Odds, ends, and archival exclusion: ephemeral archives and counter-history in the English country house

Abstract

Ephemera — material culture not generally considered to be of enduring cultural or historical value — has long confounded archivists and recordkeepers. Often considered anomalous within broader institutional repositories, ephemeral records are further side-lined by dominant archival processes, standards, and logics; they lose their contextual nuances and thus become hidden collections within collections. Despite persistent professional anxieties and archival omissions, ephemeral archives often constitute a powerful source for counter-histories of a given institution, community, movement, or era. Such materials are imbued with the specific social, and emotional textures of their creators’ lives and accordingly, they require a level of familiarity with their context in order to produce useful, meaningful layers of interpretation. Taking as its site of investigation the English country house archive, this article explores an ephemeral collection which offers a radically different history of an institution often perceived as a bastion of patriarchy and privilege, but which has simultaneously been obscured because of its ephemerality. In offering a close reading of a collection that represents working-class and non-heteronormative archival practices and genealogies, I draw from feminist and decolonial approaches to the archive that centre notions of care, slowness, and intentionality and present ways of better understanding, valuing, and making use of ephemeral collections.