Time, Domesticity and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain

200 Pages·2016·2.235 MB·English

by  Maria Damkjær (auth.)

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture
General Editor: Joseph Bristow, Professor of English, UCLA
Editorial Advisory Board: Hilary Fraser, Birkbeck College, University of London;
Josephine McDonagh, Kings College, London; Yopie Prins, University of
Michigan; Lindsay Smith, University of Sussex; Margaret D. Stetz, University
of Delaware; Jenny Bourne Taylor, University of Sussex
Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture is a new monograph
series that aims to represent the most innovative research on literary works that
were produced in the English-speaking world from the time of the Napoleonic
Wars to the fin de siècle. Attentive to the historical continuities between
‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’, the series will feature studies that help scholarship
to reassess the meaning of these terms during a century marked by diverse cul-
tural, literary, and political movements. The main aim of the series is to look at
the increasing influence of types of historicism on our understanding of literary
forms and genres. It reflects the shift from critical theory to cultural history
that has affected not only the period 1800–1900 but also every field within the
discipline of English literature. All titles in the series seek to offer fresh critical
perspectives and challenging readings of both canonical and non-canonical writ-
ings of this era.
Titles include:
James Campbell
OSCAR WILDE, WILFRED OWEN, AND MALE DESIRE
Begotten Not Made
Margot Finn, Michael Lobban and Jenny Bourne Taylor (editors)
LEGITIMACY AND ILLEGITIMACY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LAW,
LITERATURE AND HISTORY
Adrienne E. Gavin and Andrew F. Humphries
TRANSPORT IN BRITISH FICTION
Technologies of Movement, 1840–1940
Joshua Gooch
THE VICTORIAN NOVEL, SERVICE WORK AND THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY
ECONOMY
James Grande
WILLIAM COBBETT, THE PRESS AND RURAL ENGLAND
Radicalism and the Fourth Estate, 1792–1835
Jason David Hall and Alex Murray (editors)
DECADENT POETICS
Literature and Form at the British Fin de Siècle
Mary Henes and Brian Murray (editors)
TRAVEL WRITING, VISUAL CULTURE AND FORM, 1760–1900
Yvonne Ivory
THE HOMOSEXUAL REVIVAL OF RENAISSANCE STYLE, 1850–1930
Stephan Karschay
DEGENERATION, NORMATIVITY AND THE GOTHIC AT THE FIN-DE-SIÈCLE
Colin Jones, Josephine McDonagh and Jon Mee (editors)
CHARLES DICKENS, A TALE OF TWO CITIES AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
Jock Macleod
LITERATURE, JOURNALISM, AND THE VOCABULARIES OF LIBERALISM
Politics and Letters 1886–1916
Kirsten MacLeod
FICTIONS OF BRITISH DECADENCE
High Art, Popular Writing and the Fin de Siècle
Charlotte Mathieson
MOBILITY IN THE VICTORIAN NOVEL
Placing the Nation
Natasha Moore
VICTORIAN POETRY AND MODERN LIFE
The Unpoetical Age
Kristine Moruzi and Michelle J. Smith (editors)
COLONIAL GIRLHOOD IN LITERATURE, CULTURE AND HISTORY, 1840–1950
Sean O’Toole
HABIT IN THE ENGLISH NOVEL, 1850–1900
Lived Environments, Practices of the Self
Tina O’Toole
THE IRISH NEW WOMAN
Richard Pearson
VICTORIAN WRITERS AND THE STAGE
The Plays of Dickens, Browning, Collins and Tennyson
Laura Rotunno
POSTAL PLOTS IN BRITISH FICTION, 1840–1898
Readdressing Correspondence in Victorian Culture
Laurence Talairach-Vielmas
FAIRY TALES, NATURAL HISTORY AND VICTORIAN CULTURE
Marianne Van Remoortel
WOMEN, WORK AND THE VICTORIAN PERIODICAL
Living by the Press
Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture
Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–333–97700–2 (hardback)
(outside North America only)
You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a
standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us
at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the
ISBN quoted above.
Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England
Time, Domesticity and
Print Culture in Nineteenth-
Century Britain
Maria Damkjær
Post-Doctoral Fellow, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
TIME, DOMESTICITY AND PRINT CULTURE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN
© Maria Damkjær, 2016
Softcoverreprintofthehardcover1stedition2016978-1-137-54287-8
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication
may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication
may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission. In
accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued
by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London
EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
First published 2016 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of Nature America, Inc.,
One New York Plaza, Suite 4500 New York, NY 10004-1562.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
ISBN 978–1–349–71298–4
E-PDF ISBN: 978–1–137–54288–5
DOI: 10.1057/9781137542885
Distribution in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world is by Palgrave
Macmillan®, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered
in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Damkjær, Maria, 1983– author.
Title: Time, domesticity and print culture in nineteenth-century Britain /
Maria Damkjær.
Description: Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015038162
Subjects: LCSH: English literature—19th century—History and criticism. |
Periodicals—Publishing—Great Britain—History—19th century. | Home in
literature. | Time in literature. | Domestic relations in literature.
Classification: LCC PR468.H63 D36 2016 | DDC 820.9/355—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015038162
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
A catalogue record for the book is available from the British Library
Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.
Contents
List of Illustrations vi
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction: Timetabling and its Failures 1
1 Repetition: Making Domestic Time in Bleak House and
the ‘Bleak House Advertiser’ 22
2 Interruption: The Periodical Press and the Drive for Realism 56
3 Division into Parts: Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and
South and the Serial Instalment 85
4 Decomposition: Mrs Beeton and the Non-Linear Text 117
Coda: Scrapbooking and the Reconfiguration
of Domestic Time 148
Notes 168
Bibliography 181
Index 190
v
List of Illustrations
Figure 0.1 Detail from Barbara Hutton’s Monday Morning, p. 13 10
Figure 1.1 Cover of the Bleak House serial, no. VI (August 1852) 26
Figure 1.2 Dakin and Company advertisement in the Bleak
House serial, no. VI (August 1852) 28
Figure 4.1 ‘Keeping Pickles’: Detail from Beeton’s Book of
Household Management, p. 217 140
Figure 5.1 ‘Needles’, page 169 of M. A. C.’s album 149
Figure 5.2 ‘Charity’, page 102 of M. A. C.’s album 157
vi
Acknowledgements
I am eternally grateful for the warm support and invaluable suggestions
of Clare Pettitt at King’s College London. Everyone should have some-
one like Clare on their side. Also at King’s, I owe special thanks to Ian
Henderson, Cora Kaplan, Josephine McDonagh and Mark W. Turner
for their comments on my work as it was progressing. I’d like to thank
Lene Østermark-Johansen at the University of Copenhagen, Matthew
Beaumont, Louise Lee, Francis O’Gorman, Caroline Levine and Tania
Ørum for help along the way.
At archives and libraries, I owe a debt of gratitude to Helen Peden at
the British Library, to Sonia Gomes at the London Women’s Library, to
Claire McHugh, Shirley Nicholson and the Leighton House Museum, to
the curators at Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections,
and to the Bodleian Library. I would also like to thank King’s College
Graduate School, Knud Højgaards Fond, Krista og Viggo Petersens Fond,
Augustinus Fonden and Carlsbergfondet for funding me through a
number of projects.
Many thanks to my editors Ben Doyle and Joseph Bristow, to Tomas
René and everyone else at Palgrave Macmillan, including anonymous
readers, for invaluable help and kindness. An earlier version of material
from Chapter 4 appeared in Serialization in Popular Culture, edited by
Rob Allen and Thijs van den Berg (New York and Abingdon: Routledge,
2014). I want to thank Rob and Thijs for their suggestions and dedicated
work, and Routledge for the permission to republish.
Special thanks to Sarah Crofton, Jordan Kistler, Jennifer Lo, Mary L.
Shannon, Anne Spangsberg, Will Tattersdill and Esben Wilstrup for tea,
jokes, conference support and useful suggestions, and for reminding me
to have fun with what I do.
Finally, I would like to thank Camilla Damkjær and Anne Duch.
I  wish my father, Søren Damkjær, were here to see this book be
published – I know he would have enjoyed it. More than anything, the
book owes its existence to my mother, Susanne Engstrøm, who never
once doubted it was possible, and who has read more drafts of my work
than anyone. It is dedicated to her, with all my love.
vii
Introduction: Timetabling
and its Failures
Mrs Gibson had once or twice reproved them for the
merry noise they had been making, which hindered
her in the business of counting the stitches in her
pattern. […] ‘Mr Roger Hamley’ was announced. ‘So
tiresome!’ said Mrs Gibson, almost in his hearing.
Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters (1865)1
[Light and ornamental needlework] may be put aside
and resumed without much inconvenience.
Mrs William [Frances] Parkes, Domestic Duties (1825)2
In a nineteenth-century novel, a morning caller interrupts a middle-
class woman while she is doing needlework. In a nineteenth-century
domestic manual, female readers are assured that needlework is excel-
lent employment for those who are liable to be interrupted. The situa-
tion is so well known to readers of works from the period as to require
no explanation. And yet, from another point of view, the assumptions
behind this predicament are singular. Why must women be interrupted?
What structure of time makes that interruption possible? What does it
mean to put your work aside, and to choose occupations that allow,
even ensure, interruption? And would we even learn of Mrs Gibson’s
embroidery if it were not for the fact that the plot, in the shape of her
daughter’s suitor, interrupts her diligent work? Both passages cause the
narrative – whether the book is a novel or an advice manual – to lin-
ger, however briefly, on the temporal aspects of domesticity: the dura-
tions, timings, and negotiations of temporality within the middle-class
home. The narrator divulges something that ostensibly belongs in the
1
2 Time, Domesticity and Print Culture
background, and, in the process, the temporal world of Mrs Gibson’s
drawing-room, no matter how briefly, becomes palpable and real.
The quintessential adage of nineteenth-century domesticity was that
there was ‘a time for everything and everything at its right time’, and
it is tempting to take this as a starting point for an investigation of
domestic temporality. It is true that the Victorians were fond of this
phrase, which is repeated again and again in advice manuals, Sunday
school books and, among many other famous novels, in Charles
Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–3). It suggests, to modern eyes, a very
clean and ordered universe, if somewhat naively mechanic; but then
the Victorians liked to think of their homes as machines (or so received
wisdom likes to remind us). However, what this memorable phrase also
implies is a rhetorical emptying out of domestic time. Only the timeta-
ble is left, nothing of the negotiations within it – and thus no thought
is given to interruptions, delays, or improvisations. Nineteenth-century
writers could not rest on their laurels after quoting this platitude. Just
as domestic work required rethinking as well as repetition, so too was
the representation of that same work a perpetual series of negotiations.
These negotiations did not just take place in narrative form, such as
in the two epigraphs to this chapter. In both fictional and non-fictional
writings, authors and publishers were experimenting with forms, lay-
outs, and rhythms of publication that could conceptualize domestic
practices as processes enmeshed in time. How, for example, could you
best present a recipe for pickles that took months to make? How could
you arrange the hours of the day on the page of a domestic manual?
What about serialized works, which were in themselves (at least meta-
phorically) interrupted – since they were divided up into monthly or
weekly instalments? Did the structure of interruption in fact form part
of their representational power?
Although nineteenth-century domesticity is a familiar area of research,
scholarly inquiries have almost exclusively focused not on time but on
space: on the functional subdivisions within the home, the politics of
who goes where, and the gendered and classed lines which intersect in
rooms, corridors, and doorframes.3 When critics have discussed tem-
porality in connection with domesticity, they have tended to focus on
choreographed practices such as morning calls (which skews the picture
towards rigid timetabling), or on the idea of the cyclicality of women’s
time (an argument which veers towards essentialism). Alternatively,
scholars have argued extensively for the sheer non-narratability of cer-
tain temporalities, whether those timings are associated with women,
the everyday or the ‘timeless’ Victorian domesticity that was so heavily