At Home In The Institution

At Home in the Institution takes a new look at institutions in Victorian England, by exploring their material life. The book focuses on asylums, lodging houses and schools - examining decoration and the use of space as well as the things that inmates were allowed. Although all three had very diverse aims, their authorities were often influenced by the relationships, rituals and material culture of contemporary domesticity, demonstrating the reach and importance of these ideas in society.

Yet an assessment of the everyday life of these places often shows the limits of these ideals in practice, the disruptions to domestic routines and the notions of class and gender that they were supposed to inculcate. While the material world was used to control, it also afforded agency to patients, lodgers and pupils - from the schoolboy carving initials on a desk to the pauper lunatics who bred songbirds.

Review: 'From billiard tables to window boxes, Jane Hamlett's innovative and perceptive study challenges stereotypical representations of austere utility, revealing the multiple, gendered and class-specific uses of material culture to domesticate institutional life, and to reconfigure relationships between residents and the homes they had left behind.' - Vivienne Richmond, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK 'Based on meticulous and wide-ranging research, this book opens up fresh approaches to the study of institutions by looking beyond rule books and the records of state agencies with their 'disciplinary' ambitions, to unearth complex experiences of life within institutions, skilfully blending analysis of material culture and space with critical interpretation of narratives of institutional life gleaned from biographies and popular representations.' - Alastair Owens, Queen Mary, University of London, UK 'This is an innovative and thought provoking book.

Its impressive research, subtle analysis and nuanced discussion enable Hamlett to provide a fascinating picture of the complex and contradictory ways inmates used the material world to appropriate and transform, at times poignantly, the vision of home and domesticity that authorities had imagined when creating the interiors of the institutional spaces they inhabited.' - Michele Cohen, Institute of Education, University of London, UK