Soap and Water

From whitened doorsteps to polished boots, starched pinafores to scrubbed floors, this book offers a compelling insight into how Victorians and Edwardians engaged in the pursuit of cleanliness and the battle against grime in domestic life. It is the first book to uncover how cleanliness and dirt were perceived and understood during a period where they were an overwhelming preoccupation. Using social surveys, advice literature, autobiographies and soap advertisements, Victoria Kelley explores this period of important change and examines how the extreme poverty of many was being interrogated by the official agencies seeking the means to alleviate it. At this time, cleanliness and dirt became part of both a material and a moral landscape, with working-class women and their domestic work scrutinised in particular and, as Jose Harris comments, 'whole worlds of meaning were conveyed by microscopic household practices, such as whether one washed ...in the bathroom or the bedroom, or at the kitchen sink'. Kelley examines the spectacular imagery of cleanliness emerging in the soap brands and advertisements that appeared at the heart of early commercial culture. and offers an important contribution to social and design history and the histories of material culture and gender.