Abstract
The development of what Mayne and Lawrence (Urban History 26: 325–48, 1999) termed “ethnographic” approaches to studying nineteenth-century households and urban communities has gathered momentum in recent years. As such research agendas have taken hold and been applied to new contexts, so critiques, methodological developments, and new intellectual and theoretical currents, have provided opportunities to enhance and develop approaches. This article contributes to this on-going process. Drawing upon household archaeological research on Limehouse, a poor neighborhood in Victorian London, and inspired by the theoretical insights provided by the “new mobilities paradigm,” it aims to place “mobility” as a central and enabling intellectual framework for understanding the relationships between people, place, and poverty. Poor communities in nineteenth-century cities were undeniably mobile and transient. Historians and archaeologists have often regarded this mobility as an obstacle to studying everyday life in such contexts. However, examining temporal routines and geographical movements across a variety of time frames and geographical scales, this article argues that mobility is actually key to understanding urban life and an important mechanism for interpreting the fragmented material and documentary traces left by poor households in the nineteenth-century metropolis.
Highlights
Almost two decades ago historian Alan Mayne and archaeologist Susan Lawrence published an essay in the journal Urban History announcing a Bnew urban research agenda^ (Mayne and Lawrence 1999)
Like similar studies focused on nineteenth-century households and communities in North American cities, this kind of historical archaeology has been most fruitfully applied to researching poorer urban neighborhoods where there has been an effort to reach beyond demonizing, bourgeois-driven representations of such localities to provide an account Bthat comes closer to an insider’s view,^ recovering the complex diversity of peoples’ struggles and experiences that were part of their day-to-day existence (Yamin 2001a p. 2; see, more broadly, the essays in: Mayne and Murray 2001b; Yamin 2001b, 2002; Gadsby 2011; Spencer-Wood and Matthews 2011)
No studies of nineteenth-century cities feature in these collections, but it would wrong to claim that historical archaeologists working in such settings have completely ignored questions of movement and mobility, as recent attempts to bring a transnational dimension to household archaeology illustrate
Summary
Almost two decades ago historian Alan Mayne and archaeologist Susan Lawrence published an essay in the journal Urban History announcing a Bnew urban research agenda^ (Mayne and Lawrence 1999). It does so by focusing on an issue that raises both conceptual and methodological challenges for historical archaeologists of nineteenth-century cities: the mobility and restlessness of urban life It seeks to address the question of what it means to undertake historicalarchaeological research in contexts where people and their things seem constantly to be on the move. No studies of nineteenth-century cities feature in these collections, but it would wrong to claim that historical archaeologists working in such settings have completely ignored questions of movement and mobility, as recent attempts to bring a transnational dimension to household archaeology illustrate (see, for example, Brighton 2009; Murray and Crook 2005). Drawing upon analysis of archaeological objects retrieved from the privies related to three households in Limehouse, we demonstrate how a focus on mobility can complicate and enhance understanding of everyday life in Victorian cities, providing new perspectives on experiences of being poor in a restless global metropolis. We re-oriented our study so that recognition of the mobility of people and objects became a central focus and a key element of our analytical framework
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
