Hilary Hinds - A Cultural History of Twin Beds

Series Editors: Victor Buchli and Rosie Cox

This exciting new series responds to the growing interest in the home as an area of research and teaching. Highly interdisciplinary, titles feature contributions from across the social sciences, including anthropology, material culture studies, architecture and design, sociology, gender studies, migration studies and environmental studies. Relevant to undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as researchers, the series will consolidate the home as a field of study.

First published 2019 by Bloomsbury Academic

Published 2020 by Routledge

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Copyright Hilary Hinds, 2019

Hilary Hinds has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.

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For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xvii constitute an extension of this copyright page.

Series design by Clare Turner

Cover image: United Kingdom, Scotland, Glasgow, East End quarter, University of Glasgow, Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, The Mackintosh ( Hemis/Alamy Stock Photo)

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ISBN 13: 978-1-350-04542-2 (hbk)

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Rosie Cox and Victor Buchli

The home is where people are made and undone. As life is increasingly seen as precarious, fluid, mobile and globalized, there is a growing interest in the home: what it is, what it means to various groups of people, how it constitutes them and how it relates to other spheres of life both in the present and in the past. Home is both physical and metaphorical, local and national, a place of belonging and exclusion. It is at the heart of the most seemingly mundane spaces and experiences the site of quotidian activities such as eating, washing, raising children and loving. Yet it is precisely the purportedly banal nature of the home that masks its deep importance for the underlying assumptions that structure social and political life. Home reveals the importance of routine activities, such as consumption, to highly significant and urgent wide-ranging issues and processes such as the maintenance of and challenges to global capitalism and our relationship to the natural environment.

Among academic writers home is increasingly problematized, interrogated and reconsidered. Long understood as an axis of gender inequality, home is also seen as a site; a space of negotiation and resistance as well as oppression and a place where such relationships are undone as well as made. As a topic of study, it is the natural analytical unit for a number of disciplines, with relevance to a wide range of cultural and historical settings. The home is probably one of the few truly universal categories upon which an interdisciplinary programme of research can be conducted and which over recent years has resulted in a distinctive analytical category across disciplines, times and cultures.

This book series offers a space to foster these debates and to move forward our thinking about the home. The books in the series range across the social and historical sciences, drawing out the cross-cutting themes and interrelationships within writings on home and providing us with new perspectives on this intimate space. While our understanding of home is expansive, and open to interrogation, it is not unbounded. In honing our understandings of what home is, this series aims to disturb and it goes beyond the domestic, including sites and states of dispossession and homelessness and experiences of the unhomely.

I am grateful for financial support received for this project. The Wellcome Trust generously funded both a years research leave and Open Access for this book. Lancaster University gave me two periods of sabbatical leave to work on the book as well as granting me, via the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Research and Enterprise Fund, financial support for visits to libraries and archives.

I also appreciate the help given by staff from the following libraries and archives: Lancaster University Library; the Archive of Art and Design and the Library of Art, Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the British Library; the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture (MoDA), University of Middlesex; the Geffrye Museum, London; the City of Birmingham Library; and the Mass-Observation Archive, University of Sussex Library. I am grateful too to Myers Comfortable Beds for allowing me to spend an afternoon looking at the archive of their catalogues.

I have benefited greatly from discussions following talks on the project given at many events during the research for and writing of this book, and I thank all the many people who showed interest and offered ideas along the way. In particular, I am grateful to the convenors of the 20s30s Network Elizabeth Darling, Richard Hornsey and Matt Houlbrook whose events have been endlessly illuminating and whose company has been an unfailing pleasure. Friends, colleagues, acquaintances and strangers have become a much appreciated de facto team of scouts, commentators and facilitators, sending me examples of twin beds glimpsed in films and novels, helping me trace elusive references and reading earlier chapter drafts. Thanks go in particular to Lucy Adlington, Amanda Armstrong, Caroline Beven, Barbara Burman, Julie Crawford, Anne Cronin, Rosemary Deller, Carole DeSanti, Laura Doan, Richard Dyer, Kamilla Elliott, Gene Gable, Jo Gill, Michael Greaney, Jane Hamlett, Lisa Henderson, Clare Langhamer, Liz Oakley-Brown, Corinna Peniston-Bird, Lynne Pearce, Kathryn Perry, Garrett Sullivan, Penny Summerfield, James Taylor, Meg Twycross and Pamela Wojcik. Claire McGann provided indispensable and meticulous research assistance in preparing the images for publication.