Translocal homemaking and home unmaking in the letter memoir of Alice Lucy Hodson

ABSTRACT

In 1909 Alice Lucy Hodson’s memoir Letters from a Settlement was published. It is unique in providing an intimate first-hand account of what it meant to reside and (attempt) to settle in the women’s settlement Lady Margaret Hall in Lambeth, South London. This article considers how home was experienced, imagined, and represented by Hodson, who like many late-Victorian and Edwardian women were finding more opportunities and roles open to them at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Building on the work of geographers of home and translocal studies, I argue that Hodson’s fragmentary letter chapters show how her homemaking relied on several home imaginaries that included the settlement house, street, neighbourhood, her familial home, and Lady Margaret’s College. This was bound up with her middle-class status and wider imperial understandings of home. Yet, home making also relied on a process of home unmaking. This article will show how her fashioning of the self was dependent on how she narrativised her experiences of translocal homemaking and home unmaking.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Kate Bradley, Mike Benbough-Jackson, Diana Maltz, James Mansell, Eloise Moss, and Charlotte Wildman for their feedback on this article. Earlier versions of this paper were delivered to the AHRC Challenging Domesticities network, the Life Writing Group and LJMU History’s Social Cluster research group. I am grateful for comments made during these sessions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Alice Lucy Hodson, Letters from a Settlement (London: Edward Arnold, 1909), x.

2 ‘Lady Margaret Hall Settlement’, The Times, February 20, 1897, 5. For histories of the LMHS, see Katherine Bentley Beauman, Women and the Settlement Movement (London: Radcliffe Press, 1996), 105–19; Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community, 1850–1920 (London: Virago, 1994), 211–46.

3 June Purvis, ‘From “Women Worthies” to Poststructuralism: Debate and Controversy in Women’s History in Britain’, in Women’s History: Britain, 1850–1945: An Introduction, ed. June Purvis (London: Routledge, 1995), 1–23.

4 K. E. M. Thickenesse, ‘Introductory Notes on Lady Margaret Hall Settlement’, Lambeth Local Library and Archives.

5 See ‘Oxford Preservation Trust’, The Times, July 9, 1936, 12; ‘Court Circular: The Oxford Society’, The Times, July 14, 1939, 17.

6 Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Anna Davin, ‘Loaves and Fishes: Food in Poor Household in Late Nineteenth-Century London’, History Workshop Journal 41, no. 1 (1996): 188 n. 53.

7 David Burnham, The Social Worker Speaks: A History of Social Workers throughout the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 2016), 18–20. See also Ruth Livesey, ‘Reading for Character: Women Social Reformers and Narratives of Urban Poor in Late Victorian and Edwardian London’, Journal of Victorian Culture 9, no. 1 (2004): 52; Jane Lewis, ‘Family Provision of Health and Welfare in the Mixed Economy of Care in the Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, Social History of Medicine 8, no. 1 (1995): 9.

8 Vicinus, Independent Women, 211–46.

9 Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 198.

10 Ibid., 192–3.

11 See Arlene Young, From Spinster to Career Woman: Middle-Class Women and Work in Victorian England (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019).

12 Amanda Vickery, ‘Golden Age of Separate Spheres: A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History’, Historical Journal 36, no. 2 (1993): 383–414; Jane Hamlett and Sarah Wiggins, ‘Victorian Women in Britain and the United States: New Perspectives’, Women’s History Review 18, no. 5 (2009): 707–9.

13 Thad Logan, The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

14 Kelly Hager and Talia Schaffer, ‘Introduction: Extending Families’, Victorian Review 39, no. 2 (2013): 7–21; Naomi Tadmor, ‘Early Modern English Kinship in the Long Run: Reflections on Continuity and Change’, Continuity and Change 25, no. 1 (2010): 13–48.

15 Alison Blunt and Ann Varlet, ‘Introduction: Geographies of Home’, Cultural Geographies 11, no. 1 (2004): 3.

16 Richard Baxter and Katherine Brickell, ‘For Home UnMaking’, Home Cultures 11, no. 2 (2014): 134.

17 See articles in Victorian Review 39, no. 2 (2013).

18 Hodson, Letters from a Settlement, 69.

19 Ibid., 9.

20 Ibid., 99.

21 Penny Summerfield, ‘Concluding Thoughts: Performance, the Self, and Women’s History’, Women’s History Review 22, no. 2 (2013): 350.

22 See Ellen Ross, ‘Introduction: Adventures among the Poor’, Slum Travellers: Ladies and London Poverty, 1860–1920, ed. Ellen Ross (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 1–39.

23 Margaretta Jolly and Liz Stanley, ‘Letters As/Not a Genre’, LifeWriting 1, no. 2 (2005): 95.

24 Liz Stanley, The Auto/Biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/Biography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992).

25 Penny Summerfield, Histories of the Self: Personal Narratives and Historical Practice (London: Routledge, 2019), 34–37.

26 ‘Concluding Thoughts’, 350.

27 Jolly and Stanley, ‘Letters’, 95.

28 Summerfield, Histories of the Self, 23.

29 Hodson, Letters from a Settlement, x.

30 Lady Margaret Hall Settlement Report, May 1909–1910, 21, 23.

31 Ibid., 23.

32 ‘Workers Among the Poor’, The Globe, March 17, 1909.

33 ‘In a University Settlement’, Westminster Gazette, May 28, 1909.

34 M.M. ‘Review: Letters from a Settlement’, Charity Organisation Review, 25, no. 150 (1909): 328. On Margaret McMillian’s life, see Carolyn Steedman, Childhood, Culture and Class in Britain: Margaret McMillan, 1860–1931 (London: Virago, 1990).

35 Katherine Brickell and Ayona Datta, ‘Introduction: Translocal Geographies’, in Translocal Geographies, ed. Katherine Brickell and Ayona Datta (London: Routledge, 2011), 3–21.

36 Philip Harling, ‘The Centrality of Locality: The Local State, Local Democracy, and Local Consciousness in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain’, Journal of Victorian Culture 9, no. 2 (2004): 216–34.

37 Suzanne Hall and Ayona Datta, ‘The Translocal Street: Shop Signs and Local Multi-Culture along the Walworth Road, South London’, City, Culture and Society 1 (2010): 69.

38 John Tomaney, ‘Region and Place II: Belonging’, Progress in Human Geography 39, no. 4 (2015): 508.

39 Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling, Home (London: Routledge, 2006), 22, 29.

40 Hodson, Letters from a Settlement, 5.

41 ‘University Intelligence’, The Times, June 22, 1896.

42 Hodson, Letters from a Settlement, 9.

43 ‘Deaths’, Northern Whig, May 24, 1890, 1. See also ‘Deaths’, Worthing Gazette, May 28, 1890, 5.

44 ‘Lady Margaret Hall Settlement’, The Queen, February 6, 1897, 247.

45 Hodson, Letters from a Settlement, 4.

46 Ibid., 52.

47 Ibid.

48 Ibid., 105.

49 Ibid.

50 Ibid., 8.

51 See also Ellen Ross, ‘Slum Journeys: Ladies and London Poverty, 1860–1940’, in The Archaeology of Urban Landscapes: Explorations in Slumland, eds. Alun Mayne and Tim Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 14.

52 Hodson, Letters from a Settlement, 242.

53 Ibid., 234.

54 Mark Bhatti, Andrew Church, and Amanda Claremount, ‘Peaceful, Pleasant and Private: The British Domestic Garden as an Ordinary Landscape’, Landscape Research 39, no. 1 (2004): 40–52.

55 Ibid., 45.

56 Hodson, Letters from a Settlement, 234.

57 Ibid., 235.

58 Mark Bhatti, Andrew Church, Amanda Claremount, and Paul Stenner, ‘“I love being in my garden”: Enchanting Encounters in Everyday Life’, Social and Cultural Geography 10, no. 1 (2009): 63.

59 Hodson, Letters from a Settlement, 237–8.

60 Ibid., 239–40.

61 Rebecca Preston, ‘“Hope you will be able to recognise us”: The Representation of Women and Gardens in Early Twentieth-Century British Domestic “Real Photo” Postcards’, Women’s History Review 18, no. 5 (2009): 781–800.

62 Hodson, Letters from a Settlement, 239.

63 Judith W. Page and Elise, Women, Literature, and the Domesticated Landscape: England’s Disciples of Flora, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 123.

64 Hodson, Letters from a Settlement, 241–2.

65 Ibid., 242.

66 Ibid., 241.

67 Ibid., 243–53.

68 Rebecca Preston, ‘The Pastimes of the People: Photographing House and Garden in London’s Small Suburban Homes, 1880–1914’, London Journal 39, no. 3 (2014): 216.

69 For instance, Deborah Cohen has argued that homes are ‘reveal personalities’: see Household Gods: The British and their Possessions (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 124.

70 Hodson, Letters from a Settlement, 243–53.

71 Risto Sarvas and David Frohlich, From Snapshots to Social Media: The Changing Picture of Domestic Photography (London: Springer, 2011), 5–22; Brian Coe and Paul Gates, Snapshot Photograph: The Rise of Popular Photography, 1888–1939 (London: Ash & Grant, 1977), 85.

72 Deborah Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 9.

73 Lady Margaret Hall Settlement Report. [1899–1900]

74 Lady Margaret Hall Settlement Annual Report, 1902–1903, 10.

75 Lady Margaret Hall Settlement Report, 1918–1919.

76 Lady Margaret Hall Settlement Report, 1919–1920, 12.

77 Hodson, Letters from a Settlement, 260.

78 Baxter and Brickell, ‘For Home UnMaking’, 134.

79 Ibid., 135–6.

80 Hodson, Letters from a Settlement, 12.

81 Ibid., 254.

82 Ibid., 11.

83 Ibid., 104.

84 Arjun Appadurai, ‘The Production of Locality’, in Counterworks: Managing the Diversity of Knowledge, ed. Richard Fardon (London: Routledge, 1995), 205.

85 Emily Cuming, ‘“Home is home be it never so homely”: Reading Mid-Victorian Slum Interiors’, Journal of Victorian Culture 18, no. 1(2013): 368–86. Ellen Ross, ‘Adventures among the Poor’, in Slum Travelers: Ladies and London Poverty, 1860–1920, ed. Ellen Rose (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 1–39.

86 Ruth Livesey, ‘Reading for Character’, 43–67.

87 Hodson, Letters from a Settlement, 14–15.

88 Ibid., 15.

89 Ibid., 16.

90 Ibid., 13.

91 Shannon Jackson, Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, and Hull-House Domesticity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 42.

92 Hodson, Letters from a Settlement, 101–2.

93 See Rachel Rich, ‘“If you desire to enjoy life, avoid unpunctual people”: Women, Timetabling, and Domestic Advice, 1850–1910’, Cultural and Social History 12, no. 1 (2015): 95–112.

94 Hodson, Letters from a Settlement, 102, 19, 101.

95 1871 Census return for Alice Lucy Hodson, The National Archives of the UK (TNA), Kew, UK.

96 David Conradson and Deirdre McKay, ‘Translocal Subjectivities: Mobility, Connection, Emotion’, Mobilities 2, no. 2 (2007): 169.

97 Anne M. Lawrence, ‘Morals and Mignonette; or, the Use of Flowers in Moral Regulation of the Working Classes in High Victorian London’, Journal of Historical Geography 70 (2000): 24–35.

98 Hodson, Letters from a Settlement, 56–57.

99 Ibid., 56.

100 Lawrence, ‘Morals and Mignonette’, 32. For a discussion on the uses of the courtyard by working-class people, see Lesley Hoskins and Rebecca Preston, ‘Chickens, Ducks, Rabbits and Me Dad’s Germaniums: The Uses and Meanings of Yard, Gardens, and Other Outside Spaces of Urban Working-Class Homes, 1890–1930’, in The Working Class at Home, 1790–1940, ed. Joseph Harley, Vicky Holmes, and Laika Nevalainen (Cham: Springer, 2022), 145–70.

101 Hodson, Letters from a Settlement, 18.

102 Ibid., 36, 140.

103 1911 Census return for Alice Lucy Hodson, TNA.

104 Helen O Hodson, England & Wales 1837–2007, 6B, 427, https://www.findmypast.co.uk.

105 1921 Census return for Alice Lucy Hodson, TNA.

106 Alice Lucy Hodson, 98b Banbury Road, Oxford, 1939 Register, 29 September 1939, https://www.findmypast.co.uk. See also C. Anson, ‘Alice Lucy Hodson: 1869–1963’, The Brown Book: Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford (December 1963), 40.

107 Anson, ‘Alice Lucy Hodson’, 40. Beauman, Women and the Settlement Movement, 110.

108 Anson, ‘Alice Lucy Hodson’, 40.

109 Ibid.

110 ‘Deaths’, The Times, December 12, 1963. Historical currency converter https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator.

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Lucinda Matthews-Jones

Lucinda Matthews-Jones is a Reader in Victorian History at Liverpool John Moores University, where she teaches nineteenth-century gender and urban modules. She researches the British settlement movement and has published articles in Victorian Studies, Historical Journal, Cultural and Social Studies, and Journal of Victorian Culture. She co-edited Material Religion in Modern Britain, with Timothy W. Jones. She is currently writing her monograph Settling at Home: The Making of the British Settlement Movement, 1880–1920.