Claybury Lunatic Asylum’, London Daily News, June 19, 1893

Thanks go to the editors of this volume for constructive comments in relation to this chapter. Some cases alluded to in this chapter can also be found in the following unpublished PhD thesis, C. Dobbing, ‘The Circulation of the Insane: The Pauper Lunatic Experience of the Garlands Asylum, 1862–1913’, (University of Leicester, 2019).

C. Dobbing (*) Leicester, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Harley et al. (eds.), The Working Class at Home, 1790–1940, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89273-9_9

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9.1   Overview The above passage is a press report detailing the ceremonial opening of London’s sixth lunatic asylum, Claybury, which admitted its first patients in 1893. Far removed from the madhouses of an earlier era, county institutions of the nineteenth century were, in part, designed to emulate a familial environment and provide a sense of home.1 This chapter will examine the experience of working classes that were resident in the public asylums during this period and demonstrate that, far from the popular cultural perception of these institutions, patients could feel at home in the asylum. Indeed, some even came to prefer it to their outside lives. For historians of the poor, emphasis has been placed on the importance of conducting ‘history from below’, which has resulted in unheard voices being increasingly brought to the forefront of recent scholarly discussions. The mainstay of this research has centred on pauper letters, wielding fascinating insights into the lives of the poor and demonstrating that ‘home’ could mean several things. As Keith Snell reminds us, for those claiming poor relief, ‘home’ was used to denote their parish of settlement, and used in an entirely legal sense.2 Problems arise when examining those placed in public institutions, as we rarely have their written experiences, with the mainstay of surviving material being written about them by doctors and medical superintendents.3 However, historians reinforce the importance of case records, particularly in relation to those in lunatic asylums, as they simultaneously encapsulate the observations of the asylum medical staff and the recollections of the patient’s relatives, and as Stef Eastoe reminds us, they ‘are an incredibly rich resource’.4 The concept of ‘home’, as Blunt and Dowling understand it, is resolutely tied to property, but a house did not always denote home. Instead, home is a sense of attachment and feelings which become linked to a ‘physical structure that provides shelter’.5 In the context of this analysis, throughout the chapter ‘home’ will be referred to in a similar vein to that which Jane Hamlett has understood it in At Home in the Institution. The term shall denote a sense of comfort, familiarity, and safety, in terms of how patients behaved whilst living in an asylum, their attachment towards domestic items, and their assuredness at residing there. Moreover, as this chapter reveals, the traditional ‘home’ did not always have a sense of endearment attached and the lunatic asylum became a place that could offer sanctuary from troubled home life.6

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The considerable literature concerning the public asylums of the nineteenth century has largely addressed the concept of home in its literal sense and centred on the shift from traditional home care to institutional treatment.7 Whilst this area is valuable in widening our understanding of the change in approach to the mentally unwell, it does not determine how individuals reacted to asylum life, and, indeed, how they could positively adapt to it. For instance, Andrew Scull viewed this shift to the institution as an attempt to domesticate the mad. He states that in earlier centuries the mad were depicted with a loss of ‘human-ness’, and that the nineteenth century witnessed a ‘decisive removal of madness from family life’.8 He also viewed this shift as a taming of the mad, suggesting that those suffering with mental illness were akin to animals. Scull’s approach depicts largescale institutionalization as a way of socially controlling the deviant.9 However since Roy Porter’s call to conduct the history of medicine from below, this understanding has been challenged, as scholars have increasingly focused on the individual experience of being institutionalised, and uncovered that patients could, and did, exercise a degree of agency.10 More recently, historians have begun to expand their exploration of agency, the material culture of asylums, and what can be learned about the patients who inhabited the wards.11 Most notable is Hamlett’s At Home in the Institution.12 Her central findings that concerned the lunatic asylum were that furnishings, domesticity, and a familial environment held significant value, in healing the patients, and in placing spatial constraints on their behavior, in an attempt realign them into the social norms of wider society. Building upon this research, this chapter will assess the ways in which patients could become at home in the asylum. Bringing together discussions of agency, material culture, and the value of individual case histories, it will show how some patients came to attach great fondness to the asylum surroundings. The case studies presented will demonstrate how some adjusted to prefer life on the ‘inside’, and how the asylum could be utilised as a place of sanctuary, away from troubled home lives. Yet this experience counters the intention of the public asylum. Every aspect of patient’s lives were observed.13 Home, and the domestic sphere, is understood to occur in a private, enclosed space. The attachments and emotional connections presented through the patient case records used in this chapter evidence that being ‘at home’ was not an entity confined to private homes, rather, institutional settings designed for maximum surveillance could be reconfigured according to an individual’s needs and state of mind.

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Patient examples will be used throughout to demonstrate the first-hand experience of institutionalised individuals with mental conditions in the period after 1845 which saw an acceleration in the construction of public asylums.14 It is important to highlight that the cases examined in this chapter provide individual stories and are not aimed to be representative of the general ‘common’ experience of being in an asylum in this period (if one truly exists). Rather, it is an attempt to counter the dominant understanding that to be in a Victorian lunatic asylum was an entirely traumatic, static experience, and, as Julia Laite summarises, provides a window ‘through which we view their world’.15 Whilst the pauper lunatic asylum is the focus of this chapter, it is important to note that individuals who resided there classified as pauper lunatics were not destitute.16 Rather, it denotes those in receipt of poor relief to fund their asylum stay.17 The research used in this chapter focuses, for the most part, on the Garlands Lunatic Asylum, the county institution of Cumberland and Westmorland. Built comparatively late in 1862, Garlands has not been the subject of sustained study, and provides geographical diversity to the literature concerning the English and Welsh asylums of this era.18 Its patient case records provide access to the experiences of those that inhabited the institution. The asylum’s annual reports and contemporary newspapers accounts have also been consulted, as they provide further context as to how the asylum operated and was publicly viewed. In addition, sources that evidence the wider life-cycle of the individuals studied are also important. This is to assist in countering the snapshot that recorded events in the medical casebooks portray, in an attempt to help understand the behaviour of the patients presented.19

9.2   Context The nineteenth century witnessed a huge shift in the way in which mental illness was treated and regarded. In England and Wales, this was facilitated by key pieces of legislation. The first, passed in 1808, recommended that all counties and boroughs provide their own public lunatic asylum. The second landmark legislation was enacted in 1845 and created a national state-sponsored network of county institutions. The Lunatics Act caused an acceleration of institutional construction, and in the decades following, the number of public asylums rose from just fifteen in 1844 to fifty-one in 1877.20 Previously, individuals suffering mental affliction would have been the primary responsibility of their families, communities, and of the Poor

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Law.21 With few public institutions, and private madhouses reserved largely for those that could afford them, many mentally unwell people remained at home in the care of relatives or in workhouses. The Lunatics Act 1845 placed responsibility for the insane on local authorities, as now all counties and boroughs were required by law to provide a public asylum to care for those in need.22 Patients’ institutional lives were ordered around a routine of nourishing meals, useful employment in the asylum to assist in the daily upkeep, engaging in religious prayer, partaking in recreational pursuits and sports, with only a small number of medicinal treatments included in this. It was believed that keeping patients active and involved would encourage self-­ restraint and recovery. The patients’ engagement in the employment tasks were favourably recorded in case notes, and could be seen as a sign that they were ready for reintegration into their ordinary lives on the outside, particularly in terms of conforming to the prevailing gender norms which employment tasks demonstrated. Similarly, patients who were noted to benefit from the diversions offered by the recreational pursuits on offer, such as board games, reading, dancing—with the asylum staff organizing regular balls for its inmates—or taking part in team sports, were considered to be engaging well with treatment, and can be judged to some extent as being the most ‘at home’ in the widest sense.23 This notion of ‘moral treatment’ extended to the furnishing of asylums. Rather than being cold and clinical, they were designed with comfort and domesticity in mind, as it was hoped to promote recovery through a heightened sense of circumstances.24 These ideals of home and domesticity were upheld by the Commissioners in Lunacy. This national body of inspectors regularly visited all public and private asylums throughout England and Wales, and later workhouses, not only ensuring that the principles of moral treatment were upheld, and investigated any wrongdoing or harm inflicted on patients. They also made recommendations for improvement, much of which centred on improving the homeliness of the asylum. For example, in 1904, they remarked of Garlands: Some of the day-rooms were dull, and much in need of brightening by lighter decoration, and by the provision of a more liberal supply of ornaments and other objects calculated to attract the attention and arouse the interest of patients25

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Comfort and cheerfulness were also stressed, when recommending the way in which asylums were constructed, decorated, and managed.26 Gifts to assist in improving the furnishings of the institution were often bestowed from prominent members of local society. In 1864 it was noted that ‘A number of pictures, statuettes, singing birds, &c., have been added to those formerly in the wards’.27 Even when patients were fit for discharge, Dr Thomas Clouston, medical superintendent of Garlands (1863–1873) and later of Edinburgh Asylum, reinforced the importance of ‘the necessity of placing patients in comfortable circumstances after they leave asylums’.28 The furnishing of asylums was modelled on middle-class homes, which were materially richer than the homes inhabited by the working classes. However, we should not immediately assume all those considered paupers in this context were from completely destitute surroundings with little material value. As Joseph Harley has found, and as demonstrated elsewhere in this volume, the working class owned a variety of non-essential items that adorned their homes.29 Therefore, throughout this chapter, the examples provided that evidence patients being ‘at home’ in the asylum will not primarily pinpoint this as being solely due to an attachment to material goods that they were not accustomed to in their ordinary lives. Rather, the sense of home will be construed by a sense of comfort, safety, and familiarity whilst residing in a public lunatic institution. Despite the shift in emphasis to asylum provision for the treatment of the insane, the fact remained that mental affliction was, and still is, stigmatised. Although it was publicly reported that patients were regarded in an enlightened, humane manner, a degree of horror still prevailed in wider cultural perceptions of the asylum. Clouston stated the following in 1885: Our building should by its very appearance and arrangements help to counteract the ideas of repulsion, gloom, coercion, and terror that were, and still remain to some extent, I regret to say, associated in the public mind with an old “madhouse”.30

Therefore despite the hard work to improve the environment within the asylum, the medical superintendent and Lunacy Commissioners still could not dispel the association between lunatic asylums and notions of horror. In fact, as Fennelly notes, the sites of former institutions have become sites of dark tourism fueled by cultural portrayals of these buildings as horrible places to live.31 The chapter will now move to dispel, to some extent, these

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myths, by demonstrating how patients could adapt well to living in an asylum and even make themselves at home.

9.3   At Home in the Asylum Guided by illuminating case histories, the feeling of being at home in the asylum can be evidenced in three distinct areas. First, the importance placed on furnishings in the asylum in a general sense will be assessed, as domesticity was an important value upheld in public asylums. Next, examples of patients that came to be attached to specific material goods will be presented. An interesting point here will be to illuminate what happened once patients were removed unrecovered, due to overcrowding, for a prolonged period of time, and returned to Garlands, and how this impacted their attachment to the institution. The final section will examine the reasons why some patients came to prefer life inside the asylum, as opposed to their disruptive and violent ones on the outside. The extreme reaction that some individuals had when faced with the prospect of discharge from the institution will also be considered here, as their feeling of being at home was threatened. 9.3.1  Domesticity in the Asylum Before examining individual cases, it is necessary to illuminate the context of domesticity in asylums. As laid out in the previous section, these institutions were conducted around a regime of moral treatment, which included treating the patients with kindness and promoting self-restraint through comfortable and genteel surroundings. Furnishings and décor were purposely chosen to evoke feelings of home, and, as Mary Guyatt notes, many suppliers of asylum goods also sold items that adorned people’s houses, providing a physical link to lives patients found themselves separated from.32 Not only this, but a familial, patriarchal framework was constructed with the superintendent as the ‘head’ of the family, and the patients as relatives, something which emerged from the Tuke’s at the York Retreat earlier in the century.33 This relationship aspect to the asylum regime is reinforced in the 1864 Garlands annual report, in which Dr Clouston remarked that readmitted patients ‘come like old friends, their coming exciting no astonishment in themselves or their fellow inmates’.34 He commented that such patients needed to be ‘properly cared for’ or they would become ‘chronic lunatics, their minds permanently weakened’.

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This attitude contrasts to the traditional understanding of the asylum as a ‘total institution’ that sought only to incarcerate, and not nurture, its patients back to health.35 Here we can see the affection felt by Clouston as head of the asylum towards his patients, both current and former. The emphasis on early removal to the asylum was a subject of much debate among the asylum community and relieving officers. The Commissioners in Lunacy and superintendents constantly reiterated the need for admission to an asylum at as early a stage as possible in an individual’s illness, as it markedly increased the chance of recovery. Particularly in contrast to the oppressive environment, and lack of care, offered by the workhouse, patients were materially, and medically worse off, when asylum admission was delayed. Problems arose when, in an attempt to reduce costs chargeable to Poor Law Unions, relieving officers would remove individuals to the workhouse until the best course of action was agreed upon. Cases emerged of mentally unwell individuals being left for weeks in workhouses, which greatly exacerbated their conditions and hindered their admission to an asylum. The consequences of this was a far larger number of long-term residents suffering with chronic conditions who came to see the asylum as their home, as the spatial comfort was much less in the workhouse.36 As noted by Hamlett, the nineteenth century witnessed more people than ever living in spaces away from their traditional homes, including lunatic asylums.37 9.3.2  Patient Attachment to Material Goods Evidence can be found in patient case notes to demonstrate that individuals could thrive in asylums, and benefitted from the daily regimes, which counters the traditional perception that asylums were repressive, dull, and gloomy locations to reside. In 1906 Dr Farquharson recounted fondly the experience of one resident, who had been in Garlands for forty-four years. He described him as one of the institution’s ‘characters’ who: for many years he blew the organ in Church, said grace in the hall before and after meals, called out the dances at the weekly entertainments, and was a walking encyclopædia of information, as he could give the dates of most events, however trivial, that had occurred during his sojourn here.

This passage was a tribute to the unnamed patient, as Farquharson was reporting the sad news of his death, aged 62.38 However, this is evidence

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that institutionalised paupers could become at home in the asylum, and could flourish in doing so. We can also see this positive reaction to the institution in terms of the homely emotions evoked by particular items of furniture. It is these characters, lacking in the common perception of the mentally unwell in this era, whose experience has largely been confined to sweeping generalisations.39 In another example, Hugh L., a patient admitted originally to Garlands in December 1866, had been removed from the asylum in September 1880 to free up space for more urgent cases of insanity. This was a common practice: those with long-term incurable conditions were often transferred elsewhere, usually to other asylums or workhouses, and brought back when extensions had been completed.40 Patients considered relatively stable and harmless to themselves or others were the ones who were disproportionately deemed suitable for removal during periods of overcrowding. Hugh L. had been moved out of Garlands as part of a group of seven male patients deemed suitable to Wadsley Asylum in Sheffield, 147 miles from Garlands. In December 1882 he, along with his fellow transferals, were readmitted when an extension on the male portion of Garlands Asylum had been completed to accommodate an additional one hundred patients.41 It was recorded in Hugh L.’s case record that on his return he ‘Refused all food until he was placed in the same ward and in the same chair as he occupied when here previously’. He had not been in Garlands for two years, but he retained emotional and therapeutic attachment to ‘his’ bed and ‘his’ chair, despite them being items of furniture in an asylum that catered for hundreds of patients in shared wards. It was also noted that because he returned and could not be reunited with ‘his’ bed, that Hugh L. ‘did not sleep well last night, because it was not his own bed he said’.42 On examination of the census records, which note Hugh L.’s life-cycle prior to his status as an asylum patient, clues can be found as to why he became at home in Garlands. Hugh L., like many other young men, migrated to England from Ireland in the post-famine era.43 Born in 1826, we can trace Hugh L. to England, and Cumberland specifically, in 1861 where he was listed as lodging with an elderly married couple, along with four other lodgers, and employed as a labourer.44 James, the head of the household in which Hugh L. lodged, died in February 1865, and his wife Catherine moved to Dalston shortly after.45 This further removed Hugh L.’s sense of kinship and network of quasi-familial support at the point he was admitted to Garlands. With no listed relatives, and assuming they

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remained in Ireland, Hugh L.’s isolation and lack of familial support would have led him to a reliance on the social and emotional bonds offered in the asylum. What is unclear is if it was only Garlands where he felt and behaved like this. We are unable to judge from the records why specific pieces of material furniture offered such comfort, and whether or not he felt this in the other asylums he resided. Whatever the truth, it is evident that patients could be at home in the asylum, particularly when their lives on the outside did not offer such a homely environment. 9.3.3  The Asylum as a Sanctuary Finally, in exploring cases of patients that became ‘at home’ in the asylum, it is important to draw upon the examples of individuals, disproportionately women, that sought sanctuary in the asylum to escape their domestic lives. The nineteenth-century home was understood as the female remit: a space in which to conduct domestic duties and nurture children. However, as Alexandra Wallis illuminates, trauma experienced in the home, particularly marital cruelty, could result in mental breakdown and subsequent asylum committal.46 Researchers, such as Marjorie Levine-Clark, have found cases of women that were admitted in a poor mental and physical state caused by domestic violence at the hands of their husbands.47 Deducing these facts is not entirely straight forward. Case records never state that injuries were caused by spouses, but by identifying the facts and piecing information together by cross-referencing documents, we can create a more comprehensive picture of an individual’s situation. One example, admitted to Garlands in June 1899, was Dinah L. Four days prior to her admission, it was recorded that she left her house barefoot, and a neighbour found her in a friend’s garden. Her case notes detail that she was suffering with melancholia, brought on by ‘domestic trouble’ and ‘unpleasantness at home’.48 Dinah L. was living in Kendal at the time of her committal with her husband Thomas and several of their ten children, the last of whom—Edith—was born in 1892 when she was 45.49 In the seven years since, it was noted that she had frequently felt suicidal, but the exact trigger for her leaving home in June 1899 was not specified. When she arrived at Garlands, as was the procedure, she was given a full physical examination, during which it was noticed that she had two black eyes and several bruises across her limbs. Given that ‘unpleasantness at home’ was cited as a contributing factor, it can be assumed that violence contributed to Dinah L.’s ‘domestic troubles’. One month after admission

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it was stated that ‘she is very happy in the asylum… and has no desire to leave’. After some months in Garlands, her health and wellbeing improved enough for her to show a willingness to return home to her family, and she was discharged in October 1899.50 Whatever the cause of her need to leave the family home, the asylum offered her requisite respite to remedy her mental ill health caused by an adverse domestic situation. This reinforces the findings of Levine-Clark, who argued that insanity, and the asylum, offered an escape from ‘dysfunctional domesticity’.51 Individuals could also seek solace in the asylum, not because their home lives were dangerous, but because they recognised the threat their illness posed to themselves and their families. Charles Dickens was fascinated, as is widely understood, with the plight of the poor,52 and had an interest in those afflicted with mental conditions. He made many visits to asylums in several countries, and regularly reported these in Household Words.53 In 1859 the following incident was relayed in the publication: In the last report of the Derbyshire Asylum there is mention of an interesting case. A young woman… left her home… [and] hurried to the asylum… She said, “she dreaded being ill at home, for they treated her badly when mad. She knew the asylum was her best place, and she came as fast as she could, to get help in time.”… This instant hurry to secure relief was a half mad act, founded on the soundest judgment. At the very first symptom of disease in the mind let remedy be sought.54

Clouston recalled a similar case in 1864 at Garlands: a married woman who had the impulse to destroy herself so strong that though she knew what she was doing, and knew how wrong it was, she made many and persistent attempts to obey it. She wishes to come to the Asylum for her own security, and immediately she came within the building she felt so safe that her thoughts were entirely diverted to other subjects, and she never had a suicidal idea again. In a few months she returned to her home quite well…55

As we have seen, patients could be reluctant to leave the asylum. Particularly for those with a lack of friends or relatives, the asylum offered a social space that provided a helpful routine and gave them an opportunity to recover whilst learning new skills and living in a shared social space.56 Moreover, patterns of increased economic migration led to family dislocation. Coupled with the stigma of mental illness, this resulted in

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asylum residents who lacked a familial support network, and very few ‘pull’ factors to return to life on the outside.57 For the few relatives they did have, some patients felt a need to remain in the asylum to preserve their families, as they understood the danger their conditions could pose. One extreme example is that of Mary Ann W., who was admitted to Garlands in May 1885 aged 50 from Whitehaven in Cumberland. She was recorded as suffering from melancholia and had previously been in Garlands five years earlier for five months, when she was suicidal. Interestingly it was stated that she ‘expressed a desire to come here herself’ as she ‘feared herself that she would harm herself and her children’.58 This is quite illuminating as it demonstrates the capacity for individual agency that asylum patients possessed, which traditional portrayals of the lunatic institution completely disregard. Focusing in on individual recorded cases is incredibly valuable to addressing these gaps in the literature. It was noted that Mary Ann W. was ‘pleasant and happy’ to be there, knowing that she was doing so in her, and her family’s, best interest. Due to her previous admission, she was familiar with the institution, and it was recorded that she ‘is sent to no. 1 [ward] according to her own request’. The reason for her preference for this ward is not recorded, but it denotes that she clearly felt most comfortable, and familiar with this space which she, presumably, had been placed in on her residence five years previously. As Mary Ann W.’s residence in Garlands continued, despite some periods of relapse, she seemed to improve. It was noted over a year after her admission in July 1886 that: Last month she looked so well that it was proposed to discharge her, but when she was told she said she did not feel well enough and had not sufficient confidence in herself and asked to be allowed to remain here a little longer.

Again, here we see the patient’s capacity for agency and having some control in their period of asylum treatment, as she displayed a willingness to remain for the sake of her own confidence in herself. Other historians have not addressed this in the literature. We know that families were consulted on the discharge of patients, but patient voices in this process have largely been confined to those who requested removal.59 On examination of census records, we learn that Mary Ann W. and her family relocated to Cumberland due to the closure of Cornish tin mines. Her husband had

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died in 1881, and her eldest child had married and relocated back to Cornwall in 1884. Therefore, a lack of familial support is a good indicator for the origins of her anxiety on being released.60 Three months later the prospect of discharge arose once again, but it was noted she ‘Is still nervous and apparently has no great desire to leave: she is easily upset but talks sensibly to you and expresses no delusions’. Her nervous temperament continued, and Mary Ann W. remained in Garlands until December 1889 when the following passage was recorded: This patient has seemed so well in mind for a long time that last week Dr Campbell discussed with her the subject of her being discharged. She said she did not yet feel sufficiently well and was anxious to be allowed to remain in the asylum a little longer… She was seen and spoken to by Miss Fraser about 4 o’clock this afternoon and nothing peculiar in her manner was then noticed. A little before 6  pm this evening the medical officers were summoned to the coal cellar of the female infirmary where the dead body of this patient had just been discovered by an attendant… A cut across the throat… clearly indicated the cause of death…61

This demonstrates an extreme example of a patient’s unwillingness to leave the institutional walls, and the levels of anxiety caused by the prospect of discharge. A lack of aftercare, and treatment within the community, will have added to Mary Ann W.’s worry. Suicide, although a feature of asylum life, was actively prevented, with suicidal patients placed on watch by attendants, and denoted a degree of failure in the ability of an asylum to care and protect its patients. However, as Sarah York notes, due to the challenging and unpredictable nature of individual behaviours, it was ‘difficult to outline the treatment and prevention of suicide’.62 Mary Ann W.’s case leads the discussion on to examining how patients could find solace inside institutions. What is interesting is that all cases presented in this section, albeit in different institutions and in different years, were women. Could it be that females were more attuned to the possible harm their illnesses posed to themselves and their families? Or were they fleeing traumatic home lives, as explored earlier in the chapter? Examining cases of individual agency prompts the need for further research into why, and which, people sought comfort in an asylum. The reasons why some felt more at home in an institution than in their own houses surrounded by their families deserves much deeper research.

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9.4   Conclusion This chapter has undertaken a micro-study approach to consider the experience of being incarcerated in a lunatic institution in the second half of the nineteenth century. Through the close analysis of patient case histories, it has been demonstrated that the asylum could have the effect of making individuals feel ‘at home’. The value of the evidence presented in this chapter is that it greatly adds to the largescale studies already undertaken on asylum patient populations. Through focusing on a small number of individual experiences, and cross-referencing asylum documents with census materials, a deeper understanding of how the working classes could come to feel a sense of homeliness in the asylum has been achieved. Material cultures within institutions are becoming an increasingly popular area of research. It is clear from the findings in this chapter that great attachments could be formed between individuals and inanimate physical objects, and created a sense of being at home. These attachments led some patients to show a reluctance to leave the asylum, and they came to prefer their lives inside an institution. This also greatly widens our understanding of the asylum as a place of sanctuary. Disordered and violent homelives could lead to mental breakdown, which in turn led to asylum committal. The sense of comfort and safety offered by the furnishings created a semblance of home, and patients recognised the asylum as a safe environment. These findings greatly contrast to the dark cultural perception of the lunatic asylum as a place of gloom, violence, and repression. These misinformed assumptions have been exacerbated by film and literary portrayals, which are reminiscent of some of the unregulated receptacles of much earlier centuries. Historians are working hard to dispel these views, and the close analysis of patient material, as has been carried out here, is incredibly valuable in this effort. Victorian asylums were intended to be therapeutic. The work of superintendents, and the Commissioners in Lunacy, was to create comfortable surroundings in which to conduct treatment for mental afflictions. The carceral architecture, and the fact that individuals had to be removed from the community to reside out of public view whilst receiving treatment, added to the fear surrounding asylums. As has been illustrated, what happened inside these walls was more progressive than has been assumed, and the working classes could in fact feel at home in the asylum.

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Notes 1. See M.  Guyatt, ‘A Semblance of Home: Mental Asylum Interiors, 1880–1914’, in S.  McKellar and P.  Sparke, Interior Design and Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 48–71; J. Hamlett, At Home in the Institution: Material Life in Asylums, Lodging Houses and Schools in Victorian and Edwardian England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 2. K. D. M. Snell, ‘Belonging and Community: Understandings of “Home” and “Friends” among the English Poor, 1750–1850’, Economic History Review, 65:1 (2012), p. 8. 3. For recent work on working class voices and institutional experiences, see A.  Tomkins, ‘Poor Law Institutions through Working-Class Eyes: Autobiography, Emotion, and Family Context, 1834–1914’, Journal of British Studies, 60 (2021), pp. 285–309. 4. S.  Eastoe, Idiocy, Imbecility and Insanity in Victorian Society: Caterham Asylum, 1867–1911 (Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), pp. 17–18. See also J.  Andrews, ‘Case Notes, Case Histories, and the Patient’s Experience of Insanity at Gartnavel Royal Asylum, Glasgow, in the Nineteenth Century’, Social History of Medicine, 11 (1998), pp. 255–281. 5. A. Blunt and R. Dowling, Home (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), p. 10. 6. Snell, ‘Belonging and Community’, p. 10. 7. For instance see A. Suzuki, Madness at Home: The Psychiatrist, the Patient, and the Family in England, 1820–1860 (Berkerley: University of California Press, 2006); R. Adair, B. Forsythe, and J. Melling, ‘Families, Communities and the Legal Regulation of Lunacy in Victorian England: Assessments of Crime, Violence and Welfare in Admissions to the Devon Asylum, 1845–1914’, in P. Bartlett and D. Wright (eds), Outside the Walls of the Asylum: the History of Care in the Community 1750–2000 (London: Athlone Press, 1999), p. 162. 8. A.  Scull, ‘The Domestication of Madness’, Medical History, 27 (1983), p. 247. 9. See A.  Scull, Museums of Madness: The Social Organization of Insanity in  Nineteenth-Century England (London: Harmondsworth, 1982); M. Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (London: Routledge, 2001). 10. R.  Porter, ‘The Patient’s View: Doing Medical History from Below’, Theory and Society, 14 (1985), pp. 175–198. 11. See C. Dobbing, ‘Review Article: Pauper Agency Among the Sick Poor in the Long Nineteenth Century’, History, 105 (2020), pp. 107–117. Also E.  C. Casella, The Archaeology of Institutional Confinement (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2007).

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12. Also useful as a starting point is Guyatt, ‘A Semblance of Home’. 13. For a discussion of patient surveillance see E. Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and other Inmates (London: Aldine Transaction, 2007). 14. As it became a legal requirement for each county in England and Wales to provide one. 15. J. Laite, ‘The Emmet’s Inch: Small History in a Digital Age’, Journal of Social History, 53:4 (2020), p. 966. 16. It is important to contextualise the language used throughout this chapter to denote those who resided in lunatic asylums and those who suffered with mental conditions. Insanity is the all-encompassing word used to denote mental illness. If you were certified insane, you were considered to be mentally unwell. Under the umbrella of insanity, two distinct terms were used to denote the length and curability of a person’s condition. The first, lunacy, referred to those suffering with what were considered ‘curable’ illnesses, such as mania, melancholia, or puerperal insanity (today, post-natal depression). If you were a lunatic, you were considered to some extent curable and it was likely that you would have developed the condition after puberty. The second distinct term, imbecility (also idiocy) referred to those who were judged to have life-long mental illness, usually from birth or childhood. All these given terms will be used throughout the chapter in their contemporary sense, and are not used to cause offence or to refer to individuals in a derogatory manner. 17. Keith Snell reinforces this, as he states that for a variety of reasons up to 50% of a parish’s population could be classed as paupers as they claimed poor relief. Snell, ‘Belonging and community’, p. 1, note 2. 18. Much existing work on lunatic asylums focuses on London’s institutions, for instance C. Arnold, Bedlam: London and its Mad (London: Simon & Schuster Ltd, 2008); A.  Shepherd, Institutionalising the Insane in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014). Also widely written about are those of Lancashire and Yorkshire. See J.K. Walton, ‘Lunacy in the Industrial Revolution: A Study of Asylum Admissions in Lancashire, 1848–50’, Journal of Social History, 13 (1979), pp.  1–22. Also, R.  Ellis, ‘The Asylum, The Poor Law and the Growth of County Asylums in Nineteenth Century Yorkshire’, Northern History, 45 (2008), pp. 279–293. 19. See the following for discussions of recorded incidents and how this shapes narratives of patients, Goffman, Asylums. 20. C. Philo, A Geographical History of the Institutional Provision for the Insane from Medieval Times to the 1860s in England and Wales: The Space Reserved for Insanity (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press Ltd, 2004), pp. 540–543.

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21. For an example of this, see V. Holmes, ‘Accommodating the Lodger: The Domestic Arrangements of Lodgers in Working-Class Dwellings in a Victorian Provincial Town’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 19 (2008), pp. 328–330. 22. K.  Jones, Asylums and After: A Revised History of the Mental Health Services from the Early 18th Century to the 1990s (London: Athlone Press, 1993), pp. 87–92. 23. Dining halls were repurposed for concerts, performances and balls, see R.  Golding, ‘“Appeasing the Unstrung Mental Faculties”: Listening to Music in Nineteenth-Century Lunatic Asylums’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 17 (2020), p. 414. 24. K.  Fennelly, An Archaeology of Lunacy: Managing Madness in Early Nineteenth-Century Asylums (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), p. 20. 25. Cumbria Archive Centre Carlisle (CACC), Forty-Third Annual Report of the Cumberland and Westmorland Lunatic Asylum, 1904, THOS 8/1/3/1/42, p. 8. 26. Hamlett, At Home in the Institution, p. 19. 27. CACC, Third Annual Report of the Cumberland and Westmorland Lunatic Asylum, 1864, THOS 8/1/3/1/2, p. 14. 28. Ibid., p. 10. 29. J.  Harley, ‘Material Lives of the Poor and their Strategic use of the Workhouse during the final decades of the English Old Poor Law’, Continuity and Change, 30 (2015), pp. 84–85. 30. Anon. (1885), Annual Report of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum for the Insane, 1885, Morningside: Royal Edinburgh Asylum, pp. 23–24. 31. Fennelly, An Archaeology of Lunacy, p. 13. Many former asylum sites have been redeveloped into residential dwellings. See S. Peters and R. Chaplin, ‘Executives have Taken Over the Asylum: The Fate of 71 Psychiatric Hospitals’, Psychiatric Bulletin, 27 (2003), pp.  227–229. Also, C.  Gibbeson, ‘Place Attachment and Negative Places: A Qualitative Approach to Historic Former Mental Asylums, Stigma and Place-­ Protectionism’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 71 (2020), pp. 1–8. 32. Guyatt, ‘A Semblance of Home’, pp. 52–53. 33. Digby, Madness, Morality and Medicine, p. 59. 34. CACC, Third Annual Report, p. 8. 35. See Goffman, Asylums; Scull, Museums of Madness; Foucault, Madness and Civilisation. 36. This issue has been widely documented. For instance see Scull, Museums of Madness, pp. 222–253; L. Smith, ‘“A Sad Spectacle of Hopeless Mental Degradation”: The Management of the Insane in West Midlands Workhouses, 1815–1860’, in J.  Reinarz and L.  Schwarz (eds), Medicine

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and the Workhouse (New York: University of Rochester Press, 2013), pp. 103–120. 37. Hamlett, At Home in the Institution, p. 1. 38. CACC, Forty-Fifth Annual Report of the Cumberland and Westmorland Lunatic Asylum, 1906, THOS 8/1/3/1/44, pp. 13–14. 39. For instance see Scull, Museum of Madness. 40. For more on this see C. Dobbing, ‘The Circulation of Pauper Lunatics and the Transitory Nature of Mental Health Provision in Late Nineteenth Century Cumberland and Westmorland’, Local Population Studies, 99 (2017), pp. 56–65. 41. CACC, Twentieth Annual Report, p. 16. 42. CACC, Casebook 1882–1884, THOS 8/4/38/8, admission no. 2334. 43. See D.  M. MacRaild, Culture, Conflict and Migration: The Irish in Victorian Cumbria (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998), chapter 3. 44. TNA RG9/3925, f. 85, p. 15. Notably, the elderly couple with whom he lodged were also Irish. It has been stated that for migrants, lodging with others from their home country allowed them to create a sense of home. 45. Carlisle Journal, Friday 28 April 1865. 46. A. Wallis, ‘Driven to Insanity: Marital Cruelty and the Female Patients at the Fremantle Lunatic Asylum, 1858–1908’, LIMINA: A Journal of Historical & Cultural Studies, 24 (2019), pp. 1–16. 47. Levine-Clark, ‘Dysfunctional Domesticity’. See also C.  Dobbing, ‘The Family and Insanity: The Experience of the Garlands Asylum, 1862–1890’, in C. Beardmore, C. Dobbing, and S. King (eds), Family Life in Britain, 1650–1910 (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 135–154. 48. CACC, Female Casebook 1895–1899, THOS 8/4/40/4, admission no. 4743. 49. TNA RG12/4333, f. 13, p. 19. 50. CACC, Female Casebook 1895–1899, admission no. 4743 51. M. Levine-Clark, ‘Dysfunctional Domesticity: Female Insanity and Family Relationships Among the West Riding Poor in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Family History, 25 (2000), pp. 341–361. 52. See R. Richardson, Dickens and the Workhouse: Oliver Twist and the London Poor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 53. An example of a visit made to St Lukes Hospital was reported in 1851, C. Dickens, ‘A Curious Dance Round a Curious Tree’, Household Words, Vol. 4, No. 95 (1852), pp. 385–389. 54. C. Dickens, ‘The Cure of Sick Minds’, Household Words, Vol. 19, No. 471 (1859), p. 416. 55. CACC, Third Annual Report, p. 9.

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56. For instance the case of Sarah M. in Dobbing, ‘The Circulation of Pauper Lunatics’, pp. 63–64. 57. See R. Adair, J. Melling, and B. Forsythe, ‘Migration, Family Structure and Pauper Lunacy in Victorian England, admissions to the Devon County Pauper Lunatic Asylum, 1845–1900’, Continuity and Change, 12 (1997), pp. 373–401. 58. CACC, Female Casebook 1884–1888, THOS 8/4/40/1, admission no. 2687. 59. See D. Wright, ‘The Discharge of Pauper Lunatics from County Asylums in Mid-Victorian England: The case of Buckinghamshire, 1853–1872’, in J.  Melling and B.  Forsythe (eds), Insanity, Institutions and Society, 1800–1914: A Social History of Madness in Comparative Perspective (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 93–112. 60. See TNA RG11/5193, f. 84, p.  77.; General Register Office (GRO), England & Wales, Civil Registration Marriage Index, 1837–1915, 1884, Jul-Aug-Sep, Penzance, Vol. 5c, p. 408. For discussions on asylums offering familial support to patients who lacked it elsewhere see C. Dobbing, ‘The Circulation of Pauper Lunatics and the Transitory Nature of Mental Health Provision in Late Nineteenth Century Cumberland and Westmorland’, Local Population Studies, 99 (2017), p. 63. 61. CACC, Female Casebook 1884–1888, admission no. 2687. 62. S. York, ‘Alienists, Attendants and the Containment of Suicide in Public Lunatic Asylums, 1845–1890’, Social History of Medicine, 25 (2012), p. 329.

CHAPTER 10

Flexible, Portable and Communal Domesticity: Everyday Domestic Practices of Finnish Sailors and Logging Workers, c. 1880s to 1930s Laika Nevalainen

10.1   Introduction The three quotations below are from Finnish sailors and logging workers working in these professions at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.1 My home is where my bag is and my nationality is what flag is at the rear of the ship.2 home is where there is a nail for hanging one’s bag3

I would like to thank Joseph Harley and Vicky Holmes for their comments on this chapter and John Richards for proofreading it.

L. Nevalainen (*) Suomen maatalousmuseo Sarka/Sarka – The Finnish Museum of Agriculture, Loimaa, Finland © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Harley et al. (eds.), The Working Class at Home, 1790–1940, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89273-9_10

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home is where I have been for three nights4

From the point of view of the middle-class home ideology prevalent at the time, these expressions would have been considered as contradictions in terms, since a home was seen as something more permanent and rooted, built upon a much wider material culture than a mere bag and its contents. The living spaces of sailors and logging workers, forecastles and forest cabins, were not considered homes or places of domesticity for they were transient, public, crowded spaces, often in a poor condition. However, as other articles in this edited collection have argued, home and homeliness could be created beyond home. In this chapter, the focus is on working-­ class men in mobile professions and their relationships to home and domesticity. The above quotations therefore reflect the domestic strategies of men who changed locations and living spaces on a regular basis and had to have developed a different kind of attitude to home and domesticity in contrast to that of the middle-class home ideology. These statements reveal that home was important to Finnish sailors and logging workers. Even if in contemporary discussions they would not have been considered to have had a home in a traditional sense, these men felt the need to emphasise the fact that even they experienced feelings of being at home or of homelessness. Their statements also raise the question of how long one needs to be in a location to be able to call that place one’s home or for it to feel like a home. Despite their mobile lives, these working-­ class men still consciously or unconsciously understood home as something that had to be tied to a place. This chapter will explore the flexible attitude to domestic routines, privacy, and feelings of belonging that was required of such men. I will demonstrate how men working in mobile professions employed strategies and practices formed communally to create a sense of homeliness and to carry out domestic routines irrespective of where they were. This requires understanding home as something beyond a specific type of place or tied to a specific ideology. This chapter demonstrates that we need to pay attention to small scale domestic practices and routines and to how everyday material possessions were used. As a sense of home is often associated with privacy and control, this chapter asks if we can find ways in which sailors and logging workers achieved or attempted to attain such elements of domesticity for themselves. In order to approach home as openly as possible, this piece draws on Alison Blunt and Robin Dowling’s critical geography of home, which emphasizes paying attention to home-making practices and the fact that

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home is not tied to a specific place or space.5 It is important to point out that, when talking about domesticity, I am not referring to an ideology, as discussed for example by John Tosh.6 Instead, more along the lines of Jane Hamlett’s recent work on institutions, I use domesticity to refer to a wide variety of practices, activities, routines, material cultures, and customs through which people, on the one hand, satisfied their everyday needs, and, on the other hand, created and upheld a sense of stability, predictability, security, and familiarity.7 In considering the mobility of these men and not automatically equating it with unbelonging, I have also drawn upon Alastair Owens and Nigel Jeffries’s work on mobile urban poor living in East-London during the nineteenth century, which exemplifies how to research what a transient life could mean in terms of domestic routines, homemaking, or the use and ownership of different types of domestic items.8

10.2   Sources The sources for this research are drawn from three written oral history collections: two collections of sailors’ and logging workers’ oral history writings from the University of Turku’s ethnology collections (TYKL-­ collection), and a collection of logging workers’ oral history writings and folklore from the collections the Finnish Literature Society.9 All three sets of oral history data were collected in the 1960s. This type of written oral history data consists of texts written by respondents, usually based on their personal experiences, on a given topic. The respondents produced these texts in response to collection calls or writing competitions organized by archives and universities.10 From the collection on sailors’ oral history writings, I systematically formed a selection which included the respondents who had started working as sailors on merchant and cargo ships before the Second World War. In order to focus on sailors who were away from home for longer periods of time, I only included sailors who had travelled at least across the Baltic Sea. This selection, therefore, consists of 84 respondents from a total of 155. Both the TYKL-collection’s and Finnish Literature Society’s collections of logging workers’ writings are extensive (369 and 789 respondents respectively), and I have only included a small group of examples which describe living conditions and everyday practices (25 and 39 responses respectively), in order to make comparisons.11

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The respondents to the oral history calls were encouraged to write freely about their life and work as sailors or logging workers, but the instructions also, to varying degrees, guided the respondents’ remembering and writing processes by suggesting topics which to focus on.12 In particular, the brochures for the collections carried out by the University of Turku included long ranging lists of detailed questions such as the respondent’s family background and life course, work practices, living conditions, clothing and equipment, free time activities, customs, and rituals. Many of the respondents did, indeed, closely follow the order of topics set out in the brochure. Participants were also encouraged to write ‘without embellishment and without minding one’s language’.13 Yet, with prizes awarded to the best pieces and respondents aware that the responses could be used by researchers, they may well have altered their tones and refrained from writing about topics which they considered inappropriate or uninteresting.14 Furthermore, oral history writings are influenced by cultural factors such as stereotypes and folklore, social change, the time that had passed since the events and experiences that the respondent was writing about had taken place, and the process of remembering and re-­ remembering itself. Nonetheless, despite such reservations, the oral history writings produced by the Finnish sailors and logging workers provide access to an area of everyday life and practices that would have otherwise gone undocumented.15 For this research, I am approaching the writings as depictions of everyday life and pay particular interest to the variety of everyday practices employed by both sailors and logging workers. It is, therefore, not crucial if a respondent was, for example, mixing up what happened to him personally with what happened to someone else or what was generally known.

10.3   Sailors’ and Logging Workers’ Living Conditions Both sailors and logging workers were absent from home for weeks or months at a time. These workers have often been considered by contemporaries and later commentators to have been predominantly young, unmarried men, in a transient phase of their life. However, both groups of workers also included men with family responsibilities, as well as men who worked in these occupations for most or their whole lives. Sailors could educate themselves to become officers and eventually captains. Meanwhile, for some farmers, logging work constituted an additional form of income in which they engaged during the logging and/or rafting season.

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Moreover, these men, at least in Northern Finland, preferred to form their work teams from family members such as sons or brothers.16 Other logging workers did the work while it was available and in-between seasons worked on other jobs they could find such as timber rafting and farm work.17 Until the 1950s and 1960s, the felling of trees was done manually with axes and saws during the winter, and, in the spring, the logs were rafted through waterways to harbours and sawmills.18 On the logging sites, the work was done in teams called ‘horseholds’ (hevoskunta), which consisted of the person in charge of the horse used to transport the trees and two to three men who cut the trees. Trees were felled all over the country, but a majority of the larger work sites were located in Eastern and Northern Finland in more or less remote areas. Men would come to work on these Northern sites from all around the country.19 In areas where local farms were close by, logging workers sought to find a place to sleep in these farmhouses, whereas in more remote areas they lived either in ‘forest saunas’ (metsäsauna) or ‘forest cabins’ (metsäpirtti). Forest saunas, the most common form of accommodation, were simple constructions housing 10 to 15 men and were built by the men who first arrived at the work site. The saunas were partially underground, consisting of one room and a separate space for the horses (Fig. 10.1). The men slept side by side on wooden benches built against the walls of the room (Fig. 10.2). An open

Fig. 10.1  Logging workers by the fireplace in a forest sauna in 1923. Sakari Pälsi, Ethnographic Picture Collection, Finnish Heritage Agency (CC BY 4.0)

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Fig. 10.2  Logging workers lying on a wooden bench built for sleeping in a forest sauna in 1926. Ahti Rytkönen, Ethnographic Picture Collection, Finnish Heritage Agency (CC BY 4.0)

fireplace made from stones was located in one of the corners. In contrast, forest cabins were bigger and better built than the saunas and could accommodate several dozen men.20 Nonetheless, neither of these buildings included facilities for washing oneself or one’s clothes—it was a rare luxury that the men got to wash themselves in a sauna at the main cabin (where the foremen stayed) or at a nearby farm.21 Logging workers had to both purchase and cook their own meals, buying supplies from travelling salesmen, nearby farms, or the main cabin.22 The crew of a ship was usually housed in a small box-shaped space which was either above or below the deck and situated either at the prow or stern of the ship. This space was called skanssi or ruffi (from Swedish skans or ruff ). The number of men living in one skanssi varied but most commonly there were 12 to 16 men sharing the space. The skanssi was where the crew members slept, ate, and spent their free time. On the sides of the skanssi were berths or bunks, two on top of each other, in which the

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Fig. 10.3  Sailors in the skanssi of sailing ship Favell in 1929–1930. FÅA - SILJA LINE Collection, The Finnish Maritime Museum’s Picture Collection, The Maritime Museum of Finland (CC BY 4.0)

sailors slept. In the centre of the space or on one of the sides, there was often a dining table with benches on the sides bolted to the floor (Fig. 10.3). If there was any heating, it came from a small stove that was situated at the centre of the space. The space could get intensely cold or hot depending on the weather, the roof often leaked, and during stormy weather the entire room could flood.23 During this period, ships generally lacked domestic facilities for its crew. There were no specific spaces on board ships for washing oneself or attire and, most of the time, not even a toilet. Compared to many other European countries, Finnish ship owners were slow to switch from sailing ships to steam ships.24 The widespread use of old sailing ships meant that the living quarters in Finnish ships were often in poor conditions and lacked facilities such as individual cabins for crewmembers or separate facilities for dining and free time. The condition of the skanssi was not a priority for employers as they were most interested in using the space for cargo in order to maximize profits. Furthermore, the fact that officers had more facilities and enjoyed more comforts than the crew, was a part of the on-board social hierarchy.25 In terms of meal provision on ships, cooks prepared all the meals and the food was provided for by the employer. Especially due to lack of

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Table 10.1  Typical foods eaten by Finnish sailors and logging workers Sailors

Logging workers

Dried bread, salted herring, biscuits, porridge, coffee, tea, pea soup with pork meat, potato soup, meat soup, bean soup, raisin soup, rice porridge, and lapskaus (a stew made from leftover potatoes, meat, and onions).

Fried foods made from bread, water, butter, flour, sugar and/or pork fat, sausages, meat soup, fish, oat porridge, potatoes, coffee, bread, tea, buns, cakes, and salted herring.

Source: TYKL/kys/19&20: informants 4, 8, 9, 11, 14, 17, 25, 30, 32, 35, 36, 37, 38, 41, 52, 58, 62, 67, 68, 70, 76, 81, 82; SKS KRA. Kiuru, Aukusti Jätkät 7. 1969; TYKL/kys/10: informants 1, 10; Snellman, Tukkilaisten tulo ja lähtö, pp. 147–149.

appropriate storage facilities, food on ships was largely monotonous. In contrast, the meals eaten by logging workers were even simpler. The typical foods eaten by both sailors and logging workers are presented in Table 10.1. At first glance, it would appear that the domesticity of sailors and logging workers could be seen as being compromised or at least limited. Yet, as I will demonstrate below, based on the written oral history data, both sailors and logging workers employed different kinds of everyday strategies which can be described as flexible, temporal, portable, and communal domesticity.

10.4   Portable Domesticity Both sailors and logging workers brought domestic items with them. Traditionally, sailors used seamen’s chests to store and transport their personal belongings, but during the early twentieth century the chest was slowly replaced by the duffel bag and suitcases, which were easier to carry from ship to ship.26 Meanwhile, logging workers typically carried their possessions in a leather bag or a birch-bark knapsack.27 There were, however, several factors which limited the number of items that both types of workers could bring but also preferred to have with them. Firstly, a mobile way of life meant that the men had to be able to carry all their personal belongings with them. Secondly, spaces for storing items both on board ships as well as in forest saunas and cabins were limited. There might have been hooks or cupboards used to store dishes or working clothes in a skanssi, but mostly chests were the only form of storage available to sailors. Logging workers had nails on the walls of the saunas for drying clothes and stored their bags either under the sleeping bench or used it as a

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pillow.28 Moreover, in the case of sailors, the risk that all their possessions could be lost in a shipwreck or that a sailor might want to abandon his duties and run away at port also limited the number of items that they carried with them. In addition to mobility, the amount and type of possessions that a worker had depended on his life situation, social background, personal preferences, and wealth. While some sailors had a well-equipped chest and bag, others had no more than a small bundle of items or could fit their possessions in a ‘box of cigars’.29 In the case of logging workers, some might arrive at a work site without even any tools. On the other hand, those who came as part of a ‘horsehold’ would generally have been better equipped, for the horse enabled the men to transport both bedclothes and cooking ware more easily than those men who came to the site alone carrying everything in a backpack.30 Both sailors and logging workers were required to bring their own work clothes, bedclothes, dishes, and cutlery with them. In addition, the personal possessions of a sailor could include non-work clothes, sewing equipment, pictures of loved ones, shaving equipment, pens, paper, envelopes, towels, pillow cases, soap, a mirror, a comb, handkerchiefs, clothes and shoe brushes, matches, cigarettes, a book of hymns, a bible, books, and tools for work.31 Logging workers mention having fewer but nonetheless similar items: clothes, a watch, a wallet, shaving and other personal hygiene items, a towel, sewing equipment, a knife, and work tools.32 In addition, since they had to prepare their own meals, logging workers had to have at least some rudimentary cooking utensils, such as a pan or special frying ladle, coffeepot, cups, a knife, and a wooden spoon.33 If the men had any, typical bedclothes among logging workers ranged from rag rugs and blankets to reindeer skins.34 The items that sailors and logging workers travelled with enabled them to practice portable domesticity. I have borrowed the concept of portable domesticity from Janet C.  Myers, who used it in her research on the domestic objects and practices of English emigrants travelling to Australia during the nineteenth century. In Myers’s work, portable domesticity refers to the ways in which immigrants attempted to uphold their English identity abroad by recreating familiar domestic spaces, practices, and rituals both during their journey to Australia and after they had arrived.35 Here I want to use the concept, not tied to a specific class, national identity, or ideal, but in order to analyse the everyday practices of sailors and logging workers. Portable domesticity was a way for loggers and sailors to

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uphold certain domestic routines and to achieve domestic comforts in the context of a mobile life. The different items sailors and logging workers had with them represented the different domestic activities that otherwise did not have room on the ship or the worksite. The men might have been forced to spend long periods of time secluded from the rest of society, but they still maintained basic domestic practices. The different items that the men carried with them enabled them to create and uphold domestic comforts and features such as warmth, recreation, sociability, textiles, crafts, or hygiene. The items provided them with familiarity as they reminded the men of home and allowed them to perform the same embodied activities in the same way as they were used to at home.36 Shaving is an example of such a routine but shaving equipment, together with other items related to personal hygiene such as personal mirrors, reveals just how important it was for sailors and logging workers to take care of their appearances. The upper classes might have often criticised working-class people for their lack of hygiene, but sailors’ and logging workers’ possessions attest to working men having the capacity for personal hygiene, even when they only owned a few items. It was especially important for sailors to look good when they went out once they reached the harbour. Many sailors even had a separate suit for going ashore. In turn, when logging workers went back to the city after a long period of work in the forest, one of the first things many did was to buy new clothes.37 The seaman’s chest and its contents were especially crucial for a sailor to be able to practice domesticity on board and to maintain a link to his home in Finland.38 A former sea captain born in 1883 described the role of the seamen’s chest as follows: There was no table nor chairs [in the forecastle], if one had not had one’s seaman’s chest one would have been quite homeless. On it one sat, on it one ate and in it one had all of one’s possessions, with the exception of oilskins and seamen’s boots. All underwear and the costume for going ashore were at the other end of the chest, there was a compartment for sewing equipment, letter paper, etc. It was also the object of everyone’s interests, one tried to make it as nice and pretty as possible with richly decorated handles, it was just the shape and colour which you could not change, the colour absolutely had to be green with the lid and bottom lath black.39

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This quotation reveals how central the chest was to the everyday lives of sailors. Besides containing all the possessions of the sailor, the chest was used as both a chair and a table since the table in a skanssi could not usually accommodate all the crew members. The chest was the only piece of furniture that the sailor owned and almost the only piece of furniture that he had exclusive use of besides his bed. A sailor therefore performed many domestic activities on his chest such as eating, sitting, or writing letters. Moreover, as sailors often made their chests themselves, the chest reflected the owner’s personality and demonstrated that the sailor in question had mastered the skills of a proper sailor.40 Having a beautiful chest or a sailor’s bag that was made by oneself was a matter of pride and honour.41 The handles of the chest were made to be decorative and the inside of lid was decorated with a painting (usually a sailing ship, a life buoy, or an anchor, heart, and a cross) and the owner’s initials were nailed to the top of the lid (Fig. 10.4). In the context of the cramped, often dirty environments that people lived in, the chest represented one of the few pieces of beauty that individuals had and the possibility of influencing how something looked. Sailors’ domestic activities also included taking care of the chest: a common Sunday activity was organising and cleaning one’s chest as well as fixing any possessions that were broken. According to Knut Weibust, sailors called this pastime a sailor’s holiday or kisteförnöjelse (chest enjoyment or amusement). The sailors reminisced as they went through their belongings and remembered where they had bought something and who had given it to them. They would look through photographs of their family members and friends, thus in a sense taking a mental holiday from their work and their current environment. As one sailor remarked, ‘if one had not had one’s seaman’s chest one would have been quite homeless’.42 As the men often changed ships frequently, the chest and its contents represented home by providing stability, familiarity, and a private space for the sailors.

10.5   Flexible and Temporal Domesticity Despite the portable domesticity enabled by the items sailors and logging workers carried with them, most of the time the men had to make do with what they had in regard to space and goods. In consequence, items were used flexibly, temporally, and communally. First, items served several purposes. For example, logging workers used their ladles both for cooking

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Fig. 10.4  An example of a seaman’s chest from the turn of the twentieth century. The Finnish Maritime Museum’s Collection, The Maritime Museum of Finland (CC BY 4.0)

and as a bowl to eat from.43 Sailors dried socks or pressed their trousers under the mattress or, when they were washing clothes, used whatever vessels were suitable to hand.44 Secondly, borrowing items from other men was common. Among sailors, it was part of the culture that crewmembers

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shared everything from soap and combs to dishes and sewing material.45 Lending goods was a form of solidarity among the men, as well as a necessity caused by the fact that most workers had so few items with them. These possessions were not only limited due to their mobile lifestyle, but also by the fact that the men might have to sell possessions in order to get money when they were, for example, in between jobs. On board, spaces and parts of the ship were used flexibly and temporally for domestic purposes. As the skanssi was cramped and fairly dark, most of the domestic tasks such as washing clothes or getting one’s haircut, were done on deck.46 Weather permitting, men performed a variety of free-time activities on deck: they relaxed in hammocks, lay in the sun, played instruments and cards, smoked, danced, exercised, boxed, and held religious services on deck.47 Therefore, besides being the sailors’ workplace, the spaces on deck functioned as the sailors’ laundry room, bathroom, barber shop, living room, gym, dance hall, and church. Areas such as a side bar or stairs were re-appropriated as a bench or a chair, or ropes were utilised as training equipment for gymnastics. In the case of logging workers, often the men ate sitting on the edge of the sleeping berth due to a lack of other forms of seating. According to one respondent, this was actually their preferred place to sit.48 Another area of everyday life in which sailors could employ flexible domestic strategies involved food rations. Certain foods such as sugar, butter or margarine, condensed milk, and pork meat were given only in the form of a rationed amount each week. The most common rations of sugar and butter were 400 or 450 grams per week.49 The rations were usually handed out every Saturday and the sailors could use these rations as they pleased. Considering how many of the respondents described the on-board food as being ‘bad’, ‘poor’, ‘one-sided’, ‘simple’, ‘nothing to cheer for’, or ‘nothing to speak positively about’, the rations gave sailors at least a little control over their food and through it some domestic comfort.50 By saving one’s rations as a reward for the end of the week, some men used food not only as a physical but as a mental stimulus. The sailors developed tactics to make the rations last as long as possible, for if you used your rations ‘carelessly’ you would very soon have run out. Some men would not, for example, spread butter or margarine onto bread if the meal contained a lot of fat or not use sugar in every cup of coffee. However, as one sailor recalled, sometimes they just wanted to treat themselves and eat a larger portion of the rations in one go, even if it meant having less during the rest of the week.51

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10.6   Communal Domesticity The quotation above pertaining to the sailor’s chest, concluded with the following comment by the former sea captain: ‘there was an unwritten law that nobody could keep their chest locked when the ship was sailing but neither was anybody going to lift the lid of somebody else’s chest’.52 The fact that on board sailor’s chests were left unlocked but that everyone knew not to touch somebody else’s belongings is an example of the standards of appropriate behaviour that were common among both sailors and logging workers. Such unwritten rules and shared understandings were part of communal domesticity which, together with portable and flexible domesticity, made life on board ships and in the forest more comfortable but also more manageable in the face of constant change and mobility. As a part of communal domesticity, the men performed domestic tasks such as washing clothes or cleaning together, and they spent most of their free time with one another telling stories, playing games, doing crafts, or playing music. Sharing songs and stories but also personal possessions such as instruments or cards to create shared enjoyment contributed to strengthening the bonds between the men.53 On a smaller scale, on logging sites communal domesticity could also take place between the men who formed a ‘horsehold’. The members often shared food and coffee and divided household tasks, such as cooking or taking care of the horse, within the ‘horsehold’.54 The following quotation from logging worker Eino reveals some of the aspects of both the communal domesticity of a ‘horsehold’, as well as the unwritten rules and shared practices of logging workers. The 19-year-old Eino went on his first logging trip in Eastern Finland in 1929 together with the master of his neighbouring house and the master’s two adult sons. He recounts their arrival at their worksite’s cabin: The first thing was to see where on the berth one wanted to sleep. There was room to choose, because there were no former inhabitants. Being close to the stove was tempting and so we reserved places from the middle of the cabin, near the side window. The side of the door remained empty, and some places next to the rear wall on both sides of the other window and the table. The stove was between the berths in the middle of the cabin and at least it would be warm there even when it was minus degrees. We did not trust the stove’s ability to give warmth to the side of the door or on the rear side, especially since the cabin had just been finished and the walls were

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damp, and the ground beneath the cabin had not had time to warm up during the few days of heating. Each horsehold with its men chose places next to each other, this way one got familiar neighbours. After reserving the places and after the loads had arrived, we brought in the equipment. This was placed under the berth. There was no other space, except for the things one needed in the bed and those that one had on. Tools, pots and pans were left outside. The loads were unloaded and welcome coffee made outside on the fire, which became our cooking place.55

Because there was so little space in the saunas and cabins of logging workers, the men were strict about boundaries with everyone and everything having their own place.56 Everyone had to sleep side by side, but logging workers were not indifferent to who they had to sleep next to: ‘The young ones kicked in their sleep, someone was a terrible snorer, some coughed a lot so that you could not sleep.’57 The competition for the spots that were considered the most comfortable could be fierce and neither in a forest sauna nor in a skanssi did anybody want to sleep too far away from the stove or too close to the door.58 The men slept in the same place throughout the season, and once somebody had reserved a spot on the berth for himself that made it his private space, the others had to respect this: Once an unknown or new man had arrived at the cabin and taken someone else’s place on the berth. The owner of the spot asked the man to leave but when he did not the old man took out his knife and said do I bloody have to do twelve years [in prison for killing a man]. Then the stranger found his way out of his spot.59

In order for the men to be able to uphold order and achieve a level of domestic comfort, it was essential that they observed shared practices and had respect for each other.60 Examples of other unwritten rules and shared practices included not moving or touching another person’s belongings such as drying clothes or a cooking ladle that was placed on the fire.61 At logging cabins, there was a designated place for urinating. Snow had to be cleared from one’s clothes before coming inside and everyone had to participate in shared tasks such as chopping wood, heating the stove, or fetching water.62 Possessions such as food bags had their allocated places both inside and outside the cabins.63 Stealing was not tolerated among either

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group of workers and punishment for theft or other wrongdoing was decided within the group.64 By being part of the shared culture of sailors or logging workers, these practices enabled men to find stability in an unstable situation, making everyday life more manageable, predictable, and safe. The continuous participation in and performance of joint forms of domesticity contributed to the creation of a sense of community and belonging among these workers and made them feel at home on board and on worksites.65 The following quotations reveal how sailors and logging workers did indeed use words such as ‘home’ or ‘family’ to describe specific ships or groups of colleagues: Over the years the men became like the same family. … Everyone knew each other after years of going from one logging site to another, those who met each other while travelling and in the end there were no strange men left.66 I had been on this ship for almost 9 months, a few a lot longer and we had become like the members of the same family. … That kind of feeling of sadness seemed to be the case for many, when we left the ship with our bags and each went his own way into the buzz of the big city. … [returns to sea after working in a factory in America] It was like coming home again. The work was familiar, the people and language familiar and homely.67 [after working on the same ship for almost 20 years] That ship in effect became my other home.68

Many sailors recalled good comradeship and group spirit as being more important to material conditions in how a sailor considered their quality of life to be. Logging workers too underlined that despite the sometimes poor living conditions, they did not experience their living spaces as unhomely, as the men quickly became friends and both places and people became familiar with repeated visits.69 In addition to shared practices and activities, a shared professional identity and working hard together in difficult circumstances contributed to the development of this comradeship. As domestic practices were part of the cultures that prevailed within these mobile occupations, together with learning the necessary work skills, adopting them was part of learning the profession in question and of assimilating into the occupational community.

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10.7   Conclusions By carefully analysing sailors’ and logging workers’ everyday practices and use of goods, we are able to see a variety of strategies, forms of domesticity, homeliness, and homemaking in the context of the everyday life of mobile working men. I formulated the concepts of portable, flexible, temporal, and communal domesticity which enabled me to identify a host of factors which contributed to sailors and logging workers being able to achieve domestic comforts, a sense of belonging, and even a feeling of home. Portable domesticity describes how mobile items enabled sailors and logging workers to uphold certain domestic routines, enjoy comforts, and maintain a link to home. Their personal, portable belongings represented different domestic activities that were otherwise absent from their living environments. Flexible and temporal domesticity, in turn, entails utilising spaces or items for different uses and at different times. Flexible domesticity can also encompass how domestic practices, needs, and desires were adapted according to one’s level of mobility as well as material and spatial circumstances. Finally, communal domesticity refers to the shared domestic practices and unwritten rules of the community. By participating in these collective practices, the members could create a deeper sense of belonging and make their everyday lives more manageable. The examples presented from the lives of sailors and logging workers have demonstrated how these different forms of domesticity were linked together. In the introduction I asked if we could find forms of or attempts at privacy and control in the practices of mobile workers. Due to their crowded, dark, and stuffy living conditions, privacy and hygiene could be luxuries which the men rarely had access to. Nevertheless, the examples presented above have demonstrated how sailors and logging workers were not indifferent towards ideas of personal space, differentiation of spaces, or cleanliness.70 Rules about respecting invisible boundaries or the allocation of particular spots for specific functions, such as urinating, are evidence of how these had to be executed flexibly. Privacy did not always entail enclosed spaces or being alone and was, therefore, more about autonomy, individuality, and having control over one’s own possessions and space, irrespective of how limited this space was.71 The unwritten rules and customs of sailors and logging workers represented forms of ‘everyday tactics’ or practices of gaining control.72 The different forms of domesticity analysed in this chapter have underlined how domesticity was

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not always tied to a dwelling or even to a specific place. Stability and belonging could be created through other means than physically staying in one place.

Notes 1. This article is for the most part based on research done for the author’s unpublished PhD thesis ‘Flexible Domesticities: Bachelorhood, Home and Everyday Practices in Finland from the 1880s to the 1930s’ (European University Institute, 2018). This research was funded by the Academy of Finland. 2. TYKL/kys/19&20: informant 17. Original: ‘Sanalla sanoen siellä on kotini missä on säkkini ja se on kansalaisuuteni mikä lippu on laivan ahterissa’. All translations by the author. TYKL refers to the TYKL-collection which is a part of the Archives of History, Culture and Arts Studies at the University of Turku. The names of the informants from the TYKLcollections will not be used due to the data protection guidelines of the archive. The numbering of the informants is based on a classification made by the author. 3. SKS KRA. Karttunen, Aarne Jätkät 5. 1969. Original: ‘koti on siellä, missä löytyy naula toimeentulopussin (repun) roikkumiselle’. SKS KRA refers to the Finnish Literature Society’s Archive Material on Traditional and Contemporary Culture. 4. SKS KRA. Korhonen, August Jätkät 7. 1969. Original: ‘koti on siellä missä olen ollut kolme yötä’. 5. A.  Blunt and R.M.  Dowling, Home (London: Routledge, 2006), esp. pp. 22–23. 6. J. Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 4. 7. A.  Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 53; J. Hamlett, Material Relations: Domestic Interiors and Middle-Class Families in England, 1850–1910 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), pp. 5, 7; J. Hamlett, At Home in the Institution: Material Life in Asylums, Lodging Houses and Schools in Victorian and Edwardian England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 8. A. Owens and N. Jeffries, ‘People and Things on the Move: Domestic Material Culture, Poverty and Mobility in Victorian London’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 20 (2016), pp. 804–827. 9. In the Finnish context, the term used for oral history is 'muistitietotutkimus' which literally translates into research on remembered information.

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Besides interviews, Finnish oral history sources also consist of written material such as the collections used in this chapter. Although these sources are not strictly oral, I have decided to refer to them as oral history writings since this piece of research uses remembered information as its source and in order to methodologically place the research in the right context. See O.  Fingerroos and R.  Haanpää, ‘Fundamental Issues in Finnish Oral History Studies’, Oral History, 40 (2012), p. 87. 10. Fingerroos and Haanpää, ‘Fundamental issues’, p.  82; K-M.  Hytönen, ‘Hardworking Women: Nostalgia and Women’s Memories of Paid Work in Finland in the 1940s’, Oral History, 41 (2013), p. 89. 11. These responses have been complemented with a few responses from the Finnish Literature Society’s Eläköön mies (Long live men) collection as well as the Labour Memory Data Commission’s (Työväen Muistitietotoimikunta) collections. In addition, I have drawn on previous research done on logging workers by Hanna Snellman and Jyrki Pöysä, who have both partly used the same written oral history collections. See H. Snellman, Tukkilaisten tulo ja lähtö: kansatieteellinen tutkimus Kemijoen metsä- ja uittotöistä (Oulu: Pohjoinen, 1996); J. Pöysä, Jätkän synty: tutkimus sosiaalisen kategorian muotoutumisesta suomalaisessa kulttuurissa ja itäsuomalaisessa metsätyöperinteessä (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 1997). 12. For more information on the nature of Finnish oral history collections, see, for example, Fingerroos and Haanpää, ‘Fundamental issues’; Hytönen, ‘Hardworking Women’; J. Suominen, ‘Mediasta kysymässä: Radiota, televisiota, puhelinta ja tietokonetta käsittelevät keruukutsut aineistona’, in S. Lakomäki, P. Latvala, and K. Laurén (eds), Tekstien rajoilla: Monitieteisiä näkökulmia kirjoitettuihin aineistoihin (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2011), pp. 236–237; A. Hynninen, ’Elämää kerroksittain: Arkistokirjoittamisen kontekstualisointi’, in S. Lakomäki, P. Latvala, and K. Laurén (eds), Tekstien rajoilla: Monitieteisiä näkökulmia kirjoitettuihin aineistoihin (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2011), p.  265; J.  Pöysä, ’Kilpakirjoitukset muistitietotutkimuksessa’, in O.  Fingerroos et  al. (eds), Muistitietotutkimus: metodologisia kysymyksiä (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2006), pp. 224, 230. 13. TYKL/kys/19&20: Questionnaire brochure; SKS KRA. Jätkät: collection brochure. 1969. 14. This is generally recognised to be a characteristic of oral history data, see Pöysä, Jätkän synty, p.  49; Hynninen, ‘Elämää kerroksittain’, p.  268; K-M. Hytönen, Ei elämääni lomia mahtunut: naisten muistelukerrontaa palkkatyöstä talvi- ja jatkosotien ja jälleenrakennuksen aikana (Joensuu: Suomen kansantietouden tutkijain seura, 2014), pp. 47–48. 15. Pöysä, Jätkän synty, pp.  50–51; Pöysä, ‘Kilpakirjoitukset muistitietotutkimuksessa’, p.  225; H.  Helsti, ‘Hedelmällisen tiedon jäljillä: teemakir-

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joitukset tutkimuksen lähteinä’, in P.  Korkiakangas, P.  Olsson, and H.  Ruotsala (eds), Polkuja etnologian menetelmiin (Helsinki: Ethnos ry, 2005), p. 154; Hynninen, ’Elämää kerroksittain’, p. 279; Fingerroos and Haanpää, ’Fundamental Issues’, p. 86; Hytönen, Ei elämääni lomia mahtunut, pp. 27, 29. 16. Snellman, Tukkilaisten tulo ja lähtö, p. 113. 17. Ibid., p. 121; Pöysä, Jätkän synty, p. 178. 18. Snellman, Tukkilaisten tulo ja lähtö, pp. 45–82. 19. Ibid., pp. 107–108. 20. SKS KRA.  Huttunen, Vilho Eläköön mies 92:2439; Koponen, Eemeli Eläköön mies 134:5675. 1993; TYKL/kys/10: informants 3, 4, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 & 17; TYKL/kys/4: informant 1; Snellman, Tukkilaisten tulo ja lähtö, p. 83. 21. TYKL/kys/10: informant 2; Pöysä, Jätkän synty, p. 68. 22. Snellman, Tukkilaisten tulo ja lähtö, pp. 147–148. 23. TMT:210:791:TA; TMT:406:2228:TA; TYKL/kys/19&20: informants 8, 9, 16, 21, 24, 30, 34, 37, 42, 44, 47, 61, 65, 67, 70, 77 & 83; K. Weibust, Deep Sea Sailors: A Study in Maritime Ethnology (Stockholm: Nordiska museet, 1969), p.  73. TMT:TA refers to the Labour Memory Data Commission’s collections held at the Labour Archive. 24. E.  Hiltunen, ‘Suomen purjeet maailman merillä’, in M.  Haapio (ed.), Purjeiden aika (Turku: Eita Oy), p.  62; T.  Soukola, Riistorauhaa rikko­ massa: Suomen Merimies-Unionin ja sen edeltäjien vaiheita 1905–2000 (Helsinki: Otava, 2003), p. 14; R. Kari, ‘Koneet voittavat perinteiset purjeet’, in E. Riimala (ed.), Navis Fennica: Suomen merenkulun historia. Osa 1, Puuruuhista syvänmeren purjelaivoihin (Porvoo: WSOY, 1993), p. 360; Y. Kaukiainen, Ulos maailmaan! Suomalaisen merenkulun historia (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2008), p. 391; Y. Kaukiainen, Sailing into Twilight: Finnish Shipping in an Age of Transport Revolution, 1860–1914 (Helsinki: Suomen Historiallinen Seura, 1991), p.  24; E.  Koivistoinen, ’Meripoika se merta seelailee’, in M.  Haapio (ed.), Purjeiden aika. Seglens Tidevarv (Turku: Eita Oy, 1983), p. 146. 25. TYKL/kys/19&20: informants 4, 21 & 43; SKS KRA. Rantanen, Väinö Eläköön mies 226:16045. 1993. 26. TYKL/kys/19&20: informants 11, 32, 34, 44, 51, 76; G. Webe, Nautika: Sjöhistorisk Årsbok 1985–1986 (Stockholm: Föreningen Sveriges Sjöfartsmuseum i Stockholm, 1986), p. 210. 27. TYKL/kys/10: informants 3, 6. 28. TYKL/kys/10: informants 2, 3; SKS KRA. Hillukka, Jouko Jätkät 3. 1969. 29. TYKL/kys/19&20: informants 9, 16, 24, 26, 28, 29, 32. 30. TYKL/kys/10: informants 2, 3; SKS KRA. Kela, Aatos Jätkät 6. 1969.

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31. TYKL/ kys/19&20: informants 7, 8, 9, 23, 26, 34, 32, 41, 45, 48, 61, 62, 64, 67, 68, 82; Webe, Nautika, p. 206. 32. TYKL/kys/10: informants 1, 6; SKS KRA. Kiuru, Aukusti Jätkät 7. 1969. 33. TYKL/kys/10: informants 1, 3, 6; Snellman, Tukkilaisen tulo ja lähtö, p. 148. 34. TYKL/kys/10: informants 2, 3; SKS KRA. Hillukka, Jouko Jätkät 3; Kela, Aatos Jätkät 6. 1969. 35. J. C. Myers, Antipodal England: Emigration and Portable Domesticity in the Victorian Imagination (Albany: State University of New  York Press, 2009). 36. A. Warde, ‘Consumption and Theories of Practice’, Journal of Consumer Culture, 5 (2005), pp.  137, 140; E.  Robinson-Thomsett, ‘“So Having Ordered My Berth I Lay Me Down to Rest”: Ships and Trains: Travelling Home’, in C.  Briganti and K.  Mezei (ed.), The Domestic Space Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), p. 275. 37. SKS KRA. Helttunen, Kalle Jätkät 3; Kiuru, Aukusti Jätkät 7; Leinonen, Matti Jätkät 10. 1969. 38. On the use of portable boxes by single, mobile workers in England see, for example, Vickery, Behind Closed Doors, pp. 39–41. On servant’s boxes, see Tessa Chynoweth, ‘Domestic Service and Domestic Space in London, 1750–1800’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, Queen Mary University of London, 2016), pp. 150–193. 39. TYKL/kys/19&20: informant 8. Original: ‘Bord eller stolar fanns inte häller, hade man inte haft sin sjömanskista hade man varit ganska hemlös. På den satt man på den åt man och i den hade man alla sina ägodelar, med undantag av öljekläderna och sjöstövlarna. Alla underkläderna och landgångskostymen fanns där I ena ändan av kistan fanss ett fack för sytilbehör, brevpapper mm. Den var också föremål för vars och ens intresse man försökte göra den så fin och nätt som möjligt med rikt utsirade bärstroppar, det var bara formen och färgen som inte gick at rucka på, den måste absolut vara grön med svart lock och fotlist’. 40. TYKL/kys/19&20: informants 61, 64, 77; TMT:115:147/29:TA.  See also Vickery, Behind Closed Doors, p. 45. 41. TYKL/kys/19&20: informant 17. 42. TYKL/kys/19&20: informant 8. Original: ‘have man inte haft sin sjömans­ kista hade man varit ganska hemlös’. 43. TYKL/kys/10: informant 3. 44. TYKL/kys/19&20: informants 15, 44. In ‘Meripoika se merta seilailee’, a picture shows a row of men washing laundry. One of them has a small wooden tub, two of them have buckets, and one of them has something that looks like a wooden box. See Koivistoinen, ‘Meripoika se merta seilailee’, p. 132.

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45. Weibust, Deep Sea Sailors, p. 193. 46. Digitalised photograph collections in Finna (www.finna.fi), collections of the Maritime Museum of Finland: SMK200414:707; SMK200414:748; SMK200316:26. 47. Digitalised photograph collections in Finna, collections of the Finnish Emigrant Museum: sv11990; sv119504; sv119604; sv119704; collections of the Maritime Museum of Finland: SMK88002:45; SMK93039:33; SMK97034:29; SMK200412:838; SMK200414:749; SMK200316:10; collections of the Labour archive: TA22136. See also Robinson-Tomsett, ‘Ships and Trains’, p. 276. 48. SKS KRA. Hillukka, Jouko Jätkät 3. 1969; TYKL/kys/10: informant 2. 49. TYKL/kys/19&20: informants 6, 16, 18, 25, 30, 32, 36, 40, 41, 45, 52, 62, 67, 68, 72, 76, 78, 81. 50. TYKL/kys/19&20: informants 2, 4, 6, 8, 18, 34, 44, 46, 48, 52, 68, 77, 79. 51. TYKL/kys/19&20: informants 23, 32. 52. TYKL/kys/19&20: informant 8. Original: ‘Det fanns en oskriven lag att ingen fick ha sin kista låst när fartyget var på resa, men det skulle heller inte fallit någon in att lyfta på en annans kistlock.’ 53. Webe, Nautika, p. 109. 54. TYKL/kys/10: informant 1. 55. E. Keronen, ‘Kämpällä: Ensimmäinen savotta’, in P. Laaksonen, L. Junnila, and J. Nirkko (eds), Leivän tähden: suomalaisen työn historiaa (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 1995), p.  27. Original: ‘Ensimmäinen asia oli katsoa riksiltä eli laverilta, mihin sijoitetaan vakituinen olotila, petin paikka. Valinnan varaa oli koska entisiä asukkaita ei ollut. Kaminan läheisyys oli houkutteleva ja niinpä varasimme paikat kämpän keskikohdalta, sivuakkunan läheltä. Ovensuupuoli jäi tyhjäksi vielä, ja muutamia paikkoja peräseinän viereen toisen akkunan ja pöydä kahden puolen. Kamina oli riksien välissä kämpän keskikohdalla ja siinä oli ainakin lämmin pakkasellakin. Emme luottaneet kaminan tehon lämmönantajana ovensuussa ja peräpuolella, varsinkin kun kämppä oli juuri valmistunut ja seinät kosteat, eikä maaperä vielä ollut ehtinyt kämpän alla tarpeeksi lämmitä muutamien lämmityspäivien aikana. Kukin hevoskunta miehineen valitsi vierekkäiset paikat, saihan näin tutut vieruskaverit. Paikkojen tultua varatuksi ja kuor­ mien saavuttua perille, tuotiin sisään varusteet. Niiden paikka oli riksin alla. Muuta tilaa ei juuri ollut, paitsi niille mitä petillä ja yllä tarvittiin. Työkalut, padat ja pannut saivat jäädä ulos. Kuormat purettiin ja tuliaiskahvit keitettiin ulkona nuotiolla, joka myös tuli keittopaikaksi.’ 56. See also Vickery, Behind Closed Doors, p. 46. 57. SKS KRA. Hillukka, Jouko Jätkät 3: 13. 1969. 58. TYKL/kys/19&20: informants 9, 42, 67.

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59. SKS KRA. Kauppinen, Matti Jätkät 6:13. 1969. Original: ‘Kerran oli tullut vieras tai uusi mies kämpille ja menny toisen petille nukkumaan. Petin omistaja pyyti miestä lähtemään pois vaan mies ei heti lähteny niin ukko nykäs puukon tupesta ja sano että helevetillä pitääkö tehä kakstoista vuotta. Silloin vieras osas tois ukon petiltä.’ 60. Pöysä, Jätkän synty, p. 189; K. Ilmonen, Johan on markkinat: kulutuksen sosiologista tarkastelua (Tampere: Vastapaino, 2007), pp.  199–202; K.  Ilmonen, ‘Sociology, Consumption and Routine’, in J.  Gronow and A.  Warde (eds), Ordinary Consumption (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 14, 17. 61. SKS KRA. Mäkelä, Juho Jätkät 13:2. 1969. 62. SKS KRA. Mäkelä, Juho Jätkät 13:2. 1969. 63. TYKL/kys/10: informant 17. 64. SKS KRA. Mäkelä, Juho Jätkät 13:2. 1969; SKS KRA. Rantanen, Väinö Eläköön mies 226: 16046. 1993. 65. N.  Yuval-Davis, ‘Belonging and the Politics of Belonging’, Patterns of Prejudice, 40 (2006), p.  203; T.  Fenster, ‘Gender and the City: The Different Formations of Belonging’, in L. Nelson and J. Seager (eds), A Companion to Feminist Geography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 242–243, 249. 66. SKS KRA. Helttunen, Kalle Jätkät 10. 1969. Original: ‘Jätkät muodostui vuosien mittaan kuin samaksi perheeksi. … Kaikki oli tuttuja toisilleen vuosi kaudet kuljettua savotoilta toisille siellä kulkiessa jotka tapasi toisensa ja niin lopussa ei ollut outoa jätkää.’ 67. TYKL/kys/19&20: informant 39. Original: ‘Olin ollut tällä laivalla lähes 9 kuukautta, muutamat paljon kauemmin ja olimme tulleet kuin saman perheen jäseniksi. … Sellaista ikävän tunnetta siinä monen kohdalla näytti olevan, kun säkkeinemme lähdimme laivasta ja kukin tahollemme sekaannuimme suurkaupungin [New York] hälinään. … Oli taas kuin olisi kotiin tullut. Työ oli tuttua, väki ja puhekieli tunnettua ja kotoista.’ 68. TYKL/kys/19&20: informant 43. Original: ‘Tuosta laivasta tuli oikeastaan toinen kotini.’ 69. TYKL/kys/10: informant 6; SKS KRA. Kiuru, Aukusti Jätkät 7. 1969. 70. Vickery, Behind Closed Doors, p. 26. 71. Vickery, Behind Closed Doors, pp. 28, 45–46. See also Mary Douglas, ‘The Idea of a Home: A Kind of Space’, Social Research, 58 (1991), p. 289. 72. Vickery, Behind Closed Doors, p. 46.



Appendix 1 Inventory of the goods in the possession of

Mr and Mrs Mills, 1799

The Inventory of Houshold Goods, Fixtures and Shop Stock of Mr: Mills (absented from his Family), of Teddington Middlesex taken by Overseers of the Parish of Teddington being under the necessity of relieving the Two Children of the deceased Mrs Mills January 3rd 1799. Right Hand Garret Press Bedstead Feather Bed and Bolster Two Blankets Small Mahogany Card Table Four Old Chairs Six Old Prints and two Cages Left Hand Garret Stump Bedstead Feather Bed and Bolster Two Blankets and Rug Stump Bedstead Feather Bed and Bolster Two Blankets and Rug Deal Table, two Old Chaires Two Salting Tubs & Wood Case Bain[?] Glass and Pair of Carpets Furn Bar and Casks and Rat Trap Back Room Four post Bedstead & white Cotten Furniture Feather Bed Bolster Two Pillows

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Harley et al. (eds.), The Working Class at Home, 1790–1940, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89273-9

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APPENDIX 1 INVENTORY OF THE GOODS IN THE POSSESSION…

Two Blankets and Counterpane Two Callico Window Curtains A Grate Mahogany Double Chest of Drawers Walnut Single Ditto Mahogany Bason Stand Bottles and Bason Toilett Table and Petticoat Mahogany Night Stool and Pan Cloaths Horse Two Small Glasses on Swing Drawers Three Bedsides Carpets Two Split Back Chaire Japanned Waiter and Small Picture Landing Two Quilts, Two pieces Needlework Front Parlour Panthen’s Stove 9[?] Inches Bow Fender, set of Fire Irons Mahogany Card Table & Lind Two Flap Dinn[in]g Table Ditto Tea Board and Tea Chest Japanned Tea Tray Easy Chair Cushions Check Cover Wainscott Pillar Table Four Walnutree Chairs Printed Hoad[?] & 8 prints framed Pair of plated Candlesticks Two China one [?] Sconces Three Chimney Ornaments Window Curtains Latts & Linen Ditto Front Door Canvas Blind and Bellows Pier Glass in Gold Frame Kitchen Fender and Tongs Copper Warming Pan Footmans and Frying Pan Two flat Iron & Box Do. & two Heaters Six brass Candlesticks Iron Ditto Two Pair of Snuffers Stone Morter and Pestle Mahogany waiter

  APPENDIX 1 INVENTORY OF THE GOODS IN THE POSSESSION… 

Round Wainscott Table Square Deal Ditto Four Prints 3 Chairs Hatchet and Saw 4 Plaster Figures Clear Starching Board Cloaths Horse Copper Tea Kettle Large Copper Pot and Cover Ditto Saucepan and Cover Gridiron Warehouse Copper with Iron Work & Wood Case Two Washing Tubs and Forms Coal Box Bag of Cloaths Pegs Water Tub Pail and Chopping Board China Three Plates two broke Blue and White Teapots Red and White Ditto Six Cups Six Saucers & Creampots Two Blue and White Basons Delph Bowl and Glass Five Decanters Two Rumers Six wine Glasses Two Salts Four Cruets Two Tumblers Stone Ware Five Dishes and Eight Plates Brown Ware Six pieces Linen Four pair of sheets Three small Table Cloths Six Dusters two Towels Utensils in Trade Long Beam and Planks 28lb – 14lb – 7lb – 4lb Iron Weights Pair of Counter Plate Scales Pair of Small Ditto Copper

239

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APPENDIX 1 INVENTORY OF THE GOODS IN THE POSSESSION…

Pair of Small Brass Ditto 50 Brass Weights 4lb – ¾ one ounce 4 Pewter Measures 6 Tin Oil Ditto Coffee Mill 11 Large Cannisters 6 Jars and Covers Egg Basket Cheese Knife Chopper Mallet and Stool Beer Stand 2 Lamp & Brackets Four Wood Measures Fixtures The new Bow Window and Shutters Compleat Counter 5 Drawers and Till Post Rails and Pegs Case of Drawers and Stands Ditto of 56 Small Drawers Small Desk and railing in Window Sand Bin 58 Shelves in Shop & Uprights Source: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), MJ/SP/1799/04/049 Petition by the parish of Teddington to sell the goods and chattels of William Mills, labourer, of Teddington, 1799.

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Index1

A Agency, 7, 8, 10, 40, 51, 64, 66, 109, 114, 195, 204, 205 Apprentices, see Apprenticeship Apprenticeship, 33, 59, 60, 66, 177, 178, 184, 185 Asylums, 2, 3, 9, 12, 174, 193–206 admission, 200, 202, 204 attachment to, 200–202, 206 domestic routines, 9, 197 domesticity, 199–200 furnishings and décor, 198, 200–202 patient records, 12, 195–196 sanctuary, 202–205 social organisation Autobiographies, 10–12, 26–28, 33, 35, 47–67, 99–115, 116n2, 116n4, 116n7, 118n37, 119n61, 124, 133, 135, 145–164 Aynsley, Jeremy, 175

B Bamford, Jemima, 55–58 Bamford, Samuel, 10, 46–67, 120n65 Barker, Hannah, 54, 59 Bedding, 30, 64, 74, 76, 79–80, 82, 84, 86, 87, 89, 180, 221 bed curtains, 48, 54, 82, 180 blankets, 79, 80, 87, 180, 221 coverlid, 180 feather, 30, 38, 64, 84, 85, 87, 180 makeshift bedding, 79, 80 mattresses, 30, 74, 76, 79, 80, 82, 84, 89, 180, 224 pillows, 64, 74, 76, 79, 80, 87, 89, 180, 182, 221 quilts, 80, 180 sheets, 80 Bedrooms/bedchambers, 82–85, 88, 93n53, 112, 132, 141n53, 173–187 Bed-sharing, 77, 79

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Harley et al. (eds.), The Working Class at Home, 1790–1940, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89273-9

253

254 

INDEX

Beds/steads, see Furniture Begiato, Joanne, 112 Belonging, 214, 226–230 Betterton, Kathleen, 108, 110 Birds affection for, 131–135 birdcages, 126, 129, 132, 156 birdkeeping, 64, 123–137, 139n24, 159–160, 162 as food, 160 pigeons, 135–136, 159 portability, 130–131 purchasing of, 126 songbirds, 123–137, 198 taxidermy (stuffed), 133 Blunt, Alison, 194, 214 Boarders, see Lodgers Booth, Charles, 123–137, 145–146, 154–156, 163 Borrowing, 224 Breadwinner, 4, 27, 83, 88, 92n43, 147 Breen, Timothy, 62 Briganti, Chiara, 10 Bristol, 6, 149, 151–152, 155, 158, 159, 161 Burnett, John, 105, 108, 111, 116n7, 118n37, 139n18 Burton, Harry, 153, 155, 158, 159 C Ceramics, 10, 64, 66, 133 Chairs, see Furniture Charity, 74, 79–80, 87 blanket and clothing clubs, 79 Chase, Alice, 112, 113 Chests of drawers, see Furniture Children/Childhood, 4, 5, 10, 25–26, 27, 29, 34, 36–37, 52, 55, 56, 62–63, 64, 77–80, 82–84, 86, 88, 89, 91n19, 99–115, 119n55, 129, 131, 139n18, 147, 153, 156, 158, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 202

infants, 62, 77, 82, 91n19, 106, 108 See also Girlhood; Play Church, Richard, 135, 151, 155, 161 Claybury lunatic asylum, 193, 194 Cleaning equipment, see Cleanliness Cleanliness, 7, 11, 52, 62, 63, 64, 108, 119n48, 127, 151, 229 cleaning equipment, 221 hygiene, 151, 221, 222, 229 laundry, 11, 52, 56, 57, 106, 112, 151, 152, 153, 157, 160, 163, 164, 218, 219, 224, 225, 226, 233n44 sanitation, 146, 147, 152 whitewashing, 5, 151–152 Clocks, see Timepieces Clothing and linen, 7, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 36–38, 40, 57, 62, 79, 80, 87, 181, 216, 222, 224 shoes, 29, 40, 109, 177, 181 See also Bedding Coal, 34, 40, 147, 158, 205 Collier, Mary, 57 Colquhoun, Patrick, 51 Comfort, 1, 9, 11, 12, 29, 30, 53, 55, 63, 66, 74, 76, 77, 80, 86, 87, 89, 108, 119n48, 121n76, 129, 146, 151, 163–164, 174, 180, 185, 190n35, 194, 197, 198, 199, 200, 202, 205, 206, 219, 222, 225, 226, 227, 229 Commissioners in Lunacy, 197, 198, 200, 206 Communality, 220, 226–228, 229 Consumption, 3, 4, 5, 7, 10, 12, 26, 40, 42n31, 62–66, 92n25 Cooking ware, 30, 33, 38, 86, 130, 221, 227 of kettle, 93n53 saucepans, 32 Coroner’s inquests, 11, 73–89, 91n14, 93n53 Couches, see Furniture Crisp, Zoe, 150

 INDEX 

Cruikshank, George, 12, 81, 140n41 Cumberland, 193–206 Cupboards, see Furniture D Daunton, Martin, 2, 147 Day, Sidney, 152, 153, 157–162, 164 Destitution, 10, 30, 35, 40, 80, 85–88 Dickens, Charles, 203 Dinnerware, 7, 33, 111 Disability, see Sickness Dollhouses, 8, 103, 110–114, 119n61, 120n76 Dolls, 103, 110–114 Domestic labour, see Housework Domestic violence, see Marriage Donald, Moira, 147 Doolittle, Megan, 8, 106 Dusinberre, Juliet, 103, 117n25 Dwellings cottages, 4, 47, 49, 50, 56, 63, 64, 104, 114, 133, 162 cottage flats, 153 double tenement cottage, 79 forest cabins, 214, 217, 218 half houses, 153, 159 semi-detached, 155 shared occupancy/multi-­occupancy, 80, 108, 148, 156–158, 164 single room, 4, 52, 54, 55, 84 subdivided houses, 52, 110 tenements, 115, 156, 157, 164 (urban) through-houses, 147 Dyhouse, Carol, 102 E Earle, Peter, 174 Eastoe, Stef, 194 Economy of makeshifts, vii, 17n27, 74, 89 Eden, Frederick Morton, 49, 51

255

Edwards, Clive, 76 Emotional attachment to domestic objects, 9, 200–202 to home, 9, 12, 50, 105, 117n31, 194 to pets, 131–135 See also Asylums; Birds; Dollhouses; Dolls Emotions, 2–3, 8–9, 11, 36, 63, 70n51, 73, 105, 109, 125, 131–135, 137, 140n45, 141n49, 147, 163–164, 201 Engels, Friedrich, vii, 7 Essex Braintree, 30 Brentwood, 83 Chelmsford, 28, 33, 35 Coggeshall, 87 Colchester, 28–30, 78, 82 Dovercourt, 80 Halstead, 28 Harwich, 85 Ramsden Crays, 77 Tolleshunt D’Arcy, 31, 39 Upminster, 35 Walthamstow, 154 Expenditure, household, 30 F Faire, Lucy, 147, 148 Female Reformers of Blackburn, 63 Finland, 6, 213–230, 230n1, 231n10 Foakes, Grace, 111, 153 Foley, Alice, 105–108, 112 Food, 7, 26–32, 33, 34, 40, 62, 77, 87, 112, 160, 163, 197, 201, 218, 219, 220, 225–227 Forecastles, 214, 222 See also Sailors Forecourts, 146, 147, 149, 153–157, 159, 160, 163, 164 Fuel, 7, 26–27, 29–30, 33, 36

256 

INDEX

Furniture, 31, 38, 48, 51–52, 54–55, 64, 76, 80, 84–86, 87, 106, 107, 112, 129, 179–181, 199–202, 219, 223 beds, 3, 7–9, 11, 19n38, 30, 33, 35, 38, 48, 52, 54, 56, 61, 63, 64, 73–89, 90n4, 92n29, 104, 105, 113, 132, 175, 177, 178, 180–183, 185, 189n32, 201, 223, 227 bedsteads, 30, 74, 76–80, 82–84, 86–89, 91n14, 91n15, 91n18, 91n92, 180 chairs, 3, 8, 30, 31, 38, 48, 63, 84, 85, 86, 106, 109, 111, 113, 118n37, 118n38, 120n71, 148, 180, 181, 201, 222, 223, 225 chest of drawers, 38, 180 couches, 84 cupboards, 32, 220 seamen’s chests, 220–223, 226 sofa, 83, 84, 106, 113 storage, 32, 120n71, 190n36, 220 tables, 31, 38, 48, 50, 56, 86, 108, 113, 118n37, 180, 181, 219, 222, 223, 226 G Gardens, 6, 11, 136, 145–164, 166n15, 202 sharing with other households, 153, 156–158 as sites of familial tensions, 162–163 See also Yards Garlands Lunatic Asylum, 193–206 Gender roles, 55–58 Girlhood, 8, 99–115 Glassware, 64 Grant, Charlotte, 175

Griffin, Emma, 27, 57, 62, 92n43, 101, 131 Guillery, Peter, 155 Guyatt, Mary, 199 H Hamlett, Jane, 3, 54, 59, 147, 194, 195, 200, 215 Handley, Sasha, 177 Hanway, Jonas, 174 Hare, Augustus, 123 Harley, Joseph, 7, 10, 11, 89, 198 Harvey, Karen, 174, 182 Hearth goods, 32–33 fenders, 32 pokers, 32 Hecht, J. J., 179 Hewitt, Cecil (C. H. Rolph), 156, 158, 164 Hewitt, Martin, 11, 58, 74, 124 Hill, Bridget, 174 Hine, Lilian, 108 Hogarth, William, 176, 184, 185 Hoggart, Richard, 4 Holloway, John, 154, 155, 157, 158, 160–162, 164 Holmes, Vicky, 6–8, 11, 12, 63–65, 119n55, 120n71, 147, 162 Home, definition of, 118n41 definition of, 7–10 Home-making, 51 Horn, Pamela, 79 Hoskins, Lesley, 6, 9, 11, 12, 54 Housework, 55–57, 102, 108, 162 See also Cleanliness; Gender roles Humphries, Jane, 100, 116n2, 119n48, 149 Hutchinson, Eleanor, 108, 109, 112, 119n50 Hygiene, see Cleanliness

 INDEX 

I Infants, see Children Inquest reports, see Coroner’s inquests Insanity, see Sickness Institutions, see Asylums Inventories, 7, 8, 11, 20n44, 26–28, 30–33, 38–40, 41n9, 45n9, 51, 54, 64–65, 106, 107, 113, 175, 180–181, 189–190n32, 237–240 See also Pauper inventories Ireland, 160, 201, 202

257

K Kean, Hilda, 124 King, Peter, 11 King, Steven, 20n42, 35 kitchens, 82, 83, 84, 108, 148, 151, 157, 162, 174, 175, 176, 187

living conditions, 217–218, 226–227 personal possessions, 221 London (city of, former parts of Middlesex and Surrey) Bethnal Green, 52, 58, 129, 130, 133, 135, 139n24, 153, 157 Chiswick, 153 Deptford, 64, 150, 160, 161, 164 East End, 3, 12, 125, 134, 145, 153, 160 Finsbury Park, 156 Highgate New Town, 152 Islington, 156 Lambeth, 60, 157 Lewisham, 153 Limehouse, 64, 70n52 St. Giles, 64 Wapping, 153 London Corresponding Society, 53, 61, 62 Looking glasses, 7, 32, 33, 48, 63, 64, 182, 221 Lunatics Act, 196, 197

L Laundry, see Cleanliness Leisure, 4, 11, 53, 57, 110, 126, 146 gardening, 11, 136, 146–147, 152, 160–161, 164 reading, 57, 101–102, 104, 119n55, 182, 197 Lemire, Beverley, 26, 70n52 Letters, see Pauper letters Levine-Clark, Marjorie, 202, 203 Life cycle of poverty, 26, 27, 32–40 Light, Alison, 115 Linen, see Clothing and linen Lodgers, 3, 12, 34, 64, 74, 77, 78–79, 80, 82–83, 84–85, 87, 88, 89, 156, 157, 177, 201, 210n44 Logging workers food, 220

M Manchester, 6, 51, 54, 110 Manliness, see Masculinity March of the Blanketeers, 47 Marital violence, 202–203 Marriage, 4, 33–34, 63, 89, 159, 162–163, 184, 189n18 See also Marital violence; Widowhood Masculinity, 55, 62, 137 See also breadwinner Massey, Doreen, 4 Material culture, 7, 32–40, 51, 141n56, 148, 179, 195, 206, 214, 215 Mattresses, see Bedding Mayhew, Henry, 12, 102, 111, 123–137, 137n2

J Jeffries, Nigel, 3, 70n52, 215

258 

INDEX

McCalman, Iain, 57 McKibbin, Ross, 124 Meldrum, Tim, 174 Melville, Jennifer, 177 Memoirs, see Autobiographies Mercier, Philippe, 182, 190n41 Mezei, Kathy, 10 Mobility, 11, 70n52, 214, 215, 220, 221, 222, 225, 226, 229, 228, 230n8 More, Hannah, 38, 49, 57, 63, 163–164, 195 Morland, George, 12, 62 Myers, Janet C., 221 N Navickas, Katrina, 58 Newlyweds, see Marriage New Poor Law, 5–6, 20n42, 74, 88, 89, 120n65, 200 Newspaper reports of coroner’s inquests, 11, 74–76 Noise, 53, 158 See also Sound(scape) Norfolk, 74 Thetford, 86, 94n66 Northcote, James, 12, 173–187 Nottingham, 111 O Old age, 4, 6, 26–27, 35, 37, 38, 55, 63, 84, 85–88, 89, 94n72, 95n78 See also Widowhood Old Bailey, 12, 58, 177, 182 Old Poor Law, 5, 10, 11, 20n42, 26–28, 74 Oral history, 2, 10–11, 215–216, 220, 230–231n9, 231n11, 231n12, 231n14

Outdoor (domestic) space, see Forecourts; Gardens; Yards Owens, Alastair, 3, 70n52, 215 Oxfordshire, 102, 103 P Pauper inventories, 11, 20n44, 27, 30–33, 38, 40, 41n9 Pauper letters, 10, 26–30, 32–38, 194 Pawning, 6, 10, 26, 27, 30, 33, 37, 38, 40, 74, 160 Pets, 7, 8, 19n36, 64, 124–126, 128, 129, 131–133, 135–137, 138n6, 158, 160 See also Birds Photographs as sources, 12, 149 Pillows, see Bedding Plants, 136, 146, 153, 155, 158, 161, 163 flowers, 104, 118n41, 146, 160, 162 indoor, 107 planting, 151, 156, 160 See also Gardens Play, 8, 52, 101, 108, 110–114, 119n55, 152, 153, 156, 158, 161, 163–164 Politics gendered political participation, 57 at home, 52–55 radical politics, 52, 57, 60 Ponsonby, Margaret, 76 Pope, Cecil, 151–153, 155, 158, 161, 162 Portability, 87, 130–131, 220–222, 229 Porter, Roy, 195 Portsmouth, 112

 INDEX 

Privacy, 4, 54, 58–62, 82, 114, 148, 154, 156–159, 161, 164, 214, 229 Psychiatry, see Asylums; Sickness R Radical politics, see Politics Rent, 28, 30, 34, 36, 38, 40, 42n30, 52, 60, 74, 87 Representations, 50–51, 100, 101, 104, 183, 186 of working-class homes, 50, 100 Respectability, 5, 32, 55–58, 63, 107, 108, 124, 125, 128, 136, 140n28, 155 Retford, Kate, 175 Roper, Michael, 114 Rowntree, Seebohm, vii, 25 Royal Academy, 176 S Sailors food, 220 forecastles, 218–219 personal possessions, 221 Sanitation, see Cleanliness Schall, Jean-Frederic, 182, 190n41 Scull, Andrew, 195 Sculleries, 147, 157, 158, 161 Second-hand market, 76, 79 selling possessions, 27, 30, 33, 35, 36, 38, 40, 87–88, 225 Security, 58–60, 125, 140n31, 185, 215 Self-education, 54 Sensory home, 4, 8, 52, 53, 56, 86, 106, 108, 126, 151, 158 See also Sound(scape) Servants and class, 9, 175 and sex/sexuality, 182–183 Servants’ bedchambers

259

decoration/furnishings, 180–181 depictions in art/visual depictions of, 181–184 meanings of/cultural associations of, 183–184 Shaving, 221, 222 Sheffield Society for Constitutional Information, 58 Shepard, Alexandra, 26 Sherman, Sandra, 49, 51 Shoes, see Clothing and linen Sickness, 26, 27, 35–38, 40, 82, 84, 86, 88 disability, 35 insanity, 195–196, 198, 203, 208n16 Silk weaving, see Work (at home) Sleeping, 54–56, 78, 82–86, 88, 93n46, 177, 217–219, 227 Snell, Keith, 194, 208n17 Sofas, see Furniture Solkin, David, 49 Sontag, Susan, 114 Sound(scape) bird song, 123–137 domestic, 106, 108 Southgate, Walter, 133, 141n53, 153, 160 Spencean Society, 58 Steedman, Carolyn, 1, 3, 51, 73, 101, 111, 175 Storey, Joyce, 151, 159 Strange, Julie-Marie, 124, 131, 140n44, 148, 160 Suffolk Badingham, 79 Bury St Edmund’s, 78 Dedham, 30 Framsden, 84 Ipswich, 77, 78, 80, 82, 83, 86 Lowestoft, 78–80, 84 Woodbridge, 87 Suicide, 74, 88, 95n78, 205 Swindells, Julia, 101

260 

INDEX

T Tables, see Furniture Tea ware, 32, 64 Temporality, 53, 54, 163, 225, 229 Theft, 7, 58, 59, 227–228 Thompson, E. P., 7, 53, 56 Thompson, Flora, 5, 102–107 Timepieces clocks, 7, 32, 106, 107, 113 watches, 32, 221 Toilets, 133, 147, 151–153, 157, 159, 162, 163 Tosh, John, 215 Tudor Walters report, 146 U Underemployment/unemployment, 34, 35, 38 V Vermin, 8, 78, 79, 124, 125, 137, 160 Vickery, Amanda, 58 W Wadsley Asylum, 201 Walker, George, 12 Wallis, Alexandra, 202 Watches, see Timepieces

Weibust, Knut, 223 Wei-Ning Chen, Nancy, 113 West Yorkshire Addingham, 64 Westgate Hill, 64 Whitewashing, see Cleanliness Widowhood, 31, 36, 38, 85, 87 Williams, John, 186 Williams, Raymond, 104, 105, 117n31 Wilson, Nicola, 3 Windows, 53, 58, 64, 155 Woollard, Matthew, 4, 44n74 Work (at home), 52 cobblers, 58 silk weaving, 52 Working class definition, 3–5, 52 divisions/distinctions within, 5, 148 Wright, Thomas, 147 Y Yards, 127, 146, 151, 157, 159, 160 facilities, 133, 147, 151, 152, 153 shape/layout (and size), 150–152 shared, 156–158 use, 133, 145–164 washhouses, 147, 156–158 See also Gardens York, vii, 25