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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.

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.

Sissy home boys or domestic outlaws? Through a series of vivid case studies taken from across the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Matt Cook explores the emergence of these trenchant stereotypes and looks at how they play out in the home and family lives of queer men.

The sixteen-year-old Benjamin Franklin entered the world of publishing in an April 1722 issue of theNew-England Courantin the guise of Silence Dogood, the widow of a rural clergyman.¹ Informing her readers that before her marriage she had been the ward of her older husband, Silence explained that the clergyman “endeavour’d that I might be instructed in all that Knowledge and Learning which is necessary for our Sex, and deny’d me no Accomplishment that could possibly be attained in a Country Place.” Widowed after seven years of marriage during which she bore three children, Silence described herself as “an