Hairwork in Victorian Literature and Culture

Matter, Form, and Craft

Heather Hind

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN:
  9783031787782
• eBook ISBN:
  9783031787799
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: History of Art
• Index: Literature

This book presents an original and engaging study of the cultural history and literary significance of hairwork – the crafting of decorative objects, such as jewellery, from human hair – in Victorian Britain. Hairwork became increasingly fashionable and commercialised in the mid-nineteenth century, before swiftly declining in popularity. Yet, in the Victorian imagination, hairwork held a peculiar capacity to emerge from and capture moments of tension: it was made to mark relationships as they were redefined or consolidated; to process transitions and articulate hope for the future; and to express identities as they were questioned and explored. This book reconstructs and interprets the role of hairwork in revealing and negotiating such desires and anxieties by studying its historical trajectory, surviving artefacts, and practices alongside its literary representations in works by Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Wilkie Collins, and Margaret Oliphant. It shows how the combination of hairwork’s matter, form, and craft – the material of hair, the designs and uses of hairwork, and the processes of its making – expose the complexities and tensions within identity, affective relationships, and social relations and thus contributed to its unique place in Victorian culture.

Table of contents

• Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture
• Hairwork in Victorian Literature and Culture
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• List of Figures
• About the Author
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Weaving Desire: The Rise of Victorian Hairwork
• 3. Strands of Anxiety: Victorian Hairwork in Decline
• 4. Matter: Hairwork, Touch, and Connection in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights
• 5. Form: Hairwork, Identity, and Relationships in Wilkie Collins’s Hide and Seek
• 6. Craft: Hairwork, Time, and Affect in Margaret Oliphant’s Phoebe, Junior and Kirsteen
• 7. Conclusion
• Index