My primary focus is on the written word, whether in pen and ink or printed, but with an awareness that this cannot be divorced from the wider material world it was used to describe. Written descriptions do not reflect the sum of knowledge about women’s clothing and textiles, and were not its only or perhaps even most significant aspect; material literacy was multisensory, learned not just through words but through repeated encounters with the material world which relied on different senses. 22 The aim of this book is therefore not to elevate the written word above all else, nor to separate it from materiality. Indeed, work on surviving garments and women’s textile productions has made significant gains by moving beyond words to understand their relationships with and to the material world, as well as their lives more broadly. 23 Some evidence of the entangled relationship between practices of textual description and material engagement also survives. Barbara Johnson’s Album of textile samples and fashion plates, compiled between 1746 and 1823, demonstrates the interaction between the written word, print, and the material. For example, in July 1764 she noted the purchase of a ‘flowered long lawn Gown. eight yards. four shillings a yard’, a textual description which was accompanied by a swatch of the fabric pinned to the page. 24 The following chapters are therefore careful not to overstate the significance of the written word in the networks of material practices surrounding women’s clothing. However, by focusing on languages of description, they advance our understanding of how knowledge about clothing both old and new was circulated, as well as the role of textual descriptions in the acquisition and dissemination of material literacies across the social hierarchy. In places, this also alerts us to what was happening beyond the text, drawing attention to the circulation of descriptions via alternative means.
Discussion throughout is primarily concerned with individual women and their clothing, and on the words they and the people around them had access to and used to describe it. However, these descriptive practices cannot be divorced from the wider world of production and commerce, as the following chapters demonstrate at certain points. Descriptive terms for clothing and textiles, and particularly the many new terms for fabrics which increased and circulated across the century, often originated with the manufacturers and wholesalers responsible for marketing them. Print culture and advertising played a significant role in this, as scholars have shown was the case for a range of consumer goods. 25 It was not simply that there existed a growing world of goods which necessitated new descriptive terms, but that cultures of description were also transformed across the period. The first three chapters trace this expanding world of words, exploring how, when, and why they were put to use. Chapter 2 also demonstrates how merchants and shopkeepers contributed to the broader circulation of descriptive terms and knowledge about pricing. However, the book is also concerned with looking beyond the world of advertising and commerce, at the words used to describe women’s material deprivation, for example, or to provide support for accusations of neglect at the hands of husbands. It demonstrates that there were some forms of material literacy evident across the period which did not necessarily revolve around textile type, pricing, or fashionability, but on longer-held and widely shared understandings of, for example, decency, bodily integrity, and the life cycle.
In order to trace some of these different descriptive practices, chapters draw together women belonging to different social groups. Previous studies have been reluctant to look across the social hierarchy, often focusing on one socio-economic group at a time. As we have seen, this has been successful in challenging a model of emulation as scholars have traced different motivations, understandings, and practices of production and consumption. There are also some signs of change. 26 Nevertheless, focus largely continues to rest on women who were literate or materially literate enough to have left behind some trace of their own making, whether in paper and ink or needle and thread. Indeed, it is no coincidence that the relationship between consumption and identity has been most fully explored for women of middling, gentry, and elite status as we have an abundance of texts which seem to record their own words, though my discussion throughout complicates the relationship between authorship and description. In contrast, the women studied throughout the following five chapters range from parish pauper to gentlewoman, allowing for an original exploration of different descriptive languages, rhetorical strategies, and relationships with clothing across the social hierarchy. Significantly, most of these women have not left behind a substantial archive of material or textual evidence but are explored largely through glimpses in records which describe their clothing in some way. By ‘gentry’, I mean those with landed interests who rested below the ranks of the titled elite, though this was by no means a position set in stone. The boundaries between the gentry and middling class were also permeable, and it was not uncommon for individuals to move up and down this scale during their lifetime and according to economic circumstance. 27 ‘Labouring’ refers to the part of the population who survived day-to-day by their own labour, though again there existed a hierarchy of skilled and unskilled labour as well as broad diversity in forms of work. 28 In Chapters 3 and 4 I look in depth at what we might term ‘poor’ women: those who were unable to labour, for instance, or who were forced to turn to charitable or institutional assistance in order to survive. By tracing descriptive practices across the social hierarchy, chapters uncover consistent themes of material obligation, expectation, and reliance which were dependent on hierarchies of status and gender. These themes are often overlooked in scholarship focused on middling and genteel practices of consumption, but this book demonstrates that they might become entangled with practices of description.