Descriptions of clothing and textiles increasingly circulated across textual genres and beyond in eighteenth-century England, entangled with an expanding world of consumer goods that has already been well traced by historians.
More importantly, what did it mean to consumers themselves? Much work has devoted its energies to addressing these questions, and the response has largely been that people used consumer goods and practices of consumption to craft, shape, and communicate gender and status identities. Though studies have focused on a range of consumer goods, clothing has been understood as a particularly fertile site for the creation and performance of identity. 7 It has also been overwhelmingly associated with the feminine sphere, perhaps because it was women who were most likely to receive the ire of contemporary diatribes against excessive consumption. Despite attempts to reintegrate men into our understanding of consumer behaviour, this association persists. 8 Indeed, in the 1990s both Amanda Vickery and Maxine Berg argued that women attached ‘emotional significance to their possessions’ in a way that men did not, and Vickery’s examination of the ‘sentimental materialism’ of the Lancashire gentlewoman Elizabeth Shackleton remains highly influential, though Vickery warned against the wholesale application of these findings. 9 In this early scholarship, women’s consumption was frequently couched in terms of ‘sentiment’ or ‘emotional’ meaning, terms which have remained enduringly popular in discussions of their clothing. They also remain loosely defined. Although the discourse of ‘sentiment’ had growing significance and cultural currency across the eighteenth century, its usage in scholarship has not been clearly linked to this but arguably to more romanticised visions of women’s positive emotional relationships with and to clothing. 10 Focusing on bequests, which are considered in depth in Chapter 1 of this book, both Catherine Richardson and Lena Cowen Orlin have suggested that ‘sentiment’ as understood in this way is simply a modern projection onto the past. 11 This book similarly argues that we need to challenge this enduring paradigm of ‘sentimental’ consumerism, focusing on description to explore the many different and complex ways in which women encountered, recorded, and understood their material worlds through words.
Answers to the questions of where, how, and why women’s clothing was described have therefore been coloured by attempts to determine the meanings they attached to their possessions. This scholarship also reflects broader and ongoing attempts to demonstrate that, contrary to contemporary accusations of excessive, selfish, and competitive consumption, eighteenth-century women were informed, thoughtful, and emotional consumers, granting them agency in the face of patriarchal controls on consumption. 12 As a result, and as the following chapters demonstrate, descriptions of women’s clothing have sometimes been used as a means to an end, with scholars deploying them as evidence for meaning rather than critically interrogating their place in broader descriptive patterns and practices. This has particularly been the case in discussions of the ‘emotional’ significance of clothing for women, often loosely defined both in terms of their attachments to their possessions as well to people. However, this book demonstrates that, in our quest to recover the meanings attached to eighteenth-century consumption, we cannot turn to descriptions alone. This is not to suggest that women did not form powerful affective attachments with and through their clothing. Arguments for a specific form of feminine ‘sentimental’ engagement with the world of goods were first made when the field of the history of emotions was in its infancy, but a comprehensive body of scholarship has since emerged. 13 Alongside this is the developing study of objects and emotions, a field which offers more nuanced approaches to exploring the relationship women had with their things. 14 Several studies of the early-modern and eighteenth-century context have already demonstrated the gains to be made by exploring the role of objects in constructing, performing, and ‘doing’ emotion. 15 Again, clothing and textiles have been understood as particularly significant in this context. 16 While our understanding of women’s affective engagements with the world of goods has therefore developed, the following chapters continue to explore where we can or cannot look for evidence of this, nuancing understandings of description.
My focus on the description of clothing and textiles also builds on and contributes to recent works asserting the ‘material literacy’ of eighteenth-century consumers, though Serena Dyer and Chloe Wigston Smith remind us that we should not assume a binary distinction between producer and consumer, nor should we focus on the moment of purchase alone. 17 The haptic skills and material knowledge exercised by consumers when browsing and shopping for goods has already been demonstrated, but Dyer and Wigston Smith highlight that knowledge of making was integral to a broader navigation of the material world. 18 They propose a model of ‘material literacy’ to describe this ‘competence, knowledge and understanding’ which ‘coursed across eighteenth-century society’. This model allows for a diversity of material literacies by encompassing three categories: individuals who actively produced goods; those who offered guidance to professional or amateur makers; and those who did not actively produce things, but ‘mobilized their knowledge of making to comment upon, judge and inform their own activities as consumers and owners of material objects’. 19 An individual might occupy more than one or move between these different categories at any point, though we encounter the third most often throughout the following chapters. Much of the growing scholarship on material literacy has thus far focused on women as shoppers, consumers, or producers, enabling us to figure the material world as a source of agency beyond the paradigm of ‘sentimental’ consumerism. 20 However, we must also remember that material literacy surrounding clothing and textiles was not the exclusive preserve of women, and nor did it belong only to the owner or maker of a thing. 21 Indeed, throughout the following chapters we find different people describing clothing belonging to individual women, while material literacy was a tool which might also be mobilised against them.