People and Things on the Move: Domestic Material Culture, Poverty and Mobility in Victorian London
Int J Histor Archaeol
People and Things on the Move: Domestic Material Culture, Poverty and Mobility in Victorian London
Alastair Owens 0 1
Nigel Jeffries 0 1
0 MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology) , Mortimer Wheeler House, 46 Eagle Wharf Road, London N1 7ED , UK
1 School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London , Mile End Road, London E1 4NS , UK
The development of what Mayne and Lawrence (Urban History 26: 325-48, 1999) termed Bethnographic^ approaches to studying nineteenth-century households and urban communities has gathered momentum in recent years. As such research agendas have taken hold and been applied to new contexts, so critiques, methodological developments, and new intellectual and theoretical currents, have provided opportunities to enhance and develop approaches. This article contributes to this on-going process. Drawing upon household archaeological research on Limehouse, a poor neighborhood in Victorian London, and inspired by the theoretical insights provided by the Bnew mobilities paradigm,^ it aims to place Bmobility^ as a central and enabling intellectual framework for understanding the relationships between people, place, and poverty. Poor communities in nineteenth-century cities were undeniably mobile and transient. Historians and archaeologists have often regarded this mobility as an obstacle to studying everyday life in such contexts. However, examining temporal routines and geographical movements across a variety of time frames and geographical scales, this article argues that mobility is actually key to understanding urban life and an important mechanism for interpreting the fragmented material and documentary traces left by poor households in the nineteenth-century metropolis.
Households; Mobility; Material culture; London; Nineteenth century
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Published online: 20 July 2016
# The Author(s) 2016. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
Introduction
Almost two decades ago historian Alan Mayne and archaeologist Susan Lawrence
published an essay in the journal Urban History announcing a Bnew urban research
agenda^
(Mayne and Lawrence 1999)
. Drawing from their collaborative work on
nineteenth-century Melbourne in Australia, they challenged scholars to develop
Bethnographic^ approaches to studying cities through the innovative bringing together
of archaeological and other historical evidence in order to build a richer understanding
the complexities of everyday urban life. Working mainly at the scale of individual
households, streets or neighborhoods, the Bethnographic^ methods they advocated
involved establishing a matrix of material and documentary evidence – from traces of
building structures and collections of artefacts retrieved from particular households, to
census lists of inhabitants, records of local businesses and institutions, legal
documents, descriptive accounts of the neighborhoods, and other historical sources that
Bthicken^ understanding of context. This material and documentary evidence was
then to be brought into an open Bdialogue^ from which scholars could attempt to
build meanings and interpretations. With a strong revisionist agenda, advocates
promised that these approaches could challenge and Bunravel conventional historical
understandings,^ being attentive to but not constrained by existing historical
narratives and being informed but not driven by theory, in order to cast light on the
Bactualities^ of life in cities
(Mayne and Murray 2001a, p. 1)
. Like similar studies
focused on nineteenth-century households and communities in North American cities,
this kind of historical archaeology has been most fruitfully applied to researching
poorer urban neighborhoods where there has been an effort to reach beyond
demonizing, bourgeois-driven representations of such localities to provide an account
Bthat comes closer to an insider’s view,^ recovering the complex diversity of peoples’
struggles and experiences that were part of their day-to-day existence
(Yamin 2001a
p. 2; see, more broadly, the essays in: Mayne and Murray 2001b; Yamin 2001b, 2002;
Gadsby 2011; Spencer-Wood and Matthews 2011)
. Historians too have advocated the
value of micro-historical perspectives and the study of everyday life in order to
recover the agency of marginalized peoples and the complexity of their lived
experiences
(Port 2015)
.
Swept along by a wider intellectual enthusiasm for the study of the Bmaterial^
dimensions to social life and an interest in the Bmore-than-representational^ registers
of human experience, this body of scholarship has matured into a substantial and
important field, and has resulted in greater collaboration between historians,
archaeologists, and Bthing theorists,^ alongside the initiation of other cross-disciplinary
dialogues
(see Hicks and Beaudry 2010)
. While much of the best of this research remains
associated with scholars working in Australia and the United States, mounting interest
in transnational archaeology as (...truncated)