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Including analyses of both canonical and lesser-known Victorian authors,Architectural Identitiesconnects the physical construction of the home with the symbolic construction of middle-class identities.

Victorian \"hidden mother\" photographs are portraits of babies in which adult figures are draped with textiles, blocked with furniture, tucked behind a mat, orotherwise (often ineffectively) obscured. Fascination with them habitually turns on their presumed erasure of nineteenth-century women's labor; however, modern assumptions about the production of these photos have shaped consumption of them. This essay locates these images within multiple contexts: the technologies of their production, growingsentimental ideals of middle-class motherhood, and the ways that carework and its cultural (in)visibilities varied widely by gender, race, and class in the period. Arguing thatthe mother figures' persistent presence (not hiddenness) is fundamental to these photographs, this essay makes a case for reading them as revealing intimacies and documenting tenderness rather than evincing erasures.

Photography may seem primarily a technology of image-making, but it was in fact a powerful mode of meaning-making in the nineteenth century, and its operation as such was actively under negotiation from its invention. This essay examines the photograph's status as both documentary object and artistic expression, drawing on examples including journalistic, political, and familial uses of the medium as well as the forms of entertainment it provided. As a force of knowledge production—whether helping consolidate emerging sentimental ideals of family relations, forwarding anthropological understandings of the world, or supporting the work of spiritualists claiming to commune with the dead—photography was used to clarify and shape people's ideas about phenomena they did not understand and often otherwise could not see. As such, it became a vital infrastructure for the transmission of culture and the consolidation of national identity.

Victorian \"hidden mother\" photographs are portraits of babies in which adult figures are draped with textiles, blocked with furniture, tucked behind a mat, orotherwise (often ineffectively) obscured. Fascination with them habitually turns on their presumed erasure of nineteenth-century women's labor; however, modern assumptions about the production of these photos have shaped consumption of them. This essay locates these images within multiple contexts: the technologies of their production, growingsentimental ideals of middle-class motherhood, and the ways that carework and its cultural (in)visibilities varied widely by gender, race, and class in the period. Arguing thatthe mother figures' persistent presence (not hiddenness) is fundamental to these photographs, this essay makes a case for reading them as revealing intimacies and documenting tenderness rather than evincing erasures.

At the height of the Indian uprising in 1857, two rival London newspapers published portraits on the same day of the man who had become known in Britain as the primary villain of the conflicts: Nana Sahib. These were clearly portraits of two different men. This essay explores why Victorian image-making processes meant that such portraits were presumed accurate, and it traces multiple leads in identifying the men pictured within them. Considering “the villain” as a category steeped in conventions of melodrama, the essay argues that the portraits' conflict with one another did not matter to the British public because such images worked to create certainty amid chaotic reportage of uprising events.

Architectural Identities links Victorian constructions of middle-class identity with domestic architecture. In close readings of a wide range of texts, including fiction, autobiography, housekeeping manuals, architectural guides and floor plans, Andrea Kaston Tange argues that the tensions at the root of middle-class self-definition were built into the very homes that people occupied. Individual chapters examine the essential identities associated with particular domestic spaces, such as the dining room and masculinity, the drawing room and femininity, and the nursery and childhood. Autobiographical materials by Frances Hodgson Burnett, Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Linley and Marion Sambourne offer useful counterpoints to the evidence assembled from fiction, demonstrating how and where members of the middle classes remodelled the boundaries of social categories to suit their particular needs. Including analyses of both canonical and lesser-known Victorian authors, Architectural Identities connects the physical construction of the home with the symbolic construction of middle-class identities.