Women and Material Culture, 1660–1830

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Women and MaterialCulture, 1660–1830Edited by

Jennie Batchelor

and

Cora Kaplan

Selection, editorial matter and Introduction © Jennie Batchelor andCora Kaplan 2007

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of thispublication may be made without written permission.

Individual chapters © contributors 2007

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmittedsave with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of theCopyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licencepermitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP.

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The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of thiswork in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published 2007 byPALGRAVE MACMILLANHoundmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010Companies and representatives throughout the world

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Women and material culture, 1660-1830/edited by Jennie Batchelor andCora Kaplan.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-1-349-28293-7 (cloth)

1. Women–Social conditions–Europe. 2. Women consumers–Europe–History. 3.Material culture–Europe–History. 4. Material culture in literature. I. Batchelor,Jennie, 1976- II. Kaplan, Cora.

HQ1587.W627 2007305.4094�0903–dc22 2006048053

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 116 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2007 978-1-349-28293-7

ISBN 978-1-349-28293-7 ISBN 978-0-230-22309-7 (eBook)DOI 10.1057/9780230223097

Contents

List of Figures vii

Notes on the Contributors ix

Acknowledgements xii

Introduction 1Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan

Part I: Dress and Adornment 9

1. Women and their Jewels 11Marcia Pointon

2. Fanny’s Pockets: Cotton, Consumption and DomesticEconomy, 1780–1850 31Barbara Burman and Jonathan White

3. ‘Changing her gown and setting her head to rights’:New Shops, New Hats and New Identities 52Jillian Heydt-Stevenson

Part II: Women and Sculpture 69

4. Sculpting in Tiaras: Grand Duchess Maria Fedorovna as aProducer and Consumer of the Arts 71Rosalind P. Blakesley

5. Pride and Prejudice: Eighteenth-century Women Sculptorsand their Material Practices 86Marjan Sterckx

6. A Female Sculptor and Connoisseur: Artistic Self-fashioningand the Exposure of Connoisseurship, Collecting andConcupiscence 103Angela Escott

Part III: The Material Culture of Empire 117

7. ‘The Taste for Bringing the Outside in’: Nationalism, Genderand Landscape Wallpaper (1700–1825) 119Ellen Kennedy Johnson

v

8. Taihu Tatlers: Aesthetic Translation in the China Trade 134David Porter

9. White Slavery: Hannah More, Women and Fashion 148Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace

Part IV: Women and Books 161

10. Reinstating the ‘Pamela Vogue’ 163Jennie Batchelor

11. The Book as Cosmopolitan Object: Women’s Publishing,Collecting and Anglo-German Exchange 176Alessa Johns

12. ‘Books without which I cannot write’: How DidEighteenth-century Women Writers Get the Books They Read? 192Susan Staves

Select Bibliography 213

Index 217

vi Contents

List of Figures

Figure 1. Joseph Highmore (1692–1780), Mrs. Sharpeand her Child 13

Figure 2. (a) and (b) English mourning ring (1791) 14Figure 3. Chatelaine, gold with enamel decoration,

mid-eighteenth century 15Figure 4. William Hogarth, Piquet or Virtue in Danger

( The Lady’s Last Stake) (1758–9) 17Figure 5. After Sir Godfrey Kneller, Sarah Churchill,

Duchess of Marlborough (c. 1700) 22Figure 6. Queen Charlotte, engraved by Henry Meyer

and published by Henry Colburn (1818) 25Figure 7. A white cotton corded dimity pocket belonging

to Fanny Jarvis 34Figure 8. Fanny Jarvis’s marks on her pocket 35Figure 9. E. F. Burney, ‘The Waltz’ (c. 1815) 38Figure 10. Linen pockets bearing the initials ‘G O’ and the

year 1774 45Figure 11. Thomas Smith. Manchester pattern book (1783) 46Figure 12. Pocket with woven ‘marcella’ front 47Figure 13. ‘Two Ladies at Breakfast in their Dressing-Room’

(November 1794) 59Figure 14. ‘Morning Dresses’ ( July 1794) 60Figure 15. ‘Morning Dresses’ (November 1796) 63Figure 16. Johann Baptist Lampi the Elder, Portrait of

Grand Duchess Maria Fedorovna (1795) 72Figure 17. Grand Duchess Maria Fedorovna, Profile Image of the

Children of Paul I 79Figure 18. Grand Duchess Maria Fedorovna, Portrait of

Catherine II in the Image of Minerva (1789) 80Figure 19. Richard Cosway, Anne Seymour Damer (1785) 87Figure 20. Julie Charpentier, Le Dominiquin (1816–18) 89Figure 21. Drury Lane Theatre with Apollo-statue.

The Gentleman’s Pocket Magazine (1 April 1795) 92Figure 22. Mrs Goldsmith, Frances Stuart, Duchess of Richmond

and Lennox (1703) 97Figure 23. Chinese hand-painted wallpaper (1775–85) used at

Beaufort, Gloucester, MA 122Figure 24. Jean-Baptiste de Réveillon, sidewall block printed on

handmade paper, Paris (c. 1785) 126

vii

Figure 25. Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique, from Tableaux-Teinturesde Dufour and Leroy 131

Figure 26. Stone in Suzhou garden 137Figure 27. Connections between the Houses of Hanover,

Prussia and Brunswick 180Figure 28. Hester Piozzi’s annotations to James Boswell’s

The Life of Samuel Johnson (5th edn, 1807) 194

viii List of Figures

Notes on the Contributors

Jennie Batchelor is Lecturer in English and American Literature at theUniversity of Kent. She is the author of Dress, Distress and Desire: Clothing andthe Body in Eighteenth-Century Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), co-editor(with Cora Kaplan) of British Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century:Authorship, Politics and History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and has publishedvarious essays on dress, gender and sexuality in the eighteenth century.

Rosalind Polly Blakesley is a Fellow of Pembroke College and Senior Lecturerin the History of Art at the University of Cambridge. She has published widelyon Russian art, including Russian Genre Painting in the Nineteenth Century(under her maiden name of Gray), and An Imperial Collection: Women Artistsfrom the State Hermitage Museum (co-editor, 2003). Her latest book, The Artsand Crafts Movement, was published in 2006.

Barbara Burman is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for the Historyof Textiles and Dress, University of Southampton. Her publications includeThe Culture of Sewing: Gender, Consumption and Home Dressmaking (editor andcontributor, 1999) and Material Strategies: Dress and Gender in HistoricalPerspective (co-editor and contributor with Carole Turbin, 2003).

Angela Escott is a music librarian working with a national collection of musicmanuscripts and early editions of music. The subject of her doctoral thesis wasthe eighteenth-century dramatist, Hannah Cowley. She has published inWomen’s Writing, Romanticism on the Net, has a chapter forthcoming in Prologues,Epilogues, Curtain-Raisers and Afterpieces: The Rest of the Eighteenth-CenturyLondon Stage, and an article forthcoming on an Oriental musical comedy inRestoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research. She is co-editing a volumeof essays on women in the early modern period and the long eighteenth century.

Jillian Heydt-Stevenson is Associate Professor of English and ComparativeLiterature at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is the author ofAusten’s Unbecoming Conjunctions: Subversive Laughter, Embodied History(Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), the associate editor of Last Poems, 1821–1850 ByWilliam Wordsworth (Cornell University Press, 1999) and the author of arti-cles on Jane Austen, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, FannyBurney and the aesthetic movement of the picturesque.

Alessa Johns is Associate Professor at the University of California, Davis. Shehas published Women’s Utopias of the Eighteenth Century (2003) and DreadfulVisitations: Confronting Natural Catastrophe in the Age of Enlightenment (editor,1999). She is currently reviews editor for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

ix

Cora Kaplan is Visiting Professor of English in the School of English andDrama, Queen Mary, University of London, and Professor Emerita of Englishin the School of Humanities, Southampton University. She is co-editor (withJennie Batchelor) of British Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century:Authorship, Politics and History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Also with JennieBatchelor, she is general editor of the Palgrave Macmillan ten-volume series,the The History of British Women’s Writing. Her most recent book is Victoriana –Histories, Fictions, Criticism (2007).

Ellen Kennedy Johnson’s teaching and research interests at Arizona StateUniversity revolve around the rhetoric of things, landscape, fashion, decora-tive objects, needlework and numerous other belongings as sources of insightinto the meaning of eighteenth-century British and American literary texts.

Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace is a Professor of English at Boston College. Sheis the author of Their Fathers’ Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, andPatriarchal Complicity (1991), Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Businessin the 18th Century (1997) and The British Slave Trade in Public Memory (2006).

Marcia Pointon is Professor Emerita at Manchester University and HonoraryResearch Fellow at the Courtauld Institute. Her most recent books are Hangingthe Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (1993)and Strategies for Showing: Women, Possession and Representation in EnglishVisual Culture 1665–1800 (1997). Her book Brilliant Effects: Jewels, Jewelleryand their Imagery is nearing completion.

David Porter is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature atthe University of Michigan. He is the author of Ideographia: The Chinese Cipherin Early Modern Europe (2001) and several articles on the Chinese taste ineighteenth-century England.

Marjan Sterckx has an MA in Art History and a postgraduate degree inCultural Studies, both from the University of Leuven. As a research assistantof the Fund for Scientific Research-Flanders, associated with the Art Historydepartment of K.U. Leuven, she defended in September 2006 her PhD thesison sculptures made by women in the metropolitan public space (Paris,London, Brussels, c. 1770–1953).

Susan Staves’s scholarly interests centre on English literature and history inthe Restoration and eighteenth century, particularly on how cultural ideolo-gies are variously created and represented in texts ranging from comedies tojudicial opinions. She is the author of Players’ Scepters: Fictions of Authority in theRestoration (1979) and Married Women’s Separate Property in England, 1660–1833(1990). With John Brewer, she edited and contributed to Early ModernConceptions of Property (Routledge, 1995). Staves has published over thirtyarticles on literary, historical and legal subjects. Her Literary History of Women’s

x Notes on the Contributors

Writing in Britain, 1660–1789 was published by Cambridge University Pressin 2006.

Jonathan White completed a PhD titled ‘Luxury and the Poor: Ideas ofLabouring-Class Consumption in Eighteenth-Century England’ at the Centrefor Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of Warwick in 2001. Between2002 and 2003, he held the Past and Present Fellowship at the Institute ofHistorical Research, before working with Barbara Burman on the AHRC‘Pockets of History’ project at the Winchester School of Art, University ofSouthampton. While continuing to publish on aspects of his research, henow works full time as Campaigns and Public Affairs Officer for the newlyformed University and College Union (UCU).

Notes on the Contributors xi

Acknowledgements

This book evolved from an international conference, ‘Women and MaterialCulture, 1660–1830’, which took place over two days in July 2004 at theChawton House Library in Chawton, Hampshire. We would like to thank theUniversity of Southampton and the Trustees and staff of Chawton HouseLibrary who co-organised the conference and supported it in every way.Chawton House Library has been the inspiration for the conference and thiscollection: our particular thanks therefore to Sandy Lerner, Jane Alderson,Graeme Cottam, Kathy Quinn and Helen Scott.

We would like to thank the British Academy both for their generous supportof the ‘Women and Material Culture’ conference and for a Small ResearchGrant for the reproduction and permission costs for the images contained inthis volume. As ever, our editor at Palgrave Macmillan, Paula Kennedy, hasbeen of immense help in making this volume possible and expediting its vari-ous stages. Finally, we would like to thank Sandy White, the Chawton sec-retary at Southampton, for her work on the conference and on the early stagesof preparation of this volume.

xii

1

Evelina Anville’s much quoted epistolary account of a day spent ‘a shopping’in Frances Burney’s first novel (1778) encapsulates much of the ambivalencethat characterises eighteenth-century responses to the consumer revolution.1

As an innocent abroad, she is suitably sceptical of, and amused by, the gamesplayed by ‘smirking’ mercers and ‘finical’ man-milliners to extort money fromtheir female customers. But even this most virtuous of heroines is not entirelyimmune to the tantalising allure of material objects. Her description of hervisits to purchase ‘silks, caps, gauzes, and so forth’ is related with a breathlessexcitement that could scarcely have been better calculated to arouse herguardian’s fears about his charge’s moral well-being.2 But Reverend Villarsdoes not travel to London to return his ward to the safety of the country, forhe knows that ‘a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World’ of eighteenth-centuryculture was, in no small part, marked by her entry into the world of goods.

Burney’s novel brilliantly documents the anxious bewilderment and intensepleasure that attended these journeys – feelings laid bare by Evelina’s subse-quent, and wilfully ambiguous, description of her newly dressed hair: ‘full ofpowder and black pins and a great cushion on the top of it. I believe youwould hardly know me’. On the one hand, Evelina seems, here, to have beenalmost entirely consumed by the commodities in which she is adorned. Herhair has been ‘entangled’ and ‘frizled’ to such an extraordinary degree thatshe no longer has possession of her own body: ‘When I shall be able to makeuse of a comb for myself I cannot tell’.3 On the other, it is difficult not to detectpalpable delight in the heroine’s account of the transformations made possibleby powders, pins and cushions, or even, perhaps, a joyful recognition that suchobjects allow her to re-imagine herself in such a way that she becomes unrecog-nisable to those supposed to know her best. It is no coincidence, of course, thata novel about a young woman’s quest for self-possession is also deeply pre-occupied with a world of material objects through and against which selfhoodis inevitably defined.4 Material artefacts, Evelina reminds us, not only shapebodies and perceptions, but allow their possessors to establish their place insociety. This book is likewise concerned with interactions between subjects

IntroductionJennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan

2 Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan

and objects and the meanings these interactions generate. Drawing on recentwork in the fields of material culture and eighteenth-century studies,5 it exam-ines the myriad ways in which objects constituted identity and mediated social,economic and political relationships in Europe between the late seventeenthand early nineteenth centuries. In so doing, it builds on and seeks to compli-cate recent work on women’s role as agents of cultural production in the period.

Eighteenth-century women’s material lives have, thankfully, become betterknown to us since Amanda Vickery lamented scholars’ unwillingness ‘to explorewomen’s relationship with the world of goods’ in The Gentleman’s Daughter(1998).6 Particularly instructive is the now sizeable body of work that hasbeen produced on consumption, luxury, taste and politeness since the publi-cation of John Brewer and Roy Porter’s Consumption and the World of Goods(1993).7 Women have increasingly taken centre stage in these accounts, in part,of course, in recognition of their centrality to eighteenth-century commentaryon the consumer revolution and the luxury debates.8 That the female sex fig-ured in such commentary as both a justification and scapegoat for the expan-sion of the trade in luxury items is now a familiar story.9 As Elizabeth KowaleskiWallace explains in Consuming Subjects (1997), the female consumer emergedin this period as a ‘paradoxical presence’, onto whose body was projectedBritish culture’s ‘fondest wishes for the transforming power of consumerismand its deepest anxieties about the corrupting influence of goods’.10 Equally,if regrettably, familiar is the fact that female consumers’ engagements with themarketplace threatened to turn them into marketable commodities themselves.Eighteenth-century literature was, as Kowaleski Wallace demonstrates, as likelyto represent female shoppers being voraciously consumed by retailers or theirown (material) desires as it was to imagine them as autonomous economicagents.11

Satirists and opponents of consumption pointed out frequently and force-fully that material possessions were as likely to ruin you as to make you. Theindividual who defined ‘his or her sexual, social, and ethical identity throughthe selection of goods’ risked, as Erin Mackie suggests, ‘a kind of psychic colon-isation by the commodity’.12 Such fears are the focus of Elizabeth KowaleskiWallace’s and Jennie Batchelor’s contributions to this volume. KowaleskiWallace’s suggestively titled ‘White Slavery: Hannah More, Women andFashion’ investigates More’s uncomfortable elision of the white fashion victimand black slave to illuminate paradoxes in and connections between theauthor’s gender and racial politics, as well as casting new light on her attitudesto consumption. For More, fashionable consumption was just another form ofcolonisation that destroyed mind, body and soul. But More was not the onlycommentator who wished to deny women ‘meaningful interaction with aworld of goods’. Eighteenth-century critics of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela(1740) were, as Batchelor shows, quick to turn the heroine’s use of materialobjects against her to imagine her as little more than a prattling commodity.The commodification of the heroine in this early criticism, as well as in Pamela

Introduction 3

merchandise and the object-narrator novel, which Batchelor reads as a responseto the Pamela phenomenon, speaks not only to the difficulties women facedwhen seeking to define themselves through material artefacts, but also to anxieties about the commercialisation of the literary marketplace and the alien-ability of literary property.

As these essays indicate, consumption was deeply meaningful in eighteenth-century culture; however its meanings were not confined to the forms ofdebilitating sexual and economic peril typically, but not universally, imaginedby the eighteenth-century novel. Jillian Heydt-Stevenson’s essay on hats, forexample, indicates that a number of Romantic fictional heroines deployedfashionable commodities to fend off the social systems that threatened totake possession of them. This essay, like all those concerned with the politics ofconsumption in this volume, understands consumption as a wilful act –something instigated by rather than something that happens to the shopper –an event that is productive of meaning, even if the consumer does not entirelymaster those meanings. One way to unlock these significations is to lookbeyond the act of purchase itself – ‘a mere snapshot in the life of a commodity’as Amanda Vickery points out13 – to the non-verbal meanings ascribed to orinherent in material objects. Barbara Burman and Jonathan White’s analysisof the material properties and cultural significance of the tie-on pocket adoptssuch an approach to elucidate how this specific and peculiarly resonant itemof costume reproduced and negotiated women’s subjectivity, and reveals, tothe modern scholar, a gendered investment in history, memory and place.That artefacts are repositories of meaning is also the starting point of DavidL. Porter’s essay on English responses to the aesthetic principles and culturalideals embedded in Chinese decorative objects. Porter’s discussion of how thisvision allowed women to re-imagine their lives and relationships reinforcesJudy Attfield’s assertion that the relationship between ‘culture and materiality,object/subject’, which ‘produces meaning’, is dynamic rather than static.14

Another important aspect of this dynamism is signalled by the fluctuationsin meaning generated by the uses to which objects are put by their possessors.Thus Marcia Pointon’s essay on women and their jewels examines these artefactsas ‘markers’ of identity, rank and wealth, the import of which was determinedby how they were displayed and circulated among individuals. Pointon’s chap-ter, like Susan Staves’s fascinating contribution ‘How Did Eighteenth-centuryWomen Writers Get the Books They Read?’, indicates the limitations of studyingwomen’s relationship with the material world solely in terms of consumption.Like jewels, books could be inherited, received as gifts or borrowed, diversemodes of distribution and circulation that spoke to the recipient’s/borrower’sposition within wider familial, social and political structures.

Among the most invigorating insights of recent eighteenth-century scholar-ship has been the recognition that women’s roles in these larger structureshas been much less peripheral and much more instrumental than previouslyimagined. Histories of consumption are being enriched and complicated by

new histories of production, which focus on the workplace, the art world,the literary marketplace and the stage to shed light on the cultural effects ofwomen’s interventions within the public sphere. New work on eighteenth-century print culture has played a particularly important role in revising pastassumptions, as Alessa Johns’s essay on book publishing and collecting ineighteenth-century Germany suggests. Johns’s account of aristocratic Germanwomen’s engagement in such activities reveals a commitment to a powerfuland patriotic form of ‘gendered cosmopolitanism’ through which these womenestablished themselves as arbiters of taste.

In addition to revisionist histories of print culture, new studies of womenartists, patrons and musicians have illuminated women’s status as agents ofcultural production.15 Part II of this book, entitled ‘Women and Sculpture’,includes three essays that advance this field of research in their accounts ofthe figure and works of the woman artist during a period in which she wassystematically excluded from artistic production and appreciation. All threeessays acknowledge the personal and professional prejudices faced by womenconsumers and producers of the arts, but challenge dominant accounts thatconsider the roles of woman and artist irreconcilable. Angela Escott’s readingof the representation of the female artist in Hannah Cowley’s plays revealsthis figure to be an empowering one, with which the playwright could iden-tify and through which she could challenge the notions of connoisseurshipand the gendering of art (associated with creation as opposed to procreation)as a masculine preserve. Marjan Sterckx’s discussion of the various constraintsunder which women sculptors and wax modellers laboured takes us awayfrom the world of the theatre to the very real struggles endured and the suc-cesses enjoyed by a small but significant group of European female artists,forced to contend with the gendered assumptions that governed their artis-tic practice. But sex and status were not necessarily constraints on the femaleartist, as Rosalind Blakesley’s essay on Maria Fedorovna, wife of Tsar Paul I,argues. Fedorovna’s story reveals how this extraordinary woman used herposition to establish herself as a consumer, producer and patron of the artsand surely one of the most significant taste-makers of her day.

As eighteenth-century women writers, artists and patrons begin to be seenmore fully by modern critics and historians as independent agents and pro-ducers of culture, they acquire ethical responsibilities commensurate to theirnewly recognised independence. The more their choices are respected, themore their relationship to everyday commodities, the standards taste, and ofcourse their own cultural work comes under scrutiny and debate. In likemanner, when twenty-first-century scholars, as a useful conceit, animatematerial culture, they do not necessarily agree about the narratives that thingscan tell and the subjectivities they create. The reflex of negative associationof women with consumption and fashion, an eighteenth-century discoursethat was itself a consumable, as contributors show, has a long tail that stillwags today. Where commodities, or the discourse of consumption involving

4 Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan

women, related to materials or practices from the expanding British Empire,or its global non-European trading partners, the debate about the meaningsthat accrue to the relationship becomes especially heated. As Kowaleski Wallacenotes, contemporary critics devised ethical discourse that would estrangewomen from their things: Hannah More wanted to make ‘fashion’ somethingwomen should regard as ‘foreign’, to be abjected and expelled. The languageof Orientalism and of enslavement deployed by eighteenth-century commen-tators to discourage women’s attachment to luxury, and to damn the affectthat went with it, has, as Kowaleski Wallace suggests, a peculiarly unliberatingresonance today. This occurs not simply because the analogy between womenand fashion and chattel slaves seems to diminish and trivialise the conditionof the latter, but because white-authored anti-slavery discourses themselveswere freighted with racial hierarchy and forms of affective identification, whichcreated new forms of psychic and social domination. Mobilised as a metaphorfor women’s subjugation to fashion, anti-slavery rhetoric conferred on womena dubious ‘free’ subjectivity. Here is an example of how the structuring languageof Empire informs the ‘domestic’ critique, and vice versa: More, conservativein her national politics and social thinking yet strongly anti-slavery, is by nomeans a unique instance of this effect.

Ellen Kennedy Johnson, for example, traces the evolution of wallpaper fordomestic use first imported from China through its more affordable adapta-tion at the height of its popularity in chinoiserie imitations which alteredthe scenes to conform better with western conceptions of Chinese differenceto its gradual fall from grace in the second half of the century in favour of a‘home-grown’ national style of picturesque which drew from the Gothic. Theshifting terms of class can be read in the vicissitudes of taste in wallpaper – butalso the development of nationalist feeling. China scenes, even domesticatedin chinoiserie, come to represent a form of aesthetic mongrelisation subtlyinflected with a ‘flowery’ femininity, and wallpaper which represents a moremasculine, national symbolism, becomes patriotism by other means.

Yet our essayists remind us that it is possible to read the importation of goodsand their evolving meanings in different registers. There are, for example, otherinstances generating new models of the ways in which the effects of Empireand trade enter British consciousness. Porter lists ‘four types of responses –wonder, assimilation, repudiation, and fantasy –’ as the modes through whichChinese artefacts entered the English imagination. The importation of objectsand images from other parts of the world does not necessarily provoke in theirfemale consumers a response that can be politically written off as ‘proto-Orientalist’. Instead, Porter offers a paradigm of translation that takes accountof Ming aesthetics, the gendered classicism of influential contemporarieslike Reynolds and the feminist scholarship of recent years which has begun toexplore the alternative aesthetics of everyday practices such as conversation –or gossip. The analogies described in this model raise the regularly debasedelements of female subjectivity to a kind of art-form that prizes singularity,

Introduction 5

‘surprise’, ‘curiosity’ and fantasy itself. Porter’s speculative exercise – his develop-ment of a paradigm that questions whether analyses which argue that everyappropriation of otherness is proto-imperialist and that resists subliminallymisogynist readings of women’s cultural practices – offers another routetowards understanding the complex and unexpected stories that materialculture and its symbiotic relationship with female subjects can generate.

The language of things as objects and references is always a situated, symbol-ising one, impulsive and surprising in its uses and effects, and never to be takenfor granted. The misadventures with wallpaper that beset Maria Edgeworth’sLady Clonbury in The Absentee, are, as Johnson notes, indicative of domesticdecoration’s role in creating a nationalising discourse. At the same time, LadyClonbury’s wallpaper introduces China as a third term in a novel whose mainfocus is the dissonance between English and Irish culture and Ireland and theAnglo-Irish, adding another complicating strand to the development of imper-ial taste and national subjectivity. We know as much of Fanny as we canthrough her plain white pockets and their history, itself full of missing elementsand conflicting interpretation, as Burman and White make clear, but unlikethe ‘it-narratives’, Fanny’s pockets cannot pretend to give us the full – or eventhe inside – story of her subjectivity. The sophisticated interdisciplinarity ofrecent work on material culture, represented by the essays in this volume,accepts that no single discourse can perform that function. Novels and poetry,as Batchelor and Kowaleski Wallace among others remind us, offer us narra-tives within a set of literary conventions whose history and politics remainto be teased out by critics and historians. Imaginative literature’s perspectiveson persons and things, its cautions and idealisations, do not represent any fixedtruth about the period, but rather gesture towards conflicting versions of itsmoral and social imperatives – a way of constituting rather than reflecting class,nationality, gender and subjectivity. Staves and Johns remind us how muchbooks convey meaning even before they are opened or read – how embeddedthey are in networks of family and friends, of rank and privilege, yet are sodynamic a force, their circulation as cultural capital bringing, as so many otherobjects discussed in this volume do, the public and private, male and female,domestic and foreign worlds into symbiosis, as well as serving to separate anddistinguish them.

It can be no accident that the surge of interest in eighteenth-century materialculture – and in its relation to women – in the last two decades coincideswith traumatic political, social and economic transformation of late capitalism,inaugurating a new era where the value and movement of commodities seemsmore certain than the identity, and in some cases even the survival, of subjectsand nations. Many of the hierarchical and ethical issues raised by eighteenth-century practices and discourses on material culture’s effect on modernisingsocieties remain alive for us, and ever more urgent, as unrestrained consump-tion coupled with appalling scarcity threatens to demolish rather than simplycorrupt the inhabited world. (One must consciously resist the easy moralising

6 Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan

of it into the revenge of things on their collective makers, mankind.) Para-doxically perhaps, this impending Armageddon – before us in the news along-side advertisements for more and better consumer items – coincides with amuch more ethically nuanced and historically complex take on the eighteenth-century world of production and consumption that has inaugurated our ownage. We are rather less disposed to praise and to blame its attitudes and actionstoday, although its uncanny stories compel us as never before. In particular,by seeing women (or femininity) as neither the scapegoated amoral consumersor the pitiable victims of fashion, but as gendered subjects constituted – like,but never exactly like, men – through commodity culture, active producersof it and its meanings, work on material culture has been liberated into a moreinteresting and productive space for understanding the past, present andfuture of that many-layered, often contradictory, relationship between womenand material culture. This collection of essays aims to expand the scope and theterms of that exploration.

Notes

1 Frances Burney, Evelina; or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, ed.Edward A. Bloom, with an introduction and notes by Vivien Jones (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2002), p. 28.

2 Burney, p. 29.3 Burney, p. 29.4 Evelina is, of course, attempting to reclaim her name and birthright as the legitimate

daughter of Sir John Belmont.5 See, for example, Daniel Miller, ed., Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter

(London: UCL Press, 1998); Judy Attfield, Wild Things: The Material Culture of EverydayLife (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000); Victor Buchli, The Material Culture Reader(Oxford and New York: Berg, 2002); Daniel Miller, ed., Materiality (Durham, NC andLondon: Duke University Press, 2005). Relevant work in eighteenth-century studiesis discussed below.

6 Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (NewHaven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 183.

7 John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (London andNew York: Routledge, 1993). This collection is indebted to, even while it complicates,Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb’s jointly written The Birth of aConsumer Society: The Commercialisation of Eighteenth-Century England (London:Europa, 1982).

8 On these debates, see, for example, Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford, eds., Consumersand Luxury in Europe, 1650–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999);Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger, eds., Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates,Desires, and Delectable Goods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); and MaxineBerg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Oxford UniversityPress, 2005).

9 See, for example, Laura Brown, Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in EarlyEighteenth-Century Literature (London: Cornell University Press, 1993); Erin Mackie,

Introduction 7

Market à la Mode: Fashion, Commodity and Gender in The Tatler and The Spectator(Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); and ElizabethKowaleski Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the EighteenthCentury (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).

10 Kowaleski Wallace, p. 5.11 Kowaleski Wallace, p. 5.12 Mackie, p. 47.13 Vickery, p. 183.14 Attfield, p. 138.15 See, for example, Melissa Hyde and Jennifer Milam, eds., Women, Art and the Politics

of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).

8 Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan

Part IDress and Adornment

11

In September 1735, Grace Boyle, aged about fifteen, wrote to her friend,Anne Strafford:

Many things have happened to me since I came here [to London] viz: theborring [sic] of my Ears, Papa’s giving me a pair of £100 Earrings, a pinkDiamond ring, & a pair of gold buckles . . . with 4 guineas for my pocket.Mama is giving me a pair of star Earrings, a set of stay buckles, & anErmine muff. So I think I came to town to some purpose.1

In thinking about the relationship between women and jewels there are vari-ous things here we might notice: first, gems (diamonds) come in the form ofjewellery, made up into a ring, buckle and earrings (requiring the piercing ofAnne’s ears); second, what is acquired has a price, which is part of the newsimparted; third, the acquisition is seen as justifying the trip to town; fourth,the jewellery is spoken of in relation to another acquisition (an ermine muff);and fifth, in addition to the gifts already received from her father, Anne expectsto receive more from her mother. This is, it seems, a family affair – perhaps acoming-of-age ritual. The itemising of these luxury artefacts is, moreover,deemed a proper subject for a correspondence between two young women.In other words, it has an emotive content.

My subject is the relationship of women to jewels and jewellery from thelate seventeenth into the nineteenth century. It is, however, important to notein passing that at least until the end of the Regency, jewellery such as rings,watches, shoe buckles, jewelled boxes and ornamented canes were an import-ant part of the self-presentation rituals pertaining to sociable masculinity, andthat men like John Evelyn and Horace Walpole were avid collectors of gemsand antique jewellery. Masculinity was not, however, discursively tied in witha relationship to jewels in the way femininity was.

One generation usually finds unfashionable the jewellery of the precedingone; stones are removed and reset and consequently examples from earlierperiods are rare. In addition to material examples that do survive, I draw on

1Women and their JewelsMarcia Pointon