Be It Ever So Humble: Poverty, Fiction, and the Invention of the Middle-Class Home

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Patrick Spedding has outlined the shortcomings of full-text searches in the ECCO database in a recent Eighteenth-Century Studies article. 2. Private dwelling and nation have long shared more than one title: domestic has also had the capacity to signify both since at least the mid-sixteenth century (OED 4: 944). 3. Alison Blunt cites the 1935 Government of India Act, which states: “An Anglo-Indian is a person whose father or any of whose other male progenitors in the male line is or was of European descent but who is a native of India. A European is a person whose father or any of whose other male progenitors in the male line is or was of European descent and who is not a native of India” (3). “Although written out of this definition,” Blunt goes on, “the maternal line of descent for Anglo-Indians usually included an Indian woman, often as far back as the eighteenth century” (3). 4. “It is in the heyday of British imperialism that England gets defined as ‘Home’ in opposition to ‘The Empire’ which belongs to the English but is not England” (George 4). 5. “The public realm, when conceived as the homeland, is explicitly modeled on an idealized version of the private realm of the household or family” (Kumar 208). 6. The song “Home! Sweet Home!” was composed in 1823 by Sir Henry Bishop (music) and the expatriate American John Howard Payne (lyrics) for the opera Clari, Maid of Milan. Its most famous couplet is, “Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,/Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.” 7. One of Charles Lamb’s “Popular Fallacies,” originally printed in the New Monthly Magazine in the mid-1820s, is titled “That Home Is Home Though It Is Never So Homely.” 8. A medley of dramatic entertainments thematizing home begins to accumulate on the English stage from the mid-1780s on. They include Cobb, Strangers at Home (1786); Dibdin, Harvest Home (1787); Holman, Abroad and at Home (1796); and Dallas, Not at Home (1809). 9. The poem was first published in 1801 as Bread; or, The Poor, and still bears that title at the beginning of the text itself; only the frontispiece of the 1803 edition names it as Cottage Pictures. 10. Romantic-era English nationalism “aimed to homogenize the private and public meanings carried in the words ‘home’ and ‘domestic’ . . . and to make home-life underwrite the authority of administrative institutions like the Home Office, as well as notions of a homecountry ” (Lynch 45). MacKenzie, rev pages.indd 227 MacKenzie, rev pages.indd 227 12/5/12 3:58 PM 12/5/12 3:58 PM 228 „ Notes to Pages 6–10 11. Gaston Bachelard shows that, while the linguistic specificity of home may be stubborn, its universalizing metaphysic has passed beyond the borders of English-speaking nations: the place of dwelling [maison], he declares, “is a privileged entity for a phenomenological study of the intimate values of inside space, provided, of course, that we take it in both its unity and its complexity and endeavor to integrate all the special values in one fundamental value” (3). 12. Mary Ellen Hombs, director of the Legal Services Homelessness Task Force, writes of the 1987 Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act: “The bill never was and could never be enough. It contained primarily emergency assistance, plus a little help for preventive programmes and transitional measures . . . The preventive measures were in fact mere deterrents; true preventive measures would ensure that housing was decent and permanently affordable, and that wages and benefits were sufficient to keep a household from permanently living at risk of homelessness. The bill did not even contain a right to emergency shelter, much less a guarantee of housing, yet it was ‘full funding’ of the McKinney Act which presidential candidate George Bush advocated in the 1988 campaign” (116–17). 13. The constitutive supplement is a paradoxical logic that Jacques Derrida has famously scrutinized and explicated: “The supplement supplements. It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of . . . If it represents and makes an image, it is by the anterior default of a presence. Compensatory and vicarious, the supplement is an adjunct, a subaltern instance which takes-(the)-place” (145). 14. The eighteenth-century poor were an undifferentiated mass in the cultural and juridical imaginary, including both wage laborers and the unemployed, as well as orphans, the elderly, and the...