The Objects And Textures Of Everyday Life In Imperial Britain

Focusing on everyday life in nineteenth-century Britain and its imperial possessions”from preparing tea to cleaning the kitchen, from packing for imperial adventures to arranging home décor”the essays in this collection share a common focus on materiality, the nitty-gritty elements that helped give shape and meaning to British self-definition during the period. Each essay demonstrates how preoccupations with common household goods and habits fueled contemporary debates about cultural institutions ranging from personal matters of marriage and family to more overtly political issues of empire building. While existing scholarship on material culture in the nineteenth century has centered on artifacts in museums and galleries, this collection brings together disparate fields”history of design, landscape history, childhood studies, and feminist and postcolonial literary studies”to focus on ordinary objects and practices, with specific attention to how Britons of all classes established the tenets of domesticity as central to individual happiness, national security, and imperial hegemony.

Focusing on everyday life in nineteenth-century Britain and its imperial possessions”from preparing tea to cleaning the kitchen, from packing for imperial adventures to arranging home décor”the essays in this collection share a common focus on materiality, the nitty-gritty elements that helped give shape and meaning to British self-definition during the period. Each essay demonstrates how preoccupations with common household goods and habits fueled contemporary debates about cultural institutions ranging from personal matters of marriage and family to more overtly political issues of empire building. While existing scholarship on material culture in the nineteenth century has centered on artifacts in museums and galleries, this collection brings together disparate fields”history of design, landscape history, childhood studies, and feminist and postcolonial literary studies”to focus on ordinary objects and practices, with specific attention to how Britons of all classes established the tenets of domesticity as central to individual happiness, national security, and imperial hegemony.

Winner, 2022 Whitfield Prize for First Monograph in the Field of British and Irish History Since the eighteenth century, European administrators and officers, military men, soldiers, missionaries, doctors, wives, and servants moved back and forth between Britain and its growing imperial territories. The introduction of steam-powered vessels, and deep-docks to accommodate them at London ports, significantly reduced travel time for colonists and imperial servants traveling home to see their families, enjoy a period of study leave, or recuperate from the tropical climate. With their minds enervated by the sun, livers disrupted by the heat, and blood teeming with parasites, these patients brought the empire home and, in doing so, transformed medicine in Britain. With Imperial Bodies in London, Kristin D. Hussey offers a postcolonial history of medicine in London. Following mobile tropical bodies, her book challenges the idea of a uniquely domestic medical practice, arguing instead that British medicine was imperial medicine in the late Victorian era. Using the analytic tools of geography, she interrogates sites of encounter across the imperial metropolis to explore how medical research and practice were transformed and remade at the crossroads of empire.

This book shows how international influences profoundly shaped the ‘English’ home of Victorian and Edwardian London; homes which, in turn, influenced Britain’s (and Britons’) place on the world stage. The period between 1850 and 1914 was one of fundamental global change, when London homes were subject to new expanding influences that shaped how residents cleaned, ate, and cared for family. It was also the golden age of domesticity, when the making and maintaining of home expressed people’s experience of society, class, race, and politics. Focusing on the everyday toil of housework, the chapters in this volume show the ‘English’ home as profoundly global conglomeration of people, technology, and things. It examines a broad spectrum of sources, from patents to ice cream makers, and explores domestic histories through original readings and critiques of printed sources, material culture, and visual ephemera.

Since the 1990s, in response to dramatic transformations in the worlds of technology and the economy, design - a once relatively definable discipline, complete with a set of sub-disciplines - has become unrecognizable. Consequently, design scholars have begun to address new issues, themes and sub-disciplines such as: sustainable design, design for well-being, empathic design, design activism, design anthropology, and many more. The Routledge Companion to Design Studies charts this new expanded spectrum and embraces the wide range of scholarship relating to design - theoretical, practice-related and historical - that has emerged over the last four decades. Comprised of forty-three newly-commissioned essays, the Companion is organized into the following six sections: Defining Design: Discipline, Process Defining Design: Objects, Spaces Designing Identities: Gender, Sexuality, Age, Nation Designing Society: Empathy, Responsibility, Consumption, the Everyday Design and Politics: Activism, Intervention, Regulation Designing the World: Globalization, Transnationalism, Translation Contributors include both established and emerging scholars and the essays offer an international scope, covering work emanating from, and relating to, design in the United Kingdom, mainland Europe, North America, Asia, Australasia and Africa. This comprehensive collection makes an original and significant contribution to the field of Design Studies.

Furniture is a unique witness to the transformations of private and public experience amidst the upheavals of the 20th century. How we work, rest and play are determined by the embodied encounter with furniture, defining and projecting a sense of identity and status, responding to and exemplifying contrasting social conditions, political and economic motivations, aesthetic predilections and debates. Assessing physical and archival evidence drawn from a spectrum of iconic and under-represented case studies, an international team of design historians collaborate in this volume to explore key methodological questions about how the production, consumption and mediation of furniture reveal shifting cultural habits and histories across diverse contexts amidst modernity. Drawing upon a wealth of visual and textual sources, this volume presents essays that examine key characteristics of the furniture of the period on the themes of Design and Motifs; Makers, Making, and Materials; Types and Uses; The Domestic Setting; The Public Setting; Exhibition and Display; Furniture and Architecture; Visual Representations; and Verbal Representations.

Although "snail mail" may seem old fashioned and outdated in the twenty-first century, Catherine Golden argues that the creation of the Penny Post in Victorian England was just as revolutionary in its time as e-mail and text messages are today. Until Queen Victoria instituted the Postal Reform Act of 1839, mail was a luxury affordable only by the rich. Allowing anyone, from any social class, to send a letter anywhere in the country for only a penny had multiple and profound cultural impacts. Golden demonstrates how cheap postage--which was quickly adopted in other countries--led to a postal "network" that can be viewed as a forerunner of computer-mediated communications. Indeed, the revolution in letter writing of the nineteenth century led to blackmail, frauds, unsolicited mass mailings, and junk mail--problems that remain with us today.

Victorian furnishers and decorators Collinson & Lock were a model of the art furniture business of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This book is the first wide-ranging study of this once highly important company. It will give insights into the workings and productions of a London furnishing business in the period. It also provides information on a wide variety of topics including furniture design developments, interior design styles, business practices, working practices and techniques, and the firm’s customers and competitors. Clive Edwards first considers the structure of the London ‘art furniture’ trade and its development to locate the firm in its community. He then traces the growth of the firm’s business, its involvement with important international exhibitions, the designers they worked with, and the furniture and interiors they produced. This important book then outlines and discusses Collinson & Lock’s creations ranging from seminal pieces that were designed for an exclusive clientele, to those displayed at national and international exhibitions between 1871 and 1900, through to batch produced objects that still maintained the quality and design that the firm was famous for. The involvement of the firm with both public and private interior decoration commissions is also examined through case studies, including those in the Anglo-Japanese, Queen Anne, Old English, and Renaissance styles used in the later Victorian period. Drawing on the author's extensive knowledge of nineteenth-century furniture and interiors, this book meets a need for a fully researched and illustrated reference work on this famous firm. If you have an interest in the history of furniture and interior design, if you are involved with furniture collections either on a private basis or professionally, or you simply have an interest in the decorative arts and culture of the period, this book should be on your shelves.