Category: Life and LifeStyle

Joan Mellish also ‘laid out’ money for Molly Harvey’s clothing on behalf of her son. In 1708 she described purchases of ‘Pladd for the Childrens Coats’, ‘scotscloth for [Molly] Harvey Handk’, and ‘Black Shallou[n] and ferret Ribband’ for a petticoat for Molly Harvey, which John Harvey paid her for later that year. 77 ‘Proxy shopping’,…

Another key difference between the accounts of Sarah Mellish and those of Dorothy Chambers is that Mellish’s expenditure was overwhelmingly dedicated to her own clothing, while Chambers frequently spent more money on clothing for other people in her family and household. She usually noted for whom a payment had been made, often using her children’s…

On average, Sarah Mellish’s account book suggests that she usually spent between a quarter and a half of her yearly expenditure on clothing (Table 1). This expenditure fluctuated yearly, and according to how much she had spent in total. Purchases of mourning dress in 1710 and 1714 reflected an expensive investment, while unusually high expenditure…

As we have seen, the household as a unit of accounting has received the most attention from scholars who usually focus on married or widowed women. Though some studies have tackled the domestic consumption of unmarried women, their relationship to the household remains underexplored. 42 As Tanya Evans points out, widows and single women need…

This focus on the household is partly the result of eighteenth-century advice manuals which often stated that women needed only a rudimentary working knowledge of accounting in order to manage household resources effectively when they married. 22 As John Richard Edwards has shown, by the eighteenth century commercial accounting was gendered as exclusively male by…

This chapter continues to focus on detailed description by exploring the act of accounting, looking at individual, family, and household expenditure. Chapter 3 considers accounting in an institutional context. Looking across the accounts kept by seven women spanning 1705 to 1803, this chapter first considers how women’s clothing appears in and across their account books…

What is clear is that women were more likely to leave bequests of clothing than were men, though this was not unique to the period as a similar pattern has been observed in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century wills. 45 They were also overwhelmingly more likely to leave clothing to other women than to the men in…

Of these 530 women, 401 left wills and it is important to note that, of those who did, less than a third mentioned clothing in some way. This includes women bequeathing individual items to specific recipients, women requesting that their clothing be sold to cover final debts, widows bequeathing their late husband’s clothing, and women…