To look across the social hierarchy, the book draws on a wide range of both manuscript and printed sources that have rarely been considered together, including account books, bills and receipts, court records, correspondence, newspaper advertisements, probate records, and administrative records of the old poor law. Discussion throughout pays careful attention to the circumstances of creation as well as the descriptive and material practices of each textual source. Significantly, chapters demonstrate the intertextuality of descriptive practices, exploring not just how women’s clothing was described in individual sources but across them. This offers a comprehensive demonstration of the dangers of isolating individual descriptions as well as distancing sources from one another, lessons relevant not just to the study of the eighteenth century but to wider understandings of the relationship between textiles and words. Looking across different sources also alerts us to the fact that languages of description and material literacies were not always democratic. The first three chapters focus on the detailed description of women’s clothing and textiles across sources very familiar to historians of consumption. Chapter 1 draws together and compares a sample of wills dating from 1696 to 1830 with advertisements describing lost, stolen, and found clothing placed in The Daily Advertiser between 1731 and 1796, tracing shared languages of description across them. Chapter 2 looks at the personal and household accounts of seven women, exploring how and where their clothing was described in this context. It also demonstrates how descriptions were moved across and between texts during the accounting process, something which challenges our understanding of description and authorship. Chapter 3 shifts focus to consider the records of the old poor law, exploring the description of poor women’s clothing from three perspectives: that of suppliers; that of overseers of the poor; and that of poor women themselves. This demonstrates differences across texts and in descriptive practices which were shaped by the relationships of power involved in the provision of poor relief.
Moving beyond detailed description, Chapter 4 explores ‘linen’ as a popularly understood category of clothing which was worn and used by women of all statuses, as well as across the life cycle. By doing so, it demonstrates that linen held powerful rhetorical and cultural currency, with contemporaries able to understand its significance even in the briefest of references. Chapter 5 represents a departure from previous discussion, offering a detailed analysis of Catherine Ettrick’s 1765 suit for separation from her husband William Ettrick. Court records such as trials for theft have already been well used by scholars of consumption, but the role of clothing in other types of litigation remains underexplored. The chapter addresses this, exploring how descriptions of Catherine Ettrick’s clothing were used to support competing claims, as well how her clothing in turn shaped the narratives presented to the court. By recovering practices and patterns of description that have previously been overlooked, together the five chapters demonstrate that we must more critically interrogate how, where, and by whom women’s clothing was described to understand its role in eighteenth-century consumer cultures.
1 Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1978), pp. 23, 179; Neil McKendrick, ‘Introduction. The Birth of a Consumer Society’, in Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb (eds), The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-century England (London, 1982), pp. 1–6; Neil McKendrick, ‘The Commercialization of Fashion’, in The Birth of a Consumer Society, pp. 34–99. »
2 On widening its reach, see Margaret Spufford, The Great Reclothing of Rural England: Petty Chapmen and their Wares in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1984), pp. 4, 145–6; Beverly Lemire, ‘Consumerism in Preindustrial and Early Industrial England: The Trade in Secondhand Clothes’, Journal of British Studies, 27:1 (1988), 1–24; Beverly Lemire, ‘The Theft of Clothes and Popular Consumerism in Early Modern England’, Journal of Social History, 24:2 (1990), 255–76. On earlier origins, see Carole Shammas, The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America (Oxford, 1990); Jane Whittle and Elizabeth Griffiths, Consumption and Gender in the Early Seventeenth-Century Household: The World of Alice Le Strange (Oxford, 2012), p. 240; Mark Overton et al. , Production and Consumption in English Households, 1600-1750 (London and New York, 2004), pp. 175–7; Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy 1650 to the Present (Cambridge, 2008). »
3 John Styles and Amanda Vickery, ‘Introduction’, in John Styles and Amanda Vickery (eds), Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America 1700-1830 (New Haven & London, 2006), pp. 1–36, at p. 1. »
4 For example, see Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660-1760 (London and New York, 1996); John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds, Consumption and the World of Goods (London and New York, 1993); Ann Bermingham and John Brewer, eds, The Consumption of Culture 1600-1800: Image, Object, Text (London and New York, 1997); John Brewer and Susan Staves, eds, Early Modern Conceptions of Property (London and New York, 1995); Amanda Vickery, ‘Women and the World of Goods: A Lancashire Consumer and her Possessions, 1751-81’, in Consumption and the World of Goods, pp. 274–304; Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven and London, 1999); Maxine Berg, ‘Women’s Consumption and the Industrial Classes of Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal of Social History, 30:2 (1996), 415–34; Hannah Greig, ‘Leading the Fashion: The Material Culture of London’s Beau Monde’, in Gender, Taste, and Material Culture, 293–314; Hannah Greig, The Beau Monde: Fashionable Society in Georgian London (Oxford, 2013); Jon Stobart and Mark Rothery, ‘Fashion, Heritance and Family’, Cultural and Social History, 11:3 (2014), 385–406. »