Victorian Hospitality and the Ethics of Social Relations

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This introduction theorizes hospitality as an ethical practice and looks at how technological and other cultural shifts in the Victorian period changed hospitality standards. Hospitality implicates various contexts, including charitable home visits, travel and tourism, and the domestic sphere. Examples from Victorian newspapers, periodicals, and fiction demonstrate attitudes on the parts of both hosts and guests. Spaces such as railway carriages and country houses offer instances where the traditional host / guest relationship was renegotiated. The Great Exhibition, as both an event and a space, represents the international scope of hospitality during Britain’s era of imperial expansion. These various examples demonstrate the ubiquity of hospitality and its importance as a consideration in the ethics of social relations.