Putting People on the Page: Material Culture as a Way in to Everyday Life behind the Facades of Tallis’s London Street Views

Abstract

Tallis’s Street Views describe London as a commercial and professional centre but the visual representation of the street elevations gives an impression of quiet emptiness; it is hard to get a sense of the activity in and around the businesses portrayed. The household inventory of one of Tallis’s advertisers, a dentist who died in 1850, suggests a way of redressing this. An interpretive reading of the list of the dentist’s belongings, disposed around the different spaces of the premises, which housed his residence, his business and other households, gives some sense of the complexity and struggle at a daily level behind Tallis’s apparently orderly professional and commercial facades. This indicates that we can look more generally to material culture – whether in textual and visual representations or as actual artefacts – to provide a deeper understanding of people’s everyday life in a developing city.

Keywords:

• material culture
• inventories
• 19th-century spaces of home and work
• professional exigencies
• London
• 19th-century dentistry

Acknowledgements

This contribution draws on my PhD thesis, ‘Reading the Inventory: Household Goods, Domestic Cultures and Difference in England and Wales, 1841–81’, Queen Mary University of London, 2011, funded and supported by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council [PTA-033-2005-00015], The Geffrye, Museum of the Home, and the School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London. I owe special thanks to Professor Alastair Owens for his advice.

Notes

1. Elizabeth Grant, ‘John Tallis’s London Street Views’, The London Journal, 37.3 (November 2012), 234–51 (pp. 237, 239).

2. Lynda Nead, ‘Mapping the Self: Gender, Space, and Modernity in mid-Victorian London’, Environment and Planning A, 29.4 (April 1997), 659–72 (p. 659).

3. Baldwin Hamey, ‘London Street Views’ <https://londonstreetviews.wordpress.com/author/baldwinhamey> [accessed 27 December 2016].

4. Henry Orme’s Legacy Duty papers, The National Archives, Kew, UK, in IR 19/96.

5. Gorgio Riello, ‘‘Things Seen and Unseen’: The Material Culture of Early Modern Inventories and their Representation of Domestic Interiors’, in Early Modern Things: Objects and their Histories, 1500–1800, ed. by P. Findlen (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), pp. 125–50.

6. Laurie Wilkie, ‘Documentary Archaeology’ in The Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology, ed. by Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 13–33.

7. Karen Harvey, ed., History and Material Culture: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 2–3. Key contributions to a material culture approach to nineteenth-century history include Jane Hamlett, Material Relations: Domestic Interiors and Middle-Class Families in England, 1850–1910 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010) and At Home in the Institution: Material Life in Asylums, Lodging Houses and Schools in Victorian and Edwardian England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Recent articles in the Journal of Victorian Culture include: Jim Cheshire, ‘Material Culture and the ‘Backstage’: A Response to Peter K. Andersson’s ‘How Civilized Were the Victorians?’’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 22.1 (March 2017), 69–80; Jane Hamlett and Lesley Hoskins, ‘Comfort in Small Things? Clothing, Control and Agency in County Lunatic Asylums in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century England’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 18.1 (March 2013), 93–114; Simon Morgan ‘Material Culture and the Politics of Personality in Early Victorian England’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 17.2 (June 2012), 127–46; Alastair Owens, Nigel Jeffries, Karen Wehner and Rupert Featherby, ‘Fragments of the Modern City: Material Culture and the Rhythms of Everyday Life in Victorian London’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 15.2 (June 2010) 211–25.

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10. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, Introduction and pp. 364–69.

11. Robert Kerr, The Gentleman’s House or, How to Plan English Residences from the Parsonage to the Palace (London: John Murray, 1871, first edition 1864), p. 112; Jennifer Melville, ‘The Use and Organisation of Domestic Space in Late Seventeenth-century London’ (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 1999), pp. 126–47; Jon Stobart, Andrew Hann and Victoria Morgan, Spaces of Consumption: Leisure and Shopping in the English Town, c.1680–1830 (London and New York, NY, Routledge, 2007), pp. 112–8.

12. Kerr, The Gentleman’s House, p. 143.

13. Hannah Barker and Jane Hamlett, ‘Living Above the Shop: Home, Business, and Family in the English “Industrial Revolution”’, Journal of Family History, 35.4 (October 2010), 311–28.

14. This part of Charles Street was merged with Mortimer Street in 1879. Volumes 51 and 52 of the Survey of London, on South-East Marylebone (to be published by Yale University Press, 2017), draft chapter 26, p. 20 <https://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/architecture/research/survey-of-london/eastern-marylebone/vols51and52> [accessed 4 December 2016].

15. Henry Orme’s Legacy Duty papers, The National Archives, Kew, UK, in IR 19/96.

16. Christine Hillam, ‘The Development of Dental Practice before 1850’, Medical Historian, 1 (July 1988), 10–16 (p. 15).

17. Derived from the Census Enumerators’ Books for 1841 (HO107, 675, 7, 26, 44) and 1851 (HO107, 1486, 546, 4).

18. Volumes 51 and 52 of the Survey of London, on South-East Marylebone (to be published by Yale University Press, 2017), draft chapter 26 <https://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/architecture/research/survey-of-london/eastern-marylebone/vols51and52> [accessed 4 December 2016], p. 20.

19. Thomas Webster assisted by the late Mrs. Parkes, An Encyclopaedia of Domestic Economy (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1844), p. 288; Kerr, Gentleman’s House, p. 160.

20. Information about the history of the dental profession is drawn from Hillam, ‘The Development of Dental Practice before 1850’, and British Dental Association, Oral Histories: A Pictorial History of Dentistry from the BDA Museum Collections (London: British Dental Association, 2002).

21. For example, the diaries of Henrietta Thornhill 1864–1875, Lambeth Archives Department, London, UK, IV/81.

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27. Lesley Hoskins, ‘Social, Economic and Geographical Differences in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Homes: The Evidence from Inventories’, Regional Furniture, xxvii (2013), 93–119.

28. Yaffa Draznin, Victorian London’s Middle-class Housewife: What she Did all Day (London: Greenwood, 2001), pp. 47–69.

29. Simon Gunn, The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class: Ritual and Authority and the English Industrial City 1840–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 28–29; Richard Dennis, Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 12.

30. Donald Olsen, ‘Victorian London: Specialization, Segregation, and Privacy’, Victorian Studies (March 1974), 265–78 (pp. 267–68).

31. Dennis, Cities in Modernity, pp. 142–43 and chapter 6; Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets, and Images in Nineteenth-century London (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000).

32. Moira Donald, ‘Tranquil Havens? Critiquing the Idea of Home as the Middle-Class Sanctuary’ in Domestic Space: Reading the Nineteenth-Century Interior, ed. by Inga Bryden and Janet Floyd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 103–20.

33. Barker and Hamlett, ‘Living above the Shop’.

34. Census Enumerators’ Books for 1841 (HO107, 675, 7, 26, 44) and 1851 (HO107, 1486, 546, 4).

35. Cruickshank and Burton, Life in the Georgian City, pp. 60–61; Dennis, Cities in Modernity, pp. 221–23.

36. Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 25–48.

37. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (London: Penguin, 1990, first published 1959) pp. 28–82; Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. R. Nice (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), pp. 11–63.

38. Victoria Kelley, ‘Housekeeping: Shine, Polish, Gloss and Glaze as Surface Strategies in the Domestic Interior’ in Material Possessions: The Objects and Textures of Everyday Life in Imperial Britain, ed. by Deirdre H. McMahon and Janet C. Myers (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016), pp. 93–111.

39. Jon Stobart and Mark Rothery, ‘Fashion, Heritance and Family’, Cultural and Social History, 11.3 (September 2014), 385–406; Margaret Ponsonby, Stories from Home: English Domestic Interiors 1750–1850 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 96–97.

40. Alastair Owens and Nigel Jeffries, ‘People and Things on the Move: Domestic Material Culture, Poverty and Mobility in Victorian London’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 20.4 (December 2016), 804–27, p. 806.