Material culture has been a staple of the work of anthropologists, archeologists, and students of design history for many years. Since the last decade of the twentieth century, historians have also begun to study the historical meanings and significance given to “things.” In Material Relations, Jane Hamlett argues that a study of personal and household possessions can illuminate interpersonal relationships and profoundly alter our perceptions of the importance “things” held for middle-class couples in the everyday “rites and rituals of marriage” (6). To shed light on the relationships between husbands and wives, masters and servants, parents and children, Hamlett links the material to the emotional world of the Victorian middle classes. While personal belongings and household items offer a lens through which to interrogate family relationships, Hamlett maintains that the spaces that the items occupied are equally significant. By examining the division of household space and the articles within those spaces, the author complicates the idea of separate spheres and domesticity, as well as their changing meanings over the course of a lifetime. This study engages directly with the work of John Tosh, who argues that Victorian men retreated from domesticity to clubs, and John Mackenzie, who maintains men furnished their personal spaces with masculine objects such as hunting trophies and guns. Hamlett takes the view that the relationship between male householders and domestic space and objects was more complex. Men often chose furnishings and objects that reflected their relationship with their fiancée or wife or arranged furniture and rooms to reflect the daily experiences of balancing work and family life.

While this study explores the homes and belongings of the middle classes, Hamlett acknowledges that the middle classes are particularly difficult to define. She therefore focuses on a variety of occupational categories but narrows the focus to households that employed one or more servants. Hamlett selects 1850–1910 because it encompassed a dramatic increase in the wealth and power of the middle classes, as well as the expansion of furniture stores and suburban house building. To examine the possessions of the middle classes as well as the room arrangements in homes, Hamlett uses a vast array of sources, including advice manuals, magazines, novels, printed memoirs, oral history transcripts, personal letters, diaries, inventories, photographs, sales catalogs, and wills. The sources offer a glimpse not only of lived experience but also of representations of the interiors of homes.

The five chapters of the study map the significance given to household things and domestic spaces over the course of the life cycle. Chapter 1 directly challenges the notion that homes were private spaces or separate from the public world. Windows, according to Hamlett, framed the outside world for children, and the presence of visitors for weekly “at homes” brought the public world inside. Many families also ran businesses from the home. Professionals such as clergymen, doctors, and teachers created public and professional spaces within their homes. The placement of personal objects and toys within these home offices suggests they were, at times, family spaces. While servants most often occupied the upper level and elaborate timetables established the privacy of the family, memoirs suggest this rarely worked as servants overslept or met family members on the stairs. Furniture such as desks and pianos in dining rooms also suggest these functioned as multipurpose rooms for eating as well as entertainment.

Chapter 2 looks at gift-giving and the significance this held for couples. Hamlett argues that goods were used to build relationships between engaged couples. Once married, the placement and display of gifts and other household goods could be used to express marital dynamics. The overabundance of hand-worked objects in the parlor, for example, could signal a wife’s desire to create domestic comforts or could equally indicate boredom and dissatisfaction in a relationship. The third chapter discusses the nursery system and the way the material culture of the home fashioned the relationship of children to both their parents and servants as well as shaping early gendered identities. The following chapter looks at the domestic spaces inhabited by single young men and women when leaving home. Some, as Hamlett argues, sought to create a space that resembled “home.” Others used personal belongings and school, university, or rented domestic space to individuate and construct separate identities. Chapter 5 returns to the home and examines the final stage of life to show the way the death of the owner dismantled homes. Hamlett additionally uses wills and bequests to explore the way objects transmitted family identities to the next generation and the way widows and widowers re-created homes and domestic spaces after the death of a spouse. In an epilogue, Hamlett explores the transition from the Victorian to the modern home.

One of the great strengths of this study is the variety of sources and archives it draws from. The numerous illustrations add to the highly readable text, which will appeal to an interdisciplinary audience of historians, anthropologists, as well as students of design and architecture. The study stresses the significance of the shifting meanings of objects and places and opens up the field of cultural studies to suggest there is still much to be learned about the relationships among people, spaces, and things. One of the most important aspects of this study is the way it offers a deeper understanding not only of the vast variety encompassed by the middle classes but also the enormous variety of interpersonal relationships. While it focuses primarily on male engagement with the home from childhood to adulthood, the study also exposes the family lives of Victorians, the difficulties of separating work from home, and the problems and possibilities of maintaining a meaningful family life. Most significantly, Hamlett has uncovered the complexities of domestic relationships over the life cycle and, in so doing, has offered a more three-dimensional vision of lived experiences in the past.