‘The Virtues of a Drop of Cleansing Water’: domestic work and cleanliness in the British working classes, 1880–1914

This article examines the material culture of British working‐class homes in the late Victorian and Edwardian period, paying particular attention to the issue of cleanliness. Using evidence from social investigations and autobiographies, it asks how cleanliness, both as a material practice and as an idea, was deployed within the working‐class home and its spatial arrangements. The relationship of working‐class and middle‐class ideas of domesticity is examined, with different chronologies of change for subjects of different class backgrounds highlighted. It is proposed that to a certain extent working‐class women found their ‘widening sphere’ within, rather than beyond, domestic life.