"True home spirit": Paper Homes from the Victoria Press

We wish we could introduce our readers for a few moments into the "Happy Home" we have been attempting to describe. It is known by that name among many of the pupils and their friends. Not a few orphans and motherless girls have found it happy indeed, after the treatment they have met with in their early years.¹

This passage, from an 1865 pamphlet published by Emily Faithfull, describes an institution, not a private household. "Home," with its capitalized first letter, is a manufactured place, something more secure and more valuable than the flawed homes its residents have left behind. It represents an idealized vision of domesticity that is accessible to working-class women through middle-class charity. This vision echoes through the diverse library of print materials produced at the Victoria Press, where women worked as compositors. At the press, Emily Faithfull explicitly attempted to build a material environment that mimicked the features of a home. She also published maternalistic pamphlets focused on charitable efforts to construct institutional homes for female industrial and domestic workers.² These pamphlets offered detailed material instructions for replicating these proprietary homes, including the provision of food and furnishings. In doing so, they suggested that the middle-class home was a portable ideal that could be cheaply reproduced and easily circulated by middle-class reformers. By reconstructing the paper homes contained in Victoria Press pamphlets, I will show how middle-class women employed the material language of domesticity within institutional homes in an attempt to disseminate a proprietary vision of domestic life.

At the Victoria Press, women printed anthologies, tracts, and feminist periodicals, including the English Woman's Journal (1858–64). Its founders, sometimes called "Langhamites" after their headquarters at 19 Langham Place, explicitly attempted to build a workspace that resembled a middle-class home. English Woman's Journal articles consistently characterize both the printing house and its offices as well-ordered domestic spaces for women. A notice about the relocation of the English Woman's Journal offices and "Ladies' Reading Room" describes "convenient premises . . . [with] a luncheon room, and a room for the reception of parcels for the accommodation of subscribers."³ An early report on the Victoria Press in the English Woman's Journal describes the premises in detail, starting with the front door: "Tap goes the twisted knocker, and in a second we are in the lady-manager's office, the front parlor of the good old house, which, neatly carpeted, and suitably furnished with desk, writing table, etc., wears at once an air of business and refinement bespeaking the presence of a cultivated woman."⁴ Immediately, our entry into the building indicates that it is both a domestic and class-defined space. The "good old house" is good not only because it is well built but also because it exists in a respectable old-money neighborhood. Its front parlor is the best room in this best house. To the reader, represented in the scene by a new visitor to the press, furnishings encode layers of meaning about class, gender, and professional status. The features of the domestic interior indicate both respectability (neatness) and professional functionality (suitability). Just as the house can be both "neatly" and "suitably" furnished, it can indicate "business" and "refinement" at the same time—with the word "refinement" indicating a particular kind of aspirational, "cultivated" woman.

Faithfull's attempt at creating a space of comfort for women at the press extended beyond the moneyed activists and subscribers who ran and patronized the English Woman's Journal. Victoria Press founders, unlike most publishers of the period, enacted protections for the presswomen who did the manual work of printing. Compositors worked an eight-hour day.⁵ During the lunch hour, "those who live near, go home to dinner. . . . Others have the use of a room in the house, some bringing their own dinners ready cooked, and some preparing it on the spot."⁶ If they worked overtime, they received extra pay and "tea at half past five, so as to break the time."⁷ Aside from these basic conveniences, Faithfull consciously sought to...