Vicky Holmes is a Visiting Research Fellow at Queen Mary University of London, UK. As an executive member of the British Association for Victorian Studies, she served as treasurer for several years and is now responsible for the creation of the society archive. She is also a current member of the Social History Society (and a former conference strand convener), the Royal Historical Society, the Economic History Society, and the Women’s History Society.
Having worked in the public sector for a number of years, she moved back into academia taking up a position at the UK Data Archive. Having completed her PhD at the University of Essex in 2012 on the topic of Victorian domestic dangers, she has continued to traverse the Victorian working-class home through the records of the coroner’s courts. Her recent book In Bed with the Victorians (Palgrave, 2017) uses these inquests to remove the sheets from the marital bed and peer into the marriage of working people. Her current research uncovers the lives of those lurking in the shadows of the Victorian working-class home: lodgers.
As well as presenting at international academic conferences, Vicky also widely shares her research to public audiences — most recently at The Foundling Museum, Historic England, and the local Mother’s Union.
Praise for In Bed with the Victorians :
‘This is a highly original exploration of the Victorian domestic interior which rethinks the way we study family history’.
Professor Rohan McWilliam, Anglia Ruskin University, UK.
‘In Bed with the Victorians offers readers a wonderful new insight into facets of life that have long remained hidden from history’.
Professor Julie-Marie Strange, University of Manchester, UK.
‘Dr Holmes has found a rich source of evidence about life in the working-class bedroom in this period by drawing on reports of coroner’s inquests, many of which include descriptions of beds and their occupants’.
Dr Megan Doolittle, Independent Researcher.
Follow me on twitter: @vicky_holmes
