I'm writing an essay on Victorian England, and at the root of it is the claim that the Victorians had a fascination for classification.
Ideas that emerged mostly in the Victorian era:
I've even found sources that say the rooms within the home would ideally only be used for one specific function. So, you could ONLY sleep in a bedroom, cook in a kitchen, read in a library, etc (though this tended not to apply to lower class families for obvious reasons).
Could anyone help me to simply find a source that agrees with the fact that the Victorians liked to classify things? i.e., they were unusually keen on/pioneered that sort of mindset.
And, of course, if anyone wants to smack my essay in the face, please let me know if I'm completely wrong about this assertion.
If you want an example of Victorian classification (though not about 'everything') then maybe have a look at the Pitt Rivers Museum (of anthropology) in Oxford. It's orgainsed as it was in Victorian times, with objects sorted by use, not chronology or place of origin.
I can't help so much with rooms of the house etc.
While I agree with you that Victorians were interested in classification, I'm not sure it was strictly a Victorian trend; rather it was a continuation of intellectual trends that had been happening for centuries. A very broad strokes explanation is that, beginning with the Scientific Revolution, and increasing throughout the Enlightenment, European intellectuals became increasingly convinced that the universe operated on a rational basis, according to fixed laws, that were observable and describable by humans.
Montesquieu is an interesting example: his Espirit des Lois introduced a taxonomy of governments, with the intention being to discover the underlying principles of contemporary governments by subjecting them to rational analysis.
Now, taxonomy itself was popularised by Linnaeus in the 18th century, and so by the time Victoria was on the throne it was a well-established part of natural philosophy. Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace and so on were working broadly within that framework in their biological, geographical, and evolutionary works. The reason for the perception of a huge interest in classification in Victorian Britain is, I think, that it was precisely at this time that science became professionalised. Where it had mostly been the preserve of gentleman amateurs at the start of the 19th century, by the close it was being carried out in universities by professional academics; TH Huxley and John Tyndall, for example. So, with the rise of professional scientists, and a movement into academia and the expansion of university education happening together, new disciplines began to spring up - things you've identified like sexology and psychoanalysis - and since the methodological underpinning of most of these approaches was (theoretically, at least) the scientific method, it included the assumption that the objects under investigation would act under rational rules, and thus be subject to classification.
There's a quite a bit of decent literature on the topic. The Organisation of Knowledge in Victorian Britain, is an edited volume (by Martin Daunton) with some interesting essays on the topic by excellent historians. Most of them would be of use to you, but there's one in particular that is specifically about classification, so I would start there. I imagine your university library will have a copy. If it doesn't, Bernard Lightman's edited volume Victorian Science in Context might be there, and it has a section on organising knowledge which would be worth a look as well. The Daunton book is more recent, but either (or both!) would be helpful.