Lesley Hoskins - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Lesley Hoskins

This is a draft of a version of a piece published in Wallpaper History Review, please reference t... more This is a draft of a version of a piece published in Wallpaper History Review, please reference the published version. 'A bright and cheerful aspect': wall decoration and the treatment of mental illness in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Readers of the WHR know that, in the nineteenth century, wallpaper was considered a threat to health. 1 Repetitive patterns on a sick-room wall could distract an invalid and hinder recovery. 2 There was, famously, the fear of arsenical colours. There was the possibility that lice and fleas lurked under the layers. And the usual distemper-printed papers were not washable although dirt was considered as the 'germ seeds of disease'. 3 Such concerns led to the introduction and successful marketing of a variety of 'hygienic', non-arsenical, impermeable, or washable wall coverings. 4 But it is less well known that, for a time, wallpaper was also considered to be positively good for the healthspecifically mental health-and was employed in the attempt to cure and care for the mentally ill, distressed and disabled. This article draws on research undertaken for the ESRC-funded project At home in the institution? Asylum, school and lodging house interiors in London and SE England, 1845-1914 at Royal Holloway, University of London, and briefly considers the role of wallpaper in the therapeutic regimes of five nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century mental institutions. 5 Over the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries attitudes towards the mentally ill and disabled underwent a significant change. Governments, funders, doctors, and the professional and lay public moved from viewing sufferers as animal-like and irrational to understanding them as pitiable victims of a terrible affliction and as human beings whose rationality could potentially be retrieved. Instead of chains, nakedness and straw bedding, 6 the new orthodoxy increasingly called for the provision of a decent, comfortable, institutional environment. New therapies attempted to induce rational, normal, social conduct through techniques of behavioural modelling, encouragement, rewards and deprivations. This was known as moral (that is brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk

The History of the Family

ABSTRACT During the twentieth-century British family life was transformed through changes in fami... more ABSTRACT During the twentieth-century British family life was transformed through changes in family size, relationships and the development of new expectations about emotions and behaviour. But in this important social transformation one factor has gone almost entirely unremarked by family historians – the role of animals in family life. Sociologists and psychologists have demonstrated that pets played an important and complex role in British family life in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. However our investigation of the interactions between household members and their pets up to 1960 shows that the personal and familial relationships of pet-keeping could be just as charged and multi-valent. We use three long-run diaries from 1925 to 1960 to investigate the place and role of pets in the family. In spite of some methodological problems, diaries remain a crucial source for investigating pet-keeping in family life. Although, in these cases, the entries were sometimes perfunctory they were also at times rich in expressions of emotions and affinities in relation to animals, allowing us to explore the role that animals played in family dynamics. The long chronological coverage of each diary has provided the opportunity of examining the role that pets played at different stages in the lives of the writers, and how animals became more or less important for the families at different times. All three diaries demonstrate the emotional attachment that individuals had with their pets but also, crucially, how bringing animals into family narratives adds to our understanding of the relationships and interactions in modern family life.

The Working Class at Home, 1790–1940, 2022

Architecture and Culture, 2018

England between 1919 and 1939 experienced enormous suburban expansion. In Greater London the popu... more England between 1919 and 1939 experienced enormous suburban expansion. In Greater London the population grew by about seventeen percent, while the built-up area doubled in size. Thousands of shopping parades were built on suburban high roads and in estates, providing the residents of these new communities not just with a local place to shop for their daily (or more major needs) but also offering a center for local activities and interactions, both informal and formal. These parades are still a familiar feature of the suburban landscape but, until recently, both the buildings and the complex process of their development have been overlooked. Drawing upon existing histories and geographies of shopping, of the commercial property market, and of suburban development and culture, this paper examines four cases in order to bring into the foreground the network of participants and processes in the financing, designing and building of London's interwar shopping parades.

A Cultural History of the Home in the Age of Empire, 2021