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Finding Women in the History of Lighting: the case of the English home, 1815-1900

Thu, March 15, 8:30 to 10:00am, Riverside Convention Center, MR 7

Abstract

As M. E. Falkus has suggested, ‘[s]o basic and unremarkable an activity as domestic lighting has left few records and excited little contemporary comment’ (‘The Early Development of the British Gas Industry 1790-1815’ The Economic History Review 1982, pp. 218-19). As evidenced by Falkus’ reading of the effort to improve the quality of light in the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century, such histories can be teased out from a variety of sources. Traces of the history of domestic illumination can be found in material culture. In literature, we find everyday assumptions about what was thought needful captured in passing: a man might be considered inebriated, uncouth and rude if he couldn’t tell that his hostesses candles were “wax; they don’t require snuffing” (Anne Bronte, The Tennant of Wildfell Hall (1848) p. 275). Other sources include newspapers, which frequently reported accidents connected with reading in bed, the dangers of using candles on Christmas trees, and pieces on how the wealthy sometimes used their candles for very lengthy periods despite the cost. All are valuable in revealing the ways in which energy decisions about lighting were made on a day-to-day basis. Reading across a range of sources we also discover that this history was messy, never linear, because as Chris Otter has demonstrated in The Victorian Eye, lighting was entangled with social role, gender, politics and ideology, and multiple energies were consumed: the lamp and the candle remained popular through the century, despite the adoption of new lighting technologies such as gas and then electricity. This paper will attempt to map the gendered elements of this entanglement within the home, via the various uses to which women chose to put light, within different elements of the home, as inflected by purpose, location and class in the nineteenth century.

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