Soap and water: cleanliness, dirt and the working classes in Victorian and Edwardian Britain

Abstract

This book is based on a body of research investigating the visual and material culture of the Victorian and Edwardian working classes. It focuses in particular on issues of cleanliness and dirt, which are understood as both material practices and as a complex set of discourses around domesticity, respectability, motherhood, the body and personal subjectivity. The book deals with this subject in three chapters, looking at 'official' discourses around cleanliness and dirt (advice literature and government publications), the actual practice of routines of cleanliness within the home (using autobiographical and social observation sources as evidence) and the development of commercial imagery around cleanliness, as soap became a heavily branded and advertised product. The book is original because of this cross-referencing of sources, and because it pays detailed attention to working-class material culture of the period, which is usually neglected in favour of analyses of middle- or upper-class domesticity. Although this book has a strong social history content, it is fundamentally concerned with the materiality and representation of social life: the research methods used include those of design history and material culture history, with more 'traditional' documentary sources set alongside objects (the branding, packaging and advertising ephemera of soap). The following conference papers and talks have disseminated this research: • ‘Soap Stories: mothers, homes and the tasks of cleanliness in working-class autobiography’, Social History Society Conference, University of Manchester, April 2011 • ‘Dirt, Sweat and Tears: how soap advertisements spread fear of dirt and germs and a rhetoric of hygiene’, public talk in association with Dirt: the filthy reality of everyday life exhibition, Wellcome Collection, July 2011 • ‘ “When he died I was hoping it wasn’t contagious”: disease and domestic hygiene, c.1880 – 1914’, King’s College London, History of Health and Medicine seminar, May 2013