All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor

I’ve just finished writing up a paper on images of Jack Tar between 1760 and 1860. I’ve rather fallen in love with Jack Tar. When my analytical brain was idling, I wondered why his figure appealed to me. After all, he’s often thoughtless, drunk, and womanizing. Perhaps I am following my heritage? My family often lived

Foetus: From the Sensory to the Scan

As a physical state, the stages of pregnancy follow a fairly consistent form. Yet maternal perceptions of pregnancy can vary enormously across time and location. As Barbara Duden comments in Disembodying Women: Perspectives on pregnancy and the Unborn: ‘over time, woman and body do not remain the same’; we cannot feel the same as our

Homes, pets, and places: how Georgian family members stayed in touch through ‘things’

In the past, just as now, family relationships sometimes needed to be maintained across distances. Today Facebook does the job well, with family members staying in touch by posting short comments, and very often sharing photographs of the activities and the loved ones’ material world. These statuses root people in their familiar (sometimes unfamiliar) surroundings, acting

Sorrowful spaces: Mary Robinson and the material culture of emotions

This post combines two of my favourite things: cathedrals, spaces that have beguiled me since childhood, and are profoudly emotional, even for athiests like me, and my massive girl-crush, Mary Robinson, the eighteenth-century author and actress. The two come together in my interest in material culture, memory, and emotions, which began when I was working

‘she drew me for her Valentine’: what was the meaning of love in 18th century England?

What does Valentine’s Day mean for you? Commercialised excess? A symbol of love embodied in hearts, chocolates, teddy bears and flowers? A chance to celebrate physical intimacy (after all, the movie Fifty Shades of Grey opens on 14 February!)? Heart-shaped valentine card at Metropolitan Museum of Art  As I’ve discussed in another blog post, romantic

‘the voice of the house’: telling the intertwined story of material culture and emotions

As a historian of family and gender, I often write in my blog about different emotions. How were various emotions expressed in the past by spouses, parents, and children? How did families forge a sense of lineage and continuity through emotions and memories? And how do my own emotions shape my responses to the lives and events I

Emotional Historians? A review of Andrew Popp’s Entrepreneurial Families

What happens when historians fall in love with their subjects? Love is supposed to make us blind, isn’t it? Does this mean we can’t write ‘objectively’ about the object of our fascination and affection? I am regularly besotted by some of the people I study, from the good (the adorable Northumbrian engraver, Thomas Bewick) to

The role of nostalgia in forging family life

I’ve just had something of a light-bulb moment after reading this report in The Observer ‘Look back in joy: the power of nostalgia’ exploring ongoing research into the role of nostalgia. When researching late Georgian parenting, one of the things that I kept on encountering were people’s memories of their parents and childhood. These recollections

Great ideas for teaching seminars

Last week, in my third week of teaching a third-year module I realised I had only planned seminars based on the students reading primary and secondary source extracts and discussing them in groups and as a class. This was already getting stale and the students no doubt getting bored. Another eight sessions like this was not