I talked to Vox’s Rebecca Jennings about the Victorian roots of maximalism and the psychic toll of the recent mania for decluttering: Television shows like Hoarders, Tidying Up With Marie Kondo, and now The Home Edit, in which a team of organization experts traipse through the pantries of celebrities and explain the importance of color-coding one’s nut butters,… Continue reading »
Archives for Victorians
LitHub: “Let’s blame the Victorians”
Thanks to LitHub for running this CLUTTER excerpt in which I suggest we blame the Victorians (at least partly—don’t @ me, Victorianists!) for our contemporary problem with excess stuff. This chapter was a lot of fun to research, BTW—I loved reading about 19th-century material culture. Enjoy!
Rag and Bone Shops
Victorianists! I need your help. I’m on the hunt for information about how people in the Victorian era thought about, managed, catalogued, and got rid of their stuff. And by stuff I mean household possessions: clothes, books, cookware, toys, papers and whatnot–the bric-a-brac and etceteras of daily life. I’m looking for accounts of the trade in… Continue reading »
