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

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

This book examines life in the homes inhabited by the working class over the long nineteenth century. These working-class homes are often imagined as distinctly unhomely spaces, which the inhabitants struggled to fill with even the most basic of furniture, let alone acquire the comforts associated with middle-class domestic space. The concerned reformers of industrialising towns and cities painted a picture of severe deprivation, of rooms that were both cramped yet bare at the same time, and disease-ridden spaces from which their subjects required rescue. It is an image which is not only inadequate, but which also robs working-class people of their agency in creating domestic spaces which allowed for the expression of personal and familial feeling. Bringing together emerging scholars who challenge these ideas and using a range of innovative sources and approaches, this edited collection presents a new understanding of working-class homes. Vicky Holmes is Visiting Research Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London, UK in association with the Centre for Studies of Home. Her Palgrave Pivot, In Bed with the Victorians: The Life-Cycle of Working-Class Marriage, was published in 2017. Joseph Harley is Lecturer in History at Anglia Ruskin University, UK. He has recently published Norfolk Pauper Inventories, c.1690-1834 (2020) and has articles in various journals including Agricultural History Review, Historical Journal and Social History. Laika Nevalainen is a historian of everyday life in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Finland.

This book opens the doors to the homes of the forgotten poor and traces the goods they owned before, during and after the industrial revolution (c. 1650–1850). Using a vast and diverse range of sources, it gets to the very heart of what it meant to be ‘poor’ by examining the homes of the impoverished and mapping how numerous household goods became more widespread. As the book argues, poverty did not necessarily equate to owning very little and living in squalor. In fact, its novel findings show that most of the poor strove to improve their domestic spheres and that their demand for goods was so great that it was a driving force of the industrial revolution.

This volume is number one of a six volume collection that brings together primary sources on gardens and gardening across the long nineteenth-century. Economic expansion, empire, the growth of the middle classes and suburbia, the changing role of women and the professionalisation of gardening, alongside industrialisation and the development of leisure and mass markets were all elements that contributed to and were influenced by the evolution of gardens. It is a subject that is both global and multidisciplinary and this set provides the reader with a variety of ways in which to read gardens – through recognition of how they were conceived and experienced as they developed. Material is primarily derived from Britain, with Europe, USA, Australia, India, China and Japan also featuring, and sources include the gardening press, the broader press, government papers, book excerpts and some previously unpublished material.

The Routledge History of Loneliness takes a multidisciplinary approach to the history of a modern emotion, exploring its form and development across cultures from the seventeenth century to the present. Bringing together thirty scholars from various disciplines, including history, anthropology, philosophy, literature and art history, the volume considers how loneliness was represented in art and literature, conceptualised by philosophers and writers and described by people in their personal narratives. It considers loneliness as a feeling so often defined in contrast to sociability and affective connections, particularly attending to loneliness in relation to the family, household and community. Acknowledging that loneliness is a relatively novel term in English, the book explores its precedents in ideas about solitude, melancholy and nostalgia, as well as how it might be considered in cross-cultural perspectives. With wide appeal to students and researchers in a variety of subjects, including the history of emotions, social sciences and literature, this volume brings a critical historical perspective to an emotion with contemporary significance.

Tracing the experiences of women who were designated insane by judicial processes from 1850 to 1900, this book considers the ideas and purposes of incarceration in three dedicated facilities: Bethlem, Fisherton House and Broadmoor. The majority of these patients had murdered, or attempted to murder, their own children but were not necessarily condemned as incurably evil by medical and legal authorities, nor by general society. Alison C. Pedley explores how insanity gave the Victorians an acceptable explanation for these dreadful crimes, and as a result, how admission to a dedicated asylum was viewed as the safest and most human solution for the 'madwomen' as well as for society as a whole. Mothers, Criminal Insanity and the Asylum in Victorian England considers the experiences, treatments and regimes women underwent in an attempt to redeem and rehabilitate them, and return them to into a patriarchal society. It shows how society's views of the institutions and insanity were not necessarily negative or coloured by fear and revulsion, and highlights the changes in attitudes to female criminal lunacy in the second half of the 19th century. Through extensive and detailed research into the three asylums' archives and in legal, governmental, press and genealogical records, this book sheds new light on the views of the patients themselves, and contributes to the historiography of Victorian criminal lunatic asylums, conceptualising them as places of recovery, rehabilitation and restitution.