Abstract

Victorian ideologies of domesticity establish the home as “the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division,” as John Ruskin famously phrased it in Sesame and Lilies (1865):

In so far as it is not this, it is not home; so far as the anxieties of the outer life penetrate into it, and the inconsistently-minded, unknown, unloved, or hostile society of the outer world is allowed by either husband or wife to cross the threshold, it ceases to be home; it is then only a part of that outer world which you have roofed over, and lighted fire in.