Material Relations: Domestic Interiors and Middle-Class Families in England, 1850–1910 by Jane Hamlett (review)

Extensively and meticulously researched, Jane Hamlett’s Material Relations informs and sometimes surprises. Forgoing large claims and theoretical speculation, it offers a wealth of local detail organized into coherent and useful categories of analysis. Its goal is to demonstrate the ways in which interior spaces were used and experienced by Victorian subjects, and it focuses attention on domestic interiors as sites of human interaction through which gender and class identities were forged.

Hamlett studies three sets of relationships—those of husbands and wives, masters and servants, and parents and children—as they were shaped by the materiality of domestic interiors. She also discusses versions of domesticity constructed in rooms at secondary schools, in universities, and in lodging houses, and, in a final chapter, considers the dissolution of the household and the dispersal of its objects. An epilogue takes up the shifts in domestic life that took place across a wide range of social classes after the First World War. Throughout, the analysis is grounded in and enlivened by specific examples taken from multiple sources, including memoirs, diaries, letters, notebooks, inventories, sales catalogues, wills and informal bequest lists, and lists of wedding presents, as well as representations of interiors in Victorian fiction and photography. Hamlett also makes excellent use of the ample literature of advice about decoration and domestic management, without mistaking it for evidence of what life in a Victorian household was actually like.

I find two main points at which Hamlett intervenes in what she calls “the rich interdisciplinary research culture focused on the domestic interior” (xiv). Having argued that the Victorian home was not a purely private space set apart from the public sphere, she goes on to make the more original point that the organization of domestic space into separate, dedicated rooms did not necessarily contribute to individual privacy, nor was it designed to do so; instead, it worked to negotiate relationships, to bring together as often as to disperse. Hamlett also contests the idea, suggested by Deborah Cohen in Household Gods (2006), that until later in the century men made most of the decisions about purchasing items for the home, finding instead that husbands and wives were both likely to participate in making consumer choices having to do with furniture and decoration. Around the question of men at home, Hamlett also takes issue with John Tosh in A Man’s Place (1999), believing that he overestimated the degree to which the home was a purely feminized environment from which men were eager to flee.

The book’s strength, however, is not in the positions it takes or the arguments it develops, but in the way Hamlett’s sources illuminate aspects of domestic life and material culture. Every chapter, indeed every section, taught me something I didn’t know. It was interesting, for example, to learn that engaged couples often wrote about domestic interiors as a way of imagining and evoking intimacy. I also enjoyed Hamlett’s detailed readings of the ways spatial and temporal distinctions functioned in the home, in particular her investigation of the masculine dressing room (with a single bed) set apart from the feminine bedroom. Among many interesting readings of the deployment of material objects, I might note the way Hamlett establishes through photographic evidence that in the university “male space could include as many frills, knick-knacks and ornaments as rooms belonging to women” (162).

Hamlett’s extensive list of primary sources, published and unpublished, is exemplary. It is unfortunate, then, that there is a lack of nuance and variety in the presentation of the material gleaned from these sources. While the evidence adduced is interesting and relevant, it is paraded past the reader in a predictable fashion. Each chapter follows the same pattern: an anecdote in the first paragraph is followed by two or three paragraphs of historical context, followed in turn by material organized under three subheadings...