Start Date
29-5-2024 12:00 PM
End Date
29-5-2024 12:15 PM
Description
In Victorian England, cultural, industrial, technological, and financial flows led to two industries being subject to processes of professionalisation: catering and hospitality, and the independent press. As such, a new form of media emerged, the trade press, which catered for those working in the catering and hospitality industry. This press content documents not only the industry’s operations, but also the aspirations and attitudes of employees, their employers, and other key stakeholders. This allows for us to glimpse into past lifeworlds and extract forgotten memories. We are able to witness how ethnoscapes characterised the trade, but also led to integration conflicts. Hence, uniting, while segregating those involved in the rise of restaurant dining with varying consequences. Nationalistic voices clash with cosmopolitan ideals in the pages of these periodicals. Yet, these sources remain underutilised, while endowing historicity. The reasons for this may be because of issues with archival cataloguing and the scale of this material, as Shattock and Wolff (1982) have suggested. To add to this, I propose that this is due to the exigent nature of locating appropriate titles, which are often hardcopy, and the limited scholarship published on the topic of working with such sources. Accordingly, this paper seeks to not only supply details of these periodicals and their value, but calls for their preservation, via digitalisation, so that those interested in the history of food, now and in the future, might engage with and learn from these rich resources.
Creative Commons License
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DOI
https://doi.org/10.21427/57s4-4w42
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Catering and Hospitality Trade Press Periodicals: Their Emergence, Their Memories, Their Preservation
In Victorian England, cultural, industrial, technological, and financial flows led to two industries being subject to processes of professionalisation: catering and hospitality, and the independent press. As such, a new form of media emerged, the trade press, which catered for those working in the catering and hospitality industry. This press content documents not only the industry’s operations, but also the aspirations and attitudes of employees, their employers, and other key stakeholders. This allows for us to glimpse into past lifeworlds and extract forgotten memories. We are able to witness how ethnoscapes characterised the trade, but also led to integration conflicts. Hence, uniting, while segregating those involved in the rise of restaurant dining with varying consequences. Nationalistic voices clash with cosmopolitan ideals in the pages of these periodicals. Yet, these sources remain underutilised, while endowing historicity. The reasons for this may be because of issues with archival cataloguing and the scale of this material, as Shattock and Wolff (1982) have suggested. To add to this, I propose that this is due to the exigent nature of locating appropriate titles, which are often hardcopy, and the limited scholarship published on the topic of working with such sources. Accordingly, this paper seeks to not only supply details of these periodicals and their value, but calls for their preservation, via digitalisation, so that those interested in the history of food, now and in the future, might engage with and learn from these rich resources.