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The Hughenden Collection of Disraeli Papers at the Bodleian Library in Oxford comprises over 50,000 items relating to the life and work of Benjamin Disraeli and his family. This article tracks hair through the Hughenden Collection in order to explore the collecting habits of Mary Anne Disraeli. It argues that reading Mary Anne Disraeli's story through hair – both hair as object, held in an archive and hair as represented in archival text – reveals aspects of that story occluded by reading only those archival texts with self-evident documentary value. It thus makes the case for a holistic reading of the Disraeli archive, and Victorian collections of personal papers more generally, by taking Mary Anne Disraeli as its central case study. In so doing it also illuminates her story, and points to the necessity of reading the stories of forgotten women through archival silences and absences. Section I reviews recent scholarship on hair in nineteenth-century Britain in order to contextualize Mary Anne Disraeli's case. Section II anatomizes the Hughenden hair collection in order to illuminate Mary Anne's history, her impulses as a collector, and the extent to which her activities complicate scholarly narratives about the sentimental commodification of Victorian hair. Section III gestures towards recent work on the archive and material culture to tease out the consequences of her example for our reading of the archive and our understanding of the texture of Victorian ‘thing culture’ more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The passage of the Postal Duties Bill in 1840 and the implementation of the penny post expanded the epistolary lives of English men and women, particularly the middle classes, overnight. The affordability of postage, the commercial boom in letter-writing appurtenances, and the increased social pressure for regular correspondence augmented and altered how individuals built all sorts of relationships, especially romantic ones. This paper relies on 45 case studies of middle-class couples' love letters to examine the role of romantic correspondence, particularly during the life-period of engagement, throughout the nineteenth century. Correspondence collections are used to examine how couples negotiated and built intimate relationships as they progressed (or not) towards their nuptials. Not only valued for their written contents, love letters took on talismanic, fetishistic, and embodied properties representing their senders and the relationships they facilitated. Their comings and goings marked time, their length signified depth of feeling, and their presentation reflected intimacy. As romantic culture adapted to progressions in epistolary technology and assigned meaning to its various aspects, correspondence became a venue for individuals and couples to create and explore their emotional, sensual, and sentimental selves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of a roundtable response to Peter Andersson's article 'How Civilized Were the Victorians', this paper argues that material culture studies can help us to articulate new historical narratives about the Victorian period. Post-structuralism helped to privilege linguistic analysis to the detriment of direct scrutiny of material culture while approaches aligned to archaeology and anthropology enable us to rediscover the significance of physical matter and those who shaped it. The opportunities for learning how to study material culture are limited but could be enhanced through the heritage sector. As a case study, the paper examines the first selected edition of Tennyson's verse. The covers, layout and design of the book clashed with the poet's ambition of publishing a cheap edition of his poetry for the working classes. The book generated a lot of profit and the selection provides evidence of Tennyson's attempts to be populist and patriotic. The posthumous description of this book, written by the poet's son, misrepresents it as a philanthropic gesture to poor readers while it was in fact a moderately expensive book pitched at middle-class readers. This interpretation of the book is only available though study of the artefact. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper will examine how the physical reality behind Tallis’s illustrations can be illuminated to explore the commercial, domestic and social dimensions of Tallis’s London. It will explore the range of material culture available, and how this can be used to analyse interior space, in particular through English Heritage’s Architectural Study Collection. Two preliminary case studies will investigate the future potential for looking behind the façades of early Victorian London. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]