What a Rag Rug Means

Abstract

A variety of approaches to the material object - primarily, psycho-analytic approaches - are employed, in order to give an account of historians' relationship to the past. In particular, the history of one domestic craft, rag rug making, is explored in its relation to the development of the textile industries and paper manufacture, from the end of the 18th century onwards. The strange absence of the rag rug from Elizabeth Gaskell's indus trial novel Mary Barton (1848) is scrutinized, in order to further explore the representation of working-class life, in literature and history: by social investigators and novelists in the past, and by modern historians. Questions are then raised about the uses to which these representations and accounts have been put, in a modern class society.