AREAS OF EXPERTISE
Nineteenth-century British History; Home; Death in the Victorian era; Coroners’ Inquests; Poverty; Housing; Homelessness; Sleep
COURSES TAUGHT
At Home with the Victorians (London Seminar)
Sleep: A Journey through 500 Years of Going to Bed
BIO
Vicky Holmes joined Notre Dame London in 2022. Following a career in the public sector, she returned to the University of Essex to undertake a PhD on the topic of accidental deaths in coroners’ inquests. After her PhD, she has focused on using coroners’ inquests to examine ‘life’ rather than death in working-class homes. Her first book, In Bed with the Victorians: The Life-Cycle of Working-Class Marriage (2017), illustrates how we can understand gender and working-class married life through the most essential of objects: the bed. Meanwhile, her (co-edited) collection The Working Class at Home, 1790-1940 (2022) presents critical new understandings of the spaces inhabited by the working class over the long nineteenth century. Most recently, her second monograph, Living with Lodgers, traverses those Victorian homes accommodating lodgers and the sometimes mundane, sometimes turbulent daily lives therein. Dr Holmes’s forthcoming (co-)edited collection Objects of Poverty is the first volume dedicated to analysing the material culture of poverty in British history from 1700 to the present, in which her chapter examines the (apparently not so) unusual practice of sleeping in egg boxes. Her present research examines the history of rough sleeping in the nineteenth century.
Dr Holmes has also contributed to a number of radio and television programmes and can be contacted via the link below.
SELECT WORKS
Objects of Poverty: Material Culture in Britain from 1700 (Bloomsbury, 2025)
Living with Lodgers: Household economy and social relations in working-class Victorian England (MUP, 2025)
The Working Class at Home, 1790-1940 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
In Bed With The Victorians: The Life-Cycle of Working-Class Marriage (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)