A Home From Home? by Claudia Soares;

Author:Claudia Soares; [Soares, Claudia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192651884
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
Published: 2022-12-30T00:00:00+00:00

Domestic Ideals: Comfort and Stability

By the late nineteenth century, a wealth of didactic literature promoted the well-ordered and fashionable home as a private haven separate from the public world of labour among the Victorian middle classes.14 Robert Edis’s 1881 advice manual about furnishing, for example, reflected contemporary attitudes about the material culture and decoration of the middle-class home. Edis emphasized the importance of careful decoration and the educative power of material culture within spaces inhabited by children, such as the nursery.15 Meanwhile, historian Katherine Grier demonstrates that comfort and gentility were imbued with new power, especially in the middle-class home. Ideas associated with a pleasurable physical state influenced domestic design and furnishing and were combined with new beliefs about standards of manners, deportment, and taste, which shaped the acts, rituals, and values of family life.16

Although such advice targeted the middle-class home, the influence of attitudes about the moral power of home decoration can be seen beyond this setting, and in the institutional home. In order to create a sense of ‘homeliness’ in the institutional setting, the Society’s residential spaces borrowed components from the middle-class domestic ideals of comfort, beauty, authority, privacy, responsibility, and division. These elements helped to create an ideal site that embodied and inculcated the Victorian values of morality, industry, authority, and autonomy that were deemed especially significant to working-class children’s development and training. Implicit in this notion of ‘homeliness’, too, was the idea that the institutional space had a psychological role in helping inhabitants feel at ease and in cultivating their sense of belonging. This could enable them to overcome their estrangement from the familiar environment of the family home and the trauma of being parted from relatives, even though the institutional home most likely bore little relation to the working-class homes from which they had come.

Domestic architecture and spatial layout reflected the Society’s attempts to create a sense of homeliness. Influenced by contemporary critiques of vast, impersonal children’s care institutions, the WSS favoured the trend of caring for children in smaller homely and familial environments, where daily life was based on reformatory rather than punitive measures.17 The WSS believed this would better facilitate children’s physical, social, and moral development, stating that it was ‘infinitely better to care for children under natural conditions’ in order to ‘develop home instincts’, rather than to ‘mass children in huge Poor-Law or other institutions’.18 The WSS may have emphasized elements of comfort, beauty, and stability more, given that the role of many statutory organizations was to simply reform and discharge inmates. However, the importance of comfort was emphasized in broader welfare discourse. The ability to individualize space, appearance, and the possession of personal objects were curative features and privileges for inmates confined for the long term.19

Size became a central feature in solidifying the Society’s idea of homeliness in spatial and architectural form. While other cottage homes, such as Barnardo’s, usually housed between twenty and forty children, WSS homes varied in size according to their function.20 A survey of 108 homes opened

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