Abstract
Over the nineteenth century, hundreds of charitable residential institutions for so-called fallen women were established by voluntary action across England. Their purpose was the moral rehabilitation of sexually experienced but unmarried women who were considered morally wayward. Through a regime of laundry, sewing and household work alongside a programme of religious observance and instruction in literacy lasting around two years, women who stayed the course were afterwards usually placed in domestic service or went home. Nineteenth-century institutions of this kind were variously called Refuge, Magdalen(e) Asylum, Home of Mercy or House of Mercy. The names of these institutions suggested places of safety and redemption, encapsulating the ways in which their managers understood and represented their work to the wider world.
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Notes
- 1.
Published in London by the Reformatory and Refuge Union in 1912, pages 98 to 127 of The Classified List of Child-Saving Institutions count around 324 English charitable reform institutions catering for women and girls across the Channel Islands, London and the English provinces. The term ‘fallen’ is specified in the remit of 230 of them, but the number is likely to have been higher. As all institutions on the Classified List were described as Magdalen institutions, the fallen state will have been taken for granted.
- 2.
The term ‘Refuge’ as applied to institutions for the moral reform of fallen women like the Cambridge Female Refuge should not be confused with statutory penal Refuge institutions for female convicts. Established from around the 1850s, women prisoners could be transferred from prison to all-female institutions such as the Fulham Refuge (1856) for an additional term of imprisonment or as part of a graduated release.
- 3.
Cambridge Independent Press, 16 October 1841, p.1.
- 4.
Cambridge Female Refuge (CFR) 27 September 1841.
- 5.
Joy Frith, ‘Pseudonuns: Anglican Sisterhoods and the Politics of Victorian Identity’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Queen’s University, Canada, 2004) and ‘Accounting for Souls: Anglican Sisters and the Economies of Moral Reform in England’ in Dijck, Maarten Van, and others, eds, The Economics of Providence: Management, Finance and Patrimony of Religious Orders and Congregations in Europe, 1733–1931 (Leuven: Leuven University Press), 2013, pp.185–204.
- 6.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, translated from the French by Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p.143.
- 7.
CFR 19 October 1841.
- 8.
By contrast, Lynda Nead argues that the term ‘prostitute’ was frequently used critically in national discourse to emphasise the ‘transactional and public’ nature of sex work. See Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1998), p.96. ‘Prostitution’ was the word used in contemporary sources and appears here for that reason. ‘Sex work’ is the much less judgemental term we use today.
- 9.
Philippa Levine, ‘Rough Usage: Prostitution, Law and the Social Historian’ in Rethinking Social History: English Society 1570–1920 and its Interpretation ed. by Adrian Wilson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp.266–292 (p.7).
- 10.
See Catherine Lee, Policing Prostitution: Deviance, Surveillance and Morality 1856–1886 (Pickering & Chatto: London, 2013), p.22.
- 11.
Religion in Victorian Britain Vol.2 Controversies ed. by Gerald Parsons (Manchester: Manchester University Press in association with The Open University, c.1998) p.6.
- 12.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: an Introduction trans. by Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), Martha Vicinus, ‘Sexuality and Power: A Review of Current Work in the History of Sexuality’, Feminist Studies 8 (1982), 132–156, Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: the Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800 (London: Longman, 1989) and Philip Howell, ‘Foucault, Sexuality, Geography’ in Space, Knowledge, Power: Foucault and Geography ed. by Jeremy Crampton and Stuart Elden (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp.291–315. For colonial regulation, see Geographies of Regulation: Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth -Century Britain and the Empire ed. by Philip Howell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). On the sanctity of the private home and the immorality of the public street, see Eric Bristow, Vice and Vigilance: Purity Movements in Britain Since 1700 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1977), Tony Henderson, Disorderly Women in Eighteenth-Century London: Prostitution and Control in the Metropolis, 1730–1830 ((London: Longman, 1999), Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) and City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (London: Virago,1992). On the Contagious Diseases Acts, see Judith Walkowitz and Daniel Walkowitz, ‘“We are not beasts of the field”: prostitution and the Poor in Plymouth and Southampton under the Contagious Diseases Acts’, Feminist Studies, 1 (1973), 73–106 and Catherine Lee, Policing Prostitution. See also Frank Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980).
- 13.
Linda Mahood, The Magdalenes: Prostitution in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1990). Margaret DeLacy highlights the limitations of reading prisons solely as tools of social control. See Prison Reform in Lancashire, 1700–1850: a Study in Local Administration (Manchester: The Chetham Society, 1986), p.6.
- 14.
Frances Finnegan, Poverty and Prostitution, a Study of Victorian Prostitutes in York (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp.164–211. See also Laura Harrison (2019) ‘The streets have been watched regularly’: the York Penitentiary Society, Young Working-Class Women, and the regulation of behaviour in the public spaces of York, c. 1845–1919, Women’s History Review, 28, 457–478.
- 15.
See Paula Bartley, Prostitution Prevention and Reform in England 1860–1914 (London: Routledge, 2000).
- 16.
Jowita Thor, ‘Religious and Industrial Education in the Nineteenth-Century Magdalene Asylums in Scotland’, Studies in Church History 55 (2019), 347–362.
- 17.
Frances Finnegan, Do Penance or Perish (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), Rebecca Lea McCarthy, Origins of the Magdalene Laundries: an Analytical History (Jefferson, North Carolina; London: McFarland and Company, 2010), pp.181–182; James M. Smith, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). See also Alana Barton, Fragile Moralities and Dangerous Sexualities: Two Centuries of Semi-Penal Institutionalisation for Women (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). See the Justice for Magdalenes campaign at http://jfmresearch.com.
- 18.
For example, Jacinta Prunty, Our Lady of Charity. On the importance of ensuring that the stories of women who experienced these institutions are remembered and remain visible in Irish history, see Natalie Sebbane, Memorialising the Magdalene Laundries: from Story to History (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2021).
- 19.
Moritz Kaiser suggests that with twenty-six Peers and two MPs as members, the Church Penitentiary Association wielded considerable power to influence the wording and extent of legislation for the inspection of charitable laundries from 1895 in ‘Anglican Magdalen Laundries and the British State, 1850–1914’, a paper given at the Social History Society Conference at the University of Lincoln, 12 June 2019.
- 20.
Anna Davin notes the same assumption of rightness by medical and social work professionals in connection with working-class domestic practices. See Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London 1870–1914 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996), p.153.
- 21.
M.J.D. Roberts, Making English Morals: Voluntary Association and Moral Reform in England, 1787–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p.2.
- 22.
Ibid.
- 23.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by Alan Sheridan (London: Allen Lane, 1977), p.125.
- 24.
Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates, with a new introduction by William. B. Helmreich (New Brunswick, NJ; London: Aldane Transaction, 2007), p.12.
- 25.
Margaret DeLacy, Prison Reform in Lancashire, 1700–1850: a Study in Local Administration (Manchester: The Chetham Society, 1986), p.7. See also Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in Working-Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp.78–84.
- 26.
Michael Ignatieff, ‘Total Institutions and Working Classes: a Review Essay’, History Workshop, 15 (1983), 167–173 (p.171).
- 27.
Rebecca Wynter, ‘“Diseased Vessels and Punished Bodies”: a Study of Material Culture and Control in Staffordshire County Gaol and Lunatic Asylum, c.1793–1866’ (unpublished doctoral thesis: University of Birmingham, 2007), p.3.
- 28.
Ibid., p.262, p.330. Margaret DeLacy also exposes the limitations of reading prisons solely as tools of social control in Prison Reform in Lancashire, 1700–1850: a Study in Local Administration (Manchester: The Chetham Society, 1986), p.6.
- 29.
Rosalind Crone, Illiterate Inmates: Educating Criminals in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), p.209.
- 30.
Francis M.L. Thompson, ‘Social Control in Victorian Britain’, The Economic History Review, 34 (1981), 189–208 (p.193). Gertrude Himmelfarb also urges crediting working-class people with the ability to act in their own interests. See The De-Moralization of Society: from Victorian Values to Modern Values (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), p.30. Similarly, whilst those leading social control activities could be cynical and manipulative, others could be driven by ‘a genuine, even a burning, passion for their cause’. See A.P. Donajgrodzki ed., Social Control in Nineteenth Century Britain ed.by (London: Croom Helm, 1977), p.15.
- 31.
Frances Finnegan, Poverty and Prostitution, pp.209–210; Maria Luddy, Prostitution and Irish Society, 1800–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) p.239.
- 32.
Jowita Thor, ‘Religious and Industrial Education in the Nineteenth-Century Magdalene Asylums in Scotland’, Studies in Church History, 55 (2013), 347–362, p.348.
- 33.
Graham Mooney, Jonathan Reinarz, Permeable Walls: Historical Perspectives on Hospital and Asylum Visiting, (Amsterdam, Brill: 2009), p.8.
- 34.
Sasha Handley, Rohan McWilliam, and Lucy Noakes eds., New Directions in Social and Cultural History, (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018), p.xvi.
- 35.
Maria Luddy, Prostitution and Irish Society, p.92.
- 36.
Lynn Hollen Lees The Solidarities of Strangers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p.107.
- 37.
9 Geo III 1768. Robert Dingley, Proposals for Establishing a Public Place of Reception for Penitent Prostitutes (London, 1758), pp.3–4 quoted in Stanley Nash, ‘Prostitution and Charity: The Magdalen Hospital, A Case Study’, Journal of Social History, 17 (1984), 617–628, p.617.
- 38.
Miles Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity: London’s Geographies, 1680–1780 (New York: The Guilford Press, 1998), pp.52–53.
- 39.
Alyson Brown sets out the four principles in Foucault’s analysis of separation: ‘enclosure’, ‘partitioning’, ‘functional sites’ and ‘rank’. See English Society and the Prison: Time, Culture and Politics in the Development of the Modern Prison, 1850–1920, (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003), p.15.
- 40.
Louise Hide, Gender and Class in English Asylums, 1890–1814 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p.93.
- 41.
Jane Hamlett, At Home in the Institution: Material Life in Asylums, Lodging Houses and Schools in Victorian and Edwardian England. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp.6–7.
- 42.
Sarah Tarlow, The Archaeology of Improvement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p.4. See also Eleanor Conlin Casella, The Archaeology of Institutional Confinement (Florida: University Press of Florida, 2007).
- 43.
Lu Ann De Cunzo ‘Reform, Respite, Ritual’: an Archaeology of Institutions: the Magdalen Society of Philadelphia, 1800–1850’, Historical Archaeology, 29 (1995), 1–168, and On Reforming the “Fallen” and Beyond: Transforming Continuity at the Magdalen Society of Philadelphia, 1845–1916’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 5 (2001), 19–43, p.73.
- 44.
Eleanor Conlin Casella, The Archaeology, p.75, emphasis original.
- 45.
Jacinta Prunty, The monasteries, magdalen asylums and reformatory schools of Our Lady of Charity in Ireland, 1853–1973 (Columba Press, 2017); Frances Finnegan Do Penance or Perish: Magdalen Asylums in Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), between pp.128 and 129.
- 46.
Karen Harvey, ed. History and Material Culture: a Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009) p.7, p.13. See also Frank Trentman ‘Materiality in the Future of History: Things, Practices, and Politics’, Journal of British Studies, 48 (2009), 283–307.
- 47.
James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten (New York: Anchor Press Doubleday, 1977), p.160.
- 48.
Hannah Greig, Jane Hamlett and Leonie Hannah, eds, Gender and Material Culture in Britain Since 1600 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p.10.
- 49.
Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway and Sarah Randles, Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions through History, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p.9.
- 50.
Sara Pennell, ‘Mundane Materiality, or, Should Small Things Still be Forgotten?’ in Karen Harvey, ed. History and Material Culture, pp.173–191 (p.179).
- 51.
Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850, rev. edn (London: Routledge, 2002); Luxury in the Eighteenth Century ed. by Maxine Berg (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America 1700–1830, ed. by John Styles and Amanda Vickery (The Yale Center for British Art, The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2006). Deborah Cohen, Household Gods: the British and their Possessions (London: Yale, 2006).
- 52.
Serena Dyer, ‘State of the Field: Material Culture’, History, 106 (2021), 283–298, p.288.
- 53.
See Joseph Harley, ‘Material Lives of the Poor and Their Strategic Use of the Workhouse during the Final Decades of the English Old Poor Law’, Continuity and Change, 30 (2015), 71–103.
- 54.
Alistair Owens, ‘People and Things on the Move: Domestic Material Culture, Poverty and Mobility in Victorian London’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 20 (2016), 804–827. For an analysis of the dynamics of masculinity, attachment and domestic space through working-class autobiography, see Julie-Marie Strange ‘Fathers at Home: Life Writing and Late-Victorian and Edwardian Plebeian Domestic Masculinities’ in Men at Home, ed.by Rafaella Sarti Gender & History 27 (2015), 703–717. See also Lesley Hoskins, ‘Stories of Work and Home in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, Home Cultures, 8 (2015), 151–170.
- 55.
Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption (Basil Blackwell: Oxford, 1987), p.86.
- 56.
Kathryn Beebe, Angela Davis & Kathryn Gleadle (2012) ‘Introduction: Space, Place and Gendered Identities: feminist history and the spatial turn’, Women’s History Review, 21, 523–532, p.528.
- 57.
Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), p.168.
- 58.
Jane Hamlett, At Home, p.4. For the link between material culture and ‘moral treatment’, in private asylums, see Barry Edginton, ‘Moral Architecture: the Influence of the York Retreat on Asylum Design’ Health and Place, 3 (1997), 91–99 (p.92). On the therapeutic ‘rational ordering’ of domestic furnishings in asylum space, see Mary Guyatt, ‘A Semblance of Home: Mental Asylum Interiors, 1880–1914’, in Interior Design and Identity ed.by Susie McKellar and Penny Sparke (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 48–71 (p.49). For an analysis of how space and material culture were constructed in terms of gender, see Louise Hide, Gender and Class in English Asylums, 1890–1914 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Chris Philo notes that communal spaces allowed patients to associate, but also facilitated surveillance. See ‘“Enough to Drive one Mad”: the Organisation of Space in Nineteenth-Century Lunatic Asylums’ in Jennifer Wolch and Michael Dear, The Power of Geography: How Territory Shapes Social Life (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989) 258–290 (p.282). On material culture as an embodied experience of power relations, see Eleanor Conlin Casella, The Archaeology of Institutional Confinement (Florida: University Press of Florida, 2007), p.3.
- 59.
Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics, 16 (1986), pp.22–27.
- 60.
Claudia Soares, ‘A Permanent Environment of Brightness, Warmth, and “Homeliness”’: Domesticity and Authority in a Victorian Children’s Institution, Journal of Victorian Culture, 23 (2018) 1–24 (pp.7–10).
- 61.
See ‘Ground Rules and Social Maps for Women’ in Women and Space, ed. by Shirley Ardener, (Oxford; Providence RI: Berg, 1993), pp.1–30 (p.3).
- 62.
Residential Institutions in Britain 1725–1970: Inmates and Environments ed. by Jane Hamlett, Lesley Hoskins and Rebecca Preston (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013), p.8.
- 63.
Jane Hamlett, At Home, p.76. See also Kathryne Beebe, Angela Davis and Kathryn Gleadle, ‘Introduction: ‘Space, Place and Gendered Identities: Feminist History and the Spatial Turn’, Women’s History Review 4 (2012), 523–532.
- 64.
William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p.125.
- 65.
Barbara H. Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p.3.
- 66.
Helen Rogers argues that bonds between prisoners in Great Yarmouth and Christian visitor Sarah Martin endured after release in ‘Kindness and Reciprocity: Liberated Prisoners and Christian Charity in Early Nineteenth-Century England’, Journal of Social History 47 (2014), 721–745, p.722. See also Laura Mair, ‘“Give my Love”: Community and Companionship among Former Ragged School Scholars’, Family and Community History, 21 (2018), 166–179.
- 67.
Keith Snell reminds us that in the early nineteenth century, ‘friends’ could include close family, lovers or seducers. See ‘Belonging and Community: Understandings of ‘Home’ and ‘Friends’ among the English Poor, 1750–1850’, Economic History Review, 63 (2012), 1–25. p.13.
- 68.
Sources for the History of Emotions: a Guide, ed.by Katie Barclay, Sharon Crozier de Rosa and Peter N. Stearns, (Taylor and Francis), 2020, p.160.
- 69.
Ibid.,p.160.
- 70.
On the importance of literacy skills as a route to reading the Bible in nineteenth-century prison education, see Rosalind Crone, Illiterate Inmates, pp.124–125.
- 71.
On historians’ reluctance to engage with religion, see Lucy Cory Allen, ‘Enchanting the Field: Where Should the History of Victorian Religion and Belief go from Here?’ Cultural and Social History, 18 (2021), 481–500, pp.483–484.
- 72.
Frances Finnegan, Poverty and Prostitution, p.174. A notable exception in relation to the impact of religious texts studied in prisons is Helen Rodgers’ article ‘The Way to Jerusalem: Reading, Writing and Reform in an Early Victorian Gaol’, Past and Present, 205 (2011), 71–104.
- 73.
Steven Ruggles argues for exploring ‘what asylums actually did, rather than just what they said they were doing’ in ‘Fallen Women: The Inmates of the Magdalen Society Asylum of Philadelphia, 1836–1908’, Journal of Social History, 16 (1983), 65–82 (p.65). See also Margaret DeLacy, Prison Reform, p.11 and Richard Ireland, A Want of Good Order and Discipline: Rules, Discretion and the Victorian Prison, (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007), p.10.
- 74.
Megan Webber ‘Troubling Agency: Agency and Charity in Early Nineteenth-Century London’, Historical Research, 91 (2018), 116–136 (pp.117–120). Lynn M. Thomas argues that historians should be more attentive to the different motivations behind agency exerted by subjugated groups which include ‘rational calculation’ and ‘struggles to get by’. See ‘Historicising Agency’, Gender & History, 28 (2016), 334–339, p.355.
- 75.
Steven A. King and Peter Jones, ‘Fragments of Fury?: Lunacy, Agency, and Contestation in the Great Yarmouth Workhouse, 1890s to 1900s’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History L1 (2020), 235–265, p.239.
- 76.
Alyson Brown, English Society and the Prison, p.73. David Englander observes the same engagement between paupers and workhouse authorities. See Poverty and Poor Law Reform in Britain: from Chadwick to Booth, 1834–1914, (London: Longman, 1998), p.134.
- 77.
E.P. Thompson notes that early nineteenth-century working-class leisure activities evolved and adapted. As a result of Methodist influence, aggressive sporting activities were replaced by more restrained pastimes such as pigeon-fancying. See The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968) p.451. Gareth Stedman Jones challenges the idea that working-class culture was overwhelmed by middle-class cultural impositions. See Languages of Class, pp.78–79.
- 78.
Anna Davin, Growing Up Poor, p.153. Gareth Stedman Jones notes the different perceptions of respectability of working-class Londoners from the 1870s to around 1900. See ‘Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870–1900: Notes on the Remaking of a Working Class’, Journal of Social History 4 (1974), 460–508 (p.475). On the ways in which working-class people could perform respectability when needed, see Peter Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control 1830–1885 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), p.178.
- 79.
On working-class literacy and political activism, see E.P. Thompson, The Making, pp.781–783.
- 80.
Catherine Lee argues that some women complied with the terms of compulsory registration, because it served their best interests as part of wider ‘individual survival strategies’. See ‘Prostitution and Victorian Society Revisited: the Contagious Diseases Acts in Kent’, Women’s History Review, 21 (2012), 301–316, (p.313) and Policing Prostitution.
- 81.
F.M.L. Thompson, ‘Social Control in Victorian Britain’, The Economic History Review, 34 (1981), 189–208 (p.193).
- 82.
Contemporaries used the word Anglican to describe sisterhoods to counter any suggestion of catholic leanings, but modern historians of these communities use the more accurate term ‘Anglo-Catholic’. ‘House’ or ‘Home’ of Mercy’ were other contemporary terms to describe sisterhood penitentiaries and originated from pre-Reformation monastic communities in which female religious and their charges lived together. See Sherrill Cohen, The Evolution of Women’s Asylums Since 1500: from Refuges for Ex-Prostitutes to Shelters for Battered Women (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
- 83.
See Geoffrey Rowell, The Vision Glorious, (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1991), John Shelton Reed, Glorious Battle: the Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism (Nashville, TE: Vanderbilt University Press, 1996) and Walter L. Arnstein, Protestant Versus Catholic in Mid-Victorian England: Mr. Newdegate and the Nuns (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982).
- 84.
For an account of the establishment of male and female religious communities in this period, see Michael Hill, The Religious Order: a Study of Virtuoso Religion and its Legitimation in the Nineteenth-Century Church of England (London: Heinemann, 1973), Arthur M. Allchin, The Silent Rebellion: Anglican Religious Communities 1845–1900 (London: SCM Press, 1958), Peter Anson, The Call of the Cloister rev. edn (London: SPCK, 1964).
- 85.
Susan Mumm, ‘“Not Worse than Other Girls”: The Convent-Based Rehabilitation of Fallen Women in Victorian Britain’, Journal of Social History 29 (1996), pp.528–529.
- 86.
Some Anglican sisterhoods were more distinctly Catholic in their liturgical practice than others. See René. Kollar, A Foreign and Wicked Institution? The Campaign Against Convents in Victorian England (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2011) and Walter L. Arnstein, Protestant Versus Catholic in Mid-Victorian England: Mr. Newdegate and the Nuns (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982).
- 87.
John Shelton Reed, Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism (Nashville, TE: Vanderbilt University Press, 1996), p.204.
- 88.
Glenn Adamson, ‘The Case of the Missing Footstool: Reading the Absent Object’ in History and Material Culture, pp.192–207, (p.192).
- 89.
The scope of surviving records defines the period of study; the earliest admission records date from 1838, the first year of operation at the Cambridge Refuge, with the latest for Lincoln ending in 1910.
- 90.
Julie-Marie Strange ‘Reading Language as a Historical Source’ in Research Methods for History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), pp.167–183 (p.172).
- 91.
Henry Glassie, Material Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), p.44. See also Joan M. Scott, ‘The Evidence of Experience’ Critical Inquiry, 17 (Summer, 1991), pp.773–797.
- 92.
New Perspectives in British Cultural History, ed. by Ros Crone, David Gange and Katy Jones (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), p.2.
- 93.
Megan Webber, ‘Troubling Agency’, p.125.
- 94.
As the All Hallows Ditchingham records were deposited with the Norfolk Record Office in 2018, all references here are to the catalogue number ACC 2018/37 unless otherwise stated.
- 95.
Sasha Handley et al, New Directions in Social and Cultural History, p.13.
- 96.
Ludmilla Jordanova, The Look of the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p.7.
- 97.
Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2001), p.81.
- 98.
John Styles, ‘Why Material Culture?’, a paper given at the Gerald Aylmer Seminar, 22 February 2013, Institute of Historical Research, London.
- 99.
Serena Dyer, ‘State of the Field: Material Culture’, History, 106 Issue 370 (2021), 283–298, p.285.
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Woodall, S. (2023). Introduction. In: Material Setting and Reform Experience in English Institutions for Fallen Women, 1838-1910. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40571-6_1
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