Globalising Housework

Domestic Labour in Middle-class London Homes,1850-1914

Laura Humphreys

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367626679
• eBook ISBN: 9781000374858
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

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.

1 Introduction

Figure 1.1 Caricature of Benjamin Disraeli as a laundress called ‘Mrs Dizzy’, cleansing the British flag of the ‘dirt’ of Zulu warriors

Source: Fun Magazine, 26 February 1879. Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL.

This caricature of Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli appeared in Fun, a satirical magazine, in the aftermath of the decisive Zulu victory over the British at the Battle of Isandlwana in January of 1879 (Knight, 2002), the first battle of the Zulu war. It shows Disraeli as a working-class laundress, scrubbing the British flag clean of Zulu warriors in a laundry trough, while more warriors continue to fall as he cleans. The image shows a close association of race/dirt and imperialism/cleansing; Zulu warriors were explicitly linked to dirt and represented as a stain on the British flag. They were ‘worriting’ [teasing] Mrs Dizzy, falling like the smog and persistent soot that plagued London’s real homes and laundries. By likening Disraeli’s supposed task – rubbing the Zulu warriors (and the shame of the unexpected defeat at Isandlwana) off the Union Jack – to laundry, this cartoon plays upon an established trope of domestic labour, that dark skin equated to dirt, and imperialism equated to cleaning or cleansing (McClintock, 1995).

At first, laundry work seems a strange choice for this kind of political cartoon. However, it speaks to an important cultural trope in late nineteenth-century discourse: that domestic labour and domesticity, and their contribution to the idea and ideals of the ‘English home’, were widely regarded as a fundamental cornerstone of English national identity. This cartoon is not only a metaphor for cleansing Zululand through imperial force, but also a reference to English domesticity as a less violent, but no less powerful, instrument of imperial rule. As scholars such as George (1993) and Blunt (1999) have argued, making and maintaining English homes in the British Empire was an important and highly visible function of imperial families and their role in imperial governance. The English home, regardless of its location, has always been a political, global space.

Much has been written about the Victorian and Edwardian home in the world, but much less has been written about the world in those homes. Tackling the subject of empire in the home, Catherine Hall and Sonia Rose make the point that ‘empire mattered to British Metropolitan life and history in both very ordinary and supremely significant ways: it was simply part of life’ in their book At Home with the Empire (Hall and Rose, 2006: 30). This is equally applicable beyond imperial borders; home had become host to the whole world in a subtle yet pervasive manner. Imperial and international trade had had a direct impact on the domesticity of the capital through the experiences of its merchants and customers; foreign commodities such as tea, curry, textiles, and jewels became so commonplace as to be an ‘incorporated’ part of the metropolitan household (Zlotnick, 1996: 52; see also McMahon, 2016).

Following the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, trade in food increased significantly. International, and particularly imperial, goods were ever more available in London. Between 1860 and 1880, there was an explosion of ‘cheap foreign foods’ being imported into Britain, and for the first time, food and manufactured goods (including domestic items) overtook raw materials, including textiles, metals, and fuel, as Britain’s principal imports (Crouzet, 2006: 352). In perhaps the most significant example, by 1900, over 241 million pounds of tea were imported into Britain from India, Ceylon, and China, and with it Chinese porcelain modified with flourishes and handles for the British market (Fromer, 2008) – we may now consider a cup of tea in an elaborate porcelain cup and saucer to be quintessentially English, but in fact it was (and is) a perfect exemplar of how the English home is a globalised entity.

One step on from large-scale trade, middle-class consumers had easy access in London to these goods. The rise of the department store in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries allowed not only for foreign goods to be purchased with relative ease, but also ‘provided shoppers with the exoticism of foreign travel without leaving the comforts of the West End’ (Cohen, 2006: 56). Advertising, itself in its infancy, began to extol the virtues of new and exciting international goods: ‘merchants were quick to trumpet foreign provenance, seeing it as an enticement to purchase’ (Hoganson, 2002: 64). Even foreign domestic servants¹ were seen as ‘exotic’ and a marker of status in the wealthiest homes (Horn, 1974: 30). The flow of foreign goods and – perhaps more importantly – influences into Victorian and Edwardian homes was significant, and growing with every decade.

In spite of all this, the nature and extent of people’s everyday engagement with the wider world (and empire in particular) in their domestic consumerism has been challenged (Hoganson, 2002; Porter, 2004). It did not require a deliberate action to take part in the international aspects of London life; it was at once as crucial and as unthought of as any quotidian domestic task. At Home with the Empire suggests people were so ‘at home’ that there was a perceptible metropolitan apathy towards empire:

The empire’s influence on the metropole was undoubtedly uneven. There were times when it was simply there, not a subject of popular critical consciousness. At other times it was highly visible, and there was widespread awareness of matters imperial on the part of the public as well as those who were charged with governing it. The majority of Britons most of the time were probably neither ‘gung-ho’ nor avid anti-imperialists, yet their everyday lives were infused with an imperial presence.

(Hall and Rose, 2006: 2)

This argument – that although everyday life was in constant contact with empire it wasn’t necessarily aware of or engaged with imperialism – echoes that of Bernard Porter’s The Absent-minded Imperialists (2004). While imperialism came to define Victorian Britain (and Britons) in the late nineteenth century for contemporary visitors and modern historians alike, Porter claims that for Britons themselves it was a far less prominent feature in their lives. With particular reference to the working classes, Porter argues that ‘there is no direct evidence that this great majority of Britons supported the empire, took an interest in it, or were even aware of it for most of the century’ (Porter, 2004: 115). While he also acknowledges that the relative wealth, education, and social opportunities of the middle classes allowed for a greater engagement with empire, it did not guarantee it.

It is from this framework of ‘absent-minded imperialism’ that this work takes its inspiration, but seeks to both expand and narrow the scope of enquiry. First, it seeks to expand by looking not only at the British Empire but also at the influence of the wider world more broadly: did people intend, know, or care about the international aspects of their homes? Scholars have perhaps been too keen to emphasise the influence of the British Empire in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when, in actuality, other prominent international influences were established by this point in time. Second, this book aims to narrow the scope of enquiry from looking at the whole spectrum of everyday life to look specifically at domestic labour in the metropolitan middle-class home: how did the making and maintaining of everyday life allow the rest of the world over the threshold? The homes of the Victorian and Edwardian middle classes fall between the great houses of the aristocracy and the so-called ‘slums’ of the inner cities, both of which have received more academic attention. However, their history is the history of a significant segment of society – quite possibly the largest by population. London was truly a global city, and nowhere was this more in evidence than in middle-class metropolitan homes.

It is important not to overlook the domestic aspect of everyday life in middle-class history. Whereas the histories of architecture, design, and literature in these homes have been poured over, housework has been largely unexplored as a mode of expression and engagement. We constantly make small, seemingly inconsequential decisions about how we make and maintain ‘home’, no matter what ‘home’ may be. We make decisions about what to eat, what to clean, what to throw away, what to buy, all in the blink of an eye, without much conscious consideration, because it is simply necessary. It is the drudgery of domesticity that we need to perform to conform to societal norms.

Although domesticity is one of the most pervasive aspects of life, it leaves very little trace in the historical record; the most common, most everyday practices of Victorian middle-class homes remain private, behind a metaphorical green baize door. We literally do not want to air our dirty laundry in public. It is an especially important window into the middle-class home, compared to the homes of the gentry and the aristocracy, because in smaller, often-rented houses, domestic labour leaves very little physical trace. It is not surprising that the large country homes of the rich tend to dominate the popular imagination when talking about domestic service, because domestic work has left a significant physical imprint there in the form of kitchens, sculleries, laundries, pantries, and icehouses. But in middle-class homes, such significant space dedicated to single tasks was not possible.

That the study of the Victorian and Edwardian home, and indeed, home in its broadest sense, has become a significant feature across the humanities and social sciences, is a product of the work of several decades of feminist scholarship. The work of authors such as John Tosh (1999) and Lucy Delap (2011) has argued that men may have been overlooked in domestic histories due to a dearth of archival evidence. However, the source material, both published and unpublished, is overwhelming; the historical geographies of home are largely geographies of women. While this book does not seek to focus on gender, by addressing the topic of domestic labour in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it produces an account of women and their work by default. Such historiographical traditions as separate spheres, ‘angels in the house’, and the apotheosis of motherhood during this period have been shown to be at best, over-simplified understandings of women and home by scholars such as Davidoff and Hall (2002) and Vickery (1993), and it is important not to forget that there has never been a monolithic, universal experience of ‘women’s work’ at any period in time. However, the fact remains that the work of house and home in the Victorian and Edwardian metropolis was largely the domain of female labourers and housekeepers – when men enter the historical discourse of domesticity, it is usually a significant intervention which reproduces the broader gender politics of the time.

What the feminist school of thought in both history and geography has shown most clearly, however, is that women’s labour in the home had influence far beyond their thresholds (or those of their employers). Scholars such as Patricia Branca (1975) and Martha Vicinus (1977) began to establish the movement towards recognising the agency and autonomy of middle-class women in Victorian homes and promoted a more nuanced understanding of women’s role in history. In geography too, the study of the domestic has taken an outward-looking turn. For example, Dolores Hayden’s works on feminist domestic architectures (1982) claimed the house as an important physical player in the development of women’s roles, rather than simply as a backdrop to their daily life. Hayden placed domestic work and technology at the geographical heart of female lives near the turn of the twentieth century, and demonstrated the broader significance to society of ever-changing models and ideals of domesticity. Geographers such as Alison Blunt have done much to establish the socio-political importance of the domestic sphere beyond house and home in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as a tool of both national and imperial government (Blunt, 1999; Blunt and Dowling, 2006). The domestic minutiae of everyday life reverberate around the world – and with it, then, the voices of the women responsible.

Domestic labour is the organising theme of this work, which aims to explore the interplay between home, work, and world. It is a complex and wide-ranging topic that was central to the experience of domesticity in London homes, and is an essential component of the historical metropolis. The chapters of this work take their themes from Leonore Davidoff’s 1974 article, ‘Mastered for Life: Servant and Wife in Victorian England’. Davidoff’s article examines the complexities of paid domestic work and the unpaid work of the wife/mother, and explores several strands of symbolic ritual evident in Victorian domestic labour. Rituals of deference (for example, domestic servants mediating contact between callers and their employers through calling cards), rituals of society and etiquette (such as sport and club membership, marking out old money from new), and the ‘rituals of order’.

The rituals of order as defined by Davidoff are cooking, cleaning and childcare. However, just as Davidoff moved on from a perception of these tasks as ‘ritualistic’ in her later works, so too does this study, but the assertion that these three tasks provide the bedrock of Victorian domestic labour, both in discourse and in practice, holds true. Chapter 2 of this book looks at the widely discussed failings and problems of English domesticity – a preoccupation of the nineteenth-century periodical press – and aims to provide context for the state of domestic discourse and practice during this period. It introduces key themes and problems that are prominent in the archival record, pointing to the discomfort, anxiety, and politics inherent in homemaking. The following three chapters take one task each, and explore in depth how the failings of English domesticity in cooking, cleaning, and childcare (whether real or perceived) were addressed by influences from the wider world in middle-class metropolitan households.

These tasks, ‘which in wealthy households were relegated to lower servants’, were, Davidoff argues, a binding point of contact between domestic servant and employer, bringing the middle classes and their servants far closer together than other class combinations (Davidoff, 1974: 412). While the middle classes sought to emulate the rituals of deference and society of the upper classes, it was the rituals of order that ensured ‘protection … from defiling contact with the sordid or disordered parts of life’ (Davidoff, 1974: 412). In essence, it was cooking, cleaning, and childcare that took on the role of perpetuating and protecting middle-class status, making domest...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. A nation uncomfortable at home
• 3. Changing tastes: Foreign food and cookery
• 4. Soap and glory: Cleaning London homes
• 5. Infant empires: Childcare and the wider world
• 6. Conclusion: Global homes in London houses
• Bibliography
• Index