Introduction: Victorians Like Us – Domesticity and Worldliness

Abstract

In response to Lytton Strachey's remark that the history of the Victorian Age would never be written because we know too much about it (9), one can argue that the greater our temporal distance to the Victorians is, the more we appear to be interested in them. As Dianne F. Sadoff and John Kucich have noted about this persistent preoccupation, "the Victorian age [is] historically central to late-century postmodern consciousness" (Kucich and Sadoff xi). The continuous reiterations of the Victorian in popular neo-Victorian cultural artefacts have contributed to the establishment of the area of neo-Victorian studies, with the publication, in recent decades, of several books focused on millennial and post-millennial literary engagements with the Victorians. Also growing out of this awareness that matrixes of modernity and postmodernity can be found in the Victorian period, an increasing interest in the sphere of domesticity has resulted in the uncovering of neglected archives. From novels to government reports, the Victorians attached unprecedented significance to domesticity. The household was a pivotal institution, and their occupants performed their different roles according to custom and circumstance. Within its sphere, gender, class, economic and political conflicts were played out as the household provided the background for significant social practices ranging from the kitchen to the parlour, from the street to the Houses of Parliament, from the colonial metropole to the British colonial outposts in Africa, Asia, Australia and the Pacific. The discourses of Victorian domesticity have been the subject of quite a few publications over the last decades. These approaches stress the interdisciplinary potential for interpretation of the characteristics of the period and often underline the strands of radical thought which encouraged aspirations for upward social mobility. The inquiry into the performance of domesticity and the management of privacy by, for instance, some of the leading figures of the Victorian period ...