Research context

Shifting intellectual terrains: the material, the everyday, the domestic
In contrast to recent writing on Victorian London, which has been concerned with questions of meaning, representation and the politics of urban identity (e.g. McLaughlin, 2000; Robinson, 2004), this research will focus on the material history of the city. As has been argued elsewhere (Gunn and Owens, 2006), in recent years there has been ‘an epistemological movement away from the cultural to the material, from questions of representation to matters of process, practice and effect’. This movement has taken place across a range of disciplines from urban cultural geography (e.g. Jackson 2000, Lees, 2002), to urban and social anthropology (e.g. Atffield 1999, Miller 2001) and urban history (e.g. Orlin, 2000, Joyce, 2003, Otter, 2002). These ‘material returns’, as geographer Whatmore (2006) puts it, draw upon an eclectic range of theoretical ideas and intellectual traditions, from a revitalised cultural Marxism (e.g. Steinberg 1994), to the appropriation of ideas from science studies and ‘actant network theory’ (Latour, 2002), and to anthropological notions of ‘objectification’, invoked to explain the relationship between people and things (Miller 1989).

Paralleling this epistemological concern for (re)materialzing the study of cities, has been a shift in analytical focus towards investigating the ‘everyday’ spaces of urban life (Moran, 2005). In contrast to the grand and totalizing visions of cities that pervade many representations of urban space (including those of Victorian London), such an approach directs attention to the mundane spaces of the urban life, the ‘infinitely minute web’ (de Certeau, 1984) of everyday activities and experiences, and – significantly for this proposal – the undistinguished and unremarkable material artefacts that sustain urban social worlds (Highmore, 2002).

This concern for the ‘everyday’ has been accompanied by a more specific interest in the space of the home and the significance of the private domestic sphere in modern urban life. Much of the recent literature on nineteenth-century cities, including London (e.g. Nead, 2000; Rendell, 2002), has focused on the idea of ‘modernity’ and the dramatic transformations and experiences that reshaped public life. Feminist historians (e.g. Felski, 1995), have been keen to demonstrate the lack of attention paid to the domestic sphere within this important historical narrative. Accordingly, work by historical and cultural geographers, for example, is beginning to demonstrate the importance of the home as a space at ‘the heart of [modern] human life’ (Blunt and Varley, 2004). More specifically, there has been a growing interest in the materiality of domestic spaces as a crucial context within which urban social relations were shaped (e.g. Jerram, 2006). The study of material objects and their social and cultural significance in domestic settings has become an important area of research among both nineteenth-century (e.g. Young, 2003, Hamlett, 2005) and contemporary (e.g. Pink 2004) urban scholars.

London: time for a material turn?
Few of these new intellectual interests feature strongly in recent writing about Victorian London. Here, the intellectual effort remains focused on questions relating to the cultural fabric of urban life and the spectacular transformations wrought by the modernizing impetus of the imperial metropolis. The discursive textures of the city’s social geography have been extensively investigated, as, for example, in the rich scholarship that surrounds the representation of slums and the domestic lives of the East End poor through fiction, journalism and social investigation (e.g. McLaughlin 2000, Driver 2001, Koven 2004, Ross, 2001). Much of this literature has been critical, recognising the political nature of such representations, that homogenise and stereotype people and places within the city, usually from a lofty, white, male, middle-class viewpoint (Mayne, 1993). While avoiding the problem of some earlier scholarship, which arguably confused the ‘imagined reality of slums with the actualities of working class neighbourhoods’ (Mayne and Murray 2001), this literature nevertheless often struggles to move beyond the city as an imaginary landscape in order to understand everyday experiences of metropolitan life (e.g. Robinson, 2004). Similar problems pervade studies of the domestic life of the metropolitan middle class which tend to rely on idealised accounts of domesticity contained in household manuals and conduct literature (e.g. Flanders 2003, Draznin, 2001). Even where there has been an attempt to consider how ideology and discourse were challenged by the historical actuality of everyday practice – such as in recent studies of women, consumption and West End street life (Rappaport, 2000, Nead 2000, Nord, 1994) – the focus here has resolutely been on the public rather than the private sphere.

Following Philo (2000), the ‘preoccupation with immaterial cultural processes, with the constitution of intersubjective meaning systems and with the play of identity politics’ evident in much of the historiography of Victorian London, leads to a lack of attentiveness to the significance of ‘the material’ in metropolitan life. Writing about twentieth-century, working-class London, Kean (2004) neatly observes that ‘lives may be reconstructed by material other than the writings of state philanthropists and do-gooders’. Drawing upon new archaeological evidence and integrating it with the detailed investigation of family, household and other documentary sources, this project will reconstruct the material histories of domestic life in Victorian London. It will deepen our understanding of the social complexity and geographical diversity of the metropolis and open up an important new intellectual trajectory in London history.