ABSTRACT
The doggerel, couched in the language of late Victorian sentiment, with its yearning for purity and sense of the closeness of death, fronted a book of advice for ‘amateur photographers’ just at the time when domestic photography was undergoing a dramatic transformation. History has been popularized, and family history has been re-framed and made more public. An explosion of interest in tracing ancestors and rediscovering images from the past has been fuelled by television programmes, as well as numerous publications and specialist websites. In Britain and the West, the twentieth-century expansion of domesticity from the respectable middle classes through to all but the very poorest, drew women, children and finally even men into the ‘charmed circle of home’. From the very early days through to the unflagging popularity of posters and postcards in the twenty-first century, popular photography has continued to include purchased pictures of unknown people and places.
