Fragments of the Modern City: Material Culture and the Rhythms of Everyday Life in Victorian London

Abstract

Lining the shelves of a Museum of London warehouse are thousands of boxes of the broken and fragmented belongings of Victorian Londoners. But how might such evidence – the product of recent archaeological excavations across the city – contribute to our understanding of the social and cultural worlds of Victorian Londoners? Can it take us beyond the familiar tropes of social investigation, or past the enduring literary narratives that have so powerfully influenced the historical imagination? Does it allow us to grasp the ‘actualities’ of life in the modern metropolis that are otherwise obscured by a pervasive bourgeois gaze that saturates other historical sources? Taking inspiration from methodological perspectives developed by North American and Australian historical archaeologists, this article deploys an ‘ethnography of place’ approach to demonstrate and evaluate the contribution of material evidence to the study of the nineteenth-century city. Sifting through a rich assemblage of objects discarded by a...