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Risk-management at home: domestic accidents and Mrs. Henry Wood’s household advice

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the representation of domestic accidents in popular Victorian fiction. Taking Mrs Henry Wood’s Mrs Halliburton’s Troubles (1862) as a case study, I discuss how accidents at home signpost changing reactions to risk and risk-management as much as to the work of managing a household. Women’s writing is more likely to depict the home as the site of domestic labour, as a place of worry even, rather than as a stable space that stands apart from or in opposition to work. Wood goes further in turning housework into a sensational topic, capitalising on a growing tendency in Victorian print to expose the hazards of everyday life, while importing new ideas of risk into household management. A critical reconsideration of accidents in the Victorian home allows us to trace how the representation of household hazards impacted on shifting concepts of chance, coincidence, and risk, as well as on attempts to make sense of them in and through narratives.