On arrival at Winchester College in September 1891, Frank Lucas wrote home to his mother almost e... more On arrival at Winchester College in September 1891, Frank Lucas wrote home to his mother almost every day. There was much to relate. There were new, tightly timetabled classes, the pleasures of socialisation in the dormitory, and the challenge and excitement of learning new customs. After just under a month at the school, he wrote: ‘I like the life here very much.’1 The subsequent 200 odd letters that Lucas wrote home during his seven years at school create a full picture of the life there. They reveal a complex and powerful material world. On arrival, a boy was required to master ‘Notions’. This was a system of naming places, objects and practices in a distinct language, known only to the pupils, that celebrated the physical environment of the college. Classrooms, entrances, and passages were given individual names, hidden crannies and hiding places were recorded, everyday objects were given special monikers, lovingly passed on by each generation of schoolboys. Lucas’s school life was not untroubled, however. The system of spatial organisation in public schools in this era was designed to keep boys and masters separate, allowing the boys to develop self-governance under the prefect system. At 1890s Winchester, this could be a licence for abuse. The few negative letters that Lucas wrote refer to this, and his own attempts to do something about it. Nonetheless, the result of seven years immersion in the school was an overwhelming attachment and strong feeling of loyalty. In his last few weeks at Winchester, he wrote to his father that: ‘I dread the divorce from this place more and more.’2
In this episode MoDA's curator, Ana Baeza, talks to historians Trevor Keeble and Jane Hamlett... more In this episode MoDA's curator, Ana Baeza, talks to historians Trevor Keeble and Jane Hamlett about the design of homes in Britain from the nineteenth century onward. They discuss the idea of the home as a private space, and consider how we are currently re-negotiating these spaces in the context of Covid19 through the uses of digital technologies
Diana Donald’s engaging and thoroughly researched new book reveals the importance of the activiti... more Diana Donald’s engaging and thoroughly researched new book reveals the importance of the activities of women in the development of the animal protection movement in Britain. As Donald argues in the...
By the early twentieth century, there were large numbers of new asylums and school buildings acro... more By the early twentieth century, there were large numbers of new asylums and school buildings across Britain. In the capital there were many model lodging houses, and common lodging houses were increasingly policed. These institutional places and spaces have been the main subject of this book; how helpful is it to consider them together? Increasingly, they were all linked to a new understanding of institutional space in British culture. By the end of the century the definition of an institution had grown to encompass many organisations. In 1888, the new Oxford English Dictionary offered the following description: ‘an establishment, organisation, or association instituted for the promotion of some object, especially one of public or general utility, religious, charitable, educational, etc., e.g. a church, school, college, hospital, asylum, reformatory, mission or the like’.1 There was a growing awareness of institutional space as a recognisable entity, in both architecture and the built environment. This was associated with the austere external edifices, long corridors and mass dormitories found in asylums, schools and model lodging houses, but it was also linked to places that were overseen by government forces. Once common lodging houses had been subjected to police inspection, contemporary commentators saw them as entirely institutionalised. The power of the idea of the institution was expressed by inmates of asylums, Rowton Houses and public schools who often employed the prison as a metaphor for their experiences. Indeed, the idea that institutions were the opposite of the domestic was behind a lot of efforts to make these establishments appear more home-like.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, boys at many English public schools lived apart fro... more In the second half of the nineteenth century, boys at many English public schools lived apart from their teachers. This was typical in such institutions at the time, with most schools adopting the ‘house system’. While notionally under the control of housemasters, within these places pupils usually inhabited house rooms and open dormitories, which teachers seldom entered. This was a deliberate policy. Discussions of the open dormitory reveal that its spatial set-up — where boys were kept isolated from their masters but in very close proximity to their peers — was intended to have a distinct emotional effect. It was hoped that the judicious guidance of senior boys would set a good example to their juniors, contributing to their emotional education. Isolation, meanwhile, was supposed to encourage independence, creating self-governing individuals who were able to exercise self-control rather than being disciplined by the institution. The aim was the production of a moral system, in which the discipline of the self, body and emotions played an important part. This meant learning to control emotional expression, but also forming the right kind of attachments to others. The prefect system, in which a chosen group of senior boys were given the right to use physical discipline, and especially fagging, is notorious. However, it is important to remember that this had set cultural limits.
In 1899, a Daily Mail journalist visited the new Rowton House at King’s Cross, a ’six-penny hotel... more In 1899, a Daily Mail journalist visited the new Rowton House at King’s Cross, a ’six-penny hotel’ for working men, set up by the Tory paternalist Lord Rowton and his company.1 He was impressed: It is the palace of a thousand windows, or surely approaching the number. At night time this huge red-brick building gleams with myriad eyes upon its grey environments. Inside it is a triumph of enamelled brick, broad stone stairs, spacious rooms, smartly varnished cubicles, and gigantic lavatories.2
In 1876, Herman C. Merivale was brought as a patient to Ticehurst, an establishment often conside... more In 1876, Herman C. Merivale was brought as a patient to Ticehurst, an establishment often considered the creme de la creme of privately-run asylums. On arrival he remembered that: ‘In my weakened perceptions I at first thought that the mansion was an hotel.’1 This was an understandable mistake, even allowing for the writer’s troubled mental condition. Large private asylums were sometimes built on a grand scale with suites of elaborate day rooms akin to country houses and hotels.2 Ticehurst opened in 1792, and was expanded and embellished in the decades that followed. By 1867, the institution boasted a Chinese gallery, billiard room, museum and conservatory, as well as a handsome chapel.3 In the 1870s an aviary and theatre were introduced, and the 1890s saw the arrival of a French chef and a ballroom.4 Like the superintendents of public asylums, the doctors at Ticehurst hoped that cure could partly be reached by reintroducing patients to domestic regimes. But this was a very different kind of domesticity, built on an idea of social prestige, the polite and formal world of the great country house as well as the new, more anonymous hotels for the wealthy. The well-off would have expected these amenities, but splendour was also meant to distract patients, as well as underlining their status and consoling their relatives. The material world was expected to create a distinctive kind of sociability and behaviour.
Netta Syrett, schoolgirl, and later novelist and playwright, entered the North London Collegiate ... more Netta Syrett, schoolgirl, and later novelist and playwright, entered the North London Collegiate School for Girls in the 1880s, when the vanguard institution had been running for just over three decades. Her experiences there were to haunt her. In her semi-autobiographical novel, The Victorians (1915), Syrett voiced the dislike and fear that she still carried, emotions triggered by interiors that reminded her of school. ‘From that moment which she entered it, Rose [Syrett] never lost her detestation of plain, distempered walls, cold stone staircases, dadoes of pitch pine and of a certain yellow, painful in its crudeness, henceforth always connected in her mind with Swedish desks.’1 Syrett found life at the North London Collegiate painful, as she struggled to cope with the institution’s multifarious spatial and material rules. The school’s distance from her home compounded her problems, as it meant that she dwelt in Myra Lodge, a boarding house run by headmistress Frances Mary Buss, who clashed with the untidy and chaotic Syrett. While most NLCS pupils had a better time, many remarked on the school’s complex rules and regulations. The system at this institution, and at its sister schools founded later in the century, aimed to deal with a new problem. Buss, and the other headmistresses, faced a completely new task, establishing institutions to educate girls to the same standard as boys. For the first time, hundreds of female pupils were to be taught together, and discipline, to be achieved without corporal punishment, was a challenge. This chapter explores the material world that these headmistresses created. While this was an important part of a new disciplinary system, the decoration of these places often had strong links with domesticity, creating a feminine institutional space.
Beryl Lee Booker, a gentleman’s daughter who grew up in London and Leicestershire in the second h... more Beryl Lee Booker, a gentleman’s daughter who grew up in London and Leicestershire in the second half of the nineteenth century, described her childhood as punctuated by ‘tiresome trips downstairs,’ visits to the drawing room from the nursery that upset her ‘after tea plans.’1 Like most middle-class children in the second half of the nineteenth century, Lee Booker’s home was organised according to the nursery system. The children were sequestered in a nursery, usually at the top of the house, under the care of a nurse. The organisation of domestic space and material culture in middle-class homes had a crucial impact on authority practices in the home. Although the arrangement of the home differed from family to family, the relatively rigid use of domestic space in the nineteenth century encouraged the construction of intimacies and distances. Access to parents was often limited to a couple of hours a day at best, and children spent the majority of their time in the nursery. Parental authority was exercised through the control of access to the drawing room, study, bedroom and dressing room. Relationships with favoured children were fostered through intimate time spent together in parental personal space, from which other siblings were excluded. Children often cherished time in parental space, closely identifying with material cultures that contributed to the formation of their own gendered identities.
On arrival at Winchester College in September 1891, Frank Lucas wrote home to his mother almost e... more On arrival at Winchester College in September 1891, Frank Lucas wrote home to his mother almost every day. There was much to relate. There were new, tightly timetabled classes, the pleasures of socialisation in the dormitory, and the challenge and excitement of learning new customs. After just under a month at the school, he wrote: ‘I like the life here very much.’1 The subsequent 200 odd letters that Lucas wrote home during his seven years at school create a full picture of the life there. They reveal a complex and powerful material world. On arrival, a boy was required to master ‘Notions’. This was a system of naming places, objects and practices in a distinct language, known only to the pupils, that celebrated the physical environment of the college. Classrooms, entrances, and passages were given individual names, hidden crannies and hiding places were recorded, everyday objects were given special monikers, lovingly passed on by each generation of schoolboys. Lucas’s school life was not untroubled, however. The system of spatial organisation in public schools in this era was designed to keep boys and masters separate, allowing the boys to develop self-governance under the prefect system. At 1890s Winchester, this could be a licence for abuse. The few negative letters that Lucas wrote refer to this, and his own attempts to do something about it. Nonetheless, the result of seven years immersion in the school was an overwhelming attachment and strong feeling of loyalty. In his last few weeks at Winchester, he wrote to his father that: ‘I dread the divorce from this place more and more.’2
In this episode MoDA's curator, Ana Baeza, talks to historians Trevor Keeble and Jane Hamlett... more In this episode MoDA's curator, Ana Baeza, talks to historians Trevor Keeble and Jane Hamlett about the design of homes in Britain from the nineteenth century onward. They discuss the idea of the home as a private space, and consider how we are currently re-negotiating these spaces in the context of Covid19 through the uses of digital technologies
Diana Donald’s engaging and thoroughly researched new book reveals the importance of the activiti... more Diana Donald’s engaging and thoroughly researched new book reveals the importance of the activities of women in the development of the animal protection movement in Britain. As Donald argues in the...
By the early twentieth century, there were large numbers of new asylums and school buildings acro... more By the early twentieth century, there were large numbers of new asylums and school buildings across Britain. In the capital there were many model lodging houses, and common lodging houses were increasingly policed. These institutional places and spaces have been the main subject of this book; how helpful is it to consider them together? Increasingly, they were all linked to a new understanding of institutional space in British culture. By the end of the century the definition of an institution had grown to encompass many organisations. In 1888, the new Oxford English Dictionary offered the following description: ‘an establishment, organisation, or association instituted for the promotion of some object, especially one of public or general utility, religious, charitable, educational, etc., e.g. a church, school, college, hospital, asylum, reformatory, mission or the like’.1 There was a growing awareness of institutional space as a recognisable entity, in both architecture and the built environment. This was associated with the austere external edifices, long corridors and mass dormitories found in asylums, schools and model lodging houses, but it was also linked to places that were overseen by government forces. Once common lodging houses had been subjected to police inspection, contemporary commentators saw them as entirely institutionalised. The power of the idea of the institution was expressed by inmates of asylums, Rowton Houses and public schools who often employed the prison as a metaphor for their experiences. Indeed, the idea that institutions were the opposite of the domestic was behind a lot of efforts to make these establishments appear more home-like.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, boys at many English public schools lived apart fro... more In the second half of the nineteenth century, boys at many English public schools lived apart from their teachers. This was typical in such institutions at the time, with most schools adopting the ‘house system’. While notionally under the control of housemasters, within these places pupils usually inhabited house rooms and open dormitories, which teachers seldom entered. This was a deliberate policy. Discussions of the open dormitory reveal that its spatial set-up — where boys were kept isolated from their masters but in very close proximity to their peers — was intended to have a distinct emotional effect. It was hoped that the judicious guidance of senior boys would set a good example to their juniors, contributing to their emotional education. Isolation, meanwhile, was supposed to encourage independence, creating self-governing individuals who were able to exercise self-control rather than being disciplined by the institution. The aim was the production of a moral system, in which the discipline of the self, body and emotions played an important part. This meant learning to control emotional expression, but also forming the right kind of attachments to others. The prefect system, in which a chosen group of senior boys were given the right to use physical discipline, and especially fagging, is notorious. However, it is important to remember that this had set cultural limits.
In 1899, a Daily Mail journalist visited the new Rowton House at King’s Cross, a ’six-penny hotel... more In 1899, a Daily Mail journalist visited the new Rowton House at King’s Cross, a ’six-penny hotel’ for working men, set up by the Tory paternalist Lord Rowton and his company.1 He was impressed: It is the palace of a thousand windows, or surely approaching the number. At night time this huge red-brick building gleams with myriad eyes upon its grey environments. Inside it is a triumph of enamelled brick, broad stone stairs, spacious rooms, smartly varnished cubicles, and gigantic lavatories.2
In 1876, Herman C. Merivale was brought as a patient to Ticehurst, an establishment often conside... more In 1876, Herman C. Merivale was brought as a patient to Ticehurst, an establishment often considered the creme de la creme of privately-run asylums. On arrival he remembered that: ‘In my weakened perceptions I at first thought that the mansion was an hotel.’1 This was an understandable mistake, even allowing for the writer’s troubled mental condition. Large private asylums were sometimes built on a grand scale with suites of elaborate day rooms akin to country houses and hotels.2 Ticehurst opened in 1792, and was expanded and embellished in the decades that followed. By 1867, the institution boasted a Chinese gallery, billiard room, museum and conservatory, as well as a handsome chapel.3 In the 1870s an aviary and theatre were introduced, and the 1890s saw the arrival of a French chef and a ballroom.4 Like the superintendents of public asylums, the doctors at Ticehurst hoped that cure could partly be reached by reintroducing patients to domestic regimes. But this was a very different kind of domesticity, built on an idea of social prestige, the polite and formal world of the great country house as well as the new, more anonymous hotels for the wealthy. The well-off would have expected these amenities, but splendour was also meant to distract patients, as well as underlining their status and consoling their relatives. The material world was expected to create a distinctive kind of sociability and behaviour.
Netta Syrett, schoolgirl, and later novelist and playwright, entered the North London Collegiate ... more Netta Syrett, schoolgirl, and later novelist and playwright, entered the North London Collegiate School for Girls in the 1880s, when the vanguard institution had been running for just over three decades. Her experiences there were to haunt her. In her semi-autobiographical novel, The Victorians (1915), Syrett voiced the dislike and fear that she still carried, emotions triggered by interiors that reminded her of school. ‘From that moment which she entered it, Rose [Syrett] never lost her detestation of plain, distempered walls, cold stone staircases, dadoes of pitch pine and of a certain yellow, painful in its crudeness, henceforth always connected in her mind with Swedish desks.’1 Syrett found life at the North London Collegiate painful, as she struggled to cope with the institution’s multifarious spatial and material rules. The school’s distance from her home compounded her problems, as it meant that she dwelt in Myra Lodge, a boarding house run by headmistress Frances Mary Buss, who clashed with the untidy and chaotic Syrett. While most NLCS pupils had a better time, many remarked on the school’s complex rules and regulations. The system at this institution, and at its sister schools founded later in the century, aimed to deal with a new problem. Buss, and the other headmistresses, faced a completely new task, establishing institutions to educate girls to the same standard as boys. For the first time, hundreds of female pupils were to be taught together, and discipline, to be achieved without corporal punishment, was a challenge. This chapter explores the material world that these headmistresses created. While this was an important part of a new disciplinary system, the decoration of these places often had strong links with domesticity, creating a feminine institutional space.
Beryl Lee Booker, a gentleman’s daughter who grew up in London and Leicestershire in the second h... more Beryl Lee Booker, a gentleman’s daughter who grew up in London and Leicestershire in the second half of the nineteenth century, described her childhood as punctuated by ‘tiresome trips downstairs,’ visits to the drawing room from the nursery that upset her ‘after tea plans.’1 Like most middle-class children in the second half of the nineteenth century, Lee Booker’s home was organised according to the nursery system. The children were sequestered in a nursery, usually at the top of the house, under the care of a nurse. The organisation of domestic space and material culture in middle-class homes had a crucial impact on authority practices in the home. Although the arrangement of the home differed from family to family, the relatively rigid use of domestic space in the nineteenth century encouraged the construction of intimacies and distances. Access to parents was often limited to a couple of hours a day at best, and children spent the majority of their time in the nursery. Parental authority was exercised through the control of access to the drawing room, study, bedroom and dressing room. Relationships with favoured children were fostered through intimate time spent together in parental personal space, from which other siblings were excluded. Children often cherished time in parental space, closely identifying with material cultures that contributed to the formation of their own gendered identities.
Institutions were intended to mould their inhabitants, and were organized in line with profession... more Institutions were intended to mould their inhabitants, and were organized in line with professional and economic constraints, public opinion, or the need to appeal to potential inmates. The authorities often modelled their arrangements on domestic ideals, and the imagined home was frequently the yardstick against which occupants measured their experiences of institutional life. The essays in this collection explore both organizational intentions and inhabitants' experiences in a diverse range of British residential institutions during a period when such provision was dramatically increasing. The book addresses inmates, environments and interactions, with essays focusing on questions of authority, resistance, agency, domesticity and the material world.
Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History: National, Colonial and Global Perspectives demon... more Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History: National, Colonial and Global Perspectives demonstrates how to do a childhood history of emotions and suggests why combining these fields affords historians from both approaches a valuable and more complete picture. It conceptualises the tensions inherent to emotional formation, taking place on the ‘emotional frontier’, where the agency of children was subjected to competing emotional prescriptions, practices and performances. The chapters represent the best new scholarship on the intersection of childhood and emotions as they relate to sexuality, war and conflict, politics and policy, space and material culture, youth organizations and institutions, and relationships with families, authority figures and peer groups, from diverse contexts and periods in Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. A global picture emerges, showing that children, childhood, and the emotions associated with them are not universal; they are dependent on time, place, and dynamics of power.
At Home in the Institution takes a new look at institutions in Victorian England, by exploring th... more At Home in the Institution takes a new look at institutions in Victorian England, by exploring their material life. The book focuses on asylums, lodging houses and schools - examining decoration and the use of space as well as the things that inmates were allowed. Although all three had very diverse aims, their authorities were often influenced by the relationships, rituals and material culture of contemporary domesticity, demonstrating the reach and importance of these ideas in society.. Yet an assessment of the everyday life of these places often shows the limits of these ideals in practice, the disruptions to domestic routines and the notions of class and gender that they were supposed to inculcate. While the material world was used to control, it also afforded agency to patients, lodgers and pupils - from the schoolboy carving initials on a desk to the pauper lunatics who bred songbirds.
Institutions were intended to mould their inhabitants, and were organized in line with professi... more Institutions were intended to mould their inhabitants, and were organized in line with professional and economic constraints, public opinion, or the need to appeal to potential inmates. The authorities often modelled their arrangements on domestic ideals, and the imagined home was frequently the yardstick against which occupants measured their experiences of institutional life. The essays in this collection explore both organizational intentions and inhabitants' experiences in a diverse range of British residential institutions during a period when such provision was dramatically increasing. The book addresses inmates, environments and interactions, with essays focusing on questions of authority, resistance, agency, domesticity and the material world.
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Material relations tells the story of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century middle-class famili... more Material relations tells the story of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century middle-class families by exploring the domestic spaces they inhabited and the material goods they prized. By opening the doors of the house, the book sheds new light on aspects of family life including love, marriage, sex, childhood and death.
Historians have argued that as the nineteenth century waned, domestic spaces became increasingly private. Material relations challenges this, contending that domestic space created a complex series of family intimacies.
Drawing upon novels, advice manuals and magazines, alongside sources for everyday use such as diaries, autobiographies, sale catalogues and inventories, wills and photographs, this fascinating book will be of particular interest to scholars and students of modern history, English literature, cultural studies, social geography, history of art and history of design.
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Historians have argued that as the nineteenth century waned, domestic spaces became increasingly private. Material relations challenges this, contending that domestic space created a complex series of family intimacies.
Drawing upon novels, advice manuals and magazines, alongside sources for everyday use such as diaries, autobiographies, sale catalogues and inventories, wills and photographs, this fascinating book will be of particular interest to scholars and students of modern history, English literature, cultural studies, social geography, history of art and history of design.