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Household Gods: Religious Domesticity in Britain, 1700 to the present day
15th July 2016
Geffrye Museum
Twitter hashtag: #reldom
Conference Programme
10.00 Registration and Tea and Coffee
10.15 Welcome
10.20- 11.20: Session 1 Observing Domestic Religion
Daniel Grey, ‘Shining examples…among all races and all creeds’: Jewish mothers and infant welfare in England, 1870-1939
Oliver Betts ‘Religious Missionaries and Working-Class Homes 1850-1914’
11.30- 1.00 Session 2 Familial Religiosity
Janice Holmes, ‘Ministers and Manses: class, property and domesticity in 19th century Irish Presbyterian clerical residences’
Mary Clare Martin, ‘Religious practice, emotion and domestic space within the London hinterland, 1740-1870’
Lucinda Matthews-Jones, ‘Unsettling Religious Domesticity in Working-class memoirs’
1.00-1.30 Lunch
1.30-3.15 Session 3 Material Religion
Laura Cuch (UCL), ‘Food, faith, home: Intersections between art, geographies of domestic religion and material culture’ including a 5 minute film showing
Brian H. Murray (KCL), ‘Idolatry at Home: Representing Pagan Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century Britain’
Alana Harris (KCL), ‘“Jesus, I trust in you”: the Divine Mercy devotion and its diasporic practice in everyday Catholic Homes’
3.05-3.20 Tea and Coffee
3.20-4.50 Sessions 4 Rituals of domestic faith
Robert Dickins ‘Light the Home: Communicating Spiritualist Ritual’
Susan Woodall, “Lo, there was I born”: experiencing religion in the ‘Homes of Mercy’.
Emily Vine, ‘The deathbed and religious minority homes in London, c1690-1800’
closing remarks finish at 5.00
Conference Abstracts
Session 1 Observing Domestic Religion
Daniel Grey, ‘Shining examples…among all races and all creeds’: Jewish mothers and infant welfare in England, 1870-1939
Dr Harold Scurfield (1863-1941), the Medical Officer of Health for Sheffield, included a number of references to the influence of ethnicity and religion on child health in British families as part of his 1919 textbook Infant and Young Child Welfare. Unusually – perhaps uniquely, in fact – for a British writer on this subject, the subjects of ‘race’ and faith crops up in Scurfield’s work sufficiently often and overtly enough for it to be argued that these were, in fact, a distinct theme of his research into parenting. Having acknowledged that ‘shining examples of [motherhood] are to be found in every modern slum among women of all races and all creeds’, Scurfield nonetheless argued that it was Jewish mothers who provided the best example of good practice in infant care. This, as for a number of other British commentators, was attributed to ‘the sanctity of motherhood and family life’ in Judaism, which he believed had encouraged the development and maintenance of customs which gave Jewish children a significant physical and moral advantage over their Gentile peers. This paper considers the entwining of motherhood and everyday religion in Jewish homes in England 1870-1939, arguing that this offers new insights into not only the histories of faith and domesticity, but also that of parenting
Oliver Betts ‘Religious Missionaries and Working-Class Homes 1850-1914’
Even before the ‘Bitter Cry of Outcast London’ shook the sensibilities of Christian Britain in the 1880s men and women across the country were venturing into the homes of the poor to spread their versions of faith. From bleak huts alongside half-constructed railway lines to the slums of the great cities of the Victorian age missionaries sought out the souls they intended to save. It was hard work. In 1857 the Reverend Edward Monro warned other clergymen that accessing railway workers was an uphill battle against drink, dirt, and indifference. But, he added, it was necessary in the extreme – ‘the parish priest must devise some means to bring the banished home’.
In their quests that took them in and out of a variety of dwelling places across Britain, missionaries left behind copious notes and publications that shed invaluable light on the domestic conditions and spiritualties of some of the poorest and least-documented members of society. Texts such as Monro’s can reveal the complex living conditions, family arrangements, and struggles to survive that defined the working-class practice of home in the nineteenth century. Yet they are also heavily filtered accounts, often published with a fund-raising goal in mind, that emphasise and gloss those homes and inhabitants as the authors saw fit.
This paper will examine two types of missionary work in the Victorian and Edwardian periods to demonstrate how class, faith, and the domestic intertwined as missionaries came into contact with the poor. The accounts of missions to both railway workers in their rural encampments and the slum dwellers of the inner city both shed light on how domestic spaces cut through by poverty and often highly temporary could be spaces for faith and the lived practice of religion.
Session 2 Familial Religiosity
Janice Holmes, ‘Ministers and Manses: class, property and domesticity in 19th century Irish Presbyterian clerical residences’
I have become increasingly interested in the intersection between public and private in the lives of Irish Presbyterian ministers in the nineteenth century. Biographical portrayals of Irish Presbyterian ministers routinely marginalise the role of family and domestic life and present a relentlessly public account of their clerical careers. But as John Tosh has pointed out, most nineteenth-century British clergymen probably worked from home (Tosh, 1991). Present-day accounts of English clerical life portray the minister’s home as a hectic clearing house for congregational business that often spills over into the routine activities of its other inhabitants (Finch, 1983). The Irish experience does not appear to be much different.
This paper proposes to explore the manse – the term used to denote a nonconformist minister’s residence – as a manifestation of the intersection between religion and domesticity within the Irish Presbyterian church. It will explore both the broad historical background to the drive to build manses in the 1840s and 1850s, as well as the attitudes and opinions which shaped this movement. Underpinned by spiritual notions of the home as a refuge, as well as more secular notions of status and permanence, Irish Presbyterians funded the erection of over 300 manses between 1853 and 93. But as a review of biographical, denominational and genealogical records will show, this process of providing homes fit for ministers could become a source of conflict and grievance within the congregational ‘family’, reflecting evolving and often divergent views about the physical, and by extension the spiritual, location of the minister and his family to the life and work of the church.
Mary Clare Martin, ‘Religious practice, emotion and domestic space within the London hinterland, 1740-1870’
Family religion has frequently been presented as representing patriarchy, especially in the period 1740-1870, as demonstrated by the image of the whole household, children, family members and servants kneeling at prayer before the patriarch. It has also been claimed that family prayers was in decline by the end of the nineteenth century, thus exemplifying the increased importance of the mother’s role and marginalisation of the father.
Through an analysis of the spaces within which domestic religious practice occurred, in this study of professional and mercantile families resident in the London hinterland, this paper will examine the relationship between space, domestic religion and emotional relationships. For example, a description of a father sitting next to a child on the sofa reading a comforting text after a young brother’s death in 1861 contrasts with the more formal image described above. It will be argued that, far from being patriarchal and remote, family worship could be structured round children’s needs, and occur in a variety of household spaces, some child-initiated. An analysis, not only of the rooms in use, but how space was used within those rooms, and out of doors, will serve to develop the rethinking of the relationship between gender, “age”, religion and domestic space in this period.
Lucinda Matthews-Jones, ‘Unhomely religious households in working-class memoirs’
Religious households were also unhomely places, especially if residents did not adhere to the religious principles set out by their families. Alison Blunt and Ann Varley have argued that domestic inclusion and exclusion depends on ‘class, age, sexuality and ‘race’’. This paper will demonstrate that religion can be added to that list. A small but significant number of male working-class memoirists in the John Burnett collection confirm John Tosh’s argument that middle-class men, like Samuel Butler and Edward Carpenter, rejected their familial homes when they clashed with the ‘character traits’ of the patriarch (Tosh: 1997, 183). Such a reading can be extended to working-class homes, where religion was also at the heart of nineteenth-century ideas of patriarchal domesticity. Arthur F. Goffin and Benjamin Taylor’s autobiographical writings reveal that religious domesticity was rejected by men not necessarily because they themselves were adverse to religion, but because they differed from their family’s religious practices and beliefs.
Session 3 Material Religion
Laura Cuch, ‘Spiritual Flavours: Intersections between art, geographies of domestic religion and material culture’ includes a 5 minute film screening.
In this paper I will present aspects of the project Spiritual Flavours, which is a collaborative arts project resulting in a 'multi-faith' cookery photo book and a short film. This project forms part of my practice-led doctoral research, where I use photography and film to comparatively explore the relationship between home, religious practices and material culture of seven different faith communities in the locality of Ealing, in West London. These include a Synagogue, a Sri Lankan Hindu Temple, a mosque, a Sikh gurdwara, an Anglican church, a multicultural Roman Catholic Church and an ethnically diverse Pentecostal church. Through interviews and cooking sessions, members of the different faith communities contribute recipes that they relate to their spirituality and religious practices.
In this paper I would like to present the film, which interweaves biographical narratives and spiritual accounts from Betty, Aziz and Ossie (who belong to a Catholic church, a Mosque and a liberal Synagogue, respectively) with the experiences of cooking in their homes. The chosen recipes thread the narratives of past, present and future spirituality, aspirations and everyday life. The commonalities and differences between them are expressed through visual and sonic synchronies and asynchronies; and a variety of visual materials and formats make visible the nature of the film as a research process. At the end, Betty, Aziz and Ossie meet, cook and eat together.
Drawing on literatures including geographies of home, material culture and material and everyday religion, I explore the significance of the relationship between food, faith and home. Here, I reflect on the experience of paying attention to affective relationships with food, as a vehicle to explore ideas about inheritance, tradition and belief. Following this, I also reflect on how visual arts practice is particularly relevant for the study of material, embodied and affective religious experiences.
This research is part of the AHRC project 'Making Suburban Faith'.
Brian H. Murray, ‘Idolatry at Home: Representing Pagan Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century Britain’
Advocates of the ‘material turn’ in religious history have found much to occupy them on the cluttered mantelpiece of nineteenth-century religious life – from the polychrome and plaster
of the Gothic Revival to the prayer books, pamphlets and porcelain of pious Dissenters. As scholars like Dominic Janes have illustrated, however, the proliferation of religious things also engendered (and reignited) anxieties about the lure of idolatry. In this paper, I want to approach this topic obliquely, not by addressing points of tension between evangelical and catholic tendencies, but by exploring some of the ways in which British Christians of all denominations encountered some varieties of pagan experience. In the words of a popular imperial hymn, Britons might well lament that the ‘heathen in his blindness’ still bowed ‘down to wood and stone’, but when they turned to the religions of Ancient Greece and Rome things were more complicated. As a product of the Hellenic ‘golden age’ and a great Classical empire, Greco-Roman paganism was less easily dismissed as monstrous superstition or hollow mummery. With the rise of Anglo-European aestheticism, we see a fashionable countercultural embrace of the rites and rituals of Greece and Rome. But decades before this, the pious historical novels of the 1850s had already invited readers to meditate on the clash between the refined and decadent paganism of late antiquity and an emergent primitive Christianity.
My paper will compare scenes of ritual, sacrifice, and ‘lived religion’ in novels by a diverse range of clergy, apologists and aesthetes (including Charles Kingsley, Nicholas Wiseman, John Henry Newman, and Walter Pater). My paper will suggest that the domestic was the sphere in which Victorian readers encountered Greco-Roman religion in its most palatable form. Victorian interest in the Greco-Roman veneration of familial household gods (lares and penates) was further stoked by the sensational rediscovery of provincial Roman domesticity at sites like Pompeii. Such discoveries were restaged for curious suburbanites at venues like the Crystal Palace, Sydenham, where, in 1853, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert hosted the King of the Belgians beneath a wall painting of ‘Ceres sitting on his throne’.
Alana Harris (KCL), ‘“Jesus, I trust in you”: the Divine Mercy devotion and its diasporic practice in everyday Catholic Homes’
In 1931 a young and poorly educated Polish nun, Sister Maria Faustina Kowalska, had a series of visions of Christ. Appearing as the Divine Mercy, with two rays radiating from His heart, the vision repeatedly instructed the now canonised Faustina to have a devotional image painted and to institute a series of prayers based on the rosary.
This paper explores the visual, material and temporal practices associated with this now immensely popular, transnational cult to the Merciful Heart of Jesus. Drawing upon oral history interviews with recent migrants to London, it excavates the ways in which the embodied and gendered intercessory strategies employed within this important strand of contemporary Catholic spirituality parallel, but also extend upon, the well-established seventeenth devotional of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
This study also draws upon Catherine Bell’s classic study of religious ritual to parse this everyday Catholic ‘grammar of devotion’ by mapping the ways in which a range of sacramental and devotional objects are used together and acquire meaning in relation to one another. Through exploring the domestic, spatial settings in which Divine Mercy icons, statues, rosary chaplets and prayer booklets are used, and their juxtaposition and utilisation with crucifixes, Marian statues, the bible, holy water, rosary beads and votive candles, it provides a ‘thick description’ of the material objects and ritual strategies available to contemporary Catholics to express their trust in an incarnational Christianity and to find, after Mircae Eliade, ‘sacred centres in profane spaces’.
Sessions 4 Rituals of domestic faith
Susan Woodall, “Lo, there was I born”: experiencing religion in the ‘Homes of Mercy’
Writing to the Matron of the Cambridge Female Refuge in 1846 from her employment in service, former inmate Elizabeth recalled the words of a prayer said during her time in the institution. Previously annoyed at ‘people making such a fuss about it’, Elizabeth’s experience of religion in the institutional ‘home’ appears to have marked the beginning of her spiritual rebirth.
Drawing on the records of two lay institutions for the reform of so-called ‘fallen’ women, this paper will examine how inmates experienced religious instruction within the institution from lady visitors, chaplains and through regular ‘family prayers’. By drawing on the material practices of religion within the institutional space, it will argue that the founders of these institutions saw religious teaching and observance as central to their ‘transformational’ purpose. Within the construct of the institutional ‘home’, regular religious instruction provided a framework by which inmates could keep to the ‘path of virtue’ once outside it.
Existing studies of nineteenth-century reform institutions for so-called ‘fallen’ women have rightly critiqued their disciplinary purpose and process as punitive, imposing middle-class moral, social and religious values on disempowered working-class women. My research seeks to complicate such readings by looking inside these institutions to explore the relationship between their material environment and the lived experience of reform. Inmates experienced religion through a series of domestic, material and personal encounters in the institutional setting. The extent to which these encounters were positive is a moot point; while Elizabeth hoped that the instruction she received would ‘never be forgotten by me’, for others, the combined strain of hard physical work, living in close confines and required religious observance was intolerable. The additional weekly visit outside the confines of the ‘home’ to the parish church gave some licence to express their own agency in unexpected ways.
Robert Dickins ‘Light the Home: Communicating Spiritualist Ritual’
This paper explores the role communication techniques, specifically automatic writing, takes in mediating home, family, and the spirit world in late Victorian spiritualism. It pays particular attention to the ritualistic aspects of communication in reconfiguring familial and domestic relationships through the elaboration and investigation of ‘spirit identity.’ The analysis will focus on the work of spiritualist William Stainton Moses, and ‘the case of Edina’ which appeared in the periodical Light whilst Moses was editor.
Emily Vine, ‘The deathbed and religious minority homes in London, c1690-1800’
In late seventeenth and eighteenth-century London most ‘natural’ deaths – that is, deaths which followed a period of sickness, rather than those caused by violence, accidental injury or suicide - took place in the home. Vanessa Harding, in a recent study of death in Anglican households in early modern London, has argued that priests or ministers did not always attend the dying in their homes, and that conversation around the deathbed was often largely secular. This paper challenges the previous emphasis upon Anglican domestic devotion, and considers evidence of deathbed rituals as practised by previously neglected religious minority communities. It contests the claim that dying in early modern London was a largely secular
affair, and demonstrates that for Catholic, Jewish and Protestant nonconformist communities, the home as the place of dying was a particularly significant site of religious expression.
This paper uses the site of the deathbed, and sources which describe deathbed rituals, as a point of access into the otherwise relative privacy of the home. For religious minorities, a domestic setting and the urgency of approaching death perhaps allowed for a final confessional honesty, for individuals to express beliefs they may otherwise have concealed in more public and less final circumstances. Dying was an event which often required outside assistance within the home itself, and when news of what had happened within the home was shared with the wider religious community. Sources such as letters and printed funeral sermons transmitted details of the final sickness to those not present in the home, and dictated how the events of the deathbed were presented, subsequently controlling access into the closed space of the home itself. Distinct rituals of dying helped religious minority communities define themselves against the mainstream Anglican tradition as well as against other faiths, and controlling the access to the domestic space around the deathbed helped strengthen the formation of distinct religious identities.
Biographies
Oliver Betts is a British urban historian. He completed a PhD on working-class domesticity at the University of York. He is currently a research fellow based at the National Railway Museum.
Email: [email protected] Twitter: @DrOliBetts
Laura Cuch is a documentary and fine art photographer. She completed an MA in Photography and Urban Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2006 and currently teaches on the Goldsmiths based International Urban Photography Summer School (iUPSS) and on the MA Photography and Urban Cultures. She is also a visiting researcher in the Centre for Urban and Community Research in the Sociology department at Goldsmiths.
Email: [email protected]
Making Suburban Faith project website: http://www.makingsuburbanfaith.org/
Twitter: @suburbanfaith
Personal website: http://www.lauracuch.com
Robert Dickins is a PhD Student at QMUL where he has a CDP with Geffrye Museum examining ‘New Spiritualities and Domestic Life c.1855-1939’.
Email: [email protected] Twitter: @RobertDickins
Daniel Grey is a social, cultural, legal and medical history of Britain and India during the 19th and 20th centuries at . He is currently preparing book Degrees of Guilt: Infanticide in England 1860-1960 for Liverpool University. Most recently, he has published research in history Workshop Journal, Media History, Journal of Victorian Culture and Gender & History.
Email: [email protected] Twitter:@djrgrey
Alana Harris is a Lecturer in Modern British History at King's College London. Her research interets span the transnational history of Catholicism, gender and sexuality, pilgrimage and material culture. She has published extensively on Catholic saints and devotional cultures and recent books include Faith in the Family: A Lived Religious History of English Catholicism (2013), Love and Romance in Britain (2014) [co-edited with Timothy
Willem Jones] and Rescripting Religion in the City: Migration and Religious Identity in the Modern Metropolis (2014) [co-edited with Jane Garnett].
Email: [email protected] Twitter: @DrAlanaGHarris
Janice Holmes is a Senior Lecturer at The Open University. Her research interests are in the social history of religion, in particular, evangelical Protestantism in nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain and Ireland. She has written on revivalism, female preaching and the interconnections between street preaching and sectarian violence. Now her interests have moved towards domestic evangelism and public history. Her most recent research includes the deaconess movement in the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, vernacular religious buildings in Ulster and a biography of the Rev. Hugh Hanna.
Email: [email protected]
Mary Clare Martin is a Principal Lecturer and Research Lead at University of Greenwich’s Department of Education and Community Studies. She is a social historian with a focus on the history of children. She is currently the Head of the Centre for the Study of Play and Recreation.
Email: [email protected]
Lucinda Matthews-Jones is a Senior Lecturer in History at Liverpool John Moores University. Her research explores the roles of domesticity, gender and class in the British university settlement movement. As part of this, she is currently completing her first monograph Settling: Domesticity, Class and Urban Philanthropy in the British University Settlement Movement. Recent publications include Material Religion in Modern Britain: The Spirit of Things (2015) with Timothy W. Jones. Articles in Journal of Victorian Culture and forthcoming in Cultural and Social History (2016) and Historical Journal (2017).
Email: [email protected] Twitter: @luciejones83
Brian H. Murray is a Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin and Oxford before completing his PhD at King’s in 2011. From 2012 to 2015, Brian was Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Cambridge, where he worked with ten other scholars on a collaborative European Research Council-funded project on ‘The Bible and Antiquity in Nineteenth Century Culture’. He returned to King’s as Lecturer in Ninteenth-Century Literature in 2015.
Email: [email protected] Twitter: @BrianHMur
Emily Vine is an AHRC funded PhD student working on a Collaborative Doctoral Award between Queen Mary University of London and the Geffrye Museum of the Home. In August 2015 she completed a Masters in the History of Medicine at the University of Exeter, which was fully funded by a Wellcome Trust Masters’ award. She also studied for a BA in History at the University of Exeter, graduating with First Class Honours in 2014.
Her PhD research investigates ‘Religion and the urban home in London, 1600-1800’ and involves a cross-disciplinary approach, working with both the History and English departments at QMUL. She has presented papers at the ‘Regional Medical Humanities’ conference at Bristol University in May 2014, the ‘Postgraduate Medical Humanities’ conference at the University of Exeter in July 2015, and has had a paper accepted for the forthcoming ‘Religion and Medicine’ conference at Birkbeck University in July 2016.
Email: [email protected]
Susan Woodall works and teaches for the Open University. Her MA dissertation explored the origins and purpose of the Cambridge Female Refuge from which grew a broader PhD project, ‘Inside the Homes of Mercy: the moral, the material and the domestic in nineteenth-century reform institutions for ‘fallen’ women’. Her study examines the relationship between the disciplinary purpose and material environment of these institutions and by drawing on the material culture of two lay female ‘Homes’ and two Anglican penitentiaries, aims to achieve a more nuanced understanding of the lived experience of reform for staff and inmates.
Email: [email protected]
