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Joseph Harley and Vicky Holmes eds., "Objects of Poverty: Material Culture in Britain from 1700" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
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Yana Byers
1-800-Contacts.
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New Books Network Announcer
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Yana Byers
Hello everyone and welcome back to New Books in History, a channel on the New Books Network. I'm Yana Byers, your host and I'm here today with Joseph Harley of Anglia Ruskin University to talk about his collection Objects of Material culture in Britain from 1700 out this year 2025 with Bloomsbury Academic. Good morning, Joe.
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Joseph Harley
Morning. Thanks.
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Yana Byers
Thanks for coming. How are you today?
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Joseph Harley
Yeah, very well, thanks. Can't complain.
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Yana Byers
Can't complain. Perfect. Doesn't. Can't complain. Doesn't necessarily stop me, but I appreciate the good, the good manners there. Hey, first thing before anything else, you have a co editor, Vicki Holmes, who isn't joining us today. So like, hello to Vicki. How do you two know one another?
- [02:21]
Joseph Harley
Yeah, so me and Vicky, we go way back now, so I probably met her about 10 years ago as a PhD student given a paper in London and yeah, she turned up to the audience. We got chatting at the meal afterwards and kind of the rest is history, as they say. But what's followed is one edited book and then this edited book as well. So we've worked closely together ever since. Really? Yeah.
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Yana Byers
That's lovely. It's a sweet story of academic, you know, kismet there. And how, how did you come to do this particular volume?
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Joseph Harley
Well, funnily enough, after our last volume, the Working Class at Home, there were a few issues when it came to fruition at the end with for various reasons, which I won't bore you with. And we kind of joked that we wouldn't do an FC volume for a long, long time again. But then this idea as a book about objects of poverty, this title, it stuck in Vicky' and it was something she brought up with me and it was just. It just snowballed from there as a result. And what followed was a conference we did online Covid was happening at the time and it seemed like a good opportunity to do an online conference. And we just kind of wanted to see what papers would come out, what people would say, what sort of objects they would look at. And what followed was some really great papers. And we realized this is a volume here that needs to be written. And so we invited some of the papers from that and we invited some others along the way and, and within a few years we've made this volume now.
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Yana Byers
Ah, okay. Yeah, I, I mean, I think, I think the average human being does not understand the work involved with, with. With an edited volume. Good. The herding cats and the like, it just trying to mold a vision and bringing it together and then, you know, the just having an editor as well. So I understand, I understand very much thinking I'm never doing this again and then getting sucked in and doing it immediately again.
- [04:24]
Joseph Harley
Yeah. On the one hand you think it's. It's not going to be too difficult because you're not in charge of writing everything. But in the end you end up steering dozens and dozens of people from, from your publishers through to the contributors through to fellow editors. And so a lot of it, a. A project management, a lot of it trying to steer people, getting them to do deadlines and things like this. So it can be rather tricky in the end.
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Yana Byers
Yeah. So what's the goal with this volume? What did you want to do here?
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Joseph Harley
So there was a couple of, a couple of goals really with this. So for one thing, having edited books where each chapter's written by someone different and new, they're not really that uncommon when it comes to elite people, the middle sort or middle wealthy people. And often they're very showy goods and discussions of those. So the likes of the things you see in the VNA or those lovely museums around the world. But what this does though, is paint a very obscure picture of the past, one in which it is all unbalanced and focus more on the untypical members of society than the more typical ones. So the poor made up the vast majority of populations around the world. And it's only really been since the Second World War where we start to see poverty decline en masse, as it has with the birth of the welfare states. And so what we wanted to do was to create a volume that addressed this imbalance and bring the poor more into the forefront. We wanted to show that their objects too are very interesting and they can tell you an awful lot about their lives as well. And with this then we. We knew that there are people out there doing some great work on poverty and some of them even looking at objects themselves as well, but doing it in some more sort of obscure ways with. With perhaps objects not being at the center for their research. So what we did, we. We wrote some people, asked them directly into doing this. We had some who gave papers at the conference, and we asked them to contribute to something because we wanted to bring in those leading figures of poverty and mater, but also those who are emerging as well. And finally, we were really keen to make a volume that was accessible to people as well. So a lot of the edited volumes that are out there, they cost 100 plus pounds, and so their market is really quite narrow. But we thought that poverty and the connection to object was something that would interest a much wider range of people. So we really did push Bloomsbury and really are grateful for them to. For publishing a book that is affordable. And accordingly, all the chapters are being written in a way that is accessible. So they are all original, they're all based on novel research which hasn't been done elsewhere, but they are written in a way that is accessible. So they don't get bogged down in really dense debates. We don't go through methodology and loads and loads of detail like you might see more academic books, but it's the kind of book that anyone can read from history enthusiasts all the way through to, you know, your professors and your PhD students and things like this, right?
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Yana Byers
So I think the first thing to note is that just as banal as this sounds, that poor people had stuff by 1700. I mean, there's a time when they don't. There's a time when nobody had stuff, right? Like one's possessions could be held in a sock. But by 1700 that's not the case. People have things and, and including the poor. And these, the homes of the poor were not empty or even really sparse.
- [08:18]
Joseph Harley
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So it is, it's one of those inherent assumptions that some people have when it comes to this. You think, oh, they're poor, therefore they must not have owned very much. And even some great notable historians, so the likes of E.P. thompson, for instance, who's one of the most infamous social historians we've had over the last hundred years or so, argued that there wasn't a huge amount that they owned over the Industrial Revolution. And people have said the same thing to me. I've told people what I've been researching in archives and they go, oh, what's the point in that? Obviously they didn't own very much. But in reality people have always owned stuff and they've always had stuff. So you could go back all the way through to archaeological finds. You can see in poor assessments in typical villages and hamlets that people owned all sorts from jewelry to toys. And this is not just those of the elite, this is amongst a much wider audience than this. And ultimately by 1700, therefore, people did own things. They needed the tools to work with, they needed the beds to sleep in, they need the furniture to use, they need the cooking items, they need the food. And it also went beyond this, so they might own non necessities, for instance. So looking glasses, timepieces, things like this. So people have always needed stuff from cavemen needing tools all the way through to us today needing iPhones. So for instance, today people can be on universal credit, for instance, in the context of Britain, they can be poor but then still have something like a iPhone, for instance. It doesn't mean that they're not poor, it just means that they have a consumer item with them. And often these consumer items that some people might perceive as superfluous and unnecessary are actually quite necessary. So for instance, iPhones or any Internet enabled smartphone is necessary for applying for things like universal healthcare, sorry, universal credits. So people always have needed stuff and what the stuff are will change and ebb and flow and will mean different things to different people. But that's one assumption that we really want to break down. So one thing I've done with my research Vicky has with hers and the contributors, we want to break down this assumption that the poor clearly didn't own very much, because that isn't true whatsoever. Not saying that they had it flowing out of their homes, but they definitely owned things and those things can tell you about their lives.
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Yana Byers
Yeah, how do we get there? How does one get at the material life of the poor in 18th, 19th, even the 20th century. Like, what does this research look like?
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Joseph Harley
Yeah, it's not easy, to be perfectly honest. And I dare say this is probably why a lot less has been written on the poor's material culture than other topics, particularly those of the elite, the middle sort, middle class, because the sources are just a lot more difficult to locate and a lot more difficult to use. For one thing, for instance, some of the chapters in the volume look at objects that still survive through to today's society, but many of those just simply don't survive. So although there would have been many millions of objects from poor people in past societies, people would have simply looked at these and go, what's the point in keeping this? Thrown it away? Not like the objects of the elite and wealthier people, where, because they're made out of precious metals, they're worth something, they're beautiful and all these other descriptive terms. So they are kept. Whereas the objects of the port aren't done in quite the same numbers, but there are certainly some out there. So for instance, in this volume we've got one contributor looking at old working class dolls that were made out of things like wood and shoe, like wood and blocks made out of shoes made out of bones. There's other objects as well, such as old whistles and things like this. So we do bring in some extant objects. But also on top of this, though, we're. We have written sources as well that we employ throughout this. So we look at how objects are characterized and described in written sources, such as inventories which catalog people's goods, autobiographies that people wrote, and diaries where they talk about their everyday material life, such as the food they ate, the objects they engaged with. Also things like welfare records as well. So for instance, one chapter looks at food in the workhouse and looks at the extent to which global goods ended up in there. So things like tea and rice, for instance. So although it is often patchy, these records and it is a lot of work to put together is definitely, definitely worth it.
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Yana Byers
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, It's a wonderful thing. Yeah. I was thinking about like, the amount of stuff I, I have as a random middle class person that just is not. No one's going to preserve. Right. Like, you know, my, my stack of diaries, no one's going to care about. I'm not going to have papers, you know, like, or just my shoes. The clothing, which is in this thing that everyone has enclosed disintegrate. Right. We have very few textiles, so there's there's something really ephemeral about most of our stuff and the. And certainly with the poor that makes it hard to. I can. The challenge here is interesting. I loved that dollar piece. I loved looking at the dolls. That was so cool.
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Joseph Harley
Yeah. You shouldn't have favorites, but it is, I think it's probably my favorite chapter of the. Of the volume.
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Yana Byers
Everyone has a favorite child don't lie. So but while we're still kind of in the stage setting, it's kind of defining the poor something we want to do because we can think of the poor simply as people who lacked resources. Right. They funny food, fuel, bed, etc, but that doesn't tell the whole story, right? Pretty much. First of all, everyone's poor. There, there's like, there's a very small group of. Of wealthy people, extremely elite, but everyone else is poor. So almost no one had resources and. But so this group, it's a group that contains multitudes because it's virtually everyone. Yeah, yeah.
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Joseph Harley
The group is huge. So to even try and put a number on it is really difficult because how you define it is will vary depending upon who you ask and the parameters you use. But we're probably looking at somewhere somewhere between half to two thirds of people throughout much of history were like this. But if you go back through some societies you'll see peasants were absolutely everywhere, making up the vast majority and the elites a few, well, a few percentage points, if that possibly in many cases 0.0 something percent instead. So defining the poor, especially like with a book like this, is quite a tricky thing to do because they are a really large complicated group of people. So for instance, the way we've done it here is to think about the occupations in which people might do so. Those where they worked for daily or hourly wages that are often more hand to mouth, the inability to be able to save things up. But also you can extrapolate poverty by looking at people in different stages of their life cycle. So for instance, we have things like the life cycle of poverty where people were more likely to be impoverished during their old age when they were unable to work, with there being no such thing as retirement. Or also when they were young children living with parents with lots of brothers and sisters and lots of expenditure. This was a typical period in which people be poor as well. There we can also think about poverty in almost like hierarchical terms as well, with those being at the top end of poverty that might, with a run of good luck be able to reach the middle sort, the middle classes with a little bit of education and hard work. But then of course, you've got those that fall further down there that are laboring sort, that are never given the opportunities educationally wise to be able to advance themselves. So kind of work hand to mouth in those ways. But even those that fall further down, such as those of paupers and those in receipt of charity or the homeless or vagrants. And there's also things like regional differences to bring in. So depending on what time period we're looking at, if you were living somewhere like in Norfolk, England in the late 18th century versus Lancashire, you'd have two very different experiences of poverty. So Norfolk, for instance, undergoing a lot of structural change with this loss of the textile industry. But Lancashire going through the complete opposite of this with a boom in their textile industry and gender differences as well, is a key one to bring into this. So in the vast majority of cases, being a woman would lead to more poverty because women were paid less. They were, they were not viewed in the same terms as men at this point in time. And so, for instance, when. So when you look at the difference between a widowed man or a widowed woman, you'll often see two very different situations to do with poverty there. So it is a really tricky thing to do. And you can't see the poor people in the same way across all the group. But either way, one thing we do argue though, is that those who do fall into this category, whether it's through occupational terms being in receipt of welfare or falling below the poverty line, each of them do have rich material culture, which all need studying.
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Yana Byers
Yeah, I was struck too by just the experience of being rural and poor versus urban and poor. You know, the peasantry in these spaces and the precarious nature of one's life in this period as well. You can be, you know, you're one accident away from impoverished sometimes or you know, one terrible turn and you're like, you know, so you may have, you may go from a life of some comfort to homelessness to like.
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Joseph Harley
Absolutely. Yeah. So even today they say that you are just a few missed mortgage payments away from being kicked out of your home. So it could just be a short period of poverty, lack of income that completely turn your life around. And I've seen in my research where it can be the result of a disaster of some sort, like a natural disaster, such as a flood flooding your home and destroying all your worldly goods, or something like a fire breaking out. It could be the result of the death of a husband or a father who was the main breadwinner of the household. And therefore it's not just, it's not just him that is affected by this, it's the wife, it's the kids and the income that they lose as a result of this.
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Yana Byers
Yeah. And so the, and the poor, I mean, are the poor viewed as a problem? You know, how, what's, what's the way the, the government manages it? There are these poor laws what did. What are they meant to do? Tell me about these.
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Joseph Harley
Yeah, so the Poor Law is the main welfare that we have in place in, in Britain, but also throughout, throughout Europe. They're coming in different, different sort of guises, of course, because they're under different systems, but there are the main way in which the impoverished were helped. So in the context of England, for instance, England and Wales, I should say we broadly separate out the poor laws into two. So you've got the old Poor Law and then the new Poor Law and then after then from 1948 you've got the birth of the so called birth of the welfare state, where you've got things like national health services and more social insurance coming in. But before then you've got the old and the new Poor Law. So the old Poor Law 1601-1834 was a system of helping people at a parish level. So England and Wales, approximately 15,000 parishes around, and each of those 15,000 parishes would administer their own poor relief. So it's a very local system of poor relief. And this did mean to lead to a lot of discretion. So in one parish you might be given help for one problem, but then another parish, later on down the road, you might not be giving it help for exactly the same problem. So there were flaws to the system, but it could also be quite a generous and flexible system which tailored help towards people. So for rent payments, food, pensions, giving some sorts of money and things like this as well. But also though the system was under pressure as a result of industrialization essentially and a lot of structural issues in society from the late 18th century. And by 1834 we have the so called New Poor Law coming in. And this is where the system does start to become really punitive and really judges people for being poor and not seeing it along economic lines. So you can't find a job and therefore you're poor, it becomes more of a moral issue than it ever was before. Not saying it wasn't ever a moral issue before, but it starts to be seen more in this way as people being categorized as work shy, for instance, and not trying hard and earth. And this is where you get things like the workhouse coming in that Victorian workouts being central to the idea of poverty. In reality, more people are actually helped in their own homes. But in symbolic terms, this workhouse was really key because it was this idea of lesser eligibility, of making the workhouse so horrible that you would look at this and go, God, that's awful, I don't want to be in there. I better get off my backside and go get a job type of. Of thinking. And of course, this doesn't work in practice because many people were poor, not through lack of industriousness, just because they couldn't. So this is the new poor law. You get where the workhouse is seen as central in this idea of less eligibility and punitiveness. But by the early 20th century, though, we do start to see movements away from the poor laws towards, for instance, liberal welfare reforms in the early 20th century, where there's sick pay and old age pensions and. And after 1948, things like the birth of the national. National Health Service, which comes about.
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Yana Byers
Yeah. And makes this huge, huge difference in the lives of everyone. Right, Absolutely. All right. And material culture is a term that some of our listeners are not going to be familiar with. What do we mean by. I mean, because it's not just stuff like. What do we mean by material culture?
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Joseph Harley
Yeah. So it is. On the one hand, you could see it as a really complex term that is highly theorized, and with there being lots of academic disciplines seen it differently, so with anthropologists, archaeologists, historians and things like this. But what we've done in this book, and one thing I try and do in my own research really, is to try and bring in a more broader and more inclusive definition of material culture. So one way the listeners might want to see it instead is just thinking about people, humans, and their connections to objects. And this can be objects that they owned. This can be objects they encountered, objects they handled, they used, they stole, they begged, they borrowed, all sorts. But ultimately looking at people's connections to said objects. And, and this is essentially how people make sense of the world they. So, for instance, you might be listening to this podcast through headphones, through a car radio. These are material objects in which you are engaging with the world. You might be reading the description for this podcast using glasses. It is helping you to make sense of the world around you. So objects are central to everything we do. Absolutely everything, from the past all the way through to the present. And the poor were no different in that way. So they, they would look at people around them and judge their position in society by the clothes they were wearing, the nature of their work they would do would be impacted by the tools that they had and how good they were. The objects in the home dictated how people could relax, the quality of the meals, the sleep they could do. And so material culture, then, this history of people and their objects is in many ways a history of everything and allows us to understand everything in the World, from standard living to our emotions to the five senses, we used ultimately everything.
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Yana Byers
Right, yeah. So incredibly crucial and very late to the party in historical studies. Right. Which is the. To say we as historians have been really late to really consider this. Some of our colleagues in anthropology do better or whatever. But. Yeah, yeah.
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Joseph Harley
Archaeologists as well, of course, because things have always been central to what they do and figuring out what the worlds of the past. Whereas historians, we've obviously stereotyping and oversimplifying, but we've kind of been obsessed with our archives and looking at the written sources. And although we know there's these great objects out there, many disciplines engaging with the objects. We were very late to the party not until 70s, 80s, where you start to see any sustained interest in material culture. And so since then, we've almost kind of been playing catch up with other disciplines with it. And with some groups, like the poor as well, it's been even slower to look at these groups, and we've only really started to see it in the last 10, 20 years, if that.
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Yana Byers
Yeah, it's funny. Disciplinary boundaries are funny because, like, in some ways they're really made up. But then you see like. Like things like this, you know, the way we approach the past or something, or the way we approach our study has been so textual and. And whereas, like, we're really good at our job. So if we start, you know, we start looking at the culture, the items of the past, we're going to have so much to say about it. So I'm glad we're doing it. I'm glad you're doing it.
- [29:22]
Joseph Harley
Yeah. I wonder almost if historians have been a bit slow to it, because looking at objects is a lot more interpretive and speculative. So you're kind of imagining what people might have felt as they were holding an object or using it, for instance. So it's not as black and white as reading a document which says yes or no to something, but it's more. You've got to think in more conceptual terms and think outside the box a bit. So maybe as historians, where we're just a bit more uncomfortable with doing that than other disciplines.
- [29:51]
Yana Byers
Yeah, I think we definitely are, yeah. The. I mean, you know, we're only now just doing away with the rule that you can't use the first person when you're explaining your work. Yeah, so funny. All right, so the book is broken into eight sections. In the first, Objects of Sustenance opens with a chapter on bread. Totally fitting. Right. Wonderful way to begin, because it's like the. You Know, it's the most important. It is the thing that keeps us alive. So tell us, tell me about bread.
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Joseph Harley
Yeah, bread. So when we. So there's 23 chapters in total in this book and when looking at how to make sense of it and make an order of it, just food and sustenance just seem to make most sense because it is central to all of human and animal and organic life in any shape or form. And of course bread encapsulates foods for many, many people from the elite to the middle sort, middle class, but especially the poor. So people protest over breads and bread prices and lack of bread. It was the central reason as to why people would turn to writing and protesting throughout history. And so bread is central to people's lives. It's something that they die for even. And it's central to the language we speak as well. So for instance, talking about the working class home and the idea of the breadwinner households, it's got the word bread in it. Even when we look at things like bread in books like the Bible. Bible appears more than the word love in there as well, which is perhaps something that you might find surprising. But it does show that centrality of bread in this, this particular chapter you talked about. Carl Griffin wrote this and I, I think it's, it sets the scene really nicely for the volume because obviously bread from the past isn't something that survives, but it's something that's central to people's lives. And I think the chapter really sets a scene on, on the centrality of it and in many, many different ways. And with that first section, objects of sustenance as well, we go on to look at other things as well. So we've got global goods in the workhouse there as well. And even things that have, have that many of the readers will not have even heard of, such as salop. It might be saloop. Actually it's only word I've ever actually read. But again that shows that it's kind of gone out of circulation. But it was a, a hot drink that rivaled even tea and coffee. But it's, it's died out and I think you can only really find it in particular parts of the world nowadays. So. Yeah, so definitely a good starting point I think. Objects of sustenance and bread for the book.
- [32:41]
Yana Byers
Yes. So funny. How is there this, this food item that is so central and I've never heard of it? That's, you know, that's kind of crazy. What else do we not know about now? You know?
- [32:56]
Joseph Harley
Absolutely. Yeah, there's loads. There's so much more to be able to find out there. And goods that have gone out of circulation and, and it takes actually a lot of work to figure out what some of these terms mean because they've gone out of circulation and just aren't really needed anymore. But each of these tell their own story and tell us about the poor and other groups for that matter.
- [33:17]
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- [33:48]
Yana Byers
Yeah, yeah, that's. It's a thing when you find something like this as a researcher because you're like, cool, this is important. We don't know what this is. I need to sort this out. But then you're like, great, how? Let me remind you, everyone who ever knew this is dead.
- [34:05]
Joseph Harley
I feel sorry for archaeologists. The mudlarks with that because they're coming across these objects and just like, what the hell is this? Absolutely. And you got to figure it out. But at least here we've, we, if we know that what they're called, we have somewhere to start at least.
- [34:20]
Yana Byers
Yeah, at least that. All right, so then we move on to objects of home which also like it feels like a nice progression self to the home. And your co editor writes about egg boxes which I learned about from this volume. I had no idea these existed and I, I'm curious like why. I mean objects of home. I think I know why you went there next. But in some ways like the egg box article that I'm talking about is emblematic of material culture for the poor. Right?
- [34:57]
Joseph Harley
Absolutely. Yeah. So like when the listeners think of egg boxes, they will probably think of the plastic ones you get from supermarket or the cardboard ones that stack half a dozen eggs or so in there. But in the past, the egg boxes that Vicky looks at are instead these giant wooden boxes that almost look like coffins actually. So they are rectangular with a lid that goes on there and they were used to transport eggs to things like supply lines to shops and things like this. And, and what Vicky does, and I think, I think really well as well, is that she shows how these objects can have a life beyond beyond their immediate use. So here their initial use is to transport eggs, but then they are sold on afterwards quite cheaply, and then they are used for other things. And quite often they doubled as cheap beds in the 19th century. So people might have these in their own homes, charity shelters might have them, so. Such as the Salvation army, and they're even advertised in newspapers, as well as an inexpensive way in which to sleep yourself. And it is a really great example because it is emblematic of. Emblematic of poverty, of the poor being resourceful, of them being creative, and also of them being thrifty and making the best of their situations. So they might have a broken bed, they might not be able to afford a bed, but here is them making the best of their situation, making a bed, lining it with your linens and soft things to make it more comfortable, and making it into something that is functional and useful and sometimes even comfortable as well. So. And this is a theme that runs throughout the. Throughout the volume, really, of the poor being creative and changing things from one function to the other and making things work for them and their needs and their situations at that time.
- [37:06]
Yana Byers
Yeah, yeah, it's just the eternal, ubiquitous egg box. And then we have other sections, the Crafted objects, Objects of childhood, living objects, monetary objects, workhouse objects, Objects of inquiry and death. And it. Do you want to talk about setting? Like, how you came to this? Like putting these in places? Yeah, it was.
- [37:34]
Joseph Harley
It's really tricky, to be perfectly honest, because we. We invited the contributors and they came up with ideas. Sometimes we suggested ideas to them, and then once we had this list of them, it's. You look at them and go, how on earth do we make sense of this? So, for instance, workhouses run across different chapters, but there is a section on workhouses, so we could have easily condensed those together. Likewise, other objects as well do find commonality. So we have a chapter on pawning, but then also some on sewing as well, pawning clothes often being one of the common things there. But then they don't go together. So it's kind of a. We could have done it in a thousand different ways, but we tried to group them in common ways that did try and make sense. And we did almost do it from. From things that are key to life. So sustenance, shelter all the way through to death, for instance, and sickness. So the last section is on medical objects, and. And then the final chapter, quite fittingly, I think, is on grave zones, actually. So we did try. And. We did try and. Sounds like cliche. Go on a journey with this. But inevitably, yeah, there's. It's impossible to do it perfectly, but I think we found a good compromise between all the different chapters.
- [39:01]
Yana Byers
Yeah, no, it works, it absolutely works. But it feels like this would have been a really frustrating game of moving.
- [39:09]
Joseph Harley
Things about this, Dominique.
- [39:11]
Yana Byers
Yeah, so in all of these pieces, basically, for the most part, they approach something that is just like a very quotidian object, something that you wouldn't think about, that's so ubiquitous part of your life and then exploring it, you know. And so I'd like to just talk about a couple of them and what. It's really up to you. What, what do you. Do you have, I know, not. Not favorites, but do you have something that you particularly want to talk about that you think would be interesting?
- [39:39]
Joseph Harley
Yeah. So as you know, there is all sorts covered in the chapters. We've got toys, we've got whistles, we've got sewing samples, we've got medical objects like trusses for holding in hernias or wooden legs, purses, which is obviously very symbolic of poverty, whether it has money in or whether it doesn't. But yeah, there's a couple I could highlight. So as I noted earlier, possibly my favorite chapter, though I shouldn't say that, is one by Emily Cumming, which looks at dolls and 19th century working class children, particularly girls, and their connections to dolls. And she looks at a lot of makeshift dolls with this. So there's some fantastic pictures, for instance, of dolls made from old mutton bones or old shoes. And you can see in writings even dolls made out of things like potatoes. So you know, if that kid got attached to that potato, then after a month, God knows what that would have smelled like and felt like. But perhaps the parents do a little switcheroo like they might do with a hamster dying or something like this, and so they can keep it going. But what this shows though is that creativity and poverty of parents loving their kids and wanting to provide for them despite their meager resources and doing it with bits of rags and doing it with what they had on hand, whether that is an old bone or an old shoe. And Emily as well, looked at girls childhoods through their autobiographies as well. And you can see these dolls being central to their childhood. And we very much have this today. So people, you know, keep teddies from their childhood. They still remain cherished items with them. And these dolls, whether makeshift or not, were. Were key to these girls experiences of childhood and growing up and learning things like emotions and, and their roles in society, for instance. So they'd often play mother to these dolls, for instance. So I think it's a really fascinating look at both the surviving objects, this chapter, and also the emotional state and their emotional feelings towards the objects. Another chapter I'll highlight as well is because I know it very well, because I wrote this one is looking at the poor and their dogs. So I looked at dog ownership amongst the poor from about 1780 to the late 19th century. And of course, dogs are not objects in the sense that a table is an object or any other inanimate object is an object, but they are objects in the sense that they are owned by people and they are interacted with people as well. So what I wanted to do in this chapter was to look at, look at when dogs went from primarily being seen as working animals, so hunting our vermin, for instance, or protecting their owners or even being used to turn a spit in a wheel. They had all sorts of functions. But I wanted to look at the transformation of them from being seen as useful, quote unquote, objects or animals, of course, to being seen as more companions and more emotional, emotional objects that are tied to that. So, for instance, I've got sleeping dog in the house right now and I love it a bit, but I'm working wise should be useless. But I just wanted to see that connection that formed and when it formed. And ultimately I find that through things like paintings of the poor and pictures, you see that they absolutely love their dogs and they want. Want pictures with them. In autobiographies as well, you can see that dogs increasingly become objects of love and companionship as well as those of protection and even working dogs still. But what bleeds throughout this is that companionship, that love, that brotherhood, sisterhood between them as well. And by looking at dogs as well, it's a really interesting way in which to look at other social groups and how they look at poverty and the objects of the. The poor. So the rich, for instance, would often look at the poor with their dogs and then go, oh, this is an example of them abusing their animals and, and oh, because they're immoral creatures, they treat their dogs like immoral creatures and they're both as bad as each other was the way of thinking. But the reality is when you dig down into the poor in their own words and you see that the dogs become central to their lives. So for instance, there's examples of the book of homeless people and their pet dogs, and you'll see that those dogs are often better fed than they are as well. So it shows that Emotional bond there as well. And it completely blows out the water. What those richer people thought about the poor.
- [44:35]
Yana Byers
Yeah. You still see this. There's so much critique of, like, homeless people having dogs and what else? This is the thing. This is a comfort and a warmth and this dog does not mind. Like, this is a happy dog. Yeah. It's also. Yeah, it's funny to think about the idea that there was this point where dogs were only primarily. They were always companionship. Right. But, like, primarily working. Yeah. My basset hound is useless. She just takes up resources. That's what she does.
- [45:04]
Joseph Harley
But. And in the 18th and 19th century, you've got more selective breeding and new dog breeds, and many of those are just born just to look pretty and be nice, to stroke and to keep him warm indoors and feed and fuss over, really. So it's an interesting transition from those that are primarily bred to hunt things to poach, to all sorts of other activities to these useless things that just take up resources, as you say.
- [45:31]
Yana Byers
I mean, if left to her own devices, she would still be a rabbit hunter of some renown. But, yeah, for the most part, she just keeps me warm. Well, yeah, I mean, she's in my wedding pictures. She's like, sent to my life. Yeah, it's funny. Anyway, I could talk about dogs forever. Sorry, not cool. All right. And, yeah, these. So, like, I love the piece on dogs, too. It's one of my favorites. I love the dolls, I liked clothes, I liked dogs. But I.
- [46:02]
Joseph Harley
We're.
- [46:02]
Yana Byers
I think our listeners can get a vibe for what this book is. And this is a book you want to check out. It's. It's interesting. It's. This is not primarily. I mean, it's absolutely useful for an academic audience and we should read it, but it's. It's also. It's a. It's a book I would gift, you know, to a. To a normal person.
- [46:22]
Joseph Harley
Thank you. Yeah. A Muggle. Yes. Yeah. So, yeah, thank you. That's really kind of you. And we, we really did try and make it as accessible as possible so it doesn't use unnecessarily big academic words. We don't get bogged down in literature and debates, so we mention it, but it's brief and easy to understand. But what we want to do is. What we wanted to do is just to focus on what can we learn about the objects of the poor and to communicate it in easy to understand terms that would cross audiences. And unfortunately, it is priced accordingly. It's not a pejoratively expensive book to Buy. So it could be make a nice gift. So Christmas coming round. Whether the podcast is out by then, I don't know, or whether you're listening to it before Christmas, but there you go. Could make a nice gift.
- [47:11]
Yana Byers
It would be a wonderful gift for Christmas 20, 25 or next Christmas, or people have birthdays at all times. But yeah, yeah. And so this feels like a really nice place to bring our conversation to a close. So I just have, you know, the one more question, which is, what's next?
- [47:27]
Joseph Harley
Yeah, so I'm, for me personally, I'm going to continue my journey looking at the objects of the poor, but I'm going to focus a lot more on workhouse material culture. So my first. My first article was on workhouses and their material goods, but I want to take a more national perspective on this and look at workhouses across the country and what they look like materially. And I want to do it before that Victorian workhouse I was talking about, that horrible, pejorative workhouse that you'd see in a Dickens novel. There were smaller workhouses before that are often in things like cottages as well. And I want to look at what it was like to be in those. So that's my next project, but I haven't done a lot on it, to be honest. I'm talking more about it rather than actually doing it at the moment. But a lot of planning's going into it, which is why I'm talking about it more. And Vicky, the co editor as well, she was messaging me this morning. She's looking at homeless sleeping for her next projects, and she's revealed some of the things she's found as well, and it looks absolutely fascinating. So I think that'll make a great book when that's out as well.
- [48:39]
Yana Byers
Yeah. So what's your next edited volume together?
- [48:45]
Joseph Harley
We might have a little break for a little bit, but yes, never say never. There probably will be one at some point. Yeah, we'll see.
- [48:55]
Yana Byers
Fantastic. All right, Joe, thank you so much for talking to me today. It's been really fun. It was a fun book and it was really fun to talk about.
- [49:02]
Joseph Harley
Great. Thanks for having me. I've really enjoyed this.
- [49:19]
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Joseph Harley
Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
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Yana Byers
They see us.
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