Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830

Styles, John; Vickery, Amanda

John Styles (Editor), Amanda Vickery (Editor)

Between 1700 and 1830, men and women in the English-speaking territories framing the Atlantic gained unprecedented access to material things. The British Atlantic was an empire of goods, held together not just by political authority and a common language, but by a shared material culture nourished by constant flows of commodities. Diets expanded to include exotic luxuries such as tea and sugar, the fruits of mercantile and colonial expansion. Homes were furnished with novel goods, like clocks and earthenware teapots, the products of British industrial ingenuity. This groundbreaking book compares these developments in Britain and North America, bringing together a multi-disciplinary group of scholars to consider basic questions about women, men, and objects in these regions. In asking who did the shopping, how things were used, and why they became the subject of political dispute, the essays show the profound significance of everyday objects in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.

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Author

John Styles (Editor), Amanda Vickery (Editor)

PublisherYale Center for British Art

Paul Mellon Centre

Print publication date February 2007 (out of print)

Print ISBN 9780300116595

EISBN 9780300256710

Illustrations 89

Print Status out of print

Publisher (out of print)

WorldCat

Google Books

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List of illustrations

A Harlot's Progress, plate 2
A Harlot's Progress, plate 3
A Harlot's Progress, plate 5
A Harlot's Progress, plate 6
View in Elfreth's Alley, Philadelphia
View in Deptford High Street
Fireplace paneling, ground floor, Albury Street, Deptford
Stair, Albury Street, Deptford
Piazza-plan house, Elfreth's Alley, Philadelphia
Ground-floor interior, Thomas Patterson house, Elfreth's Alley, Philadelphia
Doorcase, Albury Street, Deptford
Replaced doorcases, Elfreth's Alley, Philadelphia
The Distressed Poet
A Description of the Miseries of a Garreteer Poet
A St. Giles's Beauty
The dozen most frequently mentioned types of objects in the 142 Old Bailey charges for theft from furnished lodgings, 1750–59
The dozen most frequently mentioned types of objects in the 123 Old Bailey charges for theft from furnished lodgings, 1790–99
Old Bailey cases mentioning counterpanes made from cotton materials, 1710–99
Old Bailey cases mentioning bed or window curtains made from cotton materials, 1710–99
Old Bailey cases mentioning teakettles, 1700–59
Plan of house of Thomas and Rebecca Smith
Survey of house with detached rear kitchen and connecting gallery or shed
Plan of enclosed estate of William Webster, Cold Lane, Boston
Reverend Ebenezer Devotion
Thomas Hooker House, Hartford
Plan of merchant Benjamin Backway's premises, Boston
Plan of Richard Smith's house, North Kingston, Rhode Island
The Ende of the Closette
Plan of central-chimney-plan house, plate 4
Plan for a tenement house
Brocaded silk gown, petticoat, coat, and waistcoat
Red cloak
Neck and arm coverings (3 kerchiefs, 1 pair gloves, 2 pair mitts)
Miniature portrait of Harriott Pinckney Horry
Notice, [Charleston] City Gazette and Daily Advertiser, 23 July, 1800
Slave Girl Going to Market, journal
Mary Maylem advertisement
Imported accessories: gloves, two fans
Short gown, petticoat
A New Way to Secure a Majority
Stand Coachman, or the Haughty Lady Well Fitted
Reconstructed Plan of George and Martha Braithwaite's Goldsmith's Shop
Trade card for Phillips Garden, Working Goldsmith and Jeweller
Neoclassical shop screen inside Freibourg & Treyer, Tobacconists, Haymarket, London
The Chandler's Shop Gossips, or Wonderful News
A Milliner's Shop or Splittfarthing's the Milliner's
A Morning Ramble, or The Milliners Shop
The Supplemental Magazine
Valentine's Day, The Fairing
Mrs. Washington
Plan of John Hook's store, New London, Virginia
Painted Bird Wings
Trade card for James Wheeleys Paper Hanging Warehouse, Opposite the Church in little Britain & Aldersgate Street, London
Trade card for [Richard] Masefield's...Manufactory in the Strand, London
Trellis wallpaper and foliate border from the ground-floor front room of 50 Manchester Street, Marylebone, London
Geranium-leaf wallpaper and chain border from the ground-floor front room of 48 Manchester Street, Marylebone, London
Oak-leaf wallpaper and neoclassical border from the ground-floor front room of 50 Manchester Street, Marylebone, London
Brown wool coat and breeches, Hartford, Connecticut
Benjamin Franklin
Thomas Jefferson
Benjamin Franklin
Silk coat, vest, and breeches
Façade, Henry and Ann Hill House (Hill-Physick-Keith House)
Plan of the ground floor, Hill-Physick-Keith House, 321 South Fourth Street, Philadelphia
Plan of the second and third floors, Hill-Physick-Keith House, Philadelphia
Eldorado fan and sidelights
White marble mantel with verde inlay, detail of central tablet
White marble mantel with verde inlay, Hill-Physick-Keith House, Philadelphia
White marble mantel, Hill-Physick-Keith House, Philadelphia
Following the Fashion
Sconces
Mantua
The Court at St. James's
Drawing Room, St. James's
Queen Charlotte (1744–1818)
Robert Gwillym of Atherton and His Family
Charles Ingram (1727–1778), 9th Viscount Irwin
Frances, Viscountess Irwin (1734–1807)
Drawing room at Rousham, Oxfordshire
Second-floor (British first-floor) plan of Holland House, Kensington
Lady Caroline Fox, Baroness Holland
Exterior view of Welbeck Abbey
Man Traditionally Identified as Gervase Holles (1607–1674/75)
Henrietta Cavendish Holles, Countess of Oxford
Chimneypiece in the present entrance hall (formerly the dining room) at Welbeck Abbey
Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford (1593–1641)
Lady Frances Spencer (1695/96–1742)
Lady Jane Cavendish (1621–1669)
Man Traditionally Identified as Sir Charles Cavendish (1553–1617)

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Contents

John Styles (Editor), Amanda Vickery (Editor)

Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830

Contents

Author

John Styles (Editor), Amanda Vickery (Editor)

PublisherYale Center for British Art

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

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Acknowledgments

John Styles (Editor), Amanda Vickery (Editor)

Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830

~THIS COLLECTION OF ESSAYS began life as one of the focused research studies undertaken between 2001 and 2006 by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior. The Centre was a collaboration among three institutions in London—the Royal College of Art, the Bedford Centre for the History of...

Author

John Styles (Editor), Amanda Vickery (Editor)

PublisherYale Center for British Art

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

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Introduction

John Styles and Amanda Vickery

Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830

HISTORIES OF MATERIAL LIFE have boomed over the last decade. Books about commodities—nutmeg, salt, aniline dyes, cod, porcelain, glass—have repeatedly appeared on best-seller lists.Giles Milton, Nathaniel’s Nutmeg: How One Mans Courage Changed the Course of History (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1999); Mark Kurlansky, Salt: A World History (New York: Walker, 2002); Simon Garfield, Mauve: How One Man Invented a Colour That Changed the World (London: Faber and Faber, 2000); Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World (London: Cape, 1998); Janet Gleeson, The Arcanum: The Extraordinary True Story of the Invention of European Porcelain (London: Bantam, 1998); Alan Macfarlane and Gerry Martin, The Glass Bathyscaphe (London: Profile, 2002). Academic research into fields as far apart as Renaissance art history and twentieth-century urban geography have been transformed by investigations that employ the notion of consumption as their conceptual point of...

Author

John Styles (Editor), Amanda Vickery (Editor)

PublisherYale Center for British Art

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

Subjects: Great Britain--Colonies--America--History--18th centuryLondon (England)--History--18th centuryAesthetics, Modern--18th centuryConsumption (Economics)Gender

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Spaces

John Styles (Editor), Amanda Vickery (Editor)

Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830

Spaces

Author

John Styles (Editor), Amanda Vickery (Editor)

PublisherYale Center for British Art

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

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Tabletop Conversations: Material Culture and Everyday Life in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World

Bernard L. Herman

Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830

THE TEA TABLE, upended, spills its contents to the floor. Teacups plunge to their catastrophic fate, and the ceremony of sociability crashes to a conclusion...

Author

John Styles (Editor), Amanda Vickery (Editor)

PublisherYale Center for British Art

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

Subjects: Great Britain--Colonies--America--History--18th centuryLondon (England)--History--18th centuryMiddle classDeptford (London, England)Elfreth's Alley, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

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Lodging at the Old Bailey: Lodgings and Their Furnishing in Eighteenth-Century London

John Styles

Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830

IN APRIL 1799, Susannah Priest appeared at the Old Bailey, the principal criminal court for London, charged with breaking and entering at the house of Elias Isaacs in Little Essex Street, Whitechapel.Old Bailey Proceedings Online...

Author

John Styles (Editor), Amanda Vickery (Editor)

PublisherYale Center for British Art

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

Subjects: London (England)--History--18th centuryHouse furnishingsOld Bailey Proceedings Online ProjectTheftRental housing

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Reading Spaces in Eighteenth-Century New England

Robert Blair St. George

Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830

IN 1748, Anthony Stoddard, a Boston, Massachusetts, cooper turned merchant, died with a total estate valued at over £16,000...

Author

John Styles (Editor), Amanda Vickery (Editor)

PublisherYale Center for British Art

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

Subjects: Architecture--United States--18th centuryArchitecture, Domestic--New EnglandBooks and readingPrivacyClothes closets

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“Enter into Thy Closet”: Women, Closet Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century English Novel

Karen Lipsedge

Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830

LITERARY HISTORIANS from Ian Watt to Christina Marsden Gillis concur that the novels of the mid-eighteenth-century English writer Samuel Richardson convey to the reader a clear impression of inhabited living spaces.See Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe,...

Author

John Styles (Editor), Amanda Vickery (Editor)

PublisherYale Center for British Art

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

Subjects: Richardson, Samuel, 1689-1761. ClarissaDomestic space in literaturePrivacyWomen--Books and reading--England--History--18th centuryArchitecture--Great Britain--History--18th century

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Shopping

John Styles (Editor), Amanda Vickery (Editor)

Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830

Shopping

Author

John Styles (Editor), Amanda Vickery (Editor)

PublisherYale Center for British Art

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

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Collaborative Consumption and the Politics of Choice in Early American Port Cities

Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor

Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830

IN 1824, Ann Eleanor Vanrhyn, a shopkeeper in Charleston, South Carolina, tried one last time to collect on a long-unpaid debt...

Author

John Styles (Editor), Amanda Vickery (Editor)

PublisherYale Center for British Art

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

Subjects: Great Britain--Colonies--America--History--18th centuryConsumption (Economics)Clothing and dress--Social aspectsSlavery--United States--HistoryConsumer credit

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Shops, Shopping, and the Art of Decision Making in Eighteenth-Century England

Claire Walsh

Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830

FOR A LONG TIME, the subject of eighteenth-century retailing remained practically unresearched, while the belief was held that both retailing and shopping really began only in the nineteenth century...

Author

John Styles (Editor), Amanda Vickery (Editor)

PublisherYale Center for British Art

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

Subjects: London (England)--History--18th centuryShoppingStores, RetailWomen consumersSocial networks

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Ribbons of Desire: Gendered Stories in the World of Goods

Ann Smart Martin

Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830

TO THE SUCCESSFUL MERCHANT SAM WALTON, four things mattered to customers in that sleepy walk-around Arkansas town of Newport in the 1940s...

Author

John Styles (Editor), Amanda Vickery (Editor)

PublisherYale Center for British Art

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

Subjects: Great Britain--Colonies--America--History--18th centuryShoppingRibbonsConsumption (Economics)Women consumers

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“Neat and Not Too Showey”: Words and Wallpaper in Regency England

Amanda Vickery

Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830

IN AUGUST 1799, Dr. Thomas Ferris of the Deanery, Battle, in Sussex, wrote to the London wallpaper and decorating firm Trollope and Sons, having seen some paper at the architect-designed mansion of a local friend...

Author

John Styles (Editor), Amanda Vickery (Editor)

PublisherYale Center for British Art

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

Subjects: Interior decoration--EnglandAesthetics, Modern--18th centuryWallpaperLondon (England)--History--18th centuryConsumption (Economics)

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Politics

John Styles (Editor), Amanda Vickery (Editor)

Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830

Politics

Author

John Styles (Editor), Amanda Vickery (Editor)

PublisherYale Center for British Art

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

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“To Make a Figure”: Clothing and the Politics of Male Identity in Eighteenth-Century America

Linzy Brekke

Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830

ON 29 JANUARY 1789, President-elect George Washington asked his friend General Henry Knox to procure some “American Broad Cloths” advertised in the New York Daily Advertiser...

Author

John Styles (Editor), Amanda Vickery (Editor)

PublisherYale Center for British Art

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

Subjects: Men's clothingFounding Fathers of the United StatesClothing and dress--Symbolic aspectsGreat Britain--Colonies--America--History--18th centuryManufacturing industries--United States--History

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The Laboring-Class Domestic Sphere in Eighteenth-Century British Social Thought

Jonathan White

Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830

THIS ESSAY TRACES the emergence and development of ideas about laboring-class domestic spheres in eighteenth-century England. Examining published pamphlet literature across the eighteenth century, I show how the laboring-class home and its familial relations came into public view and became an object of knowledge for propertied Englishmen. This was largely due to the rise of a new...

Author

John Styles (Editor), Amanda Vickery (Editor)

PublisherYale Center for British Art

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

Subjects: Working class--England--HistoryHome economicsSocioeconomic statusInterior decoration--EnglandLondon (England)--History--18th century

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People

John Styles (Editor), Amanda Vickery (Editor)

Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830

People

Author

John Styles (Editor), Amanda Vickery (Editor)

PublisherYale Center for British Art

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

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A Family Affair: The Design and Decoration of 321 South Fourth Street, Philadelphia

Amy H. Henderson

Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830

BETWEEN 1785 AND 1790, a family, living on opposites sides of the Atlantic...

Author

John Styles (Editor), Amanda Vickery (Editor)

PublisherYale Center for British Art

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

Subjects: Decoration and ornament--NeoclassicismArchitecture, Domestic--PennsylvaniaHistoric buildings--Pennsylvania--PhiladelphiaArchitecture, Domestic--English influencesHill, Henry, 1732-1798

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Leading the Fashion: The Material Culture of London’s Beau Monde

Hannah Greig

Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830

THE CHARACTERIZATION OF London’s beau monde as matchless masters of fashion is a compelling feature of eighteenth-century commentary. Whether celebrated or despised, the representation of this metropolitan set as the...

Author

John Styles (Editor), Amanda Vickery (Editor)

PublisherYale Center for British Art

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

Subjects: Fashion--Social aspectsInterior decoration--EnglandClothing and dress--History--18th centuryCourts and courtiersLondon (England)--History--18th century

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Patrilineal Portraiture? Gender and Genealogy in the Eighteenth-Century English Country House

Kate Retford

Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830

OVER THE LAST FEW DECADES, as part of a broader concern with the life of the image subsequent to production, many art historians have studied the display of paintings and concomitant issues of space and spectatorship...

Author

John Styles (Editor), Amanda Vickery (Editor)

PublisherYale Center for British Art

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

Subjects: Portrait painting, BritishInterior decoration--EnglandOxford, Henrietta Cavendish Holles Harley, Countess of, 1694-1755Women art patronsWelbeck Abbey (England)

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