The Working Class at Home, 1790–1940

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

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction: The Working Class at Home, 1790-1940.- Part I:  The Material Home.- 2. ‘I can barely provide the common necessaries of life’: Material Wealth over the Life-cycle of the English poor, 1790-1834.- 3. Politicising the English Working-Class Home, c.1790-1820.- 4. Pulling Back the Covers: Uncovering Beds in the Victorian Working-Class Home.- Part II:   The Emotional and the Exterior Home.- 5. Spaces of Girlhood: Autobiographical Recollections of Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Working-Class Homes.- 6. Songbirds in East London Homes, from Henry Mayhew to Charles Booth.- 7. Chickens, ducks, rabbits, and me dad’s geraniums: The Use and Meanings of Yards, Gardens and Other Outside Spaces of Urban Working-Class Homes, 1890–1930.- Part III: Home beyond Home.- 8. Diligence and Dissipation: The Maid Servant’s Bed Chamber in the Late Eighteenth Century.- 9. Pauper Lunatics at Home in the Asylum, 1845-1906.- 10. Flexible, Portable and Communal Domesticity: Everyday Domestic Practices of Finnish Sailors and Logging Workers, c. 1880s to 1930s.  

About the Author :
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.

Review :
“The Working Class at Home 1790-1940, uncovers hidden aspects of the domestic lives of the working-class in the long nineteenth century. ... The Working Class at Home both combines and builds upon these scopes and sources it reminds us the diversity of working class people … . Bearing in mind the complications of uncovering authentic histories of working-class people but navigated so well in this book ... .” (Tanya Hawkes, The Charles Lamb Bulletin, charleslambsociety.com Issue 176, Winter, 2022)