![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
Abstract
In this study I return to an announcement of a new club that appeared in The Times in 1902. It remained in my mind over many years because of the description of a black cook who was expected to take a post in the Columbia Club’s kitchen. Though brief, this reference to a black Southern woman working in a London kitchen raised several questions, many of which I was unable to answer. Focusing on this announcement, I return to this nameless domestic worker within a strand of my current book project that explores how people lived together in the multi-ethnic cities and towns in the Victorian fin de siècle. Using reports and advertisements in newspapers, I explore the labour undertaken by black working-class men and women within the hierarchies of domestic labour, specifically the spaces of London’s kitchens, and how we can reconstruct or imagine the experiences of those who (may have) cooked in them.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Royal Historical Society, Race, Ethnicity and Equality in UK History: A Report and Resource For Change (London: Royal Historical Society, 2018).
2 ‘Campaign to make history lessons less white’, The Times (19 October 2018), 32.
3 The Times (29 May 1902), 12.
4 Westminster Gazette (26 March 1902), 6.
5 Evesham Standard and West Midland Observer (10 May 1902), 6.
6 The Times (29 May 1902), 12.
7 Caroline Bressey, ‘The Next Chapter: The Black Presence in the Nineteenth Century’, in Britain’s Black Past, ed. Gretchen H. Gerzina (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), 315–329.
8 ‘The Black Man’, All The Year Round (6 March 1875), 492.
9 ‘The Black Man’, 493.
10 Liverpool Mercury (7 November 1876), 5.
11 The Times (15 March 1880), 3.
12 John R. Gillis, ‘Servants, Sexual Relations, and the Risks of Illegitimacy in London, 1801–1900’, Feminist Studies, 5.1 (1979), 142–173; Andrea Broomfield, Food and Cooking in Victorian England: A History (Westport: Praeger, 2007).
13 South Wales Echo (29 November 1896), 12.
14 Brenda Assael, ‘Gastro-Cosmopolitanism and the Restaurant in Late Victorian and Edwardian London’, The Historical Journal, 56.3 (2013), 681–706.
15 The Times (10 August 1880), 15.
16 Jan Marsh, Black Victorians: Black People in British Art, 1800–1900 (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2005), 20, 149, 162; and Jan Marsh, ‘Pictured at Work: Employment in Art (1800–1900)’, Immigrants and Minorities, 28.2-3 (2010), 154–163.
17 The Times (8 March 1910), 21.
18 The Times (25 March 1914), 15.
19 Sheffield Daily Telegraph (13 April 1874), 4.
20 Croydon’s Weekly Standard (12 April 1890), 3.
21 Vivian Nun Halloran, ‘Recipes as Memory Work: Slave Food’, Culture, Theory and Critique, 53.2 (2012), 147–161.
22 Greenock Telegraph and Clyde Shipping Gazette (27 June 1870), 4.
23 Star of Gwent (7 July 1882), 9.
24 North Bucks Times and County Observer (7 February 1903), 2.
25 Tower Hamlets Independent and East End Local Advertiser (17 October 1908), 7. The trial ‘revealed’ she had been married to someone else and the application was dismissed.
26 West London Observer (17 July 1886), 6.
27 On intersections of racial imaginaries and world fairs, see: Nathan Cardon, A Dream of the Future: Race, Empire, and Modernity at the Atlanta and Nashville World’s Fairs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); and Sadiah Qureshi, Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).
28 For examples of Black working class labourers in Australia, see: Caroline Bressey, ‘Surfacing Black and Brown Bodies in the Digital Archive: Domestic Workers in Late Nineteenth-Century Australia’, Journal of Historical Geography, 70 (October 2020), 1–11.
29 Assael, ‘Gastro-Cosmopolitanism’, 681–706.
30 India (4 March 1898), 15.
31 Lady of the House (14 January 1899), 4; Lyttelton Times (18 January 1899), 2.
32 Sunday Times (Sydney) (5 August 1900), 11; Illustrated Police News (7 July 1900), 10.
33 Illustrated Police News (7 July 1900), 10.
34 See: Kelley Fanto Deetz, Bound to the Fire: How Virginia’s Enslaved Cooks Helped Invent American Cuisine (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2017).
35 Gentlewoman (17 April 1897), 26. My emphasis.
36 See: Mark Hathaway, ‘Aunt Sally’, in Encyclopedia of Traditional British Rural Sports, ed. Tony Collins, John Martin, and Wray Vamplew (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 36–37.
37 This is a reference to images in catalogues from 2008 and 2012.
38 J. Redding Ware, Passing English of the Victorian Era: A Dictionary of Heterodox English, Slang, and Phrase (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1909), 12.
39 Dundee Evening Telegraph (21 May 1902), 3.
40 American Register (1 December 1912), 3.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Caroline Bressey
Caroline Bressey is Professor of Historical Geography at University College London. Her research focuses upon recovering the historical geographies of the black presence in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Parallel to this are her interests in ideas of race, racism, anti-racism, and identity in Victorian society. These themes were the focus of her book on the historical geographies of Victorian anti-racist periodical publishing, Empire, Race and the Politics of Anti-Caste (Bloomsbury, 2013). Her interests in how history is represented in heritage spaces has led to curatorial collaborations with the National Portrait Gallery, the Museum of London Docklands, and Tate Britain.