Professor Jane Hamlett - Professor of Modern British History

I am a historian of modern British society and culture with a focus on the home, the family and the material and visual world. I have written books about the material world of the nineteenth-century middle-class home and Victorian and Edwardian institutions – and I’m currently working on a research project on the history of pets. I teach Modern British History in the History Department and my specialist courses include ‘Britain on Camera: Photography, Film and British Society 1845-1960,’ and ‘People and Things in Victorian London’.

My first book Material Relations: Families and Domestic Interiors in England 1850-1910, looked at the Victorian home as a site for the creation of family relationships and identities. The book explored marriage, parenting, masters and servants and the experiences of children as well as home decoration and domestic rituals and routines. I have also co-edited special issues on Home and Work and Victorian Women, and most recently the book Gender and Material Culture in Britain from 1660.   

After that I wanted to find out about what happened to ideas of domesticity beyond the home – so I started to investigate the material worlds of residential institutions – where tens of thousands of people lived in the Victorian period.  From 2010-13, I led the ESRC-funded At Home in the Institution Project, examining daily material life in asylums, schools and lodging houses. This was the basis of my second book, At Home in the Institution: Material Life in Asylums, Lodging Houses and Schools in Victorian and Edwardian England. 

More recently I’ve researched the role of animals in British families – and the history of pets in the home. From 2016 to 2019 I led the first major archival survey of the role of pets in British family life, funded by the AHRC. Together with Professor Julie-Marie Strange, I’m now writing a book about the history of pets. Our book tells the story of the powerful emotional investment of British people in their pets –and how human-pet relationships have altered over time. I’m also developing a new project on family photographs and public history.

Taking history outside the academy has been an important part of my work – in 2008 I co-curated ‘Choosing the Chintz’ with the Museum of the Home in Hoxton. In 2014 I worked with the museum again to curate ‘Homes of the Homeless: Seeking Shelter in Victorian London’, based on my institutions project. The exhibition explored Victorian London from the point of view of the very poor and homeless – bringing to life the spaces and places that they encountered, using material objects to recreate their experiences. Visitors were able to try out a ‘coffin bed’ from a Victorian homeless shelter, and to pick oakum – a task that confronted inmates of workhouses and casual wards. Since then I’ve worked with local history organisations and heritage providers – and have collaborated with Surrey History Centre, Hampshire Local Archives, Wandsworth Libraries and Blue Cross.

At RHUL I co-direct the Bedford Centre for the History of Women and Gender and the Centre for the Study of the Body and Material Culture. I am a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Higher Education Academy and a member of the executive committee for the British Association of Victorian Studies. I co-edit the The Journal of Victorian Culture.

I have also contributed to BBC History Magazine and History Today and have appeared on a range of TV and radio programmes including Who Do You Think You Are? and Making History.

More information about my research is available via PURE

Email - Jane.Hamlett@rhul.ac.uk

Twitter - @janehamlett @pethistories

Website - https://pethistories.wordpress.com