Soap and Water

Cleanliness, Dirt and the Working Classes in Victorian and Edwardian Britain

Victoria Kelley (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

256 Seiten

2020
Bloomsbury Academic (Verlag)
978-1-350-16942-5 (ISBN)

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From whitened doorsteps to polished boots, starched pinafores to scrubbed floors, this book offers a compelling insight into how Victorians and Edwardians engaged in the pursuit of cleanliness and the battle against grime in domestic life. It is the first book to uncover how cleanliness and dirt were perceived and understood during a period where they were an overwhelming preoccupation.

Using social surveys, advice literature, autobiographies and soap advertisements, Victoria Kelley explores this period of important change and examines how the extreme poverty of many was being interrogated by the official agencies seeking the means to alleviate it. At this time, cleanliness and dirt became part of both a material and a moral landscape, with working-class women and their domestic work scrutinised in particular and, as Jose Harris comments, 'whole worlds of meaning were conveyed by microscopic household practices, such as whether one washed ...in the bathroom or the bedroom, or at the kitchen sink'.

Kelley examines the spectacular imagery of cleanliness emerging in the soap brands and advertisements that appeared at the heart of early commercial culture. and offers an important contribution to social and design history and the histories of material culture and gender.

Victoria Kelley teaches posgraduate students at the Royal College of Art, London, and the University for the Creative Arts, UK.

Introduction

Chapter One
Monday Washday
- class and the ideal organisation of cleanliness

1. Cleanliness, Dirt and Health
-Dirty cities
-Invisible germs

2. Cleanliness, Dirt and the Boundaries of Class
-Cleanliness and anthropology
-Observing the dirty poor
-Metaphors of purity and filth
-Other and unimaginable men
-Wives and mothers

3. Order and Repetition in the Work of Cleanliness
-Ordering the tasks of cleanliness in everyday life
-Regularity and order
-Rhythms, cycles and the myths of everyday life

Chapter Two
The Place Where My Mother Could Always be Found
- working-class domesticity, gender and cleanliness

1. The Material Practice of Cleanliness
-An anatomy of dirt
-Washing
-Bathing
-Cleaning

2. Mother and Home
-Home in everyday life
-The idealised mother
-For love and money
-Children helping
-Cleanliness, dirt and the spatial arrangement of the home

3. Cleanliness and Working-class Consumption

Chapter Three
No Rubbing, No Scrubbing
- cleanliness in commercial discourse

1. Soap
-Soap as a product of ‘universal consumption’
-Soap brands and advertising techniques

2. An Analysis of Soap Advertising, 1880-1914
-Advertising and the periodical
-Soap, the sea and invisible germs
-Thrift, regularity and pleasure
-Women’s work in soap advertisements
-The consuming wife and mother

3. A Sunlight Demonstration

Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	02.01.2020
Zusatzinfo	27 bw illus
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 234 mm
Gewicht	363 g
Themenwelt	Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie ► Schönheit / Kosmetik
	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
ISBN-10	1-350-16942-0 / 1350169420
ISBN-13	978-1-350-16942-5 / 9781350169425
Zustand	Neuware