On Historical versus Material Objects, or, What It Means to Care Rather Than Simply to Clean

Abstract

Through a case study of domestic advice manuals, the article considers a theoretical distinction between material and historical objects. The changing advice about the treatment of boots and shoes between late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century editions of Cassell's Household Guide shows that an idea of personal care for one's boots and shoes replaces an idea of their mechanical cleaning carried out by others. This recognition of boots and shoes as materially fine objects affords them a change of status. They turn into newly constituted historical objects, able to articulate a changing sense of the domestic subject who is formed through advice about caring for them. The domestic interior is the crucial site for considering this change to both the objective and subjective conditions of domesticity. It is a site that emerges between representation and spatialized action, implicating both the historical subject of domestic advice, and researchers who study domesticity through its representations.

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