Jane Hamlett

Ethnicity and Consumption : South Asian food shopping patterns in Britain, 1947-75

This article reviews the literature that explores the relationship between ethnic identities and food consumption, with particular reference to business management studies. It focuses on the food shopping practices of south Asians in Britain in the period 1947 to 1975, to illustrate the need for more historically contextualized studies that can provide a more nuanced exploration of any interconnections between ethnic identity and shopping behaviour. The article draws on a reasonably long-standing interest in ethnicity and consumption in marketing studies, and explores the conceptual use of acculturation within this literature. The arguments put forward are framed by recent interdisciplinary studies of the broader relationship between consumption and identity, which stress the importance of contextualizing any influence of ethnic identifications through a wider consideration of other factors including societal status, gender and age, rather than giving it singular treatment. The article uses a body of empirical research drawn from recent oral histories, to explore how these factors informed everyday shopping practices among south Asians in Britain. It examines some of the shopping and wider food provisioning strategies adopted by early immigrants on arrival in Britain. It considers the interaction between the south Asian population and the changing retail structure, in the context of the development of self-service and the supermarket. Finally, it demonstrates how age, gender and socioeconomic status interacted with ethnic identities to produce variations in shopping patterns.

Living above the Shop: Home, Business, and Family in the English “Industrial Revolution”

This article explores the living arrangements and familial relations of small business households in northwest English towns between 1760 and 1820. Focusing on evidence from inventories and personal writing, it examines the homes that such households lived and worked in and the ways in which space was ordered and used: indicating that access to particular spaces was determined by status. This study suggests both the continuance of the ‘‘household family’’ into the nineteenth century (rather than its more modern, ‘‘nuclear’’ variant) and the existence of keenly felt gradations of status within households making it likely that the constitution of ‘‘the family’’ differed according to one’s place in the domestic hierarchy.

The British Domestic Interior and Social and Cultural History

For much of the twentieth century, the domestic interior has been on the sidelines of social and cultural history. Since 2000 this has changed, with the publication of a number of key studies. This essay explores the different disciplinary approaches that lie behind the growth of this new field, including the study of decorative styles in art history, social geography’s exploration of the meaning of space, anthropologists’ emphasis on the role of objects in social rituals, the direct analysis of objects undertaken by scholars in museums, and literary studies that have examined the meaning of the domestic interior through the text. It also argues that recent analysis of the domestic interior has transformed three central narratives in social and cultural history. Firstly, it has enhanced studies of the modern history of consumption by locating consumerist practices in a domestic context, questioning the extent to which they can be viewed in terms of individual choice. Secondly, exploration of the home has rejuvenated the debate over the division of the social world into public and private, raising new questions about how privacy was experienced through the spatial organization and material technologies of the house. Finally, the intersection of the domestic with the history of women and gender has led to studies that explore the power dynamics associated with control over the selection of goods for the home as well as the role of objects in constructing gendered identities. An overview of the multidisciplinarity of the field will be followed by an appraisal of its contribution to these three broader areas of debate. The first histories of the home were written from the perspective of designers and architects, and focused on stylistic change. Mario Praz, whose book was published in 1969, was the first art historian to treat the domestic interior as a whole: a room and its contents were perceived as a form of artistic expression.1 Since then a rich art history

Space and Emotional Experience in Victorian and Edwardian English Public School Dormitories

In the second half of the nineteenth century, boys at many English public schools lived apart from their teachers. This was typical in such institutions at the time, with most schools adopting the ‘house system’. While notionally under the control of housemasters, within these places pupils usually inhabited house rooms and open dormitories, which teachers seldom entered. This was a deliberate policy. Discussions of the open dormitory reveal that its spatial set-up — where boys were kept isolated from their masters but in very close proximity to their peers — was intended to have a distinct emotional effect. It was hoped that the judicious guidance of senior boys would set a good example to their juniors, contributing to their emotional education. Isolation, meanwhile, was supposed to encourage independence, creating self-governing individuals who were able to exercise self-control rather than being disciplined by the institution. The aim was the production of a moral system, in which the discipline of the self, body and emotions played an important part. This meant learning to control emotional expression, but also forming the right kind of attachments to others. The prefect system, in which a chosen group of senior boys were given the right to use physical discipline, and especially fagging, is notorious. However, it is important to remember that this had set cultural limits.

‘Tiresome trips downstairs’: Middle-Class Domestic Space and Family Relationships in England, 1850–1910

Beryl Lee Booker, a gentleman’s daughter who grew up in London and Leicestershire in the second half of the nineteenth century, described her childhood as punctuated by ‘tiresome trips downstairs,’ visits to the drawing room from the nursery that upset her ‘after tea plans.’1 Like most middle-class children in the second half of the nineteenth century, Lee Booker’s home was organised according to the nursery system. The children were sequestered in a nursery, usually at the top of the house, under the care of a nurse. The organisation of domestic space and material culture in middle-class homes had a crucial impact on authority practices in the home. Although the arrangement of the home differed from family to family, the relatively rigid use of domestic space in the nineteenth century encouraged the construction of intimacies and distances. Access to parents was often limited to a couple of hours a day at best, and children spent the majority of their time in the nursery. Parental authority was exercised through the control of access to the drawing room, study, bedroom and dressing room. Relationships with favoured children were fostered through intimate time spent together in parental personal space, from which other siblings were excluded. Children often cherished time in parental space, closely identifying with material cultures that contributed to the formation of their own gendered identities.

Common Lodging Houses

In 1848 John Davis, a resident of a lodging house at No. 8 Mill Lane in Deptford, was sentenced to transportation for seven years for stabbing a fellow lodger, Joseph Plummer, a hawker. Plummer gave this statement to the court: I was sitting in the kitchen with my wife — the prisoner began to use ill words, and said he had a little thing that would settle someone in the house — I did not answer him — he went out, and came back again between nine and ten in the evening — he was not the worse for liquor — I believe he had taken something — I saw him strike a child who was there — I got up, and said, ‘If you hit him again, I shall hit you’ — he said, ‘I am quite ready for you’ — I struck him, he fell — he put the knife into me twice, and said, Joe I have done it for you.’1

“White-Painted Fortresses”?

ABSTRACT In Victorian and Edwardian upper- and middle-class homes in England, children were often segregated in a nursery at the top of the house under the direct care of a nanny or nursemaid. This article explores the material culture of the nursery and the way it functioned as a space within the wider home. It demonstrates the impact of this on relationships between parents, children, and servants as well as the formation of early ideas of gender. While adults attempted to use space and objects in the nursery to discipline and control Victorian and Edwardian children, they often negotiated and evaded these boundaries through imagination and play.

Schools for Boys

On arrival at Winchester College in September 1891, Frank Lucas wrote home to his mother almost every day. There was much to relate. There were new, tightly timetabled classes, the pleasures of socialisation in the dormitory, and the challenge and excitement of learning new customs. After just under a month at the school, he wrote: ‘I like the life here very much.’1 The subsequent 200 odd letters that Lucas wrote home during his seven years at school create a full picture of the life there. They reveal a complex and powerful material world. On arrival, a boy was required to master ‘Notions’. This was a system of naming places, objects and practices in a distinct language, known only to the pupils, that celebrated the physical environment of the college. Classrooms, entrances, and passages were given individual names, hidden crannies and hiding places were recorded, everyday objects were given special monikers, lovingly passed on by each generation of schoolboys. Lucas’s school life was not untroubled, however. The system of spatial organisation in public schools in this era was designed to keep boys and masters separate, allowing the boys to develop self-governance under the prefect system. At 1890s Winchester, this could be a licence for abuse. The few negative letters that Lucas wrote refer to this, and his own attempts to do something about it. Nonetheless, the result of seven years immersion in the school was an overwhelming attachment and strong feeling of loyalty. In his last few weeks at Winchester, he wrote to his father that: ‘I dread the divorce from this place more and more.’2

Schools for Girls

Netta Syrett, schoolgirl, and later novelist and playwright, entered the North London Collegiate School for Girls in the 1880s, when the vanguard institution had been running for just over three decades. Her experiences there were to haunt her. In her semi-autobiographical novel, The Victorians (1915), Syrett voiced the dislike and fear that she still carried, emotions triggered by interiors that reminded her of school. ‘From that moment which she entered it, Rose [Syrett] never lost her detestation of plain, distempered walls, cold stone staircases, dadoes of pitch pine and of a certain yellow, painful in its crudeness, henceforth always connected in her mind with Swedish desks.’1 Syrett found life at the North London Collegiate painful, as she struggled to cope with the institution’s multifarious spatial and material rules. The school’s distance from her home compounded her problems, as it meant that she dwelt in Myra Lodge, a boarding house run by headmistress Frances Mary Buss, who clashed with the untidy and chaotic Syrett. While most NLCS pupils had a better time, many remarked on the school’s complex rules and regulations. The system at this institution, and at its sister schools founded later in the century, aimed to deal with a new problem. Buss, and the other headmistresses, faced a completely new task, establishing institutions to educate girls to the same standard as boys. For the first time, hundreds of female pupils were to be taught together, and discipline, to be achieved without corporal punishment, was a challenge. This chapter explores the material world that these headmistresses created. While this was an important part of a new disciplinary system, the decoration of these places often had strong links with domesticity, creating a feminine institutional space.

Model Lodging Houses

In 1899, a Daily Mail journalist visited the new Rowton House at King’s Cross, a ’six-penny hotel’ for working men, set up by the Tory paternalist Lord Rowton and his company.1 He was impressed: It is the palace of a thousand windows, or surely approaching the number. At night time this huge red-brick building gleams with myriad eyes upon its grey environments. Inside it is a triumph of enamelled brick, broad stone stairs, spacious rooms, smartly varnished cubicles, and gigantic lavatories.2