Focusing on everyday life in nineteenth-century Britain and its imperial possessions"from preparing tea to cleaning the kitchen, from packing for imperial adventures to arranging home décor"the essays in this collection analyze the idiosyncratic and ideological contours of materiality.
'This lively and inventive collection of essays demonstrates how nineteenth-century British people's changing sense of themselves and their relationship to the rest of the world was made through their everyday engagement with material objects - from reading cheap printed maps, to polishing dusty sideboards and slaving over kitchen stoves. Bristling with fresh insights, it pioneers new approaches to the study of Victorian things to reveal the complex and contradictory ways that relationships of class, 'race' and gender were lived and imagined and illustrates how home, nation and empire were bound together in imperial Britain. This agenda-setting, multidisciplinary volume will be an inspiration to all scholars interested in the relationships between domesticity, empire and Britishness.' Alastair Owens, Queen Mary University of London, UK
